Chapter Three

Chapter Three

Takako’s eyes were vacant.

As if the blood of the other carried with it the soul of the other, this salacious branch that had made the hearts of women beat fast despite themselves aroused in her not the slightest reaction.

It came to Takako’s feet. The tapered end slipped inside the leg of her sweatpants and disappeared. The small lump traveled up her ankle, across her knee, and to her thighs. Imagining what awaited it at the end of its journey, this could only be the quiet prelude to a most savage scene.

Kuranishi gripped the bars of the cell. A small shiver traveled down Takako’s body. The twig had surely arrived at its destination. Kuranishi’s face was drenched with wretched anticipation. And soon turned to disappointed surprise.

Takako didn’t move at all.

“This is not possible—” moaned the madman. “Nothing exists on this planet that can consume my branches and continue on as if nothing were amiss. There is no way.”

The mad scientist was about to fall into despair when the expression changed on Takako’s face. In a twinkle, it had darkened with ecstasy. Either a credit to the wood or its creator. Soft pants—that would make man and woman alike grab themselves—issued from her pale lips.

“It’s working! Even the victim of a vampire cannot deny herself the pleasures of the flesh. The name of Dr. Kuranishi has never known failure! None shall ever exceed me!”

Evil and madness, fortune and insanity clouded his countenance. A flash of insight came with his next utterance.

“Chief among those instincts controlling the body and soul of a vampire is the lust for blood. The joys of my wood may exceed even that. Ah, a once in a lifetime opportunity to put the theory into action!”

He refocused his gaze from the moaning Takako to the reporter, still suffused with the reverberations of unsated desire. He beckoned to her.

“Wouldn’t you again like to drink from the well of bliss? As a woman? Come and love it, fully and deeply. Come.”

No matter how deranged and treacherous a criminal, his brilliance as a scientist was unquestioned. Hitomi had been eyeing the squirming Takako, gripped by envy and hatred. Now she came tottering to her feet. With uncertain sleepwalking steps, she approached the bars of the cell.

“Hold out your hands.”

She thrust out her arms between the bars. Ripe and womanly arms. Kuranishi pressed his lips to the inside of her wrist. With the echoes of the wood still resounding in her frame, she stiffened and groaned.

The old man’s tongue licked the young woman’s forearm, leaving behind a trail of slime as if from a large slug. He reached her elbow and continued back down a different path.

The lover’s caresses of this awful geezer brought tears to her eyes. And then a second later, a scream of pain. Bright red flowers blossomed on the floor as a trickle of blood ran down her arm.

The mad scientist had bitten her wrist down to the vein. Restraining the wailing girl with his hands and mouth, he shouted, “Blood! The fresh blood of a woman. The stuff of life.”

The side of his face was smeared with Hitomi’s blood, transforming the face of the madman into that of a beast.

More blood spilled from her trembling wrist, filling the room with the thick smell of salt and iron.

“Stop,” Hitomi said in a rational voice. The pain canceled out the lust and restored her to her normal self. “This woman was taken by a vampire. What do you think the odor of blood will do to her?”

“Relax. See for yourself. This parasite of the night has forgotten all about her quest for prey. The sexual impulse controls all others. I have done it. My wood wins over all others.”

He roared with laughter, rearing his head back and baring his Adam’s apple. Such an evil sound was rarely heard even in this accursed city.

But in the next breath he was quiet.

Kuranishi let go of Hitomi, lips and hands alike. Nevertheless, Hitomi did not retreat. Her arms resting on one of the horizontal bars of the cell, she twisted her body and looked back over her shoulder, her attention focused on a single point.

Kuranishi did the same.

Takako stood with her back against the wall, her face like white wax. The moment before she had appeared entranced, her features like a fog. Then before their eyes, a completely different expression welled up.

A hunger like that of a starving man at a buffet.

“This is not possible—” The old scientist coughed out the same words he had spoken before. “It is not possible. My wood would never surrender to the impulses of a vampire. It is simply impossible.”

What he did next was something only a man touched by madness would do. A sane man would take to his heels and run. But Kuranishi did not flee. A normal person would have taken steps to keep Takako locked up in the cell. Kuranishi reached into his pocket and took out a metal card and inserted it into the key slot.

The lock unlatched. The insane criminal pushed open the door and stepped inside.

“This girl has merely been bitten by a vampire and she makes a fool of me and my work? Like hell. You will show me the fruits of my labor. Weep for me. Wipe that haughty look off your face.”

Whether Takako heard him or not, she slowly walked forward, making Hitomi shriek. Covering the wound with her handkerchief, she sidled toward the open cell door. She was clearly the person Takako was aiming at.

Takako’s eyes smoldered and glowed red. Hitomi froze in her tracks. As if savoring her fear, Takako reached out with both hands as she came closer, like a zombie out for a leisurely stroll.

“Blood—”

Takako’s lips parted, revealing her white fangs. Hitomi couldn’t shut her eyes. Just as Takako’s hands reached for her throat, from the side Kuranishi seized her wrist with what was for him a surprising amount of force.

“She is not meant for you. You are meant for me,” he said, dragging her toward the door of the cell.

Takako cast at him little more than a dismissive glance. The ghostly fire in her eyes froze the mad scientist where he stood.

“Insolent man,” she said, her voice like a rumble from the earth, and waved her hand as if flicking away a fly.

Kuranishi flew away from her, striking the side of the cell so hard the iron bars sank into his back. He hung there momentarily two feet above the ground. The bars rattled. Kuranishi dropped to the floor with a thud. That he sprang to his feet at once was sure evidence that he had applied his science to his own body as well.

“Demon bitch! I won’t let you get away with this!”

With an enraged glare in his eyes that spoke no surrender, he darted to the paralyzed Hitomi and grabbed her by the hand and ducked out the door.

“Ah, that must sting. Your prey is mine now. If you want her, try and take her away from me.”

Rising to the challenge, Takako gripped the bars with both hands. “Blood—”

The steel in her deranged voice resonated with the iron of the bars. The bars and frame ripped free of the concrete. The bolts spun through the air, one grazing Hitomi’s cheek. Chunks of the stressed concrete ceiling rained down.

Takako appeared through this brutal torrent of white. The madman’s body shook with delight. “Unbelievable! No matter how immortal the Toyama bastards might be, here is a vampire who hasn’t completely turned, and her power puts them to shame! Tell me, Miss, who is your sire?”

Her answer was a bounding leap—not at Hitomi—but at Kuranishi.

It wasn’t a lust for blood, but retaliation against anyone who dared interfere with her quest for prey. Considering that the mad doctor’s tree branch was still at work inside her, this behavior was unusual in the extreme.

Princess’s blood demanded it.

Kuranishi dodged the sweeping, roundhouse blow, but not before the lightning-fast strike tore his lab coat and shirt asunder.

Beneath the fabric, the old man’s flesh gleamed dark gray. His body was studded with metal parts. From his steel-encrusted ribs came the faint whirring of gears and motors. The old man’s surgical skills had produced vintage work. He touched his right side.

“You broke a bolt in one of my hydraulic pistons. But no matter. A woman has challenged the product of my research. Bring it on. Let me introduce you to your true opponent.”

Meanwhile, Hitomi scurried to the door behind her unnoticed.

Takako didn’t need an invitation. Her eyes glittered with demonic malice and she pressed forward with her attack. Her hands had already seized his flesh. Her fingers pulsed torturously against his chest.

Kuranishi backed to the inner door. He pressed a switch on the wall. The sound of the taiko drum grew louder. The door opened slowly to reveal a room filled with white light.

From within that light came vaguely human shapes, wavering to and fro and up and down. With a whoosh, a rain of tapered rods of wood poured through the shower of light. In the next second, the thousands of them painted the inside of the door black.

The custom of using plants to symbolize the pleasures of sex was still found in parts of Africa and India. But even its practitioners were not likely to expect the “symbol” to behave like the real thing.

To say nothing of the wood that—burrowing its own way in—could well result in the victim dying not in pain, but from pleasure.

Kuranishi’s mad mind had come up with such a thing. His intent had been to scatter them about Shinjuku—for no particular reason. If compelled to come up with one, then to drive the women crazy and the men into the depths of despondency. And the results of that was something Kuranishi had given no thought to at all.

The beats of the drum grew more and more agitated.

Half-hidden behind the door opposite, Hitomi screamed. White fruits were attached to the attacking branches. They swayed back and forth, each of them a skull. Along with the branches protruding from the mouth and eye sockets came the dry sound of hollow laughter.

“Get her!” Kuranishi shouted. “Her face and heart and sex—stab her through and through.”

Takako’s fingers closed around his windpipe, digging into the skin and muscle and cartilage. Blood spurted out. Takako pressed her lips to his spasming throat and drank.

In the next instant, she coughed and jerked her head away and vomited the blood onto the floor.

Excepting its color and principal components, Kuranishi’s blood was nothing like that of a normal human being. Oil and nourishment to sustain and supply his artificial heart and mechanical organs.

And obviously not agreeable with Takako’s palate.

But her fury was not his friend. The poisonous blood streaming from his neck, with one hand Takako tossed him at the advancing branches. Black wooden tips burst from the front of his white lab coat, from his stomach—a scene that was strangely arousing.

The drumming abruptly ceased, as if the one making the wood dance had become aware of his partner’s death.

The branches wormed their way though Kuranishi’s body, rending it apart. A long minute later, a smaller body appeared inside it—no more than a yard tall—carrying a cruel face atop its diminutive frame. The full lips in the middle of the black skin parted to reveal pure white teeth. He was wearing cutoff jeans. Hanging on his bare chest was a drum the size of a newborn child.

He fixed his narrow eyes on Takako as might an eagle focusing on a rabbit. He said, “You killed.” The statement was suffused with an emotion that masked the broken Japanese. “This man. My benefactor. He understood my drum. I swear. No matter how long. I will revenge.”

The next words seemed to change into music. A rhythmical sound came from the man’s chest. The branches rustled.

Hitomi felt the cold tendrils of a brand-new dread. The man who said to protect her was probably now sleeping peacefully in her home. The night would soon come again. The vampire sought out its servant and prey. It was said that no hiding place would frustrate the sire. She had to protect her until then.

That was the thought that stopped her from abandoning Takako’s frightening presence.

Hitomi ran up to her—standing ramrod straight—and wrapped her arms around her from the back. “We’ve got to get out of here!”

They made quickly for the door. The sound of the drum trailed behind them.

“I will not—kill you. Now,” said the little black man. “But. You cannot escape. Flee in fear. You will never—sleep well. This city—my allies—will track you down. Avenge and revenge. My revenge—never—slackens.”

“Hurry!”

Hitomi pulled Takako through the door and down the white hallway. The entranceway must be somewhere ahead of them. In the back of her mind, she was already working on the outlines of an article about the victim of a vampire, Doctor Kuranishi, and his strange and warped creations.