Tomoko Kanan had been studying its movements for the better part of an hour. As if brushing aside the thin darkness hanging about her like a veil, the finger stroked the surface of the wooden box.
That finger filled her whole view—its entrancing gracefulness—every word she could think of related to beauty floated through her mind and evaporated like mist. None of them fit, none were truly appropriate. It had taken her less than an hour to curse her impoverished vocabulary.
The hand stopped. And time around her started again.
“Interesting,” said the white silhouette.
Tomoko could have sworn she heard the gloom around them moan in turn. We too wish to become that silhouette’s shadow. We wish to trace the outlines of that figure.
“Can you open it?” Tomoko asked.
And then started a bit herself. This was a question that no one should ask the hospital director. It was like asking him if he could cure a patient.
Mephisto backed away from the table holding the box without answering and sat down in an armchair.
The faint creak of the spring brought her back to herself.
“It is as you say.” Mephisto rested his eyes on Tomoko. That was enough to make this university professor forget about those porcelain hands. “This box is definitely it. However, opening it would take as much time and effort as sealing it did.”
“Even you—”
“Our enemy is four thousand years of Chinese history,” Mephisto said, in a manner that on any other day might suggest that even the Demon Physician had a sense of humor. But not today.
Entranced by the movements of his hands, Tomoko had the sense of a slightly demonic air filling the large room and shivered. To start with, why was the room so dark?
“In any case, the key shall reveal itself, as the day always follows the night. No, it has already come.”
Mephisto’s eyes glittered. Tomoko shuddered. The gleam in his eyes had a particular crimson glint. She suddenly remembered why she had entrusted her daughter to this doctor.
The chiming of the intercom interrupted her thoughts.
“Mephisto here.”
“A person has arrived wishing to speak with you. You don’t have any such appointments scheduled.”
In which case, a meeting should be impossible.
“Show him in,” said Mephisto, and hung up.
He got up and circled around the chair Tomoko was sitting in. She felt his hands on her shoulders. She had heard of his particular dislike for the fairer sex. And yet she could not deny the flame of desire welling up in her chest.
“All humans have throats, but yours is exceptional.”
It took several seconds for the meaning to crystallize in her mind. Tomoko couldn’t move—mesmerized by Mephisto’s touch, and because of a different sensation.
Fear. Who was this person?
The hands let go of her. But for some reason she couldn’t turn around. A different presence entered the room. The magical miasma it emitted kept Tomoko rooted to the chair. Considering the distance to the director’s office, the brief amount of time taken getting from the receptionist’s desk to this room convinced her that this new guest was in no way Mephisto’s inferior.
Then where did he stand?
The presence came closer and stopped right behind her. And where was Mephisto? For the first time, she sensed him nowhere.
“So it was here,” an old man said in a hoarse voice. “No matter where it goes, the connecting links will always join up. Finding the end point is only a matter of time and simple effort.”
She strained her ears, but couldn’t make out Mephisto’s replies, only the enlivened responses of the old man in the course of what appeared to be a conversation.
“I am very sorry, but this box is our lifeline. I ask you to return it as speedily as possible.”
She could not hear what was said in turn.
“And why is that?” Now there was a harder edge to the old man’s question. The next words came quickly. “Yes, joining our little band is altogether too great a risk for you. Do you want to know why? Even should the Demon Physician lose but one drop of blood, whoever drinks it would rule over him.”
Tomoko’s whole body went rigid. Fear poured forth from the very pores of her skin.
The air hummed around her. The hoarse voice cried out. At the same time, the room was flooded with light.
“How do you find the illumination, Doctor?” he asked, the question rising in timbre from the dredges of pain to a shout of triumph.
This was sunlight, Tomoko’s uncomprehending mind somehow grasped the simple fact. Not artificial sunlight. The sun that graced the sky of every season, that woke the living from their slumber and played across the farmers in their fields. That gleaming force of nature.
Tomoko couldn’t begin to comprehend how he had gathered it, stored it, brought it with him, and now unleashed it. But she had the feeling that none of that was beyond the grasp of the man behind her.
“Hoh! You cannot move, can you? Understandable in this sunlight. Become one of us and you will behold a world no mortal can see. But the toll on your freedom is high. I knew I could at least count on you, Doctor Mephisto, to maintain a grip on your wits while in the light. Well, then. I shall take the box and take my leave.”
His voice approached the desk. A moment later, the sound of smug assurance turned into an exclamation of surprise.
Unable to bear the mystery a minute longer, Tomoko sprang to her feet and whirled around. Before her eyes was an old man with a white beard. He was holding the box and writhing. The way his spine arched backwards, the box itself had sent a shock of pain through his arms to his body.
Mephisto must have devised something since bringing the box here. He had only touched it. That those beautiful hands, that mystical loving touch, contained such awesome power was hard to believe.
A small sun radiated forth from the old man’s chest. This glowing globe, this jewel pouring forth its vivid light, tumbled onto the floor. A golden arrow of fire shot down from the ceiling and straight though it. The jewel itself showed no changes at all.
“Damn you—Mephisto—to do such a thing—in such a way—”
Tomoko had never heard spoken such deeply held resentment in all her life. And never would again.
The old man’s arms rose up, as if to smash the box against the floor.
“Stop!” Tomoko cried out.
“I won’t hand it over, Mephisto!”
His hands waved back and forth. A cracking sound came from around his shoulders. Still holding the box, he jumped toward a corner of the room, where a bookcase was filled with volumes of unknown origins. All the more surprising was the elliptical opening that rippled across the surface. The box and the old man’s arms were sucked into it.
One even stranger scene after the other. When Tomoko finally looked back at the old man, off in the distance came the sound of a door closing with a heavy thump.
“Kanan-san,” Mephisto called out behind her.
However overjoyed she was that he was back to “normal,” Tomoko felt a chill down her spine.
“That ball of light, could you wrap it up with something? It is a bit too bright for me to handle right now.”
There were a mountain of things she wished to ask him, but she put them all out of her mind. No matter what questions she asked and answers she got, this was all beyond her powers of comprehension.
She couldn’t find anything useful in the immediate vicinity, so Tomoko took off her jacket and covered the little sun. She was afraid it might burst into flames. Nothing happened. This was light without heat.
Mephisto approached through the shadowed darkness, not Tomoko, but the oval tear in the bookcase.
“So this is the connecting link?” mused Mephisto, gazing down at the space, wavering like a patch of rough sea. “And what happens when the box connected to it is cast down it?”
The intercom chimed. “Yakou-sama is here to see you.”