The Lost Stones
by
Jim Mountfield
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
Copyright 2023,
Jim Mountfield
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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