Amelia Earhart was a famous woman airplane pilot in the years leading up to the Second World War. On the first of June, 1937, she and her navigator, Fred Noonan, launched their second attempt to circumnavigate the globe. On the second of July, they left Papua New Guinea and never arrived at their destination, Howland Island.
One theory held that they were on a secret intelligence gathering mission for the American government, were captured by the Japanese military and executed.
According to Wagner’s version of The Flying Dutchman, obstructed for nine days by terrible storms and high seas while rounding the Cape of Good Hope, an arrogant sea captain named Van der Decken cursed God and Heaven in frustration. As a result he was condemned to sail the Seven Seas without setting foot on land.
He was finally redeemed by the love of a faithful woman. This story seems to have been based on that of Bernard Fokke of the Dutch East India Company, whose mastery of the seas was so complete it was rumored that he had made a pact with the devil.
Half an hour later, the blue lady came to a stop on a street near Yocho. Going right down the alley fifty yards ahead of her would bring her to a camp of vagrants.
A strange sight came down the road, a beautiful woman covered with red roses and trailing plumes of white smoke. Takako melted though the shutters of a dry cleaners and emerged after the woman had passed.
Takako smiled. “I wonder where that Methuselah of a Princess is headed? I didn’t imagine she’d take a stroll in the middle of the morning. There’s no way she can keep that up for long. I guess I’ll just have to wait and see.”
At last contending with the golden rays of dawn, the blue light followed after the lady of roses.
Chapter Three
Soon after those two women passed down the street, headed for parts unknown, a visitor arrived in a hurry at Mephisto Hospital. She asked to see the Director. The head nurse refused politely. The woman pressed, “Please tell him that Takako Kanan is my daughter.”
This was indeed Takako’s mother, Tomoko Kanan.
“He left strict orders to turn away everyone, even the prime minister, should he show up here.”
Excepting one, she was wise enough not to add. She couldn’t help feeling a tinge of jealousy toward the one person with a free pass to the director’s office, no matter what. At the same time, the face of the handsome young man clad in black flitted through her mind, assuring her that, no, it simply wasn’t possible.
“Then tell him this—I may know the location of the person who drank my daughter’s blood.”
“I’m sorry, but the director’s instructions were unequivocal.”
Tomoko backed away from the receptionist’s desk and smacked the handbag hanging from her right shoulder with the palm of her hand. “Then I’ll go tell him myself!”
“Don’t be unreasonable!” the head nurse pleaded.
Tomoko had already headed past her down the hallway. But then her body seemed to freeze in mid-stride, as if her movements were being recorded with a high speed camera. She’d been caught in a force field projected from the receptionist’s desk.
At that point, she could be manipulated at will. The head nurse was reaching toward the control panel when the director’s voice emerged from the intercom speaker.
“Let her pass.”
The intercom mic was off. He must have been observing the whole thing, but the head nurse knew that wasn’t the case either. Without another word, she cut the power.
“I’m sorry for the inconvenience,” she said politely. “Please proceed to the elevator at the back. It will take you to the director’s office.”
It was only afterwards that she was struck by how ominous the director’s voice sounded.
The thick bands of shadow and firelight flickered across the two faces. The sound of burning crackled in their ears.
Not six feet away, a huge silo a hundred feet wide and three hundred feet high reached skyward. The light from the candles on the surrounding walls couldn’t reach that high. The top faded into the pitch black. Even so, the stone ceiling above seemed to weigh down on them in a great dark mass.
The silo contained the heat source that fueled this world.
Between the two and the oval-shaped chute to the silo, that also apparently served as an incinerator, lay the body of Setsura Aki.
“And?” said Doctor Mephisto—Kikiou’s carbon copy—the glow from the flames playing like moonlight across his striking features. This carbon copy had at least preserved all of the aesthetic qualities of the original.
“Do it,” said his creator. “Only a bird witnessed what happened, but changes have occurred in his body. Before anybody can botch the next move, we should consign him to the flames. It is in all our best interests.”
“But to destroy such a living work of art and scatter the ashes, it seems such a sad waste.”
“You are giving this task too much thought,” Kikiou said, with a scathing glance at Mephisto. “I made you in haste, so perhaps your true self is awakening. That furnace burns at three-hundred-thousand degrees. So not even the ashes will remain. Toss him in. I have got to get back to repairing this world properly.”
“Yes.”
Mephisto bent over, hoisted up Setsura, walked to the chute and unceremoniously threw him in. His right foot caught on the edge of the chute. Mephisto grabbed it and stuffed it in and shut the door.
“Good. The rest is in your hands. Please continue with your research as you see fit.”
The great warlock strode out of the room. Mephisto watched him leave. He stood there for a little while longer like a beautiful statue, then nodded to himself and turned around and headed back to the incinerator chute.
He opened the door. The flames lit up his pallid face. The white doctor didn’t hesitate but thrust both hands into the fire.
And pulled them out a second later grasping a black ankle. Mephisto gazed curiously upon the body of the senbei shop owner, that not even three-hundred-thousand degrees could singe.
“Any way I look at it, ashes to ashes is a waste. I shan’t disobey Kikiou-sama’s orders. But I shall at least bury him in a manner befitting me.”
A minute later, carrying Setsura on his shoulders, he walked down the dark corridor. As handsome as Mephisto, as skilled as a pharmacist, and acting the same around Setsura, two peas in a pod. This was nothing more than a duplicate, who first and foremost deferred to Kikiou.
However, just as Kikiou feared, this quickly thrown-together doppelganger was exhibiting not only Mephisto’s tics and mannerisms, but in a kind of living irony, whatever construed the wellspring of his true self.
And that faithfulness to his creator welded deep within his personality?
After silently treading down the corridor, the white figure came to an iron door. He opened it.
An enormous abyss waited for them there.
A stone staircase attached to the wall on the right descended into a hellish darkness. A thousand steps later, Mephisto’s shoes again touched solid ground. At that moment, from some indistinguishable direction, a wan light welled up.
The faint illumination revealed a world filled with rows of coffins. The gray stone boxes reached out over a hundred wide and deep, and must amount to ten or twenty times that many out of eyesight.
Though none bore a seal or engraving indicating a name or place or date of birth or death, the stone sarcophagi carried about them a sense of dignity and gravitas, proof of the power and knowledge that suffused the dynasties of the ancient world.
“The mausoleums of the Hsia Dynasty were disinterred in place.” Mephisto’s voice rang out inside the startling silence. The heavy lids of the coffins were closed. “I do not understand why, but this should suffice as a resting place for a man of such incomparable beauty.”
He scanned the lines of stone. Several seconds later, he approached a row closer to the staircase and laid his hand on one. The lid of the sarcophagus, that must weigh several hundred pounds, slid off without the slightest
resistance and dropped to the ground with an earth-shaking thud.
Mephisto cradled Setsura in his arms and lowered him into the casket. “Rest easy, my fond friend.”
He spoke without sentiment. He gripped the edge of the lid and lifted it easily into the air and placed it back on top of the sarcophagus. The heavy reverberations echoed through the graveyard. His cape fluttering behind him, the white figure climbed back up the long staircase.
Setsura was dead.
Having drunk the elixir prepared by the imposter, he was now entombed within a hundred miles of stone, with no prospect that the light of day would ever fall on his face again.
The imposter climbing the stone steps vanished into the distance. The faint illumination extinguished, an ancient silence filled this underground cavern. Time itself seemed to freeze.
So there was no telling how long it was before a new sound emerged. A thin sound. A faint sound. Fading away and arising again, twining together clear and wet.
The sound of water.
Ears that could make out a single footstep in a throng of people would have heard that sound coming from Setsura’s coffin. Eyes that could see in the dark would have seen the thread-like lines spilling from the seams of the sarcophagus.
The unmistakable flow of water.
The black stain grew on the floor below. A groan from within and some indistinguishable form, blacker than the surrounding gloom, slowly but steadily rose up.
The Demon Princess appeared like a star in a night sky.
The air was dank and damp. There was enough light to make out her surroundings. She looked around. She was on a sizable concrete passageway about thirty feet wide. The walls arced over her head to the left. On the right, the passageway dropped off abruptly to form a drainage culvert ten feet deep and a hundred feet wide.
The walkway and the sloping walls on the far side, the black ribbon of water snaking through the bottom of the culvert, the stinging scent assailing her nostrils—the nature of the place where she found herself was obvious.
These were the haunted remains of Shinjuku’s sewer system. Construction had begun three years before the Devil Quake. It was tragically destroyed the very same day it was completed.
Shinjuku had since converted to a new underground water treatment facility. The wrecked portions six hundred feet below the surface were inhabited by creatures and criminals who couldn’t stroll about on the surface, who were making it into a second, subterranean Demon City.
Those creatures had definitely been there. And were there now.
Less than ten feet away from her, above the passageway, at the bottom of the culvert, on the piles of rubble, on the rotted, solidified waste that had nowhere else to go—heaps of human bodies lay everywhere.
Even without taking in the prefab houses and tents pitched in the bottom of the culvert, this was clearly a living space. But for the time being, the dark shadows daubing the darkness weren’t those inhabitants.
The clothes made some of these men: suits of the latest fashion worn by men in high places, cheaper outfits worn by salesman, caps marked by the logos of taxi services; housewives bearing shopping bags, security guards, cops, street youths, gangbangers, shop owners, yakuza, the comatose, two-headed freaks, and tourists.
Every member of this menagerie had fangs jutting from their lips, hunger etched on their faces, and eyes crazed with lust.
The white smoke stopped curling up from the Demon Princess. Dropping down six hundred feet from the broken-down access tunnel to the water treatment facility in Yocho, she stripped away her rose garment, leaving her stark naked.
Casting a disparaging glance around her, she grumbled, “To think I would bed down with such vulgar companions? I think not. You find yourselves another place to sleep.”
Her graceful limbs faded into a rapid blur as she spun like a top, kicking up the mud in the tunnel. Every vampire she touched suffered the fate of a dandelion run over by a lawn mower. Heads and hands and feet separated from torsos, some still attached as they whirled around and erupted into the air.
Vampires slept deeply, and death came so instantly that some never raised a sound of complaint. But here and there cries erupted from the ground around her, the result of the demon qi radiating from Princess’s body.
“W-What are you doing?”
“Spare us!”
“No way!”
The screams of children mingled with those of men and women and they were all sucked into the air. Others ran around trying to escape, blood and body parts raining down on their heads. In their fear-filled eyes reflected the kaleidoscopic faces of Princess as she turned and turned.
Every one of her faces was smiling. Not a flicker of anger. Shining with bliss. The love of the massacre. The victims were all her minions, and thus her happiness. This was the dazzling smile of the woman who once forced retainers who criticized their ancient emperors to cling to a red-hot iron bar, and slit open the bellies of pregnant women.
The spinning top of death suddenly ceased. Her pealing laughter rang out. “Hoh! Is anybody there? Any living soul answer me!”
“H-Here—here—”
Several reed-thin voices identified themselves from different directions. No matter what awful fate they might meet, that Princess was their sire was as firm a rule as the physical laws of the universe.
“W-Why—did this happen—to me—?” moaned a young salaryman, his right leg twisted off at the knee.
“Hoh. You are my servants, the bodies you offer up to me are mine to do with as I please. I’ll tell you why; because even asleep you were a bother and a nuisance.”
“T-That’s all—the only reason—to—”
“Of what other use could you possibly be? I didn’t choose you to start with. Useless vermin replicating without meaning. Eradicating you is the only pleasure you will ever bring me.”
“What an—awful—terrifying—person—” said a man. A moment later, similar castigating voices flowed forth.
How would the Demon Princess react to such criticism—she shut her eyes, she writhed. No, this was not chagrin and remorse arising from self-reflection. Her body flushed pink. Her fingers sank into her throat and breasts. Her face shone with ecstasy.
She was elated. She shook with joy. Stealing away life, swimming in blood, and then basking in the deprecations of the suffering propelled her to the heights of rapture.
Her eyes opened. She said in a throaty voice, “Get out of here.”
Knowing they didn’t have the will to disobey, and willing to mete out greater retribution if they did not, without waiting for an answer she descended into the center of the culvert, lay down on her side and promptly fell asleep.
Bearing eyes filled with loathing, the creatures of the night, dumbfounded by such overweening arrogance, did as they were told and scattered deeper into the tunnels wearing wretched expressions on their faces.
A figure in blue blocked the path of one high-placed executive type. After a brief suspicious look, hunger and lust displaced any doubts.
He licked his lips. “What are you doing here, young lady?”
“I came here to observe your sire.” Takako Kanan smiled. “She has done great and terrible things, and has been doing them for so much longer than I. I must unleash all that I am in order to exceed her.”
“Come here,” said the man, approaching her. He lay a hand on Takako’s shoulder, a hand that looked perfectly normal but felt foul and debased, and pulled her toward him.
“Let’s have a little fun together, what do you say?”
A blue arm pushed the man’s face and his foul breath away. “Alas, you are not a funny man and I am not amused.”
In the next breath, her palm smashed into his face. Her other hand plunged through his chest like a spike and through his quivering heart.
She cocked her head to the side in genuine puzzlement. “So what would be the best way to deliver another knockout punch and send her down for the count? Something that would strike a
little fear into the heart of our fair Princess?”
Apparently Takako was a fan of boxing.
Part Twelve: The Akashic Records
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.”
Yashakiden: The Demon Princess, Volume 5 Omnibus Edition Page 24
