Maohden Vol. 1 Page 5

  “Don’t I know it,” Sasaki said. He restrained himself from adding a few choice words about that cabbie. The man had shown up to hear him out. The least he could do was buck it up.

  “What little information I have says you’re a reporter for the Historical World,” Setsura said, glancing at the business card.

  The statement was a tad anticlimactic. Historical World was a history periodical apparently as well-known inside Shinjuku as elsewhere. Nationwide, it had an audited circulation of five-hundred fifty thousand, leaving its competitors in the dust. That the subject of history could boast such a dependable audience spoke well of its enviable fan base.

  “I’ll send you some back issues. But I am surprised.”

  “What about?”

  Eyes so deep they seemed portals to his very soul rested upon him. Sasaki shivered despite himself.

  “The response to my letter said I was to take Shinjuku Avenue from the station straight towards Yotsuya. I didn’t imagine I’d end up meeting you in an interrogation room in the police station.”

  “Did you say anything to the police?”

  “Only that I was meeting you to get some material for a story.”

  Setsura nodded, his eyes still fixed on Sasaki. “Fine with me. It’s as good an approach as any.”

  “I wouldn’t have believed that’d ever pass muster. The biggest surprise of all. Walk into a police station in Demon City without any reason to be there, and walk out again with all your limbs intact. To tell the truth, this is exactly the kind of thing I’m looking to learn more about.”

  He wasn’t kidding. The senses he’d honed during his twenty years in the business were kicking in. That sense of excitement, that flutter in the stomach—it was like watching the shell around the egg beginning to crack, the creature within poking out its beak, reaching out with its claws.

  “As I explained in my letter, this is for our upcoming special edition issue. Historical World is taking a hard look at Demon City.”

  Whatever reaction might have registered on the young man’s face, the answer he gave was totally disarming. “From the day Shinjuku became Demon City up to now, every medium of mass communication on the planet has taken a hard look at Demon City. Every last one of them amounted to nothing more than vulgar sensationalism. Though I suppose as long as that meets the needs of the masses, this city will simply remain as one more source of sordid entertainment.”

  As a journalist, Sasaki wished to voice objections to this analysis. That human propensity to relegate objects of horror to a genre of entertainment must reach back into the mists of time.

  Turning the horrors of Demon City into “special editions” and increasing circulation many fold wasn’t done to panic the population, but because the readers really were fascinated by headline articles such as:

  “Demon City’s Tragic Year”

  “True Crimes Attributable to Shinjuku’s Devil Quake”

  “The Witches and Warlocks of Shinjuku”

  “Who’s Behind Those Unsolved Murders”

  “Shinjuku’s DMZ: Then and Now”

  As if responding to the need from outside the ward to produce greater and greater thrills, Shinjuku seemed to sink deeper and deeper into its accursed swamp.

  Several years before, Shinjuku had seen an influx of forty-five thousand members of the criminal classes, approximately equal to the lives lost in the Devil Quake. That number had by now risen to at least sixty thousand.

  Versus “regular” citizens sixty thousand strong. One out of every two was on the wrong side of the law somewhere. It was unlikely that such ratios could be found in any “uncivilized” city anywhere else in creation.

  “Excuse me, but I’m not talking about the customary tabloid press treatment. We are going to address the meaning of Demon City in today’s world. That means digging down through the historical strata and getting back to the beginnings, to the origins of everything that goes on here. I’ve taken personal responsibility and have gone to great lengths.”

  Sasaki awaited the young man’s reaction. This little speech should have given him an edge. He knew he had that look in his eyes that dared anybody to think otherwise.

  “Hmm,” the young man said. “So, exactly how much do you know? Roran’s name came up in your letter.”

  Sasaki felt a rising frustration, unable to infer anything from his tone of voice. It was like conversing with an animatronic doll that had perfected human speech. He licked his lips. Wait for the other man to play his hand or show his cards? The room fell silent. The silence stretched out. Sasaki blinked first.

  “I’ve researched the Devil Quake from every angle, the results of which leave me with one big question. Supposing we could assign to it something like intention, can what has sprung forth since be attributed to the person who triggered the Devil Quake, or attributed to the Devil Quake itself? A satisfactory answer has eluded all my investigations. How could that intention be described in the first place? This is where scholars are bound to focus their attention next.”

  Sasaki worried he was laying it on a bit too thick. The young man listened attentively with no evident distaste. Or at least he appeared to be paying attention. Sasaki had no choice but to continue. At some point, the drive of a veteran reporter to seek out a response from the questioner had abruptly waned.

  “This was the focus of my attention when I started collecting material. A magnitude 8.5 earthquake struck directly beneath the city. As if reading a map, the earthquake left the neighboring wards untouched. What could explain such a phenomenon?”

  Sasaki took a breath and continued.

  “How could forty-five thousand people die while at the same time and literally next door, not even a puppy was hurt? Then there were the repeated and unsettling setbacks in the reconstruction efforts. The killing sprees with automatic weapons. The transport that inexplicably went missing on its return route. The memorial service where the skin melted off the priest’s body. What is at the root of all this? There’s so much to investigate that I hardly knew where to begin. In fact, were it not for a rather trivial incident, I would have approached this special edition with a point of view hardly different from the rest, and equally far removed from the reality of the situation.”

  He stopped talking. Not so much because he’d come to the conclusion of his thoughts. Something stirred on the young man’s face, as if to say: Don’t tell me what I already know.

  Sasaki hadn’t gotten to the point, but Setsura Aki was doing a fast-forward. He asked in a perfectly polite tone of voice, “What was this rather trivial incident?”

  Sasaki gulped a bit. His mouth was so dry there was nothing left to swallow. “That would be—” he began hoarsely. He paused and tried to summon up some saliva to wet his vocal cords. He hadn’t felt like this even interviewing one of Shinjuku’s deadliest assassins.

  “A friend of mine is an internist,” he began again. “He showed me something very interesting, a microcellular scan he’d done on a cancer patient. The display showed the afflicted carcinoma and the surrounding organs. This was a patient on his death bed. The only question was how rapidly the cancer cells would invade the healthy tissue. He’d mapped the whole thing using computer graphics. Not exactly my cup of tea, but he seemed to get a kick out of it.”

  Sasaki permitted himself a small sigh. “So I ended up as the spectator for his show. The cancer cells were dyed black. They spread into the white normal cells. I sat there glued to my seat. You can probably guess where this is going. The map of those cells perfectly aligned with a map of Tokyo—I know, because I carry a map of Tokyo with me wherever I go. I pulled it out, and I swear it raised the hairs on the back of my neck.”

  He wiped his brow. The ventilation left much to be desired. All the better to make the suspect literally sweat. The interrogators could take a drug to cool down their own body temperature during the questioning. But it wasn’t the warmth that was making Sasaki sweat. The fever was erupting from within. He felt he’d said
too much already. He felt something approaching despair.

  “That definitely is quite interesting.” Though his eyes said something else entirely. “Please continue. Let’s get to me and Roran.”

  “Ah, first, I need some water.”

  “Yeah, it is hot. But there’s no running water down here. Keep going, in as much detail as you can.”

  “Just a minute—”

  “Exactly how did you come to know about me and Roran?”

  Sasaki stared back at him. It was like he was looking at a different person. “Who—who the hell are you?” Civility was hardly the issue now.

  “How did you find out what you found out?”

  “I’ve done some investigating of my own—witches and warlocks working in Shinjuku, new religious sects—and the connection between these supernatural phenomena and the Devil Quake is impossible to ignore. God, I need some water.”

  “And the result of these investigations?”

  “Nothing but dead ends there. I chanced across a more productive thread while looking into the early days of Demon City’s fratricidal conflicts.”

  “Hoh.”

  “I have connections at the National Library and the resource center at the Police Training Academy. I turned up a name, Onizuka. A police officer, nearing seventy. He was the only cop who survived Demon City’s first year.”

  “That many died?” the young man said. He seemed surprised.

  “In the three days after the Devil Quake, until the temporary bridges were erected, gangs ran rampant, violence and murder broke out everywhere, and the Shinjuku law enforcement infrastructure was in shambles. The cops who’d survived the Devil Quake were all pretty much killed in the line of duty.”

  “Horrifying.”

  “And I’m sure you don’t need to be told the murder rate in the year following. The total came to 5,824. If my memory serves correctly, the number of homicides for the entirety of Japan during that period was 1,920. In other words, a single ward had three times as many killings as the rest of the country combined. Add in theft, burglary and assault and it comes to more than three-hundred thousand cases. That year, 2,819 police officers died in the line of duty. Only one lived to tell the tale.”

  “And that would be Onizuka.”

  “Yeah. He was discovered in a vacant lot near Kabuki-cho, alive but his memory gone. He spent the next fifteen years convalescing. I checked him out.”

  Perhaps in order to put the officer’s mind at ease, Onizuka’s hospital room was filled with a wan, dusky light. This was the room he’d silently occupied for fifteen years. He opened his mouth for the first time.

  Sasaki only had one question to ask him: “What did you see?”

  He had no way of knowing that in doing so he was taking hold of the end of the strange thread that tied them together, himself, Setsura Aki and that letter he’d sent. He still believed Onizuka was mad. If by chance some spark of sanity had returned, the brain cells holding those memories from a decade and a half ago must have turned to dust in the meantime.

  Contrary to expectations, the old cop, all white hair and mottled skin, looked at Sasaki, his eyes coming unmistakably alive. Sasaki had to wonder if he’d been feigning insanity all along.

  Onizuka told the story in a voice that sounded like rust falling off an old lock. He’d been transferred to Shinjuku—where the criminal class ran amok—two months after the Devil Quake. Though police headquarters had covered up the true number of cop killings going on, news about Demon City filled the airwaves. An officer who found out he’d been transferred there either resigned on the spot or made out his last will and testament.

  As fate would have it, Onizuka was assigned to a police station in Kabuki-cho.

  The ragged walls and skeleton of the Koma Theater still remained, while the rest of the buildings and houses had been leveled. Not so different from anywhere else in Shinjuku, except that perhaps because of some lingering karma from its prior existence, the remains of this entertainment district that once fed on human wants and desires became a magnet for all the lower forms of life.

  That may have also decided Onizuka’s fate after only two days at his new post.

  He set off on a patrol late that night. At one end of “Water Fountain Square” in Kabuki-cho, in the midst of the mountain of bricks and rubble where the Shinjuku Milano and Shinjuku Tokyu Theater once stood, he witnessed a fight.

  It was a battle of two against one. The one was a man of medium build. The two consisted of a tall, lanky man and a quite shorter one. The battle resembled a dream beneath the beautiful moonlight, a scene that could surely be found nowhere else.

  The Demon City police had been ordered to ignore any gang wars if civilians weren’t caught up in the fray and the combatants outnumbered them by more than three to one.

  There were three of them and one of him. And even if the ratio was different, Onizuka would still have stood there rooted to the ground. The contest unfolding before his eyes did not resemble any kind of human combat.

  The short man threw a right hook. His opponent ducked behind a slab of concrete. The concrete shattered into a thousand pieces. And didn’t make a sound. As if awed into silence by the scope of this struggle, even shattered concrete dared not break the mood.

  The man with the medium build now waved his right hand, as if scattering the moonlight. The short man jumped into the air. A crisscross of slashes tore into the stone wall behind him.

  Before the short man touched down, his attacker raced across the ground, like the wind. The silhouette of the lanky man appeared in front of him, sitting cross-legged. The running man’s right hand—that had somehow sliced through stone—flashed again. An invisible surge of energy assaulted the sitting man.

  Onizuka could feel it ricocheting off of him.

  The short man twisted his body in midair. The man with the medium build reached his left hand behind him. At a distance of ten feet, the invisible power blossomed again.

  Windmilling his arms and legs, the fierce surge of energy shot the short man skyward and sent Onizuka crashing into the concrete wall behind him. His skull still ringing, he somehow managed to open his eyes.

  The fight was now a duel—at least until the short man came back down to earth.

  The sitting man was wearing what looked like a black kimono jacket. Both eyes were closed. The only thing distinct about him were the dark shadows traced by his sunken cheeks. His age was indecipherable.

  His adversary was dressed in black as well. Aside from his age, nothing else about him could be discerned. The one thing they did have in common was a demonic aura welling up from their beings, as if about to burst out of their skins.

  Despite being bathed in it, Onizuka kept himself conscious.

  The hands of the standing man suddenly sprouted dozens of extra appendages. It was an illusion, but that’s what Onizuka saw. He moved his hands up and down at a blazing speed, pausing only a fraction of a second in each stroke.

  Whatever he was up to, at some point he tightly closed his eyes. And then opened them wide. At the same time, his infinite number of hands faded into a blur and concentrated into a line extending horizontally from his shoulder.

  “Got you, Kongojin Roran!”

  Together with the cry, his sweeping left hand grabbed hold of something. The man sitting on the ground convulsed. With a shower of blood, his head dropped to the ground. The fountain of dark blood formed a dome above his head, as if sticking to the air, and then faded away.

  The nightmare battle having come to its horrifying conclusion, the stabbing pain washed away by the terror of the moment, Onizuka got to his feet. Now his ears made out a low and bitter sound, a voice crawling across the ground toward him.

  A small silhouette stood behind the man with the medium build. Not the short man from before—he’d disappeared into the surrounding darkness—for this was a child.

  He was barely three feet tall, ready to enter kindergarten. But the voice—what Onizuka had taken for tear
s, when he listened more closely—was the sound of an adult.

  “I saw you, Renjo Aki, I saw what you did and how. Don’t count on it working a second time. Father, it was worth dying to show me that, wasn’t it?”

  That was when Onizuka realized—the child wasn’t weeping. He was laughing. His words were suffused with joy. This young person was literally shaking with delight as he’d watched his father’s head drop from his shoulders.

  “Decades hence, we will meet again. And when we do, remember tonight’s encounter, for therein shall be revealed the fate that awaits you or your son.”

  The young one’s laughter, sounding at times like it was issuing from an old, rusty pipe, abruptly stopped.

  “Gento Roran, I presume. So nice that you could drop by. I do not enjoy killing children, but the enmity between the Roran and Aki clans extends to even the bugs in our beds. That is the fate that awaits you.”

  The man called Renjo Aki raised his hands and stopped. He stared at the gaunt, headless man he had so strangely killed. The torso was, from an utterly perverse perspective, doing what it should naturally do. It leaned forward, reached out, and picked up the head.

  The man who had killed him stood there like a statue as the bloody corpse clambered to its feet. The air was thick with magical miasmas and the stench of blood.

  In the crystal clear moonlight, the bad dream had taken a turn for the worse.

  The arms cradling the head raised it up and placed it on the stump of the neck. Out of alignment at first, the head facing to the side. A quick adjustment brought it facing forward.

  The head opened its eyes. A grave and gravelly voice said, “I, Gensei Roran, have spoken. When we meet again, the era will no longer be ours. I shall rest for a while. What shall become of this city? Renjo Aki, this is the time for you to start planning as well.”

  The words had barely left his mouth when his body crumpled. In a flash, the bloody black smoke spread through the air and shrouded the dark silhouettes of the three other figures.