Chapter One
Chapter One
Tonbeau Nuvenberg clapped her hands together, hands like a pair of fat lotus flowers. “Are the preparations ready?”
“Yes,” the doll girl answered crisply.
She was in a corner of the forty-by-forty foot room, backing away from a rugged-looking cylinder studded with large rivets. A dynamo.
The brick walls were lined with shelves stacked with medicines and elixirs, guides to the earthly and transcendental realms, atlases of human physiology. Dried plants and roots dangled from the ceiling on cords, along with the antique lighting fixtures. From the lack of windows and the dank claustrophobic atmosphere, they must be in an underground vault.
In the center of the room was a rollaway table. A wooden box was on the table, the item that Mayor Kajiwara brought them.
Tonbeau had tried everything she could think of to break the seal. Now with the help of the doll girl, she was resorting to the last desperate measure she could think of.
Namely—
“Injecting the Akashic Records.”
She pulled down on the rusty lever rising out of the floor. The chains coiled beneath the lever were wrapped around that which her older sister, Galeen Nuvenberg, had sealed away.
Knowing there were no other means, she had swept aside her older sister’s magical wards in under an hour. An hour later she was getting ready the means to control the Akashic Records.
The generator gave off a low hum.
By “injection,” nothing in fact tied together the wooden box and the outside world. But two pairs of eyes—one filled with avarice, the other with reason—could feel the currents flowing toward the box.
“Do you know when to stop?” the doll girl asked.
“Well.”
“Are you intending to inject an infinite amount?”
“If that’s what it takes. That loathsome lid is gonna open sooner or later.”
“Jealousy and envy are at the root of your being.”
“Aw, shut it. Ah, the wind.”
The hair of both of them wafted backwards.
“A gentle breeze. A wonderful breeze. These are the currents of the universe.”
“The draft circling the repository of the transcript. How many others have felt its touch, I wonder?”
“What in the world?” The doll girl stared at Tonbeau.
“What are you looking at?”
“You have returned to your younger self. You were quite pretty.”
The ruddy cheeks of a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old girl reflected in her blue eyes. Her braided hair hung down to her waist. She was wearing a one-piece dress, pink flowers on white fabric.
“You’re turning into your raw materials too. Ah, don’t look down.”
The doll glanced down at her right hand. Seeing the bright red fluid circulating through glass tubes twined around brass bones, she gasped softly and closed her eyes.
“It seems that our bodies themselves are reading through the records of the past. Any number of wizards, warlocks and my big sister have done the same. The problem is the future.”
“The lid has never been removed in the past, then?”
“Only a very powerful sorcerer could have erected such powerful defenses.”
“With four thousand years of Chinese history at his disposal, Kikiou must have known of the Akashic Records and when they were made.”
“No.” The five-year-old child shook her head. “He wouldn’t have. Neither would have we.”
“When you talk like that, you remind me of my mistress.”
“Thank you,” she said with an unusual gravity. Tonbeau’s voice didn’t come from human vocal cords. It wasn’t even a “voice.” The body projecting it had lost its human form and turned into a lump of protoplasm. The doll girl herself had reverted to an unformed nothingness.
Despite having lost their forms and all their senses, together with this underground room, their individual existences still clearly remained. They had gone back to the beginning.
“I understand everything. Everything and all at once.” There was fear and trembling in the doll girl’s “voice.”
“You’ll forget it all soon enough,” Tonbeau answered her. “No one can bear the full knowledge of all there is. And so we make as much of life as we can. Now that we have arrived, expand your consciousness wider. See the future when that box is opened.”
“Yes.”
What had happened to these two? This was the result of injecting the Akashic Records. The energy spanning all dimensions in the universe stabilized its very structures, and thereby served as a record book upon which the entire history of creation was inscribed.
The entire history. The past and the future. Every and all possible futures. The lid of the box—that had not been opened in eons in this universe—had been opened in an infinite number of others.
Tonbeau Nuvenberg and the doll girl only had to pick one among those infinite others and apply it to the box in this one.
“I have found it.” The doll girl’s voice echoed from within the distant chaos. “I will now superimpose that reality.”
“Take care. Not even my big sister touched these mysteries. A most serious undertaking. Edgar Cayce read but a smattering, and only enough to heal the sick, and even those skills retrograded to the material levels of this world. Nevertheless, and because of that, he was able to completely fulfill his divine calling.”
“We can only pray that the same may be said of us.”
“Yeah. Pray on. No, let’s get it done!” Tonbeau’s “voice” filled with her customary arrogance.
“Here it comes!”
“Go for it!”
Within the shapeless nothingness, something was “chosen.”
And in that moment—
The song of a bird wafted through the window. The doctor in white looked down at Takako sleeping on the bed.
They were in a room in the Crystal Pavilion. He was lost in thought. Whatever would he do with this girl? Kikiou had told him to do nothing more in this world. That was all. Had he taken note of the changes occurring inside his own creation?
The pretend Mephisto had camped out at the Crystal Pavilion and there laid a trap for Setsura, which may have been why he returned to his old haunt. But what aroused his attention was that something within Doctor Mephisto, the intense desire to cure Takako.
With Takako there before him, Mephisto thought. His memories concerning her were implanted by Kikiou with precision.
As “Doctor Mephisto,” he was equipped with his thoughts and his medical knowledge. When poisoning Setsura, after all, there was the off chance that questions of medicine would occur, questions he should not be hard pressed to answer. His level of knowledge, in fact, equaled that of Kikiou.
“No,” the pretend Mephisto said, shaking his head. “The only treatment for these symptoms is to restore her other self. Doing that would be practically the same as making her a vampire again. But then again—”
As he quietly gazed down at her, a strange expression stole across his face, possessing a demonic air even.
“Setsura Aki exerted all his efforts to save this girl and died as a result. But did he really? Three hundred thousand degrees did not scald him. Perhaps administering an antidote might bring him back to life. That is something I can do.”
Aside from the excessive chattering to himself, this was exactly the line of thought that Doctor Mephisto’s mind would take.
“If Setsura were revived, he would escape with this girl. And all my efforts would be for naught.”
He laced his fingers together in front of his chest in obvious aggravation. Not the kind of thing the Demon Physician would ever do. Had Kikiou wanted the real Mephisto, he would have instilled in the copy those peculiarities of thought that identified the individual as a unique and moral agent.
As is, this Mephisto was limited in the extreme, showing those convincing characteristics only to Setsura. He felt the desire to monopolize Setsura. Anybody else who held similar thoughts must be expunged. That meant dealing with anybody attempting to establish any kind of relationship with Setsura.
The beautiful man glided up to Takako’s bedside, the gentleness gone from his features. The shadows from his five fingers fell onto her neck, across which crawled the pairs of teeth marks.
In a flash, the shadows grew darker and thicker, until they were overlaid by the fingers themselves.
“Wait,” came a sharp command.
The pretend Mephisto hesitated. The location of the speaker was difficult to identify at first. Then he looked directly above him.
There appeared the face of a young man. Then his shoulders, his chest, his long legs. He was wearing a dark gray three-piece suit. His leather shoes seemed attached to the ceiling. He hung there upside-down like a bat.
“You—are Yakou.”
The upside-down young man answered with two, three flaps of the wings folded across his back. “And you are a make-believe Mephisto.” The rush of wind wafted the white cape back. “Based on appearances only, the way you walk and talk, you could be his twin. But no. The real doctor would have spied my presence here from the start. Who made you?”
“Sir Kikiou,” pretend Mephisto answered at once. He assumed that Kikiou’s name would make Yakou think twice and retreat. He was wrong.
Yakou warmly smiled. “He makes you and you kill Kanan-san—two birds with one stone.”
“What?”
“Princess keeps that girl around to dangle under Setsura’s nose. And so you won’t be touching her, not while I’m around.”
“Bastard. Weren’t you thrown out of here?”
“I was certainly thrown for a loop. From a corner of that forest clear over those distant mountains. Sprained a wing, I think. But I made it back eventually. It’s just been one thing after another ever since I came here.”
The smile didn’t leave his face as a killer vibe welled up from below and pierced Yakou’s entire body.
“And here’s one more. Die in peace.”
He raised his right hand. A light flashed from the tips of his fingers and shot through Yakou’s throat. Yakou glanced down at the steel shaft of the scalpel.
“I was once known as the Elder’s grandson,” he said in a raspy voice. “If you were aware of that, you would have not even thought of killing me in such a fashion. Ah, it’s sad in a way. Make believe has its place, but not here. This is the way you throw a shuriken!”
The black streak parted the air. A white veil danced up in front of it. With a single sweep of his cape knocking the shuriken from its murderous trajectory, the pretend Mephisto leapt through the doorway and into the next room. Another jump and through that room and out the exit, landing a good ten feet from the door. A splendid physical feat, to say the least.
But he had a hand pressed against the left side of his neck. He staggered. A scarlet liquid welled up between his fingers and fell in bloody beads onto his cape.
“Once my shuriken strikes the target, it burrows in until it reaches the other side.”
The pretend Mephisto threw back his head. The shadow was perched on the roof of the Crystal Pavilion like the grim reaper.
“Doctor Mephisto would have done something about it already. But you obviously lack the means. Pray that at least after you die, you share the next world with the real Demon Physician.”
Yakou pushed out his hands in front of him. Before he could discern that this was not a shuriken-throwing motion, a streak of light reached out from Mephisto’s left hand. Halfway along the line tying the two together, it transformed into a bird of prey and launched itself at Yakou’s chest.
A strange sound from below brought that motion to a halt, the sound of a hole a foot in diameter opening in Mephisto’s white torso. Yakou batted aside the wire eagle and gazed down at the fallen Mephisto. He flapped the wings on his back and alit at his feet.
He stood there, hands on hips, and glared at him. “Can you hear me?”
The pretend Mephisto weakly opened his eyes. His life force was that remarkably strong.
“What I’d expect from any creation of Kikiou’s. Stubborn bastard. Before I go looking for everybody else, answer me this—where is Princess?”
Mephisto’s lips trembled. “I—do not—know—but—as for Setsura—”
“Hoh. Is he around here someplace?”
“Right—behind you—”
Yakou watched as his head fell back. He whirled around. The picturesquely handsome man stood in the doorway of the Crystal Pavilion. Even eyes accustomed to the sight of Doctor Mephisto’s beautiful mien in this warped world became the clouded crystallization of entranced midnight suns.