Mephisto led them to a what looked like a bronze door. The patina was an even deeper shade of blue, perhaps from infrequent use.
“Huh,” Setsura said. He almost sounded impressed.
“So this is a first for you too?” Yakou said.
“Yeah. Seen it plenty of times from the outside, but never gone in.”
Fifteen feet wide and thirty feet high, the door brought to mind a gate built to admit a giant. A ring glittered on Mephisto’s left hand. One side of the door began to recede.
A gust of wind struck them in the face. It came from beyond the door.
“That’ll send a shiver down your spine,” Tonbeau said, hugging her arms across her chest. “The same feeling I got going into the laboratory of Doctor Faustus. Makes the hair stand on end.”
“Quite a lot of it,” Setsura said.
“Shut up.”
“Let’s go,” said Mephisto, and started off.
The door had opened all the way by now. A faint light wrapped around them. In the somehow familiar sepia glow, Setsura had that sense of recovered memories of times past.
Mephisto continued on his way, as if pushing the light aside. Giant mechanisms grew from the ceiling and floor, striking strange poses before the visitors. He recognized the electron microscopes and laser range finders, but the rest were a complete mystery to him.
None of them seemed able to maintain a state of equilibrium in this world. None had a fixed form. Even their warped and twisted platforms changed shape from moment to moment.
An eyeball fifteen feet in diameter opened its camera-like iris and stared at them, but took no other action.
As they proceeded apace toward an iron door tucked into the back of the roomy space, Tonbeau raised a hand and made a grabbing motion in the empty air.
Yakou and Setsura furrowed their brows. Tonbeau opened her plump hand, revealing a translucent blob squirming there. It looked like a clump of snow fungus.
“What’s that?” said Setsura.
“A miasma?” said Yakou.
“I am familiar with miasmas. But not one that ever looked like this.”
“It is extremely rare,” said Tonbeau with evident pride as she strolled along. “Normally, when miasmas take corporeal form, they’re much uglier, dirtier things. This one is remarkably pure. But—touch it—”
Setsura glanced at Yakou. He didn’t look terribly concerned, so, what the hell, he nudged it with the tip of his finger. And pulled it away.
“It’s cold.”
“This one must be a dozen degrees below freezing. It steals heat from whatever comes into contact with it. The air around it is hardly there at all. This space seems half-filled with spirits of a high order, and half-filled with ghosts of a low order. Otherwise, something like this couldn’t exist here.”
“Huh,” Setsura said, dutifully impressed.
Mephisto stopped in front of the iron door and looked back at them. “Through this door is the Resurrection Room.”
“This is the place, huh,” Setsura said, a timbre in his voice different from before. “It’s said that the one thing that Doctor Mephisto cannot do is raise the dead. But that is a lie. Because there’s this here Resurrection Room, you see. Among his thousands of patients, a lucky few are snuck down here, brought back to life, and then under the cover of night, taken back to the city through a secret door. Well, at least according to Shinjuku’s urban legends.”
Mephisto didn’t reply. When the legends in this city revealed their true faces, what kind of countenance would they show?
At a touch of his fingers, the rusty door opened inward and ushered them in. Stone walls lined the large room, so large that, throw a stone hard and it would not reach any of them or make a sound when it landed.
In the center of the room were an operating table and an old wooden desk, sitting there as if left behind by accident. Not far from the desk was a medicine cabinet. These were the only furnishings in this legendary room in which the dead were said to rise from their deathbeds.
“Man, I’m all on pins and needles,” said Tonbeau, rubbing her burly arms.
“I wouldn’t have imagined there was a place like this in Shinjuku,” agreed Yakou.
“Totally.” Though it was hard to tell how authentic those last impressions were. “Can you make a connection here?” Setsura asked.
“No problem,” Tonbeau assured him. “It’s not stuff that matters here. In a place like this, we can assemble anything we need.”
“Lie down there,” Mephisto said, indicating the operating table as he went over to the medicine cabinet.
Setsura looked at the other two as if he expected one of them to step forward. When they didn’t, he laid down on the table with a resigned expression.
He was a man, after all. A very handsome man, to be sure. And lying defenseless on an operating table. A brilliant artist letting her feeling flow through her brush without restraint would surely create from this scene a masterpiece of unbridled licentiousness.
Three pairs of eyes watched as Mephisto reverentially sorted through the medicine cabinet, reached in and selected a vial, then returned to Setsura’s side. He was carrying a blue, wide-mouthed bottle.
“Take two of those and call you when I get there? Spare me the lame magic tricks.”
“I am always serious. Drink it.”
“What’s it going to do to me? Give me a literal spiritual high? Maybe I’ll float there.”
“It is not that kind of drug. Your physical being can make the journey. But however ready you may have made yourself, you cannot point yourself in the proper direction. That is Miss Tonbeau’s job.”
The same Tonbeau was staring intensely at Mephisto’s hand. “That drug—well, no, I don’t imagine you ever let it out of your sight. But now and then other geniuses in the outside world have cooked up similar concoctions. One day out of the blue a man will grasp the truth of the universe, another will travel to the edges of the Milky Way. They drank something like that, no?”
Mephisto didn’t answer. “Drink it. A mouthful or a drop, the effectiveness will be the same.”
“How’s it taste?” said Setsura, eyeing the bottle.
“Not sweet, but perhaps a hint of cherry.”
“Works for me.”
Setsura popped off the top and downed the contents in a single gulp. His throat bobbed as he swallowed, though it’d take a bit more time to permeate his body through his bloodstream.
The man in black grew indistinct.
“And now to recite the sutra that will send you to that other world.” By now, even Setsura’s pricked-up ears had dissolved like diluted paint. “Miss Tonbeau, if you would please.”
“Gotcha,” Tonbeau Nuvenberg said, giving her belly a hearty slap. She stood next to the operating table and spread her arms wide and began to chant an incantation.
A wind kicked up from an unseen quarter. Setsura’s body was barely recognizable as human. Yakou exclaimed beneath his breath as colors snaked around Tonbeau’s form and spread out in a mist.
Sweat, born of her powers of concentration, streaked with tints and hues. Setsura’s body slowly floated towards her. The wind howled around them, forming a whirlpool. Yakou watched as Setsura swirled closer, and was sucked into the witch in the rainbow.
Here was Mephisto’s reason to have her there. The flesh and bone of this fat witch itself formed the gate into that other world.
The hazy tips of his shoes passed through her chest, and the wind suddenly ceased. Tonbeau collapsed. Yakou ran up and caught all three hundred pounds of her. That was one strong vampire.
“Doctor, some medication—”
“And stat!”
“Well then, nothing to worry about, I guess.” Tonbeau’s vigorous response set Yakou’s mind at ease.
Mephisto gazed quietly at the operating table. “Not much longer, don’t you think, Miss Tonbeau?”
A question Yakou hadn’t expected.
“So it seems.” Lying down, the big woman nodded. “Definitely right around the corner. The end of everything. It may be a good idea to get ready to move.”
“You mean, leave here?” Yakou asked.
The witch responded with a somehow sad smile. “This city. No matter how you look at it, all of its citizens turning into vampires makes life plenty hard for the real humans. Hold on, that means all of the shops and parks are empty during the day—”
The multicolored lady had ferreted out a silver lining of profit in the situation. Yakou turned his attention to Mephisto. At some point, he’d sat down on a wooden chair at the desk and seemed lost in thought. A dreamlike fog seemed to fall across his sculpted features.
Mephisto said in a cold quiet voice that not even Yakou’s ears could hear, “The medicine I compounded here crosses over with you, Setsura.”