“See . . . You see that?” Granny said, the words spilling from her trembling lips. “Would you look at your face now? That’s what Tae’s kid will be like, too. No matter how handsome he might be born, or how much stronger than a human being, in the end he’ll always show that face. And every time he does—mark my words—every time it happens, everything he’s managed to build up ’til then is finished. Not just once or twice. Every time. How many times have you worn that face so far? How often have you had the face of a Noble?”
“Leave her alone,” D repeated.
“No, I won’t stop. You may be a dhampir, but you’re a man. How could you know the least bit about how a woman feels?”
The bloody hue rapidly left D’s eyes. Staring at Granny, his expression was calm as he said, “You’re a dhampir, aren’t you?”
Time seemed to stop.
Granny was mired in a perplexity she couldn’t begin to conceal. “What?” she exclaimed. “What do you mean?”
“Back in the desert, Clay came to lead you and me away. But Lance and Tae he carried off asleep.”
“Pure coincidence is what that is.”
“There’s more. Except for the first glance you caught of the marker I set up on the grave, you wouldn’t look at it at all. Because it’s a shape you have trouble with. And why is it that when you came here earlier looking for the girl, your shoes were white with dust but you weren’t breathing hard?”
D stared at her. The silence following the question was a hundred times more fearsome than any enraged shouting could’ve been.
Granny shook her head feebly from side to side. “Lies,” she said. “You’re making this up . . .”
“I have one more piece of evidence I couldn’t have made up.” D dealt the coup de grace.
“What . . .”
“The hatred you have for dhampirs. Only another dhampir feels that strongly.”
“Stop it!” Granny exclaimed. As she shouted, she raised her right hand high in the air. Sand billowed from between her fingers.
A shot rang out.
The crone’s right hand was thrust as high as it could go, and the sand in it scattered vainly in the breeze.
As he watched D dash toward the falling crone, Bingo called out, “Clay!” His voice may have been sleepy, but his orders were sharp.
“I’m on it!” Clay replied as his massive form vanished in the direction from which the shot had come.
There was never a second round fired.
D inspected Granny’s wound; it went right through her heart. It must’ve been the work of a firearm of some sort. While it wasn’t exactly a wooden stake, surely the only reason she was still alive was because she was a dhampir.
“D—” the old woman rasped.
“Don’t speak.”
“Don’t boss me around.” Granny took a shallow breath. “Don’t know who the blazes did this or why, but there’s no saving me now. That’s okay. Let me go. And don’t you dare think about waking up the girl. I wanna go out smooth. Say, would you mind holding my hand for a bit?” And as soon as Granny said that, she grabbed hold of D’s hand herself. “Come on, it’s not like we’ve got a lot of time. Ah, just as I thought—a cold hand. That’s okay. It’s a dhampir’s hand. There’s not much anyone can do about it. Oh, it’s been decades.”
D looked down at her face, the paleness of which was evident even in the darkness.
“You know . . . I had a child,” Granny said with a laugh. “The mother was a dhampir, so her son was bound to be one, too. That’s why my man ran out on me. I must’ve worked ten times as hard as anyone else bringing up my boy. If he had to be a dhampir, I wanted him to at least have a good dhampir life. But in the end there wasn’t anything I could do. The night before his wedding . . . he went and sank his fangs into the throat of the girl he loved and was set to marry. Cried tears of blood, I did.”
Granny turned her gaze toward Tae.
“Looks pretty while she sleeps, doesn’t she?” the old woman remarked. “Tonight may be the last night for that. You know, other people always used to tell me the same thing. They’d say they’d never seen anyone look so hurt and angry in their sleep. It shouldn’t be that way. I never wanted her to have to go through what I did. I still don’t think what I was about to do was wrong. There are dhampirs who live like you do. Well, maybe I was in the wrong after all . . .”
Suddenly, Granny’s complexion became more pallid.
“Oh . . . goodbye . . . Looks like peace is mine at last,” the old woman said, her head dropping sharply to one side.
D peered down at her.
“Ah, that’s right,” Granny said as she opened her eyes. “I forgot to ask you to say some last words to me. Don’t worry, I’m not asking you to tell me you love me or anything. Just say something.”
“The girl’s child won’t run off.”
“Is that a fact?” Granny said, breaking into a smile. “Great . . . If you can guarantee me that, everything will be fine.” The old woman laughed heartily, and her head lolled to one side. After that, she moved no more.
Putting his hand to her temple, D folded her wrinkled hands on her chest.
“Is she dead?” Clay asked. He was standing next to his brother again.
“What about our duel tomorrow?” Bingo asked.
“Push it back to noon,” the Hunter replied. “I’ve got a funeral to attend.”
“If we’ve gotta postpone it, we could make it for the same time the next day instead.”
“Think your employer would want that?” D asked, gazing at Bingo. Bingo turned to Clay, but Clay looked away. “Tell him I’ll be paying a call on him a little past noon,” D said in a bloodcurdling tone, and then he turned to Tae.
Tomorrow the girl would have to start her life all over again. But for now, her breathing was serene as she slumbered.
.
At noon the next day, a black carriage set out from a funeral parlor on the edge of town. Carrying the coffin, it would typically make its way through the major streets of Barnabas, with those in mourning for the deceased walking along behind it. Relatives, friends, and acquaintances alike had a chance then to bid farewell to the departed. Apparently, the person being buried that day didn’t have a peaceful death. The driver of the carriage was still a young lady, and the lone mourner in tow was a gorgeous young man in black raiment.
There were remarkably few people on the streets in the strong light of midday. Those who were there watched the lonely funeral procession suspiciously. Ordinarily, even townsfolk who had nothing to do with the deceased would join the procession—that was simply Frontier courtesy toward those who died without family around. But not a single soul did so today. The previous night, certain facts about the nature of the driver, the deceased, and the lone mourner had blown through town like a hurricane. And the woman who’d whipped up that storm had left town early that morning with her husband.
Out in the white sunlight, there was no sound save the creaking of the wheels on the black carriage as the woman and man went by. The girl had lowered a black veil over her face, and the young man held his wide-brimmed traveler’s hat over his heart. An almost imperceptible wind tousled the hair of both.
Before long, the procession passed by a three-story building. In one of the rooms there, three men were looking out the window.
“Perfect timing,” the lawyer Thornton said, snapping his pocket watch closed with a crisp sound. Looking back at the men behind him, he said, “The time necessary to report Granny’s death, the criminal investigation, and the arrangements for the hearse were all taken into account—there’s no better time than high-noon for the dead to make that final journey. Don’t you think so?”
There was no reply. Bingo Bullow and Clay Bullow—two of the Frontier’s greatest warriors—looked rather displeased as they stared at their employer’s back.
“Statistics say that for a dhampir, doing battle in broad daylight means a 40 percent drop in combat effectiveness. Don’t look so unh
appy,” Thornton told the brothers. “It’s not like I wanted to have to do this, either. Hell, if she hadn’t been the grubby little people-finder she was, I don’t think I would’ve used her like this at all. But to be perfectly frank, this all springs from your failure to get rid of him out in the desert.”
As the lawyer needled him in that sore spot, Clay shrugged his shoulders. Bingo was looking down at the floor—though, of course, he was neither deeply impressed nor conscience-stricken.
“Desert crossing or not, this job isn’t done until you kill the Hunter. And until then, I don’t get my due, either. See to it you kill him today for sure.” With these words, Thornton shut his eyes—one had to wonder just what sort of compensation he’d requested. The lascivious and arrogant expression he wore was unique to a certain sort of person, and it spread across his face like an oily film. His plump hands lovingly massaged the back of his own neck.
Clay leaned forward a bit. The creaking of the approaching carriage had reached the second-story window.
“Well, now. This warrants full marks for effectiveness—he certainly looks like he’s in pain. It would appear I haven’t lost my knack for judging characters. Not only is the Hunter seeing her off at this hour, he’s actually got his hat off, too. It only goes to show you can’t believe all those rumors you hear about some people being heartless and cold.”
The two brothers silently watched the passing carriage.
“You could take him now. Go to it,” Thornton said, his voice vested with a strength that would brook no resistance.
Turning their backs on him, the pair walked toward the door.
Coming out of the building’s entrance, the Bullow Brothers went right out into the street; the carriage and D continued to move along about forty feet ahead of them. The pair walked quickly. At a point about two yards from D, they slackened their pace. Neither D nor Tae turned around. Both brothers took off their hats. Holding them gently to their hearts, they followed along behind D. Now there were three mourners.
.
An hour later, the carriage halted at the communal cemetery out behind the same funeral parlor where its journey had begun. The gravedigger and undertaker were waiting by the hole they’d already completed. The group gathered around the grave, the coffin was lowered into the earth, and the undertaker began to recite a prayer. It was a short one. Tae chewed the words over in her mouth.
The ceremony ended, and the gravedigger began shoveling dirt back into the hole.
“Well, then,” Clay said in a way that suggested the time had finally come to square accounts. “There’s an open spot over that way. Let’s settle this there.”
“I just don’t get it,” Bingo said in a sleepy tone. “The night we first met, we were ready to kill you . . . But to be honest I really don’t feel much like doing it now.”
D started walking straight ahead. He got the feeling he heard Tae’s voice.
Leaving the rows of gravestones, the trio squared off in an almost circular section thick with grass. They were ten feet apart.
“I have to thank you,” said D.
“What for?” the smirking Clay replied. Making a massive leap away, he went for his harp with his right hand.
D made a dash for Bingo.
As proof that his foe had expected as much, the sleeper spat dream bubbles from his mouth. But spitting was exactly what D’s left hand did, too. Strings of black blood attacked the cloud of bubbles with the suppleness of a whip, but slipped between them. The bubbles had skillfully avoided the attack.
“Good work, bro!” Clay howled. As long as Bingo was locked in battle with D, he couldn’t let his deadly ultrasonic waves fly, but it looked like his older brother was doing pretty well.
Dodging the bubbles that came at him, D flung strings of blood at Bingo from his left hand. A new dream glittered into being in the sunlight to meet that attack. Every bloody thread broke against the surface of the bubble—blocked off completely. But once that bubble was gone, Bingo’s expression showed agitation for the first time—his face filled with a forced vitality. Having spit up all of his dreams, the dreamer had awakened.
Using a melody of unearthly beauty to change the black shape that hung high in the air for a second like a mystic bird to dust, the younger Bullow gave a shout. Dazed, Clay then swayed unsteadily as he saw the naked steel that protruded from his brother’s back. It’d dawned on him that what his harp had destroyed had merely been the Hunter’s coat, just as D had raced across the ground and impaled his brother. His fingers went for the strings as his warrior training made him prepare a second attack reflexively, but then he stopped dead. D was on the far side of his brother. A split second of indecision—
As Clay stood there, a wooden needle whined through the air and sank into his forehead, dropping him. Due to the time necessary to extricate the Hunter’s blade, Bingo didn’t hit the ground until after his younger brother.
Two corpses lay in the white sunlight. The battle was done.
The wind blew by. For a time, D gazed at his two foes. Suddenly, he ducked as something hot whizzed over his head, followed by the delayed report of a gun. It came from the direction of the graveyard.
Crouched down and about to sprint into action, D heard a faint melody slip past his ear.
A cry of agony arose in the graveyard.
When D turned and looked down, Clay was lying there smiling. His harp trembled at the end of his outstretched hand.
“So . . . does that even the score?” Clay said, blood spurting from his forehead as he spoke.
“It was more than enough,” D replied.
“Was it . . . really? Well, here’s some interest on it. The guy that hired us . . . was Thornton. And that character just now . . . was another one of his killers.”
“I know.”
“In that case . . . let’s finish this . . .”
The warrior’s harp rose, then swiftly fell again.
“My luck is crap,” Clay said, and then he closed his eyes.
D turned around.
Tae was standing there. That was why Clay hadn’t used his harp.
.
The girl’s face was pale with fright.
“Scared?” D asked.
“Yeah.”
“Don’t let your child become a Hunter.”
“That’ll be up to him or her,” the girl replied in a trembling voice that was charged with power. “But even if my baby doesn’t grow up to be a Hunter, I’ll raise him or her to be like the Vampire Hunter I saw.”
“It’s almost time for your ride to leave,” D said as he took a quick glance at the sun.
“You give me money and buy me a ticket for a coach . . . and there’s nothing I can do to repay you?”
“Just see to it that I hear rumors that you’re doing well.”
Tae’s eyes sparkled. “I’m sure you will,” she said with a nod. Taking a bundle of white fabric from the bag she carried, she unfolded it. It was a tiny garment to swaddle a tiny life. “This is what I made on the sewing machine,” Tae said, as if lost in reflection. “Now I have a feeling I’ll be able to get by somehow. And it’s all thanks to Granny. She did nothing but help me, and we weren’t even kin.”
“I still have business here in town,” D said as he gazed at the girl’s face. “Godspeed.”
“You take care, too.” Tae watched as he turned his black back to her and went off into the white light. Her womb was filled with the movements of the tiny life within her, and felt warm. Just as they parted, she’d seen a smile rise on D’s lips. And for a long, long time after that, through days of intertwining joy and sadness, the girl would recollect how she’d been the one to put it there. She would tell the tale to her only child with a touch of pride. It was just such a smile.
POSTSCRIPT
How did you enjoy this D novel? It’s hard to believe we’re already up to the sixth book. Actually, 6 is my lucky number, and if you put two more 6’s after that, you wind up with The Omen. (Laughs) Of course, if
it’d get me that kind of power, I wouldn’t mind putting those extra 6’s on there. (Laughs)
Well, as this is my third new postscript in a row, I thought I might talk about how the Vampire Hunter D series came to be. My debut as a novelist, Demon City (Shinjuku),was published in September of 1982, and because it sold fairly well, the publisher asked me to get to work on another novel right away. At the time, something about vampires popped into my head as the prime book candidate—although it would be more accurate to say that I had wanted to do a story about vampires for my first book. The reason I ended up going with something else first was because the theme of vampires seemed to be much too specialized, and, up until that time, there really hadn’t been a book intended for a juvenile audience that dealt with such grotesque material. Most likely, a horror tale written to illustrate the terror of the protagonist as he or she is menaced by supernatural forces would’ve been poorly received by young readers (males in particular). In order to avoid that pitfall, I introduced action into my debut novel. It is an indispensable element in stories for younger readers, and since I’d always liked action myself, it was almost inevitable that I’d wind up writing books like this. What’s more, I decided to include more elements of science fiction in my new novel. The reason for this should be obvious: young people seem to prefer sci-fi to horror. (Although the reception horror receives may differ in this respect between Japan and America.) At that time, no one here had written a novel like Demon City. It proved to be the birth of what I later termed “horror action.” Fortunately, it got results—and because the sales were good, the editorial staff had no complaints when I said I wanted to go with vampires.
Basically, I grew up watching movies about Japanese ghost stories; Hammer Films from England like Horror of Dracula and Curse of Frankenstein, and Universal offerings from America such as Dracula and Frankenstein. I had but one complaint about monster movies, and a wish to see it remedied. I always thought, “Instead of having these monsters and ghosts just beating the hell out of everybody non-stop, wouldn’t it be great if there was a hero who had even greater strength than they did?” After all, who likes losing all the time? To be perfectly honest, my novels take a lot from the best points of horror movies. The setting of Demon City, where Shinjuku has been cut off from the rest of Tokyo by a massive earthquake, is very similar to that of the John Carpenter film Escape from New York and the Japanese manga Violence Jack. Also, the protagonist of Vampire Hunter D is reminiscent of the titular character of the Hammer Films movie Captain Kronos—Vampire Hunter (though D is about ten thousand times more handsome than the actor who played the lead in that movie (laughs)). And D’s also naturally patterned after the leading character of the classic Horror of Dracula, who scared the life out of me when I was nine or ten—Count Dracula, as portrayed by Christopher Lee. Despite the fact that I found Count Dracula to be a creature that should obviously be destroyed, and regardless of the fact that at the time I was more enthralled with Peter Cushing’s role of Van Helsing than I was with the vampire he kills, the utter coolness of Count Dracula dressed in black and standing at the entrance to some beautiful woman’s room was something I couldn’t overlook simply because he was the villain—it had a great impact on me. D’s hallmarks—being distant, tall, and garbed in black—were all traits borrowed from Lee’s Dracula. In other words, you could say D is like Horror of Dracula embracing the trappings of Captain Kronos.
Pilgrimage of the Sacred and the Profane Page 17
