Book Girl and the Famished Spirit (16 page)

We asked a girl in her class about her.

“Amemiya? She’s been out since yesterday. Actually, I heard she quit school now that she’s getting married.”

Getting married?!
Tohko and I looked at each other in shock.

“Did Hotaru tell you that?” Tohko squeaked.

“No, not quite. Someone went into the teachers’ office for something, and they were all gossiping about our class. They were saying she got into a rivalry with Himekura over a guy and that the Princess hated her and forced her to drop out.”

“Hold on. What do you mean? Maki and Hotaru were in a love triangle?”

I leaned forward just as eagerly as Tohko did. A love triangle? And with
Maki
?

“Well, I guess there’s been this tall guy in a suit who comes to pick Amemiya up in his car all the time? And someone says she saw Maki get into the same car before. She said Amemiya must have stolen Himekura’s boyfriend.”

“Tohko, does Maki even have a boyfriend?!”

“I never heard of one.”

Tohko shook her head, puzzled.

Next, we headed to Maki’s classroom, but we didn’t find her there, and the music building was locked.

When the bell rang, we rushed back to our respective classrooms.

What in the world was going on? Amemiya was getting married? Why so suddenly? And to whom? Was Kurosaki the man who came to pick her up? Or was it Amemiya’s new boyfriend? And he was supposed to be Maki’s ex-boyfriend? And where had Ryuto disappeared to?

Once again I pictured Amemiya’s fierce expression as she swung the golf club around to destroy everything in that room, her white nightgown stained with blood. I felt a chill run down my spine.

I had the mother of all bad feelings about this.

After school, Tohko came running to my classroom, her face pale.

She hadn’t been able to find Maki.

“Konoha, I’m going to try going to Amemiya’s house. Ryuto might still be there.”

She stared at the blood dripping onto the floor, her chest heaving wildly.

“No! Don’t open your mouth any farther! Don’t take my hand! Don’t come near me!”

Blood ran down his face, his arms, his hair. He lay at her feet.

The carpet was dyed red where it had soaked up his blood.

Her throat burned and her stomach knotted painfully as she let out a scream. Blood spread across her vision.

His stomach was full of holes. And oh, his blood kept flowing. It wouldn’t stop.

He had been such a nice person. Such a warm person. As brilliant as the noontime sun. Even when she had been gloomily silent, he never lost his patience. Instead, he would tell her shockingly daring or funny stories in his strong, cheerful voice. When he looked at her, his eyes told her how deliriously happy he was to be able to spend his time with her. When they walked through crowds, he would offer his hand to her and smile. His hand felt big and warm around her own.
Whenever he was around, the world spilled over with bright sunlight.

But now what? I’ve killed him.

The weather deteriorated quickly and it began to rain. The wind gusted.

Black clouds piled up over the mansion perched atop the hill, and the farther up the hill we climbed, the more violent the wind became, threatening to rip the umbrellas from our hands.

Tohko had her violet umbrella and mine was sea blue. We held the handles firmly as we stood outside the gate and buzzed the intercom.

But the intercom seemed to be broken, and there was no reply.

The gate was unlocked, just as it had been when Ryuto and I had come two days ago, and it swung open with a slight push.

“Hello?” Tohko called quietly and then went inside. I moved in after her.

When Tohko saw that the window of the room facing the terrace was shattered and a curtain had partially slipped off and was flapping in the wind, she paled and gulped.

We leaned forward, still holding up our umbrellas, to peer into the room.

It was exactly the way I had last seen it two days ago, the floor littered with shards of glass and porcelain and ugly cracks running across the television and shelves. The dishes thrown across the sideboard were exactly as they had been, too. No—the room looked even more ghastly in the darkness of the falling rain.

Tohko’s hand trembled slightly as she gripped the handle of her umbrella.

Just then, lightning flashed overhead.

“Eek!”

Tohko ducked her head in surprise.

Huge beads of rain carried by the fierce wind fell over our heads like a jungle squall and pounded against our umbrellas.

“Oh—”

Tohko cried again and closed her umbrella. Then she went into the room through the broken glass doors as if in a trance, without even knocking.

She knelt down on the floor and picked something up.

“What is it?” I asked, following her in.

There was a black cell phone in her hand, and she held it out to me, her lips trembling.

It had a rabbit ornament hanging off it. This was Ryuto’s cell phone!

The white rabbit was stained red. Looking around, I could see splotches of blood on the carpet.

“This… is Ryuto’s cell phone. Something’s happened to him!”

“It could be Amemiya’s blood on it. She was cut all over by the glass.”

I tried to reassure Tohko, but unease swirled deep in my heart like an approaching rain cloud. Ryuto said Kurosaki had followed him and that guys who looked like mobsters had threatened him. He said he had almost been run over by a car.

Had Kurosaki come home after I’d left?

Tohko slipped the cell phone into the pocket of her uniform and stood up. She left the room and started searching for Ryuto. She opened every door on the first floor, all the while calling his name.

“Ryuto! Ryuto! If you’re there, answer me! Hellooo? Is anybody home?!”

Each time thunder pealed, Tohko cringed.

We searched every cranny of the drawing room and kitchen but found no one.

As we were starting up to the second floor, Tohko found a door behind the stairs.

“I wonder where this door goes.”

“You don’t think it’s just a closet?”

Tohko turned the handle and the door opened. There was a set of stairs leading down. It was dark at the bottom, and I couldn’t make out much of anything.

Tohko swallowed loudly.

“Let’s see what’s down there.”

“Are you crazy?”

“Then you wait here.”

“I can’t do that—hey, Tohko!”

I watched as Tohko gritted her teeth and descended the stairs. I hurried after her.

In the darkness, it felt as if we had sunk into a bottomless swamp. The chill, murky air clung to our skin. The sound of thunder crashing outside grew gradually more distant behind us.

We had no light, so we followed the wall with our hands and searched out each step with our feet, holding our breath as we moved forward. The walls were cool to the touch, and my fingertips shook nervously.

“Try turning his phone on, Tohko. We can use it as a light.”

I heard a rustling noise as Tohko got it out of her pocket.

“Um, wait. What do I push? I’m really bad with electronics…”

“Let me see it.”

When I turned it on, the screen and numbers flared up out of the darkness.

Relying on the tiny light, we descended even farther until we reached a heavy-looking gray door at the bottom.

Tohko knocked. There was no answer.

“E-excuse me,” she muttered, as if someone would stop her, and opened the door.

It was dark and hard to tell, but it looked like there was a bed and a bookshelf inside. I ventured in reluctantly. As I held the cell phone up to look around, a sharp bolt of icy terror shot through me from fingertips to toes.

The stained gray walls bristled with numbers.

Red numbers, black numbers, thick and spidery; numbers written in neat, gentle handwriting and wild numbers scrawled onto the wall in the throes of wild emotion.

The numbers were so disturbingly intense that they seemed to pulse on the edge of floating off the wall. And in their midst,
countless heads flickered into being, staring at us with Amemiya’s blood-spattered face
.

“Eeeeeeeek!!”

Tohko shrieked, just before the door slammed shut behind us.

Tohko screamed again.

I rushed to the door and turned the handle. It only rattled but didn’t give. It was locked!

“Please! Open up!”

There was no answer. We heard only the faint sound of footsteps running up the stairs.

Who in the world had shut the door?!

My breathing started to get more ragged, and the blood rushed to my head. How could this have happened? My head was spinning. No—this was no time to have an attack. I dug my nails into the palms of my hands and struggled to retain my reason.

I stiffly turned the cell phone toward the wall and peered at it, trying to calm my heart. It still felt like it was about to explode. I saw again the sweep of numbers written in red and black, and above those, dozens of photos taped to the wall. Amemiya was in all of them and in each one, a big
X
had been drawn across her face in red marker. It was these photos that had looked like a cluster of bleeding faces.

As soon as I felt relief washing over me, a fresh horror rose up in me with a chill. I felt my hand go cold around the cell phone.

“Look… that photo…”

I felt that there was something strange about the girl in that picture and turned around to get Tohko’s opinion on it.

When I turned, I saw her crouched down on the ground, burying her face in her knees and covering her ears with both hands, shaking. And it was no ordinary shivering: She was shuddering as if she were wearing her short-sleeved summer uniform in a blizzard in the dead of winter.

“Tohko, are you all right?!”

“No… the ghosts… I’m afraid. I hate horror stories… more than anything.”

I was shocked to hear how fragmented her voice was, more frail and tearful than I’d ever heard her before.

“What? But you threatened to drag the ghost out of hiding! You even kept watch for it every night. And didn’t you say that ghosts and curses are unscientific? You said you didn’t believe in them.”

Tohko shook her head fiercely, keeping her face hidden.

“If you found out how scared I was of ghosts, you would start writing me scary stories, so I pretended that they didn’t bother me.”

“What are you talking about? I wouldn’t do something like that.”

But maybe, I reflected, if I was aggravated, I would start writing more ghost and horror stories, just like Tohko said.

When I first joined the book club, I had written strange stories on purpose in order to make Tohko blubber about how bad they tasted. Considering that, I couldn’t really blame her for being cautious.

Actually, I remembered that on the day the notes started appearing in our mailbox, I had written a story about decapitated heads dropping off trees, which made Tohko shriek about how spicy it was and made her eyes water.

I didn’t see why she needed to eat the stories if they were that bad, but Tohko had never left the stories I wrote uneaten. Whether she said they were gross or sour or salty, she ate every last scrap.

If I wrote her horror stories chock-full of ghosts every day, she would finish those, too, despite her tears.

She was shaking, and it looked like she was crying.

“B-boys are all the same. When we were little, Ryuto would follow me around shouting my name. He was so tiny and cute, but then he got so big all of a sudden, and… and he got so full of himself because he had hair growing on his legs… Whenever I would scold him for something, he would read scary books aloud to get back at me. I know you’d be like that, too, Konoha. You always forget your duty to help your president out, and you write about decapitated heads or dead spirits or curses or
The Village of Eight Graves
or
Hell’s Gate Island
. You’re like some kind of demon.”

“… My duty?” I repeated. “I think you’re the one who’s supposed to be helping me, actually.”

A sob racked her and she sniffed. “See? You say things like that.”

But it was the truth.

“I… I was at a total loss over how to protect the book club from the ghost’s evil grip, and you…
snf
… you cut me out…
hic
…”

“I didn’t cut you out.”

Hanging her head and crying so pettishly made Tohko seem like a much younger girl. Bittersweet feelings surged up in me. It was a strange sensation, a little unsure but gradually warming my heart, like holding a baby bird in my hand.

Why did I never feel like I could stand up to her?

I crouched down next to her and looked into Tohko’s face before quietly telling her, “I didn’t want anything bad to happen to you. You always get carried away and do stupid stuff. I was worried. I think Ryuto felt the same way. Because you’re a girl, Tohko.”

Saying this, I realized for the first time that it was true. I didn’t want Tohko to do anything dangerous.

“You think I get carried away? I—”

“Just try and tell me you don’t,” I interrupted calmly.

She caught herself and then started crying again. I broke.

“… Do you want a handkerchief?”

“I—I have one.”

“Okay…”

“But gimme.”

She was still keeping her face hidden. I reached into my bag and got out the light blue handkerchief my mother had ironed for me and held it out to Tohko.

“Here. Wipe your face off.”

Tohko took the handkerchief in her white hand and pressed it to her face.

“
Snf
… You’re the one who made me cry, Konoha.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Do you really apologize?”

“… Yes.”

“
Hnk
…”

“Hey, don’t blow your nose.”

“Hmph… How can you be so calm?”

Talking like this finally coaxed Tohko to stop crying, and she timidly peered out from behind the handkerchief.

“I’m sorry for crying. I’ll wash your handkerchief for you.”

She folded it neatly and put it in her pocket; then she stood up, looking embarrassed.

“Okay, so we have to think of a way out of here,” she said with a smile.

Immediately after, she caught sight of the photos on the wall and shrieked and cowered away again.

“I—I forgot. Oh god, there are ghosts everywhere.”

“Look closer. They’re not ghosts, just photographs.”

“What?”

Tohko turned hesitantly to look at the wall. I shone the cell phone in that direction.

She gasped and her eyes widened; then Tohko stood up and moved toward the wall.

She ran her fingers over the numbers written there and curiously examined the photos with red
X
’s over their faces.

“The girl in these photos… She looks a lot like Hotaru, but it’s not her.”

“You’re right. Her face and the color of her hair are just slightly different, and her clothes look older. This uniform is the same design that Amemiya was wearing in the courtyard.”

One photo showed a girl smiling brilliantly in front of the school gates, dressed in a sailor suit.

Another had her holding a hose in one hand, watering the lawn in a white dress.

In another she was seated on a leather couch, wearing an elegant long-sleeved kimono.

A girl who looked very much like Amemiya but different.

“This girl… is Kayano Kujo.”

Tohko was right. The girl in the pictures bore the same expression on her face as the girl I had spoken to in the chemistry lab. It made me feel odd to think that this was the real Kayano.

But why was the wall covered in pictures of her? And why had someone drawn big red
X
’s over her face?

“These numbers are the same as the ones in the notes,” I murmured, turning to the strings of numbers written in red marker.

“We know that Kayano and Aoi used to talk to each other in a number code, so this could be something they wrote. Look, there are two numbers written differently from the others. Plus, after Kayano’s father died, her guardian sent him down to live in a room in the basement. This could be it…”

Tohko looked around the room.

I scanned over everything, too.

There were no windows in the room, which was enclosed by the stained gray walls. For furniture, it had a desk, a table, and a bookshelf. There was a bed. A closet. A door other than the entrance led to a toilet and sink. There was a candelabra on the table with three used candles in it.

“Do you think this was Aoi’s room?”

“But I heard that the entire house was renovated when Kayano died so they could rent it out, which would make it odd if the basement, and even these numbers, had been kept exactly the same.”

“That’s true. So then this room and the numbers on the walls are from after Hotaru and Kurosaki moved in. So it wasn’t Kayano and Aoi who wrote these numbers, but Hotaru and—”

Tohko broke off.

Amemiya and her guardian Kurosaki were the only two people living in the house. There were two styles of handwriting on the wall. That led to only one conclusion.

“Hotaru and Kurosaki… wrote this.”

“Why would he have done that?”

Tohko’s face clouded over.

“I don’t know. I don’t know why he followed Hotaru’s boyfriends and had them hurt or why he had to restrict her and watch her that closely, either.”

“Could Kurosaki be the one she’s marrying? He can manage her fortune for now as her guardian, but when she grows up, his role is over. So he might be trying to seize complete control of her fortune by marrying her. If that were the case, he would keep those boys from getting close to her so that he could marry her when she’s old enough.”

It made a kind of sense when I thought about it.

Tohko’s expression grew even darker. “If that’s true, then… Ryuto is in serious danger.”

Her soft voice was colored by her concern for her brother. Tohko shook her head as if to cast off some dark thought and said, as though to reassure herself, “No, Ryuto wouldn’t let anyone get him that easily. He’s been making people worry about him for a long time only to come home looking like nothing even happened. It’s infuriating how lucky he is.”

He was like Tohko that way…

“First we have to think of a way out of here. Can’t you call for help on that phone?”

“No, there’s no reception underground.”

“Then we have to find something to help us escape. Like a hammer or a chain saw or plastic explosives…”

Tohko opened the desk drawers and peered inside.

“I’m not
quite
sure if they’d have dangerous stuff like that in a
kid’s
room.”

“Does this look like your average kid’s room? Besides, if you look for something expecting to find it, you will.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“Look, stop standing around and help me.”

I looked at Tohko’s slender back and her long, busily swaying braids as she issued orders exactly like she always had, and I sighed.
This is just how she is, I guess.
I started searching the room.

We found a lighter, so we lit the candelabra and the room brightened slightly. The photos on the walls caught the light of the flames and reflected the flickering creepily out of the darkness.

Tohko stood in front of the bookshelf and gasped in admiration.

“Look at this! They have a whole collection of MacDonald children’s stories.
At the Back of the North Wind, The Princess and the Goblin, The Princess and Curdie, The Light Princess, The Golden Key
—my, my, my. This edition is out of print, you know. I can’t believe I’d run into it in a place like this. The conditions are perfect for preserving it, too. It looks de-
lic
-ious.”

Did her love of food trump even a situation like this? She looked like she was about to bend down to the shelf where the old books were lined up and rub her face against them.

“George MacDonald was a Scottish-born fantasy writer of the nineteenth century. He had a big influence on C. S. Lewis, who wrote
The Chronicles of Narnia
, and on J.R.R. Tolkien, who wrote
The Lord of the Rings
, and he discovered Lewis Carroll’s
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
and even helped get it published! C. S. Lewis especially was such a huge fan that he featured MacDonald as a character in his stories. He praised MacDonald’s
Phantastes
in his autobiography. Life and death, light and dark coexist in MacDonald’s stories. The instant you turn the page, the magical chain of words echoes like sublime music and tints the
world around us in the rosiness of dawn or the sepia tones of nightfall.

“MacDonald’s stories are like bread baked by fairies. It’s smooth on the tongue and fragrant with a light, creamy texture, and even though you expect it to be like something you’ve eaten before, there’s something completely new about it, and the taste it leaves behind is so subtle!”

As I listened to Tohko pour her heart out, I remembered the book Amemiya had been reading in the library.

That book, the inside of its cover packed with numbers, had also been by MacDonald.

Then Tohko murmured curiously, “What’s this? There’s one book missing. They don’t have
The Day Boy and the Night Girl.
That’s the only thing they need to complete this collection. Oh—but here’s
The Light Princess and Other Stories.
This is a collection put out by a different publisher from the complete works’ edition of
The Light Princess,
and you’d think
The Day Boy and the Night Girl
would have been included with it. Hmm. That’s too bad. They only needed one more book.”

“Amemiya has it.”

Tohko whirled around.

“What? Hotaru has it? How do you know that?”

I told her how I had run into Amemiya in the library. And about how she had wished she could escape to the world of light like the girl in the book, and how sad she had looked when she said it. And then I told her about my conversations with Kayano in the chemistry lab.

“So you weren’t hitting on a girl after all.”

“Kotobuki misunderstood.”

“I see… I’m sorry for doubting you.” Tohko looked meek. “But I can’t believe Hotaru would say something like that! And there’s something about what Kayano told you that bothers me, too…”

She muttered, frowning even more intently. Tohko took each volume of MacDonald’s complete works from the shelf and started flipping through them, checking for writing.

“Hmm. Not here, either, and there’s nothing strange about this one. Ack, ack! My eyes are catching on the words! Oh—this part is translated differently from the one I read. Mm, this part looks so good…”

“Try not to eat it.”

“Urgh. I’ll fight it.”

I wondered if she could really be trusted. I was still a little uneasy, but I started searching in the closet.

“By the way, what did you give Maki for telling you where the Kujos’ housekeeper worked?”

I had been wondering about that. Tohko was clearly panicked when she answered.

“Wh-wh-wh-wh-what do you mean?”

“Maki gave you information, right? I’m sure it wasn’t free.”

“I—I don’t think that matters right now…”

“Did you get naked for her?” I asked, throwing a glance behind me.

Tohko whirled around.

“Come on, of course I didn’t do that! I just… dressed up like a waitress with a headband that had cat ears on it and carried a tray and said stuff like, ‘Have you decided what you want, meow?’ That’s all!”

My mouth dropped open. Tohko’s ears and cheeks flushed visibly.

“Meow? You said that? And wore cat ears?”

“Don’t… don’t make me
remember
it!”

Tohko spun away from me and shuffled through the books haphazardly.

“Ugh. It’s definitely in my top three lifetime humiliations. I will never, ever ask Maki for anything again.”

I saw her shoulders and braids quivering. It was obvious how much she regretted it. And how much Maki had probably enjoyed it…

There were older style dresses hanging in the closet, and as I pushed aside each one, I sighed.

“I’m amazed that you would accept a condition like that, but Maki is taking her joke too far. When I asked her where you’d gone, she grinned and told me you’d gone to see Ellen Dean, which is totally cryptic, and then we find out she’s supposed to be in a love triangle with Amemiya? I can’t figure her out.”