Book Girl and the Famished Spirit

by Mizuki Nomura

  “Do you think this was Aoi’s room?”

  “But I heard that the entire house was renovated when Kayano died so they could rent it out, which would make it odd if the basement, and even these numbers, had been kept exactly the same.”

  “That’s true. So then this room and the numbers on the walls are from after Hotaru and Kurosaki moved in. So it wasn’t Kayano and Aoi who wrote these numbers, but Hotaru and—”

  Tohko broke off.

  Amemiya and her guardian Kurosaki were the only two people living in the house. There were two styles of handwriting on the wall. That led to only one conclusion.

  “Hotaru and Kurosaki… wrote this.”

  “Why would he have done that?”

  Tohko’s face clouded over.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know why he followed Hotaru’s boyfriends and had them hurt or why he had to restrict her and watch her that closely, either.”

  “Could Kurosaki be the one she’s marrying? He can manage her fortune for now as her guardian, but when she grows up, his role is over. So he might be trying to seize complete control of her fortune by marrying her. If that were the case, he would keep those boys from getting close to her so that he could marry her when she’s old enough.”

  It made a kind of sense when I thought about it.

  Tohko’s expression grew even darker. “If that’s true, then… Ryuto is in serious danger.”

  Her soft voice was colored by her concern for her brother. Tohko shook her head as if to cast off some dark thought and said, as though to reassure herself, “No, Ryuto wouldn’t let anyone get him that easily. He’s been making people worry about him for a long time only to come home looking like nothing even happened. It’s infuriating how lucky he is.”

  He was like Tohko that way…

  “First we have to think of a way out of here. Can’t you call for help on that phone?”

  “No, there’s no reception underground.”

  “Then we have to find something to help us escape. Like a hammer or a chain saw or plastic explosives…”

  Tohko opened the desk drawers and peered inside.

  “I’m not quite sure if they’d have dangerous stuff like that in a kid’s room.”

  “Does this look like your average kid’s room? Besides, if you look for something expecting to find it, you will.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “Look, stop standing around and help me.”

  I looked at Tohko’s slender back and her long, busily swaying braids as she issued orders exactly like she always had, and I sighed. This is just how she is, I guess. I started searching the room.

  We found a lighter, so we lit the candelabra and the room brightened slightly. The photos on the walls caught the light of the flames and reflected the flickering creepily out of the darkness.

  Tohko stood in front of the bookshelf and gasped in admiration.

  “Look at this! They have a whole collection of MacDonald children’s stories. At the Back of the North Wind, The Princess and the Goblin, The Princess and Curdie, The Light Princess, The Golden Key—my, my, my. This edition is out of print, you know. I can’t believe I’d run into it in a place like this. The conditions are perfect for preserving it, too. It looks de-lic-ious.”

  Did her love of food trump even a situation like this? She looked like she was about to bend down to the shelf where the old books were lined up and rub her face against them.

  “George MacDonald was a Scottish-born fantasy writer of the nineteenth century. He had a big influence on C. S. Lewis, who wrote The Chronicles of Narnia, and on J.R.R. Tolkien, who wrote The Lord of the Rings, and he discovered Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and even helped get it published! C. S. Lewis especially was such a huge fan that he featured MacDonald as a character in his stories. He praised MacDonald’s Phantastes in his autobiography. Life and death, light and dark coexist in MacDonald’s stories. The instant you turn the page, the magical chain of words echoes like sublime music and tints the world around us in the rosiness of dawn or the sepia tones of nightfall.

  “MacDonald’s stories are like bread baked by fairies. It’s smooth on the tongue and fragrant with a light, creamy texture, and even though you expect it to be like something you’ve eaten before, there’s something completely new about it, and the taste it leaves behind is so subtle!”

  As I listened to Tohko pour her heart out, I remembered the book Amemiya had been reading in the library.

  That book, the inside of its cover packed with numbers, had also been by MacDonald.

  Then Tohko murmured curiously, “What’s this? There’s one book missing. They don’t have The Day Boy and the Night Girl. That’s the only thing they need to complete this collection. Oh—but here’s The Light Princess and Other Stories. This is a collection put out by a different publisher from the complete works’ edition of The Light Princess, and you’d think The Day Boy and the Night Girl would have been included with it. Hmm. That’s too bad. They only needed one more book.”

  “Amemiya has it.”

  Tohko whirled around.

  “What? Hotaru has it? How do you know that?”

  I told her how I had run into Amemiya in the library. And about how she had wished she could escape to the world of light like the girl in the book, and how sad she had looked when she said it. And then I told her about my conversations with Kayano in the chemistry lab.

  “So you weren’t hitting on a girl after all.”

  “Kotobuki misunderstood.”

  “I see… I’m sorry for doubting you.” Tohko looked meek. “But I can’t believe Hotaru would say something like that! And there’s something about what Kayano told you that bothers me, too…”

  She muttered, frowning even more intently. Tohko took each volume of MacDonald’s complete works from the shelf and started flipping through them, checking for writing.

  “Hmm. Not here, either, and there’s nothing strange about this one. Ack, ack! My eyes are catching on the words! Oh—this part is translated differently from the one I read. Mm, this part looks so good…”

  “Try not to eat it.”

  “Urgh. I’ll fight it.”

  I wondered if she could really be trusted. I was still a little uneasy, but I started searching in the closet.

  “By the way, what did you give Maki for telling you where the Kujos’ housekeeper worked?”

  I had been wondering about that. Tohko was clearly panicked when she answered.

  “Wh-wh-wh-wh-what do you mean?”

  “Maki gave you information, right? I’m sure it wasn’t free.”

  “I—I don’t think that matters right now…”

  “Did you get naked for her?” I asked, throwing a glance behind me.

  Tohko whirled around.

  “Come on, of course I didn’t do that! I just… dressed up like a waitress with a headband that had cat ears on it and carried a tray and said stuff like, ‘Have you decided what you want, meow?’ That’s all!”

  My mouth dropped open. Tohko’s ears and cheeks flushed visibly.

  “Meow? You said that? And wore cat ears?”

  “Don’t… don’t make me remember it!”

  Tohko spun away from me and shuffled through the books haphazardly.

  “Ugh. It’s definitely in my top three lifetime humiliations. I will never, ever ask Maki for anything again.”

  I saw her shoulders and braids quivering. It was obvious how much she regretted it. And how much Maki had probably enjoyed it…

  There were older style dresses hanging in the closet, and as I pushed aside each one, I sighed.

  “I’m amazed that you would accept a condition like that, but Maki is taking her joke too far. When I asked her where you’d gone, she grinned and told me you’d gone to see Ellen Dean, which is totally cryptic, and then we find out she’s supposed to be in a love triangle with Amemiya? I can’t figure her out.”

  I heard Tohko turn around.

 
“Ellen Dean? That’s what she told you?”

  I twisted my head around and saw a complex expression on Tohko’s face. Something had clearly caught her attention.

  “Yes.”

  Tohko lowered her eyes and flipped through a book. She seemed to be thinking about something else, though, her eyes never moving over the page.

  I pulled a huge flat case out of the closet, and as I tugged at the stiffened zipper, I asked, “What is Ellen Dean anyway? It’s not the housekeeper’s real name, is it?”

  The zipper refused to open.

  “No, it’s not. Ellen Dean is—”

  “Ack!”

  The zipper suddenly gave way and the bag fell open grandly to either side, spilling out painting supplies, brushes, and a sketchbook. So it was an art case.

  “Oh my gosh! Are you okay?”

  Tohko had jumped at my shout, too. I scrambled to gather up the art supplies and then picked up the sketchbook.

  “I’m sorry I scared you. It looks like this is Amemiya’s sketchbook. It says ‘Hotaru Amemiya, 1-B’ on the back. Our school doesn’t use letters for the classes, so this must be from middle school.”

  Flipping through it, I saw many drawings of flowers. Charcoal sketches had been colored in with watercolors. It looked like Amemiya was pretty talented: Her pictures were so precise it was like looking at a photograph.

  “Oh—”

  “What is it?” Tohko came closer and peeked at the sketchbook. Then her eyes widened just as mine had.

  It was a drawing of a boy around ten years old with disheveled chestnut-colored hair and eyes like glass beads. His clear eyes were painted brown with a hint of blue over them, a mysterious color that felt isolated.

  When I turned another page, there was a picture of the boy slightly older, fourteen or fifteen. I turned the next page. He had grown again and looked seventeen or eighteen now.

  “This boy… Could it be Aoi?”

  “But this sketchbook belongs to Amemiya, and if she’s the one who drew these pictures, that means she would have known about him in middle school.”

  “Hmm… that’s true.”

  Tohko closed her eyes and sank into thought.

  I turned the next page.

  There was a sheet of paper folded in half between the pages. When I opened it, I saw the alphabet. At the top it said “From the K in Kayano,” and beside the letters K, L, M, N, and O were the numbers one through five.

  From the K in Kayano

  A B C D E F G H I J

  K-1 L-2 M-3 N-4 O-5

  P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

  I remembered Kayano telling me that her name was a hint, and my heart beat faster.

  “Tohko, this looks like the guide to Kayano’s number code.”

  “Let me see.”

  From the K in Kayano… Tohko must have realized what that meant, too. She took a red marker from a drawer and stabbed it at the paper, writing numbers next to the letters.

  K-1 L-2 M-3 N-4 O-5

  P-6 Q-7 U-8 R-9 S-10

  T-11 U-12 V-13 W-14 X-15…

  If K was one, L was two, and M was three, then P was six, Q was seven, and going back to the beginning, A was seventeen and B was eighteen.

  At the end, a little apart from everything, the apostrophe was twenty-seven and spaces were twenty-eight.

  We filled everything in and then took the paper over to the wall, tracing each number out with a finger and filling in the right value.

  17(A)-5(O)-25(I)-28()-1(K)-17(A)-15(Y)-17(A)-4(N)-5(O)—25(I)-27(’)-3(M)-28-()-18(B)-17(A)-19(C)-1(K)-28()-1(K)-17(A)-15(Y)-17(A)-4(N)-5(O)—25(I)-28()-2(L)-5(O)-12(V)-21(E)-28()-15(Y)-5(O)-11(U)-28()-22(F)-5(O)-8(R)-21(E)-12(V)-21(E)-8(R)-28()-17(A)-5(O)-25(I)—13(W)-21(E)-27(’)-2(L)-2(L)-28()-9(S)-10(T)-17(A)-15(Y)-28()-10(T)-5(O)-23(G)-21(E)-10(T)-24(H)-21(E)-8(R)—

  “I’m back, Kayano—”

  A shudder ran through my body, as if cold water had just been dumped over my head.

  These words were written by Kurosaki and Amemiya… And the photos of Kayano taped to the wall and the pictures in the sketchbook… When I pieced it all together, an outlandish thought occurred to me.

  What if Aoi Kunieda hadn’t died like everyone thought? What if he were still alive? What if he had changed his name and come back for revenge? What if he had made Amemiya a substitute for her mother since she so closely resembled Kayano?

  Tohko was staring at the wall, her face ashen. Her lips moved and a strangled sound made its way out of her.

  “You know… I always suspected. I thought I’d read a story like this before… I thought the setup was very similar to the passionate, excrutiating, uncompromising story I knew, but I didn’t have enough to be sure. But… but if he’s Aoi—if he intended to get revenge on the man who married Kayano and everyone around them, then this story is exactly like—”

  I caught the smell of lamp oil, then gasped and looked at the door.

  A thick liquid was seeping in under the firmly shut door.

  “Tohko, look!”

  “Eek! Wh-what is that? A leak? A flood?!”

  “No, it’s lamp oil.”

  “What?!”

  Someone was on the other side of the door, and we heard the loud splash of liquid hitting the floor.

  It was clear what they intended to do, and we paled.

  “N-no! Stop!” Tohko shouted, beating against the door, but there was no answer. Instead, we heard a flame burst into life and smelled something burning.

  “Ow!” Tohko jerked her hand away from the heat of the doorknob.

  “Watch it! Get back, Tohko!”

  I grabbed her shoulders and pulled her back just as orange flames crawled under the door like a swarm of earthworms.

  She brought the tank full of oil to the basement and splashed its contents over the walls and floor.

  When she had seen them arrive from a window on the second floor, her heart had tightened and her body had shaken feverishly.

  A girl wearing a sailor suit and a boy in a short-sleeved shirt and pants. They looked like the boy and girl she had seen in old photographs.

  They’re here!

  Aoi and Kayano—!

  They had escaped the darkness, deeper than the abyss of space, and come back from the distant past as ghosts to stalk the world of the living!

  Aoi and Kayano came in through a door on the first floor, looking for her. They would find her and tear her soul from her body and try to inhabit the freshly emptied vessel.

  Thunder pealed, the wind shook the trees to the point of breaking, and huge drops of rain pelted the window.

  What could she do? What was there to do? She had to hide. Had to run away.

  Her stomach knotted painfully with merciless force; her bony fingers had been fit stiffly together.

  Ah, their footsteps were moving away. Going into the room in the basement. To their secret room.

  The sky lit up and thunder rumbled. Pierced by the light, she flew from the room as if by divine guidance and ran without an umbrella through the rain, pouring down on the world like a muddy river, to the shed outside, where she caught up a tank of oil.

  She would end it all. She would burn them up completely this time, these people who had twisted her destiny.

  Trudging barefoot through the tepid mud, she panted wildly, clutching the tank in her arms, and headed toward the basement.

  Kill them—kill them—she would kill them both.

  As she splashed the oil, she heard a voice crying, “Stop, stop!” It would avail them nothing to beg for mercy. They had died once. There was nothing wrong with sending them back to hell.

  She dropped a match onto the oil-soaked floor, and at last she could smile in satisfaction.

  “Good-bye, Aoi. Good-bye, Kayano.”

  “Nooo!”

  Tohko tore the blanket off the bed and tried to beat the flames down with it. I beat at them with a pillow, coughing painfully. There were tears in Tohko’s eyes and she coughed, too.

  “This is really bad, Toh
ko.”

  “Agh! They’re going to burn this complete collection of MacDonald children’s books! There’s a new translation out in paperback, but I’ve always dreamed of eating the entire twelve-volume set in hardcover! I refuse to watch something so delicious get turned to charcoal right in front of me!”

  “Why don’t you worry about yourself burning to a crisp instead?!”

  Why was I making jabs at Tohko at a time like this?

  The small room filled with smoke, which stung my eyes and made them water. I was coughing too much, hurting my throat. I couldn’t breathe.

  Was I going to die here with Tohko?

  Tohko was still fighting to put out the fire. Swinging the blanket down with a desperate look in her eye, she yelled, “Nooo! They can’t burn up! Books aren’t any good when they’re well-done! You can’t cook them that long!”

  I was utterly astounded by her devotion to food.

  All at once, we heard the sound of several pairs of footsteps rushing down the stairs, accompanied by a jumble of sounds and voices, like an avalanche of pounding water, and the sounds of a jet lifting off and people shouting.

  The door opened, and I was dumbfounded to see Maki appear, holding a fire extinguisher and wearing her school uniform.

  Why was she here? Was she stalking Tohko or something?

  Tohko’s eyes popped out, too.

  Maki turned the fire extinguisher to the burning floor. The chemicals spewed out with a loud bwoooosh! and deposited a white foam.

  Behind Maki were two adult men, working efficiently to put out the fire. One of them looked familiar. It was the guy who’d driven the limousine when Maki came to get us from the police station two days ago.

  When they’d put out the fire, Maki told the other man to bring down a first aid kit and towels; then she looked at us. She quirked her sensual lips into a bewitching smile.

  “That was a little close. Now how do you intend to show your appreciation?”

  Chapter 7 – The Tale of the Famished Spirit

  Night had not yet fallen. We were in the workroom in the music hall and finally felt like ourselves again.