by Kim Newman
‘This is the Daikaiju Building,’ said Lefty.
Daikaiju – Oversized Monster.
Conceptual breakthrough!
He was in an office block in the shape of a dinodroid. An actual G-bot, built life-size.
Way cool!
He had wished he were outside the building so he’d be safe. Now he wished he were outside so he could get a proper look at the edifice of awesome.
Hal Takahama thought that outstanding. And outrageous.
Jun Zero wanted to slay the beastoid, bring it down with a spear thrust to its heart. That was megachill too.
If Hal were in charge, he’d commission smaller-scale robo-versions of the building to patrol corridors and breathe fire on intruders. Maybe Jun Zero had been consulted and suggested just that.
Being totalled by his own idea would be the bring-down of all time.
‘I give up,’ he said. ‘Lefty, where are the elevators?’
‘Floor 44 is not accessible by public elevator or stairwell. In Japan, the number 44 is considered ill-omened. The Processor Room is located in a part of the building many assume not to exist.’
‘Terrific. So this is a cursed floor!’
‘The only points of entry or egress are the transporter circles marked on the plan.’
The framework blew up, giving a cross-section of the guts of the dragon – Floor 44 was the cloacal region, natch – with a scattering of flashing emerald lights.
‘Transporter circles? Is teleportation a thing in 1999?’
Eight years could have seen all sorts of advances. Faster than light travel. Peace in Central Europe. Harold Takahama having a girlfriend.
‘Transporter circles are hatches. With ladders.’
A disappointment. Still, less chance of getting his atoms scrambled.
Three emerald lights blinked red.
‘What does that mean?’
‘These circles are activated.’
‘“Activated” means “open”?’
‘Affirma— yes.’
The hologram shut off. A skeleton afterimage danced in his vision.
‘Let’s get this off the table,’ he said. ‘We’re not being rescued, right?’
‘The combination of tenses, double negative cut-outs and ambiguous interrogative inflexion renders your statement-stroke-question a non sequitur. The individuals who have gained access to Floor 44 do not share desired outcomes with Jun Zero. A ninety-two percent likelihood exists that their actions will be inimical to your survival.’
Figured. Killbastards incoming.
‘This way,’ said someone shrill. ‘The nitwit’s talking to himself.’
Thank you very much, Lefty – he thought.
Did his hand want to quit the partnership? Maybe it had an urge to take Vegas as a solo act. Or find another wrist to clamp.
He smelled old lady smell. Lavender water.
A child-sized head peeped around a corner. She had a lot of frizzy hair. Did electric filaments grow out of her scalp?
‘Peek-a-boo, I see you,’ she said.
A vampire kid. They were the worst.
He remembered what a horror Cousin Helen had been as a kid. Hellish wasn’t even a bloodsucking fiend with hundreds of years of practice.
A little Japanese girl stepped shyly around the corner. The skirt of her red sailor suit was two sizes too small to cover frothy petticoats. A jaunty cap was pinned to her curls. She licked a glistening red lollipop. Not cherry flavour.
‘Want to play tag, Mr Zero?’
She knew who he was. Maybe everybody did!
The girl’s eyes were big and strange as those horrible orphan paintings old people in Ojai hung above hearths they never lit fires in. Her lollilipsticked mouth was a pushed-out rosebud. She’d grown an adult vampire dentition without losing her baby teeth. Sixty-four fangs! Not a biter – a shredder. Patsy Piranha, with Shirley Temple pumps and a pom-pom hat.
Li’l Orphan Alucard was prepped to take on Jun Zero.
Jun Zero – aka Hal from 1992 – knew she’d have no trouble killing him.
And she had friends with her. Also bent on actions inimical to his survival.
‘Lefty, input would be appreciated.’
The girl looked around for the phantom he was talking to, then shrugged. She figured him for bonkers in the nut.
‘Talking to yourself is a bad habit,’ said the vampire girl.
Lefty whirred, clicked and flashed.
‘Evasive action advised,’ said Lefty.
That song again. One of Lefty’s standards.
The girl’s eyebrows flared archly. She peeped he was talking to his hand.
‘My name is Tsunako Shiki and I’m eight years old.’
‘Maybe you were eight,’ he said, hoping he sounded tough. ‘When you died.’
Tsunako tutted and made an exaggerated sad face.
Shielding her maw with her hand, she whispered, ‘It’s rude to say the d-word.’
Her eyes grew bigger, rounder, with red whirls in the irises.
He knew she was putting a glamour on him – to hack his brain!
No, in this room, he was the hacker. Tsunako was… a peril, an obstacle.
Without needing a prompt, he improvised. A thing had worked before – with another monster – and he didn’t mind the repetition. Flash-pan gamers who didn’t deign to reuse plays crashed out of their level. Botjocks in it for the duration hit rinse and repeat until the battlefield was a litter of broken mechas and mangled pilots.
Hal sliced his cardkey down the reader-slide. The Processor Room door unlocked.
Ishikawa stumbled out, eyes red. More ghoul than vampire. He’d bitten through his lips and dribbled a gore goatee. He lurched at Hal, then sniffed the dust-free air and turned his red gaze on Tsunako.
She giggled.
‘I was wrong, Jun Zero,’ she said. ‘You’re fun!’
YOSHIO MIZUNO - ASTRO-MAN (YUREI 139)
The plan was a tri-pronged pincer movement. Shiki, the speartip, would drop down from above. Mizuno (Astro-Man) and Kurokawa (Caterpillar), the prongs, would come up from below.
The objective was to put down a stray.
They didn’t need to know the dog’s name, but Shiki told them anyway.
Jun Zero. Not a vampire. A code cowboy.
Eesi-peesi, she said. A minor piece to knock off the board. This was tidying up before getting on with the rest of the evening.
Nothing was ever simple outside a briefing room. After more than half a century as a ghost soldier, Mizuno should have drummed that into his skull. Especially after the unholy catastrophe of the ‘Cthulhu in Shinjuku Caper’.
Whenever he went to mist, Mizuno lost his train of thought.
Each coalescence was a new start. He had to reassemble memories. Trying to recall specifics was as frustrating as singing one song while a different tune played on the radio.
Like his mother-in-darkness, he was condemned to re-enact his death for eternity. She had done it for terrified audiences. He did it mostly in fog.
According to characters on his arm, he was a ghost.
YUREI 139
As mist, he was a ghost of a vampire. As meat and bone, he was yurei turned yōkai.
Colonel Golgotha gave orders, not explanations. Shiki, from the private sector, shared information. They were mopping up someone else’s mess. A chiropterid was supposed to blankslate the hackers after the breach. It hadn’t finished the job.
Tonight, they weren’t soldiers, but janitors. The turd Jun Zero refused to be flushed. A big smelly dump on a clean floor.
His lowly station always came back to Mizuno when he pulled his droplets together. He was janitor, minion, stage-hand. In the mud, not on a horse. Even as a vampire, he was a renfield.
Mikaeris (the Butler), the elder on the Golgotha Squad, wore pride like armour. Despite self-identifying as a servant, he was lordly and resolute. A true vampire. He wore European Victorian clothes. He didn’t turn to fog. He marched up to front d
oors and demanded an invitation. He fought enemies face to face. People he killed admired him.
Mizuno seeped through drains, cracks in walls, gaps around doors and windows, chimney flues. No draught excluder could keep him out. He was Johatsu Ningen – the Evaporated Man. He swirled into nostrils and mouths, drew breath from lungs. He got into veins, forced blood through the skin. He could suck the life out of a room. People he killed often didn’t even know he was there.
He offered to snuff Jun Zero like that.
Shiki said no. She wanted to play.
An old child, she hadn’t outgrown whimsical cruelty. She was high-born, like Mizuno’s maker. Some vampires treated get like children or lovers. Lady Asaji turned retainers.
In the seventeenth century, the warm Asaji Washizu was a radical. When the Noh theatre was forbidden to women, she posed as male in life to play female parts on stage. The double imposture was remarkable enough to draw audiences even after her secret was out. By the 1930s, the vampire Lady Asaji was a traditionalist relic, perpetuating a production draped in frosted cobweb. Every night, she acted to the same music, in the same mask, with the same gestures. Like a ghost walking. Or a record stuck in a groove. Strictly, The Demon and the Lady should have been part of a whole evening’s programme. She pared the jo-ha-kyū ritual down to her star turn. Ten stylised minutes, repeated forever.
Kiri – the Demon Play. Kyū – repeated rapidly.
Kiri-kyū… kiri-kyū… kiri-kyū…
Mizuno found the access hatch. A hollow column sheathed a ladder. The internal architecture of the Daikaiju Building mimicked anatomical forms. Corridors and ducts were veins, threaded through meat and around muscle. Rooms throbbed like organs. The Astro-Man knew the insides of bodies.
As mist, he had different senses.
He felt the spaces he filled. He could rise as a cloud, floating to the next floor without opening the hatch. But the EarthGuard issue HazMat suit didn’t dissipate. Without properly willing it, his limbs went gaseous. His coverall sleeves flopped like used condoms. His boots dragged. He was contained, trapped. He had to focus to solidify his hands enough to grip the ladder rungs.
He found the hatch hanging open. While he climbed, his lighter-than-air substance rose inside the HazMat suit. The chest and arms swelled, leaving him shrivelled below the belt. He had to drag himself through the hatch, making an unmistlike clatter with the helmet. He tried to stand but his ankles crumpled and his boots tipped. The hampering garment was camouflage, a stage costume – but getting it off was a two-man job. Seals that kept out contaminants kept in the Astro-Man. The sooner this charade was over, the better.
He concentrated and solidified.
Why was he here again?
For Jun Zero.
Who? A stray dog. Hacker trash. Survivor of a trio. The Third Turd.
Mizuno couldn’t see far down the corridor. The inside of his faceplate was fogged with his own mist. His feelers extended only to the man-shape of the suit. Four tubes, a barrel and a nubbin. Was this what it was like for the warm, trapped in single shapes, unable to feel anything beyond their skins? He couldn’t remember being so limited.
He tried to think back. Ancient history was in focus. The present blurred.
In 1935, Mizuno – a student librarian obsessed with Noh – sought out Lady Asaji’s small theatre, a former chapel in the Bund. Japan had turned away from Hollywood musicals and Western dress to revive its own traditions. Mizuno saw The Demon and the Lady so often he could shut his eyes and replay it in his mind. He couldn’t remember his family home or what he’d done last week, but knew every nuance of the damned play.
The Chapel Theatre was one of the attractions of the vampire enclave. Connoisseurs sought out a performer of Lady Asaji’s vintage, though they would rather a male master had preserved the purest form of Noh. The star ignored carping traditionalists, except on the rare occasions she had them brought to her dressing room with knives at their throats. She lifted her horned, snarling demon mask to show her blank-white, unpowdered face as she lapped their blood from a lacquered bowl. It pleased her if they died as she took a last swallow.
Mizuno’s first duty as a serf was to get rid of the bodies.
The Princess Casamassima disapproved of such things in the Bund but understood their inevitability. Some warm fools were born to be bled. Vampires could no more abstain from hunting humans than cats could observe fast days. Lady Christina valued her realm above any of its residents. She must abide by her Treaty with Japan. Penalties for murder, if the charge was proven, were severe. Therefore, charges must not be proven. If Mizuno didn’t get rid of corpses, his duty was to confess to the crimes – no matter that he was (then) a warm man and the dead were exsanguinated. He was even guilty. He stuck knives into throats. Lady Asaji, at worst, received stolen goods – in a bowl. She did not give orders. She did not need to. She accepted offerings.
In life, Lady Asaji played the onnagata part – reserved for an actor who specialised in female roles – of the Lady in The Demon and the Lady. Fray Sebastian, a vampire who disapproved of her unwomanly behaviour in taking to the stage in the first place, thought it a great joke to replace her co-star one night. At the climax of the play, he unmasked and bit through her jugular. The barbarous Christian dripped his blood into her mouth as she died. Thrown off her stage like a discarded rag-doll, she turned. Her loyal company rallied to their new-risen vampire mistress. For disrupting the Lady’s performance, Sebastian was bound in chains and thrown into Kagami Pond. He survived but never came near his daughter-in-darkness again. Lady Asaji was no one’s minion. She would not be the passive acolyte of a red-headed gaijin leech.
The Lady bore the European nosferatu taint, but conducted herself as yōkai – as if the get of Yuki-Onna herself. Long hair, white face, white robes. As a vampire, she switched roles and played the Demon. Over hundreds of years, she enacted her tragedy thousands of times. Never varying a jot.
Lady Asaji enslaved her troupe. Her play had only two characters. Shite and waki. Star and Support. Diva and Stooge. She was the Demon shite. There was a turnover of Lady waki, female and male. Typically, she selected a smitten supporting actor and bled them till they could bleed no more. Most, she got rid of. Some – like Mizuno – she turned, not for solace but because theatre needed jobbers to do the scut-work.
As a new-born vampire, with his mistress whispering in his head, he was still flesh and blood.
The misting came later.
Lady Asaji turned him from warm to vampire. The Key Man turned him from vampire to wraith. Circumstance made him a ghost soldier.
Mizuno’s mother-in-darkness was truly dead. Her old haunt was a pachinko parlour. The din of pinball replaced the chords of a samisen. Even the longest-lived residents walked by without remembering the Chapel Theatre.
In March 1945, an American air raid seeded incendiaries throughout Tokyo. One hundred thousand died. High winds spread blazes across sixteen square miles. Industrial and military targets were sited in residential and commercial prefectures, so the bombing was indiscriminate. Even the Wall was no barrier. Fire – deadly to many bloodlines – caught in the crowded, overbuilt Bund. Ironically, the spirit O-Same – who razed the same area, with about the same death toll, in 1657 – was heroine of the hour, absorbing so much flame into herself that she expanded into a phantom fire giant and exploded warplanes above the reach of anti-aircraft guns. Few noticed that Lady Asaji’s theatre burned down with her inside. Mizuno was out on the bay in a small boat, tipping a weighted corpse into the water. That made him sole survivor of the company.
At first, he professed not to believe the Lady was gone.
But she no longer whispered in his head. He faced the truth. His obligation as loyal retainer was to avenge her.
As a vampire of the Bund, he was exempt from conscription. A week after the raid, he renounced stateless status and volunteered for the Imperial Army. He expected to be shipped out to kill GIs. He looked forward to tearing into greasy bar
barians with teeth and claws. Instead, he – along with other patriotic yōkai – was sent to Higanjima Island, where the Black Ocean Society maintained an underground facility. He was entrusted to Dr Komoda, who augmented his natural abilities with transfusions and operations. That’s where things got misty.
He had few memories of the rest of the War, but was awarded a China Incident Medal for meritorious service. He wasn’t sure if he surrendered in 1945 or was ever mustered out. He had only foggy impressions of the immediate post-war era.
Besides the medal, he’d picked up the tattoo. YUREI 139. That made him a ghost, vanished from official records.
In 1960 or so, he came to his senses long enough to seek Lady Asaji’s birthplace and make a shrine to her. He spread ashes from the Chapel. The peaceful spot was long since abandoned. The Lady had returned with her troupe a hundred years after her final performance as a living woman and killed every man, woman and child in her village, then burned down their homes and dismantled the castle where her descendants cowered and bled their last. Mizuno thought to sit by the shrine and shapeshift permanently, becoming a low-lying reddish fog travellers would do well to avoid.
But his country called again. His mind came together, if imperfectly.
Major Golgotha recruited him. He knew Mizuno’s war record, which was more than Mizuno did. Golgotha browbeat him into signing up again. He wasn’t necessarily serving his (or any) country, but he hadn’t truly fought for the Emperor last time. His obligation to Lady Asaji was discharged. He kept going over his and her story, the demon and the lady, whenever he came back from the mist… and, though he believed it, he no longer felt it. The Lady was ashes and he was the Demon now.
Golgotha took him back to the Key Man. Multiple blood transfusions partially cleared his head and helped him keep his body together. Mizuno was with EarthGuard when Big Man Turtle attacked Expo 70. He took part in other actions. Gokemidoro’s upper voice sent him on missions that had little to do with defence of the planet. Most of the time, Mizuno held down a sinecure. He was a university librarian, in charge of a wing with no books. At night, he sat in his office and remembered The Demon and the Lady. He hoped that eventually the play would not be there when he thought of it.