by Kim Newman
GEIST 97
Now, after he’d almost given up, a clue was handed to him on a platter by this Dr Akiba. He intuited no deception from the man.
He’d never considered the 97 as anything but a number. Now, its indivisibility might be significant. Or was that another false trail? British Intelligence hadn’t turned up answers since 1945. He knew this to be true. He’d risen so high in the Diogenes Club he had access to secrets withheld from his father. Sometimes, he wondered whether that privilege – more than duty or aptitude – was what had kept him at his post all these years.
This trip, undertaken at the end of the century, had seemed an honourable finis to his front-line career. It might be time to step back, take a consulting position. Advise the Ruling Cabal. The Lovelies could look after the mysteries. Now, apparently, Jeperson’s Last Case reopened Jeperson’s First Case – the mystery of himself.
That made him suspicious.
Standing outside the Armourdillo, he looked up beyond the vehicle’s ridged back at the Daikaiju Building. Eyelights burned in the sky.
He had to concentrate to stop scratching his sleeve. His whole skin prickled.
Something didn’t fit properly. No, something fit too properly.
The Ghost/Yurei connection was convenient – a nice, juicy, personal distraction.
Who wouldn’t want to solve their own mystery first and last of all? And would drop anything else to hound after that hare.
But he was in the Bund for something else. He was to look up, not in. Think forward, not back.
Did he detect the subtle touch of Christina Light?
Or any of the other Big Beasts in the Rogues’ Gallery. John Alucard. Derek Leech. Jun Zero. The Broken Doll.
He must focus. See what was in front of him.
Which was Syrie Van Epp. Dr Akiba had given her a once-over too. She was clear of the frightful fungus. So far as could be told. But she was still coldly furious.
Syrie was a Big Beast too.
Before Wings Over the World moved in, there had to be a disaster.
An epidemic would count. Were there WOtW wondercraft above the clouds? A high-priced antidote ready to roll, provided the Princess signed over half her realm?
Nezumi stood unobtrusively nearby, eyes on him.
Mr Horror was gone and the funeral cars nowhere to be seen. Who’d given them a clean bill of health? It couldn’t just be bribery. In any situation where money and position could open a door, Syrie had unmatched power.
Who was in the back of the hearse?
It couldn’t be Alucard – the Man Who Was or Might As Well Be Dracula. He had his own New Year’s Eve party to host. Geneviève said Mr A planned to bungee jump off the Hollywood sign at midnight, before the premiere of Vladiator, the new Ridley Scott historical epic.
But it was someone close to the King of the Cats.
The ranking EarthGuard officer – who wasn’t in a decontamination suit – strode over and barked at Dr Akiba.
Richard tried to read Colonel Golgotha, but got only static. Richard’s trick didn’t work on stone-cold sociopaths. Monomaniacs threw him off too – the devout and dutiful, vampires with counting fixations or overwhelming red thirst, the deeply dry and boring, and run-of-the-mill addicts. Whatever they thought or felt was blotted out by idées fixes.
Golgotha was a tall, hard man. Tight cheek muscles. The sort of flat belly you’d break your knuckles on if you tried to sucker punch. Tinted aviator glasses. Male model haircut.
‘You can go,’ he said, in English to Richard and Syrie.
That was a surprise to both of them. Welcome, but worrying.
Neither wanted to query his decision with ‘Are you sure?’ – but, really, was he sure? Golgotha acted more like a fighter than an epidemiologist. Richard looked to the doctor for a qualified second opinion.
Dr Akiba shrugged inside his suit.
‘Enjoy the party,’ said Golgotha, with an unmistakeable shooing motion.
Richard wished Syrie would take off her digishades. He’d like to see her eyes.
She’d been annoyed to be detained. Now she was irritated to be let go.
A man was dead. Another mutilated – for his own good, admittedly. A dangerous disease was possibly loose.
And EarthGuard’s response was ‘Happy New Year’?
That couldn’t be right.
SI MOLINAR
The phones stopped ringing and flashing. Molinar wasn’t relieved.
Verlaine speed-dialled from her desk.
‘Who are you calling?’ he asked.
‘Inugami,’ she said, ‘but it doesn’t matter. It rings, but no one picks up. Not even a machine.’
‘Busy night,’ he suggested, knowing that wasn’t the issue.
Verlaine cut off the call and speed-dialled again.
‘Hyakume has had some woman who can speak leave a dozen messages,’ she said. ‘… and the same, her number just rings.’
Molinar tried to raise Hyakume’s interlocutor on his wrist radio. No response. He clicked on a couple of random contacts. No one answered. Which was improbable.
Verlaine gave it a last shot. ‘Nope – nothing from EarthGuard. An emergency service. We’ve been deliberately cut off. The lines don’t seem dead but we’re not getting through.’
‘Arashi,’ Molinar said, raising his voice – which everyone did with Suzan, though they knew she was invisible not deaf. ‘See if you can reach anyone. Use Fujiwara’s line. He has every woman in the Bund on auto-dial. He always bangs on about how his system can’t be hacked.’
He followed what he assumed was Suzan walking across the room. She took care to shift chairs, brush the leaves of potted plants, and tread heavily – so far as bare feet on plush carpet could tread heavily – so people knew she was coming. She had a phobia about being bumped into. Something to do with walking around naked most of the time.
Mitsuru Fujiwara’s cordless phone – sleeker, blacker and with more functions than anyone else’s – lifted from its cradle. It beeped as buttons were pressed.
Verlaine looked at her screen.
‘The system is telling me it’s running. I’ve got position markers all over the building, pinging locations. Our ops are reporting in. All normal – except they’re getting responses from us, which we aren’t sending.’
‘How?’
‘I don’t know. Fujiwara would, but—’
‘He’s chasing bakeneko tails.’
‘Well, yes. Could this be…?’
Verlaine pointed at the ceiling.
Molinar looked up. The Princess?
‘The thing that’s to happen. The Ascent?’
So long awaited, so little explained. Christina Light thought it would be a nice surprise that way. So Molinar did too. He tried to explore, theoretically, the possibility that the Ascent was a dangerous jaunt into the unknown with potentially catastrophic side effects. That went against the glamour. Needles burned in his eyes.
‘Can’t see it. Fujiwara said not to worry about the Bug Thing. This is something else. An attack. Aum Draht?’
‘What have they got against us?’
‘They’re terrorists, Verlaine. They don’t hurt who they want to, they hurt who they can.’
‘That’s just it. They can’t hurt us. We’re not a soft touch.’
She gestured at the office. Computer terminals, racks of equipment, weapon lockers. Framed commendations. Charts and plans. The Princess wouldn’t rely on this department if it wasn’t fit for purpose. They’d been on a war-preparedness footing for a hundred years.
Even Watson and Kuchisake were formidable. Devoted to each other and terrifying to everyone else. Albert ‘Smiler’ Watson had taken a razor to his own cheeks to match the scarification that gave Kuchisake her nine-inch open mouth. Unlike Verlaine’s, their bloodlines did not automatically heal self-inflicted wounds. They sliced their faces like paper sculpture to suit muy loco ideals of beauty. Watson wore a red regimental tunic with medals and sabre. Kuchisake�
�s party outfit was a formal kimono with layers and lattices. Instead of Verlaine’s hold-out gun, she carried a fan with dart spines. Open and held over the lower half of her face, it displayed a demure painted simper. A considerably less elegant weapon was concealed in the folds of her dress: a pair of old pruning shears.
‘Listen up,’ he told them. ‘You too, Arashi.’
Watson’s and Kuchisake’s eyes swivelled at him. Fujiwara’s phone held still in the air.
‘Until midnight, the Bund is a country. We are its army. We can only rely on ourselves. Outsiders are to be considered enemy combatants unless they prove themselves otherwise. We urgently need intel on the situation in the Plaza and in the rest of this building. We need to know how our comms have been disabled, and we need – dammit, we need Fujiwara – to get back online.’
The elevator arrived. Someone coming down from above.
Others must have noticed the shut-down. Security was the logical place to come.
Who would the Princess send?
Or was this an enemy incursion? Floor 88 might be the last ditch.
He pulled his gun.
The elevator doors opened. For a long second, no one moved.
Then a fat man erupted from the elevator. He was wrapped in a metallic sheet and wore a twisted silver foil tiara. He held a stone bottle of sake in one fist and a sheaf of hundred-dollar bills in the other.
NEZUMI
As Derek aimed a blacklight gun at her, he made a zhzhzhzh with his mouth. The gadget looked like a prop from a science fiction TV programme.
‘Ex-ter-min-ate,’ he croaked.
She smiled that he’d had the same thought she did.
He passed the UV over her hands and feet where spatter would most likely be found. No suspect spots were lit.
Then, to finish up, he told her to shut her eyes and flashed the projector in her face.
When she could look again, Derek was concerned. He pointed at the corner of his mouth.
‘You’ve got some specks, ah…’
The blacklight wouldn’t only reveal the fungal agent. It was used at crime scenes to find where splashed blood had been cleaned up.
‘I fed, earlier,’ she admitted.
He looked at her as if she were a monster.
‘A rabbit, at the legation house where we’re staying,’ she explained.
‘Ah, poor bunny.’
The unctuous liaison official had offered to source human blood. That would have upset Derek less.
‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘I didn’t finish it off.’
That was true. The rabbit would be good for a few more feeds. She didn’t reckon it had much of a future, though. She’d tasted imminent death in its blood, like mould in jam.
The smudges weren’t visible without the blacklight. But she still licked the back of her hand and wiped her mouth with it.
‘You look like a little kitty,’ said Derek, cheerful again.
Nezumi remembered the bakeneko girls. Cat vampires were as common in Japan as bat vampires in Europe. Her bloodline was unlike either. She couldn’t shift shape. She was a winter witch, like Yuki-Onna. A girl of the snow. Warmer than the Ice Queen, though. Her body temperature was 93.4 degrees – higher than the undead average. Still cool enough to tick off the 98.6, the hate group which professed to take pride in their ‘normal’ warmth. Other people – she thought of them as butterfly collectors – were more interested in classifying her than she was herself.
‘You’re good to go,’ said Derek, giving her the thumbs-up. ‘No flies on you. Or necrotising fungus.’
She thanked him.
‘Give us a toggle, would you,’ he asked, half-turning and shaking his head inside his helmet. He pointed to a release catch just out of his reach.
She pressed, and seals unstuck.
Musk escaped and her fangs prickled. Fortunately he was looking the other way. She kept her lips pressed over her teeth.
He twisted his helmet as if releasing a bayonet-cap light bulb and lifted it off its ridged rim.
He vigorously scratched his nose.
‘Been wanting to do that since about ten seconds after I put it on,’ he said. ‘Imagine poor old Neil Armstrong having an itchy hooter from the Earth to the Moon. No wonder NASA wanted to shoot off one of your mob in a coffin. No complaints to Ground Control, then. Still, good on Neil. Inspiration to the warm world.’
Olof Carlsen, the seventh astronaut to walk on the moon, was a vampire. Sunlight, unfiltered by Earth’s atmosphere, blinded him. The warm mission commander – played by Tom Hanks in the film – had to donate blood to save his life. Since then, only the Russians sent nosferatu into space.
‘It’s safe, then,’ she said.
Derek confidently breathed in lungfuls of air.
‘Can’t be sure without fiddly tests back at the lab,’ he said, ‘but the likely scenario is that your nasty has mutated on contact with the environment. Turned harmless. At the worst, nothing a tin of foot powder won’t shift. Terrorists generally don’t know jack about microbiology. Word’s come down we shouldn’t make too big a brouhaha. No one likes a party-spoiler, eh?’
Nezumi remembered the policeman’s foot melting in his shoe.
Nothing harmless about that.
Derek scratched his scraggy beard.
‘I always have this reaction,’ he said. ‘I reckon these nuke-bio-chem jim-jams keep in as much dreaded lurgy as they keep out.’
‘What will you do now?’ she asked.
‘Too much to hope we can pack up and go home. We’ll be here all night at this rate. Colonel G-Force wants to have a shout at chummy the mad bomber. The bloke you pigstuck. Reckon he’ll be wishing you’d stabbed deeper.’
Nezumi agreed. She hadn’t left the boy alive as a mercy.
Kill only when necessary to save life. A wounded enemy is often more use than a dead one.
Derek dug a fat, swollen paperback out of his kit-bag. The Lord of the Rings.
‘Before the balloon went up, I was getting to a good bit… the Siege of Minas Tirith. Have you read Tolkien? He’s my absolute favourite. Rather read a page of names by him than a bloody shelf of Jeffrey bloody Archer.’
‘Tolkien? The man who wrote the very long book?’
Derek was mock-offended.
‘Long?! Nah, mate, it’s not long enough. Whenever I get near the end, I wish there were more of it, you know. Pages and pages more. Extra chapters, fit in between the ones that are there. More endings. Longer farewells. I suppose that’s why when I turn over the last page I always take a breath, chug a couple of weeks’ worth of Shortland Street on video, then start again at the beginning. Well, before the beginning… with The Hobbit.’
‘I like The Hobbit,’ she admitted. ‘But I prefer stories without dragons, swords and wizards.’
‘Get enough of that at home, do you?’
‘I like books about girls at school.’
‘You certainly ought to get enough of that at home.’
She admitted he was right.
Being at Drearcliff Grange wasn’t like reading books about school. Nezumi had tried not to be disappointed. The difference between real school and Louise Teazle’s books about school was nowhere near as tragic as the shortfall between the honourable code of bushido and the scurvy conduct of most samurai. She had school spirit in her heart and strived to live by it.
Just, kind, fair.
Only decapitate when absolutely necessary.
‘I think your Dad wants you,’ said Derek, waving his helmet.
Nezumi looked. Mr Jeperson stepped onto the red carpet a few paces behind Mrs Van Epp.
‘That’s not my father,’ she said, wrinkling her nose. ‘I’m looking after him.’
‘Oh, I see,’ said Derek. ‘You’re his minder.’
She nodded.
‘Well, mind how you go,’ he said. ‘Don’t drink anything that tastes rum. Or anyone either.’
‘Good night, Derek,’ she said, bowing. ‘The Road Goes
Ever On…’
He grinned and waved his Lord of the Rings at her.
SI MOLINAR
The Senator did backflips and a cartwheel, showing the dress pants – rolled up to his chubby knees – he wore under his robe. In a mood to par-tay, he wasn’t shy about letting everyone know it.
John Blutarski (R), Illinois.
Red-flagged on the ‘annoying guest’ list. But not someone Molinar could shoot.
The Senator slid his bottle-arm around Kuchisake and flapped dollar bills at the fan held over her mouth.
‘How’s about a little kissy-kissy, nursie?’
She folded her fan-mask and the Senator boggled. He wasn’t too far gone to notice her cheek rifts.
Watson drew his sabre and was on the point of causing a diplomatic incident when the drunk American was pulled away from the Japanese vampire and waltzed across the room. His limbs jerked as if on strings. The foil sheet unwound from his blubbery, hairy torso.
‘I can’t see lips,’ he said, in wonder, ‘but I can feel them.’
Then an invisible pillow flattened his nose. He went cross-eyed. Panic momentarily cut through his drunk daze and he went to sleep. The sheet fell over his face and riffled with his snore.
‘Thank you, Arashi,’ said Molinar.
‘I’d ’ave stuck ’im, the blighter,’ said the Smiler.
The sake bottle rose. A bubble glugged out of the neck then disappeared.
‘We can’t be at war with America,’ said Verlaine.
‘Dunno,’ said the Smiler. ‘This is Japan-like and them Yanks ’as memories like blinkin’ elephinks. Remember Pearl Bailey?’
A Victorian ranker – with a Victoria Cross to prove it – Albert Watson had a shaky grasp on the twentieth century. He was another one who came over on the Macedonia. He’d be even further out to sea tomorrow. Only his sweetheart with the matching horror-gob kept him compost mentist, he said.
‘The Senator was on the razzle earlier,’ said Molinar. ‘We had complaints. He’s a nuisance, not a threat. Tie him to a chair as a precaution. Put baby’s bottle where he can reach it.’
‘I’ll piss in it first!’
