by Otsuichi
“The dog was a mutt, but a pretty small one.”
Abruptly, I realized I had forgotten to ask Pavlov’s owner the same question. I broke off the conversation as naturally as I could and ran back out the door, still in uniform, my mother calling out after me that it was almost time for dinner.
When I reached the house where Pavlov had once lived, it was getting dark out. I rang the bell, and the same young housewife I had spoken to a couple of hours before appeared. She looked surprised to see me again, and she was no longer holding her child.
“Sorry to bother you again, but there was something I forgot to ask. How big was Pavlov?”
“You came all this way for that?” she said, puzzled. Then she explained that Pavlov had not been full-grown and was still on the small side.
“Only a little bigger than a puppy?”
“Right. But his breed can get very big, which is why his house is so large.”
I thanked her and left.
When the kidnapper had taken the dogs, the leash had been left behind. So how were the dogs transported? Did the kidnapper bring a leash? It would’ve been easier—and faster—to simply unhook the leash from the doghouse, if that were the case. So the kidnapper had taken the leash off the dog’s collar and carried it away.
Now, why had the pet kidnapper chosen Pavlov and not the quiet dog across the street? I would have chosen the one that barked less simply because it would probably be easier to kidnap. But whoever was behind the pet kidnappings had not done that. My best guess was that Pavlov had been taken because he was smaller and thus easier to carry. The dog my sister’s friend had owned was also on the small side. It seemed likely that all the dogs the kidnapper had taken were small ones.
But why pick dogs that were easy to carry? One possibility was that the culprit didn’t have a car or any other vehicle large enough to carry a dog, which would explain avoiding large dogs and choosing small ones. From all the information I’d managed to gather, I knew that the area from which dogs had gone missing was not very large. Someone with a car would have avoided carrying out the crimes in such a confined area, instead collecting dogs from all over the city.
I remembered reading about a kind of analysis used when investigating killings done without motive, purely for the fun of it—it focused on the basis for the killer’s choice of victims. The killer in that case had unconsciously chosen targets that were weaker than himself. For example, all his victims had been less than five feet tall, not a single one of them even close to five foot three. In that case, they were able to speculate that the killer was between five feet and five feet three inches tall. Such a method of thinking might prove helpful in the missing-dog case.
When I got home, my father had returned from work, and my family had started eating already. I told them I’d gone to the convenience store and joined the conversation, smoothly working it around so that I could ask about houses that kept dogs in the neighborhood.
“The dog over there is really cute. I can’t imagine why they don’t keep it indoors, as small as it is,” Sakura said, somewhere in the middle of the list.
“It must bark a lot,” my father said.
I asked for the address. It was Tuesday night, so it was possible the kidnapper would target the house that evening.
†
The house in question was on the corner, an old building of Japanese construction. I looked over the wall and spotted a large garden with a doghouse at the far end. The doghouse looked handmade, like a wooden box, and there was a stake driven into the ground next to it, around which the dog’s leash was tied.
The dog had big eyes, and the moment it saw me, it began barking furiously, jumping around. It was small enough that even a child could carry it easily.
I moved away from the house, hiding myself in a thicket a safe distance away. There were no lights near me, and I was surrounded by darkness.
I checked my watch. It was dark out, but when I pressed the button on my watch, a light inside it turned on so I could read the display. It was ten, the same time they had last heard Pavlov bark two weeks ago. If the kidnapper was coming here tonight, it would be soon.
The ground beneath me was covered in leaves, and the slightest movement shook the branches of the bushes around me. It was early fall, so it was still warm during the day, but come night, it was a little chilly.
I reached into my jacket pocket, touching the hilt of the knife inside, which I had brought with me just in case.
If I did catch a glimpse of the kidnapper, I had no intention of turning the criminal in. I intended to simply watch from a distance, unseen—so it was unlikely I would need the weapon, yet I had brought one of the knives from the knife set with me anyway, without really thinking about it. The naked blade made it easy to cut myself, so I carried it in a leather case I had bought for it.
I enjoyed watching people carry out unusual crimes. This hobby had once led me to encounter a man who had killed several women. I’d stolen a set of twenty-three knives from that man’s apartment, which I now kept hidden behind a bookcase in my room. When I was at home, I often gazed at the reflection of the ceiling light in the metal of the blades—the white light gleamed like it was wet.
Occasionally, my reflection in the blade would transform into the faces of the women those knives had killed. I knew this was just a trick of the mind, but I felt like their suffering and despair had stained the knives forever.
The knives were a little too much for me. I should never have brought them home. I felt like the gleam in that metal surface was telling me to use them.
I checked my watch again, turning the light on and reading the display. It was Wednesday now. Not a single person had passed the whole time I’d sat in the bush.
I wondered where the kidnapper lived. If I knew that, I might be able to narrow down the list of places to wait. At any rate, it seemed obvious I hadn’t seen the kidnapper that day.
Ten minutes later, I left the thicket and returned home.
My parents were asleep, but Sakura was studying for exams. When she heard me come home, she came downstairs, asking where I’d been. I told her I’d been to the convenience store.
†
I’d known the man would be coming today, so I should never have fallen asleep.
I was torn from my slumber by Yuka’s scream, her voice coming from the living room.
I ran toward her.
She had been hiding in back with me, but he must have taken her into the living room. Mama was out of the house, so the man was alone with Yuka.
Yuka was lying in a heap, groaning. She sounded very sad, fighting against the pain.
The man was standing next to her head, staring down at her without expression. He seemed so big, like his head was touching the ceiling. And Yuka seemed so small. All she could do was moan in pain, powerless.
Anger boiled over in my mind. I howled, the voice tearing out of me.
The man turned toward me, eyes wide in surprise. He took a step back, moving away from Yuka.
She lay there groaning, but her eyes were on me, eyes filled with love. From the bottom of my heart, I knew I had to protect her.
I heard the front door open and someone call out. Mama had come home from shopping. That was where she had gone when she’d left him there.
I tried to bite the man’s hand, but Mama grabbed me from behind. My jaws snapped shut a few inches too short.
But that was long enough for Yuka to stand up. As Mama shouted angrily, Yuka ran for the door. I ran after her, and we both fled the house.
Outside, we both ran as fast and far as we could. I heard Mama calling after us, but we didn’t turn around. We fled into the depths of the night.
Rows of lights lined quiet, dark roads, but the only thing they really illuminated was the ground beneath our feet. Our two small shadows flitted from one lamppost to the next.
The night stretched as far as we could see in every direction—but I was with Yuka, so I wasn’t scared. Still, thinking about her made
me very sad.
Yuka wasn’t crying, but I could tell she was hurt. I felt it too. Occasionally, the pain was too much, and she had to stop for a moment. It hurt me to see that, but there was nothing I could do but stand by her side.
The animal we had found that afternoon was tonight’s prey—that’s what Yuka said. That day on our walk, we’d found an animal that looked easy to take away. We headed for that house.
I was sure Yuka had noticed it too—it was getting harder to find animals we could steal easily now. More and more houses were keeping the animals inside. They were beginning to take measures against us.
I was always anxious now, afraid that someone would see what we were doing … and I was always on guard, startled by every shadow.
I wasn’t afraid of Yuka, of course, nor Mama, nor even that bad man. I was afraid of strangers. There was someone after Yuka and me because we were taking the animals. And that someone would eventually discover what we had been doing underneath the bridge. It was easy to guess what would happen. If everyone knew what Yuka and I were doing, we would be separated. Without me, there would be no one to protect Yuka, and I couldn’t let that happen.
We could see tonight’s house up ahead. The top of the roof caught the streetlight, but everything else was dark, swallowed by the night. The house was on a corner; when we’d walked past that afternoon, there had been a small dog in the yard.
“Come,” Yuka said, and we stepped forward.
But then something caught my eye. I called out to Yuka softly, and we froze. She looked over at me, puzzled.
A moment ago, there had been a small gleam of light in the thicket across from the house. It had been just a tiny point of light, which had soon vanished—but I knew someone was there. All my nerves stood on end, focused on that spot. I couldn’t be sure, but I felt as if someone was hidden there, watching the house where Yuka and I had been headed. It was possible that my mind was playing tricks on me and there was nothing there—but I felt sure.
Not today, I told Yuka with my eyes. She looked at the house again and agreed.
That night, we did not steal any animals. We spent some time under the bridge, and then we went home. Yuka wanted me to kill something, but I was relieved that I didn’t have to.
Still, I was anxious. The shadow chasing after us had taken form and shown itself. It was not just a figment of my imagination—it was real.
iii
My Tuesday night stakeout had passed without the kidnapper showing. The next day, Wednesday, I casually quizzed my classmates and family, trying to figure out if any dogs had gone missing. But it seemed the kidnapper hadn’t stolen anything that night—or perhaps a dog had been stolen somewhere beyond the reach of my information network.
“Do you know what kind of person is behind this?” Morino asked me, looking up from her book as she sat in the corner of the chemistry lecture hall Wednesday at lunch.
I shook my head. I had no idea.
“Why would anyone steal that animal in the first place? To sell them to pet shops for money?” Morino asked, as if it was utterly incomprehensible that anyone would ever want that particular kind of animal.
“I doubt the kidnapper’s after money—even the purebred dogs they sell in pet shops tend to get put down once they’re fully grown. Almost nobody buys them.”
If someone was in the market, it’d be for research test subjects, not pets. Pet dogs trusted humans, making them easier to handle than wild dogs. I’d heard they would fetch a good price on the black market.
“The only reason I can think of to kidnap dogs is to hurt them. There are people who claim abandoned dogs and cats from Internet sites for that reason.”
“So the kidnapper is killing the stolen pets for fun? That’s pretty crazy,” Morino said.
But something about this seemed off to me. If that was true, where was the killer hurting the animals? Not at home. When the news occasionally mentioned animal bodies discovered in parks, discussions about animal abuse usually followed, but I hadn’t heard about any such discoveries recently.
†
On my way home from school that Wednesday and Thursday, I made inquiries at homes where pets had gone missing, covering one house each day. The homeowners didn’t seem to suspect that I didn’t actually work for the school newspaper, and they were helpful.
But I found no real new information about the culprit. Both the stolen animals were small, and both were mutts. One of the pet owners had found partially eaten food left behind, the other had not.
On Friday, I once again got on a bus, heading for a home with a missing pet. According to the information I had managed to gather, this was the earliest disappearance, and the farthest from my home and school. It was one of the houses along the river.
Comparing my map with the addresses, I found the house I was looking for. It was newly built. I rang the front doorbell, but it seemed nobody was home.
There was a small garden with a bed of tulips, along with a dog food dish in front of an empty doghouse. The dish was made of plastic; it was a bit dirty, and it had “Marble’s dish” written in marker in a childish scrawl.
I left the house and got back on the bus, this time getting off at a stop near home.
It was Friday; another pet might well vanish tonight. As I was thinking about that, someone called out to me. I turned around and saw Sakura, wearing her junior high school uniform and pushing her bike toward me. She jogged a little until she caught up with me.
She always stopped at cram school on her way home, studying for a few more hours, so I asked her what she was doing there so early.
“Something came up, and I couldn’t go to cram school today,” she said listlessly. She looked a little pale and downcast, and she could barely keep her bike going in a straight line.
“You saw something again?” I asked, taking her bicycle.
She thanked me and nodded.
Sakura was born under an unusual star, giving her what I called a gift but what she detested and called a curse: Sakura frequently discovered corpses.
The first time was on an elementary school field trip to the mountains. She had been in the first grade, and she’d become separated from the others. She ended up at the edge of a pond, where she found a human corpse floating in the water.
The second time was four years later. Sakura had gone to the sea with a friend’s family, and she’d once again been separated from the others. This time, she found a man’s body washed up on the rocks by the shore.
The third time was three years later, in her second year of junior high, at her volleyball club camp. After taking a wrong turn while out jogging, she’d found herself in a deserted area. Then she’d tripped over something—a human skull.
Every time she found a body, she came home looking pale. Then she would run a fever and spend the next week in bed.
“Why is it always me?” she cried.
The gaps between her discoveries were getting shorter, and a quick estimate suggested she would find her fourth body this year or next. When she got old, she might very well find them every minute or two.
“So what did you find today?” I asked, as the wheels of her bike squealed at my side.
“On the way to cram school, I saw something … and then I felt sick and decided to skip.”
Between the junior high and her cram school, there was a river with wide banks—broad, shallow, and slow moving. Crossing the river was a big concrete bridge, which lots of cars used. There was a separate lane for bikes and pedestrians.
“I had my bag and a towel in the basket of my bicycle.”
The towel was a blue and white one she used often. A truck had zipped by, and the wind had sent the towel into the air. Before she could catch it, it had flown over the edge of the bridge, dropping out of sight.
With cars zipping past behind her, she had leaned over the railing, looking down. Fortunately, the towel had not fallen into the river. Rather, it was caught on the grass along the riverbank far below.<
br />
“I went down to the bank to get my towel.”
At the end of the bridge was a set of stairs made of concrete that led down to the bank. When Sakura reached the bottom of those steps, she’d found herself in a sea of grass with pointy green leaves as tall as she was. She’d pushed her way through them—the grass was thick, but not too thick for a person to pass through.
“I couldn’t tell from up above, but there was a space under the bridge where the grass stopped.” There was a circular patch of dry ground surrounded by a wall of grass. It was like being inside a cage.
The massive bridge loomed overhead like a roof; when Sakura had looked up, half the sky was filled with the underbelly of the bridge.
“I looked around for my towel, but …” She’d heard the buzzing of insects—a great number of flies. Looking closer, she saw the swarm clustered over one spot.
“I pushed my way toward it because it was in the same general direction as my towel …”
As she walked, Sakura smelled something rotting. She parted the grass, and just as she neared the swarm of flies, a black pit opened beneath her feet. It was more of a depression than a hole, only about three feet across and three feet deep. She almost fell in. Then, heaving from the stench, she looked down, and she saw what was in the hole …
†
The hole was filled with an alarming number of lumps. They were torn to bits and shapeless, so at first I didn’t know what they were, just black and red lumps.
Trying to ignore the stench, I bent down, looking closer.
Jaws, tails, and collars—dogs. Beneath the torn fur and flesh, maggots wriggled. There was layer after layer of lumps piled up in the hole. All of them had once had life and frolicked about beneath the sun. It was a strange feeling, the lure of death and destruction.
The hole was filled with rot and stench. Staring down into it, I found myself remembering images of World War II. The hole of death had a lot in common with those images.
I stood up and looked around. Like Sakura had said, there was nothing here but grass: the pointed tips of the grass against the red light of the setting sun and the flies buzzing around them like black specks. The flies must have thought me a friend, as they kept crashing into my uniform and cheeks. Everything was tinted red by the fading sunlight.
