Please read Disclaimer in Chapter One.
Title: Maya's Tale (C13: Vault)
Author: JaganshiKenshin
Genre: Action/Adventure, General
Rating: K+/PG-13 (for anime-style fight scenes/language)
Summary: With Maya missing, Olivia and Ruth decide it is high time to open the vault.
A/N: Idiot Beloved takes place shortly after the Dark Tournament; Firebird Sweet directly follows that timeline. For reference, I use a combination of the American YYH manga and the subtitled anime. I appreciate your reviews; thanks for reading!
"Were we selfish? Or just afraid?"
Maya's Tale (13: Vault)
by
Kenshin
Olivia could pretend no longer.
Dressed as for a tea party, Olivia wore a gray Chanel suit that highlighted her salt-and-pepper bob. Ruth was in a storm-blue shantung silk dress that made her hair glow like polished silver. Checking her watch, Olivia gave Ruth a worried glance and saw that Ruth, too, was concerned.
"I feel such a nervous old biddy," Ruth said, wringing her hands, "and that won't do."
Maya had been expected for a late afternoon tea, and it was already dark outside.
"She did have an appointment with that mystic of hers, and then a local delivery," said Olivia.
"But it's not like Maya to leave us hanging."
"She could have gotten a call for another job on the fly," Olivia said reassuringly, but she was a little worried herself.
Ruth stood at the front window, parting the lace curtains. "There was no answer at her home, or her mobile."
Olivia went to the mantlepiece, first gazing at the fire, then at the Sevres vase. "But phones do get turned off, for one reason or another."
The Old Paris Green Sevres vase had arrived yesterday, and as there were no seasonal flowers to speak of, Ruth had arranged in it a pink sprig of artificial sweet pea. Unsatisfactory, but it would have to do.
The snow had stopped, leaving no trace, but it was, if possible, even colder. The warmth of the house made Olivia reluctant to venture outside, and she thought it would do little good to prowl the street anyway.
This house was a rarity in that it had been custom-built with insulation and central heating, back when this was one of the wealthiest neighborhoods around. Nevertheless they had laid on the fire, but the brave crackling of the cedar logs and the smoky scent did little to dispel Olivia's nerves.
"Silly, fussy, old biddy," Ruth insisted.
"This isn't like Maya at all," Olivia murmured.
"Poor thing, no mother, father away on business nine-tenths of the year, and that job of hers, all odd hours."
"She seems to handle it well enough."
"Could we use an assistant here, do you think?"
"Would she go for it?"
"She's not here to ask," said Ruth, still at the curtains.
The flames went on eating the logs, and Olivia's nerves kept eating at her. It was too warm. She left the fireplace and went to the sofa. "Ruth," she said, "I do believe it's time."
"Time?" Ruth let the curtains fall back to cover the window. "Do you mean-"
"The Vault." Olivia nodded. "It does seem peculiar that we two, who are so interested in history-"
"-should have avoided this subject for so long."
"As though we were afraid."
Ruth crossed to the sofa and sat next to Olivia, but her eyes were on the front window. "That man with his camera. The girl we saw trailing after him once or twice. The sight of them fills me with dread that some awful event is about to occur."
Olivia agreed. "As we told that young man. But there's more to it. Something is taking place around us, some danger half-glimpsed. These fifty years have passed in a dream of safety, an illusion that-"
"-is about to burst," said Ruth.
Her stomach a-flutter, Olivia replied, "Then we'd better get up there."
0-0-0-0-0
With the mother of his new race unconscious, Von Brandt carried her limp little body across the threshold of The Room, and laid her down on a cold steel table.
He disliked her casual garb, the dark ugly sweat shirt and the dungarees. Clothing that could have been worn by a boy.
Could he not spare time to change her clothes? Where was that blasted girl anyway? This sort of thing really was her job.
The mother-to-be was beautiful, but her raiment should be beautiful as well. She looked down at him, from every angle, every nook, every curve in the room, smiling sometimes, dreamy sometimes, sometimes in fierce concentration.
Von Brandt paused for a moment, looking all around, savoring her beauty.
Over on a chair, a gown had been laid, eggshell-pale, a lovely thing of lace and satin.
He had nothing to fear after all. His camera, his protection, his escape clause, was now perfected, and secreted at the ready. His other instruments, the gleaming test tubes, the scalpels, the needles, were also poised at the ready.
He would change the girl himself. And then, eager to see the sort of offspring that would result from this union, Von Brandt would begin the process of combining his genetic material with hers.
0-0-0-0-0
'The Vault,' as Olivia and Ruth referred to it, was in the upstairs office where Mother and Father Kawasaki had managed their business affairs.
The cozy little room had a curtained window facing the street. The gold-striped burgundy walls were busy with small paintings from Mother and Father's personal collection; nothing too valuable, but paintings they had liked: mostly landscapes in oil, but one or two historical scrolls, even a watercolor swan.
There was a smell of gun oil where the trusty Browning shotgun hung on a rack with an American Civil War sword and the English blunderbuss.
The mahogany desk, its fancy beadwork trimmed with well-worn gold leaf, was angled to hide a worn spot in the rug, and the old ladderback chair was stiff and uncomfortable, but they had never changed it out.
"I always feel like a safecracker." Ruth eased behind the desk to a landscape that hung on the wall. She touched a button hidden by the frame, and the painting slid aside, revealing a small safe. She dialed the combination.
The Vault was where Ruth and Olivia kept essential records, stock certificates, a small amount of gold boullion, three or four pieces of valuable jewelry, and The Letter.
Ruth reached for the letter, but she jerked her hand back. "Oh, I can't! I'm so foolish. Olivia, dear, could you...?"
The letter was from Mother, inside a parchment envelope that had been sealed with red wax. "I'll try." Sitting in the stiff uncomfortable chair, Olivia took the letter from Ruth, who settled in an armchair beneath the display of weaponry.
With a bronze letter-opener, Olivia carefully pried off the wax seal and drew out the letter.
The letter had also been written on parchment, folded in thirds, with creases as sharp as if they had been made yesterday. Olivia unfolded it to reveal Mother's graceful, fluid hand, in black ink that had faded to sepia:
"If you are reading this, the time has come."
Briefly shutting her eyes, Olivia could envision Mother sitting in the same uncomfortable chair, clad in one of her smart Paris-tailored suits, dipping an ivory-handled pen in an inkwell, her brow puckered in thought.
"Please, dear," Ruth urged, "read the letter aloud."
"Very well." "Fifty years ago, something happened. Fifty years ago, the neighborhood changed."
"Well, we knew that much," said Ruth. "Go on."
"The authorities tried to suppress what happened that night, and they succeeded. The papers only reported a 'disturbance.' But we know the truth.
"This area used to be called Sakura Heights, in part due to the cherry trees that lined the boulevard. But after that one night, everything changed. You were both away, my dear girls, and we thanked God for that."
"Sakura Heights." Ruth's hands twisted together. "Of course. Don't you remember how the cherry trees died?"
"And they cut them all down."
"Except for the one in our yard. And to think we've been living here in a sort of oblivious peace all along!"
With a dry mouth, Olivia read:
"Ruth was up at school, and Olivia was setting up housekeeping on her own. Both of you quite busy."
Olivia's voice shook. "But we did know. When we came back to visit, Mother and Father were so-"
"-not themselves," concluded Ruth, sorrowful. "So distracted. Silent. Almost-"
"-as though in shock."
"And we never pursued the matter," said Ruth.
"Though we could have. Indeed, we should have."
"We never questioned the cherry trees."
And yet," Olivia said, "in her later years, Mother spoke of the 'contents of the Vault,' and how we would know it was time."
"And the weather that April, which had been so cold-"
"It had gone back to normal when we paid our visit."
They studied one another. "We did know," whispered Ruth.
Olivia nodded, slowly. "Were we afraid, or merely selfish?"
"Both?"
With her staunchly-gathered pluck draining fast, Olivia murmured, "Insulated. Heated. Everything for our comfort and convenience."
"And I am grateful for that," Ruth reminded her. "Don't misunderstand. But I wonder if we had become too comfortable? Veering into complacency?"
"We can't change the past." Olivia straightened her shoulders. "Time enough later for regrets and repentance."
The authorities, Mother noted, had not been regular police, and had commanded them to remain indoors, even going so far as to warn against looking out at the street.
"But your father and I disregarded their warning, and scurried up to the office, and peered outside. And when we saw what was going on, we thanked Providence once again that you were away, and safe."
Olivia paused to dab at her stinging eyes. She felt like a child again, missing her parents, but she pasted on a smile for Ruth's benefit.
"There were unfamiliar cars prowling the street, as though this was a covert operation. One or two people had already been killed, but we did not know this at the time."
Olivia put down the letter, her face and hands going cold. "Killed? I don't recall anything in the papers."
"Mother said there wouldn't be." But Ruth appeared to be equally shocked by the revelation.
Olivia continued: "At that time, Mr. Sanrio lived across the street. You will remember him. He loved to garden. And he was generous, giving us roses that we still have in the way of bushes. The roses he gave us were always white, but the next morning they had all turned blood-red. And his house has stood empty since he was murdered."
"Mr. Sanrio? Murdered?"
"People said it was a heart condition."
"And we just accepted it, along with everything else." Ruth, too, paled. "The secrecy ran deep."
With her back aching from an effort to sit straight, Olivia continued, and the room and the present fell away, and she seemed to be there, fifty years ago, the sights and smells and sounds of the past alive around her.
"They were walking the street. The killers.
"Now you know I have nothing in the way of a sixth sense. But your father's abilities are quite powerful. 'This is of the occult,' he muttered. 'Can't you feel it?' I couldn't, but I could see it. And that was enough to freeze me to the marrow.
"There seemed to be an army of them, but my fear may have added to their actual numbers. Perhaps there were ten of them, more or less. I had heard of these creatures, of course, but thought them to be harmless, merely pranksters who enjoyed frightening us humans."
Olivia caught Ruth's startled gaze. "Us humans?"
"Your father held me up or I would have passed out right then. Strong man that he was, I felt him shaking. I wanted to let the curtains fall back, I wanted to stop watching, but some force held me there, just as something held us stubbornly to this house. Perhaps we made a mistake, staying here, intending for you to occupy it or sell it as you wished after our departure from this world. Forgive me."
"Oh, Mother, of course," murmured Olivia.
"What happened next seemed an illusion. Imagine a balloon, floating away, still attached to the grasping hand, but the string stretching, growing, longer and longer, until it reached the roof-top.
"Now imagine the balloon is a head, and the string a neck, yet still attached to the body. From the neck down, these creatures were merely girls. They walked even as you and I. But that is where their resemblance to people ended. For these were monsters. The fabled Rokurokubi."
"But I thought they were legendary," protested Ruth.
Olivia herself could not quite take it in. She dredged up what she knew of the creatures. Were they violent? Nothing suggested that they were. They were said to lie in wait for unwary people, and enjoyed frightening them when their long, serpentine necks were suddenly revealed.
"Mr. Sanrio also disobeyed orders. He fled his house. One of the creatures singled him out, ran after him, but then stopped. I breathed a sigh of relief, but it was too soon.
For though the monstrous girl stopped pursuing him, though she stood stock-still on the sidewalk, she merely stretched out her neck, four feet, five feet, ten, like a rippling ribbon, overtaking poor Mr. Sanrio, wrapping that deformed neck around him as though she were a strangling snake.
"And then-I could not look. But I heard his screams. I hear them still in my dreams.
Ruth glanced fearfully around, as though the creatures had leapt through space and time and were already at the door.
It had been dark, Olivia thought, that night, like now, and no one could risk shooting the creature to protect Mr. Sanrio. But he died anyway.
"Rokurokubi," said Ruth, as though trying to steady her nerves, "are supposed to be fairly harmless. Even human by day."
The letter went on to say that after that night, more and more people abandoned the neighborhood, and those who bought houses in their wake also walked out, until the decline into Rokurokubi Block was complete.
"We could follow suit," said Olivia. "Pack it all up and move to England."
"We'll do no such thing and you know it."
Olivia drew a shuddering breath. "There's one last paragraph."
"A wild irrational terror seized me. I thought if I should glance out the window again, it would be there: a face, staring at me. And then the monster would snake through the window, and wrap itself around me as it did poor Mr. Sanrio. "
Olivia shut her eyes. The age-old human fear of serpents.
"Olivia," said Ruth, in a voice of such icy calm, that Olivia had to turn, had to look, even though she already knew what she would see.
Before she could steel herself to face it, there came from the window a girl's voice: "We meet at last."
-30-
(To be continued: The call to arms!)