by Kim Newman
It’s a standing joke that a compulsion of vampires of this class is collecting pictures of themselves in different clothes and wigs. A vanity gallery was once a good way to get found out. Even the most inbred aristocratic family doesn’t consist exclusively of lookalikes of the same sex who chose to have their portraits painted when they were the same age. At least the mob knew to tip their hats and address the screaming idiot as ‘my lord’ while hammering an ash branch through his gold brocade waistcoat.
‘I have… a reputation!’ exclaimed the Marquis, delighted. ‘Don’t believe any of it… or else, do. Please yourself. Tell me, what do they say about me? The elders. The ones that matter. Ruthven, Varney, Karnstein…’
He mouthed three syllables. You know the ones.
‘I don’t move in those circles,’ I said. ‘I knew Karnstein’s daughter.’
‘Oh, the flirty piece who was destroyed.’
‘Yes, though that’s not the whole story.’
‘Do tell…’
This ancient was addicted to gossip. Another child-brain trait.
‘I’m sworn to secrecy,’ I lied. I didn’t want to talk about Carmilla. You know why.
De Coulteray was pettish when I shut off the tap of tittle-tattle, but got over it quickly. He was mercurial. All over the place. Mostly repulsive, but with traces of charm…
Vampires sink their teeth into you in all manner of ways. De Coulteray’s tactic was to be so ridiculous you laughed at him, then when you got tired of that you felt a pang of pity, and let him in.
There’s a truth in the lore that victims invite vampires across their thresholds, but it’s too often taken literally. When a spendthrift gambles away the deeds to the estate and no longer owns his front door, is the invitation unwisely extended to the sallow stranger with the hungry eyes revoked? If a property is rented, can a trembling tenant answer a scratching at an upper-storey window without consulting the landlord? It’s seldom as simple as an engraved card entitling the bearer to call when convenient on Lady So-and-So at her town house and bleed her dry between the cucumber sandwiches and the string quartet. The undoing of a collar button can be an invitation. And tapping an empty teapot can be a dismissal.
Against my better judgement – no, against every instinct bred in me as a warm girl, compounded by centuries of experience as a vampire – I let the Marquis de Coulteray in. Not into my house, but my life. He made my acquaintance and that was enough. We were not friends. For a long time, I did not believe I could have friends, warm or vampire. But we knew each other.
And I could not get rid of him.
7
YOKAI TOWN, DECEMBER 10, 1899
Christina chose to ignore Drusilla’s announcement of a mystery death, brushing it under the carpet as she concentrated on more important things. Asking Dru to elucidate is always a frustrating endeavour. She won’t even admit she remembers blurting out ‘one of us just died’ so it’s no use hoping she’ll revisit the topic and cough up something useful like a name.
Kostaki and I thought it worth taking a census and Danny Dravot was willing to take care of it, discreetly. The Sergeant made a survey of the warehouse where our sleepers are stored, examining coffins for signs of tampering. He found nothing except a few of the cheaper caskets (essentially crates packed with straw) have had holes gnawed in them by ship’s rats. We picked the Macedonia clean of vermin – is this how vampire lords came to be hailed as Kings of the Cats? Rodents are entitled to chew a few boxes in reprisal.
At sea, I insisted on bed checks for medical reasons (not that I could do anything when a lid was prised open to disclose bone and dirt). Also to be sure none of our party were craftily preying on Larsen’s crew. On the Elizabeth Dane, Yiorgos Jurek – arrogant even by the standards of vampire elders – enacted the fable of the frog and the scorpion by ripping out the throats of sailors carrying us across the sea. Kostaki tossed the vrykolakas over the side before he could bite a bosun. Christina had to work her magic on Captain Blake to persuade him not to consign us all to the deep. Jurek was subject to another of those vampire phobias – a fear of running water. The ocean maddened him, I suppose. It certainly swallowed him.
I was willing to let it drop, but Kostaki decided it couldn’t hurt to be certain. He and Dravot set about lifting lids and peeping in. Some vampires stirred but stayed put. A few insisted on being let out. One or two showed no signs of life – which, in vampire terms, isn’t the same as being dead. I determined they were just deep sleepers.
One oddity came to light. One of our problem passengers is Clare Mallinger, an English newborn. She looks innocuous – a blonde, spirited English rose – but is a vicious, amoral murderess. Something went awry in her turning. To examine her, I had to tear away a nest of gossamer-like secretion. She had spun a cocoon. Her eyes reacted to candlelight, though she didn’t wake. Not the oddest quirk of a bloodline I’ve come across, but the webbing is new to me. Near Clare’s head, the fine matter was studded with fragments of what felt like shell. Was she feeding on snails in her sleep? Her neck was stippled with pinprick dots – the stigmata of her father-in-darkness or a new variety of leech-bloat? Clare’s was one of the shabbier boxes, a black paint splotch on the side.
Kostaki noticed I was giving her special attention.
‘She’s one of the ones foisted on us,’ I said. ‘The Mallingers are gentry or else she’d have been staked for what she did to the ploughboys in her village. The assizes gave her a choice between four hundred years’ hard labour and transportation. We’re a penal colony now.’
Kostaki looked at the placid face, surrounded by fuzzy white matter.
‘She’s not the worst of us.’ He put her lid back on. Something squirmed in me and I suppressed a shudder. Kostaki looked at me, knowing I’d had a ‘moment’.
‘I have this powerful thought – an urge. Something not rational, which I don’t understand. A child-brain thing. Like General Nurarihyon’s mania for drinking someone else’s tea or Dru’s fixation on counting every blessed thing. I want to nail Clare Mallinger’s coffin shut. And give her a good Christian burial.’
‘Are you a good Christian?’ He pointed at the plain gold cross I always wear.
‘Not really. This was my father’s. It’s a keepsake. I’ve lost everything, over and over… except this.’
I kissed it – a gesture easy to mistake for religious devotion. And, before the Ascendancy, a good way to prove I couldn’t possibly be what evidence suggested I was. That trick has worn out now.
‘I thought it might be to keep the vampires away.’
I held it up at him. He looked at it, steadily.
‘You are becoming droll, Captain Kostaki. Is that deliberate?’
‘Not that I know, my lady elder.’
I slipped the cross back into my blouse.
A sighing hiss came from inside Clare Mallinger’s box. It shook and settled. Had she turned over in her cocoon?
I know what cocoons are for. Changing. Clare was bad enough as a vampire. What would she be next?
‘Should we do something about the state of her box?’ I asked. ‘Paint over the stain?’
Kostaki tapped the black splash with his boot.
‘That’s deliberate – look at it. That Japanese print of the wave…’
‘By Hokusai.’
‘Yes. Hokusai’s wave.’
Looking at the blotch, I saw what Kostaki meant. It wasn’t an artless stain, but Hokusai’s wave executed in black paint.
‘Black Ocean,’ I said.
Kostaki nodded. ‘It’s not the only time I’ve seen this mark. It’s on the breastplates of the guards. The yōkai with the yards-across moonface has it etched into his forehead. That wasn’t done by his choice.’
‘We knew Baron Higurashi was with the Black Ocean Society. Lieutenant Majin too, probably.’
‘They’re not yōkai.’
‘Not that I know of. Though there’s something about Majin.’
Kostaki nodded agreement. ‘I
do not like this mark,’ he said. ‘It’s as much a brand as a banner. It looks to me like a promise… a great wave, rearing up like a black dragon, poised to crash down, to sweep us away…’
‘You know, Kostaki, sometimes you sound just like Dru. You should be her boyfriend. You could whisper apocalyptic omens to each other on the little bridge over the artificial stream and drop cherry blossoms into the water to be swept away like doomed souls offered up to the cruel gods of chance and chaos…’
Kostaki looked at me with eyes like red marbles – as if my attempted levity cut like a lash.
‘Drusilla Zark. Is. Not. My. Girlfriend!’
He turned and walked away.
‘What did I say?’ I asked Dravot.
The Sergeant swallowed something like a laugh and didn’t look at me. ‘Nothing that I ’eard, miss,’ he said.
I believe I understand lady loons like Dru better than I do the most sensible and straightforward of men.
8
A KNIGHT TEMPLAR II
He would not go mad. Not from pain. Not from red thirst.
Not from the unwanted, unneeded society of women.
Lady Geneviève and Princess Casamassima.
In different ways, each were capable. The elder was practised in surviving a world that might at any moment turn on her. The newborn believed she would live forever. Kostaki trusted Lady Geneviève and understood Christina Light. Sometimes, the other way round would have been more convenient.
Both were needed here. By the exiles.
And both, though they seemed not to notice, needed him.
* * *
Twice, since coming to Japan, Kostaki had experienced earthquakes. The ground lurched, bucking like a startled horse. The seconds-long events were trivial, he was told. Dust shaken from ceilings. Poles wobbling. Dogs barking. No damage worse than a shattered cup.
The Macedonia had steamed through storms that raised up and threw down four-hundred-foot, million-gallon cliffs of water. Captain Larsen steered between maelstroms that could suck a vessel under in seconds, tearing a ship’s plate apart as if peeling an egg. Helpless against the elements, Kostaki had no choice but to hope the ship seaworthy and the crew competent. About that, he could be stoic. But the shifting, grinding and breaking Tokyo found so everyday as to be not worth mentioning disturbed him. When dry land was as treacherous as wild water, nothing was settled.
A twinge in his knee, as when weather was about to change, presaged the shocks. Then, a few unsteady moments and an impulse to run. Locals still as statues, paused in conversation or at work, silently counting between tremors, then carrying on blithely when they sensed – how? – that the quake had peaked and the danger was past. For now.
The Japanese lived with land maelstroms – the possibility that the ground might crack open and swallow them – as a soldier lived with the possibility of surprise attack. Troops couldn’t sleep in armour or be always on watch. On a sunny day, no one avoided the shadows of tall buildings. But faults were there, red lines in the earth. At any moment, busy streets might fracture. Houses and temples could fall.
He felt it too. Ever-imminent catastrophe.
It wasn’t unfamiliar.
In London he had been reminded that vampires were not true immortals. Dracula hadn’t changed that. On the contrary, now everyone believed in vampires, dangers were more acute. Once, slayers were jeered at as crackpots or violent lunatics. With the Ascendancy, they were no longer ridiculous. Warm firebrands preached war to the death. In some countries, the heirs of Van Helsing were gathering political and popular support. More people had turned in the last ten years than in the previous ten thousand but more vampires had been destroyed also.
Jihads were declared. In the Sudan, under the sway of the late Mahdi, ifrits were scourged to death in the desert. In the Ottoman Empire, where the name Dracula was forever reviled, giaours were beheaded on sight. In America, vampire hunts were a national pastime – even in states where there were no vampires. Suspects were burned alive by puritan sects, lynched by the Ku Klux Klan and shunned by neighbours.
Like an earthquake, it was never all at once. Small tremors presaged devastation.
In Japan, vampires were kept in their place. Concentrated in Yōkai Town.
There was no extermination order – yet.
Kostaki thought of the Black Ocean emblem. The Hokusai wave could fall on Yōkai Town like a steam hammer smashing a doll’s house. Places could be subtracted from the world. All it would take was the will, and enough silver. For Dracula and the Templars, Kostaki had participated in such actions. Villages and towns – cities, even – could be obliterated. No one alive even remembered their names.
This was how they lived now. Waiting for the earthquake.
Would vampires be remembered for their works or their stories, like the Mayans or Trojans? Or would they pass completely from the world, leaving behind nothing but ghosts of memories, fables to frighten children into staying on the path or bad dreams consequent upon a surfeit of dressed crab?
* * *
Over and over, he patrolled Yōkai Town. He memorised names and faces. Kostaki knew the names of the gate guards and noted their tics and traits. Who was lazy, who was afraid, who was too confident and who was bored. He made an effort to pick up more of the language. He seldom let on how much of their hosts’ talk he understood. Another tactic learned from Dracula – a better linguist than scholar, and one to gain and press any advantage. The arrogant spoke freely around those they believed didn’t understand what they were saying.
He had made little headway with written Japanese, but grasped an essential point. The kanji for rain looked like falling rain, seen through a window. . In Japan, pictures – indeed, anything designed and made – were saying something. Building a watchtower in the form of a giant warrior was a message. Coded, yet obvious. The colossus of Yōkai Town. Eyes turned inward, not over the wall. So – a keeper, not a protector. An overseer. A giant sword hung from the statue’s belt. Potentially, an executioner.
The snarling face of the statue was familiar. It resembled Lieutenant Majin. Again, a message. Kostaki knew who was watching.
When the scouts Yam and Verlaine reported back, they would help him make maps. Not just maps of the city – which could be had for pennies in any post office – but maps of power. Diagrams of how things worked. Japan, like many nations, was ancient as a vampire elder, slow and creaky and set in its ways but, like Dracula, tempted to embrace modernity and act like a ravenous newborn. All the throats of Asia were bared beneath its sharp new fangs. The country was riven by factions advocating tradition or change. Often, confusingly, both at the same time – tradition disguised as change, or change sold as tradition. The Black Ocean Society had resisted the Meiji reforms, but now embodied them – the new Japan was the very old one in a new hat. The Emperor was all-powerful in his palace, but as much a prisoner as any in Yōkai Town. Emperors and kings were all the same. Even Dracula, who conquered death and Britain, was coffined by his titles, the expectations of his subjects and a lassitude that set in after the victory fireworks burned out.
Kostaki walked by night and day. The perpetual fog of Yōkai Town meant even the most sensitive noctambulist could venture outdoors at noon, but Kostaki had taken to wearing a yard-across circular straw hat. It shaded his eyes from view but he could peep between loosely woven strands. It was like observing from cover.
The deconsecrated church was quiet, perhaps abandoned. Fresh snow on the steps was unmarred by boot prints. Dorakuraya and Komori were in hiding, though Kostaki had seen their Renfield scuttling about on errands. He was still mulling the business of the strange child and her puppet ninja theatre. As outside the walls, there were factions here: kappa and tengu, yōkai and kyuketsuki, disciples of Dracula and subjects of Yuki-Onna. In the short term, the newcomers must remain neutral. In the long, decisions about alliances must be made. He would need to share intelligence with Princess Casamassima. She was practical enough to know who to su
pport, appease or oppose. Lady Geneviève did not need the distraction of the strife within Yōkai Town. She would ponder the moral course of action, then stick to it with certainty. Thinking like that was why she had been forced to flee country after country. She was admirable, but likely to get them all killed.
Dravot had posted guards on the warehouse where most of the exiles still lay in boxes. Even if it was just painting black waves on crates, no more tampering would be tolerated. Also, a few vampires had stirred and pushed up their own lids. It was a good idea to keep a tally of who was awake. The exiles had their factions too. Some were packed off for being too murderous even for Dracula; others, like himself, for being not murderous enough. It had already fallen to him to put down one mad dog among their party. Was this what Dracula intended when he let them set sail from Plymouth? That they slaughter each other to save the Prince the trouble?
Kostaki nodded his hat to the current sentry, Albert ‘Smiler’ Watson. Another old campaigner. A little too fidgety for the duty, prone to jump at every squeak. Dravot said Smiler had a Victoria Cross in his pack, awarded after an action on the North-West Frontier. Kostaki wasn’t reassured. Some soldiers had only one fight in them. When turned, Watson sprouted permanent fangs, and his big ape teeth stretched his mouth into a permanent grin. With whiskers and bared teeth, Smiler looked like a jolly monkey… only monkeys weren’t truly jolly, Kostaki remembered. The simian smile wasn’t humorous, but a display of aggression – often to mask fear.
He called out a ‘hello’ so Smiler wouldn’t shoot him.
The sentry had nothing to report. He was chewing on mouse meat.