by Chris Ward
‘What the hell is this?’ Jun said.
‘It’s the approach road to the castle. We need to be careful.’
Jun nodded. He still had no idea of a plan, other than to drive right up to the gate and challenge Crow to come out. His mind had been a mess ever since the hotel was bombed. He had been in Heigel for less than twenty-four hours, but it felt like weeks. He just wanted to get the confrontation over with.
He was about to pull out on to the road when Jennie put a hand on his arm.
‘There’s a car coming from the right.’
Jun had been so caught up in his thoughts that he hadn’t heard the hum of an approaching engine. He looked up and saw a long, official-looking car come racing past. Its windscreen and side windows were tinted as if they were carrying an emperor or prince. Framed by the railings as it bumped along the flagstones it didn’t look as out of place as an ordinary car would have, almost as if it belonged—
Even as Jennie started to protest that it would be safer to wait a while, Jun pulled the car on to the road, accelerating hard in pursuit of the other car, the old police cruiser bouncing and jerking over the uneven flagstones. Heigel Castle appeared up ahead, at the end of a wide stone causeway spanning a deep gorge. The castle was like something out of a picture book, tall battlements, towers, and high walkways, surrounded by a thick outer wall and fronted by a gatehouse housing a huge black portcullis.
Up ahead, the other car was speeding across the causeway.
‘What are you doing?’ Jennie shouted as Jun hunched over the steering wheel, cajoling the car onwards.
‘Old technology,’ he said. ‘Look how slow that portcullis is lifting. We can follow the car inside.’
Massive wooden gates stood open, but the portcullis was rising slowly like an old man waking up.
They had reached the other side of the causeway, with just a short climb of around fifty metres leading to the gatehouse. The other car drove through the archway into a courtyard inside.
‘We’re not going to make it!’ Jennie screamed as the portcullis began to lower again.
‘Hang on!’
Jun stamped the accelerator, willing the car to squeeze one last gasp of power out of its rundown engine. The castle walls loomed high above them, the massive metal spikes of the portcullis dropping down, ready to skewer them like fish from the nearby river.
‘Jun!’
The scraping of metal and the crunch of breaking safety glass filled the car as the spikes scraped across the back of the car as it plunged through. The clatter of the bumper being ripped off came from behind them, then they were careening wildly across a wide, open courtyard, clipping the back of the other car and then tailing over to come to a bumpy stop in a far corner, under the shadows of a gallery protruding from the wall above.
Jun threw open the door and tumbled out. Three cloaked figures were running towards them from across the courtyard. Jennie came around to meet him and Jun grabbed her arms and pointed into the shadows.
‘Let’s go,’ he said. ‘This way.’
He pulled open a door opening on to a staircase leading down. He pushed Jennie ahead of him and then pulled the door shut. He fumbled for a bolt, but there was nothing, so he turned and followed Jennie down into the dark, trying to ignore the rising beat of his heart and the oppressiveness of the cold, damp castle.
Hang on, Jun. Don’t break down now.
From back up the stairs came the hideous squawking of some kind of bird creature, but rather than fill him with fear, it made him tingle with a nervous excitement.
Crow was near, he knew it. All he had to do was fight off the demons inside him to find the one from his past, and he could end this for good.
32
Dancing in the air
‘Bring him to me,’ Kurou said, waving forward the two birdmen supporting Grigore’s stiff, awkward gait as the battered businessman walked between them. The professor stood by the window of the tower room, looking out on the town below. Overhead, grey clouds had moved in to obscure the sun, threatening rain. Kurou gave a lopsided grin. At least the girl wouldn’t have to worry about sunstroke.
The Queen’s Tower was the second tallest of the castle’s five. The tallest, the King’s Tower, was Kurou’s favorite, although he was quite happy to let it out to his guests. Grigore had enjoyed it for a while, and now it was Crina’s abode.
The King’s Tower jutted out from the wall of the castle, suspended over the bluff, giving dizzying views of the valley. With the bluff making attack on this side of the castle impossible, its builders had taken their adventurous design to the next level, building a walkway between the King’s Tower and the Queen’s Tower fifty metres to the west. Stretching out across the chasm below like a finger of stone, it linked the room beneath where Kurou now stood to a room about halfway up the Queen’s Tower. Supporting buttresses arched out to take the weight of a bigger, central room in the middle of the walkway that, in contrast with the thinner catwalk on either side, gave the impression of floating in the air. From such an effect had come its name, Galerie Plutitoare, the Floating Gallery.
Kurou lifted a radio and pressed a button. The radio emitted a sharp hiss.
‘You can bring her now,’ he said, and clicked off. Turning behind him, he said to the birdmen, ‘Help Mr. Albescu to the window. I want him to see every second of this wonderful event.’
He stepped aside as the birdmen dragged Grigore forward. One of them attached a chain to Grigore’s shackles and secured it to the wall, then they turned him around so that he had a clear view of the Floating Gallery from the window.
Kurou went to a table in the corner and took a computer tablet out of a case. His fingers raced over the screen and a moment later Grigore’s head jerked towards him with a squeal of wires. ‘Dear Mr. Kurou,’ Grigore said in Kurou’s native Chinese, his mouth chomping up and down to reveal a tongue laced with wires. ‘How delightful to see you again. I’m so happy that you thought enough of me to allow me to watch such a wondrous event.’
Kurou smiled and patted Grigore on the arm. ‘Oh, there’s no need to flatter me, sire,’ he said. ‘I’m just a simple scientist, trying to make my way in the world….’
‘I love you and I want to bow on my knees to you—’
Kurou pressed a button on his tablet and Grigore’s face relaxed for a moment before contorting into an expression of pure rage. ‘I’ll have them bring back the death penalty for you, you sick bastard,’ Grigore spat through gritted teeth, his voice returning to his native Romanian.
Kurou scowled. He pressed a button, and Grigore’s face went tight again. ‘I think I prefer the … doctored version. My deepest regrets, sire.’
‘I can’t wait to see the show you have planned,’ Grigore said, his eyes filled with hate. ‘You delight me with your intellectual talents.’
Kurou gave a little bow. ‘Then let’s get started. After all, this is a performance that can last as long as you want it to. I’m offering you full creative control, kind as I am.’
The door opened in the King’s Tower and two birdmen stepped out on to the catwalk. A gurney rattled along behind them, a woman lying on top, her bare feet facing them. As they moved out along the walkway towards the Floating Gallery in the centre, a string of further gurneys appeared, piled high with what looked like hundreds of coils of orange rope.
The two birdmen were straining to pull their load. As the last of five gurneys appeared, three other birdmen stepped out on to the catwalk. The five of them together struggled to shift the massive cargo, slowly inching it out towards the Floating Gallery in the centre.
The woman was awake. Her head lolled from side to side, and her scalp was a mass of matted hair and blood. Kurou admired her resolve; it was just a pity that her efforts had only managed to give Grigore less time to make his decision.
‘Very good,’ Kurou said into his radio. ‘Now begin lowering her. Remember to spread the ends of the braids out so there is more surface area.’
; The first birdmen reached the Floating Gallery and disappeared under its covered roof, appearing again at the large windowless viewing balcony with the woman now held in their arms.
‘Crina,’ Grigore gasped through lips that barely moved.
Kurou raised an eyebrow. ‘I’ll let you call out your love for her if you promise not to give me another ear-bashing,’ he said.
‘Fuck…you.’
‘That’s it? Don’t you want to hear her call out her love for you?’ Kurou gave a twisted sneer and his words came out in a near-perfect version of Crina’s voice. ‘Oh … oh … oh … Grigore, my darling … help me! Won’t you help me escape from this crazy, deformed madman?’
Grigore’s brow furrowed, but he said nothing. A sudden scream made him turn back to the events outside.
The birdmen were lowering Crina over the edge of the catwalk. Her legs kicked out and her arms flapped around her head as they lowered her by her hair, the thick, extended braids fed out arm over arm, inch by inch.
‘A quite wondrous sight, sire, wouldn’t you agree?’ Kurou said. ‘I’m sure the vain little lady loves her golden new locks. Almost as beautiful as this fine scenery, don’t you think?’
Grigore let out a low moan. Kurou considered releasing the wires holding his face muscles, just to hear Grigore’s thoughts, but decided against it. Getting endlessly berated became tiresome after a while.
Crina was now hanging in the air twenty feet below the Floating Gallery. She was screaming and holding on to her hair as if afraid her scalp would just rip right off her head. It was folly, of course; in other live tests Kurou had established that the average human scalp could support several times a human’s average bodyweight for several hours. It was rather messy when one’s scalp did finally give way, but Crina had nothing to fear for a couple of days at least in that regard.
Her concern was a lot more pressing.
Crina came to a halt about fifty feet below the gallery. The birdmen had done a fine job, tying the ends of each of dozens of braids to weights that they had spread across the catwalk, so that Crina appeared to be at the bottom of a huge golden semi-circle, an inverted setting sun.
‘Beautiful, isn’t it, sire?’ Kurou said. ‘Vanity personified. I bet women everywhere dream of such hair.’ He lifted a finger and waggled it in front of Grigore’s face like a teacher telling off a silly boy. ‘However. All is not quite what it seems.’
A shadow fell across Crina’s face and was gone. Grigore made a strange gargling noise.
A screeching cry came out of the sky above them. The dark shape of an eagle soared across the clouds in one lazy arc, then came swooping down, almost too fast for the eye to follow. Grigore moaned as if he thought it was about to pluck out Crina’s eyes, but it landed above her, its claws hooking over two of the braids as it tore away a clump of hair with its beak. It shifted its position, then launched itself back into the air and flew away.
‘Piqued your interest yet, sire?’ Kurou said, flashing the best smile his deformed face would allow. Grigore’s eyes turned towards him, another low moan escaping his motionless lips.
Kurou spread his arms. ‘And now—since you ask—the grand reveal. That great golden shower raining down on your poor darling’s bloodied head is not human hair, nor is it wool. It is bark fibre from the Carpathian Birch, a tree native only to Transylvania. When a tree dies its bark begins to break away, revealing long golden strands that can stretch the height of the entire tree. Thanks to their durability and flexibility, and the ease with which they can be woven, they are the favoured nesting material among roosting Romanian Black Eagles, making up around ninety percent of the average bird’s home.’
Grigore’s eyes were daggers, and Kurou had an urge to hear what the man had to say. He pressed a button to let the wires holding the man’s face go slack.
‘You sick bastard, I’ll have you killed for this. I know people you can’t begin to imagine—’
‘Yes, yes.’ Kurou waved away Grigore’s threats with a flap of his hand. ‘And the eagles in these parts tend to breed several times per year. That’s a lot of nests.’ He gripped the edge of the windowsill and let out an earsplitting squawk. From somewhere far distant three similar squawks answered him.
He looked at Grigore and shrugged. ‘A communal lot, too. Within minutes every one of the beautiful things within a few miles will arrive for a beakful or two of your darling’s beautiful hair. I imagine it’ll be a few hours before there’s too little of it left to hold her, but I guess we’ll see, won’t we? The clock’s ticking, sire. Tick … tock.’
‘You bastard,’ Grigore said, his voice barely audible. ‘You sick bastard. What do you want from me?’
Kurou smiled. He went over to his bag and plucked a sheet of paper out of a plastic folder. He gave a bow as he held it out to Grigore.
‘Just your signature, sire. Nothing less, nothing more.’
33
The fall and rise of Naotoshi Waribe
Naotoshi wanted a ten second delay on the live recording. He argued with his director for hours, but the stubborn asshole wouldn’t budge. Live meant live. Naotoshi was a professional, it would be easy for him, they said. After all, he just had to act natural, and react to the situation.
They wouldn’t tell him what was going to happen, but it was fairly easy to guess.
A team of interns—contractually obliged to secrecy—had set a trail of footprints leading up through the woods along a steep river channel towards some peak or other where Naotoshi was supposed to convince the audience that he would find a monster’s lair.
His first job had been to actually find the trail.
The interns had been told to make it hard, but what they hadn’t been told was to make it natural. The footprints were all over the place, sometimes near the steep, bubbling river, other times further up in the trees, sometimes—rather ridiculously—pointing back downslope.
For a normal tracker it would have been impossible to follow a creature that was either losing its mind or had no idea where it was going, but for Naotoshi it was easy—he just followed the intern’s own footprints, making a concerted effort to make sure the impressions of hiking boots stayed off camera.
The supposed remoteness of the location meant only a single hardy cameraman could accompany him, amplifying the supposed danger, but the reality was that after night had fallen, shots of the distant ridgeline had to use a tinting filter so that the glow from the city of Toyama, just thirty miles to the north-west, wouldn’t be seen in the sky. It was possibly the hardest mission Naotoshi had ever undertaken, but the hardship was in hiding the charade from the watching public.
The creature, he told the viewers at home, talking into the single camera, was frightened. Its keen senses had alerted it to pursuit, which was why its path was haphazard. Soon, though, the steepness of the gully would force it into moving in a straight line up towards the ridge. There, he, Naotoshi Waribe, Monster Hunter, would confront it, and confirm the existence of the Yeti once and for all.
A regular show brought in something like a million viewers, a respectable sum in a country where only half the households had a TV. The live special, however, which began broadcasting at two p.m. had run long over its supposed finish time of four p.m., and the general belief that Naotoshi Waribe had finally found something had brought new viewers in their droves. Later he would find out that more than six million people watched his greatest failure live on national television.
In the years before he was properly forgotten, he would change apartments on average once every three months, just to escape the continually escalating jibes.
From mid-afternoon onwards, the camera was fitted with increasingly darker tints to accommodate for the time zone differences between Nepal and Japan. The cameraman was instructed to keep the camera pointed downwards for fear that one shot of the sun would break the ruse.
Of course, in retrospect, every frame of the near four-hour broadcast was analysed by viewers looking for falsehood
s, right down to the expressions on Naotoshi’s face, as the debate raged over whether he was in the know or not. He tried to claim that he had been tricked, that there really had been a trail in the Japan Alps, that they had falsified their location in case of a matter of national security, but in the end there were enough members of the crew willing to take money to tell their stories, and enough willing to claim that Naotoshi had, in fact, come up with the whole idea himself as a way of keeping his fading star in the limelight, and he had never successfully managed to shrug off the accusations.
The truth, though, was that as he climbed up through the forest, following the haphazard fake footprints, he had no more idea what was going to happen than any of the millions of people watching at home.
It started off with a few cat calls; strange, shrill whistles that echoed through the trees. They were done well; at first he was genuinely spooked. Rustlings in the undergrowth were next, as if the beast he was hunting had decided to play a little joke on him. The falsehood began to glow brighter than the camera’s inbuilt spotlight, but because he used his best method acting to emphasise his own concern, it was all playing out smoothly.
Had they left it at noises, they might have got away with it. Of course, they had to show the beast.
The trees had thinned out, and Naotoshi found himself walking up a river gully where patches of snow left over from the previous winter made treacherous ice bridges over the gurgling water. The dark shadows beneath the ice were the perfect place for a shy Yeti to hide.
At the sound of a deep growl, Naotoshi dropped to his knees behind a cluster of rocks. ‘Up there,’ he said to the camera. ‘See it? About thirty metres up. We’ve cornered it. Come on. Let’s go easy now. We don’t want to scare it.’
How could he have known that his whole career would have been defined by one five-minute stretch of tape? That the worth of dozens of meticulously researched documentaries would be undermined by five minutes of pantomime?