Maohden Vol. 1 (6 page)

The taxi descended Meiji Avenue and turned left onto Yasukuni Avenue. The look of the city suddenly changed. The blocks leveled during the Devil Quake back in the 1980s had since gone through cycles of rebuilding and setbacks while the real estate brokers played a game of musical chairs. The look of the city here bore no resemblance to what had been there before the tragedy.

From the intersection with Meiji Avenue to where it collided with the elevated Yamanote line, the street lined with such grand structures as the Isetan Shinjuku Annex, Isetan Hall, Shinjuku Shochiku, and Shinjuku Ad Hoc was jammed with long and narrow three-story buildings, crowded with shops stocked with questionable and hazardous wares. Nothing to match the grandeur of Shinjuku Avenue.

The high-volume arms dealers were wont to frequent the weekly Hanazono Shrine discount bazaar. The storefronts were packed with the grotesque and magical goods peculiar to Demon City.

Body snatching parasites with five times the efficacy of potency of human personality modification drugs. Resembling sea cucumbers or jellyfish daubed with nauseating hues, the created personality profiles lodged in their cells got injected into the brains of the hosts, turning a demure young lady into a professional sneak thief, or a scrawny teenager into a hardened street tough that’d put a mobster to shame.

They also sold souvenirs more to the liking of the sightseers. But most of those were available at the customs stations adjacent to the three gates that connected Shinjuku and the outside world. Items successfully smuggled through raised such hell that the authorities exercised all due precautions.

The unfortunate effects of Demon City weren’t limited to its citizens alone.

Take the pottery piled on tables in one of the shop fronts.

A crudely-shaped small black saucer, looking like it’d been fired by a rank amateur, went for a hundred thousand yen. A bit much, it might seem. But then, from that night hence, the purchaser would dream bad dreams, and forget all about them the next morning. By and by, they would sap his physical and mental strength, within a fortnight rendering him little more than a vegetable.

At that point, whoever discovered the saucer would find it stained blood red. Some unknown necromancer had literally baked the curse into the glaze of this “nightmare saucer.” Needless to say, those harboring criminal intent would find reasons to give someone this gift.

Take the dazzling array of flowers.

A rare species that certainly did not exist in the outside world. Its uses were as varied as its strange effects. Set out on the roof on a night when a brisk wind blew, the flowers’ petals unfurled in the glittering moonlight, scattering its scent on the wind. Then wait. Like moths drawn to the flame, men and women would clamber up to the room, hoping to seize a bouquet of those flowers swaying so gently in the breeze.

Hardly a concern, at least until they pitched from the building and toppled to the ground in perfect bliss. Heaven forefend that a ne’re-do-well might plant them in some less godforsaken place.

Perfectly legitimate items were sold as well.

Leveled in the Devil Quake, the mayor had turned Kikuicho into farmland yielding produce rich in minerals and proteins. Exports brought two billion yen a year into the ward, though what sold at ten thousand yen a pound yielded barely one percent of that inside Shinjuku itself.

Recent publications filled the stacks in secondhand bookshops, more often than not in the form of crudely-bound machine-made copies. Information didn’t care what medium it was printed on as long as it was there to be read.

Scholars with a keen knowledge of the handwriting of the great thinkers and scientists of the past would not believe their eyes, for there they would find preserved the soul and intellect of those great minds lost to history. These were the very writings those great men had once consigned to oblivion, and had gone to their graves assured that such accursed thoughts would never be read by future generations.

Books about sorcery and witchcraft; books about the
modus operandi
and true deeds of the criminal class; books spelling out their scorn and contempt for human intelligence and the future of the human species; books expressing skepticism about the fundamental basis of their own thoughts and philosophies.

Nobody ever knew from whence they sprang forth or into whose hands they fell, only that those who defined the world as it was presently known possessed minds given over to darkness.

But the sightseers who came to this city weren’t known for their interest in research monographs and prophetic scribblings. A handbook revealing the true face of the world was available in three volumes, fifty yen each. They sat there gathering dust on a grimy store shelf in Shinjuku.

The taxi passed beneath an elevated train track and onto Oume Road and stopped.

“This is as far as I go,” the cabbie said. “I’ll round it down to the nearest ten-yen.”

“You gotta be kidding me,” Sasaki grumbled. “It’s another quarter mile to the police station. I’ll round it up to the nearest hundred, so keep going.”

“Hey, don’t give me no lip about it. You don’t get out now, I’ll round it up to whatever you’ve got on you.
Capisce?
” The cabbie reached for the control panel on the seat console.

“Yeah, I got it,” Sasaki said, thumping his hands on his knees.

The air was hotter and more humid than downtown. The sultry air felt as if individual molecules of water were clinging to the skin and getting absorbed directly into the body. And in perverse exchange, the demonic miasmas welling up all around seemed to rob the soul of all ambition. Walking a dozen paces was enough to bring a strong man to his knees.

Sasaki raised his left hand to his eyes. The winding chain-link fence was over ten feet tall. Now and then blue-white sparks showered down. The five-hundred thousand volts of high-tension current had snatched a harmless gremlin out of the sky.

If a commando police patrol car hadn’t passed by, Sasaki might have collapsed after another twenty yards or so.

“What the hell you doing something like that for?” one of the cops sighed. “We’ve warned people so many damned times about walking here from the station, you’d think they’d get the message. But there’s still a couple every year.”

His partner added, “The miasma from the park blows through here the strongest. Don’t you listen to the news?”

Sasaki shook his head. The news updates at six in the morning, noon, six at night, and midnight broadcast DMZ miasma density eco-zone warnings to the general public on the public television screens. Though lately they had become more part of a general safety policy directed at tourists and visitors. The previous February, the “Third Mopping-Up Operation” had yielded great results.

Sasaki was treated in the infirmary of the Shinjuku police station. After some bed rest, he started feeling mostly normal again. The diagnostic machine next to his bed analyzed the symptoms when he was brought in and dispensed the proper amount of medicine. Sasaki mulled over the three white pills and pocketed them.

There wasn’t a doctor. He must be helping out at the affiliated hospital. Suspects were constantly being hauled down to the station. If they hadn’t already gotten roughed up pretty severely for “resisting,” interrogation was bound to leave many of the rest of them half dead.

Sasaki discharged himself from the infirmary, found an elevator, and pushed the button for the third underground level. The cops had confirmed his ID in the patrol car. After explaining what he was doing in Shinjuku, he was given an all-access badge.

The third underground level was lined with steel doors. Interrogation rooms. All of the doors were bent and dented, the marks left by criminals freaking out inside. In this city, there was no underestimating the kind of damage a roid rage could inflict on two-inch hardened steel.

Sasaki knocked on the door marked with the number seven. The fingerprint lock clicked and the eight-inch steel door silently slid open. The windowless, steel-lined, battle-hardened ten foot square room was designed to contain the worst effects of a suicide bomber.

The wall on the right held an intercom and switch panel. Facing the entrance was a wooden table and two chairs. The lights recessed into the ceiling filled the dreary space with cool light. The fair features of the young man standing behind the table cast off a cold fire all their own.

“Are—are you Setsura Aki?”

Sasaki’s voice rose half an octave. His blood pressure followed suit.
Keep your head in the game
, he remonstrated with himself.

This was probably the same young man who, on the corner in front of Mitsubishi Bank, had whispered in his ear that he could come to this room in the Shinjuku police station.

“I’m Sasaki, from
Historical World
. I apologize for taking you away from your regular business.”

He held out a business card. The young man took it, and motioned him to the remaining chair.

Sasaki had the uncomfortable sense of being under a microscope. Glancing at the young man’s face, he simply couldn’t get riled up about it. He knew he was staring at the smiling countenance beneath the wave of black hair, but had a hard time averting his eyes.

“I heard you ran into a bit of trouble getting here,” Setsura Aki said, the pleasant expression not fading from his face. “Get into the wrong taxi and you can end up in a world of hurt. In this city, you take your life in your hands just visiting the police station.”

“Don’t I know it,” Sasaki said. He restrained himself from adding a few choice words about that cabbie. The man had shown up to hear him out. The least he could do was buck it up.

“What little information I have says you’re a reporter for the
Historical World
,” Setsura said, glancing at the business card.

The statement was a tad anticlimactic.
Historical World
was a history periodical apparently as well-known inside Shinjuku as elsewhere. Nationwide, it had an audited circulation of five-hundred fifty thousand, leaving its competitors in the dust. That the subject of
history
could boast such a dependable audience spoke well of its enviable fan base.

“I’ll send you some back issues. But I am surprised.”

“What about?”

Eyes so deep they seemed portals to his very soul rested upon him. Sasaki shivered despite himself.

“The response to my letter said I was to take Shinjuku Avenue from the station straight towards Yotsuya. I didn’t imagine I’d end up meeting you in an interrogation room in the police station.”

“Did you say anything to the police?”

“Only that I was meeting you to get some material for a story.”

Setsura nodded, his eyes still fixed on Sasaki. “Fine with me. It’s as good an approach as any.”

“I wouldn’t have believed that’d ever pass muster. The biggest surprise of all. Walk into a police station in Demon City without any reason to be there, and walk out again with all your limbs intact. To tell the truth, this is exactly the kind of thing I’m looking to learn more about.”

He wasn’t kidding. The senses he’d honed during his twenty years in the business were kicking in. That sense of excitement, that flutter in the stomach—it was like watching the shell around the egg beginning to crack, the creature within poking out its beak, reaching out with its claws.

“As I explained in my letter, this is for our upcoming special edition issue.
Historical World
is taking a hard look at Demon City.”

Whatever reaction might have registered on the young man’s face, the answer he gave was totally disarming. “From the day Shinjuku became Demon City up to now, every medium of mass communication on the planet has taken a hard look at Demon City. Every last one of them amounted to nothing more than vulgar sensationalism. Though I suppose as long as that meets the needs of the masses, this city will simply remain as one more source of sordid entertainment.”

As a journalist, Sasaki wished to voice objections to this analysis. That human propensity to relegate objects of horror to a genre of entertainment must reach back into the mists of time.

Turning the horrors of Demon City into “special editions” and increasing circulation many fold wasn’t done to panic the population, but because the readers really were fascinated by headline articles such as:

“Demon City’s Tragic Year”

“True Crimes Attributable to Shinjuku’s Devil Quake”

“The Witches and Warlocks of Shinjuku”

“Who’s Behind Those Unsolved Murders”

“Shinjuku’s DMZ: Then and Now”

As if responding to the need from outside the ward to produce greater and greater thrills, Shinjuku seemed to sink deeper and deeper into its accursed swamp.

Several years before, Shinjuku had seen an influx of forty-five thousand members of the criminal classes, approximately equal to the lives lost in the Devil Quake. That number had by now risen to at least sixty thousand.

Versus “regular” citizens sixty thousand strong. One out of every two was on the wrong side of the law somewhere. It was unlikely that such ratios could be found in any “uncivilized” city anywhere else in creation.