Chapter Two
Chapter Two
Mayumi sensed the door opening. Turn around and she could see who was coming through the door. But she lacked the energy to do so.
She was in a room in a big warehouse. Though it dated back to before the Devil Quake, it didn’t appear to have suffered much structural damage. The high ceilings and walls were spackled with filling compound that covered up the cracks.
An oily smell hung in the air. Not so much from it being stored somewhere but rather from having soaked into the joists and beams.
Mayumi’s hands were handcuffed behind her, and the handcuffs were attached to a ring around a steel post with another pair of handcuffs. She saw no way of easily freeing herself, and was not in the mood to try.
The late afternoon light streaking through the window next to her painted long shadows on the concrete floor. Through the window and walls came the sound of footsteps and voices of men. Bad men. They were men, and that made them bad. That simple equation was all Mayumi needed to know.
She’d been snatched off Okubo Avenue the night before by this biker gang and violated in every orifice. The three of them had spent their wads and were probably off partying happy as clams.
A grating noise chased away the falling darkness. The steel shutters across the fifty-foot wide bay doors rolled up. Shadows like ghosts approached her through the slash of sunlight and solidified into the shapes of men.
The underboss of the gang that had kidnapped her along with several of his men, plus four others wearing dark suits.
One of the suits was a fat man in his fifties, but carrying the kind of fat that lent his presence additional psychological and not just physical weight. The rest, in their thirties, formed a line behind him. From the crisp line of the fat man’s suit, he was the only one not packing heat.
The men formed a half-arc around Mayumi. The fat man, obviously the godfather of the bunch, said to the biker gang underboss, “This is the girl, eh?”
“Yeah,” he answered, bowing repeatedly and subserviently. The balance of power was clear to anybody’s eyes. “I couldn’t hardly believe it myself. Three of our guys bit the dust in thirty seconds flat.”
“Why the long face? Thanks to her, you won yourself a promotion to boss of your little gang.”
“Well—I—” The underboss scratched his head in evident confusion.
“The problem is, how exactly do we know you’re telling the truth? Fuck her and die, you say? If that’s true, you deserve your reward.”
“Yes—that—” The underboss bowed again.
The godfather turned to one of the suits behind him and said with a greasy smile, “I happen to know a way. You—”
One of them nodded and melted back into the sunlight. He returned a minute later with another man. Mayumi aside, they all wore the same smile as the godfather.
“Shit! Feast your eyes on this!”
An abominable growl made Mayumi turn around before the words came out of the underboss’s mouth. She blanched with fear.
The man accompanying the suit was well over six feet tall. The growl issued from his parted thick lips—like a slit in a slab of fresh meat—revealing a set of yellow teeth and a dangling, rancid-colored tongue. From the swollen eyeballs and the dilated pupils, he was juiced on the hard stuff.
The hands and feet jutting out from the stained polo shirt and jeans were mottled and gray from the necrosis that attended habitual drug abuse. His legs bowed backwards from the knees down in the manner of the hind legs of a wild animal.
What froze the blood in Mayumi’s veins was the face, steadily transforming before her eyes. Not his expression. A black pelt was covering his skin, like that of a wolf or bear. In a flash the follicles sank into the skin and began to grow outwards.
“Surprised? He OD’d and fucked up his endocrine system. Can go from human to wolf man in five seconds flat. Brain’s in no better shape. Family gave up on him, sold him to us for pocket change. Not much good for anything, not even as a guard dog. Nobody will miss him when he’s gone. I’d say this would be the perfect way to ring his bell one last time.”
“Stop it.” Mayumi slowly shook her head, exhibiting a strength of resolve that would have made any other man withdraw the offer on the spot. “Stop it,” she said again.
Grinning faces filled her field of view. Wearing lewd smiles that turned them ugly and primitive, the suits and gangbangers alike were already close to slobbering at the prospect of a taboo sex show, practically trembling in anticipation.
“The two of you are going to do it,” the godfather proclaimed. “And we’re gonna watch. How you get it done is up to you. From the front, from the back, or with that pretty mouth of yours. But getting it done is the only way you’re walking out of here. Comprende?”
Mayumi remained silent in the face of such a cruel question. She would have nothing to say to anyone forever after this.
“What, your mouth stop working? Fine. Then we’ll let him choose.” The godfather jerked his chin toward the man-beast.
The man-beast crept toward her. His shirt bulged and rippled. The fur must cover his entire body by now. His black hands undid his fly and freed his rigid, engorged member, eight inches long and as dark as the rest of him.
He knelt in front of Mayumi and placed his hands on her hips and fixed her in his gaze, the red slits of his eyes alone radiating an all too human lust.
“Hoh. Wants to do you doggie style. Figures.” The godfather chuckled. He undid the handcuffs. “Go get her, pooch.”
Mayumi tried to scramble away. He tackled her by the legs, pinning her down as he tore off her clothing. Warm drool dripped onto her haunches. His fingers stabbed into her flesh like metal clamps, rendering her immobile.
He shoved hot and hard against her sex, penetrating her mercilessly and with overwhelming force. Mayumi screamed. The man-beast’s hips slammed against her ass. The muscles trembled.
The man-beast commenced his assault, and Mayumi felt a sensation melting through her lower torso she had never experienced before in her life. The man-beast’s cock stroked her like a fine paintbrush, filled her completely, massaging her soft, sensitive flesh with each thrust. At once vanishing and then driving at her again. The preternatural rhythm was driving her half-mad.
A wet, whimpering sound filled the empty warehouse. The beast-man leaned forward and seized Mayumi’s chin and pressed his mouth against hers.
One of the bikers shamelessly hurried around to get a better look.
Mayumi opened her mouth against his. His tongue and bodily fluids flowed in. The overpowering odor made her gag. The man-beast didn’t let up. His salivary glands must be as hopped up as his metabolism. His tongue swirled inside her mouth. A line of spittle trailed from her lips and across her cheek.
The gyrating motions shaking her from behind increased in speed and intensity. Mayumi screamed, the sounds forced out of her mouth by the burning pleasure.
The man-beast howled. He rammed himself home and poured his essence into her. The rest of the men moaned in a kind of sympathetic vibration.
The man-beast yanked himself free, a satisfied smile on the dumbly crazed countenance.
“Well?” the godfather said to the underboss.
“Soon.”
The eyes of the assembled men focused on Mayumi’s ass and the beast man. He lazily wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
“Nothing’s happening.” A growing edge of irritation punctuated the godfather’s statement.
“Another minute.” Sweat beaded on the underboss’s forehead.
The man-beast slowly came to his feet, pulled up his fly, and started toward the exit. The suit he’d come with chased after him.
“Hey.” He reached out to clap him on the shoulder. An odd sound rang out, followed by a hard thump and a spray of blood next to the godfather’s feet.
A man’s hand. The suit howled like a banshee. The shriek cut off like extinguishing a light. The suit crumpled to the floor, blood flowing from his wrist and neck. Next to him the man-beast raged, driven in some sort of avant-garde performance by his inner artistic demons.
Blood flew. Arms and feet slashed at the air. Not from any new victim, but erupting out of himself. The involuntary spasms of those in their death throes, known as St. Vitus’s dance or chorea, was known from time immemorial. But this was more a Danse Macabre.
Spraying blood from a thousand places, the man-beast charged amongst the dumbstruck humans. A frenzied swipe of a paw carved one biker’s face in half.
“Don’t shoot!” the godfather commanded his henchmen, even as they reached for their pieces. He grabbed the underboss by the collar and pushed him forward. “Hey! Want a piece of this? Come and get it!”
The head stuck out as if being thrust into the stock of a guillotine. Black lightning flashed through the air and ripped it off with no more difficulty than a freshly sharpened blade. The burly arm swept down at his head when the godfather jumped ten feet backwards with surprising nimbleness.
The man-beast reached his limit. A mist of blood enveloped his body. With one last cry, wheeling his arms and legs around, a moment later he collapsed to the ground, a bag of bones without a breath of life left in him.
The warehouse fell deathly silent.
“Looks like you were right, after all,” the godfather said to the now headless corpse of the underboss. He glanced at the man-beast and then Mayumi. “Fascinating. And this thing had the strength of a dozen tigers. What a prize you turned out to be.”
“So let’s hear about this information of yours.”
Setsura’s voice grew louder and then softer. Leaning against the post and rail fence, Azusa cast a dubious look at the young man in the swing. They were in a small park a block off of Shinjuku’s Kuyakusho Street.
It was built there eight years before as part of a “cultural” urban revitalization effort. Designating parks as a “culturally-enhanced environment” got people vested in the restoration and revitalization effort far more than their own homes.
That creating these tiny, child-friendly oases of green should have so accelerated the restoration effort in Demon City, of all places, made the powers that be shake their heads in wonder at the dreadful irony of it all.
Setsura had left his secretary at Mephisto Hospital and then led Azusa Sasaki here.
Mephisto was on rounds, so he’d left her in the care of an old warhorse of a nurse, who’d assured him that any of the doctors there could treat Mina’s hypnotic trance. She should already be on her way out of the city under heavy guard.
“You’re a strange one,” Azusa said with genuine surprise. “I get by picking up freelance writing and modeling jobs, like my brother. A guy with a face like yours, though, could be the prince of this city without lifting a finger. The competition’s a motley crew compared to you. Give the biggest actress a wink and a nod, and she’d be spilling the beans in a red-hot second. So what’s with this senbei shop business? And in a city like this?”
“Much appreciated,” Setsura said, flashing his white teeth at her from the swing. Azusa couldn’t help blushing like a schoolgirl. “No matter where you are, as long as it’s not a ghost town, people are bound to be there.”
Setsura’s countenance faded away and then swung closer again. The sound of children playing could be heard in the distance, singing the nursery rhyme about the “Red Dragonfly.”
“Men, women, old and young, as long as there are people, there will be happiness and sorrow, suffering and joy. Demon City can’t change that. Many people here have lost something very important to them. Or have come here to leave it behind. Many eventually return to where they came from. Occasionally they come back. Because we can’t truly leave anything behind. That’s where I come in.”
“Lost what? Important how?”
“Mostly what I look for is people.”
“You’re good at not making sense,” Azusa said, rubbing her brows. “Didn’t come here looking for a philosopher king. If you’re joking, sure don’t sound like it. Sitting there on that swing, I can’t tell if you’re up to something.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment too. However strange I am, I’m no more stranger than you. You don’t seem the slightest bit curious about what happened to your brother.”
“Knowing won’t change what happened. There’s plenty of action going on outside Shinjuku. No need for a blood 'n' guts war reporter to come here on purpose.”
“In that case, the sooner you leave the better.”
“You still don’t want to know what I know?”
“You leave, and I’ll be fine not knowing too.”
“What a nice guy,” she said with sardonic intent, though along with the gleam in her eyes as she looked at Setsura, it didn’t quite come out that way. “So I’ll give you this one on the house. It’s about that seal thing.”
Azusa gave Setsura an inquiring look. Setsura didn’t react in the slightest, only swung closer and then farther away. She couldn’t help noticing that although he did not appear to be exerting himself in the slightest, the swing of the pendulum didn’t change.
“And how did you get hold of this information?”
“My brother didn’t tell you? My boyfriend—not from around here—is a fellow in archeology at the National University Research Center. He ran across a report in a single volume in the archives that concerned you and yours.”
“News to me.”
“Not so much a report as a personal diary. At least that’s what scholars like to call it, or so says my boyfriend. Whose diary do you think?”
“Like I would know.”
“Guess. Here’s a hint: professor, physician, author, priest, businessman, baker, and stationery store owner are all wrong.”
“It’s getting late.”
“Okay, okay,” Azusa said in an irritated voice. “The answer is: midwife.”
“Now that you mention it, I was born at home, not in a hospital.”
“Yeah, you and Gento Roran both.”
“You don’t say.”
Like she was reciting poetry, Azusa said, “Setsura Aki was born on the thirteenth day of the month at three o’clock in the morning. Gento Roran was born the same year, the same month, the same day, exactly an hour later.” She looked intently at Setsura, a strange light radiating from her eyes. “And the same midwife.”
“That’s news to me too. And how did that person’s diary come to the attention of this boyfriend of yours?”
“There are businessmen who specialize in Demon City refuse. Seems that the book got thrown out with some old furniture and household goods during a year-end housecleaning. Along with everything else trucked out of Demon City, it ended up at the National University Research Center.”
“I’m familiar with the business. So what does it say?”
“As they say, everything has its price.”
“And I haven’t got the money.”
“You will do,” Azusa said in a sultry voice. “Never laid eyes on a man as fine as you. A date and we’ll call it even.”
“That’d be fine with me, but it’s not the sort of thing I would want to do.”
“Huh?”
“Oh, nothing. How about we go directly to the source and ask that boyfriend of yours? I’m sure he would stipulate an altogether different set of conditions.”
“Another brush-off, eh?” Azusa raised her hands in mock surrender. “Fine. You don’t want to swap for the mystery of the feud between you and the Roran clan?”
“I believe that’s what your brother was after. But why would anybody care?”
“Who wouldn’t? It’s part and parcel of what gave birth to this city in the first place. Why is all the evil in the world gathering here? What if the answer to that question explains what makes your two families tick as well?”
“I think you’re blowing this way out of proportion.”
“Then what’s your explanation?”
“I haven’t got a clue.” In response to Azusa’s pout, he said, “I’m not kidding. I bet Gento’s as much in the dark as I am.”
Azusa pouted some more.
“It’s true that our two families have been at loggerheads for a while now. But why and to what end, I can’t say.”
“And yet you keep on fighting in the dark.”
“I guess that’s what it’s come to.”
“What a joke. Give me a fucking break.”
“Let’s say I do. What do you think the purpose behind all this is?”
“You having me on?” The pout returned, her face reflected in his eyes. In a flash, her anger dissolved away like a sandcastle on the seashore. She said hastily, hiding her momentary loss of composure, “Yeah, it’s pretty obvious. A battle for hegemony of Shinjuku.”
She went on, “This city is a place that gathers evil in all its forms. Exploit it right and there’s big bucks to be made—by terrorist organizations, crime families, wizards and witches. The assassins for hire under every rock. The seminars for average citizens on the best ways to kill people. Of course the curriculum could be replicated outside of Shinjuku, but those genetic abilities amplified by the magical miasmas of Demon City are priceless. Imagine being able to wield such powers at will, being able to rule over the dark forces in the world—no general or warlock could stop you. It’d be the ruin of every secret society. This city is a cauldron stewing a witch’s brew. The only question is who will be the witch.”
“A fascinating question, to be sure,” came Setsura’s voice from above her, and then away from her. “I have given it some thought. At any rate, my father died without saying a thing about it. But there wouldn’t be much meaning to the fight otherwise. I’m sure Gento Roran feels the same way.”
The last line surely reflected Gento’s proposal in Shinjuku Gardens.
“Gento has been out of sight and mind for the past fifteen years. Where the hell’s he been all this time?”
“No idea. Except that he definitely wasn’t anywhere else but here.”
“I find it hard to believe he could be hiding here in Demon City all that time without you noticing once.”
“If that’s what he did, then that’s what makes him an even more formidable opponent.” Setsura thought for a moment. “But there’s still one thing I don’t get—how did this city come to exist anyhow?”
“The Devil Quake.”
“Yeah, but why did the Devil Quake occur?”
“There’s no point to that question. It’s been tying scientists and philosophers and theologians in knots ever since. A magnitude 8.5 megaquake that stopped right at the borders of the ward and didn’t even shake the coffee in a cup immediately outside it. Who could begin to comprehend that kind of supernatural phenomenon?”
“Comprehension and the fact that it happened are two different things. Let’s try this again. What caused the Devil Quake?”
“That I can answer, if you’ll settle for fairy tales,” Azusa said. Legends on the one hand and history on the other—any kid living in Shinjuku knew which one to believe when push came to shove.
She cleared her throat. “Almost ten years ago, a warlock by the name of Rebi barricaded himself inside his Shinjuku station sanctuary and attempted to sow seeds of evil throughout the world. He and his demon servants were destroyed by a young man. Before he perished, the warlock prophesied that the city would sink into darkness and the human race would know the meaning of its existence for the first time.”
“Hell, we’re happy when anything here turns out to have a meaning.” A rare look of consternation crossed the senbei shop owner’s face, at once close up, and then further away from her. “Let’s assume the Devil Quake was triggered with some ulterior motive in mind. Who caused it? Beyond causing the phenomenon itself, what intent was behind it?”
Azusa didn’t answer. Anybody who had anything to do with Shinjuku had pondered those questions at one time or another. And nobody had yet come up with an answer, or even a clue. What did Demon City Shinjuku mean?
“That’s all I know. Let’s hear what comes next.”
“Good idea.” Azusa straightened. “Let’s go then.”
“Where to?”
“Where else? The midwife’s place.”
“She’s still alive?”
“Hoh. Something Shinjuku’s best P.I. doesn’t know? As they say, it’s always darkest at the foot of the lighthouse.”
“Is that what they say?”
“Whatever. Come on.”
The comely doctor strode through the falling twilight, his shadow reaching out behind him.
Among the pedestrians sharing the dusky Okubo Avenue with him were a cyborg, metabolic stabilizers jutting out from its back—an addict strung out on LSD, each belch condensing into the form of a woman or some other related private body part and disappearing just as quickly—a brain-eating roundworm wrapped around the moth-eaten flesh of a sleepwalking zombie—
But all that strangeness yielded as if by natural law to the physician’s beauty.
It was a rare occasion in this city when beauty trumped the weird. For this was Mephisto. An exquisiteness that surpassed even Setsura’s threw off ripples like small waves that rose up and sank down in the gloom, painting his portrait against a melancholy landscape.
Except that his was an unusual state of mind for the otherwise cool-headed physician, the result of what he had heard and seen just twenty minutes before.
After making rounds that afternoon, he’d paid Mayumi a house call as scheduled. He was running a bit behind schedule. In this case, “a bit” became an eternity.
Armored cars of the Shinjuku police were parked in front of her house. Two dead bodies were being carried out on stretchers. He identified himself and pulled back the sheet. The woman’s dead face revealed the extent of the tragedy to him.
The cops filled him in on the details. The man and the woman were brutally slain, the young woman presumed to be the perpetrator was nowhere to be found.
Mephisto looked around the room. The day before, the mother and daughter had come to the old Shinjuku government office building where his hospital now stood. Up to that point, the daughter had killed three men, including her father.
The mother had confessed to having confidentially “dealt with” the bodies of the other two. Mephisto didn’t know whether that meant she’d buried them in an unmarked grave, or arranged with the medical examiner to make them disappear, and he didn’t much care.
Everyone who’d had sex with her had died. This wasn’t a one-off freak of nature, but the kind of phenomenon that got Mephisto’s medical juices flowing.
His examinations had yielded no useful data so far. The coroner’s report the wife had brought in said only that her husband had died of a coronary infarction. This struck him as a commonsensical conclusion as he had detected no abnormalities in the daughter either.
Except that with the death count up to three, plus the one dying the night before, it was hard to dismiss the connection. The detectives speculated that the daughter must have fled after killing her mother, who in turn had been driven mad by the man’s death.
He was about to leave when a call came in from headquarters that the night before, an eyewitness had observed a girl riding a folding scooter down Okubo Avenue getting nabbed by a biker gang.
This “eyewitness” report came from an information broker representing the eyewitness. The crime database at the police station had matched it to the description sent in by the cops on the scene.
The information broker would forward the reward money to the informant, and would make sure identities weren’t leaked. Even taking their cut, brokers promised generous payouts, guaranteed the veracity of the intel they provided, and were fully prepared to punish providers of phony leads.
For that reason alone, the police preferred working with the “professionals,” as opposed to civic-minded bystanders.
The detective went to interview the witness. Mephisto accompanied them. He listened to what the man had to say, but did nothing more. The strung-out vagrant couldn’t even recall with certainty the gang emblems and colors always emblazoned on the sides of their bikes.
The broker wasn’t any more help. “So a bunch of bikers showed up and you thought you could cash in, eh?” spat out the disgusted detective. “These penny-ante outfits got no quality control. The big boys never pull crap like this.”
So Mephisto ended up walking the dusky streets alone. He had to wonder about what had happened to her. But he also knew it was beyond his control. In Shinjuku, the time he spent worrying about one patient could be better used to save ten more.
He knew this plain as day, but couldn’t shake the image in his mind’s eye of the young and pretty girl sitting there in the chair, eyes cast down. He spied a dilapidated telephone booth out of the corner of his eye. There were other ways of gathering information that would reveal the gang’s true colors.
Mephisto didn’t stop. Sometimes when the wheel of fate turned, all a doctor could do was stay out of the way until it came to a rest. Besides, he had enough on his plate this evening already.