Black Fairy Tale

by Otsuichi

  Suddenly, pain burst through my left eye, turning it into a throbbing ball of heat. I felt like my eye might explode at any moment.

  Something similar had happened when I’d been watching TV. That program had also been about missing children.

  I remembered. The girl in the newspaper is the same girl I saw on TV. The girl in the picture stared right at me. I couldn’t turn my eyes away.

  My left eye twitched. The capillaries constricted, and it felt like my bloodstream reversed course.

  Something dreadful lay inside the jewelry box in the eye. The memory of it was trying to get out. No, I thought, I have to look away from the picture.

  But my left eye, as if magnetically locked onto it, stared at the picture of the girl.

  She had a youthful face and large eyes.

  The eyes blinked.

  It started. The box of memories opened, images pouring from my left eye. Hitomi’s picture had been the key, and it had brought forth the semi-transparent images stored within. This time, as always, I couldn’t look away until the projected film reached its natural end.

  I closed my eyes and images filled my head, enveloping me in the memories of what Kazuya had seen.

  A girl’s face was a short distance from Kazuya. It was Hitomi. She was lying on the floor on the other side of a window. She stared blankly in his direction, then blinked again.

  The scene panned around, passing over his surroundings. He was standing next to a large house deep in a forest. The walls of the Western-style house were made of blue bricks. Kazuya was either at one of the sides or the rear of the building.

  His view shifted back to the window between him and Hitomi Aizawa. The window was at his feet, low to the ground. It must have been the window to a cellar. It was rectangular and small and the glass was dirty. He looked through the window, down at the girl on the cellar floor. The room was dark, so he couldn’t see much. Only the girl’s face was illuminated by the light from outside.

  In the library, I watched the dream in disbelief. Why was the missing girl inside the cellar? Why was Kazuya looking at her?

  At first, I didn’t know what to make of it, but soon a hypothesis floated into my head. Maybe Hitomi Aizawa had been kidnapped by someone and confined in the cellar. If so, then Kazuya had witnessed something important.

  I stood frozen in the library, unable to move. The view in my left eye turned from the window and focused on the surrounding bushes. He was nervous, and I felt like I could almost hear his breath. He must have been afraid that the owner of the house would find him.

  Was the owner of the house the one who had shut Hitomi Aizawa inside the cellar?

  The space between the bushes and the walls of the house formed a small path. The house had two floors. Leafless trees clustered around the house. It was winter, or at least near it.

  At some point Kazuya had taken a large flathead screwdriver into his hand. Perhaps he had been keeping it inside his jacket pocket. He kneeled on the ground and started to inspect the edges of the window frame.

  I know what he’s doing. He’s there to save her.

  The window was built into the wall, and he couldn’t see any screws to remove. Taking one more cautious look around, Kazuya wedged the flat tip of the screwdriver in between the window and the wall. It looked like he was going to try to pry it open.

  But his hand stopped. He’d noticed something. One second later, I noticed it too.

  Hitomi Aizawa, lying on the floor of the cellar on the other side of the window, was looking at him with the side of her face flat against the floor. There was something peculiar about her clothes as well. She wasn’t actually wearing clothing, just a cloth sack. She had been put into the sack in such a way that her body only showed from the neck up. The end of the sack was tied shut at her neck with a string.

  The size of the sack was wrong. An ominous feeling came over me. The room had been too dark for me to notice at first, but the sack the girl had been put into was clearly too small—not nearly big enough for a person’s body to fit inside. I supposed she might have been able to scrunch her knees up to her chest, but I quickly rejected the theory, because if that were true, the bag would have had more of a bulge. The body of the girl in my left eye could only have been the size of a torso.

  Could it be? I rejected the thought. If she had no limbs, then she could fit into that sack. I felt immediately disgusted with myself for even considering it. I drew my hand to my mouth.

  The viewpoint in my left eye moved violently. The vision rocked up and down as Kazuya ran from the window. He turned the corner of the house and hid himself there. He pressed his body against the blue brick wall, seeming to listen for a sound. For me there had been only silence, but I knew Kazuya had heard the sound of footsteps and fled from the window.

  The blue bricks of the house filled the upper half of my vision. The corner of the wall was just before my nose, beyond that was where Kazuya had been standing. A shadow fell across the ground. Someone was there.

  I was too terrified to breathe.

  Kazuya stepped backward to escape the shadow. My vision moved, and he looked down to put the flathead screwdriver back into his jacket pocket.

  That was when he met his misfortune. The large screwdriver caught on the edge of his jacket and slipped from his hand. I watched the tool as it fell through the air.

  A concrete gutter lined the base of the outer walls. The gutter was open, lidless. Rotting leaves formed a layer at the bottom. If the screwdriver had landed in the leaves, it might not have made a sound. But it struck the exposed concrete edge before rebounding inside. The dream was silent, so I heard nothing, but the sound of metal colliding with concrete rang inside my head.

  My viewpoint rocked violently. Kazuya broke into a run toward the forest behind him and down a tree-lined slope. The earth was piled with leaves. He ran through them.

  He took a swift glance over his shoulder. In the center of his choppy, shaking vision I saw a figure in pursuit. I couldn’t make out its face or its height. But it was there.

  Shuddering, I clutched at the newspaper shelves.

  Kazuya ran through the gaps between the tangled trees, ducking under branches and scrambling over exposed roots. Twigs caught at his clothes as he sprinted past, and he shook them free without breaking his stride. The trees were endless. Just as he’d pass one, another would take its place. It felt like it would go on forever.

  After a time, the trees changed. The shorter, barren trees gave way to tall, upright, pillarlike conifers. He wove his way between the trees and ran on.

  The image in my left eye flipped top over bottom. The slope had suddenly turned steep, and he must have lost his footing. He rolled down the hill, scattering fallen leaves into the air. Suddenly, he broke through the edge of the forest. Kazuya rose to his feet. Beneath him was asphalt. A road. Right in front of his eyes was the rapidly approaching bumper of a white car.

  In the library, I screamed. My left eye pulsed fiercely.

  Kazuya was struck down by the car. How hard, I couldn’t tell from the images. But the view remained motionless on the pavement. After rocking and shaking so much, the viewpoint was still, as if drained of its power. His eyes were still open.

  The fever faded from my eye. The image dimmed, and the memory ended like the lifting of a fog. But in the last moment, on the slope Kazuya had tumbled down, I thought I saw a figure hiding among the trees, out of sight of the car’s driver.

  The scene in my left eye ended completely. I was crying. That had been the moment Kazuya had died. He’d been hit by a car and died. But it had not been a normal death.

  He saw her, the kidnapped and captive girl. Unless I had been mistaken, Hitomi looked as if she had no limbs. In the picture I’d seen on the TV, she had been whole.

  Kazuya had witnessed where she was being held. He’d tried to save her but had been discovered by the kidnapper.

  I despised the kidnapper. Whoever it was might just as well have murdered Kazuya. But K
azuya’s death was probably assumed to have been a traffic accident. The thought was unbearable.

  How devastated was Saori? How many dreams had been cut short?

  I stood frozen in place. After the memory had finished playing, my left eye returned to normal, just another part of my body, as if the fever that had come over it hadn’t been real.

  I have to go to where he died. In that house nearby, Hitomi Aizawa is still trapped.

  Part 2

  1

  —An Author Of Fairy Tale

  Miki had a dream in which people rained from the sky.

  He stood atop a building in a city where he could look out far into the horizon. He saw clearly the figures of the raining people.

  They wore black suits, every one, men and women alike. From high up in the sky they poured down endlessly. Above him, people formed black stars against a cloudless purple sky. The people, possibly asleep, showed no signs of fear.

  Miki looked at the city below. Countless bodies had struck its roofs and streets and soaked them in red. Bodies, twisting on impact, piled up throughout the city. But none had fallen upon the roof where Miki stood.

  He awoke. He had fallen asleep at his desk while revising his manuscript. Sheets of printed copy paper were scattered on the carpet. He started gathering them up.

  “Are you awake?” the young girl on the couch asked with a tilt of her head. “You were asleep for an hour. I got bored.”

  Miki neatly stacked the papers on top of his desk. It was an antique, with solid wood and intricately carved detail work, left in the house by the previous tenant.

  He looked out the window. The sun had already begun to set. The forest spread black along the base of the crimson sky. He shut the curtains. They too had been left behind by the last person to live there. They were black and thick like a theater curtain.

  “Tell me a story,” the girl said as she wriggled on the couch.

  “And not that one about the raven bringing eyes to the girl. I’m tired of that one, so tell me another.”

  She was talking about “The Eye’s Memory,” a story of his that had been published some time before. He often read it to her when she grew bored.

  “Tell me about when you were a child,” she continued. “Don’t you think that’s a splendid idea? It’s been a while since you brought me here, and yet I still don’t know anything about you.”

  The corners of her mouth turned up into a smile. “Is Shun Miki even your real name?”

  He shook his head. Miki was only his pen name.

  He sat down on the couch and put his hand on the girl’s head. He adjusted her hair and she closed her eyes. Miki thought back upon his past.

  *

  He was born the son of a doctor. His father was a surgeon and a large hospital was their home.

  The first thing Miki always remembered when asked about his childhood were the patients who had been hospitalized in his home. Young Miki liked to run his toy cars up and down the hospital hallways and he frequently saw, through the open doors of the rooms, patients lying on the hospital beds, staring out their windows—some with their bodies wrapped in bandages, others with their limbs suspended in slings. When they noticed him playing with his toys, they stared at him with eyes that might as well have been hollow pits.

  When he was in grade school, Miki often went bug catching with some of the neighbor kids. Near his house was a piece of land overgrown with weeds and left vacant by whoever owned it, where the children would search through grass up to their eyes for crickets and grasshoppers. When he was in fourth grade, one of his friends came up with an idea for a new game: killing grasshoppers by sticking them with needles. His friend impaled countless numbers of the insects onto a wooden board and showed them to him. The legs of the freshly pinned grasshoppers twitched for a time, then stilled.

  Miki wanted to try it for himself. He put a captured grasshopper onto a board and stuck it through the abdomen with a sewing pin he’d brought from home. But the grasshopper didn’t die.

  He didn’t think anything of it, assuming that by pure chance he’d missed the vital parts of the insect’s anatomy. And so he’d stabbed some more pins into the bug.

  He stuck three pins into it—one in the head, one in the thorax, and a third in the abdomen. Yet the grasshopper continued to move, its six legs scrambling at the air as good as new. Its antennae waved about and bodily fluids leaked from where the pins stuck into it, but its squirming didn’t stop.

  With the piercing of the twelfth pin, the grasshopper finally died. Stuck onto the board, it no longer resembled an insect—just a clump of pins.

  Miki tried it with other insects and got similar results. He threw a stag beetle against a wall over and over, but it wouldn’t die. Even with its legs detached and its exoskeleton fractured, its horns kept moving.

  He assumed that this was just the way insects worked. With a pair of scissors he cut a cicada into two halves, and he grabbed a beetle by the horns and plucked its head right off, but for a time, their legs and wings continued to move. They just wouldn’t die. Insects are stubborn creatures, he figured.

  But eventually Miki came to learn this wasn’t normal, that none of the other kids thought as he did. Maybe I just happened to catch bugs that were tougher than the rest, he reasoned. But when he looked down at his hands, he had the feeling that something else was occurring.

  I have a mysterious power.

  One time, a girl Miki’s age was admitted to his parents’ hospital. Their eyes happened to meet through the open door of her hospital room, and from that point on, Miki often went to visit her.

  Miki didn’t have very many close friends. Even the friends who used to catch bugs with him had found more interesting playmates and then grown distant. So each day when he came home from grade school, he went to talk to the girl.

  When Miki would enter her hospital room, her face would light up, and she’d wave a bandaged arm. Both of her arms ended at the elbow. She’d lost them playing alongside some railroad tracks. Just as an express train passed by, she had thrust her arms out onto the tracks.

  “I just wanted to see what would happen,” the girl explained, looking at her bandaged arms. “The instant the train passed, it burst open my arms from the elbow down.”

  Miki enjoyed their conversations. He made up stories from his father’s speeches and his mother’s lectures.

  *

  One day, Miki had been telling one of his stories to the girl when an emergency patient was rushed to the hospital. The two children stood in front of the door to the operating room and peeked inside to see how bad the patient’s injuries were.

  Miki’s father and several nurses were preparing for the surgery. After a moment, the children caught a glimpse of the patient on the gurney. He was a young man, with no discernible injuries, and he looked asleep.

  But during the operation he died.

  “He was hit in the wrong spot,” Miki’s father said to his son, explaining that the patient had only fallen from his bicycle and hadn’t suffered any external injuries.

  “What’s the wrong spot?” Miki’s amputee friend asked. “As long as that spot is okay, could someone keep living?”

  Miki asked, “Is it possible that somebody could have the subconscious ability to avoid the wrong spots while injuring someone?”

  “Gosh, I wonder,” his friend said, trying to cross her arms. Since they ended at her elbows, the gesture wasn’t very effective.

  *

  Miki captured grasshoppers and tried to discover which injuries killed them. At first, they died quickly, comparatively speaking. His subjects, pierced with a great number of pins, died within a minute. But as he repeated the experiment, he felt they were staying alive longer.

  A group of stag beetles, the lower half of their bodies crushed, lived for a week. But squishing or cutting off their heads killed them immediately.

  He dissected a frog, and he cut open the belly of a fish and removed the organs from its body. He retur
ned them to the water, and for a time, they went about just as they had before. The frog kicked through the water, pulling an increasingly lengthy trail of guts behind it.

  He also tested mammals. With a trail of food, he lured a stray cat to an unfrequented area behind the hospital, and when the feline came close, he chopped it neatly in half.

  The cat kept on living and Miki learned something new. His test subjects didn’t seem to feel any pain from the injuries he inflicted on them.

  The cat hadn’t noticed that it had been cut into two pieces. Even though there wasn’t anything below its stomach, it still tried to lick its back paws. There wasn’t much blood, and it still experienced thirst and hunger. The food it ate passed right out of its exposed stomach. Over a period of a week, it gradually lost its strength, eventually dying as though it had lain down to sleep.

  He tried it on another cat. That time it lived for two weeks, and without any food or water.

  Miki wanted to share his findings with his short-armed friend. She had been released from the hospital and lived in another school district a thirty-minute bicycle ride away. Miki often went there to play and talk with her.

  Miki parked his bike in front of her house, went up to the door, and rang the bell. Her mother answered the door and said, without much sadness apparent in her voice, “She died the day before yesterday.”

  The mother went on to explain, “She fell down the stairs. She used to love sliding down the banister, so I’m sure that’s what she was doing. If she slid down it and lost her balance, she wouldn’t have had a way to grab on. She must not have realized that until it was too late. She was always forgetting that she didn’t have anything past her elbows.”

  *

  In the fall of his junior year in high school, Miki committed murder for the first time.

  It was a cold and cloudy day. Miki was riding his motorcycle along a mountain road not far from his home, headed nowhere in particular.