The Gate of Sorrows (59 page)

Sometimes Kotaro woke with a start after nodding off on the train, or in one of the armchairs in the cafeteria. He’d feel as if he’d been asleep for a long time, but when he looked at his watch, only a few minutes would’ve passed.

He felt that way now. He’d lost consciousness momentarily. When he opened his eyes again, he was on the rooftop of the tea caddy building.

Someone had been here. The roof had been tidied up; the fragments of the gargoyle statue were gone. Oddly, the hatch leading to the fourth floor was gone. The expanse of concrete was unbroken.

He looked around. The lights of West Shinjuku seemed to press down on him, close enough to reach out and touch. Yet the lights from the skyscrapers on the far side of the district seemed oddly far away, like a distant star cluster.

He heard a thump and turned to see Nakasono sprawled on the roof. A moment later, Galla touched down alongside him.

Kotaro spoke first. “You sure didn’t waste any time showing up.”

He had intended to lure Nakasono into the shadows, as he had with Keiko Tashiro, but Galla was upon them as soon as Nakasono arrived at the appointed spot.

“Next time give me some warning, okay? My head’s spinning.”

Galla gazed at him. The blade of her scythe shone dully. “You have not left your house.”

“Huh? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It is of no importance. What will you do with this one?”

Nakasono coughed painfully and sat up, holding his head. He gazed around in a daze, as though he’d just woken up. When he finally noticed Kotaro, he nearly jumped out of his skin.

“It’s you!”

“Good evening.”

Kotaro walked up to him and squatted down so he could look straight into his eyes. The man slid hurriedly away from him on the concrete, as if he was afraid Kotaro might infect him with something deadly. He was wearing the same jeans and white T-shirt. The apron and the rubber boots were gone. He had changed into sneakers.

Kotaro showed him a big grin. “Got anything with you, like a knife? Some kind of weapon? I figure you wouldn’t meet me in the dark without bringing a little protection.”

If Nakasono had believed Kotaro’s story, killing him would’ve been an option he would have considered, along with trying to befriend him, or feed him some kind of story.

Nakasono shook his head and glowered at Kotaro with indignation. “Where is this? What did you do to me?”

“You’ll find out soon enough. You didn’t bring any money with you? Don’t you want to buy my silence?”

Something happened then, something that had never happened before. He saw the monster with both eyes open. Whorls of black tar eddied and pulsed beneath its skin. In a moment it was gone, replaced by its owner.

“What do you want from me? Who are you?” Nakasono’s jaw was trembling so hard that his words sounded slurred.

“That’s what I was going to ask you. Who are you? Are you the Serial Amputator?”

Again for a split second, he saw the monster. The head facing him had an expression this time. The two black knotholes that served it for eyes, and the larger hole below and between them, were round and dilated. It looked like a wailing ghost in a spirit photo.

“I’m not a criminal,” Nakasono said doggedly. His human version was shaking so violently with panic and indecision—Should he threaten Kotaro? Try to get him on his side?—that he was about to lose control of his bladder. This made him furious, and he looked it.

“Liar. You murdered Saeko Komiya. I’ve got proof.”

“No way. You’ve got nothing.”

“So you think. People like you assume they’re clever. But everything they do is screwed up.”

Instead of reacting with more anger, Nakasono’s face drained of color. His thoughts were easy to read. Maybe he really had left some clues behind. Where? Had he made a mistake? Fear fought the instinct to deny everything, and fear won out completely.

“It was … her fault,” he said haltingly. “She got in the car. She should’ve said no. She made the decision.
He
took her away. I couldn’t do anything about it.”

Kotaro had to know if he was conscious of what he had done. “You said she got in the car. You invited her to get in, didn’t you? ‘Are you going to the nursery? I can give you a lift.’ That’s what you said, wasn’t it?”

“Well, yeah. But—” Nakasono put a hand to his throat. His eyes jerked back and forth in their sockets. “I wasn’t doing the talking.”

Kotaro’s left eye saw it again. He stepped back quickly. The face with the knothole eyes and mouth swiveled away and the other head turned to face him. It was blank and featureless, like the effigy at the gas station. Just below the surface of its skin, snakelike forms coiled and uncoiled ceaselessly.

“He … he likes that kind of thing. He’s always made my life miserable. First it was animals, then he had to start in on people. He likes women. Women with beautiful legs. And if they look a little vulnerable, like they need a little help, so much the better.”

Kotaro watched, fascinated, as Nakasono transformed into the monster and back again several times a second, like the animation in a flipbook. Man, monster. Fake, real. Outer, inner.

“I try to keep him from coming out. I’m a respectable citizen. He’s not. Everything bad is his doing. I’m a good person.”

It was like a scene from a bad psychodrama, complete with bizarre special effects. Nakasono couldn’t stop his diarrhea of the mouth. He just kept repeating the mantra: He’s evil, I’m good. Kotaro broke in cuttingly.

“This monster inside you—does he have a name?”

Nakasono’s mouth snapped shut. Suddenly everything was quiet.

Kotaro wondered what Galla thought of all this. He could sense her somewhere behind him. She must be invisible to Nakasono, or maybe he was too preoccupied to notice her. He sat slumped over with his mouth half-open, looking slightly idiotic.

“I call him the Beast.”

The monster with hooves.

“He says he’s me. He says we’re the same.”

“I see. It must be hard.”

Kotaro was shocked by his own words.
Why should I feel sorry for this piece of shit? He won’t admit that everything is his responsibility. He just keeps crapping on about his split personality.

Nakasono’s face was wet. Kotaro thought it was perspiration before he realized it was tears. The man was crying.

Kotaro stood up and patted his pockets, searching for his mini camcorder. He hadn’t brought it. He realized he was dressed as he would be at home. He’d even forgotten to bring his jacket.

After leaving Katsura Florist that morning, he’d returned to the gas station in Totsuka. The good-natured attendant wasn’t there; the pumps were manned by Tomita, the ten-year part-timer he’d mentioned. As always, there were no customers. Tomita didn’t have much to do, but he quickly recognized the pictures of the van that Kotaro showed him on his camera.

“Ah, right. The florist from Kawasaki. He comes by every couple months, maybe. He said he has a regular customer near here.”

“I went to the gas station where you dumped the body,” Kotaro said to Nakasono. “The attendant remembered you.”

Nakasono looked up at him, eyes brimming with tears. “It wasn’t me. I didn’t do it.”

“So the guy who gets gas there every couple of months isn’t you? It wasn’t you who lifted the key and made a copy? If the Beast inside you is doing all this, where are you when it’s happening? Answer me that.”

No reply. The man just sat there sobbing like a little girl. He didn’t even try to run away.

“Are there other victims?”

Nakasono nodded dutifully.

“You’re the Serial Amputator, aren’t you?”

“No. That woman was the first time I ever killed anyone. I thought I’d get lucky. I could make it look like the serial killer did it. I never did that before.”

The crybaby face was replaced by the two-headed monster. “I wanted to see what it was like.” The voice of the Beast was a thick wet tongue moving in a wet maw.

“You thought people would blame it on the Serial Amputator?”

“Mm-hmm.” Kosuke Nakasono was back. He nodded deeply, appealing for sympathy. “It seemed like the chance I was waiting for. If I cut off part of the body, everybody would think the Amputator did it. It worked, didn’t it?”

Black thoughts eddied in whorls in Kotaro’s head now too.

“Who else did you kill?”

“I told you, I didn’t. I just … I cut them a little, with a knife. He likes women. He likes their blood.” He wiped his nose. “It’s their fault anyway—walking alone or riding their bikes through the park late at night. That’s when the Beast goes hunting.”

Blood pouring from a laptop screen. The image was burned on Kotaro’s retina.
I just cut them a little. He likes their blood.

It made a kind of sense. If Nakasono had attacked several women in his neighborhood, that would explain what Kotaro had seen on the website. A woman walking at night is slashed by an unknown attacker. It was outrageous, but the papers would only run a brief account, with no follow-up. You wouldn’t know from the media whether or not the perpetrator was ever caught. That’s just the kind of crime it was.

“How long have you been doing this?”

Nakasono had to think carefully before answering the question. He wiped his nose and eyes again. “The Beast does it. I can’t remember.”

“What about before the Beast? You must’ve been obsessed with something. Something that brought out the Beast and made it stronger.”

“I collected women’s shoes,” he said without a trace of guile. It was as if he’d said he collected
Pokémon
cards as a child. “When I was a kid, there was a rooming house in our neighborhood. It was a dormitory for nurses. They always left their shoes and sandals in the entryway. I couldn’t resist them.”

This guy’s a certified deviant. I’m listening to the diary of a pervert.

“I didn’t care about underwear. I specialized in shoes. They’re easy to steal, just sitting there in the entryway like that, so I had to make it more challenging. I’d snatch them right after the girl took them off.”

“That’s enough.” Kotaro was tired of struggling with his nausea. “I’ll ask you one more time. Answer truthfully. You killed Saeko Komiya, didn’t you?”

“Y-yes.”

“And no one else?”

“No, nobody. She was the first. Until I tried it, I wasn’t sure I could do such a thing.”

“Where did you kill her? You took her someplace.”

“We have a warehouse. We rent it, near my parents’ house. I’m a native of Totsuka.”

Kotaro almost groaned with disgust. “What did you do with her leg?”

“It’s in the warehouse. I wrapped it in plastic and put it in an oil drum. I’m not like the Beast. I didn’t care about the leg.”

The Beast was in hiding during this exchange. There was no flipbook effect from man to monster. But now it was back with its thick, wet voice. “Anyway, I kept her shoes.”

The black tar whorls under the beast’s translucent red skin revolved with dizzying speed. Kotaro knew it was aroused.

“So you didn’t have anything to do with the murders in Akita and Mishima?”

“Not me, pal.”

The fourth murder was another one-off. As Kotaro stood there dazed, Kosuke Nakasono returned and started muttering compulsively.

“All I care about is shoes. He’s the one with the bad habits, not me. He wants women’s blood. He wants to kill. It’s a bad habit. It’s his fault—”

The whining stopped abruptly. Kotaro realized that this nondescript, middle-aged man was staring at him in wonder.

“Are you a Beast too?”

What the hell? Why is he looking at me like that?

Nakasono looked slightly exasperated, as though waiting for a customer to settle a bill. “I mean, you’ve got huge fangs …”

Kotaro’s eyes widened in surprise as an intense flash of light exploded behind Nakasono’s neck.

It was Galla. She raised her scythe above her head and whipped the blade sideways.

The crescent hissed. Nakasono’s head took flight as his body toppled forward slowly. There was no blood.

Out of the severed surfaces gushed a red-black liquid that was somehow light and insubstantial, like smoke. The streams spiraled around each other in midair before disappearing into the blade of the scythe.

It was a double helix, like a string of DNA.

Galla held the scythe over her head, twirling it like a baton, and began an elegant dance. The red-black torrent chased the blade. Its tip shone with a pure light as the torrents twisted in the air like a charmed snake, drawn to the scythe.

The torrent was powerful, inexhaustible. Galla’s dance accelerated. She traveled the circumference of the roof, returned to where she’d been before and hurled the scythe straight upward. It rose into the air, turning end over end.

The red-black torrents chased the tip of the blade, plunging toward it with greater urgency. The spinning scythe blurred and became a pale disk high above Galla’s head.

Two points of light flashed out from the disk. Galla extended both arms above her head as a scythe fell into each hand. Her long, gauntleted fingers gripped the handles triumphantly. An instant later, the pair of scythes were stowed behind her back.

Each one had a slightly smaller blade than the original, with a shorter handle, but the blades shone with an icy brilliance that waxed and waned like peaceful breathing. They were alive.

The physical manifestations of Keiko Tashiro and Kosuke Nakasono’s cravings had been horrifying and grotesque. But with each new infusion, the beauty and power of Galla’s weapons only grew.

There was a faint noise, like dry leaves rustling. Kosuke Nakasono’s head and body, emptied of craving, crumbled into dust and blew away on a phantom wind.

“His body was little more than a vessel for his cravings,” Galla said quietly. Kotaro nodded, remembering what she had said about Keiko Tashiro.

“Without its contents, the vessel can’t maintain its existence.”

Galla could return Keiko Tashiro’s craving, but she could not be restored to her original state.

“Galla …” Kotaro found himself on his hands and knees. He looked up at the warrior. “I think something’s happening to me. When I was talking to him, I could see his true form with both eyes open. He kept changing from human to monster and back again.”