Black Fairy Tale

by Otsuichi

  I ran into the forest, perhaps on the very same path that Kazuya had taken. I looked back over my shoulder, but I saw no signs that Shiozaki had followed me. Still, inside I felt a shadow chasing after me.

  At last I cautiously emerged from the slope and onto the road. Free now from my terror, I cried a little.

  5

  —An Author Of Fairy Tale

  Miki looked at the half-crushed fly in the palm of his hand. It had been bothering the limbless Hitomi as she sat on the couch in the study.

  “I couldn’t stand it,” she said, relieved. “I couldn’t do anything to shoo it away.”

  It wasn’t that her wounds had grown rotten and attracted the fly. Wounds inflicted by Miki didn’t rot. The fly had just happened to be nearby.

  When it landed on her sack, he’d crushed the insect, its bodily fluids leaving a small stain on the fabric.

  He looked at the smashed fly stuck to the palm of his hand. It still moved.

  “That has to be annoying,” Hitomi said. “You can’t even kill a single fly easily.”

  Miki had two options: crush the pest completely until its movements ceased altogether or throw it outside while it still barely squirmed. He moved to the window.

  “So that fly too will be eaten alive by ants,” said Hitomi.

  Just as he opened the window, Miki froze.

  Cautiously, he stuck his head outside to look around.

  “Is someone there?” asked Hitomi.

  The study was on the rear side of the house. He’d thought he’d heard a noise from the area between the house and the surrounding forest.

  But no one was there. Maybe it had just been his imagination.

  “I just know somebody’s come to rescue me. They must have figured out that you’re a kidnapper.”

  Miki walked out of the study, leaving Hitomi in the room.

  “Where are you going?” she asked. Then, after a pause, she answered her own question. “Oh, that’s right, you’re going to bury the Old Man.”

  *

  Kaneda had died in the cellar a short time before.

  As Miki had been carrying Hitomi to her bed, Yukie Mochinaga said from behind the shelves, “Something’s wrong with the Old Man.”

  By that time, Kaneda was already near death in the corner of the cellar.

  *

  Miki took his new shovel and went outside. He walked along the brick walls to the back of the house.

  He looked around. Whatever he had heard from the second floor window was no longer there.

  The still trees spread out around him. Pushing aside the layers of leafless branches, Miki stepped into the forest. After a short walk, he found a suitable place to bury Kaneda. He stuck the tip of the shovel into the ground. The earth had frozen, but with a little effort he was able to dig.

  *

  Miki first met Kaneda shortly after he had moved into the house—two weeks before he dragged Shinichi and Yukie into the cellar.

  At that time, Miki had not interacted much with any of his neighbors. Because his house was up in the mountains, nobody bothered to come calling on him unless he first sought out company. He secluded himself there and lived as if nobody resided in the home.

  Consequently he didn’t learn until later that Kaneda lived in the area.

  The man had come to the house and looked at Miki as if he were inspecting a strange creature.

  “I didn’t think that anybody lived here,” he said.

  Miki invited him in. He wavered for a bit before passing through the front door.

  “Do we leave our shoes on? This house is like a castle.”

  Kaneda was a shabby-looking man. He was short and he walked with a stoop. Half his hair was gone. He seemed very interested in both how Miki lived and how Miki made a living.

  Outside, rain began to fall. Miki moved his attention from the old man and went up to the study to shut a window he’d left open.

  Just then a scream came from the first floor. While Miki had been away, the old man had gone rooting around in the refrigerator. Inside he’d found rows of ears and fingers lined up one by one like eggs in a carton. Miki had brought these with him when he moved.

  Kaneda was slumped onto his knees when Miki plunged the kitchen knife into his stomach. He bound the old man with a roll of nearby packing tape and led him down to the basement.

  Kaneda looked down at the kitchen knife still sticking out of his own stomach. “I feel strange,” he said in an reverent whisper. Happiness shone in his eyes. He seemed to have forgotten to wonder why he didn’t feel any pain.

  Miki leaned the old man against the wall of the cellar and asked him what he wanted to do—live or die?

  If he wanted to die Miki could cut off his head. From his previous experiences Miki had learned that when he separated the brain and the heart, death was soon to visit. Or the old man could wait for his wound to close. When wounds that Miki inflicted closed, the life force that had come into the body left as well. Then the man could be left for hunger or old age to overcome him.

  Kaneda chose to live.

  Miki made a vertical opening in his stomach. He cut through the skin and split the muscle, revealing the ribs and organs inside. After that the man wasn’t able to say a single word.

  Miki turned Kaneda’s body inside out.

  He cut the old man open and emptied him. He took everything that had been on the outside and switched it to the inside, and everything that had been on the inside to the outside.

  Kaneda’s hands and feet were put on the inside, with his skin and muscles covering them. Miki severed the man’s bones one by one and then, using screws, secured them back in place facing the opposite way. He decorated the bones with Kaneda’s organs, and secured the organs with wire to keep them in their new places.

  During all this, Kaneda didn’t die and he didn’t pass out. There was very little blood—almost subconsciously, Miki avoided the arteries as he worked the scalpel he had brought with him from his parents’ home. Even when blood did start to flow, it quickly ceased. Miraculously, Kaneda’s organs, now exposed outside of his body, retained their fresh sheen and never dried.

  In the end everything from Kaneda’s neck down had been flipped inside out. His exposed organs drooped weakly from the wires where they had been fastened so they wouldn’t fall.

  Kaneda was no longer able to support the weight of his own body, and without any support he would have collapsed. Miki suspended dozens of fishhooks with fishing line from the ceiling of the cellar and on them he hung Kaneda’s organs and wires to force the old man upright. The tips of Kaneda’s fingers and toes poked out from where they had been stuffed into his lower torso; from time to time, they moved with froglike hops.

  Kaneda was still conscious and Miki could read his feelings from his eyes. Awe was in those eyes. Tears were flowing from them, but Miki knew they were tears of euphoria.

  As he evaluated his handiwork Miki realized that Kaneda’s nose and mouth were no longer necessary. He made a vertical incision in the old man’s face and gathered the skin and muscle into a ball at the back of the head. The bones of the man’s skull were now bared, within them only his thoughts and his eyeballs. Only a few troublesome bits of flesh, like the gums, still remained to be shaved off and reattached at the back. Kaneda’s eyelids had been removed, and the two exposed orbs in their eye sockets followed Miki’s movements.

  The old man’s body, suspended by the fishing lines, was able to stand. But the parts above his neck limply slumped into a permanent nod. There hadn’t been anywhere on his skull to hang any of the hooks.

  Miki hammered a nail into the crest of the man’s skull. He knew that even if the nail pierced the brain, Kaneda wouldn’t die, so he used a long nail. The old man’s head shook from the force of each strike of the hammer. After the nail had been driven into the man’s skull, Miki tied one of the fishing lines around it to prop it up.

  Miki decided he had done enough.

  Although Kaneda could no long
er blink, his eyes retained their moisture. He couldn’t speak, but he could communicate his thoughts through the movements of his eyes and his emotions through the twitching of his limbs beneath the organs.

  There was nothing shabby-looking about Kaneda’s new form. Within the clump of organs that hung from the ceiling was a mass as red as the sun. It beat at a steady rate, delivering blood throughout the body. Miki had repaired the severed veins and covered Kaneda’s entire body with them. His exposed heart was imbued with a divine light.

  When he searched the man’s belongings Miki learned that Kaneda had lived nearby.

  *

  After Miki had finished digging the hole, he left the shovel and returned to the house. He still needed to carry Kaneda’s body to the grave.

  He heard the flapping of wings and looked up to see a black bird on the roof of the house. From beneath the skeletal branches of the leafless trees, he felt the raven’s icy stare.

  Behind the house was a shed. The person who had lived in the house before him had left it there. Miki hooked his finger into a dent in the sliding door and muscled it open. That was the only way he could get it to open, probably due to the rotting of the wood.

  The door creaked as it slid aside, sunlight falling onto Kaneda’s feet and hands. Thinking it would be too heavy otherwise, he had stuffed the rest of the Old Man into a garbage bag. He had brought all of it up from the cellar and stored it in the shed.

  The cause of death was a cellar mouse. The rodent had run up Kaneda’s body and gnawed at his exposed heart. By the time Shinichi and Yukie noticed something was wrong, Kaneda’s breathing had already ceased.

  Miki started to drag the garbage bag full of Kaneda’s organs out of the shed.

  But then he saw something out of the corner of his eye he hadn’t seen before and stopped. It rested in the dirt a short distance away.

  Miki picked it up. It wasn’t his. He recalled the presence he had sensed from the window in his study.

  Someone had been there after all. He was sure of it. He trusted his intuition.

  It wouldn’t have been the first time somebody had figured out his crimes—or at least suspected his actions. They secretly snooped around the places he lived. Miki called them visitors.

  A young man had come looking around the house before. Then, as now, he had gotten the feeling he was being watched.

  Did the visitor discover proof of my crimes? If so I’ll deal with it. Just like I dealt with the last visitor who came snooping around.

  The Eye’s Memory — Conclusion

  3

  One day, the girl sat in the chair at the window and said, “I’m afraid . . .”

  She placed two of the stoppers the raven had given her into the two holes in her face and began to tremble. The two eyes were oriented in separate directions; regardless, she seemed to be taking in the sights the round objects had observed.

  “What are you afraid of, miss?”

  He had given her two new bloody presents straight from his beak.

  “The stoppers you bring me—when I use them like this, wondrous dreams fill my head. It’s a marvelous experience for someone like me, someone who can’t see anything. But the stoppers you bring me always show the same frightening thing. I hadn’t noticed it until recently.”

  “A frightening thing?”

  She nodded, and one of the eyes she had placed in a socket plopped out to the floor. She picked it up and put it into the glass jar where she saved all the eyes. The jar was already filled to the brim.

  The raven asked what the frightening thing was. But the girl only shook her head.

  “I don’t know. I only see it for a split second. It looks like a monster, and somehow I know I should be afraid of it. But . . .”

  She changed her fearful expression into a smile and turned toward the raven.

  “Don’t think anything of it. Your presents are always wonderful. I’m alone in the darkness, and the light and color you bring me are the only things that give me comfort. I can never express how much you have done for me.”

  The girl held out her hands to the raven perched on the table. He realized she probably wanted him to hold her hand. There was a scene like that in one of his favorite movies. But her face and her hands were at a slight upward angle. If the raven had been a human and not a bird, her hands might have been around his face.

  “Won’t you tell me your name, mister? Are you really real? I’ve never touched your hands . . .”

  The raven’s heart felt like it was about to break. He couldn’t let her touch him. He was a bird. If the girl ever learned that he wasn’t a person, it would only hurt her.

  “I’m sorry, miss. I cannot hold your hand. Several years ago, while traveling in a foreign land, I caught a terrible illness. If you were to touch me you would become infected. Miss, the second you touched my body you wouldn’t be able to stop hiccuping.”

  The raven flew out the window. The girl said something behind his tail feathers, but he kept on flapping his wings. A sadness clutched his avian breast. The raven couldn’t understand the feelings inside him.

  He turned toward the town in search of a new present for the girl. He had to work cautiously. Lately, the humans had become wary of ravens.

  Many had witnessed the raven’s attacks, and it was known throughout the town that a black bird was picking eyeballs from people’s faces.

  Townspeople were shooting ravens with rifles, and the children, fearful of attacks, all ran to school with their hands covering their eyes.

  The raven himself had even been shot at once, but he’d been lucky—the rifleman had had poor aim. But ever since, whenever he flew above the town he flew high enough that he couldn’t be seen from the ground. And in order to safely obtain presents for the girl, he traveled to faraway towns where the rumors had not yet spread.

  He had even thought of a few contrivances to help him extract the eyes. By chance he had found a wall with a hole in it in a residential area. The hole’s size was just right for a human to peep through. The raven hid on the rear side of the wall and whenever a person walked by he said in a human voice, “Heyyy! You! Stop right there! Please take a look in this hole. If you do it now, you’ll see something beautiful and wonderful on the other side.”

  The raven kept rapt attention for the moment the tricked human put an eye to the hole. Then he thrust his beak deep into the hole from the other side. An hour after the black, pointed tip of his beak dug into the face of a victim, the raven would be rewarded with the girl’s smile.

  Even after they tried to beat him to death with sticks or chase him away by throwing sharp heavy rocks, the raven still went to the humans and dyed his beak red.

  From the tops of trees and the roofs of buildings he observed the humans below, swooping down upon them whenever the opportunity presented itself.

  Suddenly the raven would stand directly before them, spreading his large black wings. The instant their eyes widened in surprise, he jumped at their faces.

  Once, at the end of a long fight, he’d obtained an eyeball while only half conscious.

  He’d accidentally crushed an eyeball in his beak when he had been struck. Another time, he’d swallowed an eye before he’d been able to deliver it to the girl.

  One day, she inserted an eye he’d just brought her and was happier than ever before. Apparently the owner of the eyeball had done a lot of overseas traveling. The girl said that all kinds of fascinating visions flowed into her through the stopper.

  After he left her mansion the raven happened to pass over a graveyard at the top of a small hill with no houses around it. The sun was fast asleep, and the land was bathed in moonlight. Only the lines of gravestones below were white.

  Someone was being buried. A gravedigger was digging into the earth with a shovel. The raven stopped on a withered tree to watch him work.

  A person covered by a cloth lay on the ground next to the grave. The raven recognized the bit of clothing from under the edge of the cloth. It
was the body of a person he had stolen an eye from a little earlier. The person must have died from the shock of having his eye taken out.

  After the corpse was buried in its grave, the raven flew from the tree, beating his black wings. It had already grown dark and only the pale moon was out.

  With each passing day the humans grew ever more vigilant.

  4

  “Hey, guess what?” said the girl one day. “I’m getting surgery.”

  Previously there hadn’t been any techniques capable of restoring the girl’s eyesight, but medical knowledge had advanced at a surprisingly rapid pace.

  “When I can see again,” the girl said happily, “I’ll be able to see what you look like.”

  “That’s wonderful, miss,” said the raven. “Congratulations.”

  But his true feelings weren’t so clear. If the girl’s sight returned, she would be surprised to see that her friend was not human.

  And she’d find out that the things she called stoppers were eyeballs taken from others.

  The raven didn’t care who died if it was for her sake. He knew that his deeds were evil, but sadly, no feelings of guilt formed inside his bird heart.

  But surely the kind young girl would be sad to learn that people had died for her. And she would condemn what he had done. He couldn’t bear it.

  What would I do if she hated me? The fear of it left him sleepless.

  Oh, if only I had been born a human and not a bird! Thought the raven, as the girl before him took in the visions of the stoppers in her eye sockets.

  Suddenly she screamed.

  “What’s wrong, miss?” asked the raven in surprise. The girl answered in a wavering voice.

  “I saw the monster—the frightening thing that always appears at the end of the dreams. It’s black, a black monster. Whenever it appears the vision cuts off. A monster that signals the end. At the end, the black beast leaps toward me. A dreadful face.”