by Kim Newman
Kostaki couldn’t be bothered to explain anything. Let Whelpdale assume what he would. For he hadn’t guessed Kostaki’s real secret.
If it got about that Kostaki was visiting geisha houses, people would be less inclined to ask after his other appetites – whether he’d slaked his red thirst lately.
But he couldn’t be detained.
‘I am making an inspection,’ he said.
‘I thought nothing contradictory,’ said Whelpdale, winking. His eye opened wide as a mouth, displacing the rest of his features, then shrank shut. The Englishman was practically a yōkai. ‘I advise a most thorough inspection. Inside and out, if the mood takes. And an extra peek under the carpet afterwards, just to be on the safe side.’
The newborn sauntered away, limber knees bending like springs. Whelpdale prospered in Yōkai Town, making the best of his lot.
Kostaki looked at the faceless geisha. Yōkai of the noppera-bō bloodline. They nodded at him, heads like ostrich eggs with wigs. One had a portrait painted on her smooth flesh, but it was smudged. Suckers in their palms resembled pink pressed rose-flowers. Hidden in their intricate folds were thorns. The noppera-bō fed by fastening these hand-mouths on the necks of those who planted kisses where their lips should have been. What had transacted between them and Whelpdale?
Kostaki hurried on past the Teahouse of Blue Leaves, a rowdy saloon known more for fighting than fornication. In the garden, a microcephalic cyclops reeled under a blizzard of blows as the four-armed boxer he was trying to fight hopped about nimbly on a single leg. He hadn’t lost a limb, but was a yōkai whose legs fused into a single muscular column. The monopod ended the bout by executing a devastating flying kick, which laid the other bruiser out in the bloody snow.
‘Who else wants steamed dumplings?’ said the winner, raising four defiant fists. Several volunteers piped up and came at the boxer with broken bottles and plates – and were smashed against tables or thrown through paper-and-wood walls. Builders must do a healthy trade around here. Their guild likely employed Major Four Arms to make damaging trouble every night.
Among the brawlers was Popejoy, the American Death Larsen nearly blinded on the Macedonia. He rolled up sleeves from massive forearms and piled in. Lady Geneviève had told her patient to avoid being punched in the head, but Popejoy wasn’t one to abide by doctor’s orders. Unlike Whelpdale’s body, the warm sailor’s face didn’t snap back to its original shape after a pummelling. His jaw was swollen and half his mouth was mashed shut.
Major Four Arms punched the sailor, who slammed against Kannuki, Lieutenant Majin’s pet. A full quart of beer splashed into the giant’s long, puzzled face. Kannuki reached for a mallet with a head the size of a barrel…
The din of the fight faded as Kostaki walked on.
A miasma hung, mingled with the fog. A stench, like dead fish and ordure. Spoiled blood and sickness. He reached for his pill-box. One last aniseed ball rattled.
He paused. According to Lady Geneviève, Japanese star anise was poisonous, used for incense not flavour. The balls were made from Chinese aniseed. This would be his last taste until trade in confectionaries reached Japan. He popped the pill in his mouth and crushed it between his teeth.
At the farthest end of Yokomori Street, an abandoned-looking house was set well back from the pavement. Garden neglected, screens ragged, lantern burning low. A post outside was papered with yellow scraps – prayers or warnings or spells. Set on the front step were three half-life-size china figures of seated courtesans, with jagged holes where their faces had been knocked in.
This was the House of Broken Dolls.
From inside, on cue, came a high-pitched scream.
* * *
Carrack in hand, Kostaki sprinted towards the geisha house. Activity was projected on the paper walls by spreading fire. Shadow-puppet figures struggled amid what might have been agitated dangling ropes or flailing jellyfish tendrils.
The screen door was wrenched aside. A sobbing, cat-faced woman stumbled out of the house, panic in her slit-pupiled golden eyes. Her kimono was skinned down to her rump, hobbling her as she ran. Blundering against Kostaki, she pressed white-furred breasts against his chest and hooked claws into his coat. She was of the bakeneko bloodline. Usually prized and pampered. This one had been badly treated.
Something like a fleshy red tube whipped through the doorway, and wrapped around the cat-woman’s ankles. She screamed as if stung by a Portuguese man o’ war, and clung to Kostaki. Her fur stood up and her docked tail twitched.
He steadied her but she was pulled away. The red rope was reeled in.
It was a tentacle, more squidlike than octopussy. Strong as ship’s cable, it pulsated with rich blood. Its underside was coated with a thousand nasty little barbs, which fixed in the cat-girl’s skin.
She twisted and clawed the ground – and almost got purchase on one of the broken-face statues. Then another tentacle uncoiled from the house, almost lazily. It lashed her across the face and coiled around her head, shutting her mouth, stopping her eyes.
Kostaki slashed at the tentacle. It was pliable and gave easily – but the tough hide would not break. Like a gaffed fish, the cat-geisha was dragged into the house.
Through the torn screen, Kostaki saw a huge wet eye and a horny, bird-like beak. With a dragging sound, whatever it was shambled away.
Blood was smeared on the steps. Bakeneko blood.
He sheathed his sword and drew the revolver he’d checked out of Dravot’s travelling armoury. He had six silver bullets.
He entered the House of Broken Dolls.
* * *
The antechamber was a wreck – shattered screens and smashed pottery. Blood and other discharges splashed across the floor matting in curls and strokes like Japanese characters.
He passed through to the central room of the house. There, he found a broad-shouldered man in a samurai helmet and partial armour, lying on a strew of pillows. His helmet mask looked like the face of Majin’s statue. Ink serpents coiled round his biceps and real snake heads stuck out of his shoulders like angry epaulettes, hissing and spitting. His arms ended in sucker-covered flippers. He was dwarfed by a living thing that grew from him as a tree grows out of a mossy riverbank. His exposed torso was covered with a tattoo of the Hokusai wave – from out of this sea surged a kraken, source of the red tentacles. Around its central eye were many more glinting segments.
The cat-girl screeched, trapped inside a constricting jacket of living ropes. Others lay around the room, twisted in broken-backed shapes, eyes dull.
Where was Lady Geneviève?
Kostaki levelled his gun but didn’t know where to shoot.
Laughter came from all corners of the room. Looking about, he saw the walls were covered with wax-leafed tendrils, which grew out of the squid samurai. On the vines hung head-like flesh bulbs with many mouths.
Looking down, he saw the samurai’s legs were planted like roots, sunk through the matting. Prominent veins throbbed in the tentacles. Each cat-girl was penetrated in some natural or new-made orifice by a wicked, spike-ended tendril. Kostaki thought that, as blood was drawn, foulness was pumped into them – some narcotic, rotting poison. He hoped the slime wasn’t spawn, for he could imagine what might grow from this thing’s eggs if hatched inside vampire hosts. Some of the geisha moaned, dimly aware of what was being done to them.
This yōkai – if yōkai it was, and not a true demon – was at once animal, vegetable and mineral. The chimera, burst out of the samurai, had made a nest of this building, and was digesting the food it found within.
He had walked in through its open jaws.
He shot at the mask, which broke apart. A green cabbagey face showed – a smoking hole punched through its middle. The wound chewed like a mouth and spat out the silver bullet.
Kostaki put his gun away and drew his sword again.
Trees could be cut down. Squid could be sliced for food. Paper would tear.
And even whatever this thing was would
bleed.
He hacked at a tentacle, closer to the main body. It parted like a rubber pipe, squirting red liquid.
Kostaki’s fangs ached. To his eyes, the blood spurts were a sparkling scarlet fountain.
He made a decapitation pass, and the samurai’s main head came off.
Like the hydra, he had plenty more.
A purple warty bulb sprouted off-centre on his shoulders. Its leaves peeled away to show a pea-green babyish face covered in ropy, milky fluid. It blinked in the light and drew breath. Kostaki sliced it in two, cleaving the crown of the not-yet-formed skull. His blade cut into the body as if through lard – only to snag on bone. He wrenched his shoulder pulling his carrack free. The cleft healed as he watched.
The new head fit itself back together. The sundered face reformed. The green skin was infused with blood and became pinkish. Eyebrows and hair grew.
The samurai had a blandly handsome Japanese face.
It was Lieutenant Majin. Or it wanted to look like Majin.
Oily water spouted from buds on the walls. The mat under Kostaki’s boots got slick. The Black Ocean wave had come.
‘Captain, oh my captain,’ shouted someone in the next room.
Lady Geneviève!
The Majin face smiled. The bulk of the yōkai was between Kostaki and the wall. Its tentacles stretched and flexed.
Kostaki charged, slicing through flesh. Tiny mouths sighed and screamed as he scythed away limbs and organs.
He felt disgusting wetness on his face. Not blood, not water.
Firmly, he shut his eyes and his mouth. He cut up and down. Left and right. He got past the yōkai and ploughed straight through the wall into a bathing room, and fell into shallow hot water. The water was rancid with congealed blood. Scummy oil floated on the surface. Braziers burned and steam rose. His clothes were sodden and heavy as he stood up.
He saw Lady Geneviève.
A crustacean yōkai – ten feet across – gripped her head and ankles with unwieldy lobster claws. A huge, stiff human face was etched into its bright red carapace. A crablike arrangement of mouth-claspers and a thicket of eyes on stalks peeped out from under the bony rim of its shell.
The room stank of sulphur and saltwater.
With her free hands, Lady Geneviève pounded the pincer that encircled her head. She had cracked the shell. Ichor trickled. The carapace rose, split and spread, like a beetle’s wing casings. It displayed the carved face – the mask of Majin.
Did the Demon Man manifest himself in multiple bodies? Was he snug in his statue, playing with the squid samurai and the shrimp behemoth as Tsunako Shiki played with her ninja puppets?
If Lady Geneviève were harmed, Kostaki would execute every last one of Majin’s monstrous forms – no matter that it meant going to war with the Emperor of Japan.
Corpses floated in the pool.
At a glance, Kostaki saw the yōkai’s weakness: where the skin attached to the shell, the soft, mushy regions around the eyestalks. When eating crab, he knew where to stick his fork to get to the tastiest scoops. He thrust his sword – his crab sword, hah! – into the cluster of eyestalks, penetrating deep, and twisted.
He pulled the sword out. Yellow stuff – bright and tart as mustard – gouted from the wound. A shrilling whine came from inside the creature. Its claspers gnashed and shook.
Kostaki used the sword tip on the joint of the cracked claw. Inside the exoskeleton, muscle tore. He sheathed his blade, prised the pincers apart with his hands…
…and looked at the face of a broken doll.
What he’d thought was Lady Geneviève was a limp, life-sized puppet.
Laughter came from above, and he looked up to see Tsunako Shiki in the eaves of the bathing room, cradled by wires and pulleys. She sat in what looked like a dissected church organ, little stockinged legs dangling. Her hands played over keyboards, turned clockwork control wheels and squeezed rubber bulbs. Unearthly sounds issued from trumpets, drums and bells. It was a ridiculous contraption. But it had gulled him.
Tsunako worked levers and made the bulky crab monster rear up and dance. Water poured from its sundered shell. Its wood legs came off and danced separately, then collapsed in a tangle, joints bobbing independently on fine wires.
She simpered, pleased with herself, as if expecting applause. To her, this was all a game, an amusement. She was another bloody music hall turn.
More laughter, from behind him.
Kostaki, soaked with bathwater and repulsive oils, turned.
A litter of bakeneko sat on the edge of the baths, furry feet dipped in the water. The stray cats hissed and chortled, mewed and stretched. Some peeled off the red linen patches that had looked like wounds. Some hiked up kimonos to cover painted scars. None were in the least hurt. One wore the squid-samurai puppet’s helmet. It was too big and heavy for her, and the cheek-guards cramped her whiskers.
The corpses in the water were stuffed dolls with crude painted faces, like the noppera-bō geisha. The blood in the water was foul. Not bakeneko, not human either. True cat blood, perhaps.
He had been right. It was all a puppet show.
‘It-looks-like-Geneviève will need saving,’ Miss Zark had said. ‘It-looks-like-Geneviève will get broken.’
In his arms was a life-size doll with a shattered face. It had needed saving and was broken.
Miss Zark had told him exactly what would happen. She had even told him to ‘think twice and not get tangled’. He hadn’t listened properly.
It-looks-like-Geneviève did not mean Geneviève.
He had thought once – of Lady Geneviève – and now he was tangled.
‘You are a delight to play with, Captain,’ said Tsunako Shiki. ‘Much more fun than the others. They are poor companions.’
Splendid! Kostaki had left his homeland, been betrayed by his father-in-darkness and voyaged to this far country of the insane just to become playmate to a monster child, the clown in her grotesque harlequinade.
Couldn’t she have singled out Danny Dravot? Or the Princess? No, it could only be him. He was fun.
Again, she blew him a kiss.
Tsunako slipped up through a trapdoor, leaving him with the geisha. They were more like cats – amoral, wicked, pretty, petty – than women. They hauled him out of the baths, wrinkling their noses at his smell. What had Tsunako used for ichor? Something repulsive. Mewing insincerely, the bakeneko darted long tongues at his face. They rubbed the smooth-furred backs of their hands on his cheeks. Meiko, the girl who’d lured him in, offered the usual hospitalities. He was too proud and annoyed to be further insulted.
As he stepped out of the cat-house, his hot wet clothes frosted. They crackled as he walked away.
If he ran into Kichijiro, he’d give the Renfield a clouting for his part in the sham.
He skulked in shadows, coat collar up around his shamed face. He didn’t want to be seen on Yokomori Street and have to explain the state he was in.
9
YOKAI TOWN, DECEMBER 11, 1899
Princess Casamassima has appropriated the best-appointed rooms in the Temple of One Thousand Monsters for her own use. Yuki-Onna herself could not expect such a welcome. Lady Oyotsu has retreated with her samisen to practise self-elongation behind a screen upon which her distinctive silhouette – more disturbing even than her distinctive person – is thrown by well-placed lanterns. Christina takes such preferment as her due, but the Abbess’s hospitality is suspiciously generous. The famous Japanese ideals of welcome and self-sacrifice are seldom practised without self-interest. Christina should be warier of obligations that come with accepted courtesies.
‘Read Japanese history,’ I told her. ‘You’ll find dozens of stories about retainers who dutifully disembowel themselves to honour a commitment to their daimyō. That a top dog might be an unworthy rogue is unthinkable. Even while looking into a pool of his own entrails, a lesser person daren’t question the rectitude of the noble lord who told him to open his stomach.’
The con
cept of giri is impossible to translate. It’s especially impossible to explain to Christina. For someone who says she wants to overturn European social order, she navigates it with something like genius. However, she mistakes Japan for Titipu, the imaginary place in The Mikado. To prosper here, she must learn that this is just another country with codes of conduct and ways of getting things done. We have not voyaged to a fairy-tale realm – though it often looks that way. Christina is literally a sparkling princess and Yōkai Town throngs with living umbrellas, cat-eared beldames, blood-drinking frogs and bird-people with detachable hands. I shouldn’t be surprised to find wheels that spin gold coins in a temple anteroom or tinderboxes that summon demon dogs with unusual eyes on a market stall in Mermaid Ancestor Place.
While Christina plays high priestess in the temple, I’m quartered in a women’s dormitory, along with Drusilla Zark and Francesca Brysse. Daffy Dru has acquired a cricket in a wicker cage and claims it talks to her in scissoring chirrups. I suspect Brysse, a just-woken crony of Christina’s, is spying for the Princess. Her long, excessively curled fringe is supposed to stop people noticing her persistent peeping. She has sharp ears too. To confuse the minx, I’m coaxing Dru into making gnomic pronouncements she must waste time committing to memory and sharing with her mistress.
We vampire women share a large, one-storey building – something between a sturdy tent and a flimsy bungalow – with many female yōkai. I am learning names and histories. The most welcoming of our hosts is Topazia Suzuki, a vampire of the yamachichi bloodline. She looks like a blue-haired, human-sized monkey, as if she once shifted shape and Yuki-Onna breathed tiny ice-diamonds on her, fixing her in her present form. It looks well on her, and she is very handy with the prehensile tail that pokes out of the back of her robe and functions as a third arm. A refined, intelligent woman who speaks excellent French, Topazia is au fait with the latest Paris fashions in couture and philosophy. A confirmed gossip addict, she has filled me in on the others in the dormitory.
