Goth (13 page)

As I left, I wiped the door handle with my sleeve, not wanting to leave fingerprints.

I went home, where I found Sakura watching television and doing homework.

“Where’d you go?” she asked.

I told her the convenience store, and then I ate my breakfast.

After, I went back to the girl’s house. As I got closer, I could feel a buzz in the air. When I turned the corner and came in sight of her house, I knew why. Someone had called it in, and the police were there, with a crowd around them, watching.

The red lights on the patrol car shone on the wall of the house. The people in the street were pointing at the girl’s house and whispering; they must’ve been neighbors—housewives in aprons and middle-aged men in pajamas. I stood behind them, looking up at the house, listening to their hushed voices.

It sounded like the woman who lived there had come home to find a man she knew lying in the entrance with a knife in his chest. From this information, I learned that he had not been the girl’s father after all.

Casually, I struck up a conversation with a woman in an apron. I asked about the people who lived there. Even though she didn’t know me, she answered happily, her excitement overcoming her suspicion.

Apparently, a woman lived there with her daughter and a dog. There was no father; there had been a divorce. The girl refused to go to school, instead spending all her time alone in the house with the dog.

According to the woman in the apron, the girl and dog were missing, and nobody knew where they were.

I turned my back on the crowd and walked away. A block away, I passed some kids on bikes, pedaling toward the crime scene like they were on their way to a festival.

†

A set of concrete stairs led from the bridge down to the bank of the river, which was covered in a sea of grass.

It was a beautiful day, and I could see my shadow clearly as I went down the stairs. The grass shone green in the sunlight, and the wind sent ripples across its surface.

When I reached the bottom of the stairs, all I could see was grass, as tall as me. Looking up, I could see the underside of the massive bridge and the blue, cloudless sky.

I pushed my way through the grass until it suddenly opened up before me, and I came out into the clearing. A golden retriever was sitting in the center of it.

The girl was nowhere to be found.

The dog wasn’t tied up or anything. It just sat like a statue, surrounded by the wall of grass, as if it had known I would come. It had distinguished, wise eyes. A beautiful dog, I thought.

I had thought the girl and her dog might be here, but I had been only half right.

I went over to the dog, putting my hand on its head. The dog didn’t seem scared, and it allowed me to touch it.

There was a piece of paper stuffed in its collar, which I pulled out.

“To the person who gave me the knife,” it said.

Apparently, it was a letter from the girl to me. The girl had noticed me, and she had guessed I might come here.

The letter was torn out of a notebook and written in pencil. It must have been written on the stairs, and the letters were hard to make out.

I read it. It was scattered and incoherent, but I could follow the general idea. She mentioned why they had been kidnapping pets and why they had been doing what they did under the bridge. She explained about the man’s violence and thanked me for giving her the knife. It was a very childish letter, but I could tell she had worked hard on it.

At the end, she asked me to take the dog. It must have taken her a very long time to write that. It had been erased several times, and it must have been hard for her to write. But I knew she had guessed the dog would be put down if she took it with her.

I put the letter in my pocket and looked at the patient retriever. It had a collar but no leash. I wondered how I would get it to come with me or if I should just leave it there.

Yesterday, the girl had beckoned to the dog and it had come, so I tried the same, and the dog obediently followed me.

It followed me all the way home, walking right behind me. I figured I’d forget about it if it turned away, but it never did.

My parents weren’t home, but Sakura was in front of the TV doing homework. When she heard the dog come inside, she turned around and yelped. I told her it was ours now. She was surprised, but she got used to the idea quickly; it was far less shocking than finding corpses. She began thinking up names for the dog, but I stopped her. I had heard the former owner call the dog by name under the bridge, and the same name had been written in the letter. I told her the dog was named Yuka.

I remembered peering in the window of the girl’s house that morning. I had done so just as the girl bit down on the man’s throat. At first, I had no idea what was going on—but now that I’d read the letter, I understood. The dogs the girl had fought and bitten to death under the bridge had all been practice, preparation for killing that man.

I left Yuka with Sakura, sat down on the sofa, and read the letter again. It was written in pencil, and she had pressed very hard, like most children did. I had to puzzle it out one letter at a time. It was clear she worshipped her dog.

I thought back on the night before. That girl had occasionally looked at the golden retriever before acting. Not wanting to get them dirty, she’d removed her clothes before fighting the dog.

She talked about the dog like it was the voice of God. In the letter, she claimed to understand Yuka’s words clearly.

“How did we get this dog?” Sakura asked.

I told her it had belonged to a friend of mine, but the stepfather had hated dogs and had been mean to it, so the friend had asked me to take it in. It wasn’t far from the truth. The girl’s letter had described how her mother’s boyfriend had hurt the dog and how she had been driven to kill him because of it.

“Who could be mean to a dog like this?” Sakura exclaimed, indignant. Yuka tilted her head, looking up at Sakura with deep black eyes. I couldn’t tell if Yuka knew as much as the girl said she did. That girl might simply have been seeing her own reflection in Yuka’s eyes.

My cell phone rang. It was Morino. I left the dog with my sister and went upstairs. Morino told me about a murder that had happened right in our neighborhood.

“We were on that road the other day! It happened right where we were! The wife found the man just inside the entrance.”

“Yeah,” I said. I explained how there had been teeth marks on the man’s neck, a trail of blood from the bedroom to the entrance—and how the knife that had ended the victim’s life had been handed over to the killer by someone else.

“How do you know all that?”

“You see, the girl we passed that day is the killer,” I said, and I hung up.

I liked watching criminals, but I had a rule: I was always a third party, and I never got involved. I had broken that rule this time. I’d seen the girl and dog run toward the door, the man coming after them. And before I'd known it, I’d given the knife to the girl.

I didn’t consider this a bad thing. It didn’t bother my conscience at all—presumably because it hadn’t been my will. I believed the knife had seen the future, and the knife just wanted it to happen.

†

A few hours later, the missing girl was found wandering aimlessly, and she was taken into protective custody. There was blood on her mouth and clothes, and she’d been found alone, in the middle of nowhere.

I learned of this via a message to my phone from Morino, a message I read in my darkened room. My room was quiet—I never listened to music—and I could hear Sakura happily playing with the dog down below.

I closed my eyes and imagined how the girl must have played with the dog under the bridge, on a hot summer day, with the green grass all around them.

i

I have a classmate with the family name Morino whom I talk to occasionally. Her given name is Yoru. If you read the names together, you get Morino Yoru, or “the woods at night.” Her hair and eyes are both jet-black. Our school also has black uniforms, and Morino always wears black shoes. The only color anywhere on her is the uniform’s red scarf.

The name Yoru matches Morino’s black-clothed figure perfectly. Her commitment to the color is so great that I imagine if the darkness of night were given human form, then it might well look like her.

In direct contrast to all that black, her skin is pale like the moon, as though it’s never known the sun. There’s no flush of health; she seems to be made of porcelain. There’s a small mole under her left eye, and she has a mystic air, like a fortune-teller.

I once saw a girl with a similar air in a movie, a movie that opened with a couple drowning. The rest of the film depicted their attempts to adjust to life after death. The leading ghosts were invisible to normal humans—but eventually, they found a girl who was able to see them. That girl was the heroine of the movie, and her name was Lydia.

“I’m basically half-dead myself,” Lydia had said, explaining why she was able to see the ghosts. “My heart is filled with darkness.”

Lydia wore all black and was sickly pale. She preferred staying indoors and reading to playing outside, and she seemed very unhealthy.

Some people began calling people like her “Goths.” Goth refers to a culture, a fashion, and a style. If you search for Goth or “gosu” online, you’ll find any number of pages. Goth is short for Gothic but has little connection with the European architectural style. It has much more to do with the Gothic horror novels popular in Victorian London, like
Frankenstein
or
Dracula.

It seems fair to call Morino a Goth. She frequently expresses an intense interest in torture methods and execution devices, and a fascination with the dark side of humanity is a common characteristic among Goths.

Morino rarely exchanges words with anyone else. She has nothing fundamentally in common with our healthy, overenergetic classmates. If classmates smile and speak to her, Morino will simply stare back at them, her blank expression never crumbling—and she’ll say, “Oh.” Even if classmates wait for her to say something else, nothing will happen: Morino will react no further.

Most people who speak to her end up feeling ignored. The girls in class have said as much. Ever since, they have begun looking down on her.

This attitude only helps complete the barrier around her that keeps everyone else away. While everyone else is laughing and talking, Morino alone remains utterly silent, as though she is in some other dimension, as if there is a shadow cast on the spot where she sits.

But Morino doesn’t intend to ignore anyone. After talking with her awhile myself, I became convinced of this. It isn’t out of spite that she doesn’t happily respond; rather, it is simply because she is that kind of person. She has nothing against the others, and she is equally distant with everyone.

After carefully observing such interactions, what I sensed was confusion. When someone spoke to Morino, she couldn’t figure out how to respond, and she was unable to think of anything to say. But this was all speculation on my part, as I didn’t know what she was actually thinking. Most of the time, her emotions didn’t register outwardly, and it was hard to tell what she felt.

For a while after we first spoke, I thought she was like some sort of doll. The impression she gave off was one more like an object than something animate.

†

One Wednesday in October, just after the leaves were changing from green to red, Morino came into the classroom with her head down, and everyone fell silent. Her long black hair was hanging down, obscuring her face, and she was walking slowly, dragging her feet in a very creepy fashion. Most of the students must have thought she looked like a ghost—but her air was much more dangerous, like some sort of wild animal.

The barrier around her had transformed from its usual transparent sphere into something covered in spikes; she seemed like she might attack anyone who got too close to her. She was silent, as always—and nobody ever spoke to her, anyway—but you could see just how different her mood was by the tension on the faces of those sitting near her.

I was not all that intrigued. I simply assumed she was in a bad mood. That day, we didn’t have a moment to speak, so I didn’t learn the reason why. (Morino would never approach me to speak when I was talking to any of our other classmates.) I learned the reason the next day, though, after school.

When homeroom ended, the other students stood up and left the room. Eventually, the class was empty—and so quiet that it was hard to imagine how noisy it had been a few minutes earlier. Only the rows of empty desks, Morino, and I remained.

A pleasantly cold breeze drifted in through the windows. The class next door had not been dismissed yet, and I could hear the teacher’s voice from down the hall.

Morino was sitting low in her seat. Both her hands hung listlessly at her sides, and she looked exhausted.

“I’m not sleeping much,” she said, yawning. There were shadows under her eyes. Her eyelids were half-closed, and she stared past them into the distance.

I was in my seat, preparing to head home. Her seat was over on the other side of the room. There was no one else there, so I could hear her well enough, and it didn’t occur to me to move closer to her to talk.