Goth

by Otsuichi

  But how would he find the thief? Shinohara rested his elbows on the desk, thinking.

  The keyboard was dirty. He reached for the can of compressed air he always kept next to it. Then he froze—his eyes had found something on the keyboard.

  No doubt about it—the thief had dropped it. No other explanation made sense. It was very small and easy to overlook, so it was something of a miracle that Shinohara had even noticed it.

  It was then that Shinohara remembered the inside of the refrigerator. Something had been bothering him, and he understood it now. The hand thief had made a mistake, a very careless mistake—one that had foolishly revealed the thief’s identity …

  iv

  The next morning, Shinohara went to work with a meat cleaver, the same one he always used when cutting off hands. It fit neatly inside his bag. As he greeted the other teachers in the office, none of them guessed what was in his bag.

  It was always hectic in the mornings. Outside the teachers’ room, students hurried past. First semester midterms were coming up quickly, and tests were being constructed on a number of different desks.

  One of the other teachers asked how Shinohara’s test was coming along. He smiled back and answered. Shinohara often believed his life consisted entirely of these feigned smiles. They annoyed him immensely.

  Hands. Hands. Hands were more important than the other teachers. First, there were hands, and then the human followed. There was no point in talking with the human.

  He had morning classes, so he couldn’t yet go to see the thief who had stolen his hands. But he knew who it was. He had to catch the thief and demand to know where his hands had been hidden.

  Only one night had passed—he desperately wanted to believe the hands were somewhere safe. When he knew where they were, then he would have to cut off the thief’s hands with his meat cleaver. It would never do to let the hands die with the rest of the body, so he’d have to make them his.

  The last session he taught that morning was his homeroom class. All those hands copying what he wrote on the blackboard … There were forty-two students in his class—and eighty-four hands.

  Shinohara explained what the midterm would cover, but his thoughts dealt only with the stolen hands. The thief had left his food, taking only the hands. Shinohara hadn’t noticed it right away, and it didn’t make any sense.

  At last, the bell rang and class ended. All morning classes were over, and it was time for lunch.

  Shinohara left the room. The bag with the meat cleaver was in the teacher’s office, and he was going to get it. The halls were at their noisiest and most crowded—but to Shinohara, it was all a dim roar.

  He waited in the teachers’ room for a few minutes, and then he headed for the chemistry lecture hall.

  †

  I headed for the chemistry lecture hall as soon as lunch started. When I opened the door and checked inside, I found it empty, so I went in, closing the door behind me. Instantly, the noise outside was cut off; the air inside was completely still, as if time had stopped.

  I measured my pulse: it was beating like I’d just been running as fast as I could. My skin felt taut. I was very tense.

  What had Mr. Shinohara done last night after he had arrived home? What had he thought when he noticed the hands were gone? Had he been too angry to think? I could only guess.

  I hadn’t seen him that morning—and if I had, I would’ve pretended to know nothing. He couldn’t notice me; if I did anything strange, there was a strong risk it would ruin everything. I was pretty sure he didn’t know I had stolen the hands, but that might’ve been nothing more than wishful thinking.

  It was possible that I had made some terrible mistake without realizing it—but there was no way for me to know. If I had, and Mr. Shinohara came after me looking for revenge, then there was a strong possibility that my life would be in danger.

  As I stood in the dark, deserted lecture hall thinking, I heard someone standing outside the door.

  †

  Shinohara opened the door of the lecture hall. There was one student inside, and the moment he saw that student’s face, a surge of emotion ran through him.

  He wanted to beat the student to death, but Shinohara stomped down those emotions, forcing himself to call out a friendly greeting instead. He planned to pretend to know nothing.

  The student looked up. “Hello, Mr. Shinohara.”

  It was like always, nothing out of place—yet Shinohara knew the student was laughing at him on the inside, enjoying the performance and being around him like this. Yes, the student had come to the lecture hall to watch Shinohara squirm, knowing that his hands had been taken.

  Hiding his nauseous rage, Shinohara drew closer. He must not betray his plans. He must not reveal that he knew the student to be the thief.

  The foolish thief suspected nothing and didn’t try to run. Shinohara was able to stand directly behind the student without arousing suspicion.

  The thief had taken away the doll’s hands—but nobody should have recognized those as hands. The doll was too small, and there were no fingers on those hands—they were just balls of cotton covered by a half sphere of cloth. Yet the thief had taken them with the rest of the hands.

  The only person who would’ve known those were hands and taken them … was someone who had accidentally found the handless doll. The moment that person found the doll, the thief must’ve guessed that the chemistry teacher was the one behind the Wrist-Cut Case.

  Shinohara put his hand on the shoulder of the student in front of him. Her shoulder shook. She turned slowly around, looking at him. “What is it?”

  She was good at acting, Shinohara thought.

  He had placed the handless doll in the wastebasket in the chemistry office. There was only one person who would have had a chance to see it—Morino, the girl who had been in the lecture hall while he’d been cleaning the chemistry office, while the office trash was sitting in the lecture hall. The male student who had been helping him would never have had time.

  “Please take your hand off me, Mr. Shinohara. You’re interfering with my reading.”

  This girl was always reading in the corner of the lecture hall. Her eyebrows twitched—more expression than he’d ever seen from her before.

  When Shinohara had noticed the dirt on his keyboard the day before, he’d also found a long black hair between the keys. It had been sheer coincidence that the hair had landed there, out of all the places in his house it could have been. Shinohara’s hair was short, so it couldn’t be his—meaning the intruder must have had long hair.

  And the bookshelves … On his shelves was the follow-up to the book the girl was reading. And it had been pulled out, ever so slightly. He always kept his spines aligned, yet this one had been jutting out a full five millimeters. This girl had found it and looked at it.

  There was no doubt in his mind: she had stolen his hands.

  Shinohara tightened his grip on her shoulder, squeezing as if to break it.

  Morino winced.

  “Tell me where you hid the hands,” he ordered, as politely as he could manage.

  But Morino just tried to push him off, complaining that he was hurting her. The book she was reading fell to the ground.

  “Where are the hands?” he asked again, loosening his grip and making sure she heard him. Her usual, expressionless mask had crumbled, and she shook her head as if she had no idea what he was talking about.

  Pretending not to know, Shinohara thought. Instantly, his hand wrapped itself around her slender throat, squeezing.

  Morino’s eyes opened wide, staring up at him in shock as his fingers sank deep into the soft flesh of her neck. He was going to kill this girl, but there was no help for that. His grip tightened.

  In a minute, she would stop moving. As he mused on that, out of the corner of his eye, he spotted a small cylinder in her hand—some sort of spray. By the time he noticed, it was too late: the spray was aimed right at his eyes.

  There was a hiss of
compressed gas, and his eyes began to burn.

  †

  Morino had been carrying around a can of pepper spray. She unloaded it in Mr. Shinohara’s face, and then she hit him in the head with her chair before she began shouting for help. She did not scream—she just called out, calmly but loudly.

  A minute later, several students and teachers came running. Mr. Shinohara lay at the center of the crowd, clutching his throbbing eyes.

  I could not leave my hiding place beneath the podium until the crowd dispersed.

  epilogue

  Mr. Shinohara was arrested—but not as a culprit behind the Wrist-Cut Case. Instead, he was convicted by society for a much lesser crime. No one knows his real crime, even now.

  He’s no longer a teacher and has since moved away. There have been no new victims in the Wrist-Cut Case.

  The hands I stole from his house are buried in my backyard. I didn’t need them. I didn’t care about hands the way he did.

  I had wanted to convince him that Morino had stolen his hands.

  When I saw the hands in the refrigerator, I knew he was keeping them all, just like I had predicted. Even before I entered his house, I had been planning on using that fact and the doll hands to lead him to suspect Morino. I was glad he was smart enough to figure out the clue about the doll hands. He simply didn’t know that I had switched the trash bins, sifting through the contents afterward.

  I also left behind a long black hair—the same type of hair Morino had. It was my sister’s hair, which had come in handy. I had remembered Shinohara cleaning his office keyboard with compressed air, and so I figured the hair stood a good chance of being discovered if I were to place it on his computer keyboard at home.

  Moving the book he had mentioned to Morino had been insurance.

  If he had determined that Morino was the thief, causing him to cut off her hands and kill her, my plan would’ve been complete. I only would’ve had to wait until her severed hands were in his fridge, and then I could’ve gone to steal them. Of course, there were a number of holes in this plan: there was no guarantee he would’ve taken her hands home even if he had killed her … but there was a good chance he would’ve.

  The only hands I had wanted were Morino’s pale, beautiful hands.

  “Will you teach me how to smile like that?” she asked me the next day. It was the first time Morino had ever spoken to me.

  Whenever I talked to someone else, I smiled. But inside, I had no expression—and Morino had somehow picked up on that. The performance that no one else had ever seen through was no match for her.

  After that, we each had someone to talk to. Our relationship was a little too cold to call friendship—but when I spoke to her, it was the only time I could stop acting, letting my face remain devoid of expression. It gave the muscles of my face a well-earned respite. There was a comfortable disinterest to our relationship that allowed me to express the inhuman and unemotional sides of myself.

  †

  The world had long since forgotten the Wrist-Cut Case by the time summer vacation ended and second semester began.

  The light in the classroom was yellow as the sun began to set. A breeze came in the open windows, toying with Morino’s long black hair as she stood in front of me.

  “So this movie used real freaks as actors, but the story was even stranger: the freaks were carrying around some sort of shrine …”

  As she spoke, I murmured the movie’s name. Morino looked ever so slightly surprised. Her expression barely changed at all, but I could tell.

  “Right.”

  It was a movie directed by a German woman. Of all the people I knew, only Morino and I would be interested in something so strange.

  “Do you remember the Wrist-Cut Case?” I asked.

  “The one from last spring?”

  “If you had been one of the victims, what would you be doing now?”

  Morino stared down at her hands. “It would be very hard to put on a watch. Why do you ask?” she said, looking puzzled.

  She didn’t know the man she’d grappled with had been the wrist cutter … and I still stared at her hands from time to time. Perhaps it was better that Mr. Shinohara had not cut them off. Perhaps they were more beautiful alive—and Mr. Shinohara might have cut them in the wrong place.

  “No reason,” I said, and I stood up to leave.

  The reason I wanted her hands was because she had those beautiful scars, from when she had tried to kill herself.

  i

  Dripping blood, my opponent attempted to flee into the grass—but it was easy for me to circle around in front of it. The four-legged animal was covered in wounds, and it was already too exhausted to move quickly.

  I thought it was time to put it out of its misery. It no longer possessed the will to fight back.

  I took the animal’s throat between my upper and lower jaw. I felt its neck bones break in my mouth. The sound and sensation traveled up my jawbone. The animal slumped, hanging limp in my mouth.

  I showed no mercy. I didn’t want to do this, not really—but Yuka wanted me to, so I killed my opponent.

  I opened my jaw, and the animal’s dead body fell from my mouth, slumping limply to the ground. There was no light in its eyes, and it had gone completely quiet.

  I howled.

  Yuka and I had brought the four-legged animal here, under the bridge. Yuka had stopped in front of a house as we’d passed, gazing through the gate and sizing the animal up. When I followed her gaze, I’d seen the animal looking back at us.

  Yuka had looked at me and said, “This is tonight’s prey.”

  It was not as if I understood the words Yuka spoke—yet I knew what she was saying.

  This ritual happened occasionally at night. I’d lost track of how many times. We would find our prey in town, taking it to the secret place under the bridge that only Yuka and I knew about. And then Yuka would make me fight.

  I obeyed her orders. I ran across the ground as she commanded. I leapt on my opponents, knocking them down. The four-legged animals I fought were all smaller than me, so if I slammed into them, they would fall over, hurt. Blood would splatter their fur, and their bones would break.

  When I won, Yuka would smile, looking very happy. We couldn’t communicate with words, but her feelings flowed through me like river water, so I always knew when she was happy.

  Yuka had been my friend since I was very small. When I first met her, I was with my brothers, who had been born with me. I was sleeping nestled up against my mother, and Yuka peered down at me with interest. I can still remember that now.

  Half my howl vanished into the night sky. The other half echoed low under the bridge. The bridge was right overhead, blocking most of the sky—and when I looked up, I could see nothing but inky darkness.

  The river was wide and the bridge large. On the riverbank around the bridge, there was a sea of tall grass, which you had to push your way through to get anywhere. But below the bridge, there was a small clearing without grass. The sunlight didn’t reach here, which left a circular clearing—where we were.

  Yuka and I had found it one summer day, discovering that you could stand in the middle and be surrounded by walls of grass. It had been our secret place to play ever since.

  But now it was where Yuka made me fight.

  I didn’t want to bite and kill the animals, but Yuka wanted me to. When she gave me those orders, her eyes were dark as night, with no light at all.

  Yuka had been sitting at the edge of the circle, watching me fight. Now she stood up.

  It was time to go home. I knew what she was thinking. We had a connection that was beyond words.

  I picked up the corpse in my mouth and went to toss it in the hole that was in the grass a little way from the clearing. When I dropped it in, the tiny body tumbled down along the edge of the pit. It wasn’t that deep a hole, but the bottom was dark and hard to see. I could hear the body hit bottom.

  The hole had been there when we found this place. Someone m
ight have dug it, planning to bury something. It was too dark to see, but the bottom of the hole was now filled with the corpses of animals Yuka had made me kill. If you stood near it, there was a horrible stench.

  The first time we carried out this ritual under the bridge, Yuka had ordered me to throw the body in the hole after. I hadn’t yet learned to fight, and I was almost as badly hurt as my opponent in the end. When I’d faced my opponent, my mind went blank, and I had no idea what to do. But now I was good at fighting. I could kill my opponents calmly. Yuka was satisfied with how strong I had become.

  The hair that had been ripped out when I bit my opponent filled my mouth. I swallowed it and then headed for the water, pushing my way through the grass until it opened up before me.

  The forest of grass abruptly gave way to a vast expanse of running water. The water was so black that it looked less like a river than a giant pool of darkness. The lights on the bridge above cast reflections in the water from there to the opposite bank.

  I washed the blood off my mouth in the river, and then I returned to where Yuka was waiting.

  “Time to go.” Yuka uttered speech that held that meaning as she headed for the stairs.

  The stairs led diagonally up the bank to the bridge. To get to the stairs from the clearing, we had to push our way through grass. I ran to her side, and we walked together.

  As we neared the stairs, I saw some grass move—the tips of the long grass stalks swayed slightly. For a moment, I thought someone was standing there, and tensed. I listened closely, but it seemed it was just the wind.

  Yuka had already reached the top of the stairs, where she was waiting for me. I bounded up the stairs after her, leaving our secret place behind.

  †

  When school let out for the day, I met my classmate Morino in front of the station. There was a big bus terminal nearby and a square with fountains and flower beds. There were also a number of benches and a number of people sitting on them, killing time.

  Morino was sitting on one of those benches, away from the road, in the shade of some bushes. She would always read when she had time—but not today. Her book lay closed next to her on the bench.