Black Fairy Tale

by Otsuichi

  “Sumida!”

  He walked to the foot of the stairs, looked up at me, and tilted his head. “Have you had enough?”

  “Get your car! We need to go to Kyoko’s house!”

  His eyes widened in surprise.

  “I’ll explain later!”

  He didn’t seem convinced, but he ran toward the front door.

  As I flew down the steps, I thought, This isn’t the house Kazuya saw. There’s another brick house. And if I’m right, Saori is in danger. Just this afternoon she said she was going to Kyoko’s.

  I have to hurry. I leapt over the last few steps in one bound.

  8

  —An Author Of Fairy Tale

  Miki wondered, What had Hitomi’s expression been on the other side of the window?

  Had the visitor noticed her missing limbs? She’s a bizarre sight, wriggling inside her sack.

  Likely apprehensive of what—or who—was near, the visitor had quickly stifled any reaction.

  Miki took a step toward the visitor. Just then, from his pocket came the faint noise of metal objects jostling each other.

  Inside his pocket were his car keys and a gold watch—the one the visitor had dropped behind his house.

  Just a tiny sound, but enough to reveal his presence.

  He heard the visitor take off running.

  Miki came out from the corner where he had been hiding.

  He needed to chase. He needed to silence that visitor.

  9

  I cleared the stairs and aimed for the front door. Sumida would be about to start the car, and I needed to get to him as quickly as possible.

  Then came something I hadn’t expected in the least.

  If my ears hadn’t picked it up, I might never have stopped there.

  I thought I’d heard someone singing.

  I halted at the bottom of the stairs. The voice was incredibly faint, just barely audible—a woman’s voice, trembling and unsteady. The lyrics seemed to be in English.

  Maybe there’s a television or a radio on in one of the rooms. I should just ignore it and hurry to Kyoko’s house. But despite those thoughts, part of me wanted to find the source of the singing.

  That’s it. I just need to calm down and think it through.

  Even if Kazuya had been wearing blue sunglasses, that doesn’t meen the red brick would appear blue. It’s a simple concept . . .

  When I walked away from the staircase, the singing grew softer until I could no longer hear it. The voice was loudest when I stood in front of a cabinet at the rear of the staircase.

  The old wooden cabinet had been placed in the recessed wall behind the staircase. I pressed my ear against the sliding door of the cabinet and closed my eyes.

  The song sounded like it came from behind the cabinet.

  I was almost positive. Something is back there and this cabinet has been put here to hide it.

  A tremor shot through my body. Any thought of going to Kyoko’s house was long gone.

  There was nothing inside the cabinet. Had it had been left empty to make it easier to move?

  It was light—light enough for me to move when I put my muscle into it. I slid it aside, revealing a hole in the wall.

  The wall seemed to have originally been covered in the same milky-white wallpaper as the rest of the house, and all but one section of it had peeled off. The hole was about as big as a person, its edges damaged brick.

  I saw hinges behind the edge of the brickwork, and I got the impression the bricks had been meant to conceal what was in fact a doorway.

  Through the opening, I saw a narrow stairway leading down. A dim light hung from the ceiling, illuminating the stairway—long and narrow like the throat of some creature.

  The singing was coming from below. I was certain that the sound wasn’t coming from a radio or a TV but from a person.

  It’s a cellar. There’s a cellar after all.

  Cautiously I went down the stairway one step at a time. I was so nervous I could barely breathe, and I could feel my heart beating furiously.

  The walls on either side of the staircase were exposed brick, and I kept my hands on them to keep from falling down the steps.

  As I neared the bottom the air grew dank. Humidity coiled around me and pressed in at me from all directions, sticky and thick enough to choke me, the darkness a liquid flooding the room.

  I emerged from the stairway into a dark room. The ceiling was crossed with support beams for the floor above. A single lightbulb hung from the ceiling, already emitting a weak light when I came in. Occasionally it flickered, like it was almost dead. The light wasn’t strong enough to reach the edges of the space. The darkness seemed so thick the room might extend into infinity. Several support posts were visible in the light—or I should say, were standing there like ghosts half vanishing into the darkness. The dirt floor was hardened and felt like stone under my feet.

  In the wide space before me was a large wooden desk. Toward the back of the cellar stood a cluster of shelving units lined up like library stacks.

  The wooden desk seemed to have been used as a workbench. Saws and hammers and other tools were strewn across its surface. One of the hammers appeared curiously new.

  On top of the workbench I found what looked like a scalpel of the sort that had been used in my surgery; its dull silver reflected the flickering light. The entire surface of the desk was covered with black stains.

  I shook away a thought—that the stains were traces of human blood that had seeped into the table and changed color over time. No, it’s just oil, I told myself.

  An assortment of boxes had been placed in front of the storage shelves, perhaps a collection of all the things in the house that had, in their age, fallen into disuse. Maybe these were all things that had been in the house since the time it was built. There was a pendulum clock without a face and a baby carriage draped with a drab-colored blanket.

  The woman’s voice kept singing. The song floated out from somewhere in the darkness that the lone lightbulb couldn’t sweep away. I couldn’t understand the English lyrics, but her ephemeral voice carried with it sorrow—it was as if the teeming darkness itself were crying and the song were its tears.

  I tried to call out to the singer, but my voice didn’t come. The words kept sticking in the back of my dry throat. When I finally spoke, my voice was trembling, weak.

  “Is there . . . anyone here?”

  As the words were swallowed up by the darkness, the singing stopped. For a moment silence fell across the room.

  Then a woman’s voice—the same one that had been singing—came from the shadows behind the shelves. “Who are you?” The voice carried a hint of fear.

  “You must be Hitomi Aizawa,” I said, approaching the source of the voice. I passed the side of the workbench and walked toward the shelves. I felt like I was in an unfamiliar world—a dark world with no sun, no morning, and no night, just a single dim lightbulb.

  “She’s not Hitomi.”

  I stopped next to one of the posts. That was a young man’s voice and it had come from behind the same shelves.

  “I’m Shinichi Hisamoto. Yukie Mochinaga’s the one who first replied to you.”

  My mind whirled. It was the first I’d heard either of those names. I had thought Hitomi was the only one in the cellar.

  “What about Hitomi?”

  In a lowered voice, the man who had identified himself as Shinichi said, “She must be sleeping now. Let’s keep our voices down so we don’t wake her.”

  I could hear them whispering to each other over by the shelves. From out of the darkness, their voices tickled my ears like the rustling of paper scraps. I couldn’t see them in the dark, but I felt their stares piercing me.

  It was eerie. My legs wouldn’t move any closer to them. I didn’t want to take even a single step away from the pool of weak light. The two of them, two people with their own will, had been hiding in the cellar. I didn’t know what to think anymore.

  “You would
n’t happen to be one of Shiozaki’s friends, would you?” It was Yukie’s voice. Not knowing why his name should come up, I was confused. “When he heard you talk, he made the slightest reaction.”

  “Is he . . . here?”

  “He’s next to us.” Shinichi’s voice. “He isn’t able to speak, but when he heard you he made a faint moan.”

  Shiozaki is here. And he isn’t able to speak. I felt like it must all be a joke.

  The low ceiling weighed down on me, a giant slab of darkness that seemed about to crush me. Enduring the feeling of claustrophobia and with my hand on one of the support pillars, I peered into the darkness where they hid.

  I could sense them back there. I could feel the gathered darkness stir. But I still couldn’t see them.

  Some things were hanging from the ceiling next to me. Several dozen slender threads with fishhooks on their ends. Looking closely, I saw some bits of dried matter stuck to the hooks.

  “Why can’t Shiozaki talk?” I asked.

  After a pause, Shinichi answered. “He’s sitting, his arms hugging his knees, with stakes driven into his entire body. He can’t move and he can’t speak. I think his lungs must have been punctured. Of course he’s still alive, though.”

  “Like that, how could he be?” My voice raised a little, and I felt the vast darkness lurking in the cellar shake.

  “But he is—although I can’t explain it well.” His voice was unsure. He said soothingly, “Please, speak a little more quietly.”

  Just then, one of the storage shelves rocked, like someone had bumped into it. It didn’t tip over, but when it tilted, a box on one of the shelves toppled to the floor and landed with a thud.

  I put my hand over my mouth and stepped back.

  When the shelves had rocked, the dim light of the lightbulb had reached to the edge of where the two were hiding. Like a phantom they had appeared for an instant before vanishing.

  I thought I must have seen it wrong. That or I had gone crazy.

  “Don’t make that face.” Yukie’s voice. It carried sadness in it.

  “We can see you, you know.”

  “Why . . .” I started to say, but it took everything just to recover my breath. Seeing them had dashed away the last shreds of my composure. The only reason I hadn’t run away screaming was because I was cowering, unable to move.

  “We’ve had surgery,” said Shinichi.

  “Surgery?”

  “Everyone who comes here undergoes some kind of surgery. Good surgery. And then we get shut away. Strangely enough, it doesn’t hurt. It’s like time stands still and we feel completely free.” After a pause he continued, “Speaking of which, are you the new resident of the cellar?”

  What does he mean, resident of the cellar? Does he mean like how he and the rest of them were brought here?

  “I’ve come to rescue you,” I said to the darkness. “Where is Hitomi?”

  First, I have to get her out of here—now. If I stay here any longer I’ll go crazy. This thick darkness clutching at my hands and feet will stretch its tendrils deep into my mind and devour it. I need to get above ground and feel the light. Then I’ll get help and return. I need to get Shinichi’s and Yukie’s bodies back to normal.

  “Hitomi is in the carriage. It’s her bed.” Shinichi’s voice.

  Keeping my attention on the darkness where they hid, I approached the carriage. It was small and old. The cloth was torn and cobwebs hung from the handle. Its once silver-colored wheels were covered with rust and losing their shape. A blanket was draped over the top of it, and I couldn’t see inside.

  I wanted to cry. When Hitomi had been kidnapped, she’d been fourteen. Now she was fifteen. Now matter how much she could bend her knees, there was no way she could fit in this tiny carriage.

  I removed the blanket and tears came to my eyes.

  Underneath the blanket was a girl’s face, so small you could fit your hands around it. Her delicate cheeks were sickly white. I could see the pale veins running beneath her skin. Her long, messy hair looked as if it hadn’t been washed in some time.

  The light fell across her face. She winced and groaned, and then her eyes opened a crack. She noticed me beside her. With an expression like she thought she might still be dreaming, she smiled.

  “Hey,” she said.

  I choked up. She was in a sack only big enough for her torso, yet she was packed inside. The sack was closed shut around her neck with a red necktie.

  “Who . . .” Hitomi spoke in a soft, sweet voice. “Who are you? Were you brought here?”

  No. I shook my head. I wanted to explain that I had come to rescue her, but the words wouldn’t come. She kept asking me questions. “You were brought here in a car too, weren’t you? Hey, did you see the raven? Even now, when I sleep, I see it in my dreams.”

  As she spoke her words had a pleasant enunciation, like the hopping of a rabbit. There in the darkness that voice felt like my only savior.

  “Yeah, I saw the raven. It was up on the roof when I came in.”

  “No, not like that. The one that was, you know, swaying.”

  Swaying?

  “I guess he did say he was buying a new car. But he liked that key chain so much, I figured he would have put it in the new car too.”

  I thought I’d leave Hitomi in the carriage and just get out of the cellar. As I started to run for the steps, someone was already coming down them. It was Sumida.

  “There you are, Nami,” he said. I came up to him and slapped him across the face. The sound rang through the cellar.

  “It was you,” I said.

  Without flinching, he stared at me. The swaying little raven.

  Hitomi had seen the key chain. When he had brought her here in his car, that image had burned into her eyes.

  10

  —An Author Of Fairy Tale

  Through the forest, Miki chased the visitor. As he went farther from his house, the leafless trees of the forest started to give way to conifers.

  Suddenly he lost sight of the visitor. The visitor had slipped and fallen down the slope. A road was ahead.

  He heard the screeching of tires—and then the visitor was struck by a car. Miki watched from behind a tree.

  The driver got out of the car. It was a middle-aged man. The man looked about, saw there were no other cars around, and got back into his own. And then the white car drove off, leaving the visitor lying in the road.

  11

  Keeping his eyes fixed upon me, Sumida approached the carriage. His movements were slow and confident, like those of a cat.

  Overwhelmed, I stepped aside.

  He placed his hand on the lip of the carriage and looked down at Hitomi inside.

  “How do you feel?” he asked.

  With her eyes closed, she replied, “So-so.”

  “So Shiozaki wasn’t the kidnapper,” I said.

  More than anger at his betrayal, I felt unnerved. I still didn’t understand everything that had happened, but one thing I remembered from when we’d first sneaked into the house:

  “You knew where the light switch was.”

  Despite being at the dark rear entrance of someone else’s home, Sumida had found the switch immediately, without having to look for it. I couldn’t think of it as a coincidence any longer. He was familiar with the inside of the house.

  His hand still upon the carriage, Sumida turned to me. “The other day, for the first time in a while, I came down to this cellar.” His expression and voice were virtually unchanged from how they’d been in the café. “We came to bring Shiozaki his coat, right? Do you remember what you said on the way back?”

  In the car I had told him that Shiozaki had described one of his walls as damaged, but that I hadn’t seen any walls like that.

  “I thought it wasn’t possible, but it turned out you were right. There had been damage to one of the walls—the one I put up to hide the cellar. By the time we came over, he had noticed the cracks, but the cabinet was covering the wall.”

>   “The cabinet?”

  He nodded. “I covered up the door with bricks a long time ago and hid it with the cabinet. When Shiozaki moved in he didn’t know there was a cellar. But an earthquake put cracks in the wall and he was able to hear Yukie singing. Shiozaki told me all this himself. Did you talk with Yukie?”

  He pointed to the back of the room.

  I could feel them staring at Sumida and me.

  “So Shiozaki discovered the cellar?”

  “When I came to see him, he still didn’t really know. I guess he thought it was a radio or something.”

  Sumida explained that Shiozaki had intended to break down the wall. He had bought the hammer for this purpose, passing it off to me as a tool to repair the wall.

  “Then when it looked like he’d discover the cellar, you . . .” I glanced at the back of the cellar. I couldn’t see him, but Shiozaki was back there in the darkness with Shinichi and Yukie.

  “Who’s Shiozaki?” Hitomi’s innocent voice came from the carriage.

  “He’s the one who moved in here after I left,” said Sumida.

  “The one I brought down here before.”

  Remembering, she said, “Oh, that’s right. The shish kebab.”

  The cellar seemed to be operating under different rules than the surface. I struggled to keep from fainting with dizziness. The low ceiling and the thick darkness pressed into my fragile mind from all directions.

  “Three days ago, with my own hands, I tore down the wall I’d built a year before.”

  With the finality of an oracle reciting his prophecy, he said that I’d come and found that hole.

  He turned from the carriage and stepped toward me.

  “Stay back!”

  My tearful voice echoed in the room.

  He stopped.

  “You used to live here?”

  He nodded and told me that he had lived here until a year before, that he had amputated Hitomi’s arms and legs in the room where we stood.

  “When I left, I bricked over the entrance and the windows of the cellar.”

  The windows.

  “You built those brick planters outside, right? To hide the windows . . .”