Kotobuki took unsteady steps through the front gate and rang the doorbell.
There was no answer.
Next she pounded on the door with a fist—again and again, gritting her teeth, tears beading at the corners of her eyes.
Still she didn’t hear the voice she’d hoped to from behind the door.
“Forget it. You’re going to hurt your hands.”
I grabbed her hands from behind to stop her. My own heart felt like it was ripping apart.
At the same time, the word hypocrite tumbled through my mind and threatened to knock me to the ground.
Kotobuki turned her back on me, hung her head, and wept softly.
Kotobuki was silent until she got home.
She stopped in front of a three-story building and murmured, her voice barely audible, “This is it.” There was a sign for a dry cleaner’s store on the first floor.
“So your family are dry cleaners, huh?”
She nodded and again murmured, “My grandma does it.” She had stopped crying at least, but her eyes were bright red and she was sniffling.
“Is it okay that you’re so late coming home?”
“It’s fine. Um…I’m—I’m sorry about what happened,” she said, her voice hoarse, and then she went up the stairs to the second floor.
She looked down at me from there with a terribly fragile expression.
She looked like she wanted to say something, but she didn’t say it. Her face fell slightly, and she disappeared behind the door.
The instant our eyes met, I thought I saw guilt surface in Kotobuki’s face.
That feeling swirled around inside me in a pitch-black mass and made it hard for me to breathe.
“You’re both hypocrites.”
“You hate getting dirty, so even though you don’t feel that way at all, you act nice and build up expectations.”
It happened just as I was starting to walk down the dark, freezing road to go home.
I saw the shadow of a person standing on the other side of the street. It looked like he was staring at the door Kotobuki had just disappeared behind.
The clouds covering the sky broke, and moonlight illuminated his profile for just an instant.
Omi?!
Just as I was trying to get another look, the shadow turned its back and started walking.
I followed quickly after him. That was Omi, wasn’t it? What was he doing there? Had he been following us?
At that thought, the hair on my back stood on end and a chill came up through my legs.
The shadow walked steadily on.
Following him, my own steps grew quicker. My breathing became strained, and I panted more. My warm, cloudy white breath caressed my cold cheeks.
Before I realized it, I was standing frozen in a pitch-dark alley that the light of the streetlamps didn’t reach.
The shadow became one with the darkness, and I couldn’t find a shape that looked like Omi anywhere.
No—but I was sure he had turned this corner! Where did he disappear to?!
In my confusion, I heard a sudden, furtive singing.
It was a low voice that sounded like it was weeping.
A voice like a ghost’s filled with bitterness and sorrow.
What the—?! Where was this voice coming from?! In front of me? No, behind me? No, from over there? No, it wasn’t there—it was from over there. No, not there, either!
The voice seemed to be echoing from every direction, one after another, and gripped by the terror that was crawling up my spine, I stood frozen.
Hadn’t there been a scene like this in Phantom of the Opera?
Raoul, who had gone into the shadowy kingdom below the opera house to rescue Christine, is bewildered by the illusions made by the Phantom, and he descends into madness.
This voice did not belong to a person.
It was the voice of an angel! The voice of a monster! It was the dirge of the masked man who lived straddling heaven and earth—the Phantom!
It dug its fingers into my soul, and I lost all composure at the diabolical singing that slowly closed in around me. My throat burned, I couldn’t breathe, and my fingertips started to get numb.
Oh no—I was having an attack.
These had plagued me often after Miu jumped off the roof, and sweat broke out over my entire body, as if the Phantom’s voice had called it forth. My head whirled, and hoarse, reedy breaths escaped my throat.
My knees buckled, and I fell to my knees on the cold pavement.
The singing became a sly chuckle. It sounded like a man’s voice, like a woman’s voice, like a young boy’s laugh, and like a young girl’s laugh.
Inside of my eyelids rose the image of Miu, wearing a middle school uniform and her hair pulled back in a ponytail, and she turned to me with an empty smile, then fell away backward.
That image repeated again and again like a kaleidoscope.
“It’s not that you don’t notice.”
“You just don’t want to know.”
A voice flecked with poison accused me.
“You’re just pretending not to see it. You hurt her and chased her to her death. You’re a murdering hypocrite.”
No—no—no.
My entire body quaked, and the intervals between my breaths grew markedly shorter.
Miu fell away.
Fell away—
After a little while, I guess I lost consciousness.
When the ring of my cell phone woke me, I was lying on my stomach, my arms and legs thrown out, in a dark alley that smelled like rotting food.
A lighthearted Western song I liked played from the pocket of my coat.
I lifted my stiff body and got out my phone with frozen, numb hands and looked at the screen.
Ryuto…
“Oh, Konoha. You got a computer on where you are?”
Ryuto said it out of nowhere in a hurried manner.
“Sorry, I’m outside. I’ll get back in about an hour, though,” I answered, resting a hand on the wall of the alley as I got to my feet unsteadily.
Feeling was slowly returning to my skin and to my heart. Had that singing been a bad dream? I felt like I was standing on the boundary between illusion and reality, and my mind was still a little clouded.
“Oh. Then I’ll send ya the file. Take a look when you get home.”
“What did you find?”
“I actually tried lookin’ for Yuka Mito a little myself. I thought I might be buttin’ in, but if ya don’t solve your problems before Christmas Eve, that’s bad news for me.”
Ryuto dropped a bomb that blew away the cottony mist billowing up inside my brain with that one.
“Yuka’s been on a members-only site since this summer under the name Camellia. She’s got customers there. Looks like she mighta been an underage escort.”
As soon as I opened the door to my room, I started up my computer without even changing my clothes first and opened the file Ryuto had sent me. The homepage of a shady website trooped down the screen, along with a user agreement and girls’ profiles.
Ryuto had told me, “They noticed the unauthorized access and locked me out partway through, so I couldn’t see everythin’.
“The Camellia that’s number sixteen on that list is Yuka.”
I felt a fraying anxiety rising up in my chest, and holding my breath, I scrolled down the screen.
No. 16 Name: Camellia.
The instant my eyes fell on those words, my throat clamped tight and I felt dizzy.
The words of Mito’s classmates resurfaced in my mind, alongside a numbing pain.
“I saw Mito get into a car with a man in a black suit before! He had his arm around her, and it looked really fishy, and he called her Camellia.”
No…it had to be a coincidence!
No matter how I denied it, my anxiety remained, and my heart pounded almost painfully fast.
I read through the profile without so much as blinking. The occupation field said, “I’m a high school girl at the
S Music Academy,” and the comments field said, “I want to be an opera singer. I’m looking for a nice old man who’ll hold me tenderly.”
Sweat broke out, soaking the hand that gripped the mouse. Was this really Mito?
There was no denying it—this was an illegal dating service. Had Mito been soliciting men for an underage escort service here? Had she made money by meeting with anonymous hordes of men?
I followed the words on the screen even farther, hunched over the computer intently.
Hobbies: Listening to classical music, shopping
Favorite food: Strawberries
Favorite place to go on a date: Theme park
Favorite author: Miu Inoue
Miu Inoue?!
I felt as if I’d been punched in the head.
Thrust suddenly upon my spirit, which was already strained to its breaking point, the name gave me a shock that bore exponentially more force than usual.
I grew feverish, as if my entire body was engulfed in a blazing fire, and my thoughts came to a complete halt.
Her favorite author was Miu Inoue.
Her name was Camellia.
It had never ended. I was still lying in the alley and had never woken up. What was this nightmare?
It’s not true! It’s not!
Dad! Mom! Satoshi! Why?! Why did you do that?!
It isn’t true, is it? We talked on the phone about me going home for New Year’s and spending the time together! You said you were both working hard, so I shouldn’t push myself, that I should cut back on my job since the recital was coming up and I should take care of my throat so I didn’t get sick. You said you’d send me the dried persimmons I like so much. That you wanted to see me soon, that it would be wonderful to live together as a family again. That it would be all right definitely someday. You both laughed! You said Satoshi had made friends at his new school and was having fun. That I should keep working on my singing.
So then why?! Satoshi was still in middle school!
I worked so hard so that we could live together.
The first time I met a customer, they told me all I had to do was eat dinner and talk a little, but then they took me to a hotel and did that to me, and I was mortified, scared, hurt; it was awful.
It was like I’d been stained black, and I couldn’t look anyone in the eyes anymore, and whenever I thought of how I would have to keep living in fear, keeping this a secret, it made my head spin, and I wished I could die.
I threw up in the bathroom so many times. I scrubbed at my body with soap and a towel until my skin was raw, but the memory that I did that never faded.
Even so, I’d gotten money. I thought that with that money, Dad wouldn’t have to get beaten up by those loan collectors or have to grovel to them, that we could pay for Satoshi’s school, too.
That was the only thing I could do. I thought it would be okay if I stopped being normal, as long as we could all live together and be happy like before.
There were a lot of gross customers after that, too, and I was really miserable and nauseated, and every day it was like a little sliver was carved away from the edges of myself, and foul-smelling black muck gradually piled up on my body, and I thought I was going to be buried in it, that eventually I would be exposed, and all I could do was flinch.
When there was a story on the news about the arrest of police officers who had engaged underage escorts, Nanase told me, “I can’t believe those girls, either. They’re just sixteen! I’d never be able to do that with someone I didn’t care about.” I thought my heart would stop.
When he held me, it hurt me and I felt guilty, and I accidentally pushed him away and made him sad.
But whenever I think about how I’m doing it for you guys, I can tell myself it’s still okay.
And besides, there was an angel with me. I got to meet an angel.
So even if it was torture, it was fine. I could bear it.
I can’t sing hymns anymore, either!
I can’t believe in God!
Even if I only pray to have my heart made pure, it accomplishes nothing. God will not smile on my corruption. He’s chased me into a world of darkness.
In any case, I’ll probably lose him and Nanase.
Did my angel experience such despair?
I have to sing. I have nothing left but that so that I’ll stay on my feet and not choose death when he and Nanase leave me.
I mustn’t cry! Sing! Keep singing!
Not a song praising the Lord, but a song calling for battle.
Chapter 3—The Angel Watches from the Shadows
The next morning, when I ran into Kotobuki in the classroom, she greeted me curtly.
“Morning.”
Her eyes were still red, and she was acting awkward. But I may have been just as strained as her.
“Morning, Kotobuki…”
Yuka Mito was an underage escort.
Did I need to tell Kotobuki that?
A bitter lump rose in my throat, and I failed to find anything I could say next. But then Kotobuki hesitantly held a bundle of papers out to me.
“These are copies of Yuka’s messages…You said yesterday you wanted to see them.”
“Th-thanks.”
“It’s just the most recent ones, and I…deleted all the personal stuff…”
She looked down, troubled, and fumbled for words.
“I’m just giving them to you in case, but if you don’t read them, that’s fine, too.”
“No, I will.”
Our fingers brushed slightly as I took the copies from her, and Kotobuki flinched.
That made my chest squeeze with pain again.
Should I be staying so close to her? I still didn’t have an answer to that.
The truth jabbed at me anew, mercilessly pursuing me, crushing my throat tight.
I struggled to get my uneven breathing under control and asked, “Hey, did you ever ask Mito what her job was?”
“She worked at a family restaurant. Her shifts were at night, so she would gripe about the gross customers she got sometimes.”
“…Oh. Do you know what restaurant it was?”
“Nope. Yuka told me not to come ’cos she was embarrassed. If I’d known this was going to happen, I wish I’d asked her about it, though.”
Kotobuki bit her lip.
“Well…”
There was a hitch in my throat that made it hard to talk. Was I managing to look calm? My face wasn’t tense, was it?
“What sorts of books did Mito read usually?”
“Huh?”
Kotobuki looked up, suspicious.
“I don’t have any big reason for asking. I was just wondering if there was anything in particular besides Phantom of the Opera…”
She must have thought it was a weird question. There was puzzlement in her eyes.
“She liked foreign children’s stories… She read those a lot. Little House on the Prairie or Little Women…Oh, she also liked Sarah, Plain and Tall.”
What about Miu Inoue?
It got as far as the back of my throat, and then I swallowed it.
Last night the name that I’d seen on the computer—Camellia—and the words that listed her favorite author as Miu Inoue had plastered themselves inside my head like a curse.
Miu’s book had been read mainly by teens and twentysomethings and had become a record-breaking best seller, and its movie and TV show had both become hits as well. Even if Mito did read Miu, it wasn’t so unusual. It must have just been a coincidence.
Even so, I couldn’t help but react to that ill-fated name that had taken everything from me.
I desperately composed myself and said, “This feels pretty different from The Phantom of the Opera. Actually, I haven’t had the time to finish it yet. Right now I’m at the part where Raoul sets off underground the opera house to rescue Christine.”
“…Oh,” Kotobuki responded listlessly. Then she turned her gaze down, as if conflicted, and bit her lip, then mumbled, “I…wonder if
maybe Raoul never existed. That maybe all that stuff about a boyfriend was just in Yuka’s imagination.”
Surprised, I asked, “Why do you think that?”
She fiddled restlessly with her nails in her lap, and then Kotobuki replied in a gloomy voice.
“Because it wasn’t normal…the fact that she wouldn’t tell me his name, but there were a bunch of times that it seemed like she was happy and gushing about him. But then all of a sudden she seemed like she didn’t want to talk, or like it hurt her to say anything more. It was especially bad lately… It was like she didn’t want me to ask about him. And then these last two months or so, whenever I was talking to Yuka on the phone, another call would come in almost every time…”
“From her boyfriend?”
“Yeah.”
Kotobuki frowned.
“Then Yuka would say, ‘Sorry, it’s my boyfriend. I’ll text you later.’ Then she’d hang up. But she didn’t used to act that way. I guess he didn’t like her working in a restaurant at night because it was too dangerous. Then Yuka told me that he would get worried and call her. It was like he was stalking her…”
Something ominous slowly filled my heart.
Maybe he’d learned of Mito’s secret.
Then he might not have been able to stop himself from calling her all the time to check what she was doing…
Or if he was a product of Mito’s imagination as Kotobuki suggested, then might those calls have been from Mito’s “job”…?
“…But the last time you talked to Mito on the phone, didn’t she tell you that she was looking at a Christmas tree with him?”
Book Girl and the Corrupted Angel Page 6
