Chapter One
Chapter One
Strange things were afoot that night at Mephisto Hospital. Doctor Mephisto appeared for evening rounds. Nothing strange about that. The hospital director was wont to show up in a hospital room at all hours of the day or night without warning, and after inquiring about the patient’s physical and mental condition, leave as stealthily as he had arrived.
In the majority of cases, he didn’t even bother with an examination or prescribe any drugs. He rarely sat around and chatted. There were plenty of other doctors and nurses who could fill that function. Simply opening the door and glancing at the patient was often enough.
The unmistakable power of that compelling countenance was well known. The faith that came from simply being in his presence—the faith that he was the Doctor Mephisto—out of this profound sense of relief was born miracles.
Four years before, the chief of the United Nations Medical Service, Professor Herman Bachuras, had examined a Hollywood actress admitted the same day. He confirmed that she was being consumed by end-stage cancerous tumors in the shapes of human faces. It was all Professor Bachuras could do to keep his wits about him.
Not only was this famous actress covered with the tumors from head to toe, but her internal organs displayed the same characteristics. The carbuncles showed the faces of men and women alike, one crying, another laughing, others deriding the professor and the other doctors.
Afterwards, he wrote the following in the case notes:
The chorus of these strange tumors—weeping, smiling, deriding, lecturing, and thousands more mixed in with them—was enough to drown out a volcanic eruption and shake the earth with its bootless cries. This woman, praised as one of the most beautiful women on earth, had the unsightly population of a psychiatric hospital arrayed across her flesh.
That alone would be enough to drive the sanest man mad, but their voices as well resonated from her body. Not to mention that they nested like vermin among this angel’s internal organs.
What held me back from the edge of madness were her eyes, clinging to me as if to a lifeline. There alone those demons did not dwell. In the face of the pure spirit of this heartrending young star—who could not release her own grasp on sanity but only plead for an impossible cure—I was tempted to flee to the safe embrace of madness. The one thing I could not do.
If the means eluded me and time became only a constant reminder of my powerlessness and failure, I had no choice but to continue to watch over her. The doctor’s duty is not only to the patient’s body, but also to her soul.
And then the miracle walked through the door.
The nurse said that the hospital director was coming, so I told the patient I would be right back and headed to the door. He was standing there. Doctor Mephisto held out his hand. I can’t actually recall if I shook it, only introducing myself.
The director was exceedingly handsome. I don’t know of better words to describe him, except that whatever those words might be, they surely couldn’t be applied to any other person—or thing.
Even what happened after this was like a summer squall compared to the hurricane of emotions I felt. No other phenomenon comes close. As I was interested in getting a second opinion on my patient’s condition, I stepped aside and allowed the director to examine her.
Professor Patricia Mayhew, the doctor who was with me, exclaimed in a startled voice, drawing my attention back to the bed. I witnessed it with my own two eyes. I would wager my social standing and pride as a doctor on what I saw next.
The tumors were shrinking. Each one—with a rather disgusting, intoxicated expression frozen on its “face”—shrank and finally disappeared, melting into her skin. The last one was gone at 11:38:20 in the morning. Exactly two minutes had passed since Professor Mayhew first drew my attention to it.
She stood there dumbstruck, as did I. Only the nurses and hospital director retained their composure. The patient was crying tears of joy. God had performed a miracle. That’s what I believed. I had seen a bona fide miracle. But I also knew who had brought it about and how.
Doctor Mephisto and that breathtaking countenance. This is what real beauty could do. Nothing and no one else would ever be equally deserving of the word—miraculous.
Mephisto had rounds that evening as well.
Like a ship passing in the night, after a glimpse of his unworldly visage, he left them with a smile. The perplexed patients watched him leave. But were their eyes not so much filled with an abiding faith as colored by fear?
One of them spoke to the nurse who’d accompanied him. He should have been sound asleep. With wide eyes he said, “He’s scary—the doctor tonight—so scary—”
The nurse nodded. “Yes—he is—I feel it too—”
It was close to midnight when Mephisto contacted the head nurse at the surgical nurse’s station.
“This is Mephisto,” said the voice over the intercom. Everybody at the nurse’s station froze in place. “I’ll be leaving for now. We’re running short of raw materials for the pharmaceuticals. Have any visitors call tomorrow.”
“I understand, sir.” It was hardly unusual for the hospital director to receive visitors at all hours of the day and night. “However—” Her words stuck in her throat. The smiling nurses all paled a little. Questioning the director’s directions was simply not done. “However, the raw materials for the medicinal compounds are kept in the Resurrection Room.”
“And we are running short of them. Well then, I shall leave the rest in your capable hands.”
“Yes.”
He hung up. The head nurse went to switch off the intercom. The switch was hard to the touch and stiff. It didn’t want to move. She pushed on it in a daze, praying that the expression on her face did not betray her state of mind.
It clicked off. A wave of relief washed through the nurse’s station, followed by light laughter.
Nobody talked about the director. Not intentionally. Their brain cells simply let the subject go.
The head nurse had the sudden impulse to offer up her prayers at the chapel that was surely in the hospital somewhere.
The citizens of the city hadn’t decided whether night or day was more suited to the owner of the senbei shop in West Shinjuku.
A splash of sunlight or a sea of moonlight—both made for a fine fit.
But there was no argument when it came to Doctor Mephisto. For this person, it was all night. The dead of night.
His pure white cape—that all but dissolved in sunlight—breathed in the moonlight and flung it back in dazzling blue shards that sparkled and metamorphosed and drifted on the night breeze.
Even his shadow on the asphalt was beautiful.
He stopped in his tracks and looked up at the windows of a building. A spot of loathing glowed on the dark and vacant outlines of the tenth floor. The gaze of a fallen woman who loved only him. The woman who had known beauty flew from the roof.
At the very least, revenging all that loathing and love on the street in front of him.
It happened in the Wakamatsu District.
Here on a street corner in the Wakamatsu District, visitors from far away were greeted by the sounds of the season. The festival orchestra played and the people bustled about.
While Shinjuku had its own share of citywide festivals and anniversaries, the residents in their individual districts chose the nights for their own unique functions and events.
One was Wakamatsu’s “Midnight Festival.” And that was where Doctor Mephisto was headed. But what was the fearsome Mephisto after?
From behind him came the sound of an engine. A two-ton truck passed by him just skirting the speed limit. The bed was covered with a tarp. What drew Mephisto’s eyes to it was a small voice in the sky above some distance away. A bird’s call, it sounded like.
Two blocks on, the truck’s rear blinker signaled a left turn. The white-clad doctor mused to himself, “A truck chased by a big raven. What manner of poet must they be bearing?”
Three minutes later, the truck slipped into a parking garage adjacent to an abandoned apartment complex. It stopped, and a black man wearing a windbreaker jumped down from the bed. He nodded to the driver coming out of the cab and scanned their immediate environment.
“Place looks secure, Lieutenant,” he said.
With a faint mechanical sound, a silver pod appeared from beneath the tarp. It slanted downward and steadied itself eighteen inches or so above the ground. This was the “handheld armored personnel carrier.”
The hideout for these three members of Special Forces Operational Detachment F was located within shouting distance of the ward government buildings and Mephisto Hospital.
Matthews said from inside the pod, “Get the casket out of the back.” Despite the gravity of his injuries, he spoke in normal tones. “Take it to the back corner on the right. I don’t think it’ll be necessary, but things could get dicey. Better have incendiaries handy.”
“Yes, sir,” said Meighan, at the back of the truck.
Kazikli Bey’s casket emerged from beneath the tarp. Guided by the blaze from the rockets, it was secured in a dim corner of the structure.
“Good,” said the pod. “Now comes the waiting.”
“But is the head honcho of these vampires going to show up?” asked Cardinal, sweeping their surroundings with a cell phone-sized 3D radar. “It’s going to take a while for news of our little heist to get out.”
“You two apparently were in on the briefing, but this guy’s a bigger bigshot than you can imagine. Not one of the run-of-the-mill vampires. A huge source of power. They will definitely come to save him. Vampires are very sensitive about anything bad happening to one of their kind.”
“If they even know what’s happening to one of their kind.”
“Shall we clue them in?”
“Eh?”
A beam of blue light erupted from the front of the pod. The stream of plasma from the particle beam weapon—that could perforate high-tensile steel—melted the ground and walls and wrapped the casket in a bright glare of light, turning night into day.
The darkness inexplicably deepened. The hot air shimmered like a mirage. And inside the mirage, the casket hovered like a phantom. Meighan looked on dubiously. It wasn’t that he expected the particle beam weapon to fail—destroying the casket here and now wasn’t what Matthews was after.
“Are you awake in there, General?” the pod asked in Romanian.
To Meighan, who’d been in covert ops in Bucharest, the lieutenant’s command of the language was halting but comprehensible.
The casket answered. Meighan felt a shock run through him. The voice seemed to erupt out of the ground in a low, long rumble. But it was definitely from the casket.
“I am awake. Ever since that damnable sun set.”
“Do you want to get out of there?”
“I have given thought to what would happen in that case. Hoh—so your men do not share the same loyalties as Setsura Aki? A man who can speak the language of my country.”
“That is true. Our interests are national in orientation.”
“Hoh, national interests,” the voice from the casket responded scornfully.
A floating pod and a casket conversing with each other in a dark parking garage—exactly the kind of scene expected from Demon City.
“And why are you here?” the casket asked.
“I would like you to summon your master. I have a proposition to discuss.”
“My master?” The casket’s voice lowered half an octave.
“Yes. Very much a discussion worth your while. As a representative of my nation’s interests, I can promise you that it will prove in the interests of General Kazikli Bey as well.”
“My master?” came the question again.
“Yes. Whoever brought you out of the earth. The reason you have now made your presence known.”
“You ask after my master, but can you open this casket? I would like to see you remove Setsura Aki’s wires first.”
The pod fell silent. Not even the particle beam could sever them.
“You cannot? You cannot do even that, and yet you demand an audience with my master? Hoh! What a worthless era this is, that put such worthless human capital into circulation. Ha! Ha! Ha!”
The pod was stymied for an answer to such derision. The sound from inside the casket suddenly changed.
“What’s that? Are you being summoned?”
A hollow thump, and then the sound of fingernails scratching wood. Bey wasn’t alone in there. Matthews didn’t know who it was, except that the sound went on and on—
Scritch scritch scritch scritch scritch scritch scritch scritch scritch scritch scritch scritch scritch scritch scritch scritch scritch scritch—
The only change, the three outside the casket realized, was when the scratcher lost a nail. But like a dead man buried alive and coming to life in the grave, the assault on the inside of the casket continued.
Scritch scritch scritch scritch scritch scritch scritch scritch scritch scritch scritch scritch scritch scritch scritch scritch scritch scritch—
Who wanted out so badly? Who beckoned so relentlessly? Entranced by this entirely different kind of demonic compulsion, these soldiers of shock and awe found themselves unconsciously looking around the dark parking garage for its source.
“Lieutenant!” barked out Cardinal.
“What?”
“Somebody—no, something—is approaching from the west.”
Cardinal stared at the compact radar scanner strapped to his wrist. Along with the standard timers, GPS and map displays, it contained a laser communicator, air pressure indicator, and weapons rangefinder.
“Definitely,” responded the pod, which must’ve been similarly equipped. The Cardinal and Meighan turned toward the entrance to the parking garage.
“Distance: eighty. Coming straight at us. I don’t detect any body armor. That’s a shitload of confidence. The master?”
The only response from the casket was: Scritch scritch scritch scritch scritch scritch scritch scritch scritch scritch scritch scritch scritch scritch scritch scritch scritch scritch—
“Meighan, Cardinal. Take cover. Get ready to take independent action. But don’t shoot until I give the word.”
“Yes, sir.”
The two silhouettes split to the right and left and melted into the darkness.
“Fifty—four-five—coming in fast.”
The caw of a crow came from the high night sky.
As if in personal defiance of these terrors of the night, as this visitor from parts unknown set down on the quadrangle in front of it, the front of the pod glowed with a blue light.