by David Reed
I wanted to find Keiko next. Wanted to get it over with. The only place I could think to look for her was the mess hall, so that’s where I went. The sailors we had seen holed up there earlier were now gone, a blood stain on the floor the only evidence that they’d once been encamped there. I searched the galley warily, ready for an Ondine to jump out at me at any second. Instead, I found a trail of water leading out of the galley and down a ladder to the lower deck. There, I witnessed a disturbing sight—an Ondine hovering over the dead body of one of the crew. I fired a few shots, but was quickly out of rounds. It was enough to get the Ondine’s attention, and soon I had another prisoner locked into a cargo container.
As I checked the steel latch, I heard an inhuman growl next to me. Keiko. Seeing her true face was shocking, but it galvanized my will. I had to kill her, to stop her from hurting anyone else.
Without any bullets, it came down to raw strength. Most supernatural creatures are far more physically powerful than they look, and Ondines are no exception. I tried the same trick that’d worked on the other Ondines, but she moved too quickly. I couldn’t trap her. A blow from her hand sent me flying across the deck, smashed my head into a bulkhead. Blood dripped down my face, and all I could see was red. My vision was already swimming from the booze, so it’d gone from bad to terrible.
She kicked me in the stomach, blew the air out of my lungs. Felt like I was drowning on dry land. Another kick, this time with even more force. Across the deck, I saw an emergency kit. Inside would be first aid equipment and a flare. I had no idea what effect it would have, but the flare was the only weapon near me. Scrambling across the wet deck, I had just reached the emergency kit when her hand gripped my shoulder, spun me around, and hurled me into another bulkhead.
I couldn’t stand. My head was spinning, my legs weren’t listening to my brain. Looking up at her, I told her exactly what I thought of her, in salty language I’d picked up from the Nishigo Maru’s crew, which I won’t repeat in polite company. Then I asked her if she’d mind kissing my ass before she killed me.
“I told you, Bobby, I’m not going to kill you,” she said, then leaped at me. Both of us teetered at the ship’s edge, but gravity was on her side. I fell backwards, down five stories from where I’d been to the roaring ocean below.
Water filled my lungs as I sank into the black abyss. It wasn’t like I thought it’d be; there was nothing peaceful about death—I was choking and gagging and fighting as I drifted further and further down, away from Nishigo Maru and away from any hope of surviving.
Then I saw her—Keiko, who’d dived in after me. She transformed before my eyes, no longer appearing as a hybrid, no longer bearing any characteristics of an old human woman, she became one hundred percent Ondine. Her tail flitted back and forth, propelling her with impossible speed towards me. My vision was starting to get fuzzy, to go black around the edges. I knew I was losing consciousness, but my eyes stayed fixed on Keiko. As she approached me, her mouth opened, and a blue light filtered out of it, sending rays of energy through the water all around us. Her face was nearly touching mine, the blue light warming my cheeks. For a second, my head cleared—it was like the light had given me a breath of air. I knew I was being turned, but I couldn’t fight it. I’d already put my whole effort into resisting her, but with water in my lungs, I couldn’t resist any longer. I opened my mouth, reached out to her, and—
Tamuro. From behind her, he grappled Keiko, twisted her away from me. She lashed out at him, scratched at his face with her claws. He had been completely transformed as well, but his face was instantly recognizable. As I watched the two of them battle above me, I realized I was still sinking. The breath of air that Keiko’s light had given me was enough to get my legs moving again. I kicked as hard and fast as I could, swimming madly for the surface, which, to my alarm, was getting dimmer instead of getting brighter. I could see the massive shadow of Nishigo Maru, but it felt like it was drifting farther away from me. The world was going black. I took one last glance downwards, and saw Keiko’s limp body disappearing into the endless deep. Tamuro was disappearing with her. He’d saved my life. Saved my human life, anyway.
Then, a shockwave blasted through the water. It felt like I’d been hit by a truck, but I kept swimming, kept fighting for the surface. A Ford pick-up truck drifted slowly past me, sinking, followed by a dozen more. A videocassette, a computer, an electric guitar. All of the ship’s cargo had been thrown into the ocean, sinking as I ascended. When I came to the surface, fire was everywhere. An oil slick covered the water, some of it burning, and the great ship Nishigo Maru was split down the middle.
I never found out what happened aboard, but I can take a guess. The Ondines, nearly finished with their task, decided to destroy the evidence, to keep humans from asking questions about what had happened to the crew. A little tinkering with the engines, and bam. Ship goes down.
Floating on the surface, gasping for breath, I made my way to a wooden plank. It’d been part of a cargo palette, but the cargo had already disappeared into the water. There, I’d wait for ten hours while Nishigo Maru slowly sank, waiting for some sort of rescue.
When rescue finally came, I told them the only thing I could. Engine trouble. Explosion. Crew went down with the ship, valiantly trying to keep her afloat. Here’s the picture from the front page of the Tokyo newspapers:
I wonder to this day if the two Ondines I trapped in the cargo containers were ever freed, or if they sank in a water-tight coffin to the bottom of their great sea, drying out within inches of a trillion gallons of water. For what they did to those sailors, they deserved it. And Keiko . . . maybe Tamuro killed her. Or maybe she just gave up on me, decided to wait for the next ship to pass by. Maybe she’s still out there.
Some day, you’ll be given the same choice I had—and I hope you’re smart enough to realize it ain’t a choice at all. Becoming a monster isn’t an option. Tamuro may have been able to retain some of his humanity, for just long enough to save me, but I’d bet anything that if you ran into him today, his time underwater will have changed him. There’d be nothing left of the man I (briefly) knew.
That was my first hunt. I’d love to say it was a success, but you read the story. Everybody died. Some of the monsters (maybe all of them) got away. That happens. But you gotta keep fighting. When the rescue boat hauled me up from the sea, they asked me where I wanted to go.
I said Tokyo. Wasn’t ready to go back. Still had too much to learn.
Japan
I ARRIVED IN JAPAN a hunter by choice. Running from it wasn’t an option, both because I knew that it’d catch up with me eventually, and because I didn’t think I could live with myself if I did. There were things out there that hurt, tortured, and killed innocent people, and if I didn’t step up to do something about it, who would? I’ve never been the type to let my problems fall at other people’s feet, and this was no exception. If there were monsters to kill, I was going to be the one to kill them.
Inconveniently enough, I had that epiphany 5,929 miles from the only hunter I’d ever met. Japan had its own share of things that went bump in the night, though, a fact which I’d learned very clearly aboard Nishigo Maru. It seemed like a good idea to try to make the most of my time in Japan by learning about the local customs, the language, and most of all, the local hunters.
Picture yourself in a foreign city. A place that you’ve read about but never visited, and you don’t know the language. Imagine you want to find a place to eat or a bathroom or a taxi cab. Those are all difficult but surmountable challenges. Now imagine you want to find the local chapter of a secret organization of monster hunters whose very existence would send shockwaves through the populace if they were ever revealed. Slightly trickier, but as with anything, there are ways.
Here’s how I did it. This particular trick works anywhere, because it relies on a simple principle: if two people are after the same thing, they’re bound to run into each other eventually. After finding a place to stay and a job f
ixing American cars to pay the rent, I spent my nights hunting. I did all the research I could at the local library, but the language barrier was steep. There’s something to be said for total immersion, though, and within a month I was able to get by in most situations. “Most situations” doesn’t cover researching ancient folklore, and I had to ask for a lot of help from the librarians, all of whom thought I was a total nut. Comes with the territory.
Sooner or later, if I kept following up on omens and clues, I’d find a legit monster case. When I did, hopefully I’d run into another hunter, and I’d be on my way. Whether they’d take me into their fold or kill me on the spot, that I didn’t know. Rufus had told me that there were hunters on every continent (apparently Antarctica has a bit of a Yeti infestation), but not how many, where they were, or their disposition towards strangers who wanted to learn the trade.
I scoured the Japanese newspapers each morning, hoping to see signs of dry lightning, cattle mutilation, black smoke, anything that’d point me towards a demon possession. What I didn’t know was anything about the local critters, so at first I had no clue what to look for. After a few particularly enlightening newspaper translation sessions with a very wary librarian, I found my first case. Three women had been murdered in the mountainous outskirts of Tokyo, drained of most of their blood, their hearts ripped out. Didn’t need any omens for that one, it was obvious that something was amiss. The press was blaming a serial killer, but the police thought a wild animal might somehow be responsible. They hadn’t found any fingerprints, DNA evidence, or clothing fibers at the scene, but they did find fur. Animal fur of a type their experts couldn’t identify. I learned all that by visiting the police prefecture for that district, posing as a visiting American novelist interested in the case. I may have slightly implied that I was Stephen King, but it was their own damn fault for thinking all Americans looked alike.
Huh. I guess that was the first time I pretexted for a case, something that’s like second nature now. At the time it was terrifying. I was sure they’d catch me in a lie, or ask for credentials (so always have a set or two handy), or even arrest me flat-out. None of that happened, and I learned a valuable lesson—if you walk tall enough, speak confidently enough, and have a surly attitude, people will believe anything you say.
My next stop was the house of the first victim. She’d been killed while watching television, a wacky game show where you had to wrestle members of your family for the right to not get dunked in a pool full of goo. Japan, man, they know how to make good TV.
Nothing seemed off about the gal’s family life, and according to her boyfriend, she didn’t have any enemies. She was what the Japanese now call otaku—obsessed with pop culture. Her bedroom was downright nuts—action figures lined every shelf of the place, posters covered the walls, a few of them a little risqué. To be honest, I really liked the lady. Too bad she was dead.
The police had combed the place well, taken away any clues long before I got there. That’s an important thing for you to learn: Get there first.
The police don’t know how to handle a vampire case, or a ghost case, or a shifter case, and they never will. That’s what your job is, and if you’re gonna do it right, you have to get to the scene before it’s been wiped clean by the CSI team and before the witnesses and the victims’ families have already been questioned five times. Trust me, they don’t like having to repeat the same answers over and over again, and you’ll get much better results if you are the first one to ask them a question. Also, if they’re still overwhelmed by grief, people are apt to slip up and tell you things they don’t mean to—clues that can be vital to solving the case.
That lesson learned, I next went to the most recent crime scene—a jogger in a public park had been torn apart with no witnesses. The police were still at the scene, marking out blood spray patterns and trying to determine the weapon that could have been used on the dead woman. Their conclusion—fangs. It didn’t seem like any blade could have caused the lacerations that they were finding on the victim’s body, but the wounds were too precise to have been caused by a wolf. Wolves were once common in that part of Japan, but had been pushed out of the area by the expansion of Tokyo and its metro area in the last hundred years.
That got me thinking about something Rufus told me. Werewolves, which I was most familiar with because of those old Universal Wolf Man movies, were apparently real. They transform from human to beast on the full moon (though you should know that in the past year, we’ve seen werewolves shifting on the half-moon as well . . . it’s all tied into this “mother of all monsters”/purgatory crap that I’ll get into later, if I’m still alive). They also are known to kill humans for food, though at the time I couldn’t remember if they ate the hearts (they do, that’s their main MO).
If it was a werewolf, the relevant facts are these (I didn’t know all this when I was in Japan, but I don’t have the time left to tell you how I learned it all):
• They munch on human hearts like they’re made of candy.
• Their transformation isn’t under their physical control. Once they start transforming, there’s nothing they can do to stop it.
• They’re not like the Hulk. Getting them mad won’t force them to turn, but the feelings of their human side will target who they attack when they wolf out. Sam likes to say that they’re “pure id,” and that whoever they hate as a human is who they attack as a wolf. Best not to piss them off in either human or wolf form.
• They often don’t remember anything they do while in their wolfed-out form. That means that some of them don’t even realize that they’re werewolves. Others know that something’s wrong with them but think that they just have a bad alcohol addiction, which would explain all the blacking out and the weird injuries they get on every full moon.
• Their mortal weakness is silver—silver stakes, silver bullets, silver knives, silver letter openers, whatever, as long as it’s silver. It’s helpful if you can jam the silver straight into their heart, but you can get creative with that part. Decapitation with a silver axe, maybe.
• They have super strength, which is a given for pretty much any monster.
• They can jump upwards of fifteen feet, at least according to my buddy Peter who took down a pack of them in Denver. Then again, Peter did a lot of drugs back in the sixties, so as far as he knows a lot of things can jump upwards of fifteen feet.
• Their vision, hearing, and sense of smell are incredibly acute. Human blood especially pulls their triggers. They’re a lot like vampires in that way, except that they’re not photosensitive—a werewolf isn’t afraid of light, they just happen to be afflicted only during the nighttime hours of a full moon, so sunlight’s a nonissue for them.
• They transfer their infection through bites—if you’re bitten by a werewolf, it’s already too late. You’re gonna become one too. Samuel Campbell had an old recipe for curing a human of vampirism, maybe there’s something similar out there for werewolves . . . but if there is a real cure, I haven’t heard of it. A few years back, Sam and Dean were protecting a girl named Madison from a werewolf, only to realize that Madison had already been turned. According to the lore they’d heard, killing the wolf that sired her would cure her, so they did just that. No dice. Even after they offed the thing, Madison still wolfed out, and Sam had to put her down.
• A werewolf’s human host is otherwise unaffected by its affliction. Whereas a vampire is a vampire all the time, a werewolf can live a largely normal human life, as long as they lock themselves up before they change each full moon.
• They grow real fur, but it’s not actual wolf fur. When Sam and Dean were investigating a potential werewolf case in Canonsburg, Pennsylvania, they found real wolf hair at the scene of a murder. While a lot of hunters mighta taken that as conclusive proof, the Winchester boys knew that werewolves are a hybrid creature—the fur they grow isn’t real wolf hair.
At the time, there was nothing in the evidence that led me to believe it wasn’t a
werewolf, but I was still a baby hunter. I’d been involved in two supernatural incidents, both of them had ended with most everyone dead but me. This time, I had to do better. I wasn’t going to let my assumptions drive my decision-making.
While I was at the scene, an agent from the Criminal Investigation Bureau (Japan’s equivalent of the FBI) showed up and took over. They had reason to believe that a mental patient from a nearby lockup had escaped and was responsible for the killings. The guy commanded a lot of respect from the beat cops who had been running the show, but there was something off about him. His hair had a little too much gel, he was a little too young, he wore sneakers with his black suit and tie.
Whereas my pretext held up because I was an American claiming to be an American, I could tell this guy was a kid playing government agent. When he left the scene twenty minutes later, I was waiting for him at his car.
“You’re here about the werewolf?” I asked him, point-blank.
I knew the guy spoke English (he had greeted me with the fluency of a native speaker earlier), but now he feigned ignorance.
“What is where? A wolf?” he said, or something like that. Don’t quote me on any of this, most of my memories are Cheez Whiz recipes at this point.
He got in his car, tried to drive away, but I was in the passenger seat before he hit the gas. Asked him again. Told him I knew that it wasn’t an escaped mental patient that was killing the girls.
The look he gave me, it was a mixture of annoyance and recognition. Like I was a brother-in-arms, but an annoying brother who he wished wouldn’t drop in all the time. Nevertheless, he drove me back to his house, which was deep in the woods outside Tokyo. There, a dozen more hunters were waiting. They had quite the setup. It was like a Fortress of Hunter Solitude, with all manner of training equipment, lore books, even some computer equipment (which was in those days very primitive, but they had the bleeding edge stuff). I was the only outsider they’d ever let into their inner sanctum, and it showed on the faces of every man and woman there.
