Maohden Vol. 1

by Hideyuki Kikuchi

  Blood flew. Arms and feet slashed at the air. Not from any new victim, but erupting out of himself. The involuntary spasms of those in their death throes, known as St. Vitus’s dance or chorea, was known from time immemorial. But this was more a Danse Macabre.

  Spraying blood from a thousand places, the man-beast charged amongst the dumbstruck humans. A frenzied swipe of a paw carved one biker’s face in half.

  “Don’t shoot!” the godfather commanded his henchmen, even as they reached for their pieces. He grabbed the underboss by the collar and pushed him forward. “Hey! Want a piece of this? Come and get it!”

  The head stuck out as if being thrust into the stock of a guillotine. Black lightning flashed through the air and ripped it off with no more difficulty than a freshly sharpened blade. The burly arm swept down at his head when the godfather jumped ten feet backwards with surprising nimbleness.

  The man-beast reached his limit. A mist of blood enveloped his body. With one last cry, wheeling his arms and legs around, a moment later he collapsed to the ground, a bag of bones without a breath of life left in him.

  The warehouse fell deathly silent.

  “Looks like you were right, after all,” the godfather said to the now headless corpse of the underboss. He glanced at the man-beast and then Mayumi. “Fascinating. And this thing had the strength of a dozen tigers. What a prize you turned out to be.”

  “So let’s hear about this information of yours.”

  Setsura’s voice grew louder and then softer. Leaning against the post and rail fence, Azusa cast a dubious look at the young man in the swing. They were in a small park a block off of Shinjuku’s Kuyakusho Street.

  It was built there eight years before as part of a “cultural” urban revitalization effort. Designating parks as a “culturally-enhanced environment” got people vested in the restoration and revitalization effort far more than their own homes.

  That creating these tiny, child-friendly oases of green should have so accelerated the restoration effort in Demon City, of all places, made the powers that be shake their heads in wonder at the dreadful irony of it all.

  Setsura had left his secretary at Mephisto Hospital and then led Azusa Sasaki here.

  Mephisto was on rounds, so he’d left her in the care of an old warhorse of a nurse, who’d assured him that any of the doctors there could treat Mina’s hypnotic trance. She should already be on her way out of the city under heavy guard.

  “You’re a strange one,” Azusa said with genuine surprise. “I get by picking up freelance writing and modeling jobs, like my brother. A guy with a face like yours, though, could be the prince of this city without lifting a finger. The competition’s a motley crew compared to you. Give the biggest actress a wink and a nod, and she’d be spilling the beans in a red-hot second. So what’s with this senbei shop business? And in a city like this?”

  “Much appreciated,” Setsura said, flashing his white teeth at her from the swing. Azusa couldn’t help blushing like a schoolgirl. “No matter where you are, as long as it’s not a ghost town, people are bound to be there.”

  Setsura’s countenance faded away and then swung closer again. The sound of children playing could be heard in the distance, singing the nursery rhyme about the “Red Dragonfly.”

  “Men, women, old and young, as long as there are people, there will be happiness and sorrow, suffering and joy. Demon City can’t change that. Many people here have lost something very important to them. Or have come here to leave it behind. Many eventually return to where they came from. Occasionally they come back. Because we can’t truly leave anything behind. That’s where I come in.”

  “Lost what? Important how?”

  “Mostly what I look for is people.”

  “You’re good at not making sense,” Azusa said, rubbing her brows. “Didn’t come here looking for a philosopher king. If you’re joking, sure don’t sound like it. Sitting there on that swing, I can’t tell if you’re up to something.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment too. However strange I am, I’m no more stranger than you. You don’t seem the slightest bit curious about what happened to your brother.”

  “Knowing won’t change what happened. There’s plenty of action going on outside Shinjuku. No need for a blood 'n' guts war reporter to come here on purpose.”

  “In that case, the sooner you leave the better.”

  “You still don’t want to know what I know?”

  “You leave, and I’ll be fine not knowing too.”

  “What a nice guy,” she said with sardonic intent, though along with the gleam in her eyes as she looked at Setsura, it didn’t quite come out that way. “So I’ll give you this one on the house. It’s about that seal thing.”

  Azusa gave Setsura an inquiring look. Setsura didn’t react in the slightest, only swung closer and then farther away. She couldn’t help noticing that although he did not appear to be exerting himself in the slightest, the swing of the pendulum didn’t change.

  “And how did you get hold of this information?”

  “My brother didn’t tell you? My boyfriend—not from around here—is a fellow in archeology at the National University Research Center. He ran across a report in a single volume in the archives that concerned you and yours.”

  “News to me.”

  “Not so much a report as a personal diary. At least that’s what scholars like to call it, or so says my boyfriend. Whose diary do you think?”

  “Like I would know.”

  “Guess. Here’s a hint: professor, physician, author, priest, businessman, baker, and stationery store owner are all wrong.”

  “It’s getting late.”

  “Okay, okay,” Azusa said in an irritated voice. “The answer is: midwife.”

  “Now that you mention it, I was born at home, not in a hospital.”

  “Yeah, you and Gento Roran both.”

  “You don’t say.”

  Like she was reciting poetry, Azusa said, “Setsura Aki was born on the thirteenth day of the month at three o’clock in the morning. Gento Roran was born the same year, the same month, the same day, exactly an hour later.” She looked intently at Setsura, a strange light radiating from her eyes. “And the same midwife.”

  “That’s news to me too. And how did that person’s diary come to the attention of this boyfriend of yours?”

  “There are businessmen who specialize in Demon City refuse. Seems that the book got thrown out with some old furniture and household goods during a year-end housecleaning. Along with everything else trucked out of Demon City, it ended up at the National University Research Center.”

  “I’m familiar with the business. So what does it say?”

  “As they say, everything has its price.”

  “And I haven’t got the money.”

  “You will do,” Azusa said in a sultry voice. “Never laid eyes on a man as fine as you. A date and we’ll call it even.”

  “That’d be fine with me, but it’s not the sort of thing I would want to do.”

  “Huh?”

  “Oh, nothing. How about we go directly to the source and ask that boyfriend of yours? I’m sure he would stipulate an altogether different set of conditions.”

  “Another brush-off, eh?” Azusa raised her hands in mock surrender. “Fine. You don’t want to swap for the mystery of the feud between you and the Roran clan?”

  “I believe that’s what your brother was after. But why would anybody care?”

  “Who wouldn’t? It’s part and parcel of what gave birth to this city in the first place. Why is all the evil in the world gathering here? What if the answer to that question explains what makes your two families tick as well?”

  “I think you’re blowing this way out of proportion.”

  “Then what’s your explanation?”

  “I haven’t got a clue.” In response to Azusa’s pout, he said, “I’m not kidding. I bet Gento’s as much in the dark as I am.”

  Azusa pouted some more.
>
  “It’s true that our two families have been at loggerheads for a while now. But why and to what end, I can’t say.”

  “And yet you keep on fighting in the dark.”

  “I guess that’s what it’s come to.”

  “What a joke. Give me a fucking break.”

  “Let’s say I do. What do you think the purpose behind all this is?”

  “You having me on?” The pout returned, her face reflected in his eyes. In a flash, her anger dissolved away like a sandcastle on the seashore. She said hastily, hiding her momentary loss of composure, “Yeah, it’s pretty obvious. A battle for hegemony of Shinjuku.”

  She went on, “This city is a place that gathers evil in all its forms. Exploit it right and there’s big bucks to be made—by terrorist organizations, crime families, wizards and witches. The assassins for hire under every rock. The seminars for average citizens on the best ways to kill people. Of course the curriculum could be replicated outside of Shinjuku, but those genetic abilities amplified by the magical miasmas of Demon City are priceless. Imagine being able to wield such powers at will, being able to rule over the dark forces in the world—no general or warlock could stop you. It’d be the ruin of every secret society. This city is a cauldron stewing a witch’s brew. The only question is who will be the witch.”

  “A fascinating question, to be sure,” came Setsura’s voice from above her, and then away from her. “I have given it some thought. At any rate, my father died without saying a thing about it. But there wouldn’t be much meaning to the fight otherwise. I’m sure Gento Roran feels the same way.”

  The last line surely reflected Gento’s proposal in Shinjuku Gardens.

  “Gento has been out of sight and mind for the past fifteen years. Where the hell’s he been all this time?”

  “No idea. Except that he definitely wasn’t anywhere else but here.”

  “I find it hard to believe he could be hiding here in Demon City all that time without you noticing once.”

  “If that’s what he did, then that’s what makes him an even more formidable opponent.” Setsura thought for a moment. “But there’s still one thing I don’t get—how did this city come to exist anyhow?”

  “The Devil Quake.”

  “Yeah, but why did the Devil Quake occur?”

  “There’s no point to that question. It’s been tying scientists and philosophers and theologians in knots ever since. A magnitude 8.5 megaquake that stopped right at the borders of the ward and didn’t even shake the coffee in a cup immediately outside it. Who could begin to comprehend that kind of supernatural phenomenon?”

  “Comprehension and the fact that it happened are two different things. Let’s try this again. What caused the Devil Quake?”

  “That I can answer, if you’ll settle for fairy tales,” Azusa said. Legends on the one hand and history on the other—any kid living in Shinjuku knew which one to believe when push came to shove.

  She cleared her throat. “Almost ten years ago, a warlock by the name of Rebi barricaded himself inside his Shinjuku station sanctuary and attempted to sow seeds of evil throughout the world. He and his demon servants were destroyed by a young man. Before he perished, the warlock prophesied that the city would sink into darkness and the human race would know the meaning of its existence for the first time.”

  “Hell, we’re happy when anything here turns out to have a meaning.” A rare look of consternation crossed the senbei shop owner’s face, at once close up, and then further away from her. “Let’s assume the Devil Quake was triggered with some ulterior motive in mind. Who caused it? Beyond causing the phenomenon itself, what intent was behind it?”

  Azusa didn’t answer. Anybody who had anything to do with Shinjuku had pondered those questions at one time or another. And nobody had yet come up with an answer, or even a clue. What did Demon City Shinjuku mean?

  “That’s all I know. Let’s hear what comes next.”

  “Good idea.” Azusa straightened. “Let’s go then.”

  “Where to?”

  “Where else? The midwife’s place.”

  “She’s still alive?”

  “Hoh. Something Shinjuku’s best P.I. doesn’t know? As they say, it’s always darkest at the foot of the lighthouse.”

  “Is that what they say?”

  “Whatever. Come on.”

  The comely doctor strode through the falling twilight, his shadow reaching out behind him.

  Among the pedestrians sharing the dusky Okubo Avenue with him were a cyborg, metabolic stabilizers jutting out from its back—an addict strung out on LSD, each belch condensing into the form of a woman or some other related private body part and disappearing just as quickly—a brain-eating roundworm wrapped around the moth-eaten flesh of a sleepwalking zombie—

  But all that strangeness yielded as if by natural law to the physician’s beauty.

  It was a rare occasion in this city when beauty trumped the weird. For this was Mephisto. An exquisiteness that surpassed even Setsura’s threw off ripples like small waves that rose up and sank down in the gloom, painting his portrait against a melancholy landscape.

  Except that his was an unusual state of mind for the otherwise cool-headed physician, the result of what he had heard and seen just twenty minutes before.

  After making rounds that afternoon, he’d paid Mayumi a house call as scheduled. He was running a bit behind schedule. In this case, “a bit” became an eternity.

  Armored cars of the Shinjuku police were parked in front of her house. Two dead bodies were being carried out on stretchers. He identified himself and pulled back the sheet. The woman’s dead face revealed the extent of the tragedy to him.

  The cops filled him in on the details. The man and the woman were brutally slain, the young woman presumed to be the perpetrator was nowhere to be found.

  Mephisto looked around the room. The day before, the mother and daughter had come to the old Shinjuku government office building where his hospital now stood. Up to that point, the daughter had killed three men, including her father.

  The mother had confessed to having confidentially “dealt with” the bodies of the other two. Mephisto didn’t know whether that meant she’d buried them in an unmarked grave, or arranged with the medical examiner to make them disappear, and he didn’t much care.

  Everyone who’d had sex with her had died. This wasn’t a one-off freak of nature, but the kind of phenomenon that got Mephisto’s medical juices flowing.

  His examinations had yielded no useful data so far. The coroner’s report the wife had brought in said only that her husband had died of a coronary infarction. This struck him as a commonsensical conclusion as he had detected no abnormalities in the daughter either.

  Except that with the death count up to three, plus the one dying the night before, it was hard to dismiss the connection. The detectives speculated that the daughter must have fled after killing her mother, who in turn had been driven mad by the man’s death.

  He was about to leave when a call came in from headquarters that the night before, an eyewitness had observed a girl riding a folding scooter down Okubo Avenue getting nabbed by a biker gang.

  This “eyewitness” report came from an information broker representing the eyewitness. The crime database at the police station had matched it to the description sent in by the cops on the scene.

  The information broker would forward the reward money to the informant, and would make sure identities weren’t leaked. Even taking their cut, brokers promised generous payouts, guaranteed the veracity of the intel they provided, and were fully prepared to punish providers of phony leads.

  For that reason alone, the police preferred working with the “professionals,” as opposed to civic-minded bystanders.

  The detective went to interview the witness. Mephisto accompanied them. He listened to what the man had to say, but did nothing more. The strung-out vagrant couldn’t even recall with certainty the gang emblems and colors always emblazoned on the sid
es of their bikes.

  The broker wasn’t any more help. “So a bunch of bikers showed up and you thought you could cash in, eh?” spat out the disgusted detective. “These penny-ante outfits got no quality control. The big boys never pull crap like this.”

  So Mephisto ended up walking the dusky streets alone. He had to wonder about what had happened to her. But he also knew it was beyond his control. In Shinjuku, the time he spent worrying about one patient could be better used to save ten more.

  He knew this plain as day, but couldn’t shake the image in his mind’s eye of the young and pretty girl sitting there in the chair, eyes cast down. He spied a dilapidated telephone booth out of the corner of his eye. There were other ways of gathering information that would reveal the gang’s true colors.

  Mephisto didn’t stop. Sometimes when the wheel of fate turned, all a doctor could do was stay out of the way until it came to a rest. Besides, he had enough on his plate this evening already.

  Chapter Three

  The midwife’s house was in East Gokencho, a prefab not far from what had once been the headquarters of the book wholesaler Tohan Corporation. It had two small rooms, a kitchen and bath. Low-cost housing from one of the earlier reconstruction efforts。

  The name plate said “Miyako Naruse.”

  Setsura rang the doorbell. A white-haired old lady appeared. Her back was so bent over her chin was practically brushing the ground.

  When Azusa told her who they were looking for, she replied in a crisp, clear voice that she was the person in question. There was nothing wrong with her hearing either. Without cybernetic implants or rejuvenation drugs, the vigor of her body and spirit shone on her aged face.

  As she turned her head to look at them, tears unexpectedly filled her eyes. “You’ve come back,” she said.

  “Well, no, I—” Setsura said. His misapprehension was understandable. She’d delivered him twenty some-odd years ago, and he was a full-grown man besides.

  “Setsura Aki-chan, isn’t it?”

  “How about that,” Azusa said to herself.

  “You remember?” Setsura asked.

  The old lady nodded. Tears ran down her cheeks. She made no attempt to wipe them away.