“Is that all?” Mephisto asked the darkness. “Then you’ll have to answer to me.”
He took off after the girl and disappeared into the gloom. He raked his hands through the empty air. It was pitch black. He could see nothing, hear nothing. The sound of the wind and the light of the moon had vanished.
Mephisto pressed forward regardless. It was not clear why he decided to. Nobody could claim to understand how the Demon Physician’s mind worked.
A brilliant light abruptly appeared, and his shadow grew long behind him. Other than narrowing his eyes and glancing up at the shining sky overhead, he barely reacted to this unearthly change. The forest rose up around him in a riot of green. Mephisto stood on a narrow path weaving among the trees.
“She left the door open,” he said to himself. He started down the walk, not even bothering to glance back over his shoulder.
The path meandered along for another fifty yards. Mephisto stopped. In the middle of the path was a tea table. Sitting on the table, on a golden stand, was an oblong lump of purple amethyst. It was aligned parallel to the ground, the tapered end pointing in his direction.
“Welcome.”
A naked woman stepped between Mephisto and the curious piece of amethyst. It wasn’t Shuuran. She wasn’t nearly as pretty. Her “beauty” more resembled the carnality of an erotic dancer.
Probably less “resembled” than “was.” Her hips swayed, exposing her breasts and the inverted triangle between her legs. “Come on in,” she said, pointing down with her left hand and reaching out with her right. Her breasts swayed, but with a lively, youthful firmness.
Mephisto approached silently.
“My job is to entertain any visitors who come down this path. You must be the first in a good hundred years.”
Her breath smelled like sour fruit. She draped her arms around his neck. The world shimmered in a white light. In the midst of it, Mephisto caught sight of a thin, incandescent line streaking through the air, angled down toward the earth.
The purple light stabbed through the woman’s abdomen and reflected off Mephisto’s cape. The temperature over the microsecond duration of the pulse peaked at three hundred thousand degrees.
By focusing the sunlight on a crystal to generate a mixed-phase beam of energy, those ancient Chinese alchemists had chanced upon the same principles and materials as the modern ruby laser.
And the woman? An aiming device. The sun above was probably artificial, yet fixed in position. While the crystal could absorb that light energy, there was no guarantee that the enemy would walk right in front of it. With her body and charms, the woman’s purpose was to lure the target into the path of the beam.
Her back and stomach belched blue fire where the beam penetrated her body. The skin turned to charcoal. There’d be another woman along to replace her soon enough.
The smell of burning wood drew Mephisto’s attention off to the left. The fat trunk of a nearby beech tree was burning just like the woman’s torso. The result of the beam that had reflected off his cape. In Demon City, everybody knew that optical weapons were useless against Doctor Mephisto.
“What a curious device,” he said, looking down at the woman’s body, which was melting like wax. It could just as well have been a wax sculpture brought to life.
Mephisto walked around the tea table and continued on his way.
She showed up in the after-hours clinic of Mephisto Hospital just past ten o’clock that night. She had a handkerchief pressed against one side of her face. Though struck by the loveliness of the exposed half, the receiving nurse nevertheless was compelled to answer her questions with a cold objectivity.
“The hospital director is currently out. But there are several qualified doctors on call who can treat burns.”
The young woman in the white cheongsam didn’t reply to this customary brusqueness and turned away. At that moment a SWAT officer hurried by her and asked, “What room is Setsura Aki in?”
After scanning and confirming the validity of his ID card, the receiving nurse consulted her computer. She shook her head. “He is not to be disturbed, and he’s not allowed to have visitors. He’s in the special isolation ward on the seventh floor. No one may see him.”
“Listen, young lady—”
“No one’s even allowed a glimpse. There’s no telling what illnesses a patient confined to the isolation ward in this hospital could have.”
“Do you know why I want to see him?”
“It’s written all over your face.” The nurse lowered her voice. “Are you one of Aki-san’s friends?”
“Well, yeah—”
“So, tell me, just between you and me, what’s the least-busy time of the day to visit his shop in West Shinjuku?”
“I guess I’ll have to ask him next time I see him.”
The nurse watched him walk toward the exits and permitted herself a disappointed sigh. Which may explain why she didn’t catch the brief flash of a white dress out of the corner of her eye as it passed by her, and headed down the hallway leading deeper into the building.
The hospital had erupted into a quiet panic when the ambulance announced it was carrying Setsura Aki. Nobody wanted to treat him. No matter how skilled the doctor, all his shortcomings would be revealed once the patient was reexamined by Doctor Mephisto.
Simply imagining how the hospital director would deal with whoever presumed to treat this young owner of an old and established senbei shop—and the best P.I. in Shinjuku—was enough to make everybody from the assistant director on down think twice before volunteering his services.
Somehow, before the ambulance arrived, an attending physician was decided upon. Within twenty minutes the patient’s condition was diagnosed as a “bioenergetic breakdown, cause unknown.”
Two young women accompanied him. The shop girl was treated for a bout of lightheadedness and sent home. Takako Kanan remained with Setsura. She said she was a friend from outside Shinjuku, and the fact that she was the daughter of a renowned scholar convinced the doctors.
The array of bedside sensors relayed the patient’s condition directly to the nurse’s station and to the attending physician’s office, so they saw no reason not to let her stay there. As a friend, she could prop up his spirits and provide moral support.
Takako sat on the sofa in the luxurious, two-room medical suite. The sofa was next to the bed where Setsura lay with his eyes closed. She tried not to stare at him too much. She got a paperback history text out of her purse. Scanning the tiny text and detailed illustrations, though, she became aware that her attention had been drawn once again to the white, exhausted face.
She shook her head in reproach and averted her gaze. As if waiting for this moment, a warm sensation flared up in her chest. This man had declared war on the monster from the shadow box in order to save her. And such courage came from a man lovelier than most women.
What she was feeling, she told herself, was gratitude. But she knew that the very first time they’d met at the bar on Fifth Street, this young man had left a searing brand upon her heart.
A movement out of the corner of her eye caught her attention. His arms lay on the blanket across his stomach. One hand twitched mysteriously. He’d fallen into a comatose state in the ambulance and remained dead to the world. Trying to imagine what force of the subconscious was prompting such behavior left her utterly vexed.
Takako didn’t know that even in an unconscious state, the devil wires had flowed from his fingers, slipped through the jamb of the automatic doors, and had stretched a cordon around the entire floor.
At that same moment, something wicked this way came, tearing through the invisible coils of razor wire, the hospital room in her sights.
Even in a coma, Setsura Aki would keep on fighting to the bitter end.
Feeling a cool breeze on the back of her neck, Takako jumped up and checked the window on the far side of the bed. Nothing there was out of the ordinary. She whirled around.
A woman in a white cheongsam stood in the doorway.
Her hand covered half of her face. The other half—more beautiful than anything else in the universe—gazed down at Setsura.
“We meet at last,” she said in an indescribable voice. “Yes, you are the man I saw that night. I have come to see you breathe your last.”
Takako felt the silent air growing frigid around her. She frantically stifled the scream rising in her throat.
“Who—Who are you?”
It took a long second for the woman to register Takako’s presence. She lowered her left hand. Takako’s scream died in her lungs. The other half of the woman’s incomparably beautiful face was a hideous mass of charred flesh.
To be continued.
Afterword
Demon City Shinjuku may well have met its most dangerous enemies ever.
Vampires.
These three (Kikiou is a different species of immortal) are not ordinary vampires. They are messengers of the night, thousands of years old and in possession of untold powers.
Even the combined forces of Setsura Aki and Doctor Mephisto may not be enough to resist them, as when Mephisto’s fortress-like hospital is easily penetrated without the perpetrators breaking a sweat.
Creating a heroic, vampire-themed, supernatural battle has long been a dream of mine. I don’t think a vampire story has been depicted in quite this way before. That’s not the sole reason, but the originally planned two volumes have soared past a thousand pages.
Ideas bubbled out of my head one after the other, and I couldn’t bring myself to discard any of them. The story has evolved enormously and the number of characters keeps growing. Keeping all those balls in the air from installment to installment is a big challenge.
But fear not. Everything will be resolved in its own good time. The light at the end of the tunnel isn’t an oncoming train. I’m not one for meaningless endings. The road ahead may look bleak, but you can trust me on this.
The one person qualified to challenge that claim is my editor, Mr. T. On occasion, a serialization scheduled to run a hundred and thirty pages has run into a brick wall after fifty or seventy. At times like that, Mr. T is wont to shout, “Man, I’m out of here!”
“Let’s take that long walk off a short pier together then.”
“Ah, this sofa is stained with the blood, sweat and tears of your poor editor,” he blusters, in a mixture of intimidation and resignation.
But looking at him out of the corner of my eye, I catch a glittering premonition of developments that will far exceed anything we could expect or imagine if left to our own devices.
To start with, my dedication to the material is completely different. I really love my vampires. Even more than the infamous Miss Toya.
More than in any other previous work I’ve committed to novel form, I’ve been breathing new life into the old-school monsters you used to see in the movies, as the haunted atmosphere of Demon City Shinjuku turns into its own worst enemy.
This city exists if for no other reason than to tell the story of Yashakiden.
So to Mr. T and my readers I say, relax. I promise you that Yashakiden will succeed as a story unequaled in its class. Lost in the midst of the labyrinth, the mists of Transylvania swirling around me, I resolve to press forward, with hope and confidence as my sole sidearms.
But even when I put the final volume to bed, will that be the end of the tale?
Hideyuki Kikuchi (while watching The Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires)
May 28, 1989
Yashakiden: The Demon Princess, Volume 1 Page 19