by Kim Newman
Hal felt insulted.
He knew where the slime came from. He cringed at the idea of that horror trunk gummed to his forehead.
That had happened to him. He was glad the memory of pain blotted it out.
The minotaur – a chiropterid, apparently – lifted Taguchi from the floor, wrapping him in its wings. Taguchi’s expression was blank. His eyes were poached. Whoever he’d been – no matter how high priority a target – he wasn’t that person any more.
‘Ishikawa?’ he asked his hand.
‘Reformatted.’
Instinctively, Hal understood reformatting. The chiropterid did to people what a hard-erase did to a drive. A complete wipe.
It was a vampire, of course. A mind vampire.
RICHARD JEPERSON
The Bund – once Yōkai Town, now Casamassima Bay – was known, of course, for nightlife. At sunset, neon signs buzzed and shop front shutters rolled up. Guests kept to the carpet. Stewards waved luminous table tennis bats to discourage strays.
Richard didn’t like being herded.
Quiet, curious spectres appeared to gape at incomers. Smiling, bowing salarymen and demure kimono ladies. Japanese murgatroyds in Regency peacock finery, cerulean make-up bars across their eyes. Other creatures were little more than skin-rags with top-knots and teeth. Christina’s people, the vampires of the Bund.
The Transylvanian cortège was finally through security. It cruised past the procession of guests. Presuming the unknown Very Important Vampire capable of walking – even flying – unaided, the flash motors and platoon of masked coffin-hefters were for show.
The long car glided by. He saw a red-on-black gothic ‘D’ on its doors. The escutcheon of Dracula. This VIV was super-well-connected. An apex predator among Big Beasts.
Every landless margrave in Europe claimed kinship with the King of the Cats and declared his (or her) high position in the Order of the Dragon. Syrie Van Epp, a new-born, was your actual vampire royalty. She’d blow her nose on Dracula’s cloak if she felt like it. She slept not on her native soil – she’d been born on a dirigible in-flight between Teheran and Washington, so that was out of the question – but on pallets of large denomination bank-notes.
Beside the tall chauffeur sat a young – or young-appearing – Japanese girl in a crimson sailor suit. The nob’s secretary or catspaw. Not a VIV herself, or she wouldn’t be up front with the help.
Nezumi strayed off the carpet and road-hogged in front of the hearse. She strolled, zigging and zagging deliberately, not getting out of the damn way. She dared the driver to toot his horn. Or nudge her with the razor prow.
Instead, the front passenger window slid down. The v-girl stuck out her head. Her hair was teased into a dandelion clock of watch-spring spirals. She was Asian but with big, round fish-eyes. A slight cosmetic shapeshift or a characteristic of bloodline?
She stuck her little fingers in her mouth and puffed her cheeks.
Richard’s fillings hurt again. Sailor Crimson had whistled – at too high a pitch for human ears.
Somewhere off the main thoroughfare, dogs – or dog-like things – set to howling.
Nezumi eyed the whistling mariner, who simpered. After a pause, she gave a Girl Guide salute and stepped aside, tube held back like a courtier’s cloak.
The hearse passed. Fifteen small skulls were scratched over its rear-wheel housing – like the little victory tally swastikas on a Spitfire. The rear lamps were chandeliers with tinkling ruby quartz pendants around a tube of flame.
More bloodline than taste, obviously.
‘Gotta make way for the homo vampyria,’ John Blaylock had once sung.
‘Eat my native dirt, peasant scum,’ the tinkling chandeliers implied.
Mycroft Holmes, founder of the Diogenes Club, had known Dracula for a monster straight off. But the Ruling Cabal did not entirely resist the Vampire Ascendancy. While followers of Van Helsing hung garlic in their windows to ward off bloodsuckers, Britain’s most secret servants began to recruit the right type of vampire.
As a warm man, Richard was now in a minority at the Club. During the Thatcher Years, when Caleb Croft was Grand High Pooh-Bah of the Secret Services, the Diogenes Club was nearly shut down. Croft was back in Civvy Street with his column in the Daily Mail and Lord Ruthven, Home Secretary in the Blair Government, proved an unlikely champion of an institution which once blackballed him for biting someone’s sister. Richard was kept on like an old armchair no one could agree to throw out.
He had a literal blood connection with his pale agents, maintaining his network through pinprick communion. In the 1960s, they started calling his vampires the Lovelies – and that stuck. Not all of them liked the name. But they took regular drops of his blood on extended tongues. They could feel what he felt. The psychic bods labelled him an empath. He was a feeling man. His instincts were, on the whole, good.
Nezumi was not quite a Lovely. The Club brought her in for odd jobs, but she was deniable and disavowable. That gave her time for school. She’d been at Drearcliff Grange, off and on, for three-quarters of a century, earning ticks, playing the game. Lessons faded from her goldfish memory, so she learned them over and over.
Miss Mouse – that was what ‘nezumi’ meant, and she had no retrievable real name – was one of fewer than five hundred people on the planet who’d been around the last time the odometer turned over all the numbers.
Of course, the European calendar was all but unknown in Japan in 999 CE.
He’d looked it up. In a book, not online. 999 was the end of the Chōtoku Era and the beginning of the Chōhō Era, which lasted until the Kankō Era began in 1004. Barely four years counted as an era in mediaeval Japan.
He had asked Nezumi if she remembered that particular New Year festival.
The vampire schoolgirl shrugged.
He had an idea nothing in particular stuck in her mind from all those Erae. Would tonight be any different?
His birthdays blurred and blended, after barely sixty of them. A war orphan with no memory of his early childhood, he didn’t know his birth date or even his age. He had no retrievable real name, either – and archives had been scoured. Captain Jeperson, who adopted the stateless boy, hadn’t wanted Richard to miss out on cards, parties and presents. He picked June 25, six months either direction from Christmas, as the lad’s birthday. It seemed only a few summers since Richard was excited to unwrap a Gene Autry cap pistol and a Tiger Tim annual… though he might be getting that mixed up with last June’s haul, an antique fowling piece and a first edition Aubrey Beardsley.
Now, around significant dates, he was targeted with offers of Caribbean jaunts for sexy OAPs and affordable interment plans for the unturned. Fewer birthday cards and more spam e-mails. Cyber-boosters hadn’t mentioned that miracle pestilence in the pitch meetings.
That was his own short warm life. A mayfly moment, like Cham-Cham’s Jane Grey reign at the top of the Hit Parade. He tried to conceive of Nezumi’s thousand birthdays… a thousand thirteenth birthdays – too old for dollies, too young for make-up, just right for pop records… a thousand New Years… a thousand Christmases… a thousand Hallowe’ens… four thousand bank holidays.
Thinking about Nezumi’s past gave him an ice-cream head.
He was an empath, though. And connected to her by a drop of blood.
He understood how the v-girl coped. By not worrying too much.
She could appear distracted, but she was in the moment. Any moment.
As the warm learned not to stare into the sun, the long-lived learned not to peer into time’s abyss.
At present, he didn’t feel particularly warm.
He wished he’d worn a scarf. None of the ones he’d brought to Japan matched his outfit.
Getting too old to change – in any sense – meant becoming susceptible to the chill. In the Bund, the temperature dropped. It wasn’t just night. Fewer warm bodies. Far fewer heat sources. Locals didn’t feel the cold. Ice sculptures formed in the park where the Temple of One Thousand Mon
sters had once stood. Beneath the snowdrifts was the tomb of Yuki-Onna, sleeping vampire queen of the East.
Richard had read the reports and talked with Geneviève Dieudonné, who had been in Yōkai Town when the treaty was struck. Geneviève had an invitation to tonight’s do. So had her business partners, Katharine Reed and Penelope Churchward. They were in Los Angeles, keeping well away. Richard inherited history with Geneviève from his predecessors. She took his call and dutifully retold the story for one more member of the Ruling Cabal of the Diogenes Nuisance. She insisted Yuki-Onna was the source of Christina’s icy glamour and warned him not to get too near either of them. Light and Snow both burned.
An oni-masked, shock-wigged apparition shriek-laughed at a pretty police boy. The copper’s hand went to his baton. The hag flapped up from the street and perched on a street-lamp. Richard suspected invisible monofilament.
A vampire policeman – in ill-fitting mufti, but unmistakably a plod from his boots to his whistle – rebuked the young officer for letting the trickster cheek him. The warm copper, face stippled with shaving cuts, nodded and backed away. The detective slouched like a fighter about to punch. One of his eyes swivelled independent of the other. Richard got an impression of sad kindness and a furnace of inner rage. He would not like to be a criminal on this man’s beat. That vulture eye would not miss much.
The masked hag – perhaps a kabuki drag act – leaped from lamp to a wall and clung like a gecko, head turning with a crick-crick-crick. A livid tongue stuck out between wooden teeth and licked stiff demon lips. With shoulder and hip moves that would dislocate a living person’s joints, she scuttled up the wall.
The vampire detective shouted in Japanese.
‘… and stay fucked off!’ Or words to that effect.
DETECTIVE YOSHITAKA AZUMA
He scratched his knuckles. His scrapes healed fast, but the itch was constant. Telling him something. Nearby, a perp needed his face punched. In this district, he might well need his head slammed into a concrete pillar too. And his ribs could definitely do with kicking-in.
Most vampires felt red thirst in their teeth. Azuma had fangs in his knuckles. Little extra nubs of bone shifted under the skin, poking through when he punched a perp. He got more blood on his hands than in his mouth. That kept him going. The punching was more important than the bleeding. That’s what kept his kyuketsuki fed. Righteous violence. He needed to dish out justice.
Ghoul Town on New Year’s Eve was a punishment detail.
Last week, Azuma bit off Jiiji the Pimp’s ear and spat it in his face. This was not conduct Captain Takeda approved of. Jiiji ran a nasty racket. His needle-fingered mermaid lured pervs into alleys. He peeled watches and rings off shrivelled raisin corpses and filched cash and cards. Azuma tossed the mermaid in the bay. Embarrassingly, she couldn’t swim and had to be netted by a patrol boat. She was mindlessly hungry. The thievery was Jiiji’s idea.
The parasite’s injury would heal, but his cellblock pals would make fun of the pink curly baby ear flowering from his scab.
Azuma wasn’t nicknamed ‘Beat’ because he liked beat music.
Though he did. He played the Stray Cats full volume while he thumped perps in the interrogation room. When the knuckle-teeth came out, he got results. Catches squealed. His clear-up rate made complaints go away. If perps got bent out of shape, they’d been asking for it. Lowlifes who hurt other people absented themselves from the courtesy of not being thumped. Or bitten. Or stabbed. Or shot. No matter what their shysters said. Or their relatives. Or his boss.
Captain Takeda kept finding punishment details.
Tonight, Azuma might as well be in uniform.
‘Hah,’ said Takeda, ‘this should suit you. You’ll be a real “beat” cop.’
Azuma kept his rolling eye on Tenjo Kudari, who was taunting Officer Kamikura. Still showing off for the crowd, the masked he-hag ziplined along overhead wires and stuck to walls. His neck twisted like a wrung-out towel. His burglary/assault sheet said he liked to slither into spaces above hotel ceilings, then crawl down light fittings to bleed sleeping drunks. He also lifted wallets from bedside tables. The Festival brought him into the open air.
Kamikura should watch himself if Tenjo Kudari had taken a liking to him.
Every scumball in Tokyo was celebrating the New Year with aggravated scumballery.
All around were petty crims and pilot fish. The thing was to protect guests, though Azuma’s gut told him most of them deserved a thumping too. Few got to wear a tux or furs without stealing something or hurting someone.
If he saw a perp, he’d drag them off the red carpet.
Go for a gun, and pow! between the eyes.
A flash of fang and silver-stiletto-stab! in the heart.
He liked elder vampires. They crumbled to dust and could be swept off the dock. Warm perps stuck around inconveniently, dead or alive. Some, of course, came back.
As he had.
He’d turned after being shot in the head. The metamorphosis was offered by his union medical plan. He’d checked a box on a form years earlier without thinking. A Type V transfusion was administered in the ambulance. He wasn’t dropped off at the morgue but a resurrection clinic. Azuma sat up, blood in his mouth, and got back on the case.
What cop wouldn’t want to solve his own murder?
The shooter was no longer in a position to boast about his kill. Others would have reinforced the message by stamping the shooter’s dog’s head flat, but Azuma didn’t extend grudges to animals. It wasn’t any mutt’s fault its owner was a lowlife. He took the dog home and looked after it for a while, but it ran off.
Azuma felt little changed in himself. In bars, he drank ounces of blood rather than sake. And he had fangs in his hands. He’d always worked at night. Seeing better in the dark was a new advantage. Perps were more afraid of him now. Solid citizens were no less wary. Meeting a cop was seldom good news. Meeting a vampire cop always meant having a bad night. He didn’t brood and got on with the job. Takeda, a warm man concerned not to appear prejudiced, eased off on reprimands when Azuma became a vampire – if not punishment details.
Guests flowed along the red carpet.
Three cosplay cops joined Kamikura. Their hydraulic-assisted armour hissed at the joints as they stamped across the street in arrow formation. Saki-A, senior rank signalled by flashing blue epaulettes, lowered a cyber-monocle from a wire pyramid fixed to her wig. A laserlight tagged Tenjo Kudari. The ceiling spectre flinched, but it wasn’t a cutting beam.
He twisted to present scrawny, mocking buttocks.
Saki-K, the shortest cop, flicked a razor yo-yo on a thirty-foot string with deadly butt-stinging accuracy. Tail salted, the shrieking Tenjo Kudari made himself scarce. Saki-K reeled in her yo-yo with a wrist-snap and held up her hand for a high-five. Kamikura sissy-slapped her palm. The vampire cops giggled like four-year olds.
Kamikura would have been better off with the trapdoor demon.
For now, the Bund had its own police force. Urufu Inugami, the watchdog who ran the yo-yo girls, wouldn’t stay in post after the handover. His department swallowed by Takeda’s command, Inugami would lope off unthanked. Azuma felt for the hairy bastard. Inugami’s policing was not to the Captain’s taste. The Wolfman wouldn’t take to a choke collar.
Azuma had been in and out of the Bund for years. Perps stupidly thought that because it wasn’t strictly Tokyo they could claim sanctuary here. Survivors learned a hard lesson. Beyond the Wall, crims had no right to draw breath. Predators smelled the difference between a tourist protected by diktat of the Wolfman and a scumball who was anybody’s for the taking. Some hard nuts begged Azuma to haul them back to a district with interrogations and beatings and lawyers and courts.
Even as a vampire, this wasn’t his patch. He’d locked horns with Inugami, fighting over scraps. Takeda dropped hints he’d sponsor Azuma for the command if he straightened his tie and became the department’s tame blood fiend. Azuma wasn’t interested in promotion. He did
n’t want to live in Ghoul Town. If anything, he wanted to move out of the city. He idly fancied a house on the beach.
Azuma had been warm most of his life. He was still wary of vampires.
RICHARD JEPERSON
He was never more aware of the beating of his heart – of his neck and wrist pulses – than in places like this.
In cities where vampires clustered in roosts and catacombs – or were penned in run-down warrens by warm-majority governments – the undead retained a mystique long since worn off in London, Toronto or New Orleans. No reason why Tokyo shouldn’t integrate. According to the latest census, four-fifths of the city’s yōkai had addresses outside the Bund. The Principality of Light was an anachronism.
A couple of bakeneko in frilly bikinis mewed at Nezumi, brushing the furry backs of their hands against her blazer. Their ears pricked and whiskers quivered. The catgirls were taken by her straight white hair. They might copy her frostilocks. Nezumi didn’t tell them how she came by the look. It was not a fashion choice, but a scar. It went back to her first involvement with the Diogenes Club, nearly eighty years ago.
Did Nezumi ever mistake Richard for Edwin Winthrop or Charles Beauregard? They had sat in his chair before him and set her extracurricular assignments. She treated missions as homework. She was diligent, prompt and neat – if often whimsical.
Vampires weren’t supposed to be so imaginative.
Richard sensed friendliness in the bakeneko but also prickly territoriality. A newcomer excited curiosity. They admired Nezumi for holding up the ostentatious hearse. Bund residents must be bored with the same old fang faces. A fresh playmate was welcome but also potentially a rival… or a snack.
Nezumi was polite but reserved. Her Japanese was formal. She wasn’t up on the latest slanguange, fashions and crazes. Her school socks were tight, when cool girls were wearing them wrinkled. And she was a professional. A mouse cats couldn’t play with.
The bakeneko got bored and abandoned Nezumi to tease a passing Japanese fellow about his peculiar pompadour. This guest was a better prospect for affectionate pestering. They slunk towards their target, tails up, furry midriffs taut.
