by Kim Newman
I mentioned the thing about him not looking at us.
‘It’s not that,’ said Dru. ‘He doesn’t want us to look at him.’
Naturally, after that, Christina and I stared at Majin. If he noticed – and I’m sure he did – he didn’t return the favour.
‘That mousey girl should mind her Ps and Qs,’ said Dru. ‘Or she shan’t have any jam for supper.’
There was no mousey girl. Christina and I exchanged shrugs.
‘Just because you can’t see her yet doesn’t mean she’s not important to the story,’ said Dru. ‘You should never forget the School Mouse.’
‘Yes, dear,’ said Christina.
Dru started humming ‘Tit-Willow’ again.
I appreciate that, in the context of comic opera, execution can have an amusing side – hence all those songs about heads being chopped off and punishments fitting the crime. ‘That singular anomaly, the vampire bicyclist – I’ve got her on the list, I’m sure she’ll not be missed.’ But why The Mikado includes a sentimental ditty about suicide is a mystery to me. I am told you have to be English to understand Gilbert and Sullivan, Punch and Judy, and cricket.
The Lieutenant walked ahead of the procession of ox-carts like the man with a red flag preceding an automobile. Higurashi had said accommodations would be found for our party in Yōkai Town. I trusted he didn’t mean a cemetery.
While Majin’s attention was on our coffins, Kostaki sent scouts into the fog with orders to whistle if we were being led into an ambush. Our spies are Mr Yam, as outlandish here as in London, and Marit Verlaine, an expressionless woman who keeps her cards close to her chest. Kostaki still thinks like a soldier, which is just as well. He’s a good judge of character. Yam, an assassin, and Verlaine, a mercenary, are about the only ones of our party I’d trust after a long dry spell. Most of us would abandon the mission and hare off in search of warm blood. Red thirst makes vampires selfish, small-minded – and easy to gull, catch and kill. It’s a reason why, before Dracula, we never really accomplished anything as a species. Too intent on our next feeding to find common cause, we don’t much care for each other’s company. Wolves are pack animals. Vampires are not.
Yam and Verlaine are as thirsty as the rest of us, but are professionals. No one wants to hire an unreliable mercenary. Like me, they earn their living by inflicting the kind of harm on people that means I’ll never be short of work. Although I suspect their opponents need burying more often than doctoring.
How many silvered swords are there in Tokyo? How many cases of silver bullets?
Majin led us along a thoroughfare, broad enough so the fog made buildings on both sides indistinct. We were watched every step of the way. Shapes and eyes behind screens and in shadows. Aside from the tengu, who had a pressing reason to show himself, the streets were empty. The inhabitants of Yōkai Town kept out of Majin’s way – and ours.
‘What does yōkai mean?’ asked Whelpdale, a newborn vampire.
‘Among other things, us,’ I said. ‘Yōkai can be translated as “monster”, “ghost”, “goblin” or “apparition”.’
‘And this is their town?’
‘It’s a polite Japanese way of saying ghetto.’
‘I suspicioned as much, Miss Doodydunny,’ said Whelpdale. ‘I knows a rookery when I sees one. Look at this how’s yer father. No life to it at all. We’ll run the place inside a week, mark my words and no mistake.’
In London, Whelpdale – a lesser light of the book trade – got on the wrong side of Special Branch by printing an obscene illustrated pamphlet entitled The Private Memoirs of Prince Dracula. He didn’t write the smut himself. The author was his brother-in-law, a warm sharpie too slippery to be taken into custody. As publisher of record, Whelpdale was convicted of seditious libel – a capital offence if you libelled Dracula, seditiously or otherwise. Exercising newfound vampire flexibility, he squeezed between the bars of Pentonville Prison, breaking bones that healed within moments, and fled as far as he could. He was still floppy and stretched out of shape.
‘Japanese prints are a popular item back home,’ said Whelpdale.
I knew which type of prints he meant. Pillow books – exquisitely tasteful pictures of folk doing things in beds, or things traditionally done in beds done in other more stimulating locations. Unlike every other vampire on the Macedonia, Whelpdale thought to pack a trunk with books – exclusively his own publications. Thanks to a shortage of reading matter on board, Christina and I have been through all of them. Even Kostaki picked one up and looked at it. Amusement wears thin after a dozen or so pages. The author is another who should learn anatomy: many acts he describes would only be possible if – like Whelpdale – one were practically boneless.
Eventually, Majin signalled a halt in front of a torii gate – two orange-painted pillars with crossbars and a slate roof. The Lieutenant had the foreman Kannuki – whose long face looks like pulled dough, with raisins for eyes – tear a docker’s hook through thick cobweb curtains hanging across the gate. Fat, fist-sized spiders scattered as the web shredded. The foreman took a mean, childish joy in stamping on them with spade-blade clogs. They squealed as they popped. The markings on their hairy backs resembled sketches of distressed human faces.
Beyond the gate was a large tiered building. Red wood, with flaking white and gold trim. A stack of projecting roofs like large square hats. Set in its own ill-kept grounds, with a shallow frozen pool in a front courtyard. The gardens were rimed with frost. Hard, dirty crusts remained from recent snowfall.
A banner bore red characters. SEN KWAI JI.
‘What does that say?’ asked Christina. ‘“No hawkers or circulars”?’
‘Or “Beware of the dog”?’ suggested Whelpdale.
Considering the specialised diet of dogs in this place, that wasn’t a poor guess.
‘So far as I can make out,’ I said, ‘Temple of One Thousand Monsters.’
‘Sounds lovely,’ said Christina.
‘Poetic licence, ducks,’ said Dru. ‘There are only six hundred and ninety-eight monsters. Eight hundred and fifteen, if you include us. Eight hundred and sixteen, if you include the Demon Man with white hands. I’m reckoning the willow tree and the lady growing out of the willow tree as one singular monster, but you might disagree. Or not. Makes little difference.’
‘Don’t pay her attention,’ said Christina, airily. ‘She makes up numbers to sound impressive. When she says there are seven thousand, six hundred and twelve grains of millet spilled on the floor, no one ever counts them and contradicts her.’
‘Seventy-six hours, fourteen minutes and three seconds,’ said Dru. ‘That’s how long eternal life lasted for Prince Casamassima. Old black blood turned to charcoal and clogged his heart. Which went sploosh.’
Christina was cross with Dru for bringing this up. She shimmered.
But we had other concerns. A deputation of three awaited us in the temple courtyard, on a raised stone platform by the iced-over pool.
A squat dwarf sat on his haunches, stunted body barely supporting a swollen head like a rotten green potato. Curly fangs stuck out of his slit mouth. He wore a coat of woven rushes and a circular straw hat a yard across.
A white-faced beautiful woman posed on a mat, playing a samisen – a long-necked musical instrument. Her kimono was decorated with a flight of cranes. She nodded with each plucked note.
A singular little fellow looked like a living folded umbrella. He had one bare, muscular, hairy human leg and a corrugated flesh cone body, sporting a single large eye and a smiling set of fleshy lips, and a topknot with a bow in it.
Whelpdale swore in astonishment.
‘These are yōkai,’ I said.
I’d known what to expect and was still rattled.
In woodcuts, the creatures look absurd and almost endearing. In the flesh, they exude wrongness. In the West, vampire shapeshifters are swimmers who stick close to the shore. They take on aspects of bats and wolves – or, in rarer cases, insects and reptiles – b
ut retain basic human anatomy. They assume other forms for limited spells, often just a few minutes. With something like relief, they revert to walking on two legs and showing more skin than fur. At most, they have permanently sharper teeth.
In the East, traditions are different. Other practices, other shapes, have emerged.
Even with his bones crushed to paste, I doubt Whelpdale could turn himself inside out like an umbrella and can’t conceive of circumstances whereby he’d want to.
Make no mistake: the yōkai of Japan are vampires, though distant cousins only to the nosferatu of Europe. The same goes for the aswang of the Philippines, the penanggalan of Malaya and the pontianak of Java. Not vampires Lord Ruthven would invite to Downing Street for a rubber of whist and a nibble on the maid… or that Prince Dracula would baptise with foeman’s blood during a Carpathian Guard initiation. Dracula’s get are shadows of their sire – so many seem impersonators or imitators, littler men trying to fill the Prince’s armour or copying the cut of his cloak. Yuki-Onna, who reigns over the vampires of the East as Dracula has set himself up as the Wicked Warlock of the West, is a distant mother to her subjects, seldom deigning to walk among them and yet demanding reverence. Her cold rages are famous, but she’s known for killing by slow freezing – the leaching of warmth is as much a part of her mode of feeding as the taking of blood – rather than avalanche. Withal, she encourages variety in her yōkai followers, not imitation. Is it for her chilly amusement or out of cold curiosity? How much shape can a shapeshifter shift? Perhaps only lack of imagination prevents General Iorga, say, from turning himself inside out and rearranging his bones into a living writing-desk. What appears grotesque to Western eyes may be decorative in the East.
Some yōkai vampires (futakuchi) have extra lamprey mouths on the backs of their heads or necks, hidden by long hair, used for feeding. Others (krasue) wear their lungs and entrails on the outsides of their bodies, and decorate their exposed innards with ribbons and bows. Many indulge in practices that would disgust von Orlok, the most repulsive vampire in Europe. Jikininki feed off carrion, skulking on battlefields to suck the spoiled blood of the slain – a practice as alien to European vampires as eating raw fish is to warm Westerners. The frog-faced pygmies of the kappa bloodline live in ponds, crawling out of the water to eat farmers’ livers and rape their wives. They bleed horses and cows, fixing mouths over the animals’ anuses while sticking tongue-tentacles into their bowels. The pale, perfume-and-powder murgatroyds who parade their ennui nightly in Mayfair and Park Lane wouldn’t go in for that. Their frilly shirts and velvet britches would get filthy.
‘At least the popsy with the sideways guitar looks halfway normal,’ said Whelpdale. ‘Though it sounds like she forgot to kill the cat before stringing its guts on that there plink-a-plonk affair. Is she one of them geisha girlies?’
The woman played and sang. Japanese music used to sound harsh and discordant to Western ears, but the Mikado craze gave London aesthetes a taste for it, along with fans and lanterns. As she plucked notes, the musician’s neck elongated by six or eight feet; a trick of the rokurokubi bloodline. Christina was revolted and pained. Dru smiled, enraptured by the trick, and flapped the heels of her hands together. Whelpdale whistled, out of tune.
Majin walked up to the trio. The umbrella yōkai hopped behind the long-necked woman. The green-faced goblin rolled into a ball. The woman’s neck undulated like a serpent. She was her own charmer, head swaying to the music of her hands. She smiled down on the Lieutenant, showing coal-black fangs.
Majin raised his hand and his glove throbbed with light. The threads of his pentagram sigil burned scarlet. It was a signal for us to come forward – or at least the most important of us: Kostaki and Christina. And me, to translate.
Majin stood back.
‘I am Lady Oyotsu,’ said the rokurokubi woman, voice ululating from distended vocal cords. ‘Abbess of the temple. These are my attendants, Abura Sumashi and Kasa-obake.’
Abura Sumashi, the potato-head, rolled around so his grinning face was uppermost. His tongue poked out. I wouldn’t trust him near the back ends of my livestock, if I had any. Kasa-obake the umbrella demon opened and closed. His struts were meat-sheathed ribs, fixed to a handle that was once a human spine. His long-lashed eye winked. Christina’s Paris parasol has an admirer.
‘My Lady Abbess, I am Geneviève Dieudonné, a physician,’ I said in Japanese. ‘This is Captain Kostaki, late of the Carpathian Guard, and Princess Casamassima, who you will find an enormous pain in the neck. We are yōkai from Europe. Kyuketsuki. In our language: vampires.’
Lady Oyotsu looked at each of us in turn, paying particular attention to Christina. Her head bobbed. Her neck was muscular and supple. At full extent, she was less like a giraffe than one of the prehistoric monster statues in Crystal Palace park. Her pallor was painted, as were the ash-smudge eyebrows in the middle of her forehead and the cherry-red bow of her lips.
‘Vampires, you are welcome guests,’ she said.
When she speaks, her mouth seems a dark cavity. Her teeth are artificially blackened. Whelpdale (the elasticated man) says the practice (ohaguro), once common among mature Japanese women, gives him ‘the shuddering flesh-creeps’ more than the Lady’s extensible neck. I don’t see the point either, but any continent that invented the bustle and the shrunken hat has no cause to take a superior attitude.
Majin made a signal and the ox-carts were unloaded. Kannuki and the workmen set the boxes down outside the gate, taking care not to step onto temple grounds. At a nod from Lady Oyotsu, several ogre-like yōkai – as big as Kannuki – shambled from the shadows to take over, hauling coffins into the courtyard.
‘Eight hundred and fifteen again,’ said Dru. ‘One of us just died.’
Having spoken, the oracle dispensed no more wisdom. She looked at us cross-eyed for a moment. Then wandered off, distracted and skipping with every third step. When everyone pays attention, Dru loses interest.
Christina – as appalled as anyone else – tried to jog the conversation along with a ‘be that as it may’ but Lady Oyotsu politely asked me what the strange girl had said.
‘Don’t tell her anything upsetting, Geneviève,’ said the Princess.
Lady Oyotsu’s neck extended a foot or so. An unnerving ratcheting-stretching sound accompanied the process. Her bones must telescope. I had an idea it would be unwise to lie to her face.
‘Our friend believes there has been a death,’ I said. ‘She has visions.’
The yōkai woman’s features became a mask of sympathy.
Christina was annoyed with me, as usual. I had a clear flash of her thoughts – she was vowing to learn Japanese as soon as possible or find someone else fluent in the tongue, so she could dispense with my questionable services.
Good luck to her.
Kostaki looked at the stack of coffins. I knew what he was thinking. Had true death come to one of our sleepers?
My guess was also that – if Dru was reading the entrails properly, and not getting vampires mixed up with spiders – the unknown casualty was someone in a box. Vampires occasionally die in their sleep like anyone else. Since elders crumble to dust, autopsies have to be performed with a sieve.
‘It’ll be the better part of a night’s work to open the boxes and count heads,’ I said.
‘We can’t wake them all yet,’ said Christina. ‘It wouldn’t be practical.’
Kostaki agreed with her. He was still unsure of the ground under us. I didn’t argue with them. We can’t let Dru direct our policy. Even if her mad witterings are a smokescreen for a deeper cleverness, she is wayward and wilful.
As our only doctor, responsibility for safely reviving the sleepers is mine. I’d prefer to take time over it, giving everyone proper examination. Vampires get aches and pains from extended periods of lassitude – especially if we overfeed before hibernation. Leech-bloat is a common ailment of vampire gluttons. Lying in blood-boltered coffins, greedy guts swell like overcooked sausages. Unsightl
y rents open in their skins. Even the tiniest prick from the business end of a stake or a silver scalpel makes leech-bloat patients burst like balloons filled with blood. Slayers used to get messy surprises when they destroyed them – they could be splattered head to foot with gouts of acidic gore and rotten flesh.
Until recently, vampire medicine wasn’t a practical field of study. Too much of it is still folklore and quackery. Diseases peculiar to vampires don’t even have Latin names yet. Leech-bloat might be medici eruperunt. We are too easily classified as simply sick. In some of its many forms, the vampire condition is barely distinguishable from disease. Christina becomes faint at times – almost ghostly, distracted and transparent. She flares if I enquire after her health. I have seen her take minutes to make her hands solid enough to pick up a cup. Many of us are ill and don’t know it. Almost all of us are in some way mad.
Before organising mass uncoffining, Christina was keen to establish herself in Yōkai Town. Ignoring the potato person and the vampire umbrella as comic relief, she fixed on Lady Oyotsu, self-evidently a person of rank. Through me, the Princess wanted to quiz her about the Emperor. I know better than to ask any Japanese to express an opinion on the divine personage. A hint of impertinence and the Abbess wouldn’t be the only one with a stretched neck.
I still get an occasional crick from when Mr Yam tried to kill me.
Happy days. Simpler times.
Which reminded me, where were Kostaki’s scouts, Yam and Verlaine? Evidently, their mission hadn’t ended with our arrival in Yōkai Town.
Dru floated off on another whimsy. She kept hanging her head, as if trying to imitate Lady Oyotsu’s flexible vertebrae, and looking at the temple through half-closed eyes.
‘It’s upsidesy-downsy,’ she said. ‘Cellars on the top, chimneys in the basement.’ She did a limber handstand and said, ‘That’s the ticket.’
Christina, weary as a mother of three at the close of a very long bank holiday, told Dru to stop being silly and brush herself off.
‘Their attic is deep, deep down,’ said Dru. ‘And their boot scrapers are above the front door.’
