Anno Dracula--One Thousand Monsters

by Kim Newman

  De Coulteray kicked against his restraints.

  ‘For shame,’ shouted someone. Cerral, the ghoul captain.

  ‘For shame, for shame,’ repeated other students, and even a few of the guests.

  Comte de Sinestre was silent. Modéran and Daubert looked around, as if ready to write down names. They both saw me. Neither could look me in the eye.

  For shame, indeed.

  ‘This is a necessary study,’ insisted Cataflaque. ‘We must learn what we can… and quickly. The extinction of the human race as we understand the term is a possibility. The future of France will be decided by what we discover here.’

  The ‘for shame’ cries were drowned out by the ‘here here’ crowd.

  I walked down the aisle and up to the dissecting table. De Coulteray’s eyes rolled. He would not recover from this outrage.

  Gheria saw me and waved his scalpel. I thumped his chest with as much force as I could muster. Pushed off his feet, he flew backwards. His head cracked the blackboard and left a chalky, sticky smudge.

  I bared my fangs.

  ‘Et, bien sûr, les dents,’ I said.

  Some of the audience hissed. Cerral, unwisely, applauded.

  Cataflaque stood away from me. I knew I was proving his point for him.

  Even those who had been appalled by the dissection now saw a vampire – me! – as a dangerous creature. Not a Frenchwoman who worked in a hospital, paid her taxes and stood up for ‘La Marseillaise’, but a panther loose in a kindergarten. See her fangs! Muzzle the hellcat! Sharpen a stake!

  I looked a question at the Marquis. He nodded a response.

  I took out my purse. Cataflaque was astonished. He must have thought I was going to offer a bribe. I felt in the purse for the coin that hurt and pulled it out.

  I pressed the silver écu into de Coulteray’s heart. It burst like an overripe tomato. Vampire blood squirted on my cloak and into the Professor’s face.

  Uproar in the audience. Interested parties scrambled and fought, missing a perfect chance to observe the accelerated process of decay. The Marquis bubbled and dwindled to red sludge, draining off the table. That ghastly gag was all that was left of his head. I took it up – ignoring the silver shock – and brandished it at Cataflaque. How would he like it strapped in his damned mouth?

  I turned and marched out of the room.

  Nicolas Cerral held the door open for me. I paused, looked back at the academicians of France, and kissed the captain of ghouls on the lips, spreading blood all over his jacket.

  I left the morgue, running. I did not stop until I reached Whitechapel – where you, Charles, found me, and our adventures began.

  19

  YOKAI TOWN, DECEMBER 22, 1899

  Something large was moving through the pool, displacing water but not breaking the surface. Gentle waves pushed through my cage.

  Chains creaked. A prisoner complained.

  The inugami barked at him to shut up.

  There was a little excitement. Guarding me in a cage must be as boring as being me in a cage. Any distraction was welcome. The kappa looked about, checking prisoners. The bo-wielder prodded me through the bars. I showed my hands above water.

  If I weren’t behind bamboo, I’d have taken his blessed stick away from him and thwacked his silly helmet with it.

  Weapons I Could Injure a Kappa With… quarterstaff, xiphos and zhanmadao.

  I looked across at the tengu. His parrot eyes were fixed on me. Then, quickly and quietly, he was gone. He hadn’t held his beak and ducked under water of his own accord. It looked to me as if he had been tugged from below.

  Feathers floated in his cage. I tasted blood in the water. Spoiled, brackish. I spat it out.

  Then a wave rolled over me. The tengu bobbed up, face down. Trapped air tented his robe over his back.

  Slowly, he twisted. His face came out of the water. Half of it gone.

  The kappa gathered to prod the corpse. My cage was clattered.

  I was swimming in blood. My fangs sprouted.

  Orders were given. The inugami turned the crank handle. My cage rose from the water. My soaked clothes weighted me down. I left my scissors in my pocket. It was best no one notice I had a weapon – no matter how small.

  The tengu’s wounds were severe. Whatever killed him did it quickly. He hadn’t even splashed.

  The kappa argued. A difference of opinion arose about who to alarm with the news. No one was overly concerned about the dead prisoner. And, foolishly, they were more worried about the wrath of Lord Kawataro than the possibility that their own scaly hides were in danger.

  While the guards argued, I noticed more floating things. Flimsy ropes I first took for seaweed. One got snagged on my cage. It was an exsanguinated eel. A tube of ropy muscle rendered into a brittle streamer. A patch of skin came away, exposing little white bones. No flesh at all.

  Something screamed at the other side of the room. Another prisoner.

  Two kappa rushed to investigate. The others kept watch on me.

  I showed my hands and opened my mouth.

  I wanted to signal no blood, no fangs, no claws.

  But blood in the water sharpened my teeth and nails.

  The katana kappa called me a disgusting witch.

  Another shout, and a splashing-thrashing from another cage! A tenjoname – a long-tongued, muscular yōkai – put up more of a fight than the tengu, dripping venom and hovering as something speared from below. Seized by his tongue, he was pulled under. He bobbed out of the frothing water and I saw his face shrivel. He turned into a husk, like General Nurarihyon. Leached of all substance, his body surfaced. His skin floated like a suit of empty clothes.

  The other prisoners – all awake now – started screaming.

  The inugami got tangled in chains trying to hoist all the cages, before the katana kappa ordered him not to.

  The room was too dark to see clearly.

  I heard more prisoners die… and saw blood threads in the water, along with scraps of dead eels and strands of white foam. Whatever was picking meals out of the bamboo boxes grew less stealthy.

  It didn’t escape my notice that I had been spared so far.

  Was I saved – or saved for last?

  The kappa stood on the ledge and waved their precious weapons at the roiling pool. For all their ninja mastery of cutting, stabbing, thumping and bashing, their toys were no use against anything that didn’t come at them directly. Upon sober reflection, they needed a fifth frog-turtle musketeer who specialised in kyudo – archery. Kawataro’s American gun might also have been handy. Only now, when I had more immediate concerns, did it occur to me that the kappa would have a struggle using his Peacemaker. With child-sized hands and webbed fingers, he probably couldn’t outdraw Wyatt, the Earp family idiot.

  The inugami whined. That set my fangs on edge.

  Whoever killed General Nurarihyon was here, tearing through yōkai like a fox in a henhouse. At least it wasn’t me. I hadn’t entirely rejected the possibility I might be guilty and not remember doing the deed.

  The room quieted and the water stilled.

  Finally, the katana kappa ordered the inugami to sound the alarm. The castle was under attack. The turnkey tried to open the door but it wouldn’t shift.

  Kappa shouted at him.

  ‘Death stones on the board, dog-man,’ yelped the sai kappa. ‘Death stones on the board!’

  The kappa competed for turns at the door. No-hope knights jostling for a chance to dislocate shoulders trying to pull the sword from the stone.

  My cage hung in the air. Close to me, distorted by water, a face loomed.

  A white oval, with round eyes… a European face. A woman.

  A head broke the surface and rose slowly, without making ripples. Her sleek hair smoothed over her ears and against her shoulders like a sealskin hood.

  She was a vampire.

  Her arms and chest were above the water. She was steady… not treading water but standing on the bottom. Either t
he pool wasn’t as deep as I’d thought or her legs were twenty feet long.

  Was this some siren loosed from our stack of coffins?

  This woman was distantly familiar. I had seen her recently, I thought, and before, but a long, long, long time ago.

  Only when she smiled and showed little fangs did I realise where and how I’d seen that face – distorted, and through the eyes of a dying dog.

  I knew why the General accused me.

  The vampire wore my face.

  ‘Enjoy it,’ she whispered, in English. ‘A reflection, like a looking-glass. Don’t have one usually, do you, my lover?’

  The voice wasn’t mine. She had a Wessex accent.

  She shook her hair out. Dark wet blonde.

  The face rippled and a hairy, moth-eyed, mosquito-proboscis horror broke through my flesh portrait, then another woman’s face, like mine but not me. Rounder and rosier-cheeked. Pretty, if narrow-eyed. Lighter blonde hair.

  Clare Mallinger. Daughter of gentry. Murderess.

  Something shifted under her hair and a bulb inflated from the back of her neck. Clare turned away, neck twisting like a wrung-out wet sheet. Eight round black eyes sprouted from a fist-sized lump. Another head. Not remotely human.

  I remembered the odd rash on Clare’s neck. And the hole in her crate. And the detritus – eggshell fragments, I realised – in the straw. And the Black Ocean wave daub.

  This wasn’t just Clare Mallinger.

  She would be bad enough, but something else inhabited her. Clare looked at me, face screwed up in pain, eyes red and pleading, but the new head, the imp bug homunculus, was in charge. It swelled and Clare’s face crumpled. Eight eyes focused. Jaws cracked open and mouth parts tumbled out. Rows of jointed mandibles. Venom-injecting needle-fangs. A maw rimmed with clasping tentacles.

  On the whole, I preferred to look at my face. Already, again, I couldn’t remember what I looked like.

  The guards noticed the Clare creature. The huge, swollen lower body – mostly spider-like, with sturdy armoured legs and a bloated puffball abdomen – lifted out of the pool. Spurts of congealing silk trailed from her spinnerets.

  Clare was commingled with a jorōgumo – an arachnid vampire, the ‘entangling bride’ or ‘whore spider’. Once, a creature like this dared challenge Yuki-Onna as queen of yōkai. It was a close thing. The Woman of the Snow vanquished the upstart by bringing winter in July. The freeze, with its attendant famine, lasted a human generation.

  Stupidly brave, the militiamen attacked.

  The spider-woman killed all four at once – juggling the screeching kappa and slicing through shells with bone scimitars. They stabbed and pounded valiantly, but wielded pins and needles against a threshing machine. When they slashed Clare’s human arms and chest, red wounds healed over as soon as they were made. Someone got a torch and shoved it in one of her faces. Angry, she took it away and lobbed it across the room. It smashed against the wall and fell into a basket of rags. The quality of the screaming changed, as the aggressive yells of would-notbe-told nursery tyrants gave way to the terrified shrieks of tots stretched on the rack by a governess gone mad.

  The nunchaku kappa’s head and limbs withdrew into his shell, leaving one of the silly sticks flapping out of the neck-hole. The jorōgumo extended a skewer-proboscis into the fore-aperture as if sticking a straw into a coconut. She sucked fluid and lumps of meat, throat expanding to swallow until loose bones rattled in the shell. With powerful mandibles, she cracked the katana kappa’s carapace and emptied a torrent of green blood over her faces, arms and breasts. She bit with multiple mouths and he came apart. Greedily, she tore into the bo kappa and the sai kappa with separate heads, simultaneously draining the last of the turtle musketeers. She dropped her leftovers into the water. A single sai stuck out of Clare’s face. A white well-shaped arm slipped out of the hairy jumble of arachnid and human parts and plucked the trident like a splinter. After wiping Clare’s mouth with the back of its hand, the arm was reabsorbed into the yōkai’s constantly shifting shape.

  I had my scissors out and cut strings. I kicked bamboo poles loose.

  The inugami cringed against the webbed-shut door and fouled himself.

  Clare’s head was its regular size again, but with feathery antennae. She turned to the dog-man and shot out an elastic tongue. He was speared through the throat, impaled to the door. The inugami weakly pawed the tubular tongue as his head expanded, eyes swelling, mouth forced open by something coming up in his throat. His face cracked like a hatching egg, then came apart like a jigsaw portrait on a pool of spreading gruel. For an instant, the turnkey’s eyes stared in horror at each other… then his skull exploded. A thousand black spiders scuttled out from his severed windpipe, poured down his limp body and spread across walls and ceiling, leaving trails of criss-crossing web.

  Death stones on the board!

  Either Clare was going to kill me last – a palate cleanser after this gluttons’ feast – or leave me here, covered in blood and webbing, looking guilty.

  This wasn’t just Clare gorging herself silly after a long sea voyage, surrendering to the base instincts which got her transported. She had been grievously violated and who knew what was left of her inside. Enough to still talk like a Casterbridge lass, but not enough to control the jorōgumo.

  ‘Clare, can you hear me?’ I called.

  I kicked the front of my cage open.

  Clare sucked in her tentacle tongue and gulped it back into her mouth. Her lips were scarlet with dog blood. Her eyes were compound – lots of little irises and pupils swirling in the whites. What must the world look like through them?

  ‘Clare, it’s Geneviève – Dr Dieudonné. From the ship. Remember me? Can you fight it? The spider. Can you change back?’

  She laughed – out of her own mouth and the spider’s, and a dozen others that ringed her neck and thorax.

  ‘My lover, why would I want to?’

  20

  YOKAI TOWN, DECEMBER 22, 1899 (CONTINUED)

  Clare left me alive for Lord Kawataro. He’d believe a prisoner who could tear guards apart like soggy origami figures and bleed out every mother-loving yōkai in the room would then sit in an open cage waiting for an unkissable, four-foot-tall frog prince to dispense justice. The kappa magistrate would assume his sheer amphibian authority would put me in such a state of reverential awe I would meekly bare my neck for the executioner.

  ‘Heigh ho! says Anthony Rowley,’ I hummed.

  I sounded hysterical, even to myself. Being found giggling and mad wouldn’t help my case.

  I considered escape options. The spider-woman – wider round the abdomen than is fashionable this season – got into the prison without using the obvious door. I leaned out of my dangling cage and plunged my head into cold, filthy water. I kept my mouth firmly shut but salt blood got in my eyes.

  Through murk, I saw a new-made tunnel mouth. Rocks pushed out from the wall were strewn on the pool bed. The egress must lead to the open sea.

  I climbed back into my cage and tried to dry my face with my wet sleeve. I rubbed my eyes and blinked away blood.

  Body parts floated about. Webbing dripped from chains.

  I could leave the castle. But I’d look even more like a murderer. The frame was obvious, but still subtler than I’d expect from Clare Mallinger. So, she had little say in the grand scheme of things. Her other head did the heavy thinking. The jorōgumo hatchling was a creature of Black Ocean. When Dru said one of us had died, she meant Clare – killed and eaten while she slept in her cocoon. What had spoken to me was an undigested lump – a parasite ghost. Majin must have had the egg slipped into Clare’s crate. He had even signed his work, with the daubed wave – a sigil of ownership.

  How long till anyone came to relieve the guards?

  The torches went out one by one.

  In the dark, I rehearsed arguments. Being sarcastic in a language you’ve not spoken in three hundred years is a challenge. Yes, My Lord Frogface, I assassinated everyon
e here without getting more than a few smears of blood on my person… then webbed the door shut from the outside with silk pulled out of my ear… and got back into the room by becoming intangible as autumn mist… Since then, I have sat quietly in my cage, digesting my supper, composing my last will and testament in anticipation of your righteous vengeance. I should like the orchestra to play anything but selections from The Mikado as I climb the scaffold… awaiting the sensation of a short, sharp shock from a cheap and chippy chopper on a big black block.

  Stop being a goose, Gené, came a voice, and pull your socks up.

  There was a light in the room. No, there was a light – and a voice – in my mind.

  A funnel of gold fog whirled, lit from within. It did not make shadows. It did not illuminate the walls. I shut my eyes and still saw it.

  This is something I can do, said Christina. It’s like astral projection… or the telephone. You can ‘talk’ back to me, if you like. Speak aloud. Or imagine you are speaking; that works best. If I concentrate, I ‘hear’ what you think. I can know what you know.

  I was alarmed.

  Yes, you’re alarmed. I know it’s an imposition. Peeping at your most precious secret thoughts is like reading your diary.

  The golden fog assumed the shape of Princess Casamassima. She was a sketch of herself – as if she were too impatient to fill in the details. Her eyes were wrong. One was red and dead, reproducing the injury suffered by her non-astral body. The other was a star, focal point of the illusion. She was…

  Pepper’s ghost, yes. The theatrical illusion. I know the principle. But that’s your choice of how to see, how to interpret. Everyone sees me differently, and I see their ideas of me in their minds. You are about to think of looking-glasses and be wistful about your lost reflection – you’ve used that chestnut to fish for compliments for four hundred and sixty years. Just like Little Miss Big Mouth: ‘Do you think I’m pretty, do you think I’m pretty, do you think I’m pretty?’Snip, snip, snip! Oh, and you’ve rediscovered death’s blood and want to indulge your fondness for putting the knout across your own back by seeing yourself through the eyes of your ‘victims’. Are you so presumptuous as to assume the cowl of the Grim Reaper and usurp the throne of Death? Geneviève, dear, you must grow up. I know you were sixteen and unkissed – nearly unkissed – when you turned, but just now we need you to be less of a mope. While you’ve been cooped up like a laying chicken, some of us have been busy with useful work.