by Chris Ward
The police officer’s mouth opened in a soundless scream. Camera flashes exposed the hideous comedy of a bearded forest ranger posing with his knife stuck in a police officer’s belly, then Igor lurched forward, a cascade of blood soaking the ground in front of him. Ludvic stumbled away as Igor writhed on the ground, his legs kicking him around in a three-sixty degree spin, hands clutching at the knife sticking out of his stomach.
The tourists stood stunned and silent for a moment then began screaming all at once. Some grabbed hold of other people near to them, while others turned and rushed for the forest, only for one of the beaked creatures to step out of the undergrowth, its arms spread wide like a demonic shepherd directing its doomed sheep.
As its cloak fell away, huge batwings rose out behind it like unfolding screens, blocking off the escape for several feet on either side. Naotoshi, now lying on his belly in the undergrowth, not daring to breathe, realised what he had seen. These things, whatever they were, couldn’t fly, but with their huge wings they were capable of gliding down from the castle far above. Folded up behind them, the bulge in the cloaks made them look like bent, hunchbacked old men.
He shivered as he thought about how he had tried to make conversation with one of them sitting beside him in the bus. He understood now. It hadn’t been there to watch the tourists, but to make sure Ludvic didn’t break whatever devil’s pact he had made.
The two creatures had herded the tourists into a group in the centre of the glade. Just in case the fearsome bird creatures weren’t enough to stop them trying to escape, Ludvic pulled the gun from Igor’s belt and pointed it at them.
‘I’m very sorry about that,’ he said. ‘B-b-but we found a way to give you a c-c-castle tour after all. Now, if you’d all be so kind as to make a line to crawl under the tree roots, we’ll be u-u-up there in no time at all.’
Some of the tourists were still screaming, others were hugging each other and crying. Naotoshi glared at Ludvic though the tiny gap in the ferns, wishing only to get his hands on the police officer’s gun. If there were three bullets, he didn’t know who he would shoot first, the creatures or the double-crossing forest ranger.
As the first of the tourists climbed crying and sobbing under the tree roots into the space beneath, Naotoshi gave a little shake of his head.
There were creatures in these woods indeed, but they’d picked the wrong man to mess with. He was Naotoshi Waribe, famous monster hunter. He reached into his bag and pulled out his phone, quickly switching the camera function to video and positioning it so that he could film the kidnapping as it happened.
He didn’t know how yet, but somehow he would save the others. As the last of the tourists crawled under the roots, with one of the creatures bringing up the rear, Naotoshi stopped the video and logged on to his private satellite link. Even that was weak, but within a few seconds the video was uploading to his website. In a few moments the whole world would know he was on the trail of a despicable crime.
He was back. Never again would anyone mock him. When this was all said and done, he would be remembered as a hero. Right now, though, he had to figure out the best course of action to do what, on the face of it, looked impossible.
25
The hotel gets a visitor
‘Jennie!’ Jun screamed as he reached the burning hotel. The flames had begun to subside as the fire ran out of things to burn, but it was still too hot for him to get within fifty metres. Smoke made a towering column up into the sky, and a couple of birds swooped around it, like vultures waiting for a meal.
A handful of other people had gathered around, older locals, huddled together as if the warmth wasn’t enough, pointing and shouting, their faces grimy from the grit that seemed to be everywhere. Jun couldn’t understand what they were saying, so he ran up to the nearest group and frantically asked them in English if anyone had seen Jennie. The few who understood just shook their heads.
‘Damn it,’ he muttered, dropping to his knees as he watched the inferno. ‘Damn it.’
She packed her purse and phone into a bag, and was about to grab them and head back downstairs, but the lure of the shower was just too much. Surely Jun would take a few minutes at least, so she stripped off and got under the hot torrent of water, glad to wash the stench of sweat, grime, and booze off her body.
She was just turning off the water when the whole bathroom shook beneath a thundering roar from downstairs.
‘What the hell…?’
She heard a crash of shattering glass, as if all the windows in the hotel had blown out at once, and a low groan that reminded her of a time when she had taken a ferry to one of the Okinawan islands and a storm had come in. As the ship had lurched and dipped, she had been terrified it would break apart.
She jumped out of the shower and pushed through the bathroom door to find her room full of smoke. Grabbing a towel, she wrapped it around herself and hurried over to the window, throwing it wide.
Coughing, she leaned out and shouted for help, but there was no one anywhere in sight. Her room was at the back of the hotel and faced out on to forest. The only road was a small access road for delivery vehicles.
She was on the third floor. Directly below her was a protruding corrugated iron roof. It looked soft compared to landing on stone, but it was still at least twenty feet below her.
She glanced back at the room. Smoke was billowing under the door and clouding around the ceiling. The bed was an old wooden framed affair but the mattress was new and strong. The sound of roaring flames came from the corridor beyond the door. She had just seconds to decide what to do.
Wrapping the corner of the damp towel over her mouth, she ran back into the room and jerked at the bed.
It wasn’t fixed to the wall, and was lighter than she had expected. She dragged it across the room in two attempts, separated by a quick dash to the window for some fresh air.
The window itself was just wider than the bed, and had two doors that opened outwards. One had a broken jamb and had been glued shut, so Jennie kicked it hard, the impact jarring up through her leg. As it broke free and swung open, she saw blood on the glass; on the sole of her foot the sharp metal had opened up a deep gash.
She would have time to worry about tetanus if she survived. She heaved the bed up onto the sill and pushed it forward until it was half out. As it leaned there precariously, wobbling up and down, her plan to surf out of the window on the bed suddenly seemed ridiculous. She had hoped that the frame and mattress would break her fall, but what if they turned over in the air and came crashing down on top of her, crushing her against the corrugated iron roof?
Behind her, the door burst off its hinges and huge flames rushed across the ceiling in a billowing cloud of orange and yellow. A blast of baking hot air wafted into her face, stinging her eyes, and she realised she had no choice. She could feel her eyebrows singing as she turned back to the bed.
She climbed on, poking her feet through the metal bars at the lower end of the frame still inside the room, while holding on to the top with her hands. Then, with heat beating at her, a blanket of smoke billowing out of the window above, she stretched her body forward, putting her weight on the part of the bed that hung outside of the window, letting it slowly tilt towards the ground.
She screamed as it began to slide forward, then it suddenly jerked as the legs of the bed caught on the window. Jennie was hanging down towards the ground, low enough to drop without risking serious injury. With the back feet of the bed still caught, she climbed over the lower frame and lowered her body as far as she could. It was still around ten feet, but if she was lucky she wouldn’t break anything. Counting to three, she let go.
She screamed as her injured foot struck a lump in the iron roofing, and she fell onto her back. Looking up, she saw flames pouring out of the window, with the bed hanging out directly above her. The end of the mattress had caught fire, the flames quickly engulfing it. It rocked back and forth, belching puffs of fire and smoke up into the air.
; Jennie started to climb to her feet, but had only made it to her knees when the burning mattress slid off the bed, dropping towards her. She dived to the right, over the edge of the roof as the flaming rectangle came crashing down. She landed on a heap of smelly refuse sacks. Several burst open, vomiting their food waste all over her.
In another situation, being naked, bloody, and covered in leftover food might have been funny, but all Jenny felt was panic as the heat of the flames pressed through the walls. Whatever had happened to the hotel had happened at the front, and the flames were still making their way back towards the restaurant and kitchen, otherwise she would be dead. Wiping the gunge off her body as best she could, she stumbled out of the garbage pile and around a couple of outbuildings towards the trees on the other side of a gravel-covered access lane.
She didn’t dare go into the forest, so she began to follow the lane around towards the front of the hotel. She hoped that someone would come and help her, but at the same time she was terrified of being seen.
Where was Jun? Was he alive or had he come back to the hotel before the explosion? What if he had been waiting for her in the lobby?
She looked down at the lumps of rotting meat stuck to her skin and began to cry.
There was still no sign of a fire truck. Several members of the crowd were holding their phones up in the air as if that extra couple of feet would magically produce a signal. The fire had spread to the third floor now, with the broken windows on the fourth billowing smoke. A couple of people had appeared on the roof, waving frantically for help. Jun had got as close as he dared to try to see better, but both of the trapped people were wearing hotel uniforms and he was sure neither was Jennie.
No one had come out of the doors. The flames in the lobby had died down a little as they moved on to tastier parts of the building, but the heat that was still billowing forth was too much to get anywhere close. Jun felt helpless as he stood and watched, praying he would see Jennie appear on the roof next to the other survivors.
The crowd was growing. Most of the people were older villagers, their faces worn from years in the fields. Jun stood out as a stranger, young as well as Asian, and as he stared at the burning building he realised that the rest of the group had opened up a distance between him and them.
As many people were staring at him as at the hotel. Unease wrapped its arms around him like an old friend, and when the first finger pointed in his direction, Jun was already beginning to move. He couldn’t understand their words as they shouted abuse at him, but he could understand the meaning. He was an outsider, and was a representative of everything that had invaded their town. Maybe their sons or daughters had been working in the hotel that had become their tomb. He might never know, but these people needed a scapegoat and he was the obvious choice.
A gunshot rang out. Jun screamed at a searing pain in his forearm and saw blood pooling in a shallow centimetre-wide gash where skin had once been. A man he recognised from the roadside café had a crude, rusty shotgun levelled at him.
The man had barely missed once, and was already closing the distance between them. Jun turned and sprinted across the car park, intent on not giving him a second chance.
The hotel loomed up in front of him, fire spitting from its windows. He ran around the side, as close as he could get to the heat, aware that the hotel and the forest beyond it was his only chance of cover. Glancing back, he saw several of the assembled crowd giving chase, the man with the shotgun at the front.
The bullet wound was just a graze, but his whole arm seemed to be burning. He hugged it to his stomach as he ran, gritting his teeth against the pain. To his right he smelt the thick, oily scent of burning lacquer, a smell that brought back terrible memories. Flaming lumps of charred wood were raining down around him, and the ground was thick with ash, his footprints leaving a trail that could easily be followed.
His only hope was to outrun them or hide.
The forest was closing in up ahead, pressing against the access road for deliveries to the rear of the hotel. There were no other roads; it did a loop of the hotel and joined up with the car park on the other side of the main entrance. He couldn’t go back into the forest; he had left his bag in the phone booth, and with it his last pills. He was stuck between the overwhelming madness of claustrophobia and a group of angry, armed villagers.
A foul-smelling creature stepped out onto the road in front of him. Jun cried out and fell as he tried to turn, slipping on the ash and crashing to the ground. He started to get up, then a voice was shouting, ‘Jun, it’s me!’ and a woman’s hands were pulling him off the road into the undergrowth.
‘We have to move,’ Jennie said. ‘The gas tanks are around the back. They could blow at any—’
The trees shook as a massive whump rocked the forest, throwing Jennie and Jun to the ground. A wave of searing heat filled the canopy above them. Jun gasped as cloying, cobalt-scented air forced its way into his lungs, but Jennie was already back on her feet, dragging him with her. Jun didn’t want to think about what might have happened to his pursuers, but some of the nearest trees were burning, the flames biting into the wet, damp wood. The forest would win in the end, he knew, but not before it had taken some damage.
‘Come on,’ Jennie gasped. ‘We have to get out of here.’
Jun gulped down a rising fear and tried to imagine what it would feel like to slip a pill into his mouth. At times he could handle it, other times not. He reached out for her, gripping her hand tightly in his. He suddenly realised she was naked, and thought that beneath the dirt, blood and gunge that coated her, she was beautiful.
‘Please don’t let go of me,’ he said.
‘I won’t.’
‘I thought you were dead.’
Jennie smiled. A piece of fish bone fell out of her hair onto the ground. ‘I decided not to be,’ she said.
26
Guests in the castle
The rain clouds blocking out the sun had never felt more welcome. Jun sat on the edge of the field in just an undershirt and boxer shorts as fat drops began to fall, each one wiping away a little more of the grime that the fire had left all over his body.
Beside him, wearing his jacket and trousers, Jennie looked equally pleased. Skirting through the trees behind the burning hotel they had found their way out on to a road leading west out of town. Beside some vegetable fields they had found a little brook where Jennie had washed herself as clean as she could, even though the smell still lingered. Both of them had cleaned out their wounds—Jennie’s a deep gash on the foot and Jun’s skinned forearm from the stray bullet—but they would probably need to find some antibiotics from somewhere to avoid infection. And with only one set of clothes between them—and one pair of shoes—they didn’t feel in any way capable of storming the castle sitting high up on the bluff.
But at least they were both alive.
‘It’s like it’s happening all over again,’ Jun muttered, his feet dangling in the little stream that gushed along a trench dug between the field and the road. ‘All this death and destruction. He’s behind all of it.’
‘Crow?’
‘Yes. I saw an old woman go into the hotel just before the explosion, and she was walking strange, as if she was carrying something heavy. It must have been a bomb, but what kind of old woman does something like that? He forced her, I know it.’
‘Did you get a good look at her?’
He shook his head. ‘I might have done if someone had cleaned the phone booth windows in the last year. She was really old, though. And there was something not right about her.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like she was….’ He shrugged. ‘It sounds stupid to say it.’
Jennie smiled. ‘Nothing you say could possibly sound more ridiculous than what we’ve been through in the last few hours.’
‘It was like she wasn’t even alive. Like she was a zombie or something. She walked in this kind of lurch, like a robot. Old women don’t walk like that.’
Jennie whistled through her teeth. ‘What if she was?’
‘What?’
‘A robot. You said he made those things that killed your friends. What if that woman … what if she was another one? What if those bird things are too?’ She put a hand over his. ‘Jun, what if he’s making these things?’
‘I guess it’s possible. In fact it’s very possible.’
‘We have to stop him.’
Jun shook his head. ‘No. I have to stop him. You have to find a safe place away from this.’
Jennie laughed. ‘There are no safe places around here. It looks like half the police are dead. You need to find your friend, and I need to find my tour group. When we’ve done both of those things, perhaps we can try saving ourselves.’
‘I don’t want you to get hurt.’
She pointed at her foot. ‘I’m already hurt. I appreciate the sentiment, but I’ll take my chances.’
Jun rubbed his eyes and put his head in his hands. ‘Ken could have been in there,’ he said, ‘but now I have no way of knowing.’ He slammed a fist down into the grassy riverbank. ‘He could be dead and it’s my fault for coming here.’
Jennie didn’t say anything for so long that Jun looked up, expecting to see condemnation in her face. Instead she was staring at him, her mouth agape.
‘Jun … what if … it’s a long shot, but….’
‘What?’
‘I told you what that police officer said back in the field, but I may have made a mistake.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘My Romanian is pretty good but I don’t know the local dialects. I assumed he said the word “tourist” when he said they hadn’t found the other person. Now that I think about it, he used the word străin, which more accurately means “foreigner”. They were looking for a foreigner, Jun. What if that was your friend Ken?’