Maohden Vol. 1 (22 page)

She went on, “This city is a place that gathers evil in all its forms. Exploit it right and there’s big bucks to be made—by terrorist organizations, crime families, wizards and witches. The assassins for hire under every rock. The seminars for average citizens on the best ways to kill people. Of course the curriculum could be replicated outside of Shinjuku, but those genetic abilities amplified by the magical miasmas of Demon City are priceless. Imagine being able to wield such powers at will, being able to rule over the dark forces in the world—no general or warlock could stop you. It’d be the ruin of every secret society. This city is a cauldron stewing a witch’s brew. The only question is who will be the witch.”

“A fascinating question, to be sure,” came Setsura’s voice from above her, and then away from her. “I have given it some thought. At any rate, my father died without saying a thing about it. But there wouldn’t be much meaning to the fight otherwise. I’m sure Gento Roran feels the same way.”

The last line surely reflected Gento’s proposal in Shinjuku Gardens.

“Gento has been out of sight and mind for the past fifteen years. Where the hell’s he been all this time?”

“No idea. Except that he definitely wasn’t anywhere else but here.”

“I find it hard to believe he could be hiding here in Demon City all that time without you noticing once.”

“If that’s what he did, then that’s what makes him an even more formidable opponent.” Setsura thought for a moment. “But there’s still one thing I don’t get—how did this city come to exist anyhow?”

“The Devil Quake.”

“Yeah, but why did the Devil Quake occur?”

“There’s no point to that question. It’s been tying scientists and philosophers and theologians in knots ever since. A magnitude 8.5 megaquake that stopped right at the borders of the ward and didn’t even shake the coffee in a cup immediately outside it. Who could begin to comprehend that kind of supernatural phenomenon?”

“Comprehension and the fact that it happened are two different things. Let’s try this again. What
caused
the Devil Quake?”

“That I can answer, if you’ll settle for fairy tales,” Azusa said. Legends on the one hand and history on the other—any kid living in Shinjuku knew which one to believe when push came to shove.

She cleared her throat. “Almost ten years ago, a warlock by the name of Rebi barricaded himself inside his Shinjuku station sanctuary and attempted to sow seeds of evil throughout the world. He and his demon servants were destroyed by a young man. Before he perished, the warlock prophesied that the city would sink into darkness and the human race would know the meaning of its existence for the first time.”

“Hell, we’re happy when anything here turns out to have a meaning.” A rare look of consternation crossed the
senbei
shop owner’s face, at once close up, and then further away from her. “Let’s assume the Devil Quake was triggered with some ulterior motive in mind. Who caused it? Beyond causing the phenomenon itself, what intent was behind it?”

Azusa didn’t answer. Anybody who had anything to do with Shinjuku had pondered those questions at one time or another. And nobody had yet come up with an answer, or even a clue. What did Demon City Shinjuku
mean
?

“That’s all I know. Let’s hear what comes next.”

“Good idea.” Azusa straightened. “Let’s go then.”

“Where to?”

“Where else? The midwife’s place.”

“She’s still alive?”

“Hoh. Something Shinjuku’s best P.I. doesn’t know? As they say, it’s always darkest at the foot of the lighthouse.”

“Is that what they say?”

“Whatever. Come on.”

The comely doctor strode through the falling twilight, his shadow reaching out behind him.

Among the pedestrians sharing the dusky Okubo Avenue with him were a cyborg, metabolic stabilizers jutting out from its back—an addict strung out on LSD, each belch condensing into the form of a woman or some other related private body part and disappearing just as quickly—a brain-eating roundworm wrapped around the moth-eaten flesh of a sleepwalking zombie—

But all that strangeness yielded as if by natural law to the physician’s beauty.

It was a rare occasion in this city when beauty trumped the weird. For this was Mephisto. An exquisiteness that surpassed even Setsura’s threw off ripples like small waves that rose up and sank down in the gloom, painting his portrait against a melancholy landscape.

Except that his was an unusual state of mind for the otherwise cool-headed physician, the result of what he had heard and seen just twenty minutes before.

After making rounds that afternoon, he’d paid Mayumi a house call as scheduled. He was running a bit behind schedule. In this case, “a bit” became an eternity.

Armored cars of the Shinjuku police were parked in front of her house. Two dead bodies were being carried out on stretchers. He identified himself and pulled back the sheet. The woman’s dead face revealed the extent of the tragedy to him.

The cops filled him in on the details. The man and the woman were brutally slain, the young woman presumed to be the perpetrator was nowhere to be found.

Mephisto looked around the room. The day before, the mother and daughter had come to the old Shinjuku government office building where his hospital now stood. Up to that point, the daughter had killed three men, including her father.

The mother had confessed to having confidentially “dealt with” the bodies of the other two. Mephisto didn’t know whether that meant she’d buried them in an unmarked grave, or arranged with the medical examiner to make them disappear, and he didn’t much care.

Everyone who’d had sex with her had died. This wasn’t a one-off freak of nature, but the kind of phenomenon that got Mephisto’s medical juices flowing.

His examinations had yielded no useful data so far. The coroner’s report the wife had brought in said only that her husband had died of a coronary infarction. This struck him as a commonsensical conclusion as he had detected no abnormalities in the daughter either.

Except that with the death count up to three, plus the one dying the night before, it was hard to dismiss the connection. The detectives speculated that the daughter must have fled after killing her mother, who in turn had been driven mad by the man’s death.

He was about to leave when a call came in from headquarters that the night before, an eyewitness had observed a girl riding a folding scooter down Okubo Avenue getting nabbed by a biker gang.

This “eyewitness” report came from an information broker representing the eyewitness. The crime database at the police station had matched it to the description sent in by the cops on the scene.

The information broker would forward the reward money to the informant, and would make sure identities weren’t leaked. Even taking their cut, brokers promised generous payouts, guaranteed the veracity of the intel they provided, and were fully prepared to punish providers of phony leads.

For that reason alone, the police preferred working with the “professionals,” as opposed to civic-minded bystanders.

The detective went to interview the witness. Mephisto accompanied them. He listened to what the man had to say, but did nothing more. The strung-out vagrant couldn’t even recall with certainty the gang emblems and colors always emblazoned on the sides of their bikes.

The broker wasn’t any more help. “So a bunch of bikers showed up and you thought you could cash in, eh?” spat out the disgusted detective. “These penny-ante outfits got no quality control. The big boys never pull crap like this.”

So Mephisto ended up walking the dusky streets alone. He had to wonder about what had happened to her. But he also knew it was beyond his control. In Shinjuku, the time he spent worrying about one patient could be better used to save ten more.

He knew this plain as day, but couldn’t shake the image in his mind’s eye of the young and pretty girl sitting there in the chair, eyes cast down. He spied a dilapidated telephone booth out of the corner of his eye. There were other ways of gathering information that would reveal the gang’s true colors.

Mephisto didn’t stop. Sometimes when the wheel of fate turned, all a doctor could do was stay out of the way until it came to a rest. Besides, he had enough on his plate this evening already.

The midwife’s house was in East Gokencho, a prefab not far from what had once been the headquarters of the book wholesaler Tohan Corporation. It had two small rooms, a kitchen and bath. Low-cost housing from one of the earlier reconstruction efforts。

The name plate said “Miyako Naruse.”

Setsura rang the doorbell. A white-haired old lady appeared. Her back was so bent over her chin was practically brushing the ground.

When Azusa told her who they were looking for, she replied in a crisp, clear voice that she was the person in question. There was nothing wrong with her hearing either. Without cybernetic implants or rejuvenation drugs, the vigor of her body and spirit shone on her aged face.

As she turned her head to look at them, tears unexpectedly filled her eyes. “You’ve come back,” she said.

“Well, no, I—” Setsura said. His misapprehension was understandable. She’d delivered him twenty some-odd years ago, and he was a full-grown man besides.

“Setsura Aki-chan, isn’t it?”

“How about that,” Azusa said to herself.

“You remember?” Setsura asked.

The old lady nodded. Tears ran down her cheeks. She made no attempt to wipe them away.

“Of course I do. I was the first one to see your face. Your real face. The first to hold you, before your own mother. You could have become the ugliest man in the world in the meantime and I wouldn’t forget. My, my, that look on your face—you seem to have something on your mind.”

Azusa smothered a laugh. Even Setsura couldn’t hide a wry smile as she led them into the living room.

It was clear that Miyako lived alone. She was well into her seventies. She said she was living on social security and a pension. Now and then a child she’d delivered long ago would show up on her doorstep to show her a child of her own. The kind of thing that made life worth living. No one need feel sorry for her in her present state.

Setsura assured her he did not. They sat down on the dusty tatami mats. He explained that they were looking for more information about the seal.

“Sure,” she readily agreed. It wouldn’t have been unreasonable to expect that her mind would have begun to yield to the inevitable ravages of age, but this was not the case with Miyako. “The story begins with the night you were born. That day, a tremendous gale was blowing through Shinjuku.”

A small man, bearing the vibe of a wild animal about him, his body bent forward almost to the horizontal, came to visit her. He asked her to come take a trip with him. Miyako thought at first he must be kidding. There were hardly any midwives left in Japan these days, medical technology being fully capable of handling every aspect of the delivery process.

The man shook his head. Miyako and only Miyako would do. This was a child upon whom the fate of the world depended, not the kind of baby who could be trusted to machines.

She didn’t understand what he meant by all that, but if her experience and personal touch was all that important, she might as well accompany him.

At the time, Miyako weighed close to two hundred pounds, but the little man flung her over his shoulder and dashed off at an alarming speed.

“He was faster than a car, and less bumpy, and didn’t slow down in the slightest, even climbing hills. I could imagine myself riding on the back of a tiger.”

With the wind whistling in her ears, almost an hour had passed when a mansion the size of a small mountain rose up before them. There wasn’t a single servant to be seen inside or on the grounds of this strangely modern-looking castle.

The man led her into a room the size of a tennis court covered with tatami mats. An ornate futon was spread out in the very center. Next to the pillow, an old man in traditional Japanese dress directed his solemn gaze down at the person lying on the futon.

A woman with long hair and a pale, waxy complexion. What must have been a once slender face was puffy and swollen. Miyako knew at once that the woman was in dire straits, suffering from a severe case of preeclampsia.

Catching the old man’s attention she indicated this with her eyes. He nodded.
Do what you have to do
, was his silent answer.

That was when they introduced themselves. He was Renjo Aki. He looked to her like a great chess master struggling to claim victory from the jaws of sure defeat.

With no time for small talk, Miyako set to work. It proved to be the most difficult delivery she had ever been confronted with. The birth canal was narrow, the baby’s head large. And then just when the mother pushed with all her might and the baby’s head appeared, a gust of wind and lightning tore through the room.

The roar filled her ears. The tide of blue fire swept through the room. It seemed that the room itself was being swallowed up by the black clouds and looming darkness outside. Miyako had to repeatedly stifle the impulse to jump up and flee.