by Kim Newman
The closest I came to ‘success’ was Lacourbe, riddled with Russian grapeshot during the ‘Battle of the Italians’ in 1812. I dripped measures of my blood into him. He began to recover and turn. His fangs came through, then he choked to true death as hundreds of fresh teeth sprouted inside his throat and worked their way out of his body like sharp pebbles. A few drops of my blood saved you, Charles, once, but you weren’t beyond healing without turning. Popejoy, broken inside and out, would definitely die, so the question was… would he come back? Dare I risk the procedure that made Lacourbe’s death so much worse than it need have been? I believed I had no choice.
I put my fingernail to my wrist. Higo pulled the sailor away from me, into her arms. She was possessive of her protector.
‘I shall do it,’ she said, curling catkins around the patient’s head.
She bent over him – her face a delicate green, skin become supple bark. Her right cheek split, under her eye, and vampire sap welled up. Her tears washed the sticky blood into Popejoy’s mouth.
She cooed at him, urging him to drink. He licked the bitter blood from his lips.
We couldn’t stay to see if Higo managed to turn her sailor.
The lights in my head were buzzing.
* * *
Christina calling…
Hello, ma baby, hello, ma honey…
Yes, very clever. Ahoy-hoy.
…hello, my ragtime gal…
Even in your own head, you can’t carry a tune.
…send me a kiss by wire…
Clever! Think-singing in Drusilla’s voice. Though that whispery warble is well below Paris Opéra standard.
Please yourself and ‘listen’ carefully, because this is important…
‘What’s the matter?’ Kostaki asked.
‘Her,’ I said.
Mr Bats didn’t ask what either of us meant.
We were at the torii gate. Only the top tier was visible above the sloping snow. Before us was a transparent wall. The misty shape of the temple roof was discernible, as through a barrier of frozen fog.
The ice wasn’t just transparent. Translucent. Greenish-white light fluctuated inside the ice mountain.
I was reminded of early public demonstrations of the miracle of electric lighting. The bulbs flared for brief seconds, then popped with the tinkle of glass splinters and the stench of sulphur. Glow-worm wiggles burned into everyone’s eyes. No wonder inventors wore goggles.
The Princess was in the ice.
‘Oh, Christina.’
Kostaki saw at once what I meant.
The mountain was immune to earthquake. No cracks appeared in the ice-front. Taira no Masakado could not breach the fortress of Yuki-Onna. Christina was buried with the Woman of the Snow. I supposed she was safe. For the moment.
Pain!
That’s not a nice way to communicate. I preferred ragtime.
A prick rather than a stab!
Better.
It’s not me, she said, in my head. It’s your Ice Queen. You must free her. I tried… but—
Made a bollocks omelette of it.
Ha ha. You’re doing Dravot. A new talent. Mental impersonation. Please pay attention to the task in hand.
How?
You’re resourceful. You’ll find a way.
You’re resourceful too. Why haven’t you?
I have. I have summoned you here.
Why me?
Because the Japanese interpreter you left behind did not prove satisfactory.
I’ve some ideas about that. I believe he’s a spy.
Of course he’s a spy. Do try to keep up, Gené. I knew that from the moment the gash-faced ghastly stepped into the temple. The white European suit. The useful abilities. The letters of recommendation. Mr Gokey Kokey was trying much too hard to get in with the inner circle. I have been in enough revolutionary factions to recognise an agent provocateur when one starts agitating provocatively.
Cowards flinch and traitors sneer.
They do, you know.
So, I am here. What do you want translated?
It’s not so much a matter of translation, as of persuasion. You’ll have to enlist the aid of a certain person.
I was momentarily blinded by a fireball in my head.
I knew whom Christina meant.
I resented being dragged from my nice safe prison just to pass on a message like a bell-boy… but I understood.
‘We need to find O-Same,’ I told Kostaki.
‘Which one is that? The tart with the snip-snips? One of those no-face women?’
‘No. The burning lady with the dress on fire.’
Kostaki rolled his eyes. ‘Makes sense, I suppose. Here we are, troubled by ice. Send for a big candle. Like the fire brigade backwards.’
I hadn’t seen O-Same since Majin blocked her attack. She might be injured, or dead – though it wasn’t likely. As Kostaki had said, a woman of flame would be difficult to get the better of.
A long-tailed monkey yōkai bounded out of the dark, sliding down the ice slope, gripping outcrops with all four hands, chittering a mix of panic and glee. An acre of pink gum was exposed at us, along with sharp teeth.
‘She’s not smiling,’ said Kostaki. He and Mr Bats drew their swords.
I stood between my comrades and the hissing monkey. ‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘I know her.’
I turned to Topazia Suzuki and tried to calm her.
Her dress had been torn off and her hair was unbound. Her fur was brittle with frost and patches had been pulled away – like the skin on my hands, from contact with black ice. She was startled and afraid. That brought out her animal spirit.
‘Topazia,’ I said, ‘they’re not going to hurt you.’
‘I’ve heard that before – tonight. From people who hurt me.’
I took off the greatcoat Kostaki had given me and offered it to her. Gratefully, she wrapped it about her shivering body. Her prehensile tail poked out of the back.
‘Have you seen O-Same?’ I asked. ‘We need her here.’
Topazia sat on the gate. She turned round several times, as if testing out a tree branch for comfort. She was still distracted.
‘I could summon her,’ she said. ‘All women can.’
Kostaki looked at me and shrugged.
Topazia still wasn’t sure about us. We had been chatting pleasantly in the dorm and she liked the funny woman with the cricket and the tiny hat but we were still foreign devils. And I was accused of killing General Nurarihyon.
‘I didn’t do that. It was the jorōgumo.’
Now she was scared of me because I saw into her thoughts. Thank you, Christina. The Princess had connected us. She was a mental telephone operator, too. If she survived beyond the end of the month, the twentieth century was going to be all about Christina Light. The Edison and Marconi companies might as well burn their patents.
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
Topazia was chewing her tail.
Give her peanuts.
No need to be insulting.
‘My friend is down there, under the ice, with Yuki-Onna,’ I told Topazia. ‘We need O-Same to get to them.’
Now you’ve given it away.
Topazia had an animal’s instincts for whom to trust. She liked being told the truth. If more people said in plain words what they meant—
You sound like my governesses, again… remember what happened to them?
Topazia now looked concerned for me. I must seem mad, distracted by voices no one else could hear. I tried to be reassuring.
The monkey yōkai looked up to the stars and opened her mouth in a smile wider than Kuchisake’s. She gave vent to a high-pitched shriek I could feel in my fangs. After a pause, she did it again. A jungle cry.
Kostaki and Mr Bats winced.
But we saw a rocket jet across the sky.
O-Same descended, raiment of flame spread like angel wings, arms folded inside flickering sleeves. Inside her fiery head was the outline of a black skull
.
I bowed low and humbly petitioned the Torch of Meireki for help.
26
YOKAI TOWN, DECEMBER 22, 1899 (CONTINUED)
O-Same pulled her long hands – more fire than flesh – out of her sleeves. Magic lantern dragons woven from interlacing flames reared on her furisode. Arms outstretched like a sleepwalker, she floated towards the glacier, radiating intense heat. Ice retreated from her touch. Her burning sleeves trailed the ground, dissipating snow. Wet green grass turned brown. Scalding steam hissed like hot ground mist.
Where O-Same pointed, a cave mouth appeared.
Open sesame.
A trickle became a flow, then a gush. We stood either side of the sudden stream. Melted ice seeped into snow like lemon poured over sugar. Where the run-off fanned, opaque white became crystal transparence then froze solid.
The cave became a tunnel. I saw the ice mountain was hollow. The Temple of One Thousand Monsters nestled under a frozen vaulted ceiling. Unmarred white thick on tile roofs. Clear icicle lanterns hanging from trees.
I walked through the tunnel. Kostaki and Mr Bats followed.
Topazia was reluctant, for a moment – then scuttled quickly after us, cringing as if she dreaded the touch of a shadow hand.
I fancied I saw the flap of dark that perturbed her. A stray garland from a shrine, tossed on the wind, burned to ashes in O-Same’s heat-wake. Or something else?
The air inside the dome was tart and chill but there was no wind. The din of battle was muted. The ice shielded the temple from the strife around it.
I looked back. The tunnel filled in as quickly as it had opened. O-Same’s firelight was distorted by the thick ice window.
I trusted our Burning Lady would still be there when we needed to get out.
Cross that bridge when you come to it.
Thank you, Christina. Did you learn Uncle Satt’s Sage Advice and Helpful Saws for Boys and Girls off by heart?
I have seldom found advice to be sage and few saws are helpful.
We’re inside the snow globe now. Where are you?
A snow globe? How apt! Like the hideous cheap ornaments uncles bring back from Brighton or Bologna. Why do uncles go to such places, do you suppose? Don’t answer. Yes, this is very like one of those gewgaws. We are in the basement. The temple is the tip of a veritable underground castle. Lady Oyotsu omitted to mention that, but Drusilla knew it at once. Upsidesy-downsy, remember? Bootscraper above the front door? You can’t miss the way in. The trapdoor is open. It’s in the room you went to that time to fetch the stuff you didn’t need for the person who didn’t want it. Remember?
Yes.
I led our party through the white gardens to the courtyard.
By the dragon fountain, we found Abura Sumashi and Rui Wakasagi, stiff as statues. The unseeing eyes of the potato-headed and musician yōkai sparkled with frost. Their skins were lightly dusted with rime. Even Rui’s angry purple bruise had turned arctic blue. The effect must have been instantaneous; the frozen folk weren’t contorted with pain like the petrified of Pompeii. Abura Sumashi was caught scratching behind his ear. Rui’s fingers were pressed to the strings of a samisen.
I didn’t know if the yōkai were still alive.
Topazia looked closely. With her tail, she touched the grotesquely bulbous half of Rui’s face. Skin flaked from the poison bruise like very old paint. Topazia pulled her tail back.
‘It stings,’ she said.
I showed her my healed hands. ‘Careful not to touch anything else,’ I said.
Topazia chewed her lips and nodded.
I fancied Rui’s eye – the one not swallowed by the mushroom growth of her disfigurement – glinted with anger. She might be still alive.
In agitated eagerness to avoid further touching Rui, Topazia elbowed Abura Sumashi. His arm came neatly off at the elbow and fell—
With lightning speed, Mr Bats caught the limb. He gently set it down.
‘Well played,’ I said. ‘He might need that later.’
Mr Bats nodded at me. He nods expressively. This was a ‘thanks for the compliment’ nod. Usefully distinct from a ‘touch that sword and die’ nod.
We walked to the temple.
* * *
The screens were grouted shut by ice. Kostaki and Mr Bats kicked them in. We pushed through into the building.
Everything inside was coated in a thin layer of ice. The glacé surface was curiously tempting. Was it sweet to taste? Fruit glistened in bowls like sinister candies in the gingerbread house that tempted Hansel and Gretel.
Christina whistled the ‘Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy’ in my mind.
Yes, very apt. Just what I was thinking. A sweet shop in a fairy tale.
The shaved, flavoured ice they sell outside the Colosseum is made from the dirtiest water and the foulest peaches. It’s a miracle more tourists don’t get the grippe and die of it.
We advanced cautiously. Statue people around. The monk Ryomen, both faces still for once. Aosagibi, the heron samurai, one leg drawn up. The miniature twin singers, sat in dollhouse chairs, glazed like Dresden figurines. Dimitri Denatos, one of our oilier refugees, in a pose of supplication. Zhang Fa, frosted hair knitted around her like a wickerwork egg, wisely not listening to him.
I didn’t know Denatos was awake.
He’s not the worst of them.
I saw what Christina meant.
In an alcove – on a futon piled with hard, cold, shiny cushions – we found Baron Carl von Rysselbert, putative father-and-furtherer of a line of Nietzschean overmen. His elite corps of fanatic get was to drag Dracula from his throne and boost him to the exalted status which was his destiny. The pretender went as far as engaging a Savile Row tailor to run up a gross of the utilitarian one-piece uniforms he had personally designed for his as-yet-unturned disciples. If he wanted his crusade of self-elevation to succeed, he should have paid his bills. But the blue-eyed, mighty-thewed overman cares nought for tradesmen and book-keepers. After repeated demands that the Baron’s account be settled were ignored, Messrs H. Huntsman & Sons turned him in to Special Branch as a seditious wrong ’un. Somewhere, Nietzsche must write ‘whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not lose his shirt… for if you gaze long enough into the abyss, your shilling will run out and your must needs shove another in the slot.’ Von Rysselbert was earmarked as one of our likely future troublemakers. We could scratch him off that list.
The elder had swooped on the wrong woman.
Von Rysselbert’s arms were tied with a familiar obi. He looked up at the Mantis, showing her a gargoyle face of terror. A film of ice sealed his screaming mouth, coating his dagger-fangs. The Mantis, grimly satisfied under her ice-mask, was savagely sticking a three-pronged hairpin between his ribs. Gouts of blood from the Baron’s bursting heart were frozen between them like blooms of red coral. Vampire and murderess, welded by the cold in a tableau of death.
‘I warned von Rysselbert off the local girls,’ Kostaki said. ‘He would not be told.’
‘The Mantis is one of the few warm women in Yōkai Town,’ I observed. ‘We should have known she’d be bait to our more foolish, bloodthirsty shipmates and what would become of vampires who bit the hook.’
‘She’s not so warm now,’ said Kostaki.
‘You know what I mean.’
Mr Bats tapped the nape of the Mantis’s neck with his wakizashi.
With a noise I’ll never forget, the tableau – von Rysselbert, the cloak spread beneath him, the fascinating blood formation, the Mantis, her splayed kimono, even the pillows – cracked into a hundred thousand shards. Flesh, blood and cloth granulated, and collapsed into a strew of gravel, which poured out of the alcove.
I looked at Mr Bats, disapproving.
Governessy, again.
In my mind, I told Christina to go away – using mediaeval French idioms her tutors were unlikely to have used, at least not to her face.
I don’t have to know what all that means to know it’s rud
e, Gené.
Von Rysselbert and the Mantis were both murderers, many times over. The Baron was the worse villain. He chose of his own free will to be an utter brute and spat half-understood German aphorisms whenever his behaviour was called into question. The Mantis, whatever her name had been, couldn’t help herself. Abused by some men, she took revenge on guilty and innocent alike. From their liebestod pose, the vampire was dead before the freeze. The mad woman was painlessly, mercifully killed by it.
Still, if they’d kept apart, one or the other or both might have lived through Christmas – three days from now, not that anyone has given the holidays much thought – and survived to see a new year, the Monday after next.
Kostaki has a Christmas present for you. Shall I tell you what it is?
That’s a horrid thing to do. And childish. I thought you were the grown-up in this party?
In our secret selves, we’re all children. Ladies and lords of the nursery. We want toys and candy and treats. I’ve learned that firsthand, visiting many, many minds. I have decided to take your advice and not struggle against my nature.
Don’t blame me!
So you haven’t got him anything? How embarrassing.
I looked at Kostaki, who was waiting patiently amid the glittering rubble of two dead people while I had a mental conversation with the Princess. At least he knew I wasn’t mad.
‘Christina says…’
This will be charming.
‘…the trapdoor’s in the dispensary.’
More romantic words ne’er were spoken.
Stepping around the mess, I led the way again.
* * *
The dispensary was more frigid even than the rest of the building. Draperies of ice hung from shelves. Breathing was painful, like inhaling little knives. The temple stocks a wide variety of dried herbs of a medicinal nature. The majority are non-lethal. Much of Yōkai Town’s trade income derives from potions and salves brewed by Lady Oyotsu and her initiates. The Abbess also keeps a large selection of teas and blends of teas. The late General Nurarihyon was far from Yōkai Town’s only chai addict. Tea ceremonies are important social and spiritual rituals here.
