Anno Dracula--One Thousand Monsters

by Kim Newman

  Rui Wakasagi, Lady Oyotsu’s music teacher, wears a striped scarf over a third of her face to cover a swollen bruise. She was murdered with a disfiguring poison generations ago and has spent centuries as a yūrei – a vengeful vampire stalking, bothering and killing descendants of the villain who wronged her. All her instruments are disguised weapons – the neck of her biwa cancels a poisoned blade and the strings of her koto are strangling loops. She doesn’t take kindly to requests for ‘Elsie from Chelsea’.

  The invisible girl is Suzan Arashi, who claims she faded from men’s sight after bathing in the glow of a fallen star. For someone who can only be seen just after she’s drunk enough blood to make her veins visible, she spends an extraordinary amount of time on her hair. She is a real geisha – a calling she equates with being a nun – and has mastered seven disciplines of sacred hospitality. She scorns the soiled doves of Yokomori Street, who call themselves geisha but don’t know a teapot from a chamber pot.

  The quietest resident is an elegant older woman known as the Mantis. Her party trick is undoing her obi to tie the hands of fellows she’s cuddling so they can’t fight back when she sticks a needle-tooth hair comb in their jugular veins. She isn’t even a vampire, but a homicidal madwoman confined to Yōkai Town because her shamed family think she can’t do any harm here.

  I took the phantasm flames (ona-bi) that caught our attention on the road to the temple for a mindless meteorological phenomenon. That was wrong. The fireballs are the spirit form (shito-dama) of the venerable O-Same. I wonder if she might be a shapeshifter like Christina, further along in an evolution from flesh to light. O-Same is held in high regard in Yōkai Town as the spark who set the Great Fire of Meireki in 1657. Getting even is prized by Japanese vampires. Compared with their grudges, Italian blood vendettas and Kentucky mountain shootin’ feuds are drawing-room spats over whether cook should cut the crusts off sandwiches. Rui was seduced, betrayed and murdered before setting out on the path of bloody vengeance but O-Same devastated Edo – at the cost of 100,000 lives – because an exorcist tried to burn her favourite kimono. To be fair, it was no ordinary garment, but a long-sleeved silk furisode, watered with the tears of hopeless love. Still… as the sage has it, learn to forgive and try to forget.

  When I told Kostaki the story of O-Same, he immediately saw what I hadn’t.

  ‘How can someone – something – as powerful as her be kept where she doesn’t want to be? Walls and guards can’t stop living fire, any more than they can imprison an invisible woman or a general whose orders can’t be disobeyed. There’s an army of yōkai here. They could take Tokyo and rule the way Dracula rules London. What makes them stay put and keep quiet? What shackles have we not yet seen?’

  It’s a good point. Has Yuki-Onna decreed her people hold themselves apart from earthly affairs? The Snow Queen is revered, but no one I’ve asked is forthcoming about what she’s been up to lately. Or where she is. Perhaps she has withdrawn from the world. If she were to deign to take a player’s seat in the Great Game, she might displace the Black Ocean Society and hold sway over the Emperor. If Dracula can ascend to a throne in the West, Yuki-Onna should be the rising vampire power of the East. But she isn’t. It’s midwinter – the height of her social season, when she traditionally takes a husband or two (often not her own). Yet the only sign of her is the snow that falls most nights and gets kicked to slush in the streets.

  When Yuki-Onna is mentioned, Lady Oyotsu – her most loyal retainer – hangs her head. I’ve pointed that out to Kostaki.

  ‘Women of snow, women of fire,’ he said. ‘What’s wrong with women of flesh and blood, I’d like to know.’

  ‘Don’t forget women of light,’ I prompted.

  He bared his teeth at that.

  ‘Vampires and light do not go together,’ he said. ‘Not where I come from.’

  Kostaki is in a mood. I worry that he keeps bad news to himself. He has also been sulking since I made that thoughtless remark about him and Drusilla. He is very wary of the poor girl. He now thinks she has designs on him. That’s unlikely. Dru treats us all as figures in a lazy dream she drifts through after falling asleep in a poppy patch. Dravot teases Kostaki about being a dashing ladies’ man, but the Sergeant is another expert at keeping quiet about things he thinks women don’t need to know. With his spectre face, Kostaki can’t blush – but he can look more like death than usual.

  My trunk is in the dorm, but I haven’t curled up in it since I came here. I was asleep long enough on the Macedonia and won’t be overcome by lassitude for weeks. I don’t want to go in the box at the moment. Dayto-day routine in Yōkai Town is dull but I wouldn’t want to miss startling developments and wake to find some ronin shoving a pike through me in the purge Kostaki and Dravot obviously expect.

  We are an informal council: the Princess, myself, Kostaki, Dravot. We meet in the Casamassima quarters at the temple. There are lists to be compiled, argued about, ticked off and thrown away. Sometimes Dru attends as observer and interjects non sequiturs to derail business. Often petitioners drop by to ask for something impractical.

  Because her dress isn’t compatible with squatting on cushions, Christina has hired carpenters to make Western-style upright chairs and a table-desk. Broken packing cases, fallen shrines and abandoned houses provide wood – even nails – for the furniture. In the joinery, dwarves with big hands and giants with small heads turn scavenged materials into useful things. Shut away from the rest of the city, yōkai must make or make do.

  I’ve learned my way around Yōkai Town. It’s more like an enclosed, fortified camp than a district or a village. Fortified to keep us in, not enemies out. No one except Kostaki calls it a prison out loud – despite the towers, the guards and the fact that we’re prohibited from leaving. Higurashi made it clear the vampires of the Macedonia are not to be found outside the walls for our own safety. You always hear that when they aren’t ready to massacre you yet.

  Something is strange about the temple – even by Yōkai Town standards. While we waited for Christina to finish looking over a list, I noticed Kostaki flexing his fingers. I’ve been doing the same thing. Only in this building. My toes twitch as well. It’s involuntary.

  ‘I do that too,’ I said to him, showing my hands. We both wore gloves.

  He was affronted – as if I’d said his shirt tail were hanging out. ‘It’s strange,’ he said. ‘That… tingling.’

  Dravot laughed out loud. He was rubbing his hands together too.

  ‘Vampire elders!’ he snorted. ‘You’ve actually forgot what it feels like.’

  ‘What what feels like?’ I asked, rattled.

  ‘Cold,’ he said. ‘It’s ruddy freezin’ in here.’

  Kostaki made fists to stop the shakes.

  ‘You’re right,’ I said to the Sergeant. ‘Cold… how odd.’

  ‘That’s one way of puttin’ it. Odd.’

  Like most vampires, I don’t feel hot or cold. With turning, some senses dull as others become keener. We have to relearn the instinct not to play with fire. I’m used to not minding extremes of temperature. On Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow, I was comfortable while everyone else was skinning dead horses and live dogs to patch together thicker coats. The naked sun hurts my eyes and blisters my skin, but candle flames, gaslight and electric incandescents don’t bother me. There’s supposedly an explanation in Moriarty’s On Tithonic Rays, but he couches his theory in such infernal jargon I can’t make head or tail of it.

  I strained to recall feeling cold. Nothing came. It was lost to me, like the taste of bloodless foods. I loved strawberries as a warm girl, I think. If I try to summon the flavour of ripe strawberries squishing, my vampire mind translates the taste memory into juice-squirt from rare steak.

  The prickling in my fingers was a novelty. Not a pleasant one.

  ‘Yes, it’s chilly in here,’ said Christina. ‘Such flimsy walls let in draughts.’

  Kostaki’s eyes rolled. The Princess was a relative newborn too. Not yet use
d to her new senses. The wrongness didn’t strike her.

  ‘How cold does it have to be that we feel it?’ the Moldavian asked me.

  ‘Colder than frozen-over Hell?’

  ‘A witch’s tit,’ put in Dravot, grinning.

  Christina frowned. Did she want to call for a vote of censure on the Sergeant’s barracks language? Bloodthirsty revolutionaries who would put whole classes up against walls and shoot them can be surprisingly prissy. A ruthless member of Robespierre’s Committee of Public Safety told me off for wearing an immodest gown to my own hanging.

  ‘Yōkai Town is where they put unnatural things,’ I said. ‘Us included. The temple is the heart of the place. It’s why this is the quarter of the city the Emperor cared so little for that he allowed it to be turned into a reservation for yōkai. The ghetto was built around it. Put this cold spot on your list of Things to Look Into.’

  ‘Yam and Verlaine have yet to report,’ Kostaki reminded us.

  ‘If Majin caught ’em, we’d know of it,’ Dravot said.

  I’d like to see Mr Yam fight Lieutenant Majin.

  ‘We need to know what goes on outside the stockade,’ said Kostaki. ‘I smell powder. And I hear gun carriages rattling. I’m sure there are mortar emplacements.’

  ‘For our protection,’ said Christina. ‘I asked Lady Oyotsu—’

  ‘Who could set our minds at rest by just looking over the wall,’ I put in.

  ‘Yes, what’s stoppin’ ’er sticking ’er neck out?’ said Dravot.

  The Sergeant lit a cheroot as the Princess glared at him.

  ‘Don’t try to be funny,’ she said. ‘The Abbess has been hospitality itself. She extends us every courtesy and asks for nothing in return.’

  ‘Yet,’ said Dravot, exhaling plumes of smoke.

  The Sergeant goes through cheroots, cigars and cigarettes like a fiend. It’s because he’s a newborn. He hasn’t got used to not tasting something that used to be a pleasure. The next smoke – that’ll do the trick! It’ll all come back and tobacco will be what it used to be! Not just smoke in the lungs, but a rapture. For years, did I suck watery strawberries and spit out tasteless pulp? If so, I can’t even remember that.

  ‘I’ll bet those mortars are pointed the wrong way for our protection,’ I said.

  All of us find ways to pass time and gain small advantages in our polite prison. I set bones and patch scrapes, though yōkai medicine is new to me. I offered to put ointment on Rui’s giant purple bruise, but she was offended. She insists nothing is wrong with her head. It’s best I confine my practice to patients with approximate human shape. Dr Charcot’s lectures were wide-ranging, but didn’t address the issue of how to treat a cut suffered by Ittan-Momen, a yōkai who manifests as a living roll of cotton with embroidered eyes. How do you bandage a bandage? A sewing kit might be more use than my medical bag.

  And we all have red thirst.

  After the initial feast of welcome, it’s been scarce. Dru eats insects and gives leftover legs to her cannibal cricket. The rest of us chew the insides of our cheeks – a bad habit few vampires can resist. How do the yōkai sustain themselves? They aren’t all tea-drinkers or cow-suckers. There can’t be enough willing attendants to go round. How many sordid blood transactions take place on the gambling barges? Or in crowded, ramshackle stews close to the walls? Even in Yōkai Town, there are chasms between respectable and vile, between the calm temple and the seedy Yokomori Street.

  Francesca Brysse is rosy-complexioned. I suspect she’s tapped extra rations. That’s one thing she’ll keep to herself.

  Dravot reports that – despite language difficulties – trade has begun between our group and the locals. I’ve seen yōkai proudly wearing gloves and bonnets – even shoes – from our travelling wardrobes. My patients press coins, fans or combs on me. If you have needs unmet by our hosts, Whelpdale is the fellow to ask. He accepts payment in small items of value and has amassed a trove of watches, rings, jewels and – perhaps most valuable of all – IOUs to be redeemed with favours or labour.

  Whelpdale is always on the move, a spring in his rubbery step. He carries messages and delivers goods. He knows everyone, including creatures I have no idea how to approach. I’ve seen him strike lucifers and write in the air with flame while O-Same bobs in agreement. I daren’t think about what they might want from each other.

  Whelpdale wasted no time discovering the covered barges where unending Go tournaments are held. Under emerald lanterns, fortunes rise and fall with the clicking of white and black stones placed on or removed from boards. Whelpdale doesn’t play, but takes side bets. He cleaned up backing Drusilla, a novice against Hon’inbō Kokingo, the faceless monk who is – was – champion of Yōkai Town. The audience laughed as Dru made a series of criminally stupid moves, but shut up when she won the game. You wouldn’t think a man with no features could frown furiously, but Kokingo managed it as he dropped his death stones on the board. ‘What’s the matter, chummy?’ Whelpdale asked. ‘Lost face?’ That trick won’t work twice. I’m astonished it worked once. I expected yōkai gamblers to be cannier. If someone as slippery as Whelpdale entered a donkey in a contest to recite Shakespeare, I’d bet on the ass to beat Henry Irving.

  Within a month, Whelpdale will be fixing matches and splitting his take with corrupted Go masters. And he hasn’t even discovered mahjong yet.

  Kostaki thinks we should shut down Whelpdale’s enterprises. ‘There’s one in every regiment,’ he says. ‘Sells the men their own kit and rations. Deals cards and wins most of the time. Organises “dances” to make introductions to the local girls. While you’re skirmishing in the streets, he’s looting the wine cellars. Sees a campaign as a series of business opportunities. Ends up shot for treason or promoted to general staff. We should kill the cur now, lest we be strung up either side of him down the line.’

  Dravot – who, in happier times, might have been Kostaki’s ‘one in every regiment’ to the letter – argued for letting the newborn stay in business. If our man’s trading is curtailed, who knows what sort of robber baron manqué will crawl out of a coffin to take over his dodge. The pliable pornographer is a busy, enterprising, mostly harmless thief we might need in the future. It’s no accident he’s up and about and enterprising – even forging trade and diplomatic ties our council can’t – while others snooze in their caskets.

  Also, I’ve met the local girls. Any fellow who thinks he’ll make time with Rui or the Mantis is due a disappointment. Kasa-obake has a better chance with Christina’s parasol than any of our fine bucks have with the almond-eyed does of Yōkai Town.

  Whelpdale’s illustrated publications are gaining a Japanese vogue. This morning, I saw Abura Sumashi paging backwards through Erica Littleby-Little or: A Harlot’s Progress. To him, the story must be about a slut who rises from a pauper’s grave to be cured of the pox, has back-to-front liaisons with low persons, takes on a fresher-faced appearance, foreswears gin, doles out coins from her purse to gentlemen who retreat while she puts her clothes on, rebuffs the kisses of her employer’s rakish son and reforms to become a priggish maid-servant and devout Sunday school attendee.

  Christina asked about the head count. I mentioned Clare Mallinger’s cocoon.

  ‘Mallinger? Which one is she again?’

  ‘The murderess.’

  ‘Thank you, Geneviève, but that doesn’t narrow it down much.’

  ‘The mad murderess.’

  ‘Now you’re being facetious.’

  ‘If you don’t know, it doesn’t matter. Who she is isn’t as important as what she’s doing inside her web.’

  ‘She may not be doing it,’ said Kostaki. ‘It may be being done to her. Her box had the Black Ocean wave painted on it.’

  ‘You think she’s been… tampered with?’ asked Christina.

  Kostaki shrugged. ‘We’ve posted guards on the building,’ he said. ‘If something was done to her, it won’t be done to anyone else.’

  Christina was pleased. She liked to be tol
d things were being done.

  ‘So, if the tampering was fatal… we’ve lost a spare murderess. If something else was intended, she’ll bear watching.’

  ‘I’m her doctor,’ I said. ‘Murderess or no, I have responsibility for her wellbeing.’

  ‘Don’t mistake my meaning. Clare Milliner matters to me.’

  ‘Mallinger.’

  ‘Milliner, Mallinger, Mulliner – she’s one of us, and we need all of us. We are too few.’

  ‘Too few for what, Princess?’

  ‘To matter, my dear.’

  I shrugged at that. Christina seesaws between callous disregard and neurotic concern. She can’t decide whether she’s our Boadicea or Mother Hen. She took the shipboard losses personally, though none of Death Larsen’s victims were her intimates. She was even curt with Kostaki after he jettisoned Jurek, which kept the rest of us alive. She has a mosaic in her mind. Each of us is a tile with an allotted position. Losing any of us means a white space in the picture.

  I don’t want to be Princess Casamassima’s puzzle piece.

  10

  BEFORE DRACULA (CONTINUED)

  Whenever de Coulteray came to the morgue, he sought me out. At first, he didn’t believe I was really studying medicine. He was convinced I’d devised a subtle scheme to bleed living patients. He knew I couldn’t be draining customers on the slabs.

  Real ghouls (another Indian bloodline) do feed on corpses, but the black blood of the dead is to European vampires what seawater is to humans – drunk only in desperation, always with ill effects. The squeezed juice of the lowest live rodent is more appetising than the cooled blood of a two-hours-dead princess royal. I know this from experience and wish I didn’t.

  De Coulteray was one of those corkscrew souls who can’t imagine anyone being different from themselves. He kept trying to surprise me, to catch me in my grand swindle – and cut himself in on fabulous imaginary profits. He proposed joint enterprises, offering a share of his tour earnings in return for my secret. He admitted he liked to pinch fat children until drops of blood welled. He would lick the wounds while cooing and patting, in the pretence of ‘kissing it better’. When I frowned, he swore he selected only the vilest of brats – the ones who stamped and frightened birds, or poked the corpses. After his ‘treatments’, he was sure they mended their ways. Probably, they became little angels, singing in choirs and making charitable visits to the poor. I’d have been readier to accept his rationale if he hadn’t giggled while advancing it.