Goth (27 page)

Inside, it was filled with the hum of people’s voices as they ate their dinners. The waitress led us to a booth at the back. The partitions and wall were covered in silver decorations, which glittered in the lights above.

“How are your parents?” Itsuki asked.

I shook my head. “Not good. They never leave the house.”

I told him what it had been like since my sister died: the dust in the corners, the TV on but the lights off, how they always forgot to lock the door.

“So they still aren’t over Hiroko’s—?”

“Yes, especially since they both saw … her body.”

He nodded. I’d mentioned at the funeral that her condition had been far worse than the news had reported.

“Will they ever be better?” I murmured, picturing their blank faces. I couldn’t imagine them recovering from that. All I could see was their slumped shoulders, the spark of life forever gone.

“What about Akagi?”

“He came by a number of times after the funeral, but recently …”

Akagi, my sister’s boyfriend … he was one of those left most devastated by her murder. He attended the same college as her; although I wasn’t completely certain, I thought he’d probably met her there. She’d brought him home with her, and I’d spoken to him a number of times. He’d stayed with my parents at the funeral, supporting them.

“Maybe I’m the one who killed Hiroko,” he’d said after the funeral. “We had a fight the day before she died, and she ran out of my room, and …”

The next day, she’d been found in the abandoned hospital. Akagi was the last person to see her alive.

If they hadn’t fought, she never would’ve met the killer, and she never would’ve died—that’s what Akagi told me as he covered his face with his hands.

“I’d better be going,” Itsuki said. It was time for his train.

“I’m going to sit and think awhile.”

“Okay, so …” He took a step away, and then he turned back. “If you have anything you need to talk about, please call me.”

As I watched him leave, I thanked him silently. I sat alone, sipping coffee, watching the family across the aisle. I didn’t want to be too obvious about it, so I watched them out of the corner of my eye.

They were here eating dinner, a young couple with their kids, infant daughters.

They reminded me of my own family. The younger sister was too young to speak, and she kept her fingers in her mouth, watching everything wide-eyed. As I glanced sideways at them, I met her eye.

I remembered my sister.

When we were children, the two of us had gone on a long walk together. It must’ve been a warm spring day. I had just started elementary school, and the guardrails and posts towered over me.

We climbed a long hill, passing house after house. At the top of the hill was a forest. We looked down at the city below from the shade—tiny little houses, as far as we could see.

There was a bird in the sky above, with long white wings. A big river ran through town, so I decided that it must’ve lived there.

It glided on the wind, drifting elegantly, its big white wings barely moving. I watched it for ages without ever growing bored.

My sister looked at me and smiled, flashing her teeth. Her canines always jutted out, even after she got her big teeth in, and we often played vampires. But I hadn’t seen my sister smile—hadn’t seen her canines—for an awfully long time.

When she’d dyed her hair, I wondered aloud if I should do the same.

“Don’t, it would look awful on you,” she’d said. I couldn’t take this as kind advice. There was an edge to her voice; she’d snapped at me.

Every time she did something like that, I felt like she didn’t want me around. Why had she died? I couldn’t believe anyone had hated her enough to kill her. And what was it she’d wanted to talk to me about before she died?

A shadow fell on my table. I looked up, and a boy in a black uniform was looking down at me. It was the boy who had passed in front of the store, walking with the girl named Morino.

“Kitazawa, you were waiting for me to leave school.”

I was not terribly surprised. I felt it was only natural he would suddenly appear like this. I didn’t stand up; I just looked up at him and asked, “Did you kill my sister?”

For a moment, he said nothing. At last, his lips parted quietly, and words emerged: “Yes, I killed her.”

His quiet voice faded from my ears, fading into the soft hum of the restaurant.

iii

The boy sat down across from me, where Itsuki had been sitting. I couldn’t move—it was like I was paralyzed. I just stared at him. But even if I had been able to move, I wouldn’t have stopped him from sitting, I wouldn’t have stood up and screamed.

“I killed her.”
The boy’s words echoed through my mind. I had known it was possible, but my mind couldn’t deal with the words as easily as my ears had. It was like too much water had been poured into a potted plant: his voice got stuck between my skull and my brain, the bulk of it sitting there unabsorbed.

He looked at me and cocked his head. Then he leaned forward slightly, his mouth moving. It seemed he was asking if I was okay. I could see his lips mouthing the words. He reached across the table and tried to touch my shoulder. My voice finally broke free just before he touched my clothes.

“Don’t!”

I pulled back against the booth, getting as far from him as I could, pressing myself against the wall. This was not a conscious movement but an instinctive one.

Abruptly, all the light and noise of the restaurant turned back on. No, they didn’t turn on—the music playing and the customers’ voices had never stopped in the first place. They simply hadn’t reached my eyes and ears. But to me, it felt like time had stopped and then started moving again.

Apparently, I had spoken loudly enough that the family across the aisle heard me. Both parents were frowning in my direction. When I met their gaze, they looked away awkwardly, returning to their conversation.

“Are you okay, Natsumi?” the boy asked, taking his arm away and sitting back on his seat. I resumed my original position and shook my head.

“No.” My chest hurt. I wasn’t crying, but there were tears in my voice. “Nothing’s okay …”

My head was overheating. I couldn’t figure out if I should be afraid of him or furious with him, but I was sure that the boy sitting across from me was more than I could handle.

As rattled and flustered as I was, he remained utterly calm, as though he were observing me scientifically, like I wasn’t a human but an insect under his magnifying glass.

“Natsumi, I don’t want you to scream,” he said without the slightest flicker of emotion in his voice, like he had no heart at all. I knew the thing across the table from me was very frightening indeed.

“Why did you kill her … ?”

This boy would never laugh like Itsuki or be surprised if someone unexpectedly dumped her problems on him. He was like a tree stripped of branches and leaves, reduced to the simple essence. A strange way of putting it, but that was how he felt to me.

“I don’t know why I killed Hiroko, not really,” he said slowly. “But it had nothing to do with her. All reasons for her death lay with me.”

“With you?”

He said nothing for a moment, apparently lost in thought—but he never took his eyes off me. Finally, without saying a word, he jerked his chin at the family across the aisle.

“You were looking at them a moment ago?” The infant girls were laughing at each other.

“You were remembering the past, thinking about how much those girls are like you and Hiroko were? It brought back fun memories of your own childhood, and you stared at them the way you would a precious treasure.”

“Stop it …”

I wanted to clap my hands over my ears to stop from hearing his voice. It was like he was climbing into my mind without even taking off his shoes.

“I have a sister myself. A dozen years ago, we must’ve gone out to dinner, much like that family. I don’t remember it, but we must have done so. Does that surprise you?”

With each word he spoke, my heartbeat grew faster. It was like I was rumbling down a slope into an abyss, going faster and faster.

“Look at that little girl—carefully, though, so she doesn’t see you looking,” the boy said softly.

I took my eyes off him, glancing sidelong at the little girl in the seat across from me. She was sitting in the booth, her innocent eyes staring into the distance, her little fingers clinging tightly to her mother’s clothes. I didn’t know the girl, didn’t know her name, but I found her lovable anyway.

“Natsumi, do you think that girl will kill someone, ten years from now?”

My heart froze. I turned back toward him to protest, but before I could say anything, he continued.

“She might kill her parents, or her sister. It isn’t impossible. She may already be planning to do so. Perhaps she’s only pretending to be childish. Perhaps she really wants to grab the knife off that hamburger plate and stab it into her mother’s throat.”

“Please … stop it. You’re insane.” I lowered my head, closing my ears tightly, fighting his words. Each word turned to pain as it reached me, like the words were slapping my cheeks.

“Natsumi, look at me … I’m kidding. That child most likely won’t ever kill anybody. Everything I just said … described me.”

I looked up and stared at him. He shimmered—there were tears in my eyes.

“That’s the way I was born. When I was as small as that girl, I didn’t understand that, but by the time I started elementary school, I knew I was different from other people.”

“What are you talking about?” I stammered.

He explained, not looking the least bit annoyed. “About how I was destined to kill. That’s the only way I can look at it. Just as a vampire has no choice but to drink human blood, I have no choice but to kill people. My fate was already decided the moment I was born. I wasn’t abused by my parents and scarred mentally. I have no ancestors that were murderers. I was raised in a very ordinary household. But whereas ordinary children play alone with imaginary friends and pets, I spent my time staring at imaginary corpses.”

“What are you?” I could no longer see him as human. He was something much more horrible, much more horrifying.

For a moment, he was quiet. Then he shook his head. “I don’t know. I’ve thought about why I have to kill people, but I’ve found no answers. And I’ve had to keep it secret, pretending that I’m normal. I’ve been very careful not to let anybody see inside my heart.”

“Not even your family?”

He nodded. “My family believes I’m an ordinary, normal boy. I’ve been extremely careful to carve that position out for myself.”

“Your … whole life … is a lie?”

“Meaning that I could only believe that everything else was a lie.” I didn’t understand this.

He explained further, “I couldn’t believe that the conversations my family had or the friendly attitudes of the people I knew were genuine. I was certain there had to be a script somewhere—and once, when I was very young, I searched the house for it. I wanted to read the same words everyone else was saying. But there was no script. The only thing that ever felt real to me was death.”

“That’s why I long … for human death
.
”
I saw him mouth those words.

“That’s why my sister … ?”

“That night, I was out walking, and I saw her sitting in front of a vending machine. She’d been crying, so I asked if she was all right, and she flashed her canines and thanked me.”

He killed her because he’d liked those canines, he said. He claimed it was a twisted kind of love.

As I listened to him, I felt like I was tied to the restaurant booth. I looked at his hands where they lay on the table: white hands protruding from his black uniform sleeves, thin fingers, neatly trimmed nails. Those hands were clearly human hands. But seven weeks ago, those same hands had killed my sister.

“Because you liked her canines?”

He nodded, and then he took something out of the bag next to him: a small rectangle, small enough to fit in the palm of his hand.

“I set them in resin. I thought you might like to see.”

He set the thing down on the table. It was a clear block. Inside were twenty little white things in a row. Two curved rows, one on top of the other, were suspended in the block.

“They were all over the room, and it took a while to find them all.”

Teeth, fixed in resin so that they looked like they were floating in the clear block—like the dentures of an invisible man, each tooth in exactly the right place.

I recognized those jutting canines.

I heard children laughing. The shiny decorations glittered in the shop lights.

Next to my sister’s teeth, the families peacefully eating dinner around us seemed like something out of a dream.

Weirdly, I wasn’t scared, only sad. Nobody had told me she was missing all her teeth.

He put the block back in his bag and took out a notebook. “But all that is beside the point. Here’s the second tape.”

He opened the envelope, turning it upside down. The cassette tape fell out onto the table.

“Voice 2: Kitazawa Hiroko,” said the printed label on the front.

“There’s one more tape.”

“Let me hear it.”

He stood up and turned his back on me.

“Think about that when you finish the second tape.”

After he left, I couldn’t stand up for a good long time. I left the tape sitting on the table, remembering my sister’s teeth in that clear block.

I took a sip of my coffee, which was cold. The girl at the table across the aisle was looking at me. There was ketchup on her mouth. She was staring at my hands with her pretty little eyes. The rattling noise the cup made in my shaking hand must have confused her.

On the train heading home from the restaurant, I sat curled up on the seat. I must’ve looked terrible; the middle-aged man across from me kept looking at me. I was afraid he was sneering at me. I was scared the other passengers or the conductor knew about the tape in my pocket, about my conversation with that terrifying boy, and that they were going to have words with me about it.

When I left the train, I ran down the dark residential streets. When I reached my house, the lights were on inside. These days, there was no telling if my parents would actually notice that the sun had set and respond by turning on the lights.