by Kim Newman
Monks, priests, witchfinders.
Stretched on their own racks of inquisition, spikes thrust through their chests, hung upside down so their heads dunked in buckets of holy water replenished by the Renfields’ piss.
Slayers, professors, doctors. Broken in combat, shot or stabbed with silver, necks snapped, veins opened with long scalpel cuts. Dictagraphs smashed and wax cylinder fragments pressed into staring eyes.
Strews of red ash, exposed to the day star and trodden into pine needles. Rotting, fanged heads piled up like balls beside cannons. Wraiths in oubliettes, red thirst rising to intolerable torment.
Kostaki’s stomach roiled; not at the sights, sounds and smells of execution by torture but at the sacrilege, the affront, the temerity of those who dared defy Dracula.
Whatever they suffered wasn’t enough. He contemplated the sea of pain.
The Master was beside him, armoured gauntlet resting on Kostaki’s shoulder. No words passed between them.
Dracula was pleased with him. Honour enough.
* * *
Victory followed upon victory. Nations knelt before Dracula.
The warm were herded onto reservations, pampered and fed through the year, culled come Hallowe’en. Blood flowed to the Master, and from the Master to his disciples. From the Arctic wastes to the Australian outback, the standard of Dracula flew.
History drew to a close.
But for one small scattering of islands.
From the castle, everything could be seen. In the eastern sea, a nation cowered behind walls of ice and mist.
Dracula convened his court.
Kostaki stood with the Templars.
‘There is my final foe,’ said the Master, pointing at Japan.
‘I shall bring you the head of the Emperor,’ volunteered Kostaki.
Dracula looked at him.
‘Your resolve does you credit, son-in-darkness, but a warm emperor is less than a village headman. Always, the living are our livestock, servants, possessions. Now we ride against those who think themselves our equals. Our ships and machines will swarm over the shores and skies of the Rising Sun. The vampires of the East will bow to us. As once we broke the Turk and made him our vassal, so now we will conquer the Woman of the Snow, the Night Queen. She is cold and she is haughty. Her breath is frost and her touch the chill of true death. She commands armies of monsters. Yet, she will be brought down. She will be less than a maidservant to our wives and all that is hers will be ours. Dracula shall reign in the East as in the West.’
The shadow of Dracula’s wings spread. He turned to the Templars, singling out Kostaki.
‘This is my command,’ he said, ‘that you, Captain Kostaki, seek out the Yuki-Onna. Break through her defences, slay her protectors, penetrate her lair. In a cave of ice deep under her palace is a coffin. There you will find the Winter Witch. She has the face of Medusa, but you must look upon it without turning to stone. Strike her breast with iron so that her body shatters like ice in the spring. Then pull out her heart and bring me that so I may drink from it.’
As he spoke, Dracula’s eyes burned brighter than suns.
A red film passed over the gold.
In Kostaki’s heart, fire caught.
His wife was beside him, her mouth close to his ear, her hands under his cloak.
His Lodge Brothers and mess comrades were assembled. They toasted him in fresh blood poured from enemies already vanquished, in anticipation of glorious banquets to follow the greatest victory of all.
He drew his carrack – the blade with no name. It glistened in the firelight as he held it up in salute.
‘So you have spoken, my father,’ he said. ‘So shall it be done!’
* * *
The ground moved under him, shockingly.
His knee exploded. Had he been shot again?
No. It was just pain, coming back like the tide.
‘God’s ’oly trousers, I felt that in my water,’ said Dravot. ‘The worst quaverin’ yet.’
The fog of fancy was shredded. What had been so vivid – imaginings sharp as life – unravelled like an ancient tapestry hauled from a tomb. Exposed to light, it rotted like some vampires at dawn. Threads came apart, colours faded to grey. The picture was gone.
Music had played – stirring, martial, inspiring, devotional. Now he heard only the bark of distant dogs…
He was looking at Dorakuraya’s bleeding chest. He didn’t know why.
The blood-trickle zigged and zagged as the vampire swayed, shifting this way and that. He knew how to roll with the tremors.
Inside the warehouse, coffins toppled. Someone groaned and swore – suffering sudden, uncomfortable awakening. A lantern crashed and broke near Dravot’s boots. He stamped out the fire.
Jarred from a dream, Kostaki tried to recapture details. It was a sketch on pond water. He thought he remembered Lady Geneviève’s face. It melted.
‘Like ice in the spring…’
Where had he heard that before? Recently?
No – it was lost, all gone. He had forgotten something as important as his own name. He felt the absence like a missing limb or a lost eye.
He scratched his moustaches – then remembered they were gone. He patted his shaven pate. It felt wrong, again.
He leaned back to steady himself. The wall he touched was shaking. Nothing could be trusted. This was worse than the worst storm at sea.
‘You’ve popped your dicky buttons, chum,’ Dravot told Dorakuraya.
The Japanese vampire refastened his clothes. Blood rivulets – dull red, not shining gold – soaked into cotton.
‘Brother Taki, are you with us?’
Kostaki couldn’t speak, but saluted. What was it? What couldn’t he remember? Moments ago, it was clear and bright in his mind. Or was it long since gone? What was it? A woman, perhaps? And Dracula – always Dracula.
The world lived under Dracula as once it lived under God.
The ground stopped shaking. Water was gushing somewhere near – a broken pipe? In the warehouse, a newly awakened sleeper complained in Low German.
Dorakuraya was gone. A patch of bare earth, a hole in ground mist, showed where he had stood.
‘There’s a fellah with a predisposition to mystification,’ said Dravot. ‘Not ’ot on the ’ow d’you dos and fare thee wells… pops up and pops off like a surprise attack. And what’s all that standin’ to attention and givin’ the dead-eye stare about? Tell you what, Brother Taki, I’ll bet ’e’s a shrimp who uses stilts to look down on us. Notice you never sees ’is feet for fog. Much mischief is concealable under a cape. But ’e’s left ’is rubbish behind.’
Kichijiro lay face down. He had fainted with terror.
‘What do you suppose that oogle-eyes malarkey was about?’ asked Dravot.
Kostaki shook his head. He had no idea.
‘A queer quacker,’ said Dravot, ‘our Mr Dorakuraya Nemuri or whateversuch ’e calls ’imself. A strange duck.’
Kostaki still tried to remember the dream.
It couldn’t be important, but…
13
YOKAI TOWN, DECEMBER 16, 1899
After Suicide Garden, I knew I’d be no good to anyone until I quenched my red thirst. What happens to vampires who go blood simple is ugly. What happens to anyone within reach of them is worse. Unless I fed soon, I’d be chewing my own wrists.
It didn’t take long to find the mongrel.
The scavenger was in the foggy alley where it had fought for the tengu’s hand, curled in a lair of chewed bones and shredded lanterns. A meagre, mean scrap of an animal – but warm-blooded. It panted in its sleep, glistening threads trailing from its jaws. Scratches on its flanks. One leg kinked the wrong way. I told myself it was dying.
I was scrupulous enough to make certain the dog was not a shapeshifted yōkai before pressing my barbed nail into its carotid artery.
I did not stop drinking until my prey was limp.
It wasn’t just the blood, it was the death.
When vampires kill, blood is richer, more satisfying, more intoxicating. Even a cur is a tonic. It’s why so many of us become murderers. Some justify themselves by hunting the worst of humanity – assassins and criminals. Others kill for king, country or cause. Drinking the blood of a defeated foe is a tradition of warrior races – though, before the Ascendancy, few admitted to liking the stuff. Even Genghis Khan washed the taste away with fermented yoghurt. Drink death’s blood often and nothing else will do. The definition of criminal or foe becomes elastic. In time, the noblest will take to slaughter the way an opium fiend sucks on a pipe. And it’s never enough, never as good as it was – so they become monsters who kill just to keep their eyes open. Some need no slope, slippery or otherwise. Those who like killing before they turn like it all the more after.
I had to fight lassitude. The ground under me felt spongy. I heard running water far away. I couldn’t keep my eyes open. Dreams waited in the dark. The temptation was to lie beside the dead dog and pull scraps of alley debris over myself, a funnel-web against the sun.
I allowed myself to be lulled…
…then came the mad magic lantern slides. Unwelcome sights and sounds spurted into my mind. Tastes too. I convulsed, knocking my head against a wall. I was the dog. Tearing into stringy meat, barking at the moon, rutting with bitches, rooting in corpse guts. The mongrel fought harder in my head after it was dead than in the alley when I was killing it. There’s less to rat lives. Their deaths flare briefly. A dog knows the difference between cruel and kind. A dog can be disappointed in you. A dog can hate and fear its killer.
Once, doctors spent lifetimes dissecting dead men’s eyes. Shining candlelight through disembodied eyeballs suspended on wires to test the folk belief that the last thing seen in life is imprinted. It’s a fallacy. The eye is not a camera. But, as vampires always knew, something salts the dregs of death’s blood. For long moments, you see what your victim last saw, feel the shock of their death. You are together with what you kill at its finish. You share a dwindling, a draining into darkness, panic and dull pain, a glimpse perhaps of something bright. Then they’re gone and you’re alone.
It left me shuddering, sickened and desolate.
I tried not to hold on to what the animal had seen but there’s no shutter for the mind’s eye.
A monster creeping out of the fog. Long-haired, long-limbed, crafty. Fang-rimmed remora maw, huge ochre eyes, talons like tapered razors.
And the sound of it – wetly whispering, almost singing, cruelly soothing. A lying sound. I’m not going to hurt you…
My fur prickling, my insides knotting.
La monstre c’est moi.
How much worse – how much better! – to see myself not with the limited colour palette of a dog but the complex vision of a human being.
Three times – unwittingly, unwillingly, I tell myself – I have tasted human death’s blood.
So I know. I know how precious, how desirable, how dangerous it is.
Some vampires are addicted to that moment of seeing themselves through their victims’ eyes. Denied mirrors, they kill to contemplate their own radiant beauty. They collect final memories, stored away and polished. Some shapeshift to take the faces – even personalities – of people they drain to death, shucking a human shell and forming another with each murder, forgetting their original names, obliterating whoever they were, spending lives at such a pace they become nobodies. The field of vampire medicine is in its infancy. The field of vampire psychiatry is a continent yet to be mapped, an Antarctica of the mind.
I trotted out of the alley on all fours, dragging my left hind leg. Then forced myself to stand and look at my paws until they were hands again.
I found a public well and emptied a bucket of water over myself.
The dog was gone. I missed him – then I didn’t. My head was clear. No red thirst. My tongue ran over even teeth. My nails were trim.
I hauled up another bucketful and cleaned myself as best I could. I scraped sticky blood and dirt from my face and hands. I dried my face with my hair.
I went back to the dorm to change clothes. I resisted the urge to throw away what I had been wearing. No telling when I’ll next get to a couturier.
Drusilla and Topazia Suzuki were plaiting each other’s hair.
‘You’ve been to a party,’ Dru said.
Suzan Arashi sat in a tub, washing off dried blood, making herself invisible again.
Not every yōkai went to the Suicide Garden. That is encouraging. Some here are fastidious, will not feed off the condemned. The canny might be warier of being beholden to Majin than of going hungry. Dru, who knows everything, skipped the seppuku party. Francesca Brysse, Christina’s tame spy, went to supper without telling her mistress. Brysse wasn’t home yet. She might still be huddled under the bridge, sucking marrow from ripped-out bones.
‘The Handyman made the ground shake,’ said Dru. ‘He shouldn’t have done that. It’s rude to rattle people when they’re snoozing.’
Topazia’s tail twisted. ‘Taira no Masakado lies under the city,’ said the monkey woman. ‘If his shrines are neglected, he will turn over in his sleep and Edo will fall.’
I know that legend. In life, Taira was a rebel sorcerer. In death, he turned into a demigod. A considerable presence in the city. His daughter, the witch Takiyasha-Hime, is not to be trifled with either. King Arthur reputedly slumbers in Avalon until England’s hour of greatest need – which, to this French woman’s reckoning, was fifteen years ago. The old gentleman has overslept. Taira rests in the earth only until he gets annoyed enough to destroy Edo. Changing the name to Tokyo isn’t likely to fool him. If Majin is a disciple of Taira, that would explain his trick of summoning tremors. Taira no Masakado is god of earthquakes.
Each emperor is supposed to make a pilgrimage to the shrine built over Taira’s grave at Ōtemachi, on the hillside overlooking Tokyo Bay, to placate him and ensure a reign uninterrupted by natural disaster. The tradition has been revived under the Black Ocean Society. It can’t have helped the earthquake god’s disposition that his original shrine was burned down in O-Same’s inferno. If he ever does wake, he’ll have words with her. After all, devastating the city is his pièce de résistance and he’s not the deity to be upstaged by a flying bonfire in a posh frock.
‘Don’t wake up the fluttery-bye man,’ said Dru, making wings of her hands and flitting about, flinging herself from one side of the room to the other like a very modern dancer. ‘Buttery fluttery uttery bye-bye fly-by flies,’ she sang, ‘bittery bottery buttery boo-hoo itchery hatchery fleas…’
Clouds of blue and gold butterflies appeared before Taira no Masakado’s battles, in anticipation of him winning most of them. In 940, the butterflies were black and red and – betrayed by a cousin – he was killed at the Battle of Kojima. His shrines, maintained by the superstitious or the fearful, are supposed to swarm with crickets, beetles and butterflies. So, besides looking after earthquakes, he’s the god of creepy-crawlies. Suicide Garden, with its medicinal scorpions and murderous butterflies, is probably sacred to him.
Butterflies had assailed Christina Light with myriad little nip-bites. We think of butterflies as pretty, poetic and short-lived, but rarely see more than a few at a time. A million butterflies are aerial piranha. They can strip a crop from a field in moments. Their wings are beautiful but they’re just better dressed locusts.
‘You’ve eaten,’ said Dru. ‘Woof woof.’
She made dog ears with her fingers and sang the refrain ‘Daddy Wouldn’t Buy Me a Bow-Wow’. Topazia laughed – a monkey laugh, not a human’s.
‘I’ve got a little cat and I’m very fond of that but I’d rather have a bow-wowwow…’
I left them to their amusements and delved into my trunk. I dug out a navy-blue pea coat and green knit cap – originally Dr Doskil’s deck gear – to wear over my fresh dress. Not very modish, but refugees are seldom exemplars of fashion.
I also found my medical bag, with its Univer
sity of France student identification tag still tied to the handle. For the ten-thousandth time, it crossed my mind that I ought to cut it off but left the faded label where it was. Who was living in my house in Île de la Cité now? Or was it abandoned and shunned?
Could everything go back to the way it was before Dracula?
Now I come to think of it, life in the frying pan hadn’t been so bad. We should never have complained.
Though someone must be enjoying the fire.
I quit the dorm and walked to the Temple of One Thousand Monsters. Fog was thick today, so dawn light wasn’t a bother.
I tasted spoiled blood in the air. How often did Lieutenant Majin convene the Suicide Club? I could see it served a purpose. Where better for those required to kill themselves than Yōkai Town? Self-slaughter is respected in Japan. Death is another spin on the wheel of reincarnation and seppuku wipes the slate clean of bad karma. I’m used to the warm tempering fear of vampires with envy of our long lives. In the East, some who see me for what I am express pity. By their lights, I have been cheated out of future existences. The wheel of karma spins. Turning vampire – becoming yōkai – puts a bamboo stick in the spokes. I was detained on the upwards path, prevented from climbing the mountain to be with Lord Buddha.
If anything, Majin has found a way to make suicide horrible again. What I’d seen in the park can’t help anyone’s karma – not those who died, those who feed off them, or those who watch in horror. Only the Demon Man comes out ahead, and I doubt he gives a fig for Lord Buddha.
What is Lieutenant Majin’s connection with Taira no Masakado? Is he a worshipper? Or perhaps a lineal descendant? There’s the question of the curse. Rui Wakasagi is expected to carry out revenge unto the seventh generation. Higo’s leaves can be brewed as a tea delicious to all – but deadly poison to the family of Toba, who once decreed she be cut down and her wood used to make a bridge. Is Majin obliged to avenge the betrayal and defeat of Kojima? That would explain what Christina and Kostaki both believe – that he doesn’t answer to the Emperor or the Black Ocean Society. His true master might be Taira no Masakado.