After Kajiwara left, the dawning light mixed with a heavy silence that filled the room.
“This is it,” Tonbeau said in a tired voice. “No mistake about it.”
“Can it be opened?”
“One way or another. The mayor managed to peek in once. The timing probably coincided with the mechanism being thrown out of kilter. In that case, we should be able to duplicate a similar chain of events.”
“I certainly hope so.”
“The problem is, which comes first? The box or that lover boy you’re so fond of?”
Tonbeau pursed her lips in evident pleasure. Her ability to look the total bitch no matter how good a mood she was in was one of her more particular characteristics.
After watching the mayor’s car speed off, the head nurse turned to the front foyer. Her lips parted in a silent expression of surprise. There was the person the mayor had come to see—and missed. The doctor in white.
“Director, when did you get back?”
“This very moment.”
The head nurse stared at him. Five seconds was the limit. Any longer than that and her vision dissolved into a misty rainbow. Her goal that year was to lengthen the time she could look at him by one second. Now at five seconds she must look through the shell of the authentic and the pretense to the physical and the transcendent.
There was nothing wrong, and yet as they stood there in the half-light of morning, something still seemed “off” about him.
“Was there anything else?” Mephisto asked.
“No, nothing. Oh, Director, the mayor was just here to see you.”
“Official business?”
“No. His wife was doing the driving. I told him you were out and he left without giving any reasons.” The head nurse narrowed her eyes and searched her memory. “He was carrying a big duffle bag. I assume it contained something he wished to show you.”
Mephisto turned his gaze toward the car, cruising through the front gate. “Any indication of where he was headed next?”
“No, but if you allow me to hazard a guess, sir—”
“Go right ahead.”
“Coming expressly to see you, and discovering you were not available, he did not seem terribly disappointed and drove off in a hurry. He surely had another resource in mind. In this city, though, any such resources to equal that of yourself would be limited in the extreme.”
“Then it seems I have no choice but to meet with the mayor. Nurse, I’ll be in my room. Please refuse all visitors for the time being.”
“I understand, sir.” She bowed as the hospital director strode toward the doorway, the morning light gradually exposing the shapes and details of the world around them. She couldn’t explain why, but the director seemed to her at that moment to be fleeing the dawn.
Shortly before the mayor left the Nuvenberg residence, a strange group of shadows surrounded a flower shop in Yocho. The dark sky was still barely tinged with blue, and the streets were empty except for this particular throng of silhouettes.
Any witnesses would surely describe them as bathed in some sort of acid, and give them a wide berth. And they would have been correct.
Wearing dark suits and fedoras, they all were spouting white smoke. They all knew the fate that awaited them. They wouldn’t die. But the sun would scald them terribly, and they would carry the scars with them as long as they lived—perhaps for eternity.
Even this gentle and wan sunlight was anathema to vampires.
So what were they doing here? Why risk the hellish pain of being burned alive inside their indestructible bodies instead of hastening home to their peaceful abodes?
“You’re sure this is it?” asked one.
They were at the back door of the establishment.
“Yeah,” said somebody else. “Got confirmed reports. Watch your step.”
They all nodded as one. Right hands slid inside their suit coats. Without another word, the signal went out. The door wasn’t locked. They were through it in a flash.
The back of the shop consisted of a rose garden. They searched for their quarry and found it. Those citizens of the city turned into creatures of the night having scattered in all directions, here in this flower garden that should surely be seeing no visitors at this time of day, surrounded by all its gaudy excess.
White roses, yellow roses, red and purple roses—and in the center of the roses warring for supremacy a dark stain was slowly reaching outwards. The color of the flowers themselves were changing.
And in that center more beautiful than any flower, the voluptuous body of a naked woman, dreaming whatever dreams the Demon Princess dreamt.
Chapter Two
Somebody asked, “Can she be destroyed?”
The rest turned censorious eyes on him and he faltered a bit. That particular question was taboo. And yet—
“Who knows?” someone else said. Nobody reacted this time, because it was the truth.
“All we can do is try and see,” came a third opinion.
They all agreed. Their bodies still trailed plumes of smoke. The greenhouse wasn’t entirely dark. Their outlines wavered as if underwater, while pulling into sharper focus.
The song of morning was to the Toyama residents a funeral dirge, announcing the arrival of pain and suffering. Their skin singed and crumbled like a match held to paper, their nerves and organs deteriorating as they stood there.
Even as they withstood this suffering, they raised their stakes over the chest of the Demon Princess.
“I’ll go first. The rest of you follow in turn.”
These directions and the actions that followed commenced in an orderly fashion. The meaning of “in turn” wouldn’t have been apparent at first to the uninitiated. The men lined up—not in a straight line—but in a circle around her.
And no ordinary circle at that. One end of the circle expanded out, the other end forming a ring inside it. Looking down from above, they had formed a human helix.
Anyone who knew something about the occult, and about the nature of the woman sleeping surrounded by flowers at the center, would have applauded the effort—this perfect execution of an execution.
The spiral helix was the structure most accommodating to the growth of human life. Life that formed in a logarithmic spiral grew in equal proportions outside and in. The extinct ammonites and the extant nautiloids of the mollusk phylum both traced beautiful spiral shapes.
The difference between the former—that disappeared with the dinosaurs—and the latter—unchanged for millions of years—was that between a tight helix and the more relaxed logarithmic spiral. The difference between finding a balance in life and the ultimate lack of it.
Following these patterns of ideal growth ensured that the energy born in the center would reach its maximum strength.
Wafting with white smoke, the men positioned themselves to maximize the extermination of the Demon Princess.
“Let’s do it.”
The head man bent over Princess’s right side, a hammer in his right hand, a foot-long wooden stake in his left. He placed the sharpened stake next to her pale, round breast, just above her heart. The hammer raised, the hand didn’t move.
In that moment, a force erupted from the center of the helix, tying every one of the men together, and streaming into the hammer.
The head of steel swung down. The stake sank into her body. Her eyes shot open, her lips frothed with blood—though which came first was impossible to say.
A gasping gurgle rose from her throat. It was as if the night itself rushed out of her mouth, painting the faces of her killers with a spray of blood. One turned away from the writhing body. Another shut his eyes. They were not without compassion.
But far more compelling emotions rose to their faces and stiffened their resolve. Invisible energy surged down the helix. The hammer again hummed through the air. The Demon Princess unleashed a scream.
These were her unmistakable death agonies. All the more surprising was the arousing nature of her movem
ents.
Their eyes were drawn inexorably to the root of her flailing thighs. The sight of her heaving chest scorched their retinas. Her bloody hands painted streaks of blood across stomach, thighs, sides.
Her own body became the canvas, like a tortured and tormented artist throwing herself at her obscene masterpiece in a mad frenzy.
Wordless moans issued from their mouths. Their groins grew hot and hard. One bolted towards Princess. The man next to him grabbed his arm. He shook it loose. Too late to stop him, he flung himself onto her naked body.
Somebody screamed. From the gap where the man had been standing, the sacred power dispersed into the air.
The spiral helix shattered.
With a shout, the man with the hammer raised up the mallet of wood and steel. A piercing clear gaze shot into his own eyes. He reared back as the head of the hammer sank into his own skull.
The men stumbled backwards. Before them, the gore-smeared body rose to her feet.
Here was the Demon Princess. The wooden stake pierced her left breast. The bloody tip jutted out her back. Her chest and flanks were painted bright red and dotted with white and yellow petals, the roses tossed and flung as she danced and writhed, attaching themselves to her with her own blood.
There could be a no more grotesque sight. And a no more beautiful woman.
The Toyama men who had pounded the stake through her gazed in stupefaction. Princess smiled. These were not the first men to behold that smile.
So had Emperor Jie. And Emperor Zhou. And Emperor You. What came before would surely come again, and now those winds of destruction were blowing through Demon City Shinjuku.
The men silently charged forward, suffused with fighting spirits that defied their inevitable fates. Princess made no effort to evade them or their slashing stakes. Then came the sound of tearing flesh. The spikes sank into her back.
The men retreated again.
She was stabbed and skewered. Through her chest, her stomach, her thighs, a single stake through her throat and out the back of her skull.
“Perhaps if you made another one of your clever curlicues?” Princess said in a hoarse voice. “Oh, not enough time? Well, then I should return these stakes to their proper owners.”
She yanked the stake out of her throat and tossed it away as if discarding a toothpick. She barely seemed in a hurry, and yet the man moved as if entranced, and the stake caught him full in the chest.
The man who had stabbed her with it in the first place.
Princess’s right hand flicked seven more times the same way. Seven stakes pierced the hearts of the seven remaining men. They toppled to the ground.
The smoke wafting up from their bodies increased in magnitude. Yet the triumphant Demon Princess was spouting that murderous smoke as well. Light poured in through the door.
“The only other person who exposed my body to the light of day was Ji Chang of King Zhou’s Privy Council. You managed the same on this unhallowed ground. Well done.”
Paying no attention to the bits and pieces of her skin flaking and falling off, Princess walked over to the men already half-engulfed in flames and stepped on the chest of one. The sternum caved in like embers in a fire, consuming the rest of the body in pitiless flames.
After treading on all eight, Princess narrowed her eyes and turned to the doorway. The sheets of blood had charred and turned black, the wounds clotted and sealed.
“Remain here, and their allies will inevitably arrive as well. What a nuisance. I need to find some temporary shelter until nightfall. Good thing I implanted that map Kikiou made in my head. In a few more hours, Takako and I will wreak carnage on this city.”
Several minutes later, not even bothering to shield the sun from her face with her hand, the Demon Princess grandly set off beneath the bright sunlight. Clothed in a robe of rose petals, her nude body charred, smoked and smoldered.
Early in the morning, a few minutes before five o’clock. Neon lights lit up the fading night like those bioluminescencing fishes from the bottom of the sea. The street life was drained of its verve, but schools of fish still swarmed to the feeding grounds.
In Kabuki-cho, on a block in the center of Demon City, the grimy unkempt heartbeat of life went on.
A marquee identified one establishment as The Flying Dutchman. It hadn’t been rebuilt since the Devil Quake. No one could remember how high it had once reached. The second floor and above had been wrecked and those scars still remained. Now it was an old one-story brown building.
Left of the plaza’s former fountain and right past the Koma Theater and descending toward Okubo brought the adventurous sightseer to the boundary avenue of the love hotel district. Turning right, and a couple more rights after that presented a view of a block utterly destroyed by the Devil Quake.
A two- to three-hundred-square-yard wasteland of bricks and debris. The lights of the bar came from a single structure at the northern end of the field.
At this hour of the morning, the pedestrian traffic was understandably light. Peering through the wavy stained glass windows revealed a steady stream of customers arriving and departing the place.
People unfamiliar with the place often stopped by. But because of the unique atmosphere there, they rarely stayed long. Though it wasn’t a members-only club, the regulars occupying the cramped, twenty-five-by-thirty-foot space had been there night after night since it opened.
Even a free spirit visiting first thing in the morning wouldn’t shift the mood. The bartender might flash a disinterested look toward the door and place a glass on the counter. The patrons playing poker at a nearby table would barely spare a backwards glance.
“Hey,” a woman said in an aggrieved voice. The woman’s body was wrapped in a blue glow. She shifted her hips. The blue light shimmered. “I come all the way here to wet my whistle and nobody pays the slightest attention. My feelings are hurt. Hey, look at me.”
An old man at the poker table puffing on a cigar turned and looked at her. He had blond hair and blue eyes and high cheekbones. The way it all went together with the beard and mustache suggested a strong Anglo-Saxon heritage.
He was wearing a navy blue top and bottom, and a white hat with a blue visor. “That hat—are you a ship’s captain?”
He answered in fluent English. “Aye, aye. Benjamin S. Briggs, at your service.”
“Pleased to meet you. I’m Takako Kanan.”
She bowed in a fashion that would have been more befitting had she been wearing a crinoline hoop skirt. But her blue and naked body created a rather stranger scene.
“I appreciate the introduction. So, Miss, where are you from?”
Takako craned her neck and gazed mischievously into space. “I’m sure I’m from somewhere. I can’t remember where that is.”
The atmosphere in the place suddenly shifted.
“Whoa.”
All eyes in the place focused on her.
“Yo, Miss, come over here.”
“We got an empty seat right here.”
The warm invitations came one after the other. Takako instead sat down at the counter.
“What can I do for you?” said the bartender, smiling like a completely different person.
“This isn’t any ordinary bar, is it?”
“You’ve got an observant eye.”
“I guess I do. The captain, that old man, that person over there—they’re all wearing clothes from a century ago.”
The last one she’d pointed to had on a farmer’s bib overalls and a thick cotton shirt. Another was wearing a bomber jacket and aviator glasses. The bartender sported some unfashionable getup from a bygone era.
“It’s not a masquerade club. Perhaps a watering hole for psychiatric outpatients?”
The bartender frowned. “That is David Lang. Over there is Amelia Earhart. You’re familiar with those names?”
“They do sound familiar.” Takako’s eyes glowed, or rather, her whole body did. She gazed back at the bartender. “A farmer who vanished off
the face of the earth in the American state of Tennessee. A pilot who disappeared shortly before the Second World War. Now that you mention it, that sea captain, I thought his name struck a bell. Ah, I see.”
“You’ve figured it out?” The bartender looked at his patrons with sad eyes. “Those who come here have nowhere else to go, no kith or kin, no home or tombstone to call their own. And yet they live on. Not enough time has passed to get used to the now, and yet having been on the other side, they can’t go back to a normal life. At the end of the day, Demon City and this bar is all they’ve got.”
“You don’t say. And you’re the owner?”
“No. A far mightier man than me. He established this place for them. Speaking of which, today is the seventh year. He should be entering Tokyo Bay. You might be able to catch a glimpse of him here.”
“Hmm. Well, I should be on my way.”
As she drifted away, the bartender called after her, “Come again! Those who return only to find they have no place to go are always welcome here.”
“Thank you.” Takako said to herself as she made her way to the door, “Such a pitiful lot. I couldn’t bring myself to destroy them.”
A man waited for Takako to leave before entering the Flying Dutchman with heavy steps. The smell of the ocean wafted about him as he passed.
“Good to see you, Boss!” called out the bartender.
The rest of the patrons turned their attention to the man in the soaking wet sailor’s coat with respectful and appreciative eyes. “Welcome aboard, Captain Van der Decken,” somebody said.
Captain Benjamin S. Briggs was a Puritan from Massachusetts. On the fourth of November 1872, he departed New York and set sail for Genoa. That same year, on the fourth of December, the Mary Celeste was discovered adrift in the Atlantic Ocean with not a person on board.
Typical of the Puritans of his era, the captain was a strict man, on himself and others, and was said to recite a verse of the Bible in a loud and sonorous voice every day.
David Lang was a farmer in Tennessee. On the afternoon of September 23, 1880, while setting off to inspect his fields, he disappeared in full view of a local minister and his children.
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