The Lost Stones

The butterflies were unexpected. Halfway through the set, the songs stopped for a minute and the singer came to the stage's edge and recited a poem. Then a cloud of butterflies was released over the crowd.

The singer was a nasty-looking little guy. Not nasty as in scuzzy. He was clean-shaven and, despite the body-heat in the venue, wore a brown tweed suit with a matching brown waistcoat and tie. No, the nasty vibe came from his slicked-back hair and sideburns and the pugnacious thrust of his face, with its small, dark and deep-set eyes and its generous-sized lips that sneered rather than pouted. These made him resemble a young thug who'd acquired money through violent misdeeds.

When the singer had first strutted on stage, Meredith turned to me and said, "Oh yeah. Performance. That's clever."

"Well," I said, "He has to perform. He's a performer."

"No," said Meredith. "Performance is a 1969 movie directed by Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg. About gangsters and musicians. About drug-taking and dark psychedelic goings-on. Jagger acted in it. And that's what this one's evoking now."

"Fucking hell, Dith. I'm impressed. You're a mine of information. Mostly useless information, but no matter."

The poem went:

Peace, peace! He is not dead, he doth not sleep

He has awakened from the dream of life.

Tis we, lost in stormy visions, keep

With phantoms an unprofitable strife

"Their chronology," said Meredith, "is fucked up."

"What do you mean?"

"That's Adonais by Shelley. Jagger recited it on stage during their free concert in Hyde Park in 1969 as a tribute to Brian Jones, who'd died just days earlier. Whereas with this lot, Brian Jones is still alive."

In a voice that had Jagger's famously pretend Cockney accent but also had the malevolence of someone about to gut you with a knife, the singer continued:

We decay

Like corpses in a charnel

If anything, the version of Brian Jones looked eviller than the version of Mick Jagger did. He wore stripy skinny-legged trousers and a dark velvet smoking jacket with a tangle of silken scarves hanging between its lapels. The scarves were psychedelically patterned with swirls and splatters of red. Clamped into place beneath his fringe of blonde hair was a pair of big round-lensed sunglasses and, beneath those, his face was pale and narrow and mean. The lenses and the red-streaked bib of silken scarves made me think of a predatory bug, a praying mantis with the blood of its last victim on its thorax.

"Not," Meredith admitted, "that this is the real Brian Jones."

"No. It would be freaky if it was."

The singer concluded:

Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass

Stains the white radiance of eternity

Until death tramples it to fragments. Die—

If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!

Follow where all is fled!

Then the Brian Jones lookalike opened a cardboard box that was sitting onstage. He raised it over his head and emptied its contents into the air rushing from an electric fan behind him. Suddenly, pouring out of the box and blowing across the audience were hundreds of white flakes, like the snowflakes falling on the white-covered city outside. Hands shot up from the auditorium as people tried to grab them. One tumbled towards me and I saw it was a butterfly. It flew into my face and automatically I reached up and seized it. I seized it too hard and realised I'd probably crushed it.

But when I opened my hand, I discovered that the thing crumpled on my palm was a piece of white paper, cut in the shape of a butterfly.

Meredith had caught one too. "That's clever," he said. "Actually, they did a better job of it than the real Stones did."

I sighed. "Now you're going to tell me another piece of pointless Rolling Stones trivia."

"After Mick Jagger had recited Adonais at Hyde Park, to complete their tribute to Brian Jones, they opened boxes containing thousands of butterflies, real butterflies, and released them. But already half the butterflies were dead. Suffocated inside the boxes." He looked again at the stage, where the five musicians were limbering up for a further song. "Oh, these guys are good. Very good."

He spoke with admiration, not affection.

I noticed that another butterfly had come down and landed on the peak of Hiroko's brown corduroy cap. I pointed and she retrieved it and held it up between two green-varnished fingernails.

Then came the opening chords of "Gimme Shelter". The chords were plucked with such precision that beside us Meredith marvelled, "Fuck, that's excellent!"

To Hiroko, I shouted, "You got one too!"

She shouted back, "But mine is different, Stu. It's not paper."

I saw her butterfly shimmer goldenly in the radiance of the stage-lights.

The final song of their final encore was "Sympathy for the Devil". "What else?" was Meredith's comment. After its primordial squawks and screeches and yelps had died away and the audience had finished cheering and applauding, the singer made an announcement. He said he hoped that any members of the audience who'd managed to catch a golden butterfly had held onto it.

Because that golden butterfly served as a pass to get into the post-gig party.

***

The man who'd collected tickets at the front desk before the gig told us that the party was in the band's hotel, which was a few blocks away. Meredith said he knew which hotel it was.

I studied the ticket collector's face across the desk. Pocked, weathered and sprouting a thick, black-grey beard, it seemed familiar to me. Meanwhile, Meredith gestured back into the foyer, which was little wider than a corridor. Its walls were lined with cheap wooden panelling and at least two panels were in the process of coming off and falling to the floor. While the main part of the floor was clean, I could see grey margins along the bottoms of the wall where the dirt had been swept aside. In Japanese, Meredith said, "By the way, I thought this place had closed down. When did it reopen?"

The ticket collector looked at him vacantly. "It reopened."

"Yes. I know it reopened. But when?"

"It reopened." That was all Meredith could get out of him.

Any other season of the year, the walk would have taken a few minutes. But because it was the middle of the Sapporo winter, it took much longer tonight. Dunes of snow, dirtied by exhaust smoke, were piled along the sides of the pavements, while the pavements themselves had a crust of hard, smooth ice that was capable of breaking bones when the foolhardy slipped on it. The three of us moved at an ultra-cautious shuffle. We went by a pachinko parlour, which despite the hour was still ablaze with fluorescent light and releasing a gale of chattering, chiming noise. As if to highlight the need for caution, the parlour's doors slid back, a stocky middle-aged man in a sheepskin coat swaggered drunkenly onto the street, his feet skidded from under him and he hit the ice with a thud.

I should have been happy. Here I was, reunited with the guy who for many years had been my best friend in the city. Also, I was with the woman who, because she'd been my best friend's girlfriend, for many years had been my second-best friend. But I simply felt tense. Meredith and Hiroko had split up the previous year and things were brittle between them. And my relationship with Meredith was complicated now too.

We shuffled by a little ramen shop, white clouds hovering around its whirring ventilation grills as warm air from inside met the sub-zero temperatures outside. Desperate to kindle some conversation between us, I asked Meredith, "How's work?"

He laughed bitterly. "What's work?"

"The part-time stuff at the colleges?"

"One's gone because there's no students." I wondered if he was going berate Hiroko for not having babies and not helping to reverse the decline in the Japanese birth-rate, which was now impacting on the number of teaching vacancies at the schools, colleges and universities. But he didn't. "As for the other post, well, there's that ongoing business with Queen Ghidorah."

Queen Ghidorah was Meredith's nickname for a hated female colleague who'd reported him to the college authorities for turning up drunk at a lecture.

"What about private students these days?"

"I'm advertising. But no one's biting."

We turned a corner onto a side-lane. To our left was a parking lot where the snow had been scooped back into hillocks that reached two metres in height. To our right was some waste ground that'd become a flat, unbroken plain of snow. The lights of buildings along its far side resembled a glinting, tangled necklace. Among them, a few bright scratches of pink and blue denoted the presence of love hotels. The Sapporo night-sky above was the colour of a bruise, an ugly mixture of yellowy light-pollution and chilly blackness. Flecks of new snow crept down from it and settled on the lane around us.

"I don't like this area," said Hiroko. "We are near the subway garage. At night they put the trains there."

Meredith asked me, "You know why that's bad?"

"No," I said.

"All the people who've committed suicide by jumping off the subway platforms, in front of the trains, are supposed to haunt that garage." Then he laughed.

"Please, Meredith," said Hiroko crossly, "it is not funny."

I almost demanded, What's up, Meredith? Are you jealous of those train-jumpers because they managed to do the job properly?

Then a long two-storey building appeared at the side of the lane. Its roof was hidden by such a thick layer of snow that it resembled an over-iced cake. Its small, square windows were sealed against the cold by metal shutters that were rusty and paint-scabbed and I saw holes in its concrete façade where fittings, perhaps fluorescent tubes, had been removed.

"This can't be it," I said.

"No," said Meredith, "this is it."

"The only thing this could serve as a hotel for is cockroaches."

But then at the building's other end we found a doorway where there was a light, its rays cutting across the waste-ground like a blade, and where there stood a doorman. Disturbingly, he had the same bearded, rough and somehow-familiar look as the ticket collector at the concert-hall. "You're late," he said. "You must be the last ones."

When Hiroko produced the golden butterfly, he told her to go in. Then to Meredith and me, who clutched only crumpled paper butterflies, he added bluntly, "You don't have the correct passes. You can't come in."

"Really?" I said. "Can't we go with her?"

The man didn't reply.

"I don't want to attend the party," said Hiroko, "if my friends can't accompany me."

Then Meredith produced a CD case from the interior of his scuffed orange biker's jacket. The name The Lost Stones was emblazoned on it. "Maybe," he said to her, "you could go in for ten minutes. Say hello to the five of them and get them to sign this."

She looked at him surprised. "But I don't want to go alone."

"We'll wait for you here, Hiroko. We won't be far away." Then he pleaded, "I'd really like to get their autographs. I mean, did you hear them tonight? They were brilliant. They sounded more like the Rolling Stones than the fucking Rolling Stones have the last three or four times I've seen them."

Reluctantly, she took the CD and then went up the front steps, past the doorman and into the bunker-like hotel. She crossed its lobby, a small and stark little room that looked like it'd had all its furniture and fittings removed by a posse of bailiffs, and disappeared from view. Then the doorman heeled the door around into its frame and slid a bolt across behind it. I stared dumbfounded at the closed door for a moment, then sprang up the steps and banged on it. Like the window-shutters, the door was metal and my fist made a clanging noise.

"Hey!" I shouted. "Hey, what's the idea? You don't have to shut her in like that!"

The only reply was a faint clicking sound halfway up the door, like that of a shackle being pushed into place in a padlock. I turned back to face Meredith. "Fuck this. I don't like this. I'm calling her and telling her to leave that place, now."

But my attempt to ring her on my mobile was unsuccessful. I stared at it and marvelled, "There's no signal. We're in the middle of Sapporo but there's no signal."

"Yes," said Meredith, "that's usually what occurs when they're around."

I descended the steps, my anger suddenly redirected from the hotel doorman to him. "Wait. There's something seriously fucked-up happening here and you know what it is."

"I know a lot of things that've been happening here." He said that with a sneer and I realised then he was aware of how Hiroko and I, for the past few months, had been sleeping together. "Now listen. I'm going to break into this supposed hotel and poop this supposed party. Break in, because there's no way we'll be allowed through that front door. And Stuart, you're going to help me."

I was going to help him, of course. But bloody-mindedly, I couldn't help croaking, "Why should I help you?"

"Because otherwise it's unlikely we'll see Hiroko alive again."

***

Meredith led me round to the back of the hotel and told me to wait for a few minutes. Then he slipped off into the darkness. I stood there stupefied, although one thought occurred to me. The sight of that CD made me realise that I'd heard the Lost Stones before. I'd heard them three months earlier, just after the first winter snow had fallen, when Hiroko had begged me to go to Meredith's apartment to check that he was okay.

"You know what Dith's like," I'd said. "He turns into a hermit sometimes and drops out of sight."

"But this is bad, Stu. Now he speaks to nobody. The last person who saw him was Kenji the Saxophone Guy. In September, in a yakitori shop. And Kenji said Dith got very drunk that night and he was sick on the bar counter. I am worried about him, Stu. Very worried." She thought for a moment and added, "Maybe he feels sad about his wife."

That was a lightning bolt. "I didn't know Dith had a wife."

"He was married many years ago."

"And she left him?"

"No. She died."

Meredith's apartment was in a weather-beaten four-storey building at the southeastern edge of Sapporo. Although he lived on its bottom floor, you couldn't say he belonged to the building's lowest tier of inhabitants, because he often complained about the legions of cockroaches skulking underneath his tatami mats. I got no answer when I buzzed his apartment from the main door's intercom, but then I remembered he'd once shown me a side door that was used by the caretaker and normally, for some reason, was unlocked. I entered through that. Again, there was no reply when I rang his doorbell, but I pulled at the door and found it unlocked, too. Dith rarely bothered to lock his apartment– "It's Japan, for Christ's sake. Safest country in the world." Though from the condition of his building, his neighbours possibly didn't inspire feelings of security. I wouldn't have been surprised if they were all yakuza and bosozoku members, and uyoku dantai nutcases, and ladies of ill repute from Susukino.

The lights were on in his porch and living room. Entering the porch, I hoped I'd see a small, dainty pair of shoes among the footwear, indicating that he'd found another woman to keep him company and keep an eye on him. Only his battered old shoes and boots were on view, though. I removed my own boots and continued through the next door into the living room.

It dismayed me but didn't surprise me that the room was in a state. The floor was littered with takeaway containers and disposable chopsticks that had mouldering globs of food clinging to them, and dishes being used as ashtrays that were spilling butts onto the tatami, and half-empty bottles of lime cordial and almost-empty bottles of shochu, and crumpled pieces of clothing that Meredith had seemingly dropped when he'd decided they were too grubby to wear any more.

I heard music playing in the apartment's other main room, where Meredith had put a chair, desk, hi-fi, computer, printer and futon, so that it served as both a study and a bedroom. The music was a blues tune with a guitarist scratching a simple riff back and forth across his strings and a vocalist wailing unnervingly.

Meanwhile, a huge cockroach broke cover from between a bento tray and a half-eaten, slightly furry onigiri. I refrained from stamping my foot on it because I didn't want my sock-sole plastered in shell-fragments and internal cockroach goo, and watched it scuttle below me. Its antennae jigging, it crossed the tatami and then some scattered A4 sheets that'd presumably been coughed out of Dith's printer. I saw how the sheets were covered in patterns of concentric circles and squiggling letters. My knowledge of written Japanese wasn't great but I knew those letters weren't examples of hiragana, katakana or kanji.

I decided Meredith was in the other room, listening to the music, and was about to go through when a clatter came from a corner where a door opened onto a veranda. The door had been slightly out of its frame and now a gust of wind outside had swung it open. In blew a muddle of snowflakes. I hurried through them to shut the veranda door.

But before I shut it, I looked out and got a surprise. Behind Meredith's building were the lower slopes of Mount Moiwa. There were no more streets or houses. Thanks to the light seeping past me from the living room, and forming a panel on the empty ground beyond the veranda, I could see a figure squatting in the snow and wearing Meredith's orange biker's jacket.

"Dith!" I shouted, "what are you doing outside, man?"

He didn't reply. He didn't move. I was about to retrieve my boots from the porch and go to him when I noticed markings on the snow around him, in a familiar-looking pattern of concentric circles and squiggles. What alarmed me was the markings' colour. Then I just dashed over the veranda and through the snow in my socks.

Reaching him, I discovered that his left jacket-sleeve had been pulled back to his elbow and a gash several inches long made down the middle of his forearm. His right hand still gripped the kitchen-knife used to make the gash. Blood enveloped his left hand like a red glove and beads of it continued to fall from his fingertips – not into the snow, but onto a couple more A4 sheets, similarly patterned to the ones lying in his living room.

I squawked, "Dith, fuck's sake!"

Somehow, I managed to tear my belt out of its hoops and bind the world's clumsiest tourniquet around his left arm. Then I seized him under his armpits and start dragging him towards the veranda. In a feeble voice he babbled, "It's okay, Stu, no worries, I didn't cut it that deep. Only enough to produce the necessary amount of blood, so I could conduct the ritual …" As I got him into the living room, he became aware of the blues music playing on the hi-fi. "It was in the song. Woven into the music, the chords … A secret code!"

My panic manifested itself as rage. "What fucking code, you daft bastard?"

Then he passed out in my arms, but not before he'd muttered, "For summoning them."

***

Finally, Meredith returned to the back of the hotel carrying a rucksack. The grains of snow still falling from its pockets and buckles and creases in its canvas suggested it'd spent the last few hours buried in a snowdrift.

He explained his injury that night by saying he'd been carving up a joint of prime Hokkaido beef in his kitchen and had suffered an accident with the knife. Apart from Hiroko and myself, everyone accepted his story, though it was assumed too he'd been drunk on shochu when he stuck the knife into himself. Now from the rucksack he produced another tool that looked capable of drawing blood. It was a steel gaff with curved barbs at one end and a sharp point at the other. The pointed end was uneven and had evidently been honed by a less-than-accomplished metalworker.

"You've come prepared," I said.

He whispered, "Keep your voice down. And let's not discuss this just now. We have to get inside."

A bank of snow rose halfway up the back wall, almost reaching another line of shuttered windows similar to the ones along the front. With the rucksack and gaff he scrambled up the snowbank and started using the gaff to prise at a window-shutter. I scrambled up too. I sank into the bank to my knees before my boots touched the hard, compacted snow at its core.

I recalled one last detail of the evening he'd nearly killed himself: the blues song playing on the hi-fi in his apartment. At tonight's gig, the band had interspersed the famous songs like "Jumpin' Jack Flash", "Street Fighting Man" and "Satisfaction" with some bleak, primordial-sounding blues numbers. I realised they'd performed the same song. No doubt it was a track on the CD he'd given Hiroko to get autographed.

"Dith," I whispered back, "you need to explain at least a little of what's going on. Okay? Please."

The gaff's barbs teased the shutter away from the window-frame. "Well, I reckon it began in the Ahl-Srif Mountains of Morocco. Late 1960s, when the Stones were hanging out there with the Master Musicians of Jajouka. Maybe it was Brian Jones. He was there just a month before he died, recording some of the Musicians' music onto vinyl. Maybe he attracted them. He had the smell of impending death on him and they liked that."

"They? Who?"

"You know what ghouls are?"

"Yeah. Horrible grey slimy things. Live in graveyards. Eat the flesh of corpses." I thought about it a little more. "The Weasleys have one living in their attic in the Harry Potter books."

"That's the modern Western notion of them. In Arabic folklore they're known as ghūl, a type of jinn, and they're shapeshifters. Can take the form of human beings or hyenas. They lure people into empty secluded places, like the desert, and devour them."

"Wait. You're claiming five of these things decided to go on the road performing as a Rolling Stones covers band?"

"Couldn't have been much fun for them roaming North Africa all the time. Putting up with heat and sand and flies. Getting just the occasional goat or camel or nomad to snack on. Maybe when they crossed paths with the Stones, they had an epiphany. Decided it was time to broaden their horizons and expand their palates. Travel, see the world, do some serious living. Sex, drugs and rock and roll." The shutter sprang away and revealed a window missing most of its glass. The room behind it was black. "That was far too easy. Someone's used this already as a way of getting in and out."

He took a torch from the rucksack. Noticing something on the wall above us, I motioned for him to direct the torch-beam upwards. It showed a curly section of pink-purple neon tubing still attached to the concrete.

"This is a love hotel!" I hissed.

Meredith picked some fangs of glass out of the window-frame, pushed the rucksack through and started climbing through himself. "Was a love hotel. Been a while since this place experienced a whole lotta love."

"Then why are they holding an after-gig party in this wreck?"

"Told you. They're ghūls. They like empty secluded places."

I followed him through the window. Inside, the end of the torch-beam wandered over walls covered in bright red tiles, obviously meant to evoke a feeling of amour though now they made me think of blood, and a cracked mirror with a whorled, gold-painted, pretend-antique frame. Our feet disturbed things as we moved forward and Meredith shone the beam down. The floor was a mess, not just with grime and smashed-window shards, but also with cigarette butts, instant-noodle pots and vending-machine coffee cans and sake jars. He shone the beam further. The room's double bed retained its mattress, but two sleeping bags and a heap of filthy blankets had been dumped on top of it. Several big plastic bags crammed full of old clothes were propped against the bed's side.

I made a connection. "The guy at the venue door and the other guy at the hotel door. I knew I'd seen them before. Now I remember them hanging around Sapporo Station. They're a pair of vagrants. They must've moved in here. I always wondered what happened to the city's homeless population during the cold months."

"Yip, I guess they were holed up here when some unexpected visitors arrived. Then they were recruited to the cause. Didn't have any choice about it. Hypnotised. Turned into human familiars."

"How did you become an expert on all this, Dith?"

"Oh, I've done research. I've taken a keen interest in the Lost Stones since I almost ran into them in Thailand some years ago."

"Almost?"

"They did a concert on a very remote tourist beach. I'd smoked way too much opium that day and was too fried to go along. But …" He sighed bitterly. "My wife attended the show."

"She didn't come back, did she?"

"No. She didn't."

He crossed the room to a door. As I followed him, I whispered, "You knew they'd be here tonight. You buried your equipment nearby. You staked this place out."

He chuckled softly. "Staked. That's an appropriate verb."

"You knew all this. Yet you let Hiroko walk in here!"

He eased the door open a fraction and a sliver of torchlight penetrated outside. "A corridor. Now keep really quiet."

It was hard to show my fury when my voice could be no louder than a mouse-squeak. I tried my best. "Bait, Dith! You used her as bait, you fucking cunt!"

Not replying, he slipped out into the dark corridor. Again, I could only follow.

Meredith had fixed a piece of gauze over the end of the torch and he pointed it low, so that we spent the next minute fumbling through darkness with a small, dim blob of illumination prowling the floor in front of us. Then the corridor twisted and we discerned light coming from a different source. Simultaneously, we became aware of music, a trancey, droning composition of reeds, pipes and drums. He stopped before the corner, put down his rucksack and placed the torch on the floor with the beam directed back at us, not ahead. I peered around the corner. The corridor continued a few yards, then formed a T-junction with another corridor that was aglow with candleflames.

Because of the music, I felt we could talk again. "What are we hearing?" I whispered.

"Moroccan stuff. Sufi music. The Master Musicians of Jajouka. Even those things must get homesick occasionally." He took from the rucksack two objects connected to two loops of chain. One he draped around his neck and the other he handed to me. "Wear this." It was a metal pendant in the shape of a hand with three long fingers and two thumbs jutting on either side. An eye was painted in the centre of the palm. "The Hamsa," he explained. "Said to date back to Carthage in Tunisia. Much prized by North African Muslims as protection against evil, but Jews and Christians use it too. I hope it works here."

Then he extracted two long tubes from the rucksack and started to screw them together. I squinted through the torchlight, trying to see them better. One tube had a handle and fixed onto its side was a small black box with a switch and couple of loose-hanging electrical wires. The other tube had a wide end like a funnel. Suddenly the contraption made me think of a blunderbuss. "Is that a gun? How the shit did you acquire a gun in Japan?"

"I made it. With a little help. A yakuza guy lives in the flat above mine. I met him one night when I was playing my music too loud and he came down and punched me in the face. But after that we became good mates. I think he was impressed by the quality of my Japanese." The handle was attached to a piston, which Meredith repeatedly cranked in and out of the tube like a pump. "Compressed air." Once the gun was powered up, he propped it against the wall and warned, "Don't touch it. It's already loaded."

"With what?"

"You'll see."

Then he passed me a fire-axe whose handle was encased in hard rubber. "You actually expect me to use this?" I demanded. "Against people?" By now I'd decided that there was no way the Lost Stones could be monsters. At worst, they might be psychos, serial killers. But still people.

"They aren't people."

"All right. It doesn't matter what they are, ghouls or human beings or the real Rolling Stones, for that matter. I'm still not Conan the fucking Barbarian!"

"Suit yourself. You mightn't be so pacifistic a few minutes from now. There's one thing I definitely want you to do, though." Once I'd forced the axe-handle down inside my trouser-belt, he handed me a glass flask with a cork wedged in its neck. When I held it close enough to the torchlight, I saw its contents were red.

"Blood," I groaned.

"It was surprisingly easy to obtain. What was a hassle was finding the anticoagulant to stop it congealing. Now, listen. When I give you the word, you throw that as hard as you can, so that it smashes. But throw it far away from us. I need it as a diversion."

Meredith equipped himself with a few more items from the rucksack, including the gaff with the barbed and sharpened ends. The last thing he removed was a bulging plastic bag. Then he lifted the compressed-airgun and nodded at me. We crept around the corner towards the candlelight and music.

The candles in the adjoining corridor were set in small dishes and arranged along the bottoms of the walls. Their light allowed us to see that the floor had been cleaned. Evidently the two homeless guys who'd been dossing in the building had been set to work with brushes and mops. In one direction, the lines of candleflames presumably led off to the lobby where Hiroko had entered. In the other, after a few more yards, the candles stopped before a large pair of curtains hanging across the corridor. Emblazoned on the curtains was an ogee arch whose stonework was purple and had a dense, latticed pattern. Inside the arch was a red tree with swirling tentacle-like branches standing against a starry indigo sky. We approached those curtains and heard behind them voices as well as music.

"Be ready," hissed Meredith. "I'm going to take a peek through. Hope they don't get a peek of me."

The border between the curtains ran down the middle of the strange red tree. He knelt, grasped the fabric, cautiously drew them a centimetre apart and positioned his eye against the gap. After a minute, he rose again and indicated for me to kneel and look through too. Into my face came not only the shrill, urgent sound of the Master Musicians of Jajouka but also a thread of warm air, carrying smells of exotic perfumes, spices and drugs.

I was viewing a grand public area that, in a fit of opulence, the management had installed in the heart of their hotel. Maybe this opulence had driven them to bankruptcy. The chamber was a dozen times bigger than the room we'd broken into and had been cleared of dirt, dust and debris. Around it, the walls were festooned with more curtains whose surfaces swarmed with stars, moons, trees and flowers or were crowded with angular or swirling geometrical patterns. Most of its floor was covered too, not by one big carpet but by a multitude of little ones, so that like the walls, the floor was a quilt-work of colours, images and patterns. More candles burned here and there, but the main light and heat came from flames sashaying inside a huge metal brazier at the room's centre. Tasselled cushions had been dumped in clusters by the walls and across the floor to act as seating.

I saw figures. Sunk in a pile of cushions on the chamber's far side was Brian Jones, the Lost Stones' Brian Jones. His legs were splayed and someone with a mop of black hair and naked torso lay between them, head rising, sinking, rising, sinking again. The Jones replica still wore his black sunglasses and his face retained its sculpted meanness, and it was impossible to tell if this oral pleasuring was giving him any pleasure at all.

A few yards along from him sat the Lost Stones' Charlie Watts, hands pattering in time with the music on a quartet of goblet-shaped drums. He wore a black SS tunic and black peaked cap bearing a silver skull-and-crossbones and projected the same bored-but-cruel languor as his bandmate. Two Japanese girls slumped on either side of him, already blitzed out of their minds with whatever the Lost Stones had given them to inhale or ingest.

"You see?" whispered Meredith behind me. "They've even managed to make Charlie Watts look evil."

Then, near the chamber's middle, I spotted Hiroko. She was on another huddle of cushions beside the band's version of Keith Richards. Black-lensed spectacles covered his eyes and a fedora was pulled down over his tangled dark hair, but enough of his face was visible for me to see he wasn't the ravaged wrinkle-monster that the 21st-century Keith Richards was famous for being. No, this was a spookily young-looking 1960s Keef, before the drugs and Jack Daniels took their toll. He passed her a tube and she sucked on its end. The tube was attached to a shisha with a pot-bellied jar. The charcoal in the bowl up top glowed lava-red and the water bubbled inside.

I'd nursed a faint hope that she had only stayed at the party for ten minutes and then been able to leave. Absurdly, my dismay at seeing her there and my concern for her safety were mingled with jealousy. I couldn't help grousing, "What's got into her? Smoking—with Keith Richards!"

"That's Hiroko for you," said Meredith. "She only parties with the best." He sounded almost affectionate.

The only other people in view were three more members of the concert crowd, a young guy and two girls, drunk, drugged-up, or both. They attempted to dance to the music but their swaying, floating movements were hopelessly out-of-synch. By now the frenzy of reeds, drums and pipes coming from the speakers seemed to evoke not so much a different civilisation or epoch as a different planet.

"Can't see Wyman," I said, "or Jagger."

Meredith stood with his head against one of the curtains. "He's just on the other side of this," he said. "Listen."

I put my left ear as close as I could to the curtain without disturbing it. Through the fabric, a conversation was audible. A Japanese voice said in slow, faltering English: "You do not play—eighties Stones? Or nineties Stones? Or two-thousand Stones?"

Then an unmistakable faux-Cockney drawl: "No! We're the young Stones." He said 'no' as 'naaaow' and 'Stones' as 'Staaaones'. "We don't wanna do the recent stuff. Not the music they made as old geezers, after they'd lost it. We only play the music from when they were, you know, at the height of their powers. Up to Exile on Main Street or Goat's Head Soup. Nothing after. Although …" He cackled. "Although I have to say I feel an affinity with "Undercover of the Night"."

"Jesus, listen to him!" I said. "Even off-stage, he's 100 percent in character!"

"Of course. That's the form he's assumed. The physique, face, voice, persona, style." Then Meredith raised the airgun so that its funnelling barrel pointed to the ceiling. "Right. We do this now."

This was the most insane experience of my life. Unfortunately, I suspected the insanity came from Meredith rather than from anything happening on the other side of those curtains. "Dith," I said, "I haven't seen any proof yet. I haven't seen them do anything bad."

"They're holding their party in a derelict building. That's freaky for a start. I told you, a lonely, secluded place."

"Well, yeah. It looks like they've got a ton of drugs on the go through there and this is Japan. If I were them, I'd be partying in the unlikeliest place possible too, seeing as I don't want to end up breaking rocks at Abashiri Prison. Convince me, Dith. Give me your evidence. How do I know these guys are really evil? That they aren't human, that they're monsters?"

"Listen to me. Before tonight they probably haven't fed for a time. They'll be weak. But they've got at least eight meals lined up in there, and the moment they start feeding they'll be strong again. And our job will be a hell of a lot harder. So right now, we hit them—"

I had no chance to argue further. As soon as Meredith said 'hit', something hit me.

At the edge of my vision, I glimpsed it coming. I managed to hoist my right arm so that the object, a thick metal bar, didn't smash into my head but into my upper arm instead. The impact sent me crashing through the curtains and into the chamber we'd been spying on, where I lost my balance completely and collapsed on the floor. One of the curtains detached itself and landed over me like a shroud.

A hand promptly grabbed the curtain and yanked it off me, and another hand seized me by the hair and dragged me up.

I was in huge pain now. My right arm was numb but simultaneously sent agonising pulses through the rest of my body. The pain was such that I hardly felt the roots of my hair being half-torn from my scalp as I was lifted and dumped on my knees. Above me, the drawling voice said: "How now, a rat? Dead for a ducat, dead!" He paused before adding, "That's Shakespeare by the way. Hamlet. Ya know old Hamlet, doncha?"

I tried to focus. I saw that one curtain still hung between the corridor and the chamber and it flapped as a struggle took place behind it. Then that curtain fell too and two more bodies blundered through into the room, Meredith and the man on duty at the hotel's entrance whom I'd identified as a city vagrant. The man was using the same iron bar that he'd clobbered me with, but instead of striking Meredith he was throttling him. He'd got behind him and pinned the bar against his throat. Meredith's eyes bulged and hands clawed uselessly. Then his legs gave way, but rather than let him drop to the ground the man kept holding him upright with the bar wedged under his jaw.

Meanwhile, I noticed that the Sufi music had ended. It left a silence that was punctuated by gasps of "Nan desu ka?" and "Yada!" from the Lost Stones' guests, at least from the more lucid ones, as they realised what was happening. Off to one side of me, I made out the figures of the three dancers. They continued dancing, happily blasted out of their minds, even though there was nothing to dance to.

His hand still emmeshed in my hair, Jagger said, "Bill, change the record. It's time to start the fun."

Meredith's arms fell against his sides and became as limp as his legs. I wondered if he was dead. Resolving to do something, I tried to reach for the axe I'd tucked behind my belt. But nothing happened. I was right-handed and my whole right arm was out of commission.

Then something flared behind Meredith and his assailant and I saw how during their struggle Meredith's plastic bag had fallen at the side of the corridor-floor, against one of the candles. Whatever was inside it had caught fire. I heard things fizz and splutter and the bag started coughing out bright multi-coloured flecks. This was followed by several thunderclaps and suddenly long grey snakes of smoke were leaping out and twisting and somersaulting across the floor. One firework collided with the man's ankle and burst apart in a swarm of red sparks. He squawked and released the bar and jumped back. Unsupported, Meredith's body pitched forward onto the ground in front of me.

Somebody screamed—obviously not one of the three dancing kids, who jigged on obliviously. Was it Hiroko? No, screaming wasn't Hiroko's style. Then from the loudspeakers came a series of icily-precise sitar chords. The final chord lingered for a moment and then—boom!—the chamber filled with the stampede of noise that was the Rolling Stones' 1960s number "Paint It Black".

Meredith wasn't dead. He raised his head off the floor and stared at me goggle-eyed. "The blood!" he croaked. "Throw the blood!"

When I didn't respond, he croaked again: "Throw the fucking blood!"

My left hand started flapping around one of my coat pockets. At the same time, my hair was pulled again and I got raised off my knees and onto my feet. Jagger's face, with its small sinister eyes and large predatory mouth, was suddenly level with mine. "Funny little fellah," he purred. His breath wafted over me, warm and dry and stinking like a carcass. "Wonder what ya gonna taste like." It was disorientating hearing that voice address me while an identical voice hollered out of the speakers. Meanwhile, I felt a point scrape across my throat. I peered down and saw that one of his fingers had impossibly sprouted a long, curved talon.

I heard another voice, the Japanese one Jagger had been in conversation with while I'd listened from the curtain. "Well," it said uncomfortably. "I think I will go home now. Goodbye." And I saw a figure rush out of the chamber, past the still-popping fireworks and along the candlelit corridor. Wise man, I thought dazedly.

My left hand found the neck of the flask and tugged it free of the coat and flung it sideways. The flask travelled only a few yards before landing on one of the many floor-mats. I doubted if there was enough force in the throw to actually break it, but it exploded as it landed and suddenly the matting was strewn with spikes of glass and plastered in a red crystalline mush—Dith had worried about the blood congealing, but it hadn't occurred to him that inside the rucksack, while it was stashed in a snowdrift, the blood would freeze.

An animalistic snarl came from Jagger and I looked at his face again. His nostrils twitched and flared, then his nose seemed to grotesquely swell and become a snout. His mouth widened and the teeth inside sharpened so that it suddenly resembled the steel maw of a beartrap.

Then I witnessed a blur of movement and felt a whoosh of speed and he was no longer beside me. Instead, within a few seconds, he and three of the other Stones had somehow congregated around the crystallised blood from the flask, down on their hands and knees at the edges of the spillage. I saw something streak towards them from another part of the chamber and then five of them were hunkered down at that blood. Their five faces bore only vague semblances to the human ones that'd existed before. Jaws and noses had slid forward from their skulls and become muzzles. Eyes were full of devilish yellow light—though the shades worn by Jones and Richards compressed that light into fierce yellow flecks. Tongues flowed out of their heads and slithered over the bloodied matting.

Meanwhile, out of the speakers raced the sitar chords, a tattoo of drums and the voice of the other Jagger.

Somebody gave the loudest scream yet. Its piercing sound helped bring me to my senses. I looked away from them and saw Meredith scrabbling about the floor. "My gun," he rasped. "Where's my fucking gun?"

Then the vagrant reappeared behind him. He had the iron bar raised overhead, about to smash it down onto Meredith's skull. I finally did something of my own accord and charged forward. I managed to bend over before I crashed into the vagrant, so that one of my shoulders ploughed into his diaphragm. The impact carried him back and down and I toppled with him. Just before we landed on the ground, something flashed behind him and showered my face with heat and light and then zoomed up into the air. I realised I'd knocked him into the path of one of the fireworks escaping from Meredith's bag, which he'd deflected and sent flying towards the chamber's ceiling.

The man thudded down. I thudded on top of him, bounced off and arrived on my back on the floor beside him. Briefly, I glimpsed the ceiling before the firework smashed through it—for it wasn't a plaster ceiling but an expanse of glass, made of many small coloured panes that curved up in a dome.

A dome of many-coloured glass, I thought—

Then above me part of the dome disintegrated and became a rain of shards and slivers. I managed to whip my hands up over my face before those plunging glass daggers reached it.

Nearby, above the clamour of "Paint It Black", a familiar voice bellowed: "Right, you bastards, let's be having you!"

I sat up and lowered my hands from my face. A few shards fell off my chest. Someone else followed the example of the Japanese man and went fleeing out of the chamber, though the figure was too fast for me to identify it as male or female. Then I realised Meredith was stumbling towards the five Lost Stones, who still crouched around the blood like five hogs at a trough. He'd retrieved the compressed-airgun and held its funnelling barrel before him.

Jagger sprang to his feet. I say sprang, but in truth he moved so fast that he seemed to flash out of existence on the floor and simultaneously flash back into existence standing upright, a couple of yards from Meredith. His features were grotesquely morphed between human and hyena but he spoke in the same cod-Cockney drawl. "Ya sad old fucker. Doncha know, bullets don't work on us?"

"It's not bullets!" retorted Meredith and fired the gun. At the same instant, a third guest tried to run out of the room. This was a skinny young Japanese man wearing nothing but a pair of black leather trousers and I realised it was he, not a she, who minutes earlier had been orally pleasuring Brian Jones. Unfortunately, he was drunk or high and he blundered into Meredith just as the gun went off. Because of the music, I didn't hear the hiss of air as it released its load, but momentarily I saw a cone of scattering white particles materialise before it, a cone that during its fleeting existence enveloped Jagger and two more Lost Stones behind him. If the man hadn't collided with him, Meredith would probably have caught all five of them in the speckling cone.

Jagger remained standing a moment more. His figure suddenly looked scoured and pitted, like a desert statue whose surfaces had been ground away by centuries of sandstorms. Then he keeled back, landed in the blood and made no further movement. Yet he still felt present in the chamber because his alter-ego continued to yell from the speakers.

Then even "Paint It Black" was drowned by a hideous yowling and keening that came from the other two members of the Lost Stones hit by the discharge from Meredith's gun. Whatever Meredith had packed down the gun-barrel had struck their faces. Both sprang up and staggered, one back into a corner, the other forwards. Their hands, or claws, clutched their misshapen animal-human muzzles and I saw plumes of smoke seeping from their wounds.

Things happened fast now. Towards Meredith hurtled one of the uninjured Stones, which I recognised as Brian Jones from its crest of blonde hair and big-lensed sunglasses. But the skinny youth in the black leather trousers, who'd only just disentangled himself from Meredith, got in the way again. Jones rocketed into him and its huge fanged jaws that'd no doubt meant to clamp around Meredith's neck clamped around the youth's neck instead. They landed together on the floor. There were splintering and tearing noises and then Jones's head reared up with glistening red strands of skin and tissue trailing from its teeth. That head was wholly bestial now. The sunglasses had fallen off and only few blonde streaks on its crown indicated who it'd been in human form.

Something sprang away from them, rolled and arrived at my feet. It was the head of the youth, nothing below its jaw but a few tattered, fleshy ribbons. I screamed. To shut out the sight of it, I put my hands over my face again—

A sharp corner dug into my cheek. I withdrew my hands and discovered that the right one had been skewered by a triangular piece of glass from the ceiling. The triangle's apex protruded from the back of the hand while its base stuck a few inches out of the palm. Already blood had leached down to the elbow of my coat-sleeve. Maybe the hand and arm were still numb from the blow I'd received from the vagrant, or maybe I'd been anaesthetised by the adrenaline that the past few minutes had released, but I'd felt nothing of this injury.

By this point I was hysterical. "Fuck!" I squawked. "Oh fuck—!"

But then someone was at my side and my hysteria seemed to drop several levels because I realised it was Hiroko, calm, cool, sane Hiroko. She flashed me a sympathetic smile as if to say, "Don't worry, I understand why you're screaming pathetically." Then she seized the base of the glass triangle and wrenched it out of my hand.

The hand pumped out another mini-fountain of red and I squawked, "Fuuuck!" And then I saw something come barrelling up behind her.

With my other hand I managed to grab her and yank her sideways, out of its path. One of the Stones winged by Meredith's gun careered past, the nearer side of its face resembling a black, smoking crater. It crashed against the brazier. The brazier toppled and a long tongue of fire shot out of it across the matting and cushions. The Stone fell too, onto the burning coals that'd been expelled, and then rolled away squealing. It seemed to take a strip of the fire with it, a strip suddenly attached along the length of its body. The end of the fiery tongue, meanwhile, extended right to the feet of the trio, the guy and two girls, who were dancing. Who were still dancing, despite the bloody, shrieking, burning mayhem that'd erupted. What sort of drugs were they on?

As I watched, the guy placed a foot on some burning matting. His outfit resembled that of a 1970s blaxploitation dude like Shaft or Super Fly, with big flared trouser-ends flapping around a pair of platform shoes. Some of the trouser-material ignited and suddenly a yellow-orange burr of flame was stuck to his leg.

I turned back towards Hiroko to say we had to help the guy who was on fire. I was in time to see something else rushing at us, at me. This was the Lost Stone modelled on Keith Richards, although the fedora was gone and its only human details now were the spectacles perched awkwardly on its muzzle. The spectacles' lenses blazed with yellow light. As it lunged, I raised my arm, my long-suffering right one, and much of my forearm disappeared between the immense jaws. I heard a noise like a snapping twig. I didn't doubt that the creature had only to shake its head violently and my arm would be ripped away at the elbow.

Hiroko materialised beside the creature, still holding the triangle of glass she'd extracted from my hand. She thrust this behind one of the spectacle lenses, into a yellow-glowing eye. The jaws parted and my forearm fell free—literally fell, because it seemed now a flimsy tube of skin, tissue and broken bone. Then the thing howled and batted Hiroko aside.

My left hand found the axe Meredith had given me, wrestled it out from under my belt and swung it at the cyclopean form in front of me—cyclopean because the yellow light radiated from one eye-socket now, the other socket blocked by glass and gore. Though the axe was propelled by my weaker arm, it embedded itself in the creature's snout. I freed it and swung it again. Up came a pair of claws to protect the face and the axe-edge sheared away taloned fingers. One glinted as it fell and I realised I'd amputated the finger with Keith Richards' famous skull-ring on it.

I kept whacking the axe into my attacker until Hiroko stopped me. She did so by inadvertently grabbing my broken right arm. Even the adrenalin swamping my system couldn't hide the intense pain that came from it then. "Stu!" she cried. "We must help the others, Stu!"

A bloody carcass lay huddled in front of me. A cleft oozed in the top of its skull, made by the axe-blow that'd probably been the fatal one. I raised my eyes from it and took in the surrounding chamber. Fires burned in a long wide fan from the end of the toppled brazier. Whatever the mats and cushions were made of was combustible. I looked further along and saw that—Christ!—the male dancer in the 1970s clothes had become a walking conflagration, his human outline barely discernible in the flames. As I watched, he shambled into a wall and collapsed and the flames that'd been devouring him immediately started to devour the curtains and tapestries hanging there. The two girls had finally stopped dancing and were looking on dumbfoundedly, maybe trying to decide whether this was real or just the first bad comedown hallucination at the end of an acid trip.

"I will get them," Hiroko shouted. She pointed in the other direction. "You must help Dith!"

I turned and saw Meredith struggling with another Lost Stone, another that'd been wounded by the gun-blast. The creature was half-blinded but Meredith was faring badly. It'd pulled him to the floor and was on top of him. Meredith clutched the steel gaff, had an arm across the creature's shoulder and jabbed the gaff's sharp end against its back. But his opponent's huge hyena-jaws gnashed just inches above his face.

Already Hiroko had run to the shrinking area of floor between the burning matting and burning wall, grabbed the two girls and begun hauling them towards the corridor. I started towards Meredith and tried to raise the axe, but realised I no longer held it. I must have dropped it during the spasm of pain I'd suffered when Hiroko seized my broken arm. Deciding I didn't have time to search for it, I improvised. I ran to the fire and pulled from its edge a large cushion that was mostly alight. Miniature fires burned along its sides where its tassels had ignited too. Then, clutching this, I rushed towards Meredith.

The idea was to thrust the burning cushion against the creature's remaining eye. But while I was running, I slipped on something, possibly the gore surrounding the youth's headless corpse. I lost my balance, covered the last yards in a helpless stagger and crashed against the struggling figures. The cushion, off-target, went instead between the creature's jaws. Unable to check myself, my hand went into those jaws too and drove the cushion further. It exploded. Gouts of flame enveloped the creature's head. On the floor, Meredith was showered with particles of burning cushion-fabric and stuffing. I yanked back my hand, which looked horribly red and raw. An instant later, the Stone was no longer on top of Meredith but pirouetting about the chamber, its head indistinguishable from the cushion wedged in its jaws because of the flames consuming them both.

I tried to help Meredith off the floor, but my burnt left hand wouldn't have been less dexterous if it'd been inside a boxing glove. My right hand, bleeding and dangling at the end of a broken arm, was out of the game too. He managed to sit up by himself. The front of his coat bore four long slash-marks and the foam lining exposed inside was soaked in red. "The gun," he wheezed. "Still need the gun. One of those fuckers is still on the go."

He squirmed around, blood dribbling from the rents in his coat, and located the gun on the floor beside him. Then someone loomed over him, seized him under his armpits and in one swift movement heaved him onto his feet. It was the vagrant whom I'd shouldered away from him a few minutes earlier. He bawled, "Ikuze, ikuze!"—"Let's go, let's go!"—and I realised that the spell the Lost Stones had cast over him was broken.

The flames on the floor and wall had merged. They created a fearsome screen of heat and light that reached to the domed ceiling, whose glass was cracking and breaking. Acrid smoke swirled around the parts of the chamber that weren't yet ablaze. The vagrant bundled Meredith towards the corridor. He called back at me, "Find Jones! I think Jones is still alive!"

But it wasn't any desire to hunt down the last remaining ghūl that stopped me following them. Something else troubled me. I tried to think amid the heat and smoke and then, yes, I recalled seeing Charlie Watts seated by the far wall. Two more girls had been slumped on either side of him, drugged to the point of unconsciousness. I was pretty sure they hadn't got out of the chamber yet.

The flames had still to cover the whole floor. I skirted them, penetrated the rear half of the chamber, and squinted through the smoke. I immediately wished I hadn't. Visible at the far wall was the crooked figure of the Brian Jones ghūl, not remotely human-looking now. It stooped over two things that looked for a moment like sacks of offal and cut-offs from a butcher's shop. Down went its head into one sack, where it took a bloody mouthful of the contents. Then it dipped its head into the other.

Looking lower down, I sickly realised that both sacks of meat possessed legs. And I remembered what Meredith had said. By this evening they'd be weak. To become strong again, they needed to feed.

A major part of the ceiling exploded and suddenly the fire had access to the night air. Its flames grew even bigger and more voracious. Alarmed by this, the creature abandoned its prey and fled—upwards. Like a monkey rather than a hyena, it clawed its way up a tapestry on the far wall, smashed through some glass at the top and hoisted itself out onto the hotel's roof.

I stood clear of the fire, but its heat was such that I feared my hair and clothes would ignite anyway. So, I turned and ran out of the chamber and along the corridor to the foyer. I found there a group of half-a-dozen: Hiroko, the vagrant, one other male, three other females. The soberer ones were shoving against the steel door that separated them from the city outside, and were swearing and lamenting because it refused to shift. It had a thick bolt with one end buried in a hole in the doorjamb and the other end held in place by a padlock.

The vagrant hadn't joined the assault on the door. He stood aside and searched desperately in his pockets. To him I demanded, "Where's Dith? My friend? You know, tomodachi? Doko?"

He shrugged, still rummaging with his big weathered hands.

"What?" I bawled. "You lost him? He's half-dead and hardly able to walk and you lost him?!"

Hiroko tried to calm me. "Stu, we can look for him."

The foyer was getting hot and smoky too. It flickered with a yellowy-orange light that emanated from the corridor behind us. I felt massively reluctant to venture that way again.

But then Meredith hobbled out of the corridor, clutching the compressed-airgun and also dragging his rucksack. The front of his coat and his trousers down to his knees were slick with blood and I wondered what might come tumbling free if someone unzipped that coat. He halted, managed to bend over and extracted another bag from the rucksack. Then, holding the gun vertically, he started pouring white stuff out of the bag and into the muzzle.

"Salt," he explained. "What did you think I put in it, brown sugar? Salt's said to be good against jinn." He rattled the pendant hanging around his neck. "Turned out better than the Hamsa did, that's for sure."

I'd forgotten the three-fingered, two-thumbed, one-eyed hand I was wearing. "Yeah, those things were worse than useless."

Meredith took a long thin rod from the rucksack and used it to pack the salt in place inside the barrel. Then he started cranking the piston. "I take it," he said, "one of them's still alive?"

"You were right. Brian Jones."

"Funny how he's survived. In the real Stones, he was the first one to go."

Suddenly the vagrant gave a whoop of triumph, barged his way to the door and forced a key into the padlock. A moment later, the bolt had been wrenched back and the door muscled open and people were stumbling outside. Hiroko took hold of Meredith and steered him through the doorway. I followed, down between the snowbanks on either side of the steps and onto the glazed surface of the side-lane.

Two of the Lost Stones' surviving guests were already running. They skidded around the corner onto the main street and disappeared from view. The girls who'd seen their dancing partner go up in flames stood in a daze, unsure if they were still inhabiting a hallucinogenic drug trip or back inhabiting reality. Then Hiroko barked something in Japanese to the vagrant. He grabbed both girls by their arms and started dragging them towards the main street, too.

The snowy mounds by the building's facade and the ice on the road had acquired an orange-yellow hue, lit by the flames that surged up from the central chamber and into the night-sky. Water dribbled from a dozen points along the roof-edge and a thick panel of snow slithered over it and crashed down near to us. I wondered what else was on that roof. Something that would soon accompany that melting snow down to ground level?

Meredith directed both his gaze and the gun-barrel upwards. "Come on," I pleaded. "Leave it. You got four of the bastards. That's good enough, isn't it? Let's get out of here while we're still alive."

"I can take him."

"For Christ's sake, Dith. You're practically slit open."

"I can fucking take him."

Just then, my injuries—the broken arm, punctured hand, burnt hand—seemed to gang up on me. Stepping out of the heat of the fire and into the freezing winter air seemed to waken me to their full, shocking pain. My head swam, I lurched sideways and a jet of vomit came out of me and splattered onto the snow. Vaguely, I heard Meredith again: "Go on, both of you. Get the fuck away!" And then I was careening along the side-lane, my legs buckling and threatening to give way. That I didn't fall was due to Hiroko, who ran alongside me, clutching my left arm and somehow keeping me upright.

At one point I twisted my head back towards the burning hotel. It resembled a giant candle, an ugly grey block of wax underneath, but a long spectacular flame flaring up above. I saw Meredith with his air-powered gun still standing at the entrance, still craning upwards. And then I tried to study the roof, where I thought I saw movement apart from that of the fire and the melting, falling slabs of snow. But suddenly we swung off the side-lane and onto the main street and the scene was no longer visible.

***

Japanese hospitals aren't known for their privacy. That was why Hiroko, once she'd had her own injuries seen to—some bruises, and a few cuts on her hand where she'd clutched that blade of glass too tightly—informed the doctors and nurses that she was my wife, installed herself in a chair at my bedside and kept the curtain drawn around the bed for as much of the time as possible. She kept checking her smartphone, accessing the websites of local news outlets like the Hokkaido Shimbun as well as national ones like the Asahi Shimbun, Yomiuri Shimbun and Japan Times. Both my hands were buried inside big white balls of gauze and bandages, so I wouldn't operate a smartphone anytime soon.

"Okay," she told me in the afternoon, just after the latest in the procession of nurses who came to pester me about my temperature, blood pressure, medication, whatever, had stepped outside the curtain again. "They are reporting more about the fire. They say the firemen found bodies. Four bodies."

"Four? There should be twice as many in that ruin."

"I guess they found only the human bodies."

"Whereas the non-human ones magically went up in smoke."

Later, she said: "Now the police are thinking it might be activity by, how do you say it? A karuto?"

"A cult."

"Yes. Like Aum Shinriko. Mass suicide. As a cult might do."

They haven't properly examined the bodies, I thought. Unless there are some incredibly messy ways of committing suicide in Japan. But I didn't say that to Hiroko. Neither did I ask if the news coverage gave any clue about what'd happened to Meredith. That was the big question now, but it also seemed an unlucky one. I felt that just by bringing up his name, I'd encourage fate to devise a bad ending for him.

Considering how he'd endangered Hiroko to ensure my help that night, part of me felt he deserved a bad ending. Though another part of me, a greater part, understood that he'd become so obsessed with the Lost Stones and his dead wife that he was no longer responsible for his actions. He stopped acting and thinking rationally a long time before.

"We must prepare a story," Hiroko told me. "Soon the police will find out you came to this hospital on the same night. They will ask many questions."

But one day later, when I got a visitor, it wasn't anybody in uniform.

A shadow formed on the curtain and it was grasped and pulled aside. My bed was in the ward's corner and the curtain-rail ran from one wall to the other. The visitor opened the curtain where it met the wall beyond the bottom end of my bed. Thinking about it later, I was glad about that. The alternative would have been him opening the curtain a yard away from where I sat propped on my pillows.

I gazed along the bed at the figure standing between the curtain and the wall. It wore a long double-breasted, six-buttoned travelling coat and woolen polo-necked sweater, and gripped the handle of a Luis Vuitton-style trolley-case with caster wheels at the bottom. "Hello, Dith," I said. "You're looking very smart."

He nodded and said: "Stu." Then he noted Hiroko in the chair beside the top end of the bed. She'd just been to the throng of vending machines outside the ward's door and sat with her handbag on her lap. "Hiroko," he added.

But she didn't respond.

He studied me for a moment and observed, "Whereas you look a little the worse for wear."

"Yeah. I got a real doing the other night. Broken bones. Burns. And a stab wound."

"A stab wound?"

"Not from a knife. It was a freak accident, like in those Final Destination movies. Some glass fell from the ceiling and caught me in the hand." Actually, I thought, it was the least freaky injury I'd incurred. Then I asked, "Did you get him?"

A trace of a smile appeared on his features, features that seemed pale and lean even by Meredith's hard-living standards. "Oh yes," he said quietly. "I got him."

Pale, lean … and mean.

"How about you?" My mouth felt unpleasantly dry now. "You looked badly hurt the last time I saw you. Deep cuts down your front."

"Oh, they didn't turn out to be serious, once the blood was wiped away. Just scratches."

He stepped forward and let the curtain fall into place behind him and began navigating his way around the end of the bed towards us. Then he froze. At the same time, I noticed that beside me Hiroko was rummaging in her bag.

After a half-minute's silence, I said, "Looks like you're going someplace."

"Yes. I've done all I can do here, I feel. Definitely time for pastures new."

"You're leaving us?"

"Yes."

"For good?"

"Yes."

In other circumstances, this would have been an emotional moment. But I merely said, "Goodbye, Dith. Take care. Good luck."

"Goodbye, Stu. And don't worry. I'll be all right. I won't … fade away."

He shifted his gaze to the chair next to the bed. "Goodbye, Hiroko." But again, she didn't reply.

He turned and walked out of our little enclosure, the Luis Vuitton bag squeaking softly on its wheels. Once his shadow had faded from the curtain's plasticky fabric, I struggled around on the bed to face Hiroko. She'd removed a small packet from the unclasped handbag on her lap.

"What have you got there?".

"Shio," she said. A glistening bead rolled down her cheek.

I sank back onto the pillows, feeling a wetness on my cheeks too. Shio.

Salt.

THE END

Bio: Jim Mountfield was born in Northern Ireland, grew up there and in Scotland, and has since lived and worked in Europe, Africa and Asia. He currently lives in Singapore. His fiction has appeared in Aphelion, Blood Moon Rising, Death Head's Grin, Flashes in the Dark, Hellfire Crossroads, Horla, Horrified Magazine, The Horror Zine, Hungur, Schlock! Webzine, Shotgun Honey and The Sirens Call, as well as in several anthologies. He blogs regularly at http://www.bloodandporridge.co.uk/wp/

E-mail: Jim Mountfield

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