Since I was out of action for a while, again, and the company was still keeping me on salary waiting to see if I could fully recover, I took a vacation.
Pro-tip: Be careful about how hardcore you are about recovery and getting back on the line. All the good hunters want to get back to killing monsters and making money. Much of the stuff that we do is fairly mundane, for monster hunting, and you can get complacent about that. But occasionally you run into an operation or an action, right out the blue, that pushes you up to the point where really it should have involved Force Recon or Delta or something. Don’t think you can just wrap the fucker and shake it off.
Stay in shape, stay in focus and when you’re injured, work to get back to top form before you hit the front-line. The distance between life and death in this work is usually measured in millimeters and microseconds. One pulled muscle can mean the end of your career and we take enough casualties as it is.
That’s a way of saying plan to take most of your vacations while you’re in physical therapy or still popping pain killers.
Wanda, the cute little physical therapist, had some vacation coming up. Pointing out this was not an intro to my life, I asked her if she’d ever been to England. She hadn’t and was more than willing to go with me, doubling as my ongoing physical terrorist. Doctors Nelson had friend with the Van Helsing Institute and they were more than happy to welcome a visiting injured American hunter.
Doctor William Rigby, vice chairman of the Van Helsing Institute, was a wild-haired, bushy-eyebrowed, standard English academic, one each. Just like the Doctors Nelson were perfect examples of the American psychological industry. He looked a bit like a short, wiry, version of Albert Einstein without the nose. He was still covered in shrapnel from his time as a Marine Commando and Special Operations Executive member in World War II and chain smoked Galois cigarettes, a habit he’d picked up in France while working with the Maquis. He had, in the intervening years, been everywhere and killed everything. Now he was semi-retired and managed the day to day operations of the various Van Helsing facilities including their archives which were, let me tell you, extensive.
Van Helsing did some stuff that I frankly thought was smarter than MHI. For one thing they had a visiting scholarship program with Oxford that was supported by the British Government. They had the same cantankerous relationship with BSS and MI4 as the US hunters but they had a much better relationship with supernatural affiliated academics. Not all of them were monster rights advocates.
Doctor Rigby provided a nice young, female, tour guide to keep Wanda occupied during the day while I dug into their archives and eventually some of the secure vaults at Oxford. What a freaking treasure trove. Oxford had been studying monsters since before the split in 1209. According to the “official” histories, Oxford and Cambridge separated due to “disputes with townsfolk.”
The true story was that some of the academics had delved a bit too deep into trying to use various unearthly powers. This caused a major break-out of demons, similar to what had happened in Microtel. The pro-demon faction, if you will, was driven out while the anti-monster faction helped the local clerics run down and destroy the demonic infestation. Thereafter one of Oxford’s cares, later made secret, was to “make This world of God’s Creation safe from the Unseen and unholy.” The pro-demon faction founded Cambridge University which was why the British pro-monster advocates still infest the place.
I started to put some things together about then. Growing up, my mother would always talk Oxford down and frequently went to events at Cambridge.
Hmmm…
Bottom line, Oxford’s secure vaults held a lot of monster lore. Much of it was collected from all over the world during the colonial period and if there had been a monster outbreak, anywhere, any time, there was probably a paper by The Royal Society for the Study of the Supernatural about it.
The academics there were quite polite to a visiting American hunter who had been injured fighting trolls. Polite and just a tad condescending. Then I started to correct some of their literature on Japanese monsters I’d been studying as well as delving into some of the, many, monster language books they had. I have a pretty much eidetic memory, even after all the bangs to the head, so the first thing I did was dig into Trollish—Trul-ska’ technically—to translate what the trolls had been arguing about when we found them. Naturally it was an argument about how to prepare the humans they’d caught wandering in their territory for tea. By some immersion in Trul-ska’ with one of the Doctors of Linguistics I was pretty much fluent in a week. It wasn’t a tough language consisting of a total of about nine hundred words, many of which were situationally adjustable.
I was offered a scholarship on the spot.
Before I left, once my arm was starting to work properly, I wrote up a formal paper on the Blue Screen demons and Microtel’s ongoing issues with them as an example of Ekaratai, as they termed them, and the warning that as the computer industry advanced this would be an ongoing problem that given the power of computers would probably worsen.
There’s a reason I still use a typewriter besides being an old fogey. I deal with enough crazy ass shit in my life. I don’t need a demon crawling out of my screen.
The scholars had divided the supernatural up into various classifications, or factions. First you had your angels and devils, in the religious sense obviously, because even the staunchest atheist had to admit there was something out there, and sometimes it even helped us. Hello. The religious scholars chalked these groups up to a Creator, and the opposition to his plan as the Fallen. Beyond that it all degenerated into arguments, like any topic involving religion.
Then there was another faction of ancient beings known as the Old Ones, which was a vast and diverse bunch of things, most of them really nasty and, as far as we could tell, in conflict with each other. They ranged in size from killable to godlike. Some said they were the remnant of a separate plan that the Creator had dropped, as well, a mistake. Others thought they were truly alien. All those academics agreed that the Old Ones were bad news.
There were references in the papers to something called “reality stones” or “ward stones” that could turn away or even destroy the greater Old Ones. I never had the time, then, to track those down. Some of these devices were created by Sir Isaac Newton. The British were understandably proud of that. But researches later had always proved fruitless despite more or less having his complete design. Something was simply missing. He might have left out a key ingredient, he was a bit of an ass that way according to some contemporary reports, or something universal might have changed since his time. Others had been created by earlier alchemists going back to the Greeks and Romans at least. Many of those had been expended over the years. It was believed that the Antikythera Device—which I had to look up—was an early ward stone despite being completely different in appearance and manner to those of Isaac Newton. Certain relics of the early Christians had been proven to have similar powers at least in the hands of a believer.
Our best guess was that it was the Old Ones, or at least one faction, who provided the powers that raised undead. Ward stones were sovereign against undead as was “the Power of The Lord Our God” wielded by a “truly Holy Believer” of any faith. One of the Royal Society papers detailed an eye witness account of a Hindu Mystic using the power of Brahma to drive back a vampire and “return three Wights of Great Power to their Eternal Rest.”
One group the Institute had collected a lot of information on was the Fey and I think I found that part the most fascinating of all. The Fey were found in various forms throughout the world and it was more or less a catch-all for anything otherworldly, but not related to the Old Ones. Fey ranged from Buddhist garuda “demons” to Grand Fey like Faerie Queens and Baba-yaga, all with a complex social structure and a caste system. They were mysterious, powerful, and much of the Institute’s information was basically educated guesswork. They believed Fey be exiles from another universe, although the ones who did occasionally comm
unicate with us insisted they were here before humans. But then again, Fey were notorious for being lying tricksters. Aspects of their magic indicated that they might be from an alternate reality where physics was slightly different than this reality’s. Or, possibly, they had a better handle on quantum physics. I read papers and got into discussions on both sides.
Bottom line, the Fey didn’t seem interested in taking over our world so much as messing with it and trying, in general, to avoid direct conflict with the dominant sentient life-form: Humans. Fey lived in and around humans in various guises, including cast off races who had long ago been their servants. It was widely believed that elves and orcs fell in that category, and maybe even gnomes, though now they had mostly resorted to lives of crime. Then there were the powerful Grand Fey Courts, some of which overlapped semi-openly with human royalty and nobility at odd times in history. One Faerie Queen in Austria had maintained a continuous Court in Vienna in the days of Johann Strauss, who she had boosted to prominence after he won a Harper’s Challenge.
Last, there were groups that fell outside the major factions. Werewolves were one of them. The supernatural etymology of werewolves were unclear. Large regions, even continents, would have one “Alpha” werewolf which generally formed the pack-culture of that region. When the Alpha was aggressive, werewolves would be aggressive. When its personal philosophy was get along with man, werewolves would do so, by and large. I thought about the Skykomish Werewolf. We’d finally found out he’d been a software engineer who’d been bitten. He’d tried to avoid hunting humans and simply failed. Pretty obviously whoever the “Alpha” was for the Northwest was “pro-human” or whatever.
This group also included the broad “Yeti” category. “Yeti” included all similar groups including Sasquatch, swamp-apes or Letiche, Ebu Gogo and others. These were generally grouped into the “mammal cryptids.” Some of them were believed to be extinct.
Interested in the Sasquatch, given where I worked, I dove into that subject. They were elusive so there was very little factual information on them. However, there was a partial dictionary of the Yeti language, which was probably related. It was mostly from secondary references that I was able to find a few details about the Sasquatch and one paper that had a few terms believed to be Sasquatch such as “Hello,” “Friend,” “water.” There was no single word for “food” in Yeti. Like Yupik, Yeti and Sasquatch were affixially polysynthetic languages. Short explanation of that is if you had some basic cognates you could make up any word you wanted by stringing cognates together and the listener has to guess what you mean. That’s sort of the explanation.
Bottom line, if I ever encountered a Sasquatch, I might be able to at least get them to try to talk to me.
The other thing I ran across, due to a conversation with Doctor Rigby over scotch, was gnolls. They are scavengers and garbage collectors. Horribly smelly things, their main defense is their stench, they are generally nonthreatening and harmless. They live to collect garbage and anything that’s decaying. They generally live in sewers in big cities for this reason and frequently can be found hiding near landfills and so on.
The Van Helsing organization had sometimes tried to use gnolls as Confidential Informants. Because despite their own stench, they had a very keen sense of smell and taste. They lived in more or less perpetual darkness and both found collections of wonderful decay and avoided potential predators by seeing the world through smell. Since everything eventually ends up tainting the sewers of big cities, they always knew where the monsters were at, if for no other reason than to avoid them.
The problem was that very few humans had ever been able to successfully communicate with them, but I was really good with languages. There was a complete dictionary of local gnoll dialects at Oxford. It might not work for gnolls in the US but I was determined to try to make contact with them even if I had to use a gas mask.
I could have spent the rest of my life in those archives. There really was the soul of an academic hiding in this broken body. But I picked up a lot of really good tips for dealing with monsters I figured I’d never encounter.
Wanda went back to the states after two weeks, her maximum vacation, totally satisfied. I’d been immersed in the archives most of the time but she had a great time and that was what mattered. She left my physical therapy in the hands of a new terrorist, Gregory. Obviously, I had nothing for Gregory. The reverse was not true. Gregory found me terribly handsome.
Obsessive heterosexuality can be a pain sometimes.
Once I was past therapy and back to physical training I bid a reluctant farewell to Oxford and the Van Helsing Institute, caught a plane back to the States and got my game face back on. I’d had enough of studying monsters, time to get back to killing them.
Shortly after I got back to Seattle, my job turned personal.
CHAPTER 11
There was a bento place I really liked right around the corner from my apartment: Saury. Saury is a type of fish mostly found around Japan, related to flying fish. They didn’t actually serve saury but in general their sushi was to die for, their udon was so authentic you’d think you were eating it in Shibuya and I liked the atmosphere. It was the kind of place where if you didn’t speak Japanese you felt out of place. In general, gaijin need not apply. On the other hand, I knew most of the servers and the owner by name. They called me Assei.
Police had found one of the servers, Kiyoshi, dead behind the restaurant. The body had been spotted by a bum who was dumpster diving instead of the workers there or we might never have been called. The reason we were called was obvious when we arrived. His body was nothing but skin and bones.
And I mean that literally: Skin, hair and bones were all that was left. There were a couple of big, nasty, entrance wounds on his stomach with the area around them discolored. Other than that, and an expression of sheer terror noticeable even with all his face muscles melted away, there were no evident wounds.
I was the first one to respond, since I’d been home at the time of the call, and I was shaking my head wondering what got him when Brad showed up.
“This is a new one on me,” I said, straightening up. The coroners and homicide dicks were being held back by one of King County’s finest and MCB.
“Spider,” Brad said, immediately.
“Except right here?” I asked, looking around the alleyway. “That doesn’t make sense. Don’t they usually drag them off to a lair? Not to mention no silk.”
“That is unusual,” he said.
I went through a list of all the spider-like creatures I could think of. Unfortunately, every single mythology has spider monsters. Many of them, though, were so similar they were probably the same species in different areas with different names.
“Anansi kama,” I said, thoughtfully. “African. Sort of a spider-were. Turns into a spider during certain days related to the stars. It attacks its victims in the open.” I stopped and looked at the dead server again and it clicked. “Jorogumo,” I said.
“Speaking Japanese again?” Brad asked.
“Jorogumo, or sometimes they call them Tsuchigumo, is a Japanese creature,” I said. “Shapeshifter. She can assume the form of a beautiful woman. But even then the victim is supposed to be bound in silk.”
“Have you gotten anything from the management?” Brad asked the King County investigator.
“He went out to take out the trash and didn’t come back,” the deputy said. “It was slow, they didn’t really miss him. Then we got the call. We found out about it before they did. No enemies that they know of. They weren’t real forthcoming but you know those Oriental types.”
“Yeah,” I said, shaking my head. “Damn slopes with their secrets and inscrutable faces.”
“They’re all over the place these days,” the deputy said, disgustedly.
“You can bag him,” I said to the jackass. “We’re not going to get anything else from this.”
By that time Doctor Nelson, Lucius, had shown up. I waved him off as he was enter
ing the crime scene.
“Jorogumo,” I said, walking over to the tape.
One of MCB’s finest was standing by and shook his head.
“No way,” the guy said, looking dyspeptic. “There hasn’t been a documented Jorogumo in the United States in years. It’s just a giant spider. Probably a nest around here somewhere.”
“Jorogumo,” I repeated. “Giant spiders stun their prey then take them to a nest to drink.”
“And Jorogumo lure men into a bedchamber for the same purpose,” Doctor Nelson said.
“Which is why this wasn’t just a random attack. He was left there on purpose.”
“What purpose?” the MCB guy asked.
“That I haven’t figured out,” I said. “But when I do, you’ll be the last to know.”
“You better watch your ass, wise-guy,” the Fed said. “You go off half-cocked and we’ll come down on you like a ton of bricks.”
“Are you entirely incapable of speaking without using metaphor?”
* * *
“What are you thinking?” Doctor Nelson asked, taking a bite out of a tuna roll.
Saury hadn’t even closed for the murder. Give the Japanese work ethic if nothing else. The servers were, to most gaijin, totally bland and unaffected. I could tell they were all on pins and needles.
“Mostly questions,” I said. “Why him? Why there? That was a message. The problem with messages is, you have to have a context. Right now, I don’t have any context. But they’re scared. Very scared.”
There was a back window in Saury. At one point when I was examining the corpse I’d seen a brief flash of someone looking out. So now my favorite noodle joint knew I was somehow involved in that business. They might just think I was an undercover cop. Given what I’d picked up about Japanese monster hunting, though, they probably knew I was Monsuta Hanta. Depending on where they sat on the subject, I might get a free meal or fugu in my wasabi. Could go either way.
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