Goth (24 page)

Saeki put his ear to the top of the nearest pole.

He could hear a voice inside, muffled as it echoed across the coffin walls. Inside the coffin, a male voice was calling the name of his lover over and over again. A quiet voice, choked with sobs, it echoed the girl’s name again and again.

prologue

Recently, my sister had begun waking up, washing her face, and immediately taking the dog for a walk. It was the end of November and quite chilly out, so she always left the house looking cold.

That morning, she headed for the door, shivering as usual. I was eating breakfast at the table, scanning the obituaries.

There was a kerosene heater in the corner of the room, which my mother had just lit, so the room stank of oil. It was the smell of brain cells dying. I had just that moment found an article about a child dying of carbon monoxide poisoning from a heater.

I opened the window to air the room out, and a wave of cold morning air came in, sweeping away the stench. The windows were fogged up, and there were traces of mist in the garden.

My sister was standing outside the window, wrapped in a sweater and scarf.

When I opened the window, her eyes met mine, and she waved. The dog was next to her, a leash running from its collar to her hand.

“I can’t get her to leave. Something in the yard has all her attention,” she said, pointing at the dog. The dog was next to the wall between our yard and the house next door. It was sniffing the ground, pawing at the ground as if getting ready to dig.

“Come on! We don’t have time for that,” she said, yanking the leash. She had to get ready for school after the walk. The dog seemed to understand her, and it followed her out of sight, their breath visible in the air.

My mother told me to close the window. I did as I was told, and then I went outside.

There was a large stone at the edge of the garden. I moved it to the spot where the dog had been trying to dig; that would stop it from trying again. I didn’t want it digging there—a few more minutes, and my sister would’ve found the human hands I’d buried there earlier that year. When I got home, I’d have to move them somewhere safer. I had just caught another glimpse of my sister’s strange ability to stumble upon the unusual.

I went back inside and finished reading the paper. My mother asked if there were any interesting stories, and I shook my head—once again, there was no new information about Kitazawa Hiroko.

Seven weeks earlier, Kitazawa Hiroko’s body had been found in an abandoned building not far from where I lived, within the city limits. The abandoned building had once been a hospital. It was in a deserted area, away from the city center and toward the mountains, at the end of a gravel path leading from the road. The building was surrounded by rusty chain-link fences and had been left there without being demolished. All year long, there was nothing around it but dried grass, no other buildings at all.

Three elementary school children had been exploring the building when they’d found Kitazawa Hiroko’s corpse. All three were now in counseling.

When the body had first been discovered, the case was all over the papers and the news. But now they were mentioning Kitazawa Hiroko less and less frequently.

There was no way to tell what was going on with the investigation.

The articles I had found about her contained nothing but the story of how her body was found, along with a photo of her. I had cut these out of the paper as I found them.

The photo had been taken while she was alive. She was smiling, flashing white teeth, and she had straight black hair down to her shoulders. No other photographs of her had been released.

Did the police have any idea who had killed her?

By the time classes ended that evening, it was already dark. The florescent lights were on, and the windows reflected the classroom like a mirror. When the last class ended, the other students surged out of the room. In the windows, I could see one immobile figure in the middle of this raucous flood. She had long black hair, and her skin was so pale it was like she was made of snow. Morino Yoru.

Only the two of us remained.

“You want to show me something?” I asked. She had whispered as much to me in the hall after lunch, telling me to stick around after classes.

“I have obtained a photo of a dead body.”

Everyone goes through life in his or her own way. You take a hundred people, you get one hundred ways of life, and all of them find it hard to understand any way of life but their own.

Morino and I had a unique way of life that was well beyond the ordinary. Exchanging pictures of corpses was simply part of this.

She produced a letter-sized piece of paper from her bag. There was a glossy look to the page; it was specialty paper, designed for printing photographs.

Printed on it was a bare concrete room—but the first thing I noticed was how red everything was.

In the center of the photo was an oblong table, the surface of which was red—as was the floor around it, and the ceiling, and the walls … not bright red, but dark red, the kind that wells up in the dark corner of your room after you turn out the lights.

She was placed on top of the central table. “Kitazawa Hiroko?” I asked.

Morino raised her eyebrows marginally. It was easy to overlook, but this was how she expressed surprise.

“I’m impressed you could tell.”

“You got this off the Internet?”

“Someone gave it to me. I was cutting out newspaper articles concerning her in the public library when someone passing by gave it to me. Apparently, it’s a picture of her—but I never would’ve guessed.”

Morino Yoru was a beautiful girl, so boys from other schools would occasionally try to strike up a conversation with her. No-body in our school ever went near her, though; they were all well aware that she had absolutely no interest.

Apparently, someone had seen her gathering strange articles in an unusual place like the library and had used that as an excuse.

She took the printed photo from my hand, looked at it closely, and narrowed her eyes. “How could you know it was her at first glance like that?”

“The girl in the photo … is barely recognizable as human.” Morino whispered this, and I explained that I had simply guessed. Kitazawa Hiroko’s head was on the table in the picture. I had made an educated guess based on the hairstyle and profile.

“Oh,” she said, nodding.

I asked about the person who had given her the photo, but Morino didn’t answer.

I would search for it online when I got home.

I looked away, out the window. There was nothing out there but darkness—deep, never-ending darkness. The classroom was bathed in white light, and the reflected rows of desks floated in the air outside.

“There are two kinds of humans: those who kill and those who are killed.”

“Abrupt. What do you mean?”

It was clear enough that some humans killed other people or wanted to kill people for no reason at all. I didn’t know if they became that way as they grew up or if they were simply born that way. The problem was, these people hid their true nature and lived ordinary lives. They were hidden in the world, appearing no different from ordinary humans.

But one day, they would have no choice but to kill. They would have to leave their acceptable lives and go hunting.

I was one of these people.

I had looked into the eyes of a number of killers. Those eyes would, on occasion, look something other than human. It was a subtle difference, barely noticeable, but in the depths of their eyes lurked something alien.

For example, when normal humans spoke to me, they would believe I was human and treat me accordingly.

But the killers I had met were different. When I looked into their eyes, I felt like they saw me as just another object, not a living human.

“So …”

I looked over at Morino’s reflection.

“You didn’t kill her, did you … ? The girl in the photo has her hair curled and dyed—she looks nothing like the photo in the papers, so how did you recognize her?”

As I listened to Morino, I thought to myself that she was very sharp today.

In her eyes, there was no sign of that alien tinge I had seen in those of the killers I had met. She viewed humans as humans. She would probably never kill anyone. She might have unusual interests compared with other humans, but she was still normal.

Morino and I had many things in common—but on this, we differed. This difference was a fundamental one, the difference between humanity … and otherwise.

She was human, the side that always got killed. I was not.

“There was another picture, after she’d had her hair done. It was used without the permission of her family, so it wasn’t widely circulated. I recognized her from that one.”

“I see,” she said, accepting this.

I went home and turned on the computer in my bedroom. I searched all corners of the net, looking for pictures of Kitazawa Hiroko’s corpse. The air in the room grew stale and stuffy. I found nothing.

I took out the knives I had hidden behind my bookcase. I looked at the reflection of my face in the blade. I could hear the sound of the wind outside, and it sounded like the screams of the people these knives had killed.

It was like the knives had a will of their own and were calling to me. Or perhaps something in the depths of my heart was simply reflected in the mirror of the blade. I looked out the window, at the lights of the city in the darkness mingled with the pale lights of the sky above.

I heard a sound from the knife in my hand that it couldn’t possibly have made. I felt sure it was the sound of the knife growing parched.

I had lied to Morino. There had not been any photographs circulated of Kitazawa Hiroko’s new hairstyle.

i

Every now and then, members of my family had temporarily left the house, such as when my father had gone on a business trip or my mother had gone traveling with a friend; each time, the house seemed strangely emptier than it did when all four of us were living there. When I was away on a field trip, my parents and older sister might well have felt the same way, as if there was something missing, as if I should have been there. When the missing family member returned home, everything would be back to normal, and the four of us could see one another again. The house was the size we were used to, comfortably cramped in a way that allowed me to trip over my sister’s outstretched legs when I passed in front of the TV.

There had been four of us … but now my sister was never coming back, and when we sat at the table together, there would always be an extra chair.

Nobody knew why my sister had been murdered, but my older sister, Kitazawa Hiroko, had died seven weeks ago. Someone had killed her twelve hours after we’d last seen her, and the body had been found in an abandoned hospital on the edge of the city.

I’d never actually been inside that hospital, but I had once looked at it from the outside, after my sister had been discovered. It was a cold place, nothing there but dry grass. The ground was gravel, and the wind turned my shoes white with sand. The hospital was a big, derelict concrete square, looming like a massive cast-off shell. All the glass in the windows was broken, and it was dark inside.

It hadn’t been long after my sister had been found inside that I’d seen the place, so the entrance was sealed with tape, and there were police going in and out.

My sister had been found in there by some children. The police had not released any information, but the room where she’d been found had once been an operating chamber.

The body had been badly damaged, and it had not been easy to identify, but they contacted us when they found her bag nearby. My mother had answered the phone.

It was around noon, less than a day since we’d last seen my sister, and my mother had assumed the call was a prank.

But the body was definitely my sister’s. This was not determined by having those of us who knew her—me, my parents, and my sister’s boyfriend, Akagi—identify her. Instead, they used medical charts and several complicated forensics tests.

The police didn’t release many details about her condition when she was found or how she had been killed. The world only knew that she had been strangled and cut up with a knife of some kind. That was horrible enough for the news to make a fuss about it, but the truth was far worse.

The police apparently decided that the truth about what had happened to her would have a detrimental effect on society, and so they kept everything secret. Even the kids who had found her were ordered to keep silent.

My parents had demanded that the police and doctors show them her body. The authorities were reluctant. It was impossible to make her presentable, and they had decided we were better off not seeing her.

I don’t believe my parents had ever doted on my sister excessively while she was alive. Their relationship with her had been an ordinary one: chatting about TV commercials, arguing about where the newspaper had wandered off to … We were that kind of family. They had never bragged about her, and I had never known how much they loved her until I saw their faces covered in tears when they learned of her death.