Sensing something in the air, Yakou looked at Setsura. Setsura had nothing to add.
“I’ll be right there,” Mephisto said and hung up.
“What’s up?” said Setsura. “You don’t look so good.”
“The plan you have been hatching,” he said as he headed for the door. “Let us undertake it.” He explained to his stunned audience, “Kikiou collided with several patients on his way out. Four are reported in critical condition. Three of them are yakuza, but the fourth is a five-year-old child.”
Mephisto returned thirty minutes later.
Setsura said, “Well?”
“Only the child died. Come here.”
In response to the beckoning white hand, the four came to their feet. Setsura put his hand on Tomoko’s shoulder. “Please wait here.”
His face seemed to glow in the gloomy darkness.
“But—”
“I promise to save your daughter. The world we’re going to encounter after this was not constructed for ordinary purposes.”
“My daughter is there,” Tomoko said in a sad voice. “And there is where I wish to be also.”
“I will be sure to tell her that,” Setsura said softly.
He couldn’t tell whether his reassurances were effective or not. But Tomoko’s eyes filled with both tears and trust. Perhaps she had some notion of the kind of work he did when he wasn’t working for a living.
“Please,” the mother said with a bow. “Please find Takako for me.”
“Don’t worry,” answered the proprietor of the Aki Detective Agency.
Chapter Two
Mephisto led them to a what looked like a bronze door. The patina was an even deeper shade of blue, perhaps from infrequent use.
“Huh,” Setsura said. He almost sounded impressed.
“So this is a first for you too?” Yakou said.
“Yeah. Seen it plenty of times from the outside, but never gone in.”
Fifteen feet wide and thirty feet high, the door brought to mind a gate built to admit a giant. A ring glittered on Mephisto’s left hand. One side of the door began to recede.
A gust of wind struck them in the face. It came from beyond the door.
“That’ll send a shiver down your spine,” Tonbeau said, hugging her arms across her chest. “The same feeling I got going into the laboratory of Doctor Faustus. Makes the hair stand on end.”
“Quite a lot of it,” Setsura said.
“Shut up.”
“Let’s go,” said Mephisto, and started off.
The door had opened all the way by now. A faint light wrapped around them. In the somehow familiar sepia glow, Setsura had that sense of recovered memories of times past.
Mephisto continued on his way, as if pushing the light aside. Giant mechanisms grew from the ceiling and floor, striking strange poses before the visitors. He recognized the electron microscopes and laser range finders, but the rest were a complete mystery to him.
None of them seemed able to maintain a state of equilibrium in this world. None had a fixed form. Even their warped and twisted platforms changed shape from moment to moment.
An eyeball fifteen feet in diameter opened its camera-like iris and stared at them, but took no other action.
As they proceeded apace toward an iron door tucked into the back of the roomy space, Tonbeau raised a hand and made a grabbing motion in the empty air.
Yakou and Setsura furrowed their brows. Tonbeau opened her plump hand, revealing a translucent blob squirming there. It looked like a clump of snow fungus.
“What’s that?” said Setsura.
“A miasma?” said Yakou.
“I am familiar with miasmas. But not one that ever looked like this.”
“It is extremely rare,” said Tonbeau with evident pride as she strolled along. “Normally, when miasmas take corporeal form, they’re much uglier, dirtier things. This one is remarkably pure. But—touch it—”
Setsura glanced at Yakou. He didn’t look terribly concerned, so, what the hell, he nudged it with the tip of his finger. And pulled it away.
“It’s cold.”
“This one must be a dozen degrees below freezing. It steals heat from whatever comes into contact with it. The air around it is hardly there at all. This space seems half-filled with spirits of a high order, and half-filled with ghosts of a low order. Otherwise, something like this couldn’t exist here.”
“Huh,” Setsura said, dutifully impressed.
Mephisto stopped in front of the iron door and looked back at them. “Through this door is the Resurrection Room.”
“This is the place, huh,” Setsura said, a timbre in his voice different from before. “It’s said that the one thing that Doctor Mephisto cannot do is raise the dead. But that is a lie. Because there’s this here Resurrection Room, you see. Among his thousands of patients, a lucky few are snuck down here, brought back to life, and then under the cover of night, taken back to the city through a secret door. Well, at least according to Shinjuku’s urban legends.”
Mephisto didn’t reply. When the legends in this city revealed their true faces, what kind of countenance would they show?
At a touch of his fingers, the rusty door opened inward and ushered them in. Stone walls lined the large room, so large that, throw a stone hard and it would not reach any of them or make a sound when it landed.
In the center of the room were an operating table and an old wooden desk, sitting there as if left behind by accident. Not far from the desk was a medicine cabinet. These were the only furnishings in this legendary room in which the dead were said to rise from their deathbeds.
“Man, I’m all on pins and needles,” said Tonbeau, rubbing her burly arms.
“I wouldn’t have imagined there was a place like this in Shinjuku,” agreed Yakou.
“Totally.” Though it was hard to tell how authentic those last impressions were. “Can you make a connection here?” Setsura asked.
“No problem,” Tonbeau assured him. “It’s not stuff that matters here. In a place like this, we can assemble anything we need.”
“Lie down there,” Mephisto said, indicating the operating table as he went over to the medicine cabinet.
Setsura looked at the other two as if he expected one of them to step forward. When they didn’t, he laid down on the table with a resigned expression.
He was a man, after all. A very handsome man, to be sure. And lying defenseless on an operating table. A brilliant artist letting her feeling flow through her brush without restraint would surely create from this scene a masterpiece of unbridled licentiousness.
Three pairs of eyes watched as Mephisto reverentially sorted through the medicine cabinet, reached in and selected a vial, then returned to Setsura’s side. He was carrying a blue, wide-mouthed bottle.
“Take two of those and call you when I get there? Spare me the lame magic tricks.”
“I am always serious. Drink it.”
“What’s it going to do to me? Give me a literal spiritual high? Maybe I’ll float there.”
“It is not that kind of drug. Your physical being can make the journey. But however ready you may have made yourself, you cannot point yourself in the proper direction. That is Miss Tonbeau’s job.”
The same Tonbeau was staring intensely at Mephisto’s hand. “That drug—well, no, I don’t imagine you ever let it out of your sight. But now and then other geniuses in the outside world have cooked up similar concoctions. One day out of the blue a man will grasp the truth of the universe, another will travel to the edges of the Milky Way. They drank something like that, no?”
Mephisto didn’t answer. “Drink it. A mouthful or a drop, the effectiveness will be the same.”
“How’s it taste?” said Setsura, eyeing the bottle.
“Not sweet, but perhaps a hint of cherry.”
“Works for me.”
Setsura popped off the top and downed the contents in a single gulp. His throat bobbed as he swallowed, though it’d take a bit more time to permea
te his body through his bloodstream.
The man in black grew indistinct.
“And now to recite the sutra that will send you to that other world.” By now, even Setsura’s pricked-up ears had dissolved like diluted paint. “Miss Tonbeau, if you would please.”
“Gotcha,” Tonbeau Nuvenberg said, giving her belly a hearty slap. She stood next to the operating table and spread her arms wide and began to chant an incantation.
A wind kicked up from an unseen quarter. Setsura’s body was barely recognizable as human. Yakou exclaimed beneath his breath as colors snaked around Tonbeau’s form and spread out in a mist.
Sweat, born of her powers of concentration, streaked with tints and hues. Setsura’s body slowly floated towards her. The wind howled around them, forming a whirlpool. Yakou watched as Setsura swirled closer, and was sucked into the witch in the rainbow.
Here was Mephisto’s reason to have her there. The flesh and bone of this fat witch itself formed the gate into that other world.
The hazy tips of his shoes passed through her chest, and the wind suddenly ceased. Tonbeau collapsed. Yakou ran up and caught all three hundred pounds of her. That was one strong vampire.
“Doctor, some medication—”
“And stat!”
“Well then, nothing to worry about, I guess.” Tonbeau’s vigorous response set Yakou’s mind at ease.
Mephisto gazed quietly at the operating table. “Not much longer, don’t you think, Miss Tonbeau?”
A question Yakou hadn’t expected.
“So it seems.” Lying down, the big woman nodded. “Definitely right around the corner. The end of everything. It may be a good idea to get ready to move.”
“You mean, leave here?” Yakou asked.
The witch responded with a somehow sad smile. “This city. No matter how you look at it, all of its citizens turning into vampires makes life plenty hard for the real humans. Hold on, that means all of the shops and parks are empty during the day—”
The multicolored lady had ferreted out a silver lining of profit in the situation. Yakou turned his attention to Mephisto. At some point, he’d sat down on a wooden chair at the desk and seemed lost in thought. A dreamlike fog seemed to fall across his sculpted features.
Mephisto said in a cold quiet voice that not even Yakou’s ears could hear, “The medicine I compounded here crosses over with you, Setsura.”
The vampire eradication squad returned to the Shinjuku Police station soon after the sun set. Perhaps weighed down by the anguish of slaying their own citizens, they seemed far more exhausted than when they left, their wan faces revealing their cruel misery.
Several of them had passed through the lobby and came to a stop. Peaches dangled from the ceiling in front of their wide-open eyes. In a flash, their attention was drawn to the bloodshot eyes of their comrades filled with loathing, and all the more so to the fangs gracing their mouths.
They were already out. They had already come here.
“Stakes!” somebody cried.
The stunned cops swung their right hands in a growling fury. The peaches rained down on the floor. A vampire cop stepped on one. Blue smoke rose from his feet. He reared back. A police officer charged, cradling a stake.
A spatter of blood, and they fell together to the floor. Another one of his coworkers feasted on his neck.
“Hit ’em with the peaches!”
“Form a barricade!”
Dodging the swaying peach boughs, the figures in their now misshapen uniforms scattered inside the police station. Gunfire broke out. Pieces of uniforms shredded and flew apart. A black dot opened on a forehead and the back of a head blew out. White bone peeked out among the nerves and flesh and muscle.
The cop bared his white teeth and laughed. Another rushed forward and stuffed a peach into the wound. Flames burst forth. He swayed and staggered. His former colleague buried a stake in his chest.
The smell of blood filled the lobby. “Don’t shoot!” came a command over a loudspeaker somewhere. “This is the assistant chief. The invaders have been repulsed. Place peaches at the entrances and exits and windows. Search the building and make sure everybody passes a peach test. They’ve no doubt hidden themselves well.”
Listening to the vigorous voice, the cops all exchanged glances. The vampires had penetrated even the police. The state of affairs was hardly any different at the ward government building. And at Mephisto Hospital.
The old woman approached the front desk. “How can I help you?” the nurse receptionist asked.
She bowed her head politely. “My grandson was admitted to this hospital. He is having an operation.”
“What room number?” asked the nurse, scanning the lobby.
The old woman cocked her head to the side, but for another reason entirely. This nurse was different from the regular receptionist, the visitor thought. The icy air about her rose up. Her skin was unnaturally pale.
“And who are you, young lady?”
“I am the assistant head nurse to the director.”
“Well, then. I’ll be on my way.”
“Wait!”
The old woman stopped. The order had an imperative edge, as if daring her to disobey and risk the repercussions.
“What?” the old woman quavered.
“There is the smell of blood about you,” the nurse said in a dusky voice.
“Me? That is—”
“Coming from around those red lips.”
The nurse pointed. And like pressing a button, the old woman transformed. Not hiding her fangs, she leapt at the nurse, who, in turn, smashed a peach against her forehead.
The slight form sprang backwards through the air. Pressing her hand against the stain, she ran for the automatic doors.
Having observed all this, another nurse called out, “What are you doing?” and ran to the door. Through the first set of doors, she came to a sudden halt.
A packed crowd of people waited outside the lobby. The demonic air about them froze her in her tracks. A moment later, it turned into a battlefield.
The old woman swayed and tottered. Upon reaching them, they fell upon her neck. Screams erupted. The fangs of these ordinary citizens slashed into her writhing body, quickly shredding it until there was nothing left.
Pairs of red dots gleamed in the faces of the human shadows staring back at the nurse, as if the front courtyard was covered by a swarm of fireflies.
“Stand back,” came the command from behind her.
Faced with no realistic option but to comply, she switched places with what turned out to be the nurse from before. She thrust out her arms, her hands cupped together, as the black wave of inhumanity rose up and threatened to engulf her.
She opened her hands, revealing a golf ball-sized globe of light. The bright flare splashed across the courtyard. The sunlight was sucked into the wall of people, overflowed like a river pouring over its banks, and filled all the spaces between the heavens and the earth.
This was either the same globe Kikiou had thrown at Mephisto in the hospital director’s office a short time before, or a similar device Mephisto had already fashioned himself.
This brilliance, suffused with life and something apart from artificial light, aroused a scream of pain from these creatures of the night. They fled like a quickly retreating tide.
“Those people—those people just now,” the nurse mumbled in a daze.
The assistant head nurse to the director placed a hand on her shoulder. They gazed together at the front courtyard, still as bright as day.
“Let’s lock down the entrances—no, as long as that light burns, they won’t be coming back. There are still people outside the gates who need saving.”
Then she added in a quiet voice, “So it seems they have finally arrived here.”
Chapter Three
Setsura knew he had reached the realm of the Demon Princess.
However the entrance might change, the accessway remained fairly fixed. Passing through the familiar sur
face, walking through the stands of trees, thirty minutes later he came to the shores of the lake.
Against the dark green backdrop, the soaring and majestic manor house was only a few hundred yards off. He would be better off assuming that Princess had already returned and had Takako in her grasp.
When Tonbeau engaged the Akashic Records and he was drawn out of there, Takako had been in the back of the Crystal Pavilion. But as a rule, the sire always knew where the servants were and what they were up to.
He was struck by the realization that there was one way to retrieve Takako safely. Setsura was equally confident that Princess would have paid no heed to his return. Such was the indifference of the lord of this world, an existence immune to rot and decay.
“That is my only way in.”
He returned temporarily to the forest, emerging again at the back of the manor house. Since arriving in this world, a strange vibe had wrapped its tendrils around him. Nothing was alive. The fluttering leaves on the sun-drenched trees, the summer breeze skittering across the lake—it all felt like—nothing.
There was light and there was wind. Light and wind literally painted on a canvas.
Setsura was beginning to see through the mirage to the reality of this place. This was a new development.
“Where the hell are they?”
Setsura approached the manor house. There were several dozen servants inside. All it’d take was getting nabbed by one.
The manor house was still as death, not only devoid of servants, but of any signs of life at all. Come to think about it, he hadn’t heard any birds in the forest either. Something strange had happened when he’d been thrown into the connecting link. Whether for good or ill at this juncture all depended on luck and fate.
“What to do, what to do?”
In the midst of the dappled sunlight playing across the leaves and the trees, Setsura closed his eyes and folded his arms.
“You could always do nothing.”
The voice—definitely that of Princess—descended on him from out of the empty air.
“Where are you?” asked the unflustered Setsura.
“Anywhere you like. You’ve done well coming this far. That girl is so important to you?”
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