Exploring Japan’s deserted Mount Rushmore

Mike GristFeatured Story, Haikyo, Statues / Monuments, Theme Parks, Tochigi

Disneyland has the grand pink Sleeping Beauty castle. The wizarding world of Harry Potter has Hogwarts. Japan’s abandoned Western Village theme park has a 1/3rd scale replica of Mount Rushmore.

Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt, Lincoln- Japan

Outside Mount Rushmore

As grand-central-structures-that-pull-their-thematic-landscapes-together go, it’s an odd one. First off, you can hardly even see it from within the park. Instead it fronts the nearby highway and bullet train tracks boldly, like a grand welcome sign that turns its back on you as soon as you enter. Second, it doesn’t fit all that well with the park’s cowboy theme. Did cowboys wage shoot-outs on Roosevelt’s nose, or rustle cattle out of Lincoln’s big nose?

Ahem.

See any cattle hiding up that big nose?

Washington has a brain-aerial, perhaps a Dalek.

That doesn’t mean I am not in awe of it. It is a pretty awesome construction. Built in 1995 to the exact specifications of the original, as determined by a variety of high-tech satellite topography mapping methods, it cost $27 million to build. I can’t imagine the Western Village was making that kind of money per year, so doubtless it was considered a long-term investment in the park.

Well, now it must be written off. It stands alone, uncrowded by tourists, its Fiberglass-reinforced plastic faces slowly tarnishing with dark rain-mold, while its unventilated plaster innards slowly cook themselves in the greenhouse of those presidential brains. If it is not demolished first, I’d imagine it will crumble in on itself within 50 years. (This prediction influenced by me watching the excellent TV show Life After People recently).

There’s a stage at the base, with tiered seating to watch perhaps some kind of Presidential show.

Two boss-men looking West to manifest destiny (and Tokyo).

The original sculpture in South Dakota is carved in granite, and will never tarnish or collapse in on itself, as granite is one of the most enduring rocks on earth. This means the four presidents carved on Mt. Rushmore will likely be standing even after everything else has blown away in the winds of apocalypse.

Very dark.

Now I will quote a great article from Outwest Newspaper (itself a pretty fascinating, one-man tabloid), written by Chuck Woodbury in 1995, 12 years before the park closed in 2007-

Meanwhile, in South Dakota, tourism officials had now figured they’d been handed a golden egg; the Japanese, they reasoned, would surely want to cross the Pacific to see the real thing. In short order, Mr. Ominami [the owner of Western Village] was declared an honorary governor of South Dakota as well as an honorary citizen of Rapid City. Rapid City and Imaichi became sister cities. And Japanese travel agencies began planning travel packages to the Black Hills.
In May (1995), the 82-foot-high replica was unveiled to a gathering of 150 members of the Japanese media, plus three reigning Miss South Dakotas (all winnners of different contests), five Dakota Sioux, the mayor of Rapid City, South Dakota’s lieutenant governor, and about 500 Japanese dignitaries. A U.S. Navy band played “Stars and Stripes Forever” and a Shinto priest blessed the mountain.
Above it all, George, Tom, Teddy and Abe gazed into the distance, over the bullet-train tracks and across the busy highway, their images flawlessly replicating sculptor Gutzon Borglum’s originals.
Kenichi Ominami shook hands, bowed and accepted congratulations. “There’s a saying in Japanese that passions will move mountains,” he said. “In my case, passion has built a mountain.”

– Chuck Woodbury, Outwest.

I curved around to the Rushmore replica last, hooking up with Rob for a few images to get the sense of the place’s scale. Massive.

Game center side.

Rob on the stage.

We wanted to get in, but on first reconnoiter it seemed impossible- the park was only abandoned 4 years ago and most of the buildings were still sealed up tight. I won’t go into detail here, but with a bit of climbing, a bit of help from each other, and some tight squeezing, we managed to get in.

And what did we find inside?

Teddy bears.

Uncle Sam is a bear!

Inside Mount Rushmore

The first floor was filled with teddy bears in various poses- at tea, on a swing, by a classic car, etc.. The main area would have been a grand restaurant, with a cool-looking play area jungle-gym for kids, with ball pools and such. We were both tempted to jump in the ball pool, but also a bit worried about what might be in there after 4 years of disuse. Could be something gross. We didn’t take the plunge in the end.

Chauffeur bear.

Pants-down swing bear. Have you no shame, sir?

Sand-wheelbarrow bear. Do some darned work!

Sweet classic car.

After the teddy bears, the only way was up. It got darker as we went up, since all the windows were shut up, or perhaps there were no windows, and what I had thought was a hotel turned out to be a game center. THE PEOPLE’S GAME CENTER!

Better start goose-stepping, people.

Sadly there were no games left, just a lot dark empty spaces. Onto the top floor.

The top floor had more stuff. A diorama of sad-looking Indians, perhaps being driven off their land, plus an excellent surprise looming in the dark.

Abe! Blurry because it was dark, and I was in a rush.

Abraham Lincoln doll animatronic statue! Of course there was no power to him, so I guess he was last switched off mid-pronouncement, leaving his jaw to hang forever half-open. I wonder what grandiloquent speech he had been giving? Perhaps the Emancipation proclamation? The Gettysburg address? His mechanical throat is now silent.

There were also flags, maps, a history of various states.

Model of the heads. Much less than 1/3rd scale.

Finally- round one corner, we saw a glimmer of burning red light through a rough-cut hole in the wall- like the distant infernos of Mordor.

Rob and I exchanged glances in bafflement. Maybe I said- “Eh?” He might have said- “Eh?” too.

A warm wind wafted from within, carrying the smell of powdery plaster. I didn’t much want to go in- putting my hand through the wall felt like entering a sauna. But, Rob insisted. So in we went.

A hole into another dimension.

Inside the Rushmore heads

Of course, it was the interior of the President’s heads. It was super hot and steamy. My camera fogged up. The best I could get was this shot of hell- with the camera pointing up past the spray-creted girders to the sun, through the Fibre-glass shell.

The fires of Mt. Doom.

At the far end of the heads, we popped out to a fire escape that led up to the roof. We contemplated leaping from the staircase to the roof, thereby allowing us to clamber on Abe Lincoln’s head, but the height, the leap, and the uncertainty of the stability of anything we might land on, turned us off like a pair of pansies. So we did not make the leap.

Looking back in from outside.

The fire escape from below. Here you can clearly see the leap from the fire escape to the roof. More than a stride.

Shooting down from the fire escape.

Cherub on the roof.

After that, it’s a story of saying good bye. The cool air of the main building, and out past the teddy bear’s, back out the treacherous exit path, and hurrying along to meet up with Jan, who had already finished with the park and was waiting for us in the car park.

We got in the car, and rolled away from the Western Village. Probably it’s one of my favorite haikyo now. I wouldn’t mind going back and having a good proper look around, at all the things I missed. Perhaps man up and leap onto the roof. Put a giant top-hat on Lincoln’s head. That sort of thing.

Here’s a little video.

Next up- a gorgeously rusted and overgrown mine/factory complex.

Western Village series:

1- History

2. Animatronic John Wayne

3- Cowboy ghost house

Explore more Japanese ruins (haikyo) in the galleries:

[album id=4 template=compact]

See a curation of world ruins in the ruins gallery.

You can also read my SF & Fantasy stories inspired by ruins.

Sky Painter @ Something Wicked

Mike GristBooks, Fantasy, Stories, Story Art, Writing

My story Sky Painter – an epic fable about a fallen king and the love he left behind – has just gone live at Something Wicked, the South African magazine that also published Freemantle Mons a while back. SW was on hiatus for a while as editor Joe Vaz moved the production to ebook format. You can check the new style and subscribe here.

Here’s Joe’s introduction to the issue-

We start the issue off with ‘The Silver City and The Green Place’, by Abi Godsell, which tells the tale of a breakthrough scientific experiment in artificial intelligence. Next up is ‘Unstitched Love’ by Michael Bailey, which is all about a little girl making a teddy bear for her rather annoying sister, needless to say things don’t quite turn out as planned. ‘Sky Painter’, by Michael John Grist is an epic fable about a fallen king and the love he left behind, and we close of the issue with a virtual reality noir murder mystery entitled Alpha & Omega by ‘Paul Marlowe’. Our feature interview for this month is with SL Grey, who is actually the pseudonym of Louis Greenberg and Sarah Lotz.

It’s a really professional ebook with fantastic art by Vincent Sammy, 4 stories, and lots of extras including interviews with all the authors (of course including me), reviews, and a few story-connected essays.

The cover image is from the story Silver City and the Green Place.

Get it here.

Read more of MJG’s SF & Fantasy short stories here.

Learn about his epic fantasy novel project DAWN RISING here.

See Story Art.

Read about the craft of writing.

History of the Western Village Amusement Park, Japan

Mike GristHaikyo, Theme Parks, Tochigi

Western Village is a quantum pocket of the Old West Disneyfied and transplanted wholesale from the American collective unconscious, replete with a $29 million replica Mount Rushmore, Western saloon, ghost house, jail, post office, shooting gallery, actual fake Rio Grande, and vast Mexican barrens.

It was built in 1975 and shut down in 2007, likely due to its remote location and the pull of other nearby parks like Disneyland sucking away its tourist base.

Now it’s a ruin, or haikyo, open only to urban explorers willing to take their chances clambering over the stockade wall.

The car park outside the Village stockade.

Mid-shootout, bleeding rust.

Kerchiefed cowboys driving a wagon across the car park plain.

Sturdy, tall, tough to climb stockade.

High noon (with washed out Japanese spring skies).

You burst through the Old West town’s 3-meter tall Indian stockade, six-irons ready for a shoot-out, but the place is silent. Long deserted boulevards stretch before you, weeds growing up through the dust. Only a rag-haired ostler at the lonely stagecoach station gazes back at you with a vapid Colorado stare, his vacuum-tube heart bared for all to see.

Your spirits sink. This place is not what it once was. A roll of tumbleweed gusts along the dry and dusty street.

Welcome to the Western Village.

The central saloon.

Overgrown cowboy facade.

Catch a stagecoach to Utah.

Armory / gunsmith.

Possibly the sherriff’s office.

From a tarpaper rooftop, like a Clayton sharpshooting sniper.

Buffalo stampede.

Spirits, candy floss, hot dogs by the church.

Nasty looking scar. Doubtless you could get WANTED posters made of you in the park.

Early History

Western Village started life humbly in 1970 as the ‘Kinugawa ranch’ in the Japanese countryside, a 4-acre family owned camp where folks could come for horse-riding, lasso practise, and go fishing in the fish pond (not exactly cowboy, I know). As time went by and the green rolled in, owner Kenichi Ominami’s ambitions grew.

He expanded what began as a simple wooden complex to become a USJ-like cowboy town, all wooden facades, horses, and dusty thoroughfares, as though you’d stepped onto the set of a John Ford Western.

The Family Ranch summer camp in 1979.

Glory days.

In time Ominami hired wranglers and cowboys for shows he put on 4 times a day, just like the parades of Disneyland but instead of Mickey and Minnie singing A Whole New World with giant floats of Robin William’s blue genie floating overhead, there was a story of cowboy lust, violence, and revenge.

You sat in the bleacher stands watching the center of town- of course the saloon- as gun battles played out before you, men went down, horses cantered past. At times there were displays of gunmanship and skill, with hired men shooting the apple off unwitting guests’ heads, William Tell style.

If you were lucky you might catch a glimpse of Ominami himself striding the boardwalk like a rootin-tootin pistoleer, clad in ten-gallon hat, leather chaps, and spurs.

The Western Village’s cowboy tale- from here.
1- The Sheriff hears about the Rogue gang.
2- ‘Crutches’ talks smack about the Sheriff who crippled him, to guests pulled out of the 20-strong audience.
3- More guests pulled onto the stage and put into the story.
4- Sheriff starts to lay down the law.

1- Sheriff shoots balloons using a hand-mirror.
2- Taking aim at an apple on a guest’s head.
3- Bam!
4- Apple into dust. Amazing. Incredibly dangerous?

1- Another occasion, horse work.
2- Sheriff posing on the deck while the crowds watch.
3- Impressive fire finale.

Wild Expansion

And things expanded further, as guest numbers rose to near 1 million per year. In 1995 Ominami, then 52, took a trip to the land of his imagination, after seeing Kevin Costner’s frontier movie “Dances With Wolves.” In South Dakota he was flabbergasted by the sheer epic scale of the cowboy landscape- so different from the renderings he’d grown up watching on Rawhide as a child.

He wanted to bring a taste of that scale to Japan, to share that sense of sweeping red desert and lonesome blue skies with a people who had only ever seen it in black and white at 12 inches across.

So he started down an interesting road- the path to building a clone of Mt. Rushmore at one third scale. I’ll talk about that more in a later post. He also expanded across a small stream that cut across his land, labelling it the Rio Grande and everything ‘south’ of it as Mexico Land.

Ominami in front of his replica Mt. Rushmore.

Cantering towards bankruptcy.

As his cowboy dreamland grew, so did its debts. Fewer and fewer people were making the long and arduous voyage to his camp, resulting in increasing pressure from the banks to cash in somehow and get back a fraction of the millions they had invested.

In 2007 the dream fell flat. From a few bits of financial reporting scattered across the web I gleaned that the closing was only meant to be temporary, for maintenance lasting just a few months. The cowboys would return from their sojourn in the desert soon, and all would be as it was; bean cans roasting on the open fire, buffalo haunches glazed with wild honey, shootouts and harlots and horse-riding galore.

But that didn’t happen, or hasn’t happened yet. Is it because of Ominami? He’d be around 78 now and perhaps unwell, if not passed away. If he is dead, would anyone really want to take on his park, which could not have been making good returns?

I doubt it. I doubt his park ever paid off the debts it incurred in 1995 for Mount Rushmore, looking at photos from recent years showing the stands sparse of punters, and reading reports about how it felt abandoned even while under operation. I doubt it ever would pay off those debts, unless vast new investment were to transform it from what it is now to something able to compete with Disney, and even then it would only have more debt to earn back- which I doubt it could. Who would want to take that on?

Empty park. A latter-day anachronistic addition (what was wrong with horses?)- Segway riding.

Hottie cowgirl doing promo.

Promo video of the Western Village.

Ominami’s park was perhaps never fated to generate profits. It was a realization of a dream, built by a man who cared more about the dream than the business. He even said as much in a 1995 interview-

“I’m an example of a self-made man,” said Ominami. “The goal of life is not to make money, but to make your dreams come true.”

– OutWest newspaper.

Now his dream stands derelict and empty, a slowly fading museum to a time long gone, in a country far away. It’s always possible it may reopen some time in the future, but more likely is a fire-sale of its assets, the destruction of Mt. Rushmore, and an ignominious end in the imagination of the people who lived nearby- the few people likely to remember it ever existed.

Taming the West

Maybe that’s fitting. The West was won, one way or the other. One-horse towns like the Cowboy Park have little hope of competing against globalized, multinational corporations like Disney and Universal Studios. The railroads came in, ushered out the little big men in their warrens of minor power, and transformed the world to something bigger, broader, and wider than it was before.

However, we’re not done with Japan’s Wild West yet. There’s still the story of my explore, the story of Mt. Rushmore, the story of cowboy-fascination in Japan, and all the photos of the cowboy ghost-houses, John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, and so on.

In the meantime, a video of the main walkthrough.

Then more to come:

Explore!

Into the saloon.

Climbing.

Animatronics galore!

Western Village series:

2. Animatronic John Wayne

3- Cowboy Ghost House

4- Mount Rushmore.

Explore more Japanese ruins (haikyo) in the galleries:

[album id=4 template=compact]

See a curation of world ruins in the ruins gallery.

You can also read my SF & Fantasy stories inspired by ruins here.

Cowboy haunted-house and Mexicoland, Japan

Mike GristFeatured Story, Haikyo, Theme Parks, Tochigi

Japan’s haikyo theme park Western Village (closed in 2007) takes its cowboy conceit in some unexpected directions; most interestingly of all the Wild West ghost house. Within its silent black-velveted walls we can find all manner of creepified Western stalwarts; skeletal pistoleers, death as a frontier dentist, zombified tomahawk-wielding Indians, and of course cowboys with their pants down.

Hmm?

Yes. There is more than one occasion of cowboys with their pants down. Each time they are displaying long and gruddy underjohns- perhaps intended to sync up with John Wayne with his fly unzipped. Maybe you can spy some of them in the video.

The piece de resistance though is of course the chap getting his tooth pulled by Death.

Death pulls a tooth, from outside.

I managed to get inside the ghost house, of course pitch black, and get up close and personal with some of the models.

Forlorn wooden tooth.

This was an uncomfortable spot to shoot from- squashed in beside Death and the wall.

Blood!

Blood-spattered window from the inside out.

Ghost house mwa ha ha!

I’ve walked around in haikyo ghost-houses once or twice before, so I wasn’t too freaked out by anything in there. It was very dark of course, and there were skeletons and the like, but with a flash light in hand, and of course no power to propel the ghosts at you or make them cackle or whatnot, they’re really not very spooky. More humorous, a bit sad-looking when you can see them clearly. But of course that’s no reflection on them- they were never meant to be seen clearly.

See the GALLANTRY ride in Nara Dreamland for more examples of looking-a-bit-crappy-by-torch-light.

Exactly what is this? Creepy lady buried half in stone, in a store-room of the main ghost walk- perhaps undergoing maintenance (getting her toenails repainted?)

Also lipstick and eye shadow. Very fetching, madame.

Prospector skeleton at a party.

Grim-looking murder victim.

I guess this hand would tap its finger when it was alive.

On the outside, giant tooth, happily free of blood.

Fun house

Next along, across from the Jail and Game Center, was a kind of fun-house, with oddly slanting walls and floors. Amongst all the attractions that had been blocked off, someone had staved in a few wooden boards in the door to this one. It was fun to canter around in, but not for much more than a couple of minutes.

Tilted floor. See more in the video.

Mexicoland

Beyond the main cowboy boulevards lay a rope bridge across the ‘Rio Grande’ to MexicoLand, an area pretty spartan of cool stuff actually- though it featured a large and elaborate putt putt gold course, and at the far end a pretty stunning collection of two authentic steam train engines, and a few cars.

Uh, wow.

On the Western Village side of the Rio Grande was a bank of laser guns, while on the other an array of American flag laser targets. If you think about that it doesn’t make a lot of sense- why would cowboys shoot at American flags on the Mexico side?

Well, better not to think about it then…

Laser targets to be shot across the ‘Rio Grande’- see more in the video.

Star sensors in the flag.

First up was the giant Mexican fort, with peeling plaster and Mexican-style designs. I’ve since seen that it’s possible to get inside here- and that there are in fact several classic cars hidden away. Wow. I didn’t have a lot of time to linger and check it out though, and bypassed it in favor of getting to the far side.

Entrance fort to Mexicoland. Very rustic.

Beyond the fort were the train tracks. Several different sets actually, some for kiddie trains and some presumably for the real behemoths yet to come.

This smiley French-looking train cop keeps discipline on the rails with a sturdy truncheon.

Beyond the rails, extensive putt-putt golf.

Tee-pee putt putt golf.

A horse in the bush is worth two in the hand.

Faux waterwheel evokes feel of Mexicohttps://www.michaeljohngrist.com.

Water shooting game.

Far entrance and giant weedy car park.

Toy trains and steam trains

Start off with an awesome kids train.

This is all I expected to find at the park- the real steam trains really took my by surprise.

Then move on to the real trains.

Before the engines though, this gorgeous red caboose.

Rusted and rain-blasted.

Interior and moldy.

Rotten windowsill.

Caboose’s caboose.

Denver!

Now the two trains. These are real steam trains- one labeled from the Baldwin locomotive works in Philadelphia.

Real steam train controls.

Giant flaky fuselage.

Number 6.

Number 4.

And again because I love it, a second shot.

Now the video-

Next up is the final surprise from the Western Village; outside and inside Mount Rushmore.

Western Village series:

1- History

2. Animatronic John Wayne

Explore more Japanese ruins (haikyo) in the galleries:

[album id=4 template=compact]

See a curation of world ruins in the ruins gallery.

You can also read my SF & Fantasy stories inspired by ruins.

Japan’s abandoned animatronic John Wayne

Mike GristFeatured Story, Haikyo, People / Culture, Theme Parks, Tochigi

Japan’s abandoned wild west theme park Western Village (closed in 2007) is filled to the tip of its ten-gallon hat with animatronic cowboy dolls.

A Stagecoach-era John Wayne with cyborg heart exposed stands by the park entrance, silent now that the tourists have stopped coming.

Animatronic John Wayne with hair peeling back to reveal flesh-toned speakers reprises his Stagecoach (1939) role.

Hidden away in the Sheriff’s office, Clint Eastwood drawls in lazy Japanese about how he ran the bad guys out of town. Down the boulevard a ways is the WESTERN SHOOTING GALLERY, filled with card-players, insouciant drunkards and brassy-lipped saloon wenches; all of whom would wiggle, dance and jive when shot with air rifles.

Of course, now they’re all dead.

What exactly are these, sparkplugs? Motors? Though there is video below of several of the animatronic dolls moving, there is none of John Wayne. His mouth obviously doesn’t move, though I imagine his arms and head must.

I went to the Western Village haikyo a few weeks back now with Jan Jornmark, an urbex guy from Sweden. We explored beneath whited out skies for a few hours, generally awed by the sheer amount of stuff left behind at the park, from these animatronic dolls to whole steam trains, classic cars, hordes of old games machines, laser guns, targets, and so on.

Stagecoach. These were as real as stagecoaches could be- I climbed on top of one, climbed inside the other. Sturdy, leather, and rolling. Perhaps they would take rides in them around the park, when it was open.

Japan loves cowboys. Also robots. Numerous connecting lines have been drawn by people more knowledgeable than myself linking Japanese samurai dramas to cowboy westerns and in turn to SF westerns like Star Wars.

– Japanese director Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai (1954) was the prime source material for John Sturges’ The Magnificent Seven (1960).

– Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961) influenced Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (1964).

– Kurosawa’s Hidden Fortress (1958) influenced George Lucas’ Star Wars (1977), with R2D2 and C3PO arguably lifted wholly from that movie and converted into robots.

So we come to the conversion of samurai-inspired cowboys into animatronic robots.

We could go even a step further, since the Western Village IS abandoned and post-apocalyptic, and talk about how the cowboy genre turned in recent years to apocalypse movies like Mad Max, The Postman, WaterWorld, finally bringing things full circle with the Zatoichi-like apocalypse-western; Book of Eli (2010).

Nice.

What has happened here? I’m not sure. It looks like someone has stuffed a silk pillow down John’s belt and, for Jackass-like reasons, made it peek out of his fly. An odd thing to do. It didn’t occur to me to move it.

A scarified head, over-the-ear speaker peeking through. Apparently, from reports in Japanese on fan sites, it was very creepy to hear this doll speak, watch it move, but see its face remain totally static. Why not motorize the mouth too?

Here’s video of some of these dolls talking, moving. Here we`ll see Marilyn Monroe, Clint, and various others. It’s all in Japanese, but you can get a good idea of the dolls and how well they moved.

Marilyn is around 2:40. Clint is around 3:12.

I climbed on one of the stagecoaches hoping to get an amazing new view of John Wayne. That didn’t happen, but what I did spot was his beautifully mottled hat. I popped it on his head.

Black and white, as John Wayne was always meant to be.

“Go for your guns!”

Dickey Rourke! Mickey’s older fur-trapping brother.

For the patriots, John Wayne before the flag.

Down the boulevard is the SHOOTING GALLERY, combined with the town Jail and a ton of dolls- all fastened to the floor so they could be powered from below.

Of course- selectively colorized by me.

Intent card-player. Looks like the animatronics made him move his cards up and down.

Bartender in the back must have had a head that bobbed up and down. From the colored cupboard to the right- a hidden cowboy popped out.

Jim Beam, anyone, served by a stone-cold hottie?

Many of the buildings in the Western Village were locked up tight, and I wasn’t about to smash my way in. As such, I couldn’t find Clint myself, and probably missed a good few other dolls too. I spied this chap through a musty old window- the post office. He’s in the video above too.

Nice visor.

Finally- the wide view of Johnny.

Western Village series:

1- History.

3- Cowboy ghost house

4- Mount Rushmore.

Explore more Japanese ruins (haikyo) in the galleries:

[album id=4 template=compact]

See a curation of world ruins in the ruins gallery.

You can also read my SF & Fantasy stories inspired by ruins.

Western Village: Japan’s Abandoned Cowboy Theme Park

Mike GristFeatured Story, Haikyo, Japan, Theme Parks, Tochigi

Western Village is a quantum pocket of the Old West Disneyfied and transplanted wholesale from the American collective unconscious, replete with a $29 million replica Mount Rushmore, Western saloon, ghost house, jail, post office, shooting gallery, actual fake Rio Grande, and vast Mexican barrens.

It was built in 1975 and shut down in 2007, likely due to its remote location and the pull of other nearby parks like Disneyland sucking away its tourist base.

Now it’s a ruin, or haikyo, open only to urban explorers willing to take their chances clambering over the stockade wall.

Animatronic John Wayne, cowboy ghost house Death, caboose, Mt. Rushmore

History and Layout

Early History

Western Village started life humbly in 1970 as the ‘Kinugawa ranch’ in the Japanese countryside, a 4-acre family owned camp where folks could come for horse-riding, lasso practise, and go fishing in the fish pond (not exactly cowboy, I know). As time went by it expanded with wooden facades, horses, and dusty thoroughfares, as though you’d stepped onto the set of a John Ford Western.

Livery, Fire Station, Sheriff concession stand, Saloon

Glory days.

In time it hired wranglers and cowboys for shows like the parades of Disneyland, involving gun battles and displays of gunmanship and skill, with apples shot off unwitting guests’ heads, William Tell style.

Sheriff shoots balloons, an apple

Wild Expansion

The park expanded further, as guest numbers rose to near 1 million per year, with ads on TV spinning the fun times to be had.

Promo video of the Western Village. Early walk-through.

As more money rolled in, the park added on a number of fascinating expansions.

More photos and details on the park’s history and layout here.

Welcome to West World

The Western Village is like an embodiment of the Michael Crichton movie West World- with many leering mechanical dolls, frozen now and dead. But who knows when they might lurch back to life?

John Wayne

A Stagecoach-era John Wayne with cyborg heart exposed stands by the park entrance, welcoming urban explorers with his silent stare.

John Wayne at the entrance.

Valves for a heart, to control blasts of air that once moved his body-parts around.

What has happened here? I’m not sure. It looks like someone has stuffed a silk pillow down John’s belt and, for Jackass-like reasons, made it peek out of his fly. An odd thing to do. It didn’t occur to me to move it.

Arizona House Saloon

The Arizona House saloon has a huge Chucky Cheeze style stage-show of drunken cowboy saloonistas, welcoming you in to a Game Center filled with ancient crocodile slam and tron-era amusements.

Card doll, post office, wench, Arizona House

More photos and details on John Wayne here.

Cowboy Haunted House

One of the first attractions in the park was the Wild West ghost house- packed full of creepified Western stalwarts; skeletal pistoleers, death as a frontier dentist, zombified tomahawk-wielding Indians, and of course cowboys with their pants down.

Hmm?

Yes. There is more than one occasion of cowboys with their pants down. Each time they are displaying long and gruddy underjohns- perhaps intended to sync up with John Wayne with his fly unzipped.

Death pulls a tooth, from outside.

Murder victim in the brewery section, tooth-pulled victim, bandolier on a diet, bubble-bath lady.

I managed to get inside the ghost house, of course pitch black, and get up close and personal with some of the models.

Are ghost houses scary when they’re dead? Basically, no. They may be pitch black, but with no animatronics to make the dolls jump and leer- it’s a cakewalk.

Mexicoland

Beyond the main cowboy boulevards lies a rope bridge across the ‘Rio Grande’, a small stream, to MexicoLand, an area featuring a pretty stunning collection of two authentic steam train engines.

Uh, wow.

On the Western Village side of the Rio Grande was a bank of laser guns, while on the other an array of American flag laser targets. If you think about that it doesn’t make a lot of sense- why would cowboys shoot at American flags on the Mexico side?

Well, better not to think about it then…

Flags, real train, real caboose, kids train.

Inside the caboose nature dampens and rots the wood.

Interior and moldy.

Here’s some short exploring video-

Ghost House Up to Mount Rushmore

More photos and details on the Ghost House and Mexicoland here.

Mount Rushmore

Exterior

Last of all, Mount Rushmore. Disneyland has the grand pink Sleeping Beauty castle, the wizarding world of Harry Potter has Hogwarts, and the Western Village has a 1/3rd scale replica of Mount Rushmore.

Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt, Lincoln- Japan

As grand-central-structures-that-pull-their-thematic-landscapes-together go, it’s an odd one. First off, you can hardly even see it from within the park. Instead it fronts the nearby highway and bullet train tracks boldly, like a grand welcome sign that turns its back on you as soon as you enter. Second, it doesn’t fit all that well with the park’s cowboy theme. Did cowboys wage shoot-outs on Roosevelt’s nose, or rustle cattle out of Lincoln’s big nose?

Ahem.

Massive, with stage.

It is a pretty awesome construction, built in 1995 to the exact specifications of the original, and cost $27 million to build. I can’t imagine the Western Village was making that kind of money per year, so doubtless it was considered a long-term investment in the park.

Now it has been written off. It stands alone, uncrowded by tourists, its Fiberglass-reinforced plastic faces slowly tarnishing with dark rain-mold, while its unventilated plaster innards slowly cook themselves in the greenhouse of those presidential brains.

The original sculpture in South Dakota is carved in granite, and will never tarnish or collapse in on itself, as granite is one of the most enduring rocks on earth. This means the four presidents carved on Mt. Rushmore will likely be standing even after everything else has blown away in the winds of apocalypse.

Very dark.

Interior

The first floor is filled with teddy bears in various poses- at tea, on a swing, by a classic car, etc..

Uncle Sam bear, flasher bear, workman bear, Monopoly-man bear

More photos and details on Mount Rushmore here.

Bankruptcy

As this cowboy dreamland grew, so did its debts. With the opening of Tokyo Disneyland, fewer and fewer people came, and by 2007 the dream fell flat. Perhaps it was never fated to generate profits. It was a realization of a dream, built by a man who cared more about the dream than the business. Owner Ominami even said as much in a 1995 interview-

“I’m an example of a self-made man. The goal of life is not to make money, but to make your dreams come true.”

– OutWest newspaper.

Now the cowboy dream stands derelict and empty, a slowly fading museum to a time long gone, in a country far away. It’s always possible it may reopen some time in the future, but more likely is a fire-sale of its assets, the destruction of Mt. Rushmore, and an ignominious end in the imagination of the people who lived nearby- the few people likely to remember it ever existed.

1. History

2. Animatronics

3- Cowboy Ghost House

4- Mount Rushmore.

Explore more Japanese ruins (haikyo) in the galleries:

[album id=4 template=compact]

See a curation of world ruins in the ruins gallery.

You can also read my SF & Fantasy stories inspired by ruins here.

If you enjoyed this post, why not subscribe for free? 🙂

Celibate Jayne the Hammerhand

Mike GristBooks, Featured Story, Jabbler's Mons, Stories, Writing

by Michael John Grist

It was nearing high-tide on the Sheckledown Sea when Celibate Jayne the Hammerhand finally bashed his way out of the belly of the whale. Ashen face covered with gobbets of blubber and gut, he slithered down the black rubber side of the beached leviathan, a river of purple slime showering down on his head.

He gasped, coughed up a wad of bloody kelp and brine, then slumped himself starfish-splayed on the beach.

Soon enough the jubilant cries of his crew carried raucously over the sand, as they moored the 6-oar gully, hefted up the smelting cauldrons, and came pell-mell dashing down the beach towards him. First by his side was half-headed Elspeth, first mate, her big chin wagging with glee.

Image from Ben Saber.

“It’s a Ptarmigan, Jayne!” she gasped, gleaming, bouncing round the whale. “You only done gone and busted out a Ptarmigan!”

Jayne smiled weak up at her.

“50 barrels o’spermaceti oil,” she said all in fizz, “and just time fore the storm hits to boil it all. You done us right proud and halesome!”

Jayne coughed again, spotlets of whale’s blood and brine, caught his ragged breath.

“Y’alright?” asked Elspeth, stood in her tan hide galoshes looking down at Jayne in the bloody muck.

Jayne shook his head. “There’s a bloke,” he said, stopping to catch his air, “inside.”

“Eh?” asked Elspeth, stopping her happy flouncing to look at him. “What?”

“A yellow bloke,” said Jayne, “inside the whale.”

Elspeth twitched, as was her wont. “In the whale?”

Jayne nodded. “Aye,” he said, reaching up a clouty metal Hammerhand. “A yellow bloke.” Elspeth grabbed the metal hand and hauled him up. Jayne swayed on his feet, then turned to the slitted hole in the whale’s flank. “Thrashing about in there.”

Elspeth moved closer to see.

“Wait,” said Jayne, blocking her path. He pointed to the whale’s still trembling eye. It flickered, rolled, flared. The slow sussurus of breath in and out ground down. The spurty veins round the hammered-out gut-hole pulsed once, twice more, and finally the whale died.

“Woulda squashed you up in its throes,” he said. “Now’s OK.”

“You comin’?” she asked.

“I ain’t even breathin’ proper yet,” he said. “Go on.”

Elspeth moved closer, prised the wound’s sides apart, peered inside. “It’s pretty dark,” she said.

“He’s in there, up the gullet and in the mouth last I felt him.”

“Hello,” said Elspeth, calling through the thin gut gap. “Any folk home?”

“See anything?”

“Nothing. Are you sure?”

“I landed on him coming in. He wriggled about some and yelped something.”

“Alright,” said Elspeth, and pushed her head and shoulders into and through the wound. Jayne heard her muted voice calling through the whale’s skin.

She popped out with a wet sucking sound.

“There’s an echo in there,” she said. “Mayhap you just heard yourself?”

“And landed on myself, too?”

“Ptarmigan’s got a big tongue. Could be you ‘fused the tongue with a bloke.”

Jayne shook his head slow. “Don’t sound straight. Tongues and blokes ain’t a bit similar.”

“Maybe was some whale food in there then, what slipped out as you bashed yourself free? Half-shark or some such, might’ve felt like a man. Might even o’been a twinge yellow.”

“Weren’t a twinge,” said Jayne. “Ain’t much light in a whale but for a pinhole through the spout, and this was bright yellow like gold. There’s no half-shark color of gold.”

“So what do we do?”

“Hold up while I catch breath, and keep them cauldron hops at bay round the other flank o’the whale. I’ll go in myself.”

Elspeth looked at the gully crew jogging along the beach, cauldrons in tow. “They’ll want to be celebratin’,” she said. “What do I tell ’em?”

“Tell them a live shark’s inside the whale, and the captain’s gonna hammer it himself. Just keep ’em clear ’til we’re sure.”

“Ayup Jayne. Just, if it is a shark, be careful.”

“It ain’t a shark,” said Jayne, and made for the slit in the whale.

*

While Elspeth was off becalming the jollied up “Ptarmigan!”-yelling boiler crew, Jayne scouted about for a strip of sturdy-looking driftwood. With a chunk in hand, he pushed himself up and into the whale side split, wedging the driftwood twixt the stiffening sides to let the light in.

After threading the bloody rib-side cavity, Jayne squirmed through the gut bag wall and into stomach’s quaggy mire. The sole chink of light crept in through the side-slit at his back.

He lolled to his feet on the rolling gut bag floor, reached up to the sagging stomach roof and grabbed a knobbin of gut muscle, planted his feet, and set out bumbling for the mouth.

At the bone-ribbed throat-way he grasped a thick vein running up like a banister, and climbed. In the fleshy dark at the top hung the whale’s baleen krill-sieve, and wrapped up in it with a shred of cloth for a hammock was a small yellow child.

Jayne stared in silence for a moment. Dull light chinked through the Ptarmigan’s blowhole and glowed on the child’s wiry body. Its skin was a bright jaundicy yellow.

“Hello,” said Jayne, voice echoing in the cartilagey throat-way.

The child sprang from its hammock like a cat at the sound. It landed on the thick bed of whale tongue, then squirmed and roiled until it was buried beneath the lolling wedge of lukewarm meat.

“Half-mast me and ride,” muttered Jayne, watching wide-eyed as the child disappeared under the near-black blanket of tongue.

The tongue shuffled, fell still.

“Y’ain’t for comin’ then?” asked Jayne.

No answer.

Jayne stood still for a moment, staring at the tongue. Then he reached up to the baleen overhead and pulled himself up into its lattice work bars alongside the child’s hammock. It was canvas, torn rough, woven, and tied firm round the baleen bone with huddershank sailor’s knots. Sat in the hammock was a shard of engraved ivory, a bronze compass glinting in the dull light, and three bare yellow skulls.

Jayne took up the compass, then dropped himself onto the bed of tongue, which flattened under his weight.

“Is this your compass?” he asked, softening his voice.

No answer.

“I can’t seem to make it work,” he said, tapping on the bronze. “Figure ye could help us out some?”

No answer. Jayne strode to the gum-line, knelt by the eave of the tongue and lifted it up by the edge. Through the near black shadows underneath he could just make out the child’s daffodil-yellow body, shuffling further from him.

“Sssh,” said Jayne, squatting in place, showing his empty open hands. “Look. I won’t hurt you. See.”

The child stared out at him.

“Can you speak?” asked Jayne.

The child only stared.

“Maybe not,” said Jayne. “Can you understand me?”

The child stared.

Jayne smiled at him. Then he stood, let the fat tongue fold softly back down over the child’s quivering body. He looked round the dim-lit mouth for a moment, down at the compass in his hand. Then he turned and walked back under the baleen, down the throat-way to the splash-pool stomach, and out of the whale.

The fresh sea air blasted him to shivers immediately. The whale had been warm. He had to blink as his eyes watered, adjusting to the mid-day spring sun. Then Elspeth was at his side and asking him quietly, “Well?”

Jayne stepped down from the gash and slicked whale-fat off his hands and arms. “It’s a child,” he said. Across the tide-line the boilers were rousting up two fire pits in the sand, scouting for tinder, and hoisting up the two black-iron cauldrons on their rimey black tripod legs.

“A child?” asked Elspeth. “There really is some folk in there?”

Jayne nodded. “A boy, I think, bright yellow from the whale’s stomach juices. Must’ve been from a wrecking, see this?” he said, showing her the rusty compass. “And sail cloth torn and sailor-knotted for a hammock in the baleen. Whale must’ve scooped him off the seafoam after she sank, probably on the Dartmaeus shipping lane to have drifted this close to the city.”

“Cavorta’s breath,” cursed Elspeth, hand over her mouth. “How long’s he been in there?”

“I don’t know,” said Jayne. “But a while, to be colored so. And he’s terrified.”

“No wonder,” said Elspeth. “Poor thing. Just a child?”

“Aye,” said Jayne.

“Then I’ll go,” said Elspeth, starting for the side-slit immediately. “I’ll go talk to him.”

Jayne shook his head, stood before the slit.

“He’s terrified, lass,” he said. “Give him a chance to calm down, eh? He’ll come out on his own.”

Elspeth sighed, stepped back. “Aye,” she said. “But Sweet Gibertus on a spike, who’d have thought a child inside the whale?”

“I know,” said Jayne. “It’s some kind of miracle, though looks like it weren’t just him, first at least. There’s 3 skeletons, skulls anyway, in there with him.”

“I never heard the like.”

“But there he is,” said Jayne.

Elspeth turned the compass over in her hands. “Says ‘Salubrious’ on the back,” she said.

Jayne shook his head. “Means nothing to me, though most likely the name of the ship it sailed for. We’ll have to scriven out some manifests.”

“What are we going to do?” asked Elspeth.

“Nothing to do but wait,” said Jayne. “Doubt I can safely haul him out of there if he ain’t for it, and right now he’s buried up under the tongue, scared stiff.”

“And if he don’t come out on his own?”

“Then we’ll dismantle his house around him,” said Jayne. “Ain’t no other way for it to go.”

Elspeth shook her head. “Storm’s rollin’ up soon, Jayne,” she said. “We ain’t got all the time we’d like for him to come on out.”

Jayne shrugged. “I know that,” he said. “But even a wry child like that could cause a whole heck of hurt for any bloke trying to haul him out. There ain’t no balance inside a whale, El, it’s like size don’t hardly matter. First lesson you learn as a Hammerhand. You’re only as good as what you’re held onto. Can’t be bashing a hole in a gut with nothing firm to cling to.”

“So we wait,” said Elspeth.

“As all we have,” said Jayne. “Aye. But now, other things. We gotta see to getting some more lads out here, and we gotta get the barrels rolling.”

Elspeth nodded.

“Already sent Shume and Fralla in the gully back to the city for a convoy,” she said.

“Good lass,” said Jayne. “And worry not on the child. That’s my province. We’ll have him afore the storm. And if we don’t, well, I can swim him out of a storm, as you’ll know.”

“I don’t like it,” said Elspeth.

“I ain’t highly in favor myself either,” said Jayne. “But we ain’t got no choice. Now get off and to it.”

Elspeth nodded, took a deep breath. “Aye, alright,” she said, set the compass back in Jayne’s hands, then walked off back to bully on the boilers.

Jayne looked over the compass, slipped it in a pocket, then waded out into the sea to wash himself off.

*

Night falling, Grammaton bonging a distant echo for All Hallows, and the work went on by freshly mulled whale-oil light, tallow-smoke swimming up on the breeze like incense. Jayne and Elspeth stood by the strip-work peeling of the whale’s front, up by the stomach slit, watching the new boiling crew rousting about the cauldrons.

“Reckon we got least a day, if the sun holds off,” said Elspeth. “Fore a storm rolls in.”

Jayne hummed agreement.

The whale behind them was stripped clean of skin down its sides, black rubber hide sloughed off like old wall-papering and paste. Long oblong tracts had been carved out in the blubber, the jelly white blocks of fat now slicking to boil in the raging cauldrons.

“Good crew,” said Elspeth.

“Aye,” said Jayne.

“Won’t be asking more than a fiftieth part a piece,” she said. “Seeing as it??s a Ptarmigan.”

Jayne nodded, watched two of the firelight flecked rousters step up to the blubber-side with a long hacking blade, set into sawing a fresh block clear.

“Already filled 11 barrels,” she said. “Shay reckoned we can have it shipped and sold within the week.”

“Good,” said Jayne. “Sounds good.”

“Y’ain’t listening a speck,” said Elspeth, half-head cocked, long hair hanging down loose in the salt-scrub night wind. “Ye’re thinking on that child, aren’t ye?”

“Hmm?” asked Jayne. “What?”

“Y’ain’t even listenin.”

Jayne smiled. “I am, lass,” he said. “Just, aye. What’s right, ye see?”

Elspeth waited.

“Child in a whale,” said Jayne.

Elspeth waited a while longer. Driftwood sparks crackled up and swirled in the air over their heads. The soft low murmur of rousters talking carried over the steady lap of the sea.

“You thinking on your lad?” she asked, eventually.

Jayne looked up at her, smiled. “Mayhap,” he said. “Though it ain’t nearly the same thing.”

Off the other side of the whale, one of the rousters laughed. The sound thrummed through the night, faded, and was gone.

“Ain’t that different,” said Elspeth softly. “Both of em lost.”

Jayne sighed. “Aye. But my lad warn’t lost in a whale. My lad hated whales, grew up hating whales ‘cos they kept his pa away.”

“Aye,” said Elspeth. “Y’ever hear from him, now?”

Jayne shook his head. “Him and the lass both long gone now,” he said. “Don’t know where.”

“Lost,” said Elspeth.

“Aye, lost,” agreed Jayne.

“It warn’t your fault.”

Jayne smiled sadly. “Don’t follow that train, El,” he said. “Ain’t nothing good goin’ down that way. I had my choices, and I chose the life over them. Chose killin’ whales over my lass and my lad. Though at the time I thought both meant the same thing.”

“They had to eat,” said Elspeth.

“Aye, they did. But there was other ways. Ways what woulda kept me around. As it was, I left ’em. Lass alone with a cold bed most nights, weeks on end. Lad, growing up lonesome without a pa. And I bear that, El. Ain’t no use tryin’ to shirk it.”

“You ain’t ever tried, long as I’ve known you,” said Elspeth.

“Long as I spent out here, with you all, I shoulda been back there. Thought though I was almost done. Almost always done.”

“It ain’t about the money though,” said Elspeth, leaning in. “You’ve enough to quit times over, now.”

“Aye, I know.”

Elspeth leaning closer in to Jayne. She reached a hand up, touched his shoulder, then his cheek. “Y’ain’t hardly the same man, now.”

For a second he did nothing. Even melted against her touch a twinge. Then something shifted, and he stepped away.

“That ain’t possible, El,” he said sadly. “We talked about that.”

Elspeth let her hand fall down by her side, let her face show her feelings. “Celibate Jayne,” she said.

“Aye,” said Jayne. “Celibate. S’what’s best.”

Elspeth sighed.

A porpoise off in the distance hooted out a quick mating call.

“Ain’t ever gonna change, are ye?”

Jayne shook his head. “Ain’t wantin to hurt folk again. Ain’t wantin’ to hurt you, El, or a child. I just ain’t that man. Whales call and I come. I know that now.”

“I’m a whaler too,” said Elspeth. “It wouldn’t have to go the same way.”

“You’ll whale with child? No, I couldn’t bear it. The sea has me, El, and I’ll not pretend otherwise. I’ll not see you hurt.”

“Aye,” said Elspeth, her tone turning sour. “Aye, you’ll not take the risk.”

Silence fell between them.

After a time, a hue and cry arose from one of the cauldron spigot-sides as a fresh barrel batch was siphoned. A couple of rousters did a boily jig around the whale.

“You best off to the city,” said Jayne, into the silence between them. He wasn’t looking at her. “Fetch out them records we talked on, might help jig the child’s memory, bring it out. Gatherin’ families’ names, and the name of a child, if the records allow. Ship’s name being the Salubrious, wrecked. Take the compass, show it to the quay master.”

“I’ll be coming back with the storm on my heels,” said Elspeth.

“Then it’s best you set off soon,” said Jayne.

Elspeth stood for a moment, staring at him. But he didn’t turn to face her. He was staring out to sea.

“Aye, cap’n,” she said. Then she was up and shuffling the next barrel-load into the gully, taking up the head herself, and soon enough setting out with the rousters rowing back for the city.

Jayne, up against the whale, sat watching the night sky sworl slow over head for a long time before sleep found him.

*

He woke at first light, shook out the sleep and ambulated round the whale. All the rousters were decked out under burnt yellow tarpaulins asleep, and a steady rain drizzled down.

Over at the rouster’s camp the rain-cold cauldrons hung canted on their frames, damp fire-ash trickling black and white down to the tide beneath. Some 50 barrels of oil sat in the wettening sand, spread out random through the camp.

“Roustabout,” he called, nudging the sleeping forms nearest. He walked through the camp like that, nudging on shanks and tugging the rain out of pooled up lakes top the canvas shelters, calling for roustabouts. “We got work to do. Rise and be labourin’, boys.”

The boiler crew groaned, moaned, and slowly got up to work. Jayne bullied them at it until the tarpaulins were hung up over the cauldrons, the fires were fizzing and spitting their way to the boil, and the fat was bubbling once again in the pots.

*

Elspeth came back with grey high noon, and the rain a downpour. Jayne waded out into the ocean with a couple of boily rousters to haul the sea-tossed gully in.

“Storm’s rollin’ in a day early,” she shouted through the hammering crash of rain on the waves.

“Talk up at the camp,” he shouted back, pointing to the tarpaulin shelters over top of the cauldrons further up from the tide.

They towed the gully up through the foamy waves, affixed it to the anchor drive point, then made for the cauldrony warmth under the tarpaulins. The rousters made room for them, as Elspeth and the rest of the gully crew stamped their feet and shook off the worst of the wet.

“Ye found it?” asked Jayne, lowering his voice around the men.

“Aye,” said Elspeth. “And bad news on the storm too. S’rolling in at forty clips nor-Easterly, Dockhead reckoned. Bound to drench up to the lambaste line.”

Jayne shook his head. “That’ll loft the whale and the barrels,” he said.

“Aye,” said Elspeth. “And it’s rolling in fast. Come eventide and the beaches’ll be flumed, he reckoned. Barely let us outta the dock as it was, only after I said was you and your crew out here did he let us ride in just a gully.”

“We’ll have to move,” said Jayne.

“And move now,” said Elspeth.

Jayne nodded. Then he stepped back, Elspeth hollered the men to silence, and Jayne gave out his orders.

*

Hard winds were ice-whipping the deluged beach by the time all the barrels and rousting gear were safely up past the breakwater dunes and tarpaulined dry in the scrubby coastline brunifer wood.

Back down on the beach, the whale was starting to shift with the roughly rising tide.

Soaking wet, draggled, silver chips cut into his silver Hammerhands after hours straight of hauling barrels and tools clear, Jayne stopped in front of Elspeth and held her close to shout through the roaring storm.

“About the child,” he yelled over the rush of storm wind whistling through the craggy bushes. “What’d you find?”

“S’a lad, for sure,” yelled Elspeth back, words whipping out of her mouth as she spoke. Jayne strained in closer to hear, and she yelled straight into his ear. “Damaris on the manifest, his pa was first mate.”

Jayne nodded, rain streaming through his blonde hair plastered to his face.

“How long?” he yelled into her ear, her long hair whipping across his cheek. “How long’s he been gone?”

“5 years!” yelled Elspeth. “Salubrious sunk 5 years gone.”

Jayne held her back, stared at her.

“5 years!” she yelled again.

He turned into the wind coming off the sea, eyes slitted against the slathering ice frosting up the dune sides. The whale was rising on the frothing waters, slipping, sliding back into the sea.

“I have to go!” he yelled back into Elspeth’s face.

“I know,” cried Elspeth. “Be careful!”

“I will,” yelled Jayne. He held her against the wind for a moment longer than he had to. Then he was gone.

She watched him into the wind, down the scree-scrabbling duneside, slipping in the icy foam, up to the whale, thigh deep in the raging shallows, then thrusting, digging, and inside the whale.

Sheltered behind a thick brunifer clump she watched the whale get tossed out to sea.

*

Jayne lay in the roiling dark for a time. As the waves bashed the whale, it rolled and thrummed. Jayne rolled and thrummed with it. The beating of the sea was all around.

Then a calmer time came, as the whale rolled out deeper and sank beneath the storm. Jayne could hear the first trickles of water pushing their way in through the puckered gut-slit.

“Damaris,” he called, into the black.

The whale was silent but for the trickling of water, flooding in slow.

“That’s your name, ain’t it? Damaris?”

The child stirred, somewhere in the dark.

“It’s alright,” said Jayne. “I know it ain’t easy.”

The child splashed in the black.

“I killed your whale,” said Jayne. “You got reason to fear me, I understand that.”

A hiss of gas bubbled, the intestinal jut squeezing out the last vapours with the deepening pressure. The side-slit began to burp water in faster. Jayne took a deep breath.

“I’ve a lad of my own,” said Jayne. “Somewhere out there, what hates me, like you must hate me, for what I’ve done. But it’s all done now. The whale’s dead. It won’t breathe for us anymore, so we gotta breathe for ourselves, and swim.”

The child didn’t answer.

“I can swim us out,” said Jayne, “and once we’re out, I can call us a whale. It’s what a Hammerhand does. But you gotta go with me. Try swimming off without me and you’ll drown. You’ll not make it to the surface from here.”

Another burp of foul gas swelled into the gut, another rush of water flumed in through the slit.

“Not long now,” said Jayne. “Breathe deep. It’s gonna burst any second.”

He breathed in. The child breathed in.

Then the whale imploded.

The sudden rush of water tore its corpse in half. Jayne was smashed inwards with the violent influx. He slammed into the child, held him tight, and they rode out the gas bubble burst together.

Then they were hanging in a watery twilight. Jayne looked on the child beside him, hung in place easily, relaxed in the water, long hair haloing around his small yellow face. In the dim deep ocean’s fuzz his odd-colored skin didn’t look so strange.

Jayne nodded at the child. Then he opened his mouth, let the water rush in, and began to sing the Hammerhand’s song.

Whale-song. A single, simple note, pulsed out loud and strong.

The child’s eyes flicked wide. He stared at Jayne. Jayne held his gaze, and the note rang out. Then the child opened his mouth, let the water flow in, and began to sing too.

He built a slow melody upwards from Jayne’s single note, Jayne staring in shock at the melodious whale-song notes pouring up from the boy’s slim yellow throat. He added harmonies and glissandos. He tremeloed. He layered and twisted and spun Jayne’s bass thrum into something vast and haunting that hung in the water, that rang out like the Grammaton, that swelled out around them like a blossoming salvo of color in the deep.

They sang together.

And the whales came.

First the smaller Pilots, long sleek eely lengths whirling the water around them, with Bride’s and Pygmy Rights in their wake. Then a pod of Humpbacks, a pack of Left Blues, a sudden squall of scurrying black Mesoplodonts, then Brontochal Giants and Pterodal Fins and Greys and Bottlenoses and Toothed Lefts and Fanged Rights and Cuveir’s Beakeds and Sperms and Tramaleir’s Jogs and finally, booming into the symphony of wheeling whirling smaller whales like a slow grinding planet across the sky came a behemothic Ptarmigan, eclipsing all light and swelling the orchestra of song higher, and louder, and fuller.

Then silence.

Jayne’s jaw was agog, slack, his lungs giving out, his vision graying in the black.

The whales formed into living walls around them, the almighty Ptarmigan at the head. The cold water turned warm, and thick, and all was silence.

The child whale-sang into the void.

The Ptarmigan’s huge black eyes blinked slow, stared through the murk into Jayne, the boy. Jayne felt his lungs crumpling, the chokes in his throat rising as his body fought for air. Then the Ptarmigan’s drawbridge mouth opened, the baleen sieve was raised, and the influx of water pulled them inside.

*

Jayne sloshed in the hot cavernous dark. His breath came back slowly. All around him came the pulse of life, the whale’s heart booming, booming, booming.

“Sweet provender,” cursed Jayne softly, eyes wide into the black, reaching out for the length of the tongue on which he lay, crawling over to the teeth, the rising wall of gum, stretching up to the arcing roof of mouth but unable to reach. “It’s a behemoth.”

The child beside him began crooning whale-song.

“It’s alright,” said Jayne, reaching out to pat the child’s arm. “It’s alright now.”

The child shrank from him, and the whale-song rose, twisted, then stopped. Jayne felt the child padding across the giant Ptarmigan tongue in the dark. Then there was a slow grinding thrum of bone on bone.

Then silence, for a moment.

“Damaris?” called Jayne. His voice sounded weak and alone in the dark. Then the tongue sank away from him, the jaws opened wide, and the ocean flumed in.

He was rolling in murky half-light, the whale hanging massive behind him. The ocean was empty and cold, the conference of whales gone, the child gone. The deeps were still and black. He spun in the water, saw the giant Ptarmigan gliding away, snippets of whale-song fired off in its wake.

Then he began to swim.

He breached the surface with his lungs bursting for air, and gasped in a spray of water. The storm still fumed around him, the rain lashed down, and the waves stretched up higher than the city walls over his head.

He had no time to speak, or scream. He had no time to see the whale-spouts circled around him. He only had time to swim, and to breathe, and to swim and to breathe.

*

When the storm ended it was night, and Jayne paddled exhausted on the calming sea skein. His breaths came in salty ragged gasps. His arms and legs burned heavy with every stroke of every weak movement he made.

A sickle moon overhead looked down on him, and a night sky filled with stars.

He stared up at them, and through the grey haze that muffled everything, he smiled.

“Elspeth,” he said, a whispered croak.

Then he stopped moving. He stopped raging for breath. The sea-line, blank and straight in every direction, rose gently above his head, and the ocean soothed him in like a baby in its mother’s arms. His last breath squeezed out, his first suck on water poured in, and he sank slowly into the black.

*

He came to and there was light, and warmth. Cold water slapped his face. He spun to it, opened his eyes to the glare.

The yellow boy. The ocean. A mound of warm black whale beneath him.

The boy was looking out to sea. Jayne craned his neck, tried to loft himself on still shaking arms, but like limpen struts of sea-leaf they jellied beneath him, leaving him pressed up against the slick black back of the Ptarmigan like a baby at breast. He felt nauseous.

Somewhere distant, a blow-hole gusted spray up into the air. It settled with the wind, stroked Jayne’s face as it came down.

There were whales all around them.

Jayne could see them. Black mounds, some finned, some mottled, some brown some black, all their backs and snouts and eyes breasting the still ocean top like dark yolks of egg splotched out on a ruffled grey table-cloth.

A second slap of water stung his face. Salt stung his eyes and he gasped some in through his nose. The child turned back to the patch of open water. Jayne coughed, hacked, and the jolt rolled him off into the water. He tried to swim but his arms and legs only trembled weakly.

Something pushed up against him, lifted him from the brine and rolled him back over the black whale-back.

He gasped, choked, and blinked.

“This isn’t real,” he croaked.

Lying on his back, the child stood over him, sun spun round his head like a halo.

“This is very real,” said the child.

Jayne stared up at him. “You can speak,” he said.

“No,” said the child. “You’re just losing your mind.”

Jayne regarded him for a time, sunlight half-blinding him, the hot pulse of the whale thrumming on like the distant Grammaton beneath him. Occasional steaming blow-hole gusts from the surrounding whales showered him with half-warm water. The deadened waves sup-supped up the Ptarmigan’s rough-skinned side, licked at his fingers and toes.

“It seems real,” said Jayne.

The child laughed at him.

“You’re a whale buster,” he said. “You know the symptoms of Caissons.”

“You think I’m bendsing?” asked Jayne, and tried to chuckle. Instead, he almost vomited.

“You rose up too fast from depth,” said the child, checking off fingers, “you’re aching, hallucinating and nauseous. You’re lying on a whale. Think about it.”

“So where am I then?”

“Watch this,” said the child.

“Watch what?”

“This,” said the child, and pointed at the open patch of water.

Jayne turned, feeling the rush of bubbles under his skin adjusting, the tracer lines of pressured pain in his joints crying out with the motion.

Then the patch of water was rising. Brackish lines of krill span sideways as something bloomed up and spread itself onto the surface. At first it was just grey-white flashes through the wash, then a long stretched out sand-bar of puckered flesh rose clear, tipped black round the edges, with pink striates of bare red muscle peeking through the deep gouges where skin and blubber had been stripped. In the middle lay the fist-burst slit, ripped open now with the pressure blow-out from deep undersea, the purple insides all on show in the sun.

Gulls wheeled overhead.

“Oh no,” mumbled Jayne.

“You think they’re stupid,” said the child. “You think your single note whale-song is enough to fool them. It’s catching fish, to you. It’s only catching fish.”

“They are fish,” said Jayne, trying to lift a hand to shade the spreading white light. His arm didn’t move and instead he felt faint. “Big fish.”

The child’s face blazed in the sun. “Listen,” he said.

A silence fell across the ocean. A silence fell beneath him as the great Ptarmigan’s pulse stopped, as its breath stopped, as the gulls fell silent overhead and the sea ceased its lapping all around.

Then the world erupted into whale-song.

The sound exploded through Jayne’s head. He felt convulsions wracking him while the child looked on and the combined roaring chorus of a hundred whales thrummed into the sky out of the deep.

The child stared down at him through it all.

Jayne struggled through the avalanche of sound, tried to shake his head clear, tried to reach out to the child, but the child turned from him, threw back his head, and joined in the song.

Leaving Jayne shivering, wracked with the bends, and alone.

Before him lay the proof of his work, a butchered baby Ptarmigan burst from the inside out, body torn and mutilated of flesh and skin, ripped and rent and crumpled under its own weight.

And alone.

The chorus went on for a long, long time.

*

Finally, when it was done and an awesome silence descended, Jayne found himself head to the whale’s rough back weeping and beating on the hard rubber skin with the flat silver palms of his lethal Hammerhands.

The child walked over to him. The child lifted his face by the chin, strewn down with tears.

Jayne stared up at the child.

The child stared down at Jayne.

A moment passed. Then the child turned, walked to the tip of the whale, and dived into the ocean.

The whales slowly disbanded.

The Ptarmigan remained, with Jayne on its back, until the sun set. Then it began to swim.

*

It stopped off the coast where he’d beached the first whale. Then it sank into the water, leaving Jayne to swim for the shore.

*

He came to with the dawn, weak light gushing grey across the shell-scragged beach around him, his head flumped down on a pillow of ocean foam and stones.

Aching and bendsing and covered in thick blooming blue bruises, he lurched to his feet, and set off for the city.

*

By the noon clanging for Midday Vespers he was through the Wicking Gate and trawling up Tullathon Quay. At the rust-ironed padlock to warehouse Gyr 36, he bunched a silver Hammerhand and smashed the door from its hinge.

Inside was gloom, motey dust unsettled, and 40 barrels of fresh Spermaceti oil. He lolled over to the nearest, braced his massive upper arms around its hoopy copper width, hawked, grunted, then hoisted it up, staggered, and headed back to the hung open doorway.

Off the Shearwater dock he set the quarter-ton barrel down. His arms were grooved with the barrel’s hoops, shaking and white.

A small child, a ratfer, saw him tip the barrel into the sea.

The Spermaceti oil glistened in the fall sunlight, splashing onto the spumey water below, rainbowing over the gentle landward waves.

When the first barrel was emptied, Jayne picked it up, and carried it easily back to the warehouse. Then he emerged with another.

The ratfer child ran off to tell its friends.

*

Around the Grammaton toll for 3 he’d splashed almost half the Ptarmigan’s rendered fat into the harbor, and the roustabout crew were gathering about to watch, at first bewildered to see him alive, then outraged at his actions. They rallied to reason and shout and force him down.

He ignored them. He promised them recompense. He said there was ample brass in his vault to see them all clear. And they ignored him, and emboldened by their numbers, laid hands on him as he lugged the 15th barrel out to the grindstone quay.

He hoisted them in his massive metal hands and flung them into the sea, then poured whale oil down onto their heads.

The others backed away. Some watched from the eaves. Others left, sickened at the waste.

*

By the 20th his arms and chest were lined with deep cuts from the barrel runnels and cooping lines, bleeding freely. He walked in a drunken weave and several times near fell off the quay.

By the 30th it was late and pushing All Hallows. Each haul from the Gyr to the dock-head was getting longer and slower. His legs and feet and chest were basted with dried and fresh blood from the rusted barrel rings. His trail was dark with it.

He kept on.

*

By the 40th it was dark and only the dock-body revelatory lights lit his passage. The crier passed his way, called out the all’s-well, tapered up the revelatory wicks, and moved along.

The char-houses and damask docks were faint lights blurry down the roll, the roar of their moany groany ruck echoing distant and unreal over the harbor waters.

Jayne trudged on through the night, far away from them all.

*

For a time he passed out, slumped over the final barrel. He saw whales in the motes of his mind, spume jetting up from their geysers.

When he came to, Elspeth was by his side, sponging his forehead with a soft white towel.

“You’re almost finished, Jayne,” she said. “Don’t quit now.”

“Elspeth,” he said, his mouth dry and grating round the name.

“It’s the last, Jayne. Finish what you’ve started.”

He slid down the side of the cool copper barrel, face to the metal, and drew it close in a tight hug. He felt the sharp runnels and lines slice into his lacerated skin. And he braced tighter, bunched his hulking leg muscles beneath him, and hoisted it up.

Elspeth led him through the dark of the warehouse, along the quay, and to the water’s edge.

“I thought you were dead,” she said, as he lowered the barrel, lay wretched over it gasping and reeling. He gasped to reply something, but she tutted him quiet.

“I’m glad you’re not.”

They stayed in silence like that for a time, the only sounds Jayne’s wheezy breathing, the slosh and lap of the waves against the grindstone beneath them.

Then Jayne tipped the barrel, and the thick amber oil splashed out.

Elspeth rested her hand on Jayne’s shoulder. He didn’t shuck it off.

“It’ll be alright,” she said.

Beneath them, the last barrel’s oil sparked with starlight on the black ocean-top, glimmered, and gradually sank out of sight.

END

Read more of MJG’s SF & Fantasy short stories here.

Learn about his epic fantasy novel project DAWN RISING here.

See Story Art.

Read about the craft of writing.

Jan Jornmark Sweden’s premier urbexer

Mike GristArchitecture, Featured Story, Haikyo, Haikyo in the Media

A while back Sweden’s premier urban explorer Jan Jornmark got in contact with me about doing some haikyo together in Japan. He was on tour for his third book (on the heels of two bestsellers of mostly Swedish ruin- you won’t find them on Amazon unless you search in Swedish), coming hot from Detroit and looking for some cool stuff in Japan.

Jan’s a fascinating guy- a professor in globalization, expert on bubbles and economic collapse- whom companies that own old buildings in Sweden PAY to go into their buildings prior to refurbishment and shoot the ruins, then prep a history and present it back to them at big launch events and fundraisers.

He is essentially a professional urbexer, perhaps the first I know of. It’s a hectic schedule of exploring, travel, and speeches, as Jan talks about in the interview that follows.

Aboard Tokyo’s Urban Battleship.

Two weeks back we went together, along with my friend Rob, to check out a new (to me at least) abandoned theme park and factory/mine complex I’ve had my eye on for some time. In an awful fit of bad luck, my driving license expired one week before the trip, so Jan had to step up to the plate and do all the driving himself- despite having never driven on the left side of the road before (they drive right side in Sweden).

Well, there were a number of mishaps with confusing wipers with indicators, but it was a heroic effort and kudos to Jan for doing it. Here’s a few shots teasing the mine/factory:

Jan on the factory approach. You’ll have to wait for the main post for the orange-rusty goodness. We can see he’s rocking two cameras- classic urbex style- plus leather jacket. Cool.

Jan and Rob down in a rock-mulching pit.

Jan and me in a shoot-off

Without further ado- video interview. I’m afraid at points the sound quality is not great. It’s my first time to use my camera for this sort of thing, and only realized halfway that Jan was standing a bit far away to pick him up clearly. I tried to jimmy it in post-production, so hopefully you’ll be able to hear.

See more on Jan Jornmark at his website Deserted Places.

Explore more Japanese ruins (haikyo) in the galleries:

[album id=4 template=compact]

See a curation of world ruins in the ruins gallery.

You can also read my SF & Fantasy stories inspired by ruins here.

Killin Jack the Malakite

Mike GristFeatured Story, Jabbler's Mons, Stories, Writing

by Michael John Grist

It was gone All Hallows by the Grammaton’s gong when Killin Jack the Malakite mobbed down the last of the Bunnymen. He was stalking spires up the Seasham cathedral that night, hopping from ladder-top to gargoyle round the copper-roofed cloisters, swerving in to the dome-top graveyard in the middle.

The Bunnyman was knelt in a moonlight lozenge midst the marble gravestones, shovel in his hand and a clothy bundle at his feet, white glow bathing his silver fur pristine.

Killin Jack padded cross the open cobblestone courtyard, shadow-casting, watching.

The Bunnyman’s long velveteen ears twitched, and he looked up, saw the approaching muscled bulk of Jack through the rail-dappled shadows, relaxed. “It’s you,” he said.

“Aye,” said Jack, stepping into the clear. “Been lookin you out for a while now.”

The Bunnyman nodded, then looked down at the bundle by his knees. “I’m burying one,” he said. “Last as before me.”

“Must be a bairn,” said Jack, stepping up to the sanctum’s rusted iron rails, shadows striping his granite face. “There ain’t no folk left.”

“Aye, and him the last o’ them, too.”

Jack nodded. “Then we’re almost done, ain’t we?”

The Bunnyman turned, his eyes flashing red in the gates revelatory lamp. “I ain’t done burying him yet. Allow us that at least.”

Jack shrugged. “Fair enough. I’ll wait. Come the dawn it’ll all look the same.”

The Bunnyman nodded. “Aye, I expect so.” He turned, went back to his digging.

Jack waited.

A zeppelin flocked with black gulls sailed by overhead, belly nigh on grazing the Seasham steeple. Its klaxon mooring sirens wailed over them, then away, fading into silence round the Firehark debarking spike.

“How many you took?” asked the Bunnyman, eyes on Jack as he lowered the tiny bundle into the fresh peat hole. “After the war.”

“I did my share,” said Jack. “Never bairns, mind. There was others what did that.”

“Now there’s only you.”

“Guess I killed all them too.”

“Aye, I heard that. Ain’t for forgiving, are ye?”

“There ain’t no forgiving while the crime’s still on.”

“Oh aye, crime,” snorted the Bunnyman. “Like it’s a crime to live.”

“For some it is.”

The Bunnyman sighed, shook his head. “Then was bunnies what killed your lass.”

“Lass and a daughter. It ain’t no right thing, outliving a child.”

“I know that,” said the Bunnyman his eyes glazing off in the distance. “I’d do anything for mine.”

Jack shook his head. “Guess you didn’t do enough.”

The Bunnyman stared at Jack.

“Sorry, but it’s true, ain’t it?”

“I would have died for them,” said the Bunnyman, slow and careful. “If I’d had the chance. What about you?”

“I’d have died too,” said Jack. “But it wouldn’t have done any good.”

“Aye,” said the Bunnyman bleakly. “Hell. Won’t make any difference if I tell you, all that’s done now? Famine and a war 5 years gone?”

Killin Jack just watched him.

“Nah, reckoned not,” said the Bunnyman, standing, stretching his long rabbity legs out for springing. “You sure I ain’t got nothing on you?”

Jack smiled sadly. “There ain’t been one that had a thing, not since I was cursed them 5 years back.”

“Cursed,” said the Bunnyman, “aye, seems a right way to say it.”

“So you fighting? Or you had enough?”

The Bunnyman breathed in deep, tasted the air, let it out. “Reckon I’ll fight, like as not. Never been a lie down die sort of bloke.”

“You ain’t even armed.”

“That don’t hardly matter now does it?”

Jack sighed. “It don’t,” he said, “but I’ll go fair on ye and play it the same way all the same.”

“That’d be neighbourly.”

“I always been neighbourly,” said Jack, wrenching the graveyard railings apart, stepping through the twisted iron gap.

“Bury us too, will ye?” asked the Bunnyman, standing his ground. “Wouldn’t do for folk to see us all splayed round the yard.”

“Aye,” said Jack, striding through the graves, “I’ll do it.”

The Bunnyman nodded. Then he flashed claws, bared his teeth, and bounded roaring down the graves.

Jack caught the scruff of his chest, the jut of his chin, and tore his head right off his shoulders. He held both parts up as the blood drained clear, the red light glimming out of the Bunnyman’s eyes, then he set them down on the grass, picked up the shovel, and started to dig.

*

Come the dawn he was perched on a gargoyle’s head, looking out over the city. The Sun-smelter’s core in the East was smoking up a pally storm, blacking out half the Levi river. Trains shuttled round and about the city bi-rails and land-lines, and down below like ants the first couple of street-mongers were rousing for the days shouting and selling.

Jack sat and watched while the city woke up, picking at the specks of dried blood and dirt on his hands.

After a time, the sun risen up and bright across the roofing, he heard a cry from behind.

He hopped off his mount and paced the burnished copper rooftop back to the graveyard, lit up gory come the light, following the cry. through the railings, past the marble stones, and down by the fresh mounding where the Bunny and his bairn lay inhumed.

A baby bunny head was pushed through the loose earth, yawling. Pink and shivering, long slender ears all hairless and shiny in the morning light, it sprayed dirt in mounds round its strong forelegs until it flopped loose and free onto the graveyard deck, white swaddling blankets left underground.

Killin Jack strode over, knelt by the quivering baby’s side.

“Looks like your pa died for you after all,” he said.

The baby gurgled, and smiled.

Jack reached down and plucked it up.

*

Killin Jack walked the Slumswelters, shadows hanging like funeral dirges round its bombed out old buildings and half-collapsed statuary, the street-way walls plastered over with long forgotten anti-Bunny posterage.

By a mildewed stone fountain in the center of the Slumswelter square he paused, dropped a cuffed sleeve in the rust-pitted stone bowl, sloshed the water clear of its dusty surface scum, and damped down the cloth.

The baby yewled in the bulging crook of his arm. Killin Jack held the cloth to its lips, and it nuzzled, licked slow, then began to suckle.

Low moanings slurred out from the Shabbath’s guinnell, up top of the Swelter square. Drunken donegones and shabbelry lay out along the walkways. Killin Jack strode the cobbles, ignoring the faint whimperings reaching out from either side, heading deeper into the rubble of forgotten Swelterside.

Round a tumbledown corner, paving slabs collapsed in on the sub-terran stopped up sewers, Killin Jack came to worn stone spiral stairs leading up. He started the climb.

Ten steps up and the Painman spoke.

“Killin Jack,” he called, his burbling voice haunting down from transceivers hung high in the stone staircase. “One step more and I shoot.”

Killin Jack grunted and climbed, eying the crossbow slits in the tubing wall.

“Last warning,” came the echoey voice again.

Jack strode on up, stepping over bone shellings and snippets of leathery skin strewn over the splintery weed-sprung stair-blocks.

“Alright,” came the voice, and then a whooshing thock as a crossbow released and struck Jack in the side. He pitched a little, staggered, then held the baby in closer, covered it with his broad forearm, and kept going up.

There were more swooshes, thocks, but Jack did not stop. At the top he strode an empty corridor, torch sconces limp and hanging loose by single screws, all in shadow but for a red glow round the Painman’s door.

Jack entered the Painman’s room, saw the Painman all white and flinching hung up in his viscous yellow fat vat embedded in the laboratory wall, rows of levers under his hands, leering odd smile on his face.

“I made you too well,” he said, jaw moving under the air-tube strapped to his face, sound pealing out of the amplifying racks hung over his chemical strewn mogrifying laboratory.

“And you’re busy at work on more,” said Jack, pointing to a row of males sleeping and strapped to chassis workbenches, pinioned wrist and ankle, half-opened up at the leg or the waist or the neck. Twisted branches of sinew flued out randomly, held up by various metal clamps.

The Painman swam to the surface of his glass vat and pushed his clammy head over the rim, slipping free the air-tube transceivers. “There’s always them that’ll pay,” he said, voice weaker minus the relays.

Killin Jack nodded, strode the length of the lab, uneven tables either side of him laden down with yellow formaldehyde pitchers filled with various guts, brains, embryos.

The Painman swung his blotchy white body over the vat’s lip and climbed down the ladder to the ground, gobbets of fat splatting over the floor at his feet.

Jack looked up. “You’re losing juice,” he said.

The Painman hawked and spat, then shook the fat free from his arms, rubbed it down off his torso and legs. “I don’t trust you here,” he said.

“I know,” said Jack, stopping by one large man, his ribcage splintered open with a vice, heart and lungs pumping brightly purple through dust. “This one’s got maggots.”

“He’ll eat them,” said the Painman. “He’s a Malakite.”

Jack looked up. “These’re Malakites? You’re building more Malakites?” he asked.

The Painman nodded. “I’m always building somethin,” he said.

Jack reached into the Malakite’s ribbed cage and squeezed the heart until it burst. Blood flumed up his forearm.

“Not any more,” said Jack.

The benched Malakite gave a sigh, and died, organs immediately shriveling to grey and black.

The Painman opened his mouth, closed it. Jack shook his bloody hand free of torn flesh.

“What do you want?” asked the Painman.

Jack un-tucked the baby bunny from beneath his ruffled cloak, sat it snuffling on a vellum shed worktop.

“What’s that?” asked the Painman.

“It’s a baby,” said Jack. “Bunny baby.”

The Painman hobbled his weak white limbs closer, peering over the flax and wriggle of the silken little rabbit on his countertop. “So it is,” he said, then looked up at Jack. “I wonder why it isn’t dead yet?”

“His pa died for him,” said Jack. “Didn’t seem right endin it straight off.”

The Painman chuckled. “That’s some trouble you have then, Jack. How are you going to kill any more when it stops seeming fair?”

“There ain’t no more killin needs doin,” said Jack. “He’s the last.”

The Painman’s eyebrows lifted. “Quick work,” he said. “A whole race in, what, just a few years?”

“I just cleaned up the city,” said Jack. “Might be some in the Sump still.”

The Painman shrugged. “If there is, they aren’t a danger to us now.”

Jack nodded. “Wish the lot of em had just taken that route.”

“Plenty did,” said the Painman, turning over a baby bunny ear, checking the underside. “These really are remarkably soft, you know.”

“He’s a pretty little thing, aye,” said Jack.

“And that’s what the ladies will say, when he’s grown in a few years,” said the Painman. “5 at the outside and he’ll repopulate the city. 6 and we’?ll be mass famining again, I guess.”

“Aye,” said Jack. “They do multiply.”

“Not any more though,” said the Painman. “Thanks to you.”

Jack watched the Painman. “We each had our own way,” he said.

“I could have saved them, Jack,” said the Painman, sad smile on his lank face, looking up from the bunny. “If you hadn’t stopped bringing them to me.”

“You made them sick in the first place,” said Jack. “There weren’t no saving them past extinction.”

“You don’t know that, Jack. They could’ve changed.”

“Like you’ve changed?” asked Jack. “Promising to quit out on meddling, and what’s this, a room full of Malakites.”

“It isn’t the same thing.”

“It ain’t no different, Painman. Eggs is eggs, and bunnies rut. Malakites kill. And you just keep on stirring the pot.”

The Painman smiled. “We’ve had this argument before,” he said. “I’m just doing what I can, to save what I can.”

“You been workin to save yourself,” said Jack. “We’ve been through that too.”

“I’ll not debate you,” said the Painman.

“Aye, we’re past debate,” said Jack.

A moment passed. The bunny baby rolled onto its side, and laughed. The sound echoed weirdly round the mogrifying lab.

“So what do you want, then?” asked the Painman.

“I think you know,” said Jack.

The Painman shook his head. “You promised.”

“So did you.”

“Come on Jack,” said the Painman, taking a step back. “Things have changed. All I’m trying for now is a cure. I swear. I’m not reproducing. I’m not even teaching.”

Killin Jack shook his head. “You’ve lied before,” he said. “We said no more. Malakites, bunnies, whatever. But you keep on.”

“Wait. You’ve got arrows in your gut, still. Let me take them out. You’ll feel different after that.”

“After I gone under the knife? Not this time, Painman. It ain’t meant to go that way.”

“You’ll kill all my Malakites too, won’t you?”

Jack nodded. “Outside this lab, they’re all gone already. S’just me left. And I’m readying for walkabout soon enough.”

“Well take me that way then, too. Me you and the babe, it’ll be like old times.”

“There was no old times no more,” said Jack. “Only you lyin. And buildin.”

The Painman shook his head. “It ain’t meant to be like this,” he said, backing up to the fat vat slowly, climbing up the ladder rungs. “It ain’t, Jack. You don’t kill your pa.”

“There can’t be no more Malakites, and no more bunnies,” said Jack, approaching softly. “And walkabout won’t quit out the machinations of your mind. Reproducin natural was never an issue.”

“It isn’t right,” said the Painman, up the ladder, wet skin sliming against the glass, flopping over the trim and into the lipidic suds. “It isn’t fair.”

“That’s what my lass said about the famine,” said Jack, stalking the fat vat, as the Painman hauled on his face tubules, started up the stream of air and logged into the speakers. “She still died.”

“This isn’t the same,” said the Painman, hanging in the juice, his voice tinny through the transceivers. “You don’t have to. Please. I want to live.”

“I can’t help you with that no more,” said Jack, and punched a hole straight through the vat glass. The Painman’s scream lodged in the transceivers and yelped out until Jack’s roving arm sought out his neck and snapped it clean broke.

Then he stepped back, slicked off the lumpy curds from his massive arms, and turned to the lab. Malakites were growing on table tops before him, wires and tubes and a sussurus of artificial breathing.

Jack walked the aisles squinching hearts to burst until not a one was left. Then he took up the babe, nestled it into the dry bulge of his massive left arm, and left.

*

Jack stood on the brink of a red-rusted water drum stanchioned out over the Levi river, babe in his arm, looking down at the turgid brown waters rolling by beneath.

“It ain’t the end,” said Jack softly to the babe. “Don’t look at it like it’s the end cos it’s not. Your pa’s waiting. All kinds o’folks is waitin.”

The baby snuggled in Jack’s massive grip.

“Even I got folks waiting,” said Jack, and stepped up to the edge, thinking of the day his wife and child died.

*

There were dead bunnies lying like tossed weeds on the frozen Levi the day his wife and child died. Tucked under the piereages and mounded round the water pumps, naked, some of them shaved bald, some of them burnt in haphazard pyres.

Jack was walking the banks. The Bodyswell healers line was ragged with black sheets off to his left, a mass moaning rising like smoke from the waiting sick.

Across his back there was a sack-cloth bag half-full with the scavengings of the past two days. Molding crumbs and livery slivers of goose-meat. A thin vial of oil and some salt crustings he’d picked off a dock-side quay ring. A half sprig of squabbled grapes and 3 rotten potatoes.

His head ached and he felt weak.

He walked back down the banks and into the Slum-swelters, moon shadows dappled too harsh cross the winter-bit stone flags. People trudged by to his left and right, some mumbling, some steaming heat off into the night. Others lay still and huddled together against lattice rod huts, rags hung for walls, children splayed round their mothers like runts of the litter rousting for a sip.

Across the square and down Shabbath’s guinnell he walked by the corpse of noseless Mrs. Dimble his neighbour. Her naked blue body was stick-thin and frozen hard to the icy cobbles. He tried to pry her up, but she wouldnĂ­t budge.

The air was fresh. Jack breathed it in. It hurt his lungs, and he walked on.

Standing in his home, shelled out and everything sold for food or fuel, he saw Delilah and Mary wrapped up together, Mrs. Dimble’s clothes thrown over their blankets and hay, not moving any more. Frost had drifted up to their feet on the bare stone floor.

There was a crusty hank of bread on the table, covered over with the cornflower blue napkin she’d made for him a long time before.

He sat down, dropped the empty pack. He moved the napkin, took up the bread, and staring at his dead wife and child, numb, began to eat.

*

The next morning, the Grammaton clock-tower ringing nothing but silence, Jack was out digging up cobbles from the Swelter-square, laying down the last of the wood from his home on the hard brown ground, and lighting a fire.

The Painman watched from the buzzing warmth of his fat vat, windowed out over the fake balconies of his turreted Mogrifying lab. He saw the fire, and Jack dragging out a woman and a child, reverent, laying them on the ground, waiting.

The slow dawn was silent. Jack sat on the mossy fountains edge, stone tribute to some long gone pauper prince. Hours passed, until the sun sat high in the blue-white sky, and Jack stepped to the fire, slat board in hand, and began to dig.

The Painman watched Jack work the ground. It was nightfall again by the time the hole was big enough for Jack to lay the bodies in. He dropped the blue napkin in over, and piled on the dirt. After the dirt, the cobbles again.

Then he sat at the fountainside, stripped to the waist, steam turning to frost on his skin, and didn’t move.

The Painman sent his servants down.

Jack woke up strapped to a table. It was warm, and a golden man with long lank hair and shiny skin was standing over him.

“It’s alright,” said the Painman. “Everything’s alright now.”

*

It was spring when he learnt how to speak again, started to control his new body, held up on crutches, lolling round the Painman’s Mogrifying lab, cooing babyfaces at the caged animals round the walls.

Later, an evening, time blurring like Jack’s blood mingling in tubes overhead, he was sitting with the Painman, eating thinly sliced pork, looking down on the Swelter-square through rose tinted arrow slits.

“You remember your wife?” asked the Painman.

Jack grunted. He could speak, but he didn’t.

“I think you do,” said the Painman. “You’re looking at the spot you buried her. By the fountain. You had to light a fire. Remember?”

“It was cold,” said Jack.

“It was very cold, that’s right,” said the Painman. “But they didn’t die of the cold. It was the famine that did it.”

Jack took a bite of gingered pork.

“You know the Bunnymen, Jack? Did you ever hear of the Bunnymen?”

“There were bodies at the river,” said Jack. “Dead bunnies.”

“And a good thing,” said the Painman. “A cull, for they were too many.”

Jack looked up, his massive neck smooth and strong. “Everybody was dying,” he said.

“And you know why, don’t you?”

“I don’t remember,” said Jack.

“I made them, Jack. But I made them wrong.”

“Wrong,” said Jack.

“They made too many babies. That was never meant to be the way of it. Then winter came, and there was no food. Because of them, your family died.”

“They killed my wife?”

“And your child. Though they didn’t mean it.”

“It was still cruel,” said Jack.

*

Painman in the long turret hallway, throwing stones at Jack’s face. Jack batted them away with a massive iron mace.

“They’ll throw worse than this at you, Jack,” said the Painman. “You should remember that.”

“I will,” said Jack.

“They won’t want to die,” said the Painman. “They’re not like you.”

“I don’t want to die,” said Jack.

“Of course you don’t, my son,” said the Painman. “Of course you don’t.”

“Why did you make them?” asked Jack.

The Painman smiled. “I was looking for cures,” he said, “experiments. To help people.”

“Good things,” said Jack.

“Yes, good things Jack.”

“Why do you want the bodies?”

“To fix them, Jack. Cure them. So they don’t hurt others, like your family.”

“They killed my family.”

“They did. And they’ll do it again, if we don’t stop them.”

“I miss Delilah,” said Jack.

“Delilah was your wife?”

“I miss Mary too.”

“I’m sure they miss you too.”

“When will we start?”

“We’ll start soon, Jack. We’ll start soon.”

*

His first was in the Boomfire Damask quarter, a Bunny lass finishing up a client on the second floor of a wrangling joint named the Yailing Chain. Jack had watched her for days. She had beautiful fur and her eyes gleamed in the dark. She wore yellow bonnets in the morning and a grey scarf in the evening. She smoked Spurgsroot cigarettes on the balcony while her wrangler took payment.

The Grammaton rang in the distance, and the wrangler towed the client downstairs for money.

Jack leapt to the balcony, swung up and over the rail. She stepped out, saw the giant bulk of Jack, raveled over with belts and weapons and leather. Before she could scream, Jack hoisted her beautiful body to his shoulder, jumped from the decking, and fled into the night.

*

Back at the mogrifying lab, the Painman spent all night cutting her open on his rickety bench-slab, stewing out the jellied bits and pieces that made her alive. She screamed at first, then fell silent, turning white as the blood drained from her. Finally, she died. The Painman dropped her pieces in slop buckets, took fluid samples in little glass tubules, stored, separated, and made marks on a chart, while Jack stood by and watched.

By dawn her body had been reduced to a grisly array of bloody bunny strips, hanging from the dusty timbelry rafters. The Painman at last set down his instruments, yellow skin sweat drenched and weak. He collapsed in his chair.

“Put me in the vat,” he gasped at Jack, who hoisted him like a rag doll, tenderly fed him into the turgid fat, strapped on his tubules and transceivers like a father tending to a child.

“It wasn’t right,” said the Painman eventually, voice ringing tinny through the echo boxes.

“I don’t understand,” said Jack. “I don’t understand why you did that.”

“A cure, Jack,” said the Painman. “I’m looking for a cure.”

“But I thought it was in their heads,” said Jack. “The multiplyin, I thought you could fix it.”

“It’s not just in their heads, Jack,” said the Painman. “They can’t help it. It’s in their nature.”

“Where’s that?” asked Jack. “Is that in their guts?”

“No Jack.”

“Well is it in their skin?” asked Jack. “Is it in their brain? Is it in their fur?”

The Painman sighed. “I don’t know,” he said.

“So why did you cut her up like that? Why did you make her scream?”

“Because it’s the right thing to do,” said the Painman. “It’s the only way to help them.”

“It didn’t help her,” said Jack, pointing up at the eviscerated body of the she-bunny. “It hurt her. Now she’s dead.”

“It might help the others though,” said the Painman. “If I can change them, then nobody more needs to die. There’ll be no more famines. Everything will be like it used to.”

“My family won’t come back,” said Jack.

“No, they won’t Jack.”

“She won’t come back.”

“No,” said the Painman, and shook his head.

Jack thought about this.

“I wish you’d never made them,” said Jack. “I wish they’d never existed.”

“But they do,” said the Painman. “And we have to try and fix it. We have to find the cure.”

A moment passed.

“It ain’t right,” said Jack.

“What?”

“This,” said Jack, waving at the dead bunny pieces, the mogrifying lab, his own distorted bulk. “It ain’t the way it’s meant to be.”

“Jack,” said the Painman.

“If Delilah saw this, she’d scream.”

“Delilah isn’t here,” said the Painman.

“No,” said Jack, stepping up to the Painman’s face against the glass, looming over him, “she ain’t.”

The Painman pushed back into the fat.

“You did wrong,” said Jack. “Making me. Making them.”

“I know,” said the Painman, “I never lied about that. I’m trying to fix it.”

“You did wrong.”

The Painman opened his mouth, closed it.

“I’m gonna set it right,” said Jack.

The Painman coughed wetly, spat out a gob of something black into the roiling suds. His skin was glazing and his eyes goggled weirdly in their sockets. “How?”

Jack didn’t answer. He just stared into the glass at the Painman, slackening in his traces and close to collapse.

“How?” asked the Painman again. But Jack was already gone.

*

He killed his first that night. Top of the Haversall, a lone bunny walking home drunk. Jack cut his head clear off before he could even scream.

Jack was happy at that. Though he wept the whole night through after.

The next night he killed two.

*

The other Malakites came for him in the winter. They crept up on him round the zeppelin spike at the Firehark docking rings. He’d already dropped two bunnies trying to board a float out of the city. He was rounding the observation deck when the first bolt hit him in the spine.

His legs fell out from underneath him, the orange glow of the city’s revelatories lurched upwards, his head mashed on the bronze railing stripe, and for a second he must have blacked out. When he came to there were three half-birthed Malakites standing over him, their features run like jelly fresh from the Painman’s vats. Two more fat feathered bolts were sticking out of his chest.

“From the Painman,” said one, and plunged a spear into Jack’s gut. A crossbow bolt flew into his right eye and half the world went black. In the thin gap remaining, Jack saw a chrome scimitar descending. He batted wildly at it, switching the arc so it sank and lodged in his shoulder. With his other hand he tore the crossbow bolt from his eye and thrust it up through one of their meaty jaws, punching up through his skull and killing him instantly.

The others shouted. The scimitar sucked out of his flesh and the spear twisted in his gut.

Jack rolled, snapping the spear off inside his body, grabbed the heel of the nearest Malakite’s leg, and punched through the knee. It buckled back and the half-formed creature dropped him screaming to the ground. Jack crushed its windpipe, snatched up the scimitar from its slackening hand, and came to rest with the last Malakite standing over him, looking still puzzled at the broken spear in his hands.

“But the Painman said,” it managed, before Jack scimitar-swept his legs free from his body and he lopped down to the ground.

“What did the Painman say?” growled Jack, coughing blood. He dragged himself over to the wailing Malakite, but it only screamed, and the sound echoed in Jack’s head like a crying baby, so he pinched the neck shut and the screaming ended.

He lay there for a time.

Time passed.

He faded some, came back again. He saw the moon yellow and grinning above him. He felt the blood leaking out of his hollowed waist, his vacuous eye, the pain coursing through him. He wondered at the thoughts of his victims, as they died themselves. Then he remembered, the Painman had tried to kill him.

And he began to crawl.

*

It was morning when he reached the mogrifying lab, the night a long memory of cold cobbles and pain behind him. The Painman was sleeping in his fat vat. Jack climbed the ladder, legs trailing useless behind, and dropped into the vat. He pried clear the breathing struts from the Painman’s face, and wrapped a hand round the Painman’s neck.

The Painman woke, tried to scream into the fat. Jack punched out the glass and they flooded out with the viscous fluid, to lie gasping entwined on the laboratory floor. The Painman flopped weakly in Jack’s oaken grip, then stopped, sighed, Jack staring into his eyes.

“I didn’t,” began the Painman, but Jack squeezed him silent. They lay together, Painman’s breaths whistling through his crushing neck, Jack staring. Then he spoke.

“Fix me,” he said.

*

Surgery lasted three days. Jack held on to the Painman’s neck or arm or leg throughout, conscious while his spine was rebuilt, his guts, a new eye. When it was done, Jack tied him up, dropped him in the puddled bottom of the fat vat, and went to sleep.

A week later Jack woke. He slid off the table and went over to the Painman, feebled and wilting and supping on curdled fat, shrouded with flies.

“No more Malakites,” said Jack, standing over him, voice hoarse with dis-use.

The Painman nodded rabidly.

“You’ll live,” said Jack. “That’s it.”

The Painman grinned weakly. Jack tore his bonds free. Then he was gone.

*

The river sworled by beneath them, Jack and the baby up top of the water drum, shifting in the warm night wind. Cries from the Bodyswell line drifted from behind them. The smell of hickaberry scones hung sweet upon the air. Shellaby bugs glimmered softly across the far banks.

“Y’are a cute one though,” said Jack, down to the purring bunny in his arms. He stroked its chin, and it googled happily. “Many many lasses you’ll have, no doubt about that.”

The baby turned in his arms, warm little head pressed up against Jack’s chest. Soon it closed its eyes, and fell asleep.

“You’ll see your pa soon,” said Jack.

The river eddied by underneath, sucking at the rust-pitted drum stanchions, rocking up the banks.

Jack bent over, kissed the bunny on the ears. Then he looked up, scanned the spreading city one last time.

“I’m coming, Delilah,” he said. Then he took his last breath, his last step, and fell down to the river.

The thick brown waters of the Levi closed over his body.

Somewhere in the distance, the Grammaton rang out for All Hallows.

And the river flowed on.

END

Read more of MJG’s SF & Fantasy short stories here.

Learn about his epic fantasy novel project DAWN RISING here.

See Story Art.

Read about the craft of writing.

Tokyo’s Urban Battleship

Mike GristArchitecture, Featured Story, Haikyo, Japan, Residential, Tokyo-to

Tokyo’s urban battleship glides through the ever-changing cityscape like a predatory shark- its mad crescent fin stocked with slate-grey torpedoes and radar foils- hunting out fresh prey for the saw-blade teeth ratcheted down its flat-iron side.

Built in 1970 by the retired Imperial Navy general Watanabe Youji, the urban battleship building (GUNKAN) was apparently inspired by a World War 2 sea-battle, where Watanabe’s cruiser faced an American submarine off the coast of the Philippines. The entire crew expected to die, stared down the barrel of death, but ultimately survived.Sailing for fresh apartment blocks to bomb with water-tank torpedoes.

Gliding through Tokyo.

Everything about its design and construction showcases that violent naval origin: from the ocean-grey torpedo water-tanks under the battleship crescent’s eaves to the diametric construction of apartment blocks ranged like saw-teeth down either side; the tiny port-hole windows to the narrow corridors and low ceilings of a cooped-up ship.

Add to that bizarre aesthetic a hint of art-deco flourish and a taste of the Metabolist movement, and it is surely utterly unique in the world.

Jagged edges all the way up.

After his stint in the Navy Watanabe went on to study architecture at Waseda university, eventually becoming a professor there and a practising architect about Japan, though the GUNKAN building remains his most striking work.

Watanabe’s original name for the place was ‘Heresy of Architects’. It’s an evocative if opaque title. Is he stating that all pretenses at architecture are inherently hypocritical and merely showpieces for their creator’s egos? Perhaps he’s bemoaning Tokyo’s investment in real estate when set next to an earnest belief that the Empire of the Sun should never have surrendered in the war, and such frivolities of building design should be melted down and poured back into the fight? If you know please let me know int he comments.

Pods criss-cross like slashing saw-teeth.

Deck stacked on deck.

The urban battleship has stood like a solid rock for 40 years against the endless tides of rebirth and renewal that wash through this city- a watch-tower for the bucking tides that have seen whole neighbourhoods subsumed by tsunami waves of modernisation and development.

In the last ten years the GUNKAN approached ruin and dilapidation as ownership changed hands, tenants were booted out, and the silver-grey exterior faded and bloomed with mould into a water-stained mockery of its former self, far from ship-shape and keeling fast.

2 years ago– water-stained and rusting.

Now- freshly painted battleship grey.

However, borne on the cyclical flow of rebirth like the tides at sea, it is now undergoing redevelopment into apartments and offices- each pod weighing in at around 15 meters square without bathroom or kitchen (not big), and costing around 100,000 yen a month (around $1,200), with only those tiny port-hole like windows for natural light.

This for offices that go all the way through the pods.

It was my second time to the Battleship- the first was 2 years ago when it was still rusting and rotting away like a harbored ship in drydock- see that story and images here. I returned this time with Swedish urbex star Jan Jornmark and his radio producer friend Katarina. They had come to Tokyo to cover haikyo for Jan’s 3rd urbex book- to that end Jan and I took a haikyo trip to a theme park and decrepit mine a week ago- I’ll post those explores soon.

The previous time I only managed to get onto the first floor roof- not a very impressive accomplishment which involved climbing over a few low fences. This time I walked brazenly into the building, all fresh, empty, and smelling of new paint, down the crazily-paved hallway, through the automatic security doors, and into the elevator. I pushed R for roof, and it took me there happily (if very slowly), though at the top the doors were all sealed up.

Entrance hall- with security camera top center. Love that art-deco flooring.

Girders stripped back and revealed.

Rooms prepped for office work. Nice retro wood and schoolroom chairs.

Marble zig-zag flooring matches the ziggurat style stacked pods.

Brushed concrete and marble- 70’s class.

Repainted and repurposed.

Jan and Katarina arrived, and together we made for the first floor roof. Katarina interviewed me for Swedish radio about the building’s history and design, while Jan found us out a second staircase winding upwards. It led us by a floor that was still open and being renovated, which let us walk through the hollowed out wing of one of the saw-blade floors- each pod with its walls bashed through, waiting for refurbishment.

First floor roofing- looks like a submarine interior, all funny little windows, slanty roof bits, different level floorings.

In one of the pods, this probably to be an office. Little natural light coming in.

Square porthole windows.

Very marginal view out of one of the saw-blade balcony windows.

Back down the length of the pods.

Then- the roof. The battleship hub wowed us all- such a big, elaborate construction that seemingly served no further purpose than being decorative. Jan said he’d never seen anything like it. I know I haven’t. And the view out over the city, 14 stories tall, was fantastic.

Two floors below the roof still, shooting up to crescent.

More random-seeming ship construction: holes, pipes, gantries.

Down from 12th floor.

Roof tail fin.

Here we see the Docomo tower beneath the tail fin. Kind of surreal for me.

Through a roof port-hole to the street below. Almost has the effect of a tilt-shift lens- all looks like toys below.

Bustling waves of cityscape.

And, the crescent.

Down 14 floors to the street.

Crescent beneath the tail fin.

Crescent left.

Central.

Right.

Torpedo water tanks.

Odd little porthole within the crescent.

Beneath water tank, showing it certainly seemed to be functional.

An HDR with bleach bypass.

Katarina, Jan, and me.

We bustled about taking photos. After a while I set up my camera and interviewed Jan about the life of a professional urbexer- I’ll post that up next. Then we climbed back down, past a dead bird and its cracked open egg-shells, back to the street below, where we said our goodbyes and parted ways.

See more on Jan Jornmark at his website Deserted Places.

Explore more Japanese ruins (haikyo) in the galleries:

[album id=4 template=compact]

See a curation of world ruins in the ruins gallery.

You can also read my SF & Fantasy stories inspired by ruins here.