A/N: I do not own or profit from any of what Kazue Kato has created.
They look human, but they're not. They act human, but they're not.
The difference…?
They can do anything. Anything at all.
They're not human.
They're monsters.
Many years ago, in elementary school, Shiro's class had gone on a trip to Kyoto. Cultural visit. Looking at historical buildings and such. On the schedule had been a visit to Gion, the old geisha district, where they had watched a tea ceremony performance. The old geisha had seemed like a mechanical doll on the stage: she folded the fukusa cloth with the expertise of endless practice, fit edge to edge with minute precision under softly billowing hands. She had wiped the rim of the cup the exact number of degrees counter-clockwise, then wiped the scoop: first the flat side, thin sides, flat side… and lingering a perfected unit of time at the head of it, before removing the cloth and setting the scoop down on the tea caddy. Shiro remembered it as one of the most boring afternoons in his life.
And still, as he mixed herbal tinctures under Matsuri-sensei's supervision, the tea ceremony was what came to mind. His hands moved, smoothly, flawlessly: mechanically. There was neither hurry, nor delay, no superfluous motions: only… perfection, just like the old geisha in Kyoto had performed it. Perfection, of the kind only achieved when humanity is absent.
Shiro hadn't wanted to detach fully from his emotions before. He had clung to the hope that he could remain the same, but when hope proved a lie it was almost a blessing to let go. Detach. Bury it all in numbness. Hope, emotion, regret: vibrant leaves falling from the tree of life, leaving the black skeleton standing naked against winter white. The bones of the world picked bare by the vultures of functionality. Edges smudged by emotional caress were cut sharp by the raw aesthetic of purpose. A mathematical equation. A straight line hunt for the x to solve the problem at hand.
"Excellent work, Fujimoto-kun", Matsuri-sensei praised as he corked the three bottles of pale orange liquid. "Now, as you are all aware, the target is an elderly woman living alone just a few blocks from our current position. She should be out hunting by now. Fujimoto-kun and I will administer the injection; Yasushi-san and Minamoto-san stand guard and search the house for potential unforeseen elements. Once we have finished our work, we take cover in a neighbouring garden and wait for the demon to return: approximately three minutes after it does, we will re-enter the house and collect the remains." She scanned their faces in the flashlight, one by one. "Is everyone clear on our procedure?"
"Yes", three voices confirmed in unison.
Irony. The taste of surly humour attempting in vain to curl his lips. Esquires normally didn't get to participate in missions that involved exorcism of humanoid demons: psychological aspects postponed it to more experienced years. That he was allowed to come meant that they either thought he could handle it, or that they knew he could. Bearing in mind that the "they" in charge of delegating missions was Mephisto, it could be either.
There were two other senior exorcists on the team, Matsuri-sensei aside: one Knight and one Tamer. Their black robes merged seamlessly with the night as they moved along the quiet streets of one of True Cross Town's suburbs, known to offer a wide range of recreational activities. It was a high-income district, where spacious villas slept peacefully in lush green nests on each side of the sloping road – although the same couldn't be said of their tenants.
Police had failed to find anybody – or anything – responsible for the night-time attacks that had struck throughout the area. There were no fingerprints, no hairs, no nothing: only half-eaten bodies left in the streets, and people speaking of shrieks so terrifying they couldn't even find the strength to crawl out of bed and call for help.
What puzzled the police was obvious to an exorcist: nukekubi. A rot-type demon that possessed corpses and suspended its own decay by feeding on live humans.
Nukekubi were special, in the sense that they were among few demons that were weaker at night: at night their heads detached from their bodies to hunt, while the body was left behind in a lifeless and highly vulnerable state. The hassle was rather that of locating them. Nukekubi hid in plain sight, snugly integrated among the humans they fed on. The two telltale signs to identify one was to look for bad breath, combined with a line of red marks surrounding the neck where the head detached.
Another ironic smile passed by Shiro's muscles: on the right side of the law, and still picking locks in the dead of night.
The door to the villa opened with a creak that made him cringe, but that was old reactions from an old life. Sound didn't matter when nukekubi was the tarbet: no head, no ears. Yasushi and Minamoto went first, at the ready should unexpected events occur. It was indeed the home of a dead person: dust hung thick in the stuffy air and made them all spontaneously cover their mouths, even though nukekubi didn't emit any noxious vapours. Picture frames, porcelain figures, reading glasses, hand lotion, hair combs - a steady stream of impressions fed his brain, to be sorted and sifted for useful information.
In one room, the lonesome ray of flashlight ghosted over photographs of grandchildren and what seemed to be grandchildren's children. In another, it found the kamidana; the altar to honour Shinto gods. Its remains lay scattered over the tatami mats, broken porcelain and moulding straw that didn't suit the tastes of the new inhabitant.
They found her in the fourth room, behind shoji doors painted with pines and cranes. Flashlight fell quivering on the old lady, who lay sleeping on her futon just like a human would. There was no head on the pillow, only a gaping hole into the red vaults of the ribcage; lungs framed by wetly glistening collarbones, and the top of the spine spilling noodle-like nerve ends and thick-walled blood vessels. No wonder they didn't give this kind of mission to newbies.
They split from there; Shiro and Matsuri-sensei entering the room while the other exorcists went to complete the search. Shiro rolled down the duvet without a word. Threadbare skin covered her arms, painted with the pale spots of old age and the Braille creases of time. So thin, looking like it would tear if he touched it too roughly.
She still… wore her wedding ring…
Assembling needle and syringe went swift, despite the splinted finger. His fingers knew, with minds of their own. With measured ease they fit components together, plucked a vial from his belt, drew liquid out through the cork. Flawless. Mechanical. Tea ceremony.
Part of him was genuinely interested in how he could preserve such calm when faced with a mutilated, perfectly human body. Another part of him saw no body at all but an objective, a problem with a solution: an equation with an x about to be injected into it. There was, he noted with no particular interest, a part of him that had no problem with killing humanoid creatures.
There was one more reason exorcism of such demons was reserved for more experienced exorcists: discretion. Nukekubi looked human. Other humans would panic if they saw some black-robed figure shoot a man dead in the street, or slice a woman in half with a sword. Furthermore, if it became public knowledge that any one in the neighbourhood could be a disguised demon... Shiro knew enough of the witch hunts that had taken place in Europe to imagine the mass hysteria and vigilante mobs that could give rise to. It was in everybody's interest to keep a low profile on operations like these, which was mostly done through lethal injection. The head couldn't survive daytime without its body, and once it re-attached and set the heart pumping again, toxins would spread and kill the demon within three minutes. To the untrained public eye, it would look like nothing more than a case of ruptured aneurism.
Shiro placed the tip of the needle to a vein in the right arm of the corpse and let it sink the few necessary millimetres into the skin before emptying it.
"Matsuri-san", hissed Minamoto from the door to the hall. "Come. We have a problem."
They had seven problems, lying in headless sleep in the basement under the house. One more peculiarity of the nukekubi: sometimes they disguised themselves as human families.
"That changes things", Matsuri-sensei agreed, her eyebrows furrowing as she tapped her lower lip in thought. "We need to exterminate all of them, but we can't explain eight ruptured aneurisms…"
"We can burn the house", Shiro suggested coolly. "Inject the bodies, open the gas vault on the stove, torch the place once the nukekubi come back. It would still look like an accident."
Matsuri-sensei glanced at him but never voiced the question in her eyes. She checked her watch instead, measuring out how much time they had spent and how much they might approximately have left.
"A crude plan but an efficient one. Very well: turn on the stove, Fujimoto-kun. Then withdraw to the meeting point. You've done well on a mission of this degree. Yasushi-san, Minamoto-san: we will inject the poison and withdraw."
Shiro handed her the remaining vials – measured, mechanical – and turned back up the narrow wooden stairs. Turn right into the small kitchen, pass the dirty plates and rotting leftovers in the sink, turn the valve. Old woman, old stove: the kind that didn't have an automatic shutoff valve that triggered if the gas was on without flame. Back into the hallw-
krk
krk-k-k-krrk
There's nothing quite like the sound of bone grinding against bone to set one's nerves on edge. The light of his torch met with a pudgy body in peach-coloured night robe, staggering and twitching towards him over the kitchen floor. It's feet angled oddly, spine not in place. There was no control in the movements: no mind. The head was still screwing itself stuck on her shoulders, feathery white hair smearing fine lines of blood over round glasses that looked just like his. The old woman blinked at him, smiled at him; opened her mouth to-
The screech of a nukekubi can cause auditory canal haemorrhage and loss of consciousness at close distance.
Gun.
The gas is on.
Shiro flipped the flashlight around in his hand and swung the butt end with crushing precision into the demon's temple. The head swivelled, creaking on its spine and stretching the skin that was stitching itself together along the red marks.
"They're coming back!" he barked, stepping aside to dodge the claws as the demon swept blindly at him.
It was harder to ignore the part of him saying this was an old lady, now that she moved. Hard, but not impossible. Shiro juggled the flashlight to his impeded right hand, grasped a handful of her hair in his left, and kicked up. His knee met her throat with the muffled crunch of cartilage deforming. No larynx, no voice, no scream.
Three minutes until the poison takes effect.
Three minutes is a long time to hold against a demon, unarmed.
Kitchen knife.
Shiro lunged for the holder on the counter, only to send it crashing down on the floor when the old lady yanked his other arm with demonic strength. Momentum dragged them both down on the floor, the lone ray of light rolling over the carpeting as they wrestled for control. He fumbled blindly for a knife, found a handle: stabbed into her arm to sever the tendons and loosen her grip. The demon hissed, baring row upon row of barbed-wire teeth behind parched lips.
Internal damage takes a demon around 40% longer time to heal than superficial injury.
She would screech soon, and he would be dead.
A long, green-furred body wormed itself around the demon, and when the creature's teeth sank into the hand around Shiro's throat he glimpsed boar's tusks and yellow eyes. No familiar he had heard of, but the distraction was appreciated.
He tore himself free, grabbed the nukekubi's hair, and used as much force as he dared to slam her face into the floor; he raised the knife and lodged the blade deep between the second and third vertebrae in her neck.
"Fujimoto-kun, what are-?"
"Preventing it from screaming."
Nerves severed, the body's movements became weak and uncoordinated in the familiar's serpent grip. Shiro wasted no time grabbing a sashimi knife from the floor, tugging the head up, and slashing the throat off above the larynx. He forced sawing motions through her flesh, hot blood making the handle slippery, gurgling noises and thrashing growing weaker: digging his fingers into the wet heat, he grabbed hold of the jaw and wrenched the head off her spine.
The body went limp. No sound was heard, save the voiceless wheezing of breath from the head. Shiro grabbed its hair anew to keep the head from flying away, only to find that he was stuck. His hand was stuck. The fingers he had dug into the wound to tear her head off were stuck. The flesh was regenerating, crawling out over his fingers and merging.
Somewhere deep below the surface of Shiro's mind, panic surged up like acid reflux.
"Get that off immediately!"
Minamoto didn't need to tell him: Shiro jerked his hand free before the Tamer had even finished the sentence. Holding his hand up, he turned it back and forth in the torch light, inspecting it for damage. The merging hadn't gone very far. The nukekubi's flesh hung in shrivelled strips from it, like shed skin: no signs of the burns associated with ghoul injuries.
"Looks alright, but get it checked with Matsuri-san when she comes up. Better safe than sorry", Minamoto grunted. The green weasel familiar had climbed up on his shoulder and sniffed curiously at the hand its master was inspecting. "The question is what we're going to do with that." He aimed his torch down at the head hanging from Shiro's other hand.
It was still alive. It wiggled and tossed, what little room for movement his grip on its hair allowed.
"How come it doesn't regenerate the neck?" Shiro wondered with a clinician's unaffected interest, turning the head in his hands to inspect the severed point. The muscles there worked feebly, as on a fish lying on ice in the food market, but no signs of regeneration were visible. His eyes wandered to the body below him, where the rest of the neck was- "It doesn't regenerate a body part that is still attached, either to the body or to the head." Good to know.
"The bodies have received the injections", Matsuri-sensei reported, joining the Tamer and the Knight in the hallway. "How are you, Fujimoto-kun?" Urgency broke the professional tone. "Are you injured?"
"Might be." He felt his body rise, while feelings swam hysterically under the surface of his detachment. "I'd need you to take a look at my hand when we've assembled at meeting point. I came in contact with nukekubi body fluids while it regenerated but I think I'm alright." The head tugged fervently in his hand. "What do we do with this?"
Disgust. Horror. There were many things to be read on their pale faces; the Knight apparently couldn't stomach to even look at the head.
"We might have to keep it like that", Minamoto mused gravely. "It will only cause trouble if we let it go. We're ready to burn the house down, aren't we?"
The head wheezed furiously and tried to bite him several times. Shiro stood by the garden pond, an unlit cigarette lolling between his lips, while the other exorcists returned the body to its futon and cleaned off the kitchen as best they could.
"Murderer!" it hissed, unable to produce more than whisper without vocal cords. "Exorsssisst ssscum!" Threats and saliva and curses flew from its lips: but when Matsuri-sensei gave them signal to draw back to the park across the road, the hissing became pleas and promises. "We will leave, boy: I swear it. We leave this city, leave Japan. We will never trouble you."
Shiro didn't reply.
There was nothing out of the ordinary with his hand, but Matsuri-sensei administered some ointment on it anyway. After that, they waited. The sky had begun to blush a pale grey when the first head returned. The old woman's head whispered frantically for them to turn back, turn back, but her voice didn't reach them. Within a minute or two all seven had returned: and Shiro lit his cigarette.
"Good luck", he said, shutting his lighter and handing it over to the Knight.
"No! No! My children!"
The exorcists jogged down to the garden: two to seal doors and windows with wards, and one heading to the window they had left open at the back of the house.
"My children…!"
Dawn flared golden, and the whisper drowned in roaring flames.
The house was only a glowing skeleton of blackened beams by the time Shiro ground out the cigarette under his boot. Matsuri-sensei's short, robed silhouette was displaying her exorcist license and explaining the situation to the firemen and the police at the scene. Shiro still stood in the park, watching. Detached. Ever since the day he cried in Kasumi's arms, he had remained detached. Taking risks and succumbing to temptation were luxuries he couldn't afford anymore.
The head had gone chalk white in his grasp, tongue hanging out and eyes rolled back into the skull. It was silent now. He hadn't heard it over the fire, but he had felt the muscles under the skin work as its jaws and lips had repeated the same words over and over.
My children.
They look human, but they're not.
They act human, but they're not.
They can do anything.
…and he who fights with monsters might take care, lest he thereby become a monster.
A/N: Nietzsche quote, obviously.
Nukekubi don't have bad breath, but I thought they must have if they chew raw flesh every night. =/ I don't know if they traditionally detach neck-and-head, or just head; but if they attack by screaming, then it would make sense to me if the neck and the vocal cords came along. (Never mind how they force air through the windpipe without lungs~)
Ramidreju is the name of a Spanish creature: supposedly a weasel with a snake-like body, green fur, yellow eyes, and a boar's head. Its fur is said to cure any and every disease.
Dear Dare mo
Good question! The way I write things, people without mashou see the body of Johann Faust when they see Mephisto, yes. The first time Shiro saw Mephisto, it was Johann that he saw. =) And yes, the statue does depict Mephisto, not Johann.
I was extremely simple-minded when I wrote that. x') I figured that Shiro saw Mephisto from a distance that first time, and was more focused on his outrageous principal's uniform (thus the transvestite sewer clown) than his looks. If you read chapter 3 again, what Shiro takes note of is a white tailcoat, a "pantyhose", and weird boots. He doesn't mention purple hair, because he doesn't see it: if he had seen it, he would've thought that was just as weird as the attire.
That he could see him turn into a dog despite not having a mashou, well… There's quite a difference in size and shape between a dog and a human. x') That kind of change would have to show, with or without mashou. I mean, if people without mashou still saw him as human, they would see the principal crawling around on all fours and hopping into pet flaps where he really wouldn't fit through… 0_o'
Going back to the question, my thought was that Mephisto and Johann were similar enough to look somewhat the same, if you spotted Mephisto for the first time and from a distance. So when Shiro saw the statue, he identified the transvestite sewer clown based on the clothes and didn't think so much about the face.
What I meant when I gave Fuji the line "he doesn't look it" was not "he doesn't look like that in reality", but rather "he doesn't look like he could be principal, with those clothes". Sorry for being unclear there. ^_^'
Your English works fine, but I'm glad I also had the Italian translation to double-check against. I really need to dust off my Italian… x'D I can still read, that's basically it. You don't have an account I can PM, no? That's unfortunate. I'm going to need Italian translations in the future. ^_^' (You over there, that Italian dude/dudette that's reading: give me a shout if you feel you want to help me write!)
/ Dimwit