The Weight of Darkness
Not a single ray of light reached the blood-dark gloom. Sixty meters underground, the hall stretched with a needless vastness where mass and emptiness tangled together. Considering the cost and labor poured into carving out this subterranean space, it had long since passed beyond the unnecessary into pure waste. And yet the weight of that darkness carried an emotion that transcended the crude efficiency of common capitalism—something close to awe.
So Gordon often carved time from his crowded schedule to come here, to Phoenix Hall.
"Distrust of me is sprouting. No—has it already passed the sprout and begun to flower, ready to bear fruit?"
A low breath spilled into the darkness where the scent of blood drifted. R. Gordon, founder of Flex Medical and the Midas of the financial world, poured steaming blood into a cold crystal glass.
When the light of civilization had gathered up its great domain of intellect from before the eyes of fools, the vulgar electric glow that illuminated the earth had been more curse than blessing. Edison would disagree, of course, but because of him that intellect had turned its back on humanity. That was why this darkness held special meaning for him.
Of course, for a vampire, darkness was no veil to block his sight. And so Phoenix Hall was ornamented with the serpent, the emblem of Tetra Anax. A human would never have sensed it, but the floor, worked with exquisite craft, suggested a serpent's scales, and each pillar was a serpent in itself.
The granite columns shaped as serpents coiled in elegant spirals toward the ceiling, supporting the marble vault and glaring into the dark. The four serpent pillars that braced the corners were the very incarnation of eternal life, immortality, and wickedness.
The serpent that stole the secret of immortality Utnapishtim had taught Gilgamesh.
The serpent that, as Satan's avatar, tempted Eve to eat the fruit of knowledge of good and evil.
This wicked creature that held the secret of eternal life was, in its very being, of a piece with the vampire. That was why Tetra Anax had stood for the vampires and shielded them from the fire of humankind.
No—it would be more accurate to say they had shielded humankind from the vampires. The vampires were far too wealthy and powerful to be compared to the persecuted disciples of Christ.
Which was precisely why vampires were the worst of things. Even if vampires went extinct, it would be no tragedy. The death of Yangtze river dolphins or pandas, creatures truly on the brink, would be far sadder. Or perhaps one ought to rejoice, the way one rejoices when a plague dies out.
"Well, dying with their fangs buried in one another's throats out of mutual distrust would be fine too. Fools. They despise humans and fancy themselves rulers over them, but aside from being unable to tan, they carry every last filthy trait of humanity intact. What kind of chosen masters are those?"
R. Gordon turned a page. Even in a world without light, paper remained a useful medium for information. As befit the head of Tetra Anax, which oversaw intelligence on every vampire, the papers stacked before him were staggering in sheer number. Yet he flipped through them roughly, as if merely counting the sheets.
"Heh heh heh. Arcadia and Astate are beginning to move as well. Excellent. Desire that has outgrown mere distrust of me is what drives them, no doubt? Hahahahaha!"
R. Gordon, who had looked for a moment like some aged copyist monk with a mountain of work before him, threw his head back and laughed with a voice gone dry and hoarse with age. Even the vampires not yet under his direct control, who had kept their faces out of this affair, seemed to have turned toward Korea to harvest the blood of the new Jinma, Jeong-ya.
With an estimated VT of a million, Jeong-ya was, without exaggeration, a vast storehouse of power in which the whole history of the vampires lay compressed. If she lacked the qualifications of a true Jinma, then even weaker vampires stood a high chance of killing her. After all, did vampires not die even to hunters who were nothing more than ordinary humans?
"So. Are you savoring your pleasures in that little eastern country, my blood kin?"
R. Gordon lifted the glass of blood to his mouth and drained it.
Bram Stoker's Dracula, cursed into vampirism, was almost romantic by comparison. A romantic who lost his beloved wife and defiled the sacred, earning a curse for it—if such a man flew from distant Romania to England and slaughtered the innocent, one could almost forgive him. Stoker himself had been rather sympathetic toward Dracula, after all.
But unlike the vampires of romance novels, the dwellers of the moonlit night who roamed the world of the mad moon—the so-called vampires—were a kind of disease. In modern terms they were AIDS; go a little further back and they were no different from plague victims, living beneath the mad moon out of human sight.
They were patients infected with VTF—the Vampiric Trans Factor. Named for the agent that turned humans into vampires, this bacterium granted its hosts formidable strength and regenerative power.
In the end, vampires were not the walking corpses of legend. Like humans, their hearts beat, blood and sweat flowed, and even their body temperature remained steady. But beyond the bare function of keeping the eyes from drying, they could shed no tears.
"In practice it was completely useless."
Silvester muttered from the driver's seat, sunlight on his face. He had once extracted a vampire's eyeballs and dissected the tear ducts in search of it, but the "vampire tears" he sought had never appeared.
"Looks like Arcadia and Island Astate have moved in as well. For creatures who claim they can't stand the taste of non-white blood, they certainly get around."
Silvester checked the Finder's data and let out a sigh. Seoul might be a metropolis of ten million, but it was far too narrow a stage for every Jinma and their households to gather for a feast. And while factions friendly to Tetra Anax might hold back, the opposing powers felt no hesitation whatsoever when it came to devouring humans.
"Information like this is no help at all."
Silvester closed the phone that had been linked to the Finder. The Finder knew nothing about Jeong-ah's whereabouts either. All it did was foam at the mouth describing the vampires who had come to Korea chasing her. Then again, vampire hunters who wanted money would hardly have the courage to pick a fight with a Jinma. You needed a life before you could spend money.
"Hm."
Silvester leaned back against the seat and closed his eyes. In the end, it seemed he would have to wait until night. To meet vampires, one had to enter the hours when vampires moved. In the end, even he would never escape the title of dweller of the moonlit night.
"Ow, ow, ow."
At the sharp, icy sting, Se-geon yanked the toothbrush from his mouth. Loading it with toothpaste and scrubbing had been the right idea—except that a spot deep in his left jaw was viciously sensitive.
"Wisdom tooth rotting?"
He hunched in the cramped bathroom and peered into the mirror. The face looking back from the sink glass had grown considerably gaunt over the past few days.
No. Have I just been gaunt ever since I quit high school?
Se-geon opened his mouth toward the mirror. Sure enough, a molar was going bad.
"Damn it. Never even been in love and I've got a wisdom tooth coming in. Feels unfair somehow."
Grumbling, he picked up the cup. It might look ridiculous for a man who had taken bullets and blades to be undone by a toothache, but Se-geon twisted his whole face as he rinsed his mouth with water.
"Pwah! Damn it! Tastes disgusting!"
He burst out of the bathroom at once and pulled on his clothes. He had to get to a dentist right away; leave it like this and the nerve endings would snap and he would go mad. Hunting season for the vampires was closing in—if he wasted focus on a toothache, he was as good as dead. For a vampire hunter already inferior to vampires in stamina and strength, any further drop in concentration was absolutely not acceptable.
But how was he supposed to get treatment?
Most medical care required a resident registration number and identity verification—to establish the facts and assign responsibility if a malpractice suit arose. In other words, a man who had burned his registration could not receive proper medical service. Dentists might run plenty of black-market practices, but Se-geon had no idea where to find one.
"Damn it."
Remembering the Russian woman doctor who had asked him to call her Sonya, Se-geon shrugged into his flight jacket and bolted outside. She was a surgeon, but if she knew a supply route for black-market medical gear, she could serve as a link to other under-the-table operators.
The moment Chang-hyun opened his eyes he was on his feet and changing clothes. Not since his discharge from the military had he gotten up in such a rush. But he had let an unknown woman sleep in his house, and that made it all the more important that he behave correctly.
"Ugh, damn it."
The dizziness that had been hounding him for days struck again. He sagged forward.
"Ah—are you all right?"
The door opened and the woman he had taken in the night before rushed out to steady him.
Huh? She's incredibly quick.
Chang-hyun was startled by the speed with which she crossed the room the instant the door opened and caught him before he fell. And then—
"You don't seem to have a fever."
Her slightly cool hand touched his forehead. For a moment Chang-hyun felt his face flush hot. Holding him as gently as a mother cradling a child, Jeong-ah was beautiful beyond belief. Flawless white skin, long glossy black hair that could have belonged to a commercial model, irises so clear they looked almost blue in the light, a long slender white throat and a face small as a fist—it was hard to believe a woman like this had been wandering the streets as a vagrant. Chang-hyun felt as if a fox spirit had bewitched him.
"Ah, I'm fine."
"Really?"
She looked worried as Chang-hyun, flustered, pushed her away. He hurriedly scanned the room. He needed something else to focus on. Just then he saw the frosted milky glass of the window where morning sunlight was streaming in.
"The rain's stopped."
Jeong-ah spoke in an accentless, perfectly natural tone.
"…Yeah."
"Then I've troubled you enough. Thank you."
She bowed deeply to Chang-hyun. Was she leaving? But for where? Somehow Chang-hyun felt that if he let her go now he would never see her again, and he stopped her.
"Ah, um…"
"Yes?"
"I threw your clothes in the washing machine. They'll take a while to dry."
Jeong-ah looked down at what she was wearing. The oversized T-shirt—his—bore the words Minjok H University, Department of Social Physical Education. On a frame far too large for it, the shirt only made her look more alluring.
"Come to think of it, I should return this to you."
"Uh."
"Pardon?"
"Nothing. Nothing at all."
Chang-hyun thumped his own skull for the ridiculous image that had flickered through it and laughed it off. Somewhere in the back of his mind he had thought, If only she'd take it off right here…
"Ah—are you hungry, by any chance?"
"What? I—well…"
She reddened. It had been the same when he handed her the bread earlier: for someone living on the street, her pride was built like an I-beam of structural steel. Stiff enough that a train could roll over it and it would not so much as bend.
"Let's just eat breakfast first and think it over."
Chang-hyun opened the refrigerator.