Maohden Vol. 1 (3 page)

The bear howled. A shower of blood spurted from around the claws pressed against the miraculously-severed stump. The beast reared back. Changes arose in the outlines of its huge frame.

The fur grew lighter in color, shortened. The body shrank as well, turning into a different living thing.

“Son of a
bitch
!”

A shout mingled with pain and articulated after a very
human
fashion. The speaker launched a backhand blow at the young man with the hand covering the wound. It never connected. The arm from the elbow down tumbled through the air.

Ducking the arcing splash of blood, the young man knelt down next to the girl. She was lying on her back and gasping for breath. He’d pulled the red dress over her shoulders when a crash rang out behind him.

The bear toppled over in the
genkan
. The impact was much lighter than expected.

The young man picked up the girl and was getting to his feet when he reached out with his left hand and caught something falling through the air. The bear’s hand—though this was clearly a human forearm.

Drained of blood, it turned as gray as the concrete of the
genkan
. The young man tossed it aside. It landed in a big trash can in the corner of the room. It’d give the janitor a start to be sure, but refuse was refuse.

With even strides, he stepped down into the
genkan
. The bear paw sticking to the wall revealed its true form and dropped to the concrete floor.

“If you would excuse me,” he said, nudging aside the obstructing body in front of him with the tip of his boot.

The bear was gone. Lying in the round pool of blood was a small, thin man in his late thirties or early forties. The owner of the hostess club and boss of the Terumoto Gang, Ryo Terumoto. The ashen face suggested there was little chance of keeping the Grim Reaper at bay.

He lifted his head. His bloodshot eyes—the only part of him that retained any vestiges of the bear—shot a piercing glare through the younger man’s back.

“
Bastard—wait—
” A barely human voice suffused with bitter maledictions. “Too bad for you—I injected her with so much aphrodisiac—right where it counts—
heh
—no treatment can keep up with it—
heh
—didn’t know she had a man waiting out there—she’s dead to that world—a creature of this city now—”

The young man didn’t move for a minute or two, digesting what Terumoto was saying. Contemplating this final retribution, his face twisted into a wicked smile of death.

Like stop motion, the smile froze on his face. The young man looked back at him. Nothing about his countenance had changed in the slightest. Nevertheless, Terumoto’s consciousness, already starved of blood, awoke to a new sense of fear, his terrorized instincts confirming the impossible turn of events in front of him.

This
was a different person.

“Too bad, then, that you have met
me
,” the young man said, the warmth of his voice alone growing icy cool. A
me
that was not
him
. “Death from blood loss would at least be a peaceful one. But you should leave this world with a clear view of hell.”

Before he’d finished speaking, the air hummed. Before the air stopped humming, the armless Terumoto’s body jumped up. Having already lost half of their functioning in the drowsy prelude to death, the nerves of the naked body lit up with a charge of pain like nothing in this world.

Being driven mad by the pain was reward enough. That in fact was what happened—he was sucked into the whirlpool of chaos—and a moment later the pain itself had restored him to “normal.”

The young man paused to gaze grimly upon the gangster, writhing wordlessly, weeping from the unending agony, and opened the door. The underlings from before were below him, still bound hand and foot. He said, “You are in my way.”

Whatever they saw, the sight erased the pain and stiffened their expressions in fear. One by one, those heads rolled onto the floor, throwing off pinwheels of blood.

The fountains streaked through the air, painting the floor and the walls. The blue air was filled with the golden dusk. The only sound amidst the quiet carnage came from that beautiful genie’s footsteps.

The footsteps stopped halfway down the flight of stairs. A woman clung to the wall like a pretty moth seeking the flame.

Noriko gasped, “You—you—pulled off—something like this—without a scratch—I felt it like—unbelievable—I—
ahhh—
” Her hands reached up her skirt, caressing herself with ecstatic gyrations, getting herself off on the death and blood and beauty.

Strange but true, a girl in her profession who didn’t trip out on blood and beauty in this city was the oddity. The young man continued on down the stairs without sparing her a second glance.

“Hey—you—” Noriko called out. Absorbed in her self-gratification, the pleasure flowing forth from her dripping fingertips, the sensations amplified all the more by the appalling scene surrounding her, her voice took on a heightened timbre. “You’re just gonna leave like this? For the love of God, kill me—like them—when I can feel it like this—and die like that—
ahh—
”

He reached the landing and started toward the back entrance. Behind him, the crimson fountains collapsed into streams and flowed down the stairs. If nothing else, the blood of the gangsters was beautiful.

With this accursed and bewitching scene as the backdrop, the man in black strolled indifferently into the sunset.

“Wait—wait—please—” Arching her back as her self-ministrations continued unabated, Noriko cried out in a strained voice, “Please—tell me—your name.”

The light streaming in through the door cast his long shadow on the floor. It was like the answer welled up out of it.

“Setsura Aki.”

One particular group of tall buildings in Shinjuku had taken on a strange and abominable existence. This still-standing grove of skyscrapers was most famously identified by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Complex.

Right now was the
O-magatoki
, that bewitched time of the day that lasted from four o’clock to five-thirty in the afternoon. The shadows of the skyscrapers reached all the further and fell on the earth.

As a case in point, behind the Shinjuku NS building was the three and a half acre site of the former Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building, soaring forty-eight stories into the sky. Its shadow fell across Chuo Park to the west and reached halfway across the Yonchome block in West Shinjuku.

The sun setting in the west threw shadows across buildings further to the west—impossible anywhere but here.

The air was thick with sprites and miasmas playing practical jokes on Mother Nature, altogether befitting to the Shinjuku dusk. If they could do that, what else might they have up their sleeves?

This was the time of day when pedestrians quickened their pace. Here and there came the sound of shutters closing and doors locking. The old and established shops run by grumpy and stubborn old men were no exception.

Panicked shouts rent the air, probably sightseers who hadn’t bothered to read the fine print in the Shinjuku Tourist Association’s indemnity clause. Now they had no choice at this point but to fork over a chunk of money and seek refuge in the closest shop or home—with only five minutes or so to conclude negotiations.

Any longer and they’d stand a good chance of being robbed blind or else suffer a worse fate.

The hems of his black slicker fluttering in the wind, Setsura Aki got home exactly three minutes after every other house in the neighborhood had battened down the hatches. The marquee on which the name of the establishment was written in the old cursive kanji style—
Aki Senbei
—shook as he brought down the shutters with a bang.

In a corner of Yonchome in West Shinjuku, Mina Chiaki, the secretary for the Aki Detective Agency, said with a smile, “Nick of time. Though I suppose you would have been fine even if you didn’t race home in time. There’s always a room for you at the Hilton, double bed.”

“Hard to believe such a pretty face can say such things,” Setsura said, lightly rubbing his hands together.

Around twenty, as capable as she was shapely (which was to say, very), she’d hit him with her stinging rejoinders a mere two hours after he hired her. The patter hadn’t abated since.

“How many do you think will buy it today?”

Avoiding the pointed look directed at him, Setsura brought his face up to the peephole and opened the iris. Somewhere in the house, the HVAC system kicked on.

“Well, looks like two are going down outside the White Tiger Sushi Emporium. Seems the owner’s going to take pity on them, but only because he’s a greedy SOB. If they’re lucky, he’ll settle for what’s in their wallets.”

Checking to make sure the bald man had dragged the two sightseers inside the shop, Setsura snapped the fisheye lens closed.

The temperature inside the house was maintained at sixty-five degrees. But outside, in the shadow of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Complex, the temperature could be expected to plunge to zero and colder.

From four o’clock in the afternoon to five-thirty, the long shadows of the buildings fell on Setsura’s house and the rest of the neighborhood. In the span of five minutes, the temperature sank to ten below.

When the morning broke, the same thing happened in the blocks opposite. This was no explicable weather pattern, but (it was theorized) a chemical change wrought in the air by a species of ghostly miasma that lingered there in the city center.

In any case, during those hours of the day where the shadows fell, the man-eating dogs and carnivorous rats kept their distance as well. The mortality rate had been kept to zero for the past several years. Those who did freeze to death were already suffering from some unknown debilitating condition unrelated to the temperature of the air.

Get caught for five minutes in the shadows and a man could be revived; ten minutes and it’d take a good six months of rehabilitation; twenty minutes and the mental and physical scars from frostbite were permanent; thirty minutes and the odds of recovery were slim to none.

This strange phenomenon, confined to this part of Shinjuku, was known as the “Government Freezer.”

“How did work go?” Mina asked in a singsong voice.

Mina had the kind of finely-formed features that would make any man or woman take a second and a third look, easily mistaken for those belonging to the top fashion models. And yet in terms of simple aesthetics, it did not best those of her employer.

“It went,” Setsura said with a nod. “I just came from the hospital. A nasty yakuza injected this girl with an aphrodisiac. It’s going to take some serious treatment to overcome. A bunch of chelation treatments and she should be able to resume a normal life.”

“You mean you took her to see Doctor Mephisto?”

“The same.”

A flicker of concern showed on Mina’s Noh mask of a face. Only Setsura and their close friends could grasp the ominous nature of such a reaction. The smile on her employer’s face suggested he was amused by this reaction. He turned to a glass case on his left and opened the top.

“No eating the merchandise,” she said, her hand reaching to his mouth.

He bit into the hard-baked, five-inch wafer with a dry, crunching sound.

“No problem. I’ll pay up. That’d be, uh—”

The price tag on the case said “Eighty yen each.” The calligraphy used on the tag had a magical quality that drew the attention of customers who cared little for the art.

He took silver and copper coins from a black leather coin purse and tossed them into the register behind the display case.

The fifteen foot by fifteen foot shop interior housed two rows of glass cases, each sectioned into thirds, and four glass jars on the shelves behind them. Including the cash register and checkout counter, there wasn’t much room left to maneuver.

Considering the “work” he’d just been up to, it was almost unimaginable that he’d come home to a little place like this. And yet this was one of Shinjuku’s venerable old shops.

It wasn’t listed in the visitor’s brochures distributed by the ward government or in handbooks published outside the ward, such as the
Shinjuku Tourist Guide
and
Shinjuku Register of Historical Places
. Nevertheless, they had a solid base of customers who appreciated the taste of homemade
senbei
.

The shop had been established on the fourteenth of September, the day after the Devil Quake. This was its fifteenth year. That made it the oldest shop in Demon City. But including the time it’d been in business before the Devil Quake, the total came to a century and a half.

“Any new jobs?” Setsura asked, crunching on the
senbei
as he stepped up from the shop to a small, six-tatami mat room.

“None presently,” said Mina. She raised the small, Japanese-style teapot and filled a cup with a pale green stream.

She’d just brewed it in the kitchen nook off to the left. There was, to be sure, the standard electric teapot. But the young proprietor would only drink fresh-brewed tea made the old-fashioned way, and the cool young secretary didn’t complain. It was all about harmony in the workplace.