Maohden Vol. 1 (13 page)

When they sent out a written challenge describing the course and day and time of their wild rampage, the police could do nothing but evacuate the civilians from the path of destruction. The commando police had not yet come into existence.

The carnage ended one night in July after 247 deaths and over 370 million yen in damage. On a bright, moonlit night, a hundred bikers attacked the former ward government building. The law-abiding citizens of the city shut themselves inside their houses and shielded their eyes from yet another massacre.

And then the throaty roar of the engines ceased.

Cracking open the shutters and doors, they saw that the grounds of the white hospital were littered with crushed bikes and crushed bodies.

The irony of the scene escaped no one, the dealers of death dying in front of a hospital.

But the real story, whispered from mouth to ear, was that the picturesque director of the hospital had looked into the gun barrels of the hundred worst men in history and erased them all from Shinjuku in a single night.

A man who could vanquish them in an instant was said to possess telepathic or some other supernatural powers. But those rumors had not been confirmed in the fifteen years since.

Except the math didn’t add up. Mephisto’s fair countenance, rising like the moon over the quaking yakuza, overflowed with youth. The Demon Physician not only ruled over life and death, but time itself.

“In any case,” he said, addressing himself to the godfather of the Haniwa Syndicate, “Supposing I do take the bodies of
them
as recompense, what then of the girl?”

“What?”

“The honey trap she laid in revenge for her boyfriend demonstrated a certain ingenuity and daring-do. But having come here to kill me, the matter cannot be resolved by simply handing her over. What do you propose?”

The godfather of the Haniwa Syndicate quavered and said, “D-Doctor, she is yours to do with as you please. I hereby sever any filial bond between us. Have her boiled alive or torn apart by wild dogs. But spare us and our organization.”

“The next time you show up here, I pray it is as
patients
.”

“Without a doubt. Without a doubt. We’ll do the dissections ourselves and have the parts delivered.”

Pinning the arms of the dazed protection racket thugs, the Haniwa Society godfather and his associates left.

“I am very sorry for all the commotion,” Mephisto said to the patients in the waiting room, his face as calm as ever. “But as you have seen, we have a fresh supply of organs that should prove most useful in your treatments.”

The patients all exchanged delighted looks. In this city, nobody fretted about where an item came from and how it got there. They had families to support, and that’d be hard to do if they weren’t alive.

Heading back to the examination rooms, Mephisto winked at Setsura. It was Setsura’s devil wires that had severed the hand of the thug attempting to unleash a volley of 9mm rounds with his Uzi.

“Hey, I’ll bring
senbei
next time I pop by. Thanks for the coffee.”

“You’re going?” said Mephisto, furrowing his brow. For a moment, the disappointed look on his face might well have been that of Juliet bidding farewell to Romeo from the balcony.

Ignoring it, Setsura started for the doors with a blithe wave.

Along the way, he passed a mother hauling along a girl of seventeen or eighteen into the hospital. She presented a card to the receptionist and was whisked away to the examination rooms, as if somebody was expecting her.

At his desk, Mephisto greeted them. The mother flushed a bit. The girl sat down behind her and didn’t move. She was definitely conscious. The strong light of will and reason glowed in her eyes. Except that sitting across from Mephisto and evincing no physical or emotional reaction suggested something else entirely.

Whatever curse she bore—that could place such a compelling visage completely outside her consciousness—was locked up inside the heart of this girl with the big eyes and flowing long hair.

Her mother’s audacious yet enchanting presence suggested a less than above-board occupation in the red light district. An equally strong sense of will emerged from beneath a light layer of makeup.

The touch of precocious sensuality about the girl obviously came from her mother. On the other hand, as she sat there wrapped in a red dress, her delicate frame and pensive air suited her age much better.

Dispel the anxieties that locked her into her prison of thought, release her to walk freely through the bright sunshine, and this was a girl who would attract looks from men and women alike.

“How is she, Doctor?” the mother pleaded. She was asking for the results of the previous examination.

Mephisto looked at the wall. The wall again changed into a screen. He studied the paragraphs of the German text and the columns of numbers for a minute. Facing the two women, he said, “Unfortunately, the underlying cause remains elusive. Genetic analysis and regression therapy have yielded no satisfactory answers.”

The voice relaying this information—contrary to the hopes and expectations of the patient—contained not one sliver of hope or hint of empathetic emotion. A harsher assessment in front of the mother, to say nothing of the patient, would be hard to imagine.

The mother’s shoulders slumped. The stored-up tension seemed to evaporate from her voluptuous body. The back of the chair creaked.

“Well—then—I guess I’ll have to take her to a hospital outside—outside the ward. But—the university medical center where I took her previously—I have connections there, you know, they said that there was no doctor in the outside world as accomplished in this field as Doctor Mephisto. If you can’t cure her, then nobody can—”

“I will continue to treat her,” Mephisto said, as stone cold as before.

The mother looked up. “You mean, you mean there are other procedures you can try?”

“I haven’t exhausted all of my resources. Despite the unwelcome results of the work done so far, we shall start all over from scratch. Your daughter’s cooperation will of course be necessary. This calls for the tenacity to drag herself up, not from a mild depression, but from the depths of despair. To that end, I would ask that you entrust her to my personal care and keeping.”

In any other circumstances, such a mother would have answered the request with rolled eyes. But under Mephisto’s watchful gaze, all such concerns would melt away.

“I understand,” she said, bowing her head. “I appreciate all you have done for us.”

“Don’t worry about the bill. As my own priority patient, I will cover all the expenses and assign her a full-time nurse. Clothing and personal belongings are fine, but please make any arrangements beforehand with the receptionist.”

Mephisto spelled all this out in unhurried tones, then turned back to his desk. All during this time, the girl didn’t make a peep, only stared off into space. The mother finally got up and with a little urging, so did the daughter.

After they left, Mephisto looked out the window and murmured, “So the dutiful daughter kills the father while in a drunken rage? I give the mother the results of the examination in her daughter’s presence and she barely stirs. It’s probably better that she be with a nurse unknown to her. The heart of a child is always a mystery to the parent. But somehow heaven has turned its face from this child as well.”

Mephisto turned his gaze out the window with eyes that could look squarely at the darkest and harshest realities.

The underground parking garage enclosed a hard and expansive space. The pipes and ducts and wires that lined the ten-foot-high ceilings performed no useful purpose, as the stale, unventilated heat and dim surroundings proved.

Outside it was high noon.

The garage was large enough to hold several hundred vehicles. The otherwise orderly concrete field was interrupted by a strange scene—a small mountain.

From the angle of its smooth surface, the base must circumscribe an area two dozen feet across. The shape suggested that an intense force had pushed the concrete up from below, and then lost its structure and form and subsided, leaving this behind.

Except that wouldn’t explain the unbroken surface that, looking more closely, appeared tawny brown in color.

It was a mountain of dirt, stamped down to remove any irregularities. An oddity in a world covered with concrete. But all the more surprising was the naked body of a young man lying on top of it.

That alone wasn’t so strange a sight in Demon City. In fact, it was rather charming that somebody would go to all the trouble of creating a pile of dirt in this location just so he could lie down on it. And yet there was something else, a kind of unnerving, eerie beauty about this young man, his face turned toward the heavy, gray concrete sky above him.

This was Gento Roran. But the body to match that shining and well-proportioned face—

The darkness wavered. Another presence entered the voluminous space and was moving about it. But in the depths of the gloom no physical thing stirred at all. Not among the concrete pillars. Not along the concrete walls. From whence came this whisper through the air—

A quiet
whoosh
. The kind of sound everyone heard all the time and nobody remembered.

It came from the ceiling, covered with a web of black hoses weaving around the bumps and protrusions in the concrete.

Whoosh
.

Now the sound came from directly above Gento, where what looked like a black hose clung to the ceiling. Not wrapped around the pipes, but affixed directly to the concrete. Considering its length—twenty feet long at the bare minimum—and mass, that it didn’t fall to the floor was a testament to its adhesive properties.

The bulbous head swung down, unpeeling its torso from the ceiling, and forming a hook—all without evincing even the slightest tremor. Blue-green eyes flashed on either side of its head. The red tongue flicked out. Fangs jutted from the sides of its mouth.

This was a very large snake. A yard around and reaching thirty feet in length, it slithered along the ceiling. Its size alone suggested it was the lord of this large parking garage.

Whether it viewed the sleeping young man below as an intruder, or a fresh supply of meat, whether anger or glee filled its gleaming eyes—it opened its fiery red mouth aiming to swallow Gento’s head whole.

The air hummed like a plucked string.

The snake’s mouth gaped open wider and wider, splitting its jaw and peeling back the skin a yard along its body. With a splatter like a dash of paint and a heavy thudding sound, it fell writhing to the floor.

Slits ran through its torso, exposing the white fat and red flesh. Reverberations rang out as it twisted, struggled and reared back, and finally fled to where the invisible blades could not reach, slithering into the shadows in a manner more appropriate to its form.

Gento hadn’t budged, hadn’t even opened his eyes. The rich scent of flowers bloomed in profusion about him. He resembled nothing so much as a young man indulging in a rose-strewn siesta in a faraway Garden of Eden.

The stench left behind by the snake, the dark purple lines trailing away into the darkness, now corrupted that paradise.

The shadow of a human form appeared, as if following that trail, Hyota’s oddly hunched over form.

“You’ve arrived,” came the low voice from the mound of earth.

“Yes,” Hyota answered, not moving from where he stood.

“And you have come to tell me you missed the mark?”

“Yes.”

The result of the duel between Setsura and Hyota on a street in Kabuki-cho’s Golden Gai. Seemingly knowing the answer already, the questioner did not react with anger. Neither was the respondent surprised by this foreknowledge, nor did he quake in fear of punishment. The tone, rather, was that of an investigator confirming what he already knew.

“Lay a single finger upon him, and it was impossible to fight back. I ran with all my might. He is a most frightening—genie.”

“You did well to get away. I was not certain you would ever return.”

The exchange sounded like nothing more than a heartless master addressing a lowly servant.

Hyota answered with a tight-lipped bow. “He mingled blithely with ordinary folk in order to lure us out. But Setsura Aki-sama has not discovered the seal. Though after this, I suspect that only time will hold him back. We should make that our first priority.”