Black Fairy Tale

by Otsuichi

  “Most of them were already there. I just added one more.”

  The dead plants hadn’t been in the planter because he’d replanted them there from somewhere else—they had grown, and withered, over the course of a year.

  But I don’t understand. In the memory of my left eye, the window wasn’t covered over. Two months ago, when Kazuya died, Shiozaki was living in this house.

  Suddenly I realized I had come to the wrong conclusion. But such a convergence of coincidences would have had to occur, I never even considered the possibility.

  “You told me that you met Kazuya a year ago. Was that true?”

  “He was a visitor.”

  “A visitor?”

  “That’s what I call people who find out what I do and come snooping around—searching around my house, asking people about me. Mr. Hisamoto over in the back of the room, he was a visitor too. I found him outside the house.”

  “And you found Kazuya looking into the cellar window?”

  He nodded. “Exactly one year ago.”

  I held my hand to my mouth and started to sob.

  My suspicion was correct. That vision in my left eye wasn’t of his death two months before, it was from an event a year before.

  The vision I saw in the library had ended when Kazuya was struck by the car. Maybe the driver had noticed and tried to brake—I wouldn’t have heard it. Of course I had assumed that Kazuya died. But could I have known for sure?

  He hadn’t died then. Examined from this perspective, the inconsistency between the place I had seen in my left eye and the site of the fatal accident was only natural—they were two different places.

  Sumida took one step closer to me. Unable even to scream, I took one step back, shaking my head.

  “One year ago, Kazuya peeked inside the cellar window. The week before, I started having the feeling someone was watching me. You came here looking for Hitomi because Kazuya told you about her, didn’t you?”

  I covered my ears with my hands. But I could still hear him speak.

  “When Kazuya was at the window, he noticed me and ran. But while he was trying to escape, he was struck by a car and fell unconscious. The car drove away, a hit and run.”

  He took another step toward me.

  “The problem was after that. You might not believe what I’m about to tell you, but by some chance it happened. When he came to, he didn’t remember anything. Not me, not the house. He had clean forgotten everything that had happened the previous week.”

  Amnesia. I see. My head was too filled with fear to be able to think about much, but that, strangely enough, I could understand.

  “I didn’t kill him. I didn’t bring him down here either.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  At first, he wasn’t sure how to answer. He considered it, then replied, “I just didn’t.” He added, “I added chance upon chance.”

  “And then,” said Hitomi, “He took him—he took the visitor—to the café.”

  Saori had first met Sumida a year ago, when he came into the café with her brother passed-out drunk in his arms. Saori had once told me, “Kazuya had moaned, ‘Take me to Melancholy Grove.’”

  But Kazuya hadn’t been passed-out drunk. He’d been half conscious, hit by a car. Sumida had been lying when he said he’d met Kazuya in town.

  And then they had started spending time together as friends.

  Sumida was standing only steps away from me. His body was slim and didn’t seem to have much strength. But it still had enough strength to catch and silence me.

  The stale air of the cellar was thick with tension, so that even as I inhaled, I felt like I was suffocating.

  Sumida was frightening. His eyes weren’t fierce or vicious, nor were they empty. He gazed at me analytically. He had the visage of an experimenter, a doctor, a researcher.

  “Right after it happened, I left this house and moved to an apartment by the station. After I’d closed up the cellar, of course.”

  Will my fate be decided when he’s done talking? I shifted my arms and legs to see if I still had the strength to run.

  “But there’s something strange,” I said. “Given what you’ve said, Hitomi and the rest must have been left in this cellar for nearly a year. How are they still alive?”

  “That’s the way they are now. Their wounds aren’t closed. So they live. Time has stopped for them, and they can sing and talk away in this sunless room. I bought a new lightbulb and left the switch on when I closed up the room.”

  He looked up at the lightbulb on the ceiling, flickering, nearly dead.

  “I’ve been bored,” Hitomi said in her small voice.

  It was nearly time for me to steel my determination. I took one step back and to the side. Inside I was praying.

  “What about Saori? Did you keep going to Melancholy Grove after you moved because of your feelings for her?”

  He fixed his placid eyes on me. In the end he never answered me, but in that moment, I learned something about him.

  Sumida took another step toward me. It’s now or never, I thought. I was afraid, but it was my fear that impelled me to flee.

  With all of my strength I sprang at him, striking with my shoulder.

  I thought I heard a number of voices gasp in the back of the room.

  The impact rocked through my body. My breath caught. I rebounded from the collision.

  Sumida toppled into the tangle of fishhooks hanging from the ceiling. He struggled to pull free. The hooks caught in his clothing, their countless arms pulling at him.

  I ran. I knew he would soon come after me.

  I flew up the stairs to the surface. It wasn’t a particularly long staircase, but no matter how hard I pushed my legs to move, the light of the hallway above seemed to grow no nearer. I had no sense of advancing up the steps—it was as though I were treading water.

  Although it felt like it took a long time, it was probably quick. I finally made it up the last of the steps and into the hallway. The freshness of the air was dizzying.

  I turned for the front door and ran. My footsteps rang on the floorboards as I dashed down the hall.

  The large black doorway to the outside was in front of me. I grabbed the gold-colored doorknob and turned it.

  But what happened wasn’t what I expected. The door only opened a crack—barely wide enough to slip my hand through. Again and again I tried with all my strength to pull it open, but it wouldn’t move. Then I noticed an extension cord wrapped around the doorknob. It would take time to untie it.

  I realized immediately that Sumida had put it there. Through waves of panic I remembered the back door.

  I turned and ran down the hall.

  Just as I passed the side of the stairs, I felt my foot strike something. I had fallen before realizing Sumida’s foot had thrust out from the entrance to the cellar.

  It didn’t hurt. I’d been running as fast as I could when I stumbled and slammed straight into the side of an open door leading to one of the rooms, but, as if I had fallen onto a cushion, I didn’t feel any pain.

  I thought, I can still run, and as I started to pull myself up, I saw it.

  My right foot was bent at an unnatural angle. Although I didn’t know why, it didn’t hurt. Rather, it felt warm and pleasant.

  I couldn’t understand what was happening to my body. I assumed that my fear and my panic were keeping me from feeling any pain.

  Sumida stood before me, a cut on his cheek—probably from where it had caught on one of the fishhooks. His clothes were torn in places, several hooks still caught in them. He must have ripped himself free with all his strength.

  I pulled the paring knife from my pocket, holding it in my left hand. My hand was shaking. Somewhere inside me I doubted the tiny blade would be enough for me to intimidate him enough for me to flee. But it was all I had.

  The moment I unfolded the blade, he kicked my hand, pinning it between his shoe and the wall. It didn’t hurt. It felt like nothing more than a strong gust
of wind.

  The knife fell to the floor. He picked it up. Alarm rang through my head. But I couldn’t move.

  At first I didn’t know what was happening. He pushed into my stomach with the hand that held the knife. I only barely felt the pressure.

  “This won’t do,” he said, looking at the knife, which was now only a handle. The blade seemed to have folded back in.

  He gripped my neck, holding me in place, then touched my stomach through my shirt.

  I wriggled to get away from his hand, and I heard the blade of the knife strike the floor. It must have been caught in my shirt.

  I don’t hurt anywhere. I’m fine. But then I realized my left hand wasn’t moving. Even when I tried to move it, it only made a hiccuping twitch.

  I looked at Sumida’s face. His eyes were directed at my stomach.

  I followed them. My shirt was torn. I had been stabbed. The wound was surrounded by red, but it wasn’t bleeding much.

  Something strange was hanging from the wound, dangling through the hole torn in my shirt.

  At first I thought it looked like an umbilical cord.

  I looked at Sumida’s hand. His fingers were red. He had put them into my stomach—I suppose to pull the cord out.

  I think the only reason I didn’t lose my sanity on the spot was because the thing coming out from my stomach didn’t look like it could possibly be my own. When I scooped it up with my hand, it felt warm.

  A brain-numbing intoxication flowed from the wound. A peculiar feeling of happiness enveloped me.

  I got the feeling I had discovered the reason the residents of the basement didn’t have any fear of Sumida.

  My mind felt like it was drifting through warm water, and through it I heard Sumida’s far-off voice.

  You can’t run.

  An unrelenting vitality flowed from the wound and filled me from the tips of my fingers to the core of my mind.

  I loathed it. Some deep-down part of me that no one could violate resisted.

  Sumida reached his hand out to me. But to his surprise, I shook free.

  I made it to the nearest room and shut the door. I went to lock it, but the door had no lock. I moved to the window. My one foot was completely immobile and I had to drag it behind me as I went.

  Behind me the door opened. Sumida was coming after me. He knew I had no escape. He watched my movements with the calm eyes of a spectator.

  The window was easy to open. If it had been locked, I would have tried to burst through, but luckily even my meager strength was enough to open it. I shoved my body through the rectangular opening.

  I fell backward onto the ground, the impact knocking the wind out of me. But the warmth overflowing from my wound stopped any pain.

  Lying on the ground I realized I had fallen next to one of the planters. Right before my eyes were the blue bricks of the planter hiding the window Kazuya had been looking in a year before—God’s idea of a joke. I wanted to laugh.

  Sumida came out the window, deftly passing his slender frame through it and then landing on the ground.

  I hadn’t the strength to get up. Still collapsed on the ground, I looked up at him. “Why do you do this?”

  “Well, I don’t know why.” He seemed to have never spent much time thinking about it. He responded as if the question were unimportant and didn’t deserve an answer. “It’s not that I want to kill people. I just do it to keep them from talking.”

  I started to crawl away. The fingers on my left hand were paralyzed, but I could still move the arm. Propping my upper body on my left elbow and my other hand, I swept my left leg across the ground. My right leg, immobile, dragged behind me.

  The ground should have felt cold, but it didn’t—I just felt the unpleasant sensation of dirt rubbing against me. I tried not to think about the viscera hanging from my wound.

  Sumida walked beside me; I could feel him staring down at me.

  Without looking up, I spoke. “Was Kazuya’s death two months ago really just an accident?”

  I had the faint hope that nothing more would happen to me as long as I kept asking him questions. As long as he’s still talking, he won’t kill me.

  My arm, tired from supporting my body, began to tremble. Its strength gave way, and my face fell to the ground, knocking gravel into my mouth.

  “I made it look like an accident.”

  Sumida put his foot on the long, thin thing that trailed from my stomach. I kept going. I could feel it slipping out from inside me. The barely audible sound of it passing out of the wound reached into my mind. I felt my stomach start to cave in.

  “I blindfolded him and broke his limbs, then dragged him to the slope and pushed him in front of an oncoming car.”

  Sumida explained that he hadn’t removed the blindfold until just before it happened. Kazuya had never known why his arms and legs wouldn’t move.

  I made it to the corner of the house and hooked the fingers of my right hand around its edge.

  How long are my intestines? I’d been relying on my arm to drag myself forward, my body scraping across the earth, my guts—pinned down by Sumida’s foot—sliding out.

  Having made it that far, I gave up crawling any farther. I raised my upper body and sat, leaning against the corner of the house. I aimed my face, dirty with mud and tears, at him. “Why would you do something like that?”

  “Kazuya’s memory started coming back—slowly, and not all at once. About the house, about when he had come to the house with that bandage over his eye. He was confused by the memories and he was starting to talk about them.”

  And so Sumida, worried Kazuya would soon remember everything, had had to silence him . . .

  Sumida stood before me. He seemed terribly tall as he looked down at me, probably because I was sitting with my butt on the ground.

  The gray sky at his back, he said, as if trying to reason with a small child, “All right, that’s enough now, isn’t it? It was just bad luck that you ended up a visitor too.”

  He bent down, circled his hands around my neck. His slender face was right in front of my eyes now.

  “It won’t hurt. I’ve gotten quite good at breaking necks.”

  My right hand moved to where he couldn’t see it. I ran my hand through the gutter at the base of the house and there, among the dirt and rotted leaves, my fingers found it.

  “You’re wrong,” I said through my tears. “It wasn’t bad luck. I meant to find you.”

  Summoning the last shreds of my strength, I shoved it into Sumida. For one year, Kazuya’s flathead screwdriver had awaited just this moment.

  12

  —An Author Of Fairy Tale

  Miki walked over to the man lying on the pavement. The man wasn’t dead. He seemed only unconscious, with no visible injuries.

  Miki had to decide whether to kill the man or bring him back to the house to make sure he’d never talk.

  Then the man in Miki’s arms groaned. His eye must have healed. When he had stopped by Miki’s house the other day white bandages had covered one eye. Now the bandages were gone.

  The man opened his eyes a crack. They were unfocused and didn’t look straight at Miki.

  But the man seemed to have noticed someone was by his side.

  Miki knew he had to silence the man before anybody else passed by. But just as Miki had prepared himself for it, the man spoke:

  “Who . . . Where am I?”

  Miki dragged the man to the side of the road and asked him some questions. The last thing the man remembered was ordering coffee at a café.

  “Who are you?” asked the man.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  The man nodded weakly, as if floating through a dream.

  Miki still held the hammer in his hand. He raised it. If he smashed the man’s brain, death would come.

  The man, barely holding onto consciousness, closed his eyes. Just as Miki’s hammer was about to bring death, he said, “Please, could you take me to Melancholy Grove?”

  M
iki decided to take a chance and spare the man’s life. If he had lost his memory, there was no need to kill him. Besides, getting rid of the evidence would be tricky. Miki would have to either leave the body by the road or haul it back up to the house, and either option meant bothersome work.

  He discarded the hammer in some nearby bushes. Lending his shoulder to the man, he walked him back to the café. Miki had never been inside, but he knew where it was. He’d frequently passed by it in his car.

  By the time the two arrived at Melancholy Grove, night had fallen. There were few streetlights and the light of the café seemed to float alone in the darkness.

  The man had passed out during the walk, so Miki was carrying him over his shoulder when he opened the door.

  The woman behind the counter, upon seeing the man slumped over Miki’s back, cried out, “Kazuya!”

  Miki lowered him into one of the booths.

  As the woman tended to the man, she bowed her head and said, “I’m so sorry my little brother put you through this.”

  Miki told her that the man had been passed out drunk. Her brother didn’t smell of alcohol, but she didn’t question the lie.

  “This is bad,” she said, reaching for him. “He’s got a bump on the head.”

  Miki explained that the man had tripped and fallen on the walk to the café.

  Miki looked around and saw there were no customers. He wondered if the woman at the counter was the owner, but she seemed too young. Maybe she was just a part-timer.

  Miki left to go home. The woman called out to stop him, but he pretended not to have heard.

  He put the café behind him and headed for his house. As he walked through the darkness he thought about the inside of the café, about the unconscious man.

  The face of the woman caring for her brother rose in his mind. She looked like his childhood friend from the hospital, the little girl whose arms had ended at her elbows. If the little girl had grown up, she might have had a face like that woman’s.

  He became aware that his fingers were playing with the object inside his pocket—the gold watch the man had presumably dropped while searching outside Miki’s home.