Goth (8 page)

After that, we each had someone to talk to. Our relationship was a little too cold to call friendship—but when I spoke to her, it was the only time I could stop acting, letting my face remain devoid of expression. It gave the muscles of my face a well-earned respite. There was a comfortable disinterest to our relationship that allowed me to express the inhuman and unemotional sides of myself.

†

The world had long since forgotten the Wrist-Cut Case by the time summer vacation ended and second semester began.

The light in the classroom was yellow as the sun began to set. A breeze came in the open windows, toying with Morino’s long black hair as she stood in front of me.

“So this movie used real freaks as actors, but the story was even stranger: the freaks were carrying around some sort of shrine …”

As she spoke, I murmured the movie’s name. Morino looked ever so slightly surprised. Her expression barely changed at all, but I could tell.

“Right.”

It was a movie directed by a German woman. Of all the people I knew, only Morino and I would be interested in something so strange.

“Do you remember the Wrist-Cut Case?” I asked.

“The one from last spring?”

“If you had been one of the victims, what would you be doing now?”

Morino stared down at her hands. “It would be very hard to put on a watch. Why do you ask?” she said, looking puzzled.

She didn’t know the man she’d grappled with had been the wrist cutter … and I still stared at her hands from time to time. Perhaps it was better that Mr. Shinohara had not cut them off. Perhaps they were more beautiful alive—and Mr. Shinohara might have cut them in the wrong place.

“No reason,” I said, and I stood up to leave.

The reason I wanted her hands was because she had those beautiful scars, from when she had tried to kill herself.

i

Dripping blood, my opponent attempted to flee into the grass—but it was easy for me to circle around in front of it. The four-legged animal was covered in wounds, and it was already too exhausted to move quickly.

I thought it was time to put it out of its misery. It no longer possessed the will to fight back.

I took the animal’s throat between my upper and lower jaw. I felt its neck bones break in my mouth. The sound and sensation traveled up my jawbone. The animal slumped, hanging limp in my mouth.

I showed no mercy. I didn’t want to do this, not really—but Yuka wanted me to, so I killed my opponent.

I opened my jaw, and the animal’s dead body fell from my mouth, slumping limply to the ground. There was no light in its eyes, and it had gone completely quiet.

I howled.

Yuka and I had brought the four-legged animal here, under the bridge. Yuka had stopped in front of a house as we’d passed, gazing through the gate and sizing the animal up. When I followed her gaze, I’d seen the animal looking back at us.

Yuka had looked at me and said, “This is tonight’s prey.”

It was not as if I understood the words Yuka spoke—yet I knew what she was saying.

This ritual happened occasionally at night. I’d lost track of how many times. We would find our prey in town, taking it to the secret place under the bridge that only Yuka and I knew about. And then Yuka would make me fight.

I obeyed her orders. I ran across the ground as she commanded. I leapt on my opponents, knocking them down. The four-legged animals I fought were all smaller than me, so if I slammed into them, they would fall over, hurt. Blood would splatter their fur, and their bones would break.

When I won, Yuka would smile, looking very happy. We couldn’t communicate with words, but her feelings flowed through me like river water, so I always knew when she was happy.

Yuka had been my friend since I was very small. When I first met her, I was with my brothers, who had been born with me. I was sleeping nestled up against my mother, and Yuka peered down at me with interest. I can still remember that now.

Half my howl vanished into the night sky. The other half echoed low under the bridge. The bridge was right overhead, blocking most of the sky—and when I looked up, I could see nothing but inky darkness.

The river was wide and the bridge large. On the riverbank around the bridge, there was a sea of tall grass, which you had to push your way through to get anywhere. But below the bridge, there was a small clearing without grass. The sunlight didn’t reach here, which left a circular clearing—where we were.

Yuka and I had found it one summer day, discovering that you could stand in the middle and be surrounded by walls of grass. It had been our secret place to play ever since.

But now it was where Yuka made me fight.

I didn’t want to bite and kill the animals, but Yuka wanted me to. When she gave me those orders, her eyes were dark as night, with no light at all.

Yuka had been sitting at the edge of the circle, watching me fight. Now she stood up.

It was time to go home. I knew what she was thinking. We had a connection that was beyond words.

I picked up the corpse in my mouth and went to toss it in the hole that was in the grass a little way from the clearing. When I dropped it in, the tiny body tumbled down along the edge of the pit. It wasn’t that deep a hole, but the bottom was dark and hard to see. I could hear the body hit bottom.

The hole had been there when we found this place. Someone might have dug it, planning to bury something. It was too dark to see, but the bottom of the hole was now filled with the corpses of animals Yuka had made me kill. If you stood near it, there was a horrible stench.

The first time we carried out this ritual under the bridge, Yuka had ordered me to throw the body in the hole after. I hadn’t yet learned to fight, and I was almost as badly hurt as my opponent in the end. When I’d faced my opponent, my mind went blank, and I had no idea what to do. But now I was good at fighting. I could kill my opponents calmly. Yuka was satisfied with how strong I had become.

The hair that had been ripped out when I bit my opponent filled my mouth. I swallowed it and then headed for the water, pushing my way through the grass until it opened up before me.

The forest of grass abruptly gave way to a vast expanse of running water. The water was so black that it looked less like a river than a giant pool of darkness. The lights on the bridge above cast reflections in the water from there to the opposite bank.

I washed the blood off my mouth in the river, and then I returned to where Yuka was waiting.

“Time to go.” Yuka uttered speech that held that meaning as she headed for the stairs.

The stairs led diagonally up the bank to the bridge. To get to the stairs from the clearing, we had to push our way through grass. I ran to her side, and we walked together.

As we neared the stairs, I saw some grass move—the tips of the long grass stalks swayed slightly. For a moment, I thought someone was standing there, and tensed. I listened closely, but it seemed it was just the wind.

Yuka had already reached the top of the stairs, where she was waiting for me. I bounded up the stairs after her, leaving our secret place behind.

†

When school let out for the day, I met my classmate Morino in front of the station. There was a big bus terminal nearby and a square with fountains and flower beds. There were also a number of benches and a number of people sitting on them, killing time.

Morino was sitting on one of those benches, away from the road, in the shade of some bushes. She would always read when she had time—but not today. Her book lay closed next to her on the bench.

Morino was leaning forward, her head down and her face hidden behind her hair, which acted like a veil.

As I approached, she raised her head and gazed at me. Her skin was pale as porcelain, untouched by the sun. There was a small mole just under her left eye. Her features were as lifeless as a doll’s. All she had to do was stop moving, and she could easily work as a mannequin.

She pointed silently at the ground. There was some dirt at her feet, on the white paving stones. When I looked closer, I saw that it was moving.

Ants were taking apart a butterfly and carrying it away. In the ants’ jaws, a butterfly wing stood up like a yacht sail, casting a shadow on the stones. Morino had been staring fixedly at that.

There was no particular reason why we arranged to meet here. It would have been equally convenient to leave school together, but Morino was a little too well-known. The way she looked and acted, and the rumors that swirled around her, meant that people often turned to look as she went past. She stood out, and I didn’t want to be seen in her company too often.

But Morino never worried about anyone around her, treating everyone like so much static. It was as if her nerves that were responsible for worrying about what people thought had burned out long ago. Or perhaps Morino simply didn’t notice how much attention she attracted. She could be a little oblivious sometimes.

“Let’s go,” she said, standing up and walking away.

I headed in the same direction. She had promised to guide me to a used bookshop she frequented.

“It’s a very small shop. I’m the only customer.”

When I’d asked the name, she’d told me—but I’d never heard of it. She had given a general description of the shop’s location, but that had not helped much either. So I had had her draw a map on the board—but the lines she had drawn resembled no place on Earth and were impossible to parse. And as she’d added yet another line of chalk, she’d been at a loss to explain how the bookstore had come to be constructed in the middle of a river. Therefore, we’d agreed that she would take me there directly.

As we walked, the shops gave way to rows of houses. The sky above was clear, and the sun beat down on our backs. The road ran straight ahead of us, middle-class homes on either side of us. Morino strode forward unwaveringly; she must’ve walked this way often.

“Have you heard about the pet kidnappings?” I asked.

“Pet kidnappings?” she echoed. Apparently she had not.

As we walked, I explained. Neighbors of ours had noticed their pet dog was missing that morning, and I’d heard my parents talking about it at breakfast.

“Not the first time,” my mother had murmured. I always watched the news, paying close attention to any strange cases, but my mother knew more about the local gossip.

According to her, about twice a week—on Wednesday and Saturday mornings—people had been discovering the animals they kept outdoors were missing, meaning that the animals had been stolen late Tuesday and Friday nights. All the stolen pets had been dogs. As the rumors spread, more and more people began keeping their dogs inside at night.

Morino listened with obvious fascination. When I’d told her everything I knew, she asked, “Anything else?” I shook my head, and she began to mull it over.

I was a little surprised that pet kidnappings were a source of interest to her. She had never once mentioned dogs, cats, or even hamsters, so I’d assumed she had little affection for animals.

“What does the kidnapper do with those things?”

“Those things?”

“You know, the stinky things with four legs that make a lot of noise.”

Did she mean the dogs?

Morino stared into the distance in front of her, muttering, “I can’t understand why anyone would gather a bunch of those things together. Is he training some sort of army? Baffling.”

It sounded as though she were talking to herself, so I didn’t respond.

“Wait,” she said, suddenly stopping dead in her tracks.

I stopped as well.

There was still a fair amount of ground ahead of us before the road ended in a cross street. I looked at her, waiting for some explanation for our abrupt halt.

“Quiet,” she said, holding up one finger.

Apparently, her feelers were so attentive right now that just my looking at her was enough to draw that response. I could see her ears perking up, trying to catch a sound.

I couldn’t hear any unusual noises—just a dog barking somewhere. Otherwise, it was an ordinary, quiet afternoon. I could feel the warmth of the sun on my back.

“Nope, we can’t go any farther in this direction,” she declared.

I looked ahead of us. There didn’t appear to be any construction blocking our way, and an old man on a bicycle was even pedaling past us.

“So much for the bookstore. This road used to work …”

I asked about her reasoning, but she only shook her head ruefully in response. Then she began heading back the way we had come.

Morino had a strong tendency to follow her own instincts, regardless of what anyone else said to her. She didn’t blend in with the rest of the class and paid no attention to anything people said to her. She spent the bulk of her time alone, without expression, so for her to look so upset and defeated … it must’ve been something significant.

I glanced down the road again. There were houses on either side of the street, and just inside a gate up ahead, I could see a doghouse—a brand-new one. Had they just bought a dog? I could barely make out the sound of the dog breathing inside. I listened closely for other sounds, never dwelling on the dog at all.