Anno Dracula--One Thousand Monsters

by Kim Newman

  Kurozuka, a toad-tongued witch who serves as pharmacist, was cross-legged on her tatami mat. Her unkempt appearance earned her the nickname ‘demon hag’ (onibaba). The story goes that she used to swear by ‘liver of unborn baby’ as a cure-all. Try filling that prescription at Boots the Chemist. Understandably, she was unsuccessful in her original specialism. Few sent for a midwife who was as likely to harvest quack remedies from a foetus as deliver a healthy child. I’d trust her over Professor Cataflaque or Dr Gheria on a non-obstetrics case. She hadn’t vivisected anyone in living memory.

  Now, Kurozuka looked like a clumsily decorated cake. She was more thickly iced than others we had seen.

  The nearer we were to Yuki-Onna, the colder it got.

  ‘Ha,’ said Kostaki, as something caught his eye. ‘Dravot said as much and I didn’t believe him.’

  He pointed to a row of tins of Lipton’s Yellow Label tea.

  ‘“Ancient infusions gathered from haunted Aokigahara forests on the slopes of Mount Fuji”, my eye!’ he said. ‘We’ve come a long way for a brew that can be had at any stall in London.’

  Mr Bats and Topazia were puzzled by this.

  Kostaki took a tin, rattled it, and slipped it in his pocket. ‘For Dravot,’ he explained.

  Of course it was Christmas in three days. What with one thing and another, I’d not thought of the holiday season. What do you get for the man who has given everything up?

  Sword oil. He’ll look after the weapon even if he neglects himself.

  Good grief, Christina – that makes actual sense.

  You are welcome.

  Beyond Kurozuka’s mat, a movable cabinet was shifted out of its place so a trapdoor could be lifted. Stone steps, shiny with ice, led down into darkness. Somewhere, a greenish light burned.

  Yes, this way.

  Thank you, Christina.

  I turned to advise caution in descending, but illustrated my point by slipping. I tumbled headlong into the room beneath the dispensary.

  Kostaki followed, surefooted, and helped me up. Topazia skittered down, using all her hands and her tail. Mr Bats took up the rear.

  Kostaki struck a flint on his tinderbox. He whistled at what came to light. The flame went out, but all four of us were vampires. We see in the dark. In my case, only reasonably well. But enough to get by.

  We were in a large stone-clad room at a junction of several passages. Stairs led down in all directions. Using a bat trick, I shouted out ‘white rabbits’. The echoes lasted a full minute. As Christina said and Drusilla had known, the temple was the tip of an underground castle. Crypts and catacombs feature prominently in vampire architecture. Warm kings look down from towers, palaces and skyscrapers – our tyrants prefer lairs, tombs and fortified cellars.

  How had all this survived the earthquakes?

  Mystic wards and enchantments.

  Not Lipton’s.

  Don’t be facetious. Follow my ‘voice’.

  We can see light. I suppose that’s you.

  Ego lux.

  That you are, Princess.

  ‘This way,’ I told the others.

  Without falling again, I led the party down a sloping path.

  The freeze here had been more direct and fatal. We walked through several drifts of multi-coloured ice chips and – thanks to what we’d seen upstairs – knew what they were. From one pile, Topazia took a flintlock pistol. Its powder was probably an icy paste. However, the relic – a European weapon, imported centuries ago – made her feel safer. She could probably do an injury by throwing her good luck charm at an enemy.

  Approaching a personage like Yuki-Onna – Dracula comes inevitably to mind, and very few others – is like walking into a maelstrom or an inferno. Or the heart of a star. They shine such eternal light or exert such gravitational pull that everything else is dull, shrivelled or crushed out of shape. Your senses betray you and – even without Christina talking very precisely in your head – you feel you’re displaced in yourself. For most of your life, you wonder if you’re imagining them but, nearing their presence, you start to wonder whether they’re imagining you.

  As we descended, I felt shadows, listened for footsteps, fancied movements in the corner of my eye. If I paused, everything fell back into place but I couldn’t suppress the thought that a threat had darted back into shadows and was watching with cold eyes.

  We all kept looking around, imagining something following us or lying in wait. Topazia clung to her pistol, pointing it this way and that to ward off terror. She was with us because she was more afraid of being left behind than going on. Kostaki held up his hand, as if expecting a strangling loop to snag him by the neck. I was sure we had passed through the wall of ice alone, then remembered the shadow that spooked Topazia. Perhaps a bat had fluttered into the snow-globe after us, or perhaps… not a bat.

  ‘Look at the ice on the walls,’ Kostaki said. ‘You can see the direction of the blast out from where we’re headed.’

  The tunnel narrowed as the ice thickened. We made slower progress, wading through shin-deep snow. No, not snow – this hadn’t fallen, but manifested out of moisture in the air as dew becomes frost. There was an unnatural amount of ice powder.

  Yuki-Onna made it – the way Christina made light.

  The Woman of the Snow inhabited cold.

  Even more bluntly than traditional nosferatu, she fed off the warm. Drawn to body heat, she could drain it all at once with a sharp intake of breath. If she took her time, she exhaled a freezing mist that slowly robbed her victims of all trace of warmth. She drank blood too, but liked it colder than body temperature, sucking salt slush from the veins of those unfortunate enough to attract attention.

  The story was that she had a sentimental streak. Once – maybe many times with different men, for we all repeat our stories of love and loss – Yuki-Onna chanced on two woodcutters lost in the mountains, an old man and his young apprentice, both near death from hypothermia. She fell on the dotard like a blanket of snow, sucking his last drops of life. However, moved by the lad’s comeliness, she spared him on the condition he never tell anyone of their meeting. She didn’t want it getting about that she was capable of mercy. Storytellers are discreet, but the implication is that the bargain is sealed with more than a handshake. Later, the mortal meets and marries a (suspiciously) normal woman, who bears him many healthy children (the figure ten is mentioned) but gives the game away by not ageing a day in many years. Eventually, it strikes the handsome (but dim) husband that his unnaturally youthful wife looks exactly like the beautiful yōkai in the mountains, whom he now writes off as a feverish hallucination. Of course, the fool doesn’t keep mum and recounts the long-ago ‘dream’ to his wife, who either kills him as promised or (more often) disappears, taking her children with her. There’s a slim but important wedge of difference between ‘never tell anyone’ and ‘never tell anyone else’. After all, Yuki-Onna knew all about the woodcutter’s first meeting with her by virtue of being there at the time.

  The Lilliput Twins have several songs about Yuki-Onna in their repertoire. One tune is distractingly close to ‘Tit-Willow’. All one thousand of the Temple’s monsters have their own airs. There’ll be songs about us soon. ‘Little Miss Mallinger Swallowed a Spider’, ‘How Do You Solve a Problem Like Drusilla?’ There’s already a ditty about the Carpathian Guard but Kostaki gets sulky if it’s so much as hummed.

  You’re distracted, again. Concentrate.

  There was something about the songs. Drusilla said the most important person in the song about the Ice Lady isn’t named.

  The husband is called Minokichi.

  Not him, Christina. Dru meant one of the children.

  The School Mouse.

  Yes, that’s what she said. She also says ‘the mousey girl’ sometimes. I’ve no idea what that means.

  Join the club. Where is Drusilla, by the way?

  We got separated in the battle.

  She’ll be fine.

  Only Christina Light would re
act to the news that a close friend had disappeared in the smoke of battle by assuming ‘she’ll be fine’.

  I ‘heard’ that.

  I meant you to. I think.

  You also believe me, you hypocrite.

  Yes, I admitted. Dru will be fine. It’s in her nature.

  Here we were, puzzling over her footnote to a sad song. Knowing it was important, not knowing why. As ever.

  We went down staircases. The chambers became less like rooms and more like caves. Clumps of frozen bats hung among stalactites like preserved fruit.

  Mr Bats/Mr Icicles must feel welcome.

  He was keeping up the rear. I thought he was looking around, as if expecting an attack… no, as if expecting someone. Good that he was on his toes. In this labyrinth, I trusted his instincts more than my own. Kostaki recruited wisely. Where had he been hiding the vampire samurai? Mr Bats was nosferatu, not kyuketsuki – a European bloodline. Had Dracula sent out missionaries to spread his taint to the Orient?

  That’s a surprisingly good guess.

  The lights in the ice pulsated. A hundred candle points inside slabs clear as glass, like some species of Christmas ornament.

  We came to a huge wooden door, quarter-way open. Beyond burned a light so bright it hurt my eyes. The light of seven suns – radiating all the colours of the rainbow.

  I took an iron ring and tugged. The door wouldn’t be pulled further open. It was stopped by solid ice – the floor was under a foot-thick skating rink surface.

  I slipped round the door and into the chamber of light. It was the size and shape of a cathedral, with galleries of intricate ice-forms. The ceiling was so high that frost flaking off it fell like steady snow.

  Topazia followed me, easily squeezing through the gap. Kostaki and Mr Bats had a harder time of it, and had to fiddle with swords and come at it sideways.

  My eyes adjusted – almost. I wished I had my dark glasses with me. Unworn since we came to this fogbound district, they were still packed in my trunk.

  Hanging in front of us was Christina Light.

  She was behind a wall of ice… no, she was inside a wall of ice. She was mostly light, but held her shape. She retained just enough physical substance to be trapped. The freeze had blasted her off her feet and she floated dramatically, hair streaming behind her, skin glowing through her clothes. Only her bloodied eye was dull. The rest of her shone.

  …O wad some Power the giftie gie us to see oursels as ithers see us.

  You’re welcome.

  Now you see me, get me out…

  She wasn’t like O-Same. She was light, not fire.

  Not yet.

  You’ve tried to melt your way free, then.

  I can set fires – but I need a magnifying glass to focus. I was hoping this ice would serve as a burning lens, but no, that would be too convenient.

  We were so struck by the angel in the ice it took a moment before any of us noticed the other woman present.

  Then Topazia made a monkey sound.

  We all turned to look.

  Yuki-Onna lay in an open tomb. It was like a sunken stone bath, filled with agitated ice. White, murderous razor-mist spilled over the rim.

  This close to her, even vampire breath froze.

  She wore a frosted gossamer shift. Her face was beautiful, if oval for a Japanese woman. She lay on her own unbound hair, which reached her ankles. It might have been a trick of the ice, but she seemed ten feet long. Her eyes were open. She was painful to look at.

  Yes, yes, she’s a wonder and a marvel, now—

  Oh shut up, Christina.

  I’ve been looking at the minx for hours. The awe wears off.

  Really?

  Since you mention it, no… but what use is awe?

  Kostaki and Mr Bats stood either side of Yuki-Onna’s bier. Topazia skipped up and crouched on the rim, gingerly probing an ice spout with her tail.

  She smiled, genuinely – not in an aggression display.

  ‘My Queen,’ she said.

  It hit me then that I’d been here before, in a situation like this, at least. A summons to a royal palace, a stalwart adventurer at my side, a captive queen, in need of freeing from a curse, a secret mission, the fate of an empire in the balance, a flash of silver knife.

  A flash of silver knife!

  It was so cold in the chamber that I didn’t feel the sword slide into my side. The sting came as the blade poked out of my ribs, tearing cloth.

  Topazia screeched!

  I half-turned – my side burned with a pain I’d seldom felt. The sword was slowly drawn out of me. I clamped my hands over my wounds. Blood welled and gushed over my fingers. I had been a flesh scabbard for a few seconds. One of my fangs jutted – another jolt of agony.

  Through red, wavery ice – illuminated by an angry rainbow radiating from Christina Light – I saw Captain Kostaki.

  His sword was slick with my blood.

  Behind him stood a shadow. A Japanese vampire with red hair. A white scarf against a black vestment. An inverted cross. A hand on Kostaki’s shoulder, with diamond-shaped nails.

  My knees gave out and I fell.

  27

  A KNIGHT TEMPLAR V

  ‘This is my command,’ the Master had 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 it had been decreed so had he done.

  Kostaki looked at the blood trickling on the length of his black carrack. It was fascinating. Each droplet was alive, a tiny fish or insect. They broke apart and rolled back together, gathering into drips. He wanted to touch his tongue to the silvered steel… the taste would be worth the poison sting. For it was the only blood in the world, the blood he craved… the blood he deserved.

  The witch’s familiar fell, pierced in the side.

  She was negligible – an obstacle, not an enemy. A stone to be removed from the path, not a foe worth the fight. Yet her blood, pouring through slits in her clothes, was an elixir, an ocean that called him to sail, a sky full of stars, a banquet laid out.

  No – he would not falter! He was near the fulfilment of his mission. Close to glory, to regaining the Master’s favour. Promises had been made, on both sides. After the victory would come the reward. Restoration. Elevation. Ascendance.

  A hand was on his shoulder, guiding him. A voice in his head whispered.

  Strike her breast with iron… pull out her heart.

  The familiar scrabbled at his boots, blood still leaking from her. She spoke, but he didn’t hear. He was not to pay heed to her lies. A Templar was beyond corruption.

  His comrades would approve. His Lodge Brothers. He heard them singing.

  ‘He who would valiant be

  ’Gainst all disaster

  Let him in constancy

  Follow the Master

  There’s no discouragement

  Shall make him once relent

  His first avowed intent

  To be a Templar.’

  He took strength. His vows were heated armour, pressed to his bare flesh, mortifying him, rendering him pure. Everything but faith and honour and purpose was burned away. He was a knife, a sword, a fang.

  He stood over the Winter Witch. She was buried in coals of ice. Frosty breath rose like smoke. He looked at her face – a white flame under the pool of jagged, broken ice – and was not turned to glass.

  His faith gave him the strength to persist. To follow the Master who was behind him. Encouraging, urging, insisting.

  Strike.

  He heard the witch’s heart. It was slow; one beat for every twenty of his, strong as a drum at an execution. He looked into her open eyes. Deep in the black chasms were tiny skulls
carved of ice. The witch knew fear.

  He could taste her blood, an arctic river in her veins, which would pass on her powers – her command of the elements – to the Master. When he squeezed blood from her heart, Dracula would become almighty, victorious, invincible, omnipotent.

  More almighty, victorious, invincible, omnipotent.

  He saw the rot beneath the beauty of the wretched familiar, the darkness behind the light of the Princess in the wall, the weakness in the heart of the Winter Witch.

  In times to come, he would ride on a magnificent black horse under the banner of Nemuri, called Dorakuraya: Son of the Dragon, Son of the Black Mass, Son of Satan Himself. Kostaki would be honoured as one of the Seven Deadly Venoms, spreading the Master’s cloak across this land, and all the lands beyond. Kostaki the Templar, Sanjuro Surnamed-What-Comes-to-Hand, Shurayukihime, the Avenging Daughter, Hanzo, the Swordsmith, Blind Ichi, the Masseur of Death, Ogami the Executioner… and his cold-eyed child Daigoro. A company without mercy, dedicated to the glory of Dorakuraya. A Guard worth joining. Feared, admired and exalted. The Seven would prevail, and the Master would rule by the square, by the level, by the plumb rule, by the compasses and by the all-seeing eye. The Seven were the scourge of Dracula, and they would strike heavy across the East.

  As he would strike now.

  ‘Strike, good Kostaki,’ urged the Master. ‘Strike, so that the blood may flow, so that I may ascend, and bear you up with me. A place awaits you, above others, on the left hand of Satan. Strike.’

  There were others in the tomb – a monkey and a soldier. They didn’t matter. The Master would see them off.

  In the wall of ice, he saw the Seven – himself included – standing ready, on the point of attack, and the Master, atop a fabulous armoured steam engine, behind them, arm raised, mailed fist to the sky.

  The Seven.