“No way. Any place more exciting than this is right out for underage kids. Here is hip enough already.”
“Hip?” the girl pouted. Across the counter, the bartender flashed a wry smile. “Even this guy is some teaching assistant sent over by the Education Association. The beer and whisky is all non-alcoholic. The hostesses are nuns working part time, so no touchy, no feely. Who in the world would bother coming to this place?”
“You got it all wrong, sister,” said the fat lady bartender, polishing a glass and glancing around the place.
The bar’s owner, Junko Toya. She was amazingly fat. She’d started off wanting to be a hostess, but none of the customers would get within an arm’s length of her. So she was stuck there behind the counter, looking rather like a hippo in a mud hole.
“Green Mountain Blues” drifted though the dim, twenty-by-fifty foot interior. The hostesses in their precisely buttoned-up blouses and the uniformed high school students sat there ramrod-straight, discussing an upcoming exam. Seven or eight altogether.
“Plenty of seminary students come here. And just between you and me, one way or another they’re all as horny as alley cats.”
“Let’s go, Izayoi-kun.” The girl again pulled on the boy’s arm.
“Hey, if you want to go, then go. I’m getting to like this place,” he grumbled, a glass of non-alcoholic beer in one hand. For a high school student, he wasn’t overly tall or short, his shoulders not too broad. And yet he was a solidly built and rather handsome young man.
At first glance, he might seem the kind of honors student never found without an English dictionary in one hand, but draw closer and he had about him an approachable, laid-back air.
Told that, just a short time ago, this young man had engaged in a fight to the death in that place, with the fate of mankind in the balance, and managed to eke out a win, the average onlooker would gape at first—then upon further consideration—nod in agreement.
His name was Kyoya Izayoi, a senior at Minakaze High School in Tokyo. “Sorry, but I work as a bouncer here. I can’t be going anywhere for five more minutes.” Then for some reason, he glanced at the clock on the wall. A shadow passed across his face.
“What?” asked Toya.
“Oh, nothing.” Kyoya shook his head. Rubbing the back of his neck with his hand, he added, “This time of the night gives me the creeps. Three in the morning.”
“Huh,” Junko Toya nodded.
Three o’clock in the morning.
The time of night when humans and demons crossed paths. The time when everybody slept, when the human heart was the weakest and most likely to part with that which made it human.
That time would soon be arriving.
“You’re mean,” the girl complained. “You finally said we could go on a date, so I came all the way here. You didn’t say anything about getting together on the job. I thought Izayoi-kun had more class than that. I’m going to—
The rest of the sentence died in her mouth. Her eyes grew wide. She looked at the side of Kyoya’s face.
This time, like a receding tide, all sounds ceased. The music too. The eyes of the hostesses and the guests focused on Kyoya.
The girl watched dumbfounded as he silently slid off the bar stool. Something sprouted from his fists. A pair of disposable chopsticks. Standing in front of the bar, Kyoya slowly rotated his body like a radar dish, scanning the room. And quickly oriented himself in the direction of the door.
His hands rose above his head, the tips of the chopsticks jutting out. There was something in front of him. He had seen something.
It was three o’clock.
“Three seconds,” said the man in the gown. He stood in front of the wall around Chuo Park.
With a mechanical whine, the turret in the bottom of the helicopter rotated to focus the tranquilizer gun on his silhouette.
“Two seconds.”
A black dot welled up on Kyoya’s face. It grew into a line and slid down his cheek.
Blood.
His whole body was soon covered by it.
“One second.”
In a spacious director’s office in a hospital not far away, a man in black raised his head. His was perhaps the most beautiful countenance in the world.
He had just dipped a quill pen into a bottle of ink. The wet tip of the pen evinced the only sign of an abnormality. With his clear, dark eyes, he examined the contents of the glittering container. Once the color of the deep blue sea, it had turned red, the color of blood.
“Construction begins.”
A thunderous roar rolled across Shinjuku.
At a “youth bar” in Mejiro, Kyoya Izayoi slashed with his hands straight down.
The ink bottle erupted with pale flames that singed the director’s hand.
On a small bed, a long-haired girl sat straight up.
A ferocious blow hit the side of the helicopter, spinning it like a top. The altitude controls were rendered useless. The stick went dead. The rotor struck the ground and bent like a pretzel. The craft careened across Twelfth Street, smashed into the Park Hyatt Hotel and burst into flames.
Whatever had destroyed the helicopter roared like an out-of-season cyclone, blowing through every street and nook and cranny of Shinjuku. It shattered windows in the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Complex, scattered buckets sitting on a corner in Kabuki-cho, and tore to pieces an ominous mist that had just sprung up in the Kawadacho neighborhood in Yotsuya.
Here and there on the streets and on the sides of buildings appeared the bloodstains of the homeless and the graveyard shift cops picked up and bodily thrown by the gale. The sudden shock wave touched every part of Shinjuku before disappearing.
The rest of the city facing Shinjuku across the quarter-mile fissure in the earth didn’t feel the whisper of a breeze. What was born in Shinjuku obeyed all of its laws. Even new and unknown forms of destruction.
“Izayoi-kun!”
The girl and all the hostesses ran over to him. Kyoya slumped to the floor on his knees. His face was covered with blood, its skeletal outlines displayed like those of a completely different person.
After the women bore him to the back room and laid him down on a bed, one chopstick was left behind, broken in two. Nobody there was aware that the tip was pointing in the direction Kyoya had been facing in Demon City Shinjuku—Chuo Park.
The next morning, as the first light of dawn cast the cityscape into shadowed relief, the people of Shinjuku saw that the destruction stealing through the streets and alleys the night before had given birth to something completely new—in Shinjuku’s Chuo Park, in the so-called DMZ, in the most dangerous place on earth, home to the mad and the magical.
Floating above it was a structure whose existence could not be believed. It wasn’t exactly floating, but rested on four spindly legs that rose up from the borders of the park, as if intending to straddle its entire hundred and six thousand square yards.
It looked like an upside-down morning glory, with a wide, double-flight of stairs winding lazily up and around the bell of the “flower,” forming a circular ziggurat.
It rose three hundred feet into the air. Holding up the several hundred thousand tons of weight while maintaining a precarious balance must be due to the geometry of the funnel-shaped tower. The flat, terraced area at the bottom would be the living area.
Even the residents of Demon City, accustomed to unexplained phenomena, were amazed at the appearance of this strange giant edifice, that hadn’t existed the day before.
If they knew how it had truly come to be, they would shiver with fear.
The dead helicopter crew knew. This immense building in the air had appeared out of empty space in but a split second.
Part One: The Blue Knight
I
Another magnetic linear-drive cargo ship arrived. A fifty-thousand-ton freighter. An elliptical hole opened at the bottom of the tower. A gangplank—that looked from a distance like it was made out of shiny aluminum foil—connected to the ship’
s hold.
With a mind-mesmerizing guidance system leading them, the cargo was taken inside the tower. Watching the procession, the short-sleeved old man behind the counter sighed.
“That ship’s from Africa. Elephants, giraffes, rhinoceroses, zebras, lions, water buffaloes—it’s Noah’s freaking ark.”
“Wasn’t that other ship from Paris’s Fine Arts Foundation? Those crates must be filled with masterpieces. What kind of a house is that?” The man’s wife mused, gazing with enchanted eyes at one of their two customers. “Who in the world could be living there?”
That customer had sat down at the back of the small ramen shop and ordered a roasted pork ramen. Had ordered, but she couldn’t say now whether or not he’d eaten it. She was sure she’d watched him sucking up the yellow noodles, but when faced with the incongruity of this particular customer and an ordinary Chinese rice bowl, she couldn’t say for sure.
It was as if a brilliant artist had imbued his final portrait with the talent and experience accumulated over a lifetime—the smooth curve drawn by the eyebrows and the bridge of the nose—black eyes like a crystal clear winter’s night—lips that would kindle in women and men alike the desire to taste them.
Even his shadow falling on the ground beside him was more beautiful than any real woman. Except that this beauty was not the work of God, but something the devil made. The haunting light glittering at the back of his eyes said as much. The cruel smile reflected now and then on the screen of a monitor said as much.
Knowing this man’s occupation, who wouldn’t have gaped in disbelief and immediately think of a madman doing unspeakable things to the dead?
“A refill, Doctor Mephisto?” the wife asked in a throaty voice.
“I’m good,” he answered curtly.
But those cool words alone were enough to make almost any woman in the universe swoon.
“What do you think, Doctor?” The ramen shop proprietor asked, oblivious to his wife’s emotional state. “What’s with that building? Three days ago it appears in Chuo Park twenty yards above the ground. And then taking shipments of whatever nonstop, day and night. No matter how big a house, isn’t it all a bit too much? There must be another thirty of those fifty-thousand-ton cargo ships waiting to dock.”
Even if he had noticed, he was unlikely to say anything to this particular man. For this was Shinjuku’s very own Doctor Mephisto. Also known as the Demon Physician. When his slender hand wielded a scalpel, the most malignant disease in the world didn’t stand a chance.
“This may sound funny to you,” the proprietor continued. “But it makes sense to me. See, the ward sold the land and air rights for the legs holding that thing up. The guy in charge at the time is dead, but the contract’s there on the computer. So that’s that. The way I look at it, they hauled it here in a single night. There’s no way they built something like that there, even if designing stuff like that on a computer is a piece of cake. Guaranteed that thing’s gonna cause one helluva shit-storm sooner than later.”
Mephisto didn’t express any objections to the proprietor’s opinions.
Three days before, the large structure had suddenly appeared in the air above Chuo Park. Ward officials insisted on an on-site inspection and made contact via wireless.
Needless to say, three minutes after its appearance was reported, the park was surrounded by antiaircraft weapon systems, starting with armored police helicopters and large caliber laser cannons.
Strangely enough, in short order a response was received over normal frequencies and the tense situation was defused.
According to the ward government, the presumed owner of the building quickly responded to demands to identify himself and provide an explanation for the appearance. He was a resident of the ward who had constructed his home following all of the lawful procedures. The contract could be found on file in the ward’s computers. According to the contract, because a name was not required at the time, it would not be provided now.
The amazed ward officials examined the computers and confirmed that the absolute and unfettered rights to the land on which the four columns sat and the air twenty yards up—the space from the ground to the bottom of the structure enclosed by the four legs—had been, in the government’s name, sold.
The paperwork was all in order. Nobody in the ward government had been given any reason to think otherwise. Even the money stipulated in the contract had been transferred to the ward accounts on the stated day.
Of course, the next question was who had signed off on the deal. Based on the name and date on the contract, the person in charge was sought out, but he had died in the meantime.
This alone did not settle the matter and the investigation continued even now. As it turned out, the contract had been drawn up in the first decade of the twenty-first century, specifically on the thirteenth of September, the same day as the abominable Devil Quake. Nobody would have imagined that a contract would have been formally concluded on that fateful day.
Every metaphorical i was dotted and t crossed. The intent of the document was in force.
And so the siege around the structure was lifted, and the rest of the day was spent rooting through the legal nooks and crannies in the Building Standards Act.
As a result, the effects on the surrounding environment—the amount of sunlight, the psychological impact, the “sense of oppression” — were judged to not be a problem. In terms of the sunlight, it was confirmed that the contours of the building changed according to the rotation of the earth, ensuring that the shadows did not fall on any “reserved” areas.
The existence of the building and the owner’s residency in the ward was formally recognized.
Within an hour of this notification, the cargo ships started arriving. The number of ships filling the blue sky from all around and their contents dumbfounded the spectators.
The onslaught of shipping continued without a break, now in its second day. The proprietor’s misgivings were understandable.
“How much?” asked a low, hoarse voice.
The proprietor and his wife cast surprised looks at the table opposite Mephisto. Directly beneath the monitor was their other customer. A thin figure wearing a gown that cast off a dull glow, as if made from metal. He got to his feet. He’d arrived a bit before Mephisto and ordered a chow mein soba.
He’d ignored the monitor and slurped down the soba and they’d all but forgotten he was there. But on closer examination, he had about him a grave and refined aura that suffered little in comparison with Mephisto.
The proprietor gathered his wits about him and said, “Um, that’ll be seven hundred yen.”
“I’ll leave it here.”
He lined up the silver coins on the table top with his gnarly fingers and walked to the door.
“Come again.”
By the time his voice and the sound of the door closing died away, it was interrupted by Mephisto’s. “Thank you for the meal.” He tipped back the ramen bowl and silently drank down the remaining broth and got to his feet. “What do I owe you?”
“No, no, no,” said the wife, beaming at him. “Taking money from Doctor Mephisto is bad luck around these parts.”
“But I couldn’t—”
“Oh, such things go without saying, Doctor.”
“Well, then.”
With an unusual alacrity, he withdrew his hands from his black cape and gave them an elegant bow. A well-worn habit.
He ducked through the door with quick steps, paused and looked right and left. He was standing on the corner at the end of a narrow alleyway. There was nobody else in sight. The bright noonday sun lingered lazily on the concrete and asphalt.
A four-way stop on his right. Mephisto set off, the hems of his cape glittering. Turning left at the crossroads, he spotted the gown-wearing man off in the distance. The asphalt of the sidewalk was stripped away, revealing the black earth beneath.
Mephisto calmly started after him. He hadn’t gone more than thirty feet when the naked framewo
rk of a ruined building rose up on the left. The gown-wearing man turned left.
Several seconds behind him, Mephisto came to a halt. A large black shadow engulfed him. A strange figure was standing there less than six feet away. Even in this nightmare-ridden Demon City, such a costume was rare—a knight astride a horse.
Not a mech battle suit, but the outward appearance was reminiscent of medieval armor. The face, the limbs—anywhere the air might touch—were encased in dark blue metal that glinted in the sunlight.
The horse sported the same, standing there silently waiting for its master’s command. It could have leapt out of a medieval engraving. Taken together with the modern buildings around them, the neighborhoods of Shinjuku reaching out behind them, they somehow became a strange and austere work of classic art.
Mephisto focused his attention on the knight’s right hand. The steel fingers held a comet trailing a long tail—a ten-foot lance.
The spear tip wasn’t metal, but was also coated with a dark blue that ran down to his hand. If this mounted knight sallied forth, no matter what kind of weapon he was carrying, he wouldn’t have any difficulty skewering his target.
The man in the gown was nowhere to be seen. “An interesting bodyguard you’ve got there,” Mephisto observed in a low voice. His cool glance met the knight’s visor. The eyes beneath were likely electronic. There was no telling what would happen next.
“Well, then,” Mephisto said. “If you would excuse me.”
He turned around. He’d taken five steps when he heard the neigh of the horse. And a hard sound—of hooves striking the ground.
Mephisto walked on in silence. Ten paces. Twenty. Thirty.
The fierce sound of pounding hooves struck against his black cape. The earth shook. The charge was upon him. Mephisto didn’t turn around. He smiled. A smile that said: You dare to threaten me? I am the Demon Physician.
Blackness swallowed up the smile. Mephisto sprang into the air. The knight passed below him. Blue light flashed from his right hand. The round spear tip of the lance plunged through Mephisto’s torso. The knight whipped his arm and flung the black-clad doctor through the sky.
Demon City Shinjuku: The Complete Edition Page 21
