Goth

by Otsuichi

  I looked out the window in front of me. A group of five boys were passing by, talking happily, laughing. One of them met my eye.

  He stopped in his tracks, surprised, and then he said something to his friends. I couldn’t hear him through the glass, but he was presumably telling them to go on without him. They moved on, leaving him behind.

  I straightened up a little.

  He came into the store and jogged over to me. “Kitazawa? What are you doing here?”

  His name was Kamiyama Itsuki, and I’d known him in junior high. He’d been a member of the basketball team, and I’d been the manager. He had a bright, cheerful smile, an expression like that of a puppy. He was taller than me, but the way he ran up to me was more puppy than dog.

  “What, don’t tell me you forgot me?”

  I was so relieved he’d come up to me that I’d almost started crying. I suddenly realized how scared I’d been.

  “Don’t be silly, of course I didn’t. It’s been a while, Itsuki …”

  I remembered my sister’s funeral. Surrounded by relatives and my sister’s college friends, Itsuki had come running over to me, the two of us in our high school uniforms. He’d stayed with me the whole time. He hadn’t tried to cheer me up; he’d simply stood next to me. And that had been enough.

  I’d remembered the crest on his uniform. That’s why I had known the boy who gave me the tape went to M**** High School. I didn’t know the boy’s name, so the school was the only way I had to find him.

  “I’m surprised to see you here. Waiting for someone?”

  I could hardly tell him I was watching the gates, waiting for someone who probably killed my sister, so I shook my head, not that. I don’t know what I must have looked like, but he grew serious.

  “Something happen?” he asked, sounding concerned. “Or is it still your sister … ?” He knew about the friction between us. I’d told him all about it at the funeral.

  The picture at the funeral had been taken just before she’d died, and that had made me want to talk about it with someone. It was a beautiful head shot of her, but it had been taken after we’d stopped being close.

  “Not my sister.”

  “But something’s bothering you? You said you wanted to talk to her again …”

  “Yes, but … forget about it. I’m sorry about dumping that on you at the funeral.”

  Itsuki looked at me with pity in his eyes. “Do the police have any idea who killed her?”

  I stared at him.

  “You just seem different.”

  He had such good instincts. I shook my head. “The police still haven’t …”

  “Oh,” he said, sighing.

  As he sighed, the one I’d been waiting for appeared. The sun had started to set while I’d been talking to Itsuki, and it was getting dark out. But I could still see his face clearly through the store window as he crossed the street.

  I was not certain the boy had killed my sister—but when I saw him out of the corner of my eye, I was instantly terrified, as if I’d been suddenly plunged into total darkness.

  He was walking next to a female student, a beautiful girl with long hair. Both of them were equally expressionless.

  They passed in profile across the glass beyond the magazine rack. Itsuki followed my gaze, wondering why I had suddenly fallen silent.

  “Morino,” he said.

  “Is that that boy’s name?”

  “No, the girl’s name—she’s pretty famous. A teacher tried to molest her, but apparently she kicked his ass.”

  Like Itsuki, they were both second-year students.

  “Do you know the boy’s name?” I asked, a little too urgently. Itsuki looked taken aback. “Uh, yeah, he’s—”

  He said a name, and I chiseled it into my brain, making sure I never forgot.

  I put the magazine down and left the store. Cold air and exhaust fumes enveloped me.

  I stood in front of the store, staring after him. I could see their backs as they headed toward the station.

  She must have felt me staring, because the girl, Morino, turned around and looked right at me. She looked me over, and then she turned back around.

  The shop door opened, and Itsuki came over. “I was in his class last year.”

  “What’s he like?”

  Itsuki stared at me for a moment, and then he shrugged. “I dunno … normal?”

  I hesitated. Should I chase after him? But Itsuki was with me. And Morino was with him. This didn’t seem like the time to ask questions about the tape of my sister’s voice. I abandoned the idea.

  “Something wrong?”

  I shook my head. The two of us began walking to the station, the same direction they had gone. They were already out of sight.

  The shop signs and vending machines lined up along the road glowed, their lights shining brightly. As we walked, the sun set, and the cold winter darkness thickened, the vending machines’ light the only thing that remained distinct.

  As we walked, Itsuki and I chatted about recent events in our lives. All I talked about was entrance exams, which seemed like a safe enough subject, whereas he had all kinds of funny anecdotes about school, his friends, places he’d been …

  They were nothing extraordinary, just the normal stories any high school boy would tell, but they went a long way toward helping me relax. Perhaps Itsuki had noticed my tension, and he was deliberately trying to cheer me up.

  Cars sped past us, their headlamps on, the lights flickering over our faces. “Want to talk in there?” Itsuki asked, pointing at the family restaurant in front of the station. Through the windows, it looked brightly lit and warm.

  Inside, it was filled with the hum of people’s voices as they ate their dinners. The waitress led us to a booth at the back. The partitions and wall were covered in silver decorations, which glittered in the lights above.

  “How are your parents?” Itsuki asked.

  I shook my head. “Not good. They never leave the house.”

  I told him what it had been like since my sister died: the dust in the corners, the TV on but the lights off, how they always forgot to lock the door.

  “So they still aren’t over Hiroko’s—?”

  “Yes, especially since they both saw … her body.”

  He nodded. I’d mentioned at the funeral that her condition had been far worse than the news had reported.

  “Will they ever be better?” I murmured, picturing their blank faces. I couldn’t imagine them recovering from that. All I could see was their slumped shoulders, the spark of life forever gone.

  “What about Akagi?”

  “He came by a number of times after the funeral, but recently …”

  Akagi, my sister’s boyfriend … he was one of those left most devastated by her murder. He attended the same college as her; although I wasn’t completely certain, I thought he’d probably met her there. She’d brought him home with her, and I’d spoken to him a number of times. He’d stayed with my parents at the funeral, supporting them.

  “Maybe I’m the one who killed Hiroko,” he’d said after the funeral. “We had a fight the day before she died, and she ran out of my room, and …”

  The next day, she’d been found in the abandoned hospital. Akagi was the last person to see her alive.

  If they hadn’t fought, she never would’ve met the killer, and she never would’ve died—that’s what Akagi told me as he covered his face with his hands.

  “I’d better be going,” Itsuki said. It was time for his train.

  “I’m going to sit and think awhile.”

  “Okay, so …” He took a step away, and then he turned back. “If you have anything you need to talk about, please call me.”

  As I watched him leave, I thanked him silently. I sat alone, sipping coffee, watching the family across the aisle. I didn’t want to be too obvious about it, so I watched them out of the corner of my eye.

  They were here eating dinner, a young couple with their kids, infant daughters.
<
br />   They reminded me of my own family. The younger sister was too young to speak, and she kept her fingers in her mouth, watching everything wide-eyed. As I glanced sideways at them, I met her eye.

  I remembered my sister.

  When we were children, the two of us had gone on a long walk together. It must’ve been a warm spring day. I had just started elementary school, and the guardrails and posts towered over me.

  We climbed a long hill, passing house after house. At the top of the hill was a forest. We looked down at the city below from the shade—tiny little houses, as far as we could see.

  There was a bird in the sky above, with long white wings. A big river ran through town, so I decided that it must’ve lived there.

  It glided on the wind, drifting elegantly, its big white wings barely moving. I watched it for ages without ever growing bored.

  My sister looked at me and smiled, flashing her teeth. Her canines always jutted out, even after she got her big teeth in, and we often played vampires. But I hadn’t seen my sister smile—hadn’t seen her canines—for an awfully long time.

  When she’d dyed her hair, I wondered aloud if I should do the same.

  “Don’t, it would look awful on you,” she’d said. I couldn’t take this as kind advice. There was an edge to her voice; she’d snapped at me.

  Every time she did something like that, I felt like she didn’t want me around. Why had she died? I couldn’t believe anyone had hated her enough to kill her. And what was it she’d wanted to talk to me about before she died?

  A shadow fell on my table. I looked up, and a boy in a black uniform was looking down at me. It was the boy who had passed in front of the store, walking with the girl named Morino.

  “Kitazawa, you were waiting for me to leave school.”

  I was not terribly surprised. I felt it was only natural he would suddenly appear like this. I didn’t stand up; I just looked up at him and asked, “Did you kill my sister?”

  For a moment, he said nothing. At last, his lips parted quietly, and words emerged: “Yes, I killed her.”

  His quiet voice faded from my ears, fading into the soft hum of the restaurant.

  iii

  The boy sat down across from me, where Itsuki had been sitting. I couldn’t move—it was like I was paralyzed. I just stared at him. But even if I had been able to move, I wouldn’t have stopped him from sitting, I wouldn’t have stood up and screamed.

  “I killed her.” The boy’s words echoed through my mind. I had known it was possible, but my mind couldn’t deal with the words as easily as my ears had. It was like too much water had been poured into a potted plant: his voice got stuck between my skull and my brain, the bulk of it sitting there unabsorbed.

  He looked at me and cocked his head. Then he leaned forward slightly, his mouth moving. It seemed he was asking if I was okay. I could see his lips mouthing the words. He reached across the table and tried to touch my shoulder. My voice finally broke free just before he touched my clothes.

  “Don’t!”

  I pulled back against the booth, getting as far from him as I could, pressing myself against the wall. This was not a conscious movement but an instinctive one.

  Abruptly, all the light and noise of the restaurant turned back on. No, they didn’t turn on—the music playing and the customers’ voices had never stopped in the first place. They simply hadn’t reached my eyes and ears. But to me, it felt like time had stopped and then started moving again.

  Apparently, I had spoken loudly enough that the family across the aisle heard me. Both parents were frowning in my direction. When I met their gaze, they looked away awkwardly, returning to their conversation.

  “Are you okay, Natsumi?” the boy asked, taking his arm away and sitting back on his seat. I resumed my original position and shook my head.

  “No.” My chest hurt. I wasn’t crying, but there were tears in my voice. “Nothing’s okay …”

  My head was overheating. I couldn’t figure out if I should be afraid of him or furious with him, but I was sure that the boy sitting across from me was more than I could handle.

  As rattled and flustered as I was, he remained utterly calm, as though he were observing me scientifically, like I wasn’t a human but an insect under his magnifying glass.

  “Natsumi, I don’t want you to scream,” he said without the slightest flicker of emotion in his voice, like he had no heart at all. I knew the thing across the table from me was very frightening indeed.

  “Why did you kill her … ?”

  This boy would never laugh like Itsuki or be surprised if someone unexpectedly dumped her problems on him. He was like a tree stripped of branches and leaves, reduced to the simple essence. A strange way of putting it, but that was how he felt to me.

  “I don’t know why I killed Hiroko, not really,” he said slowly. “But it had nothing to do with her. All reasons for her death lay with me.”

  “With you?”

  He said nothing for a moment, apparently lost in thought—but he never took his eyes off me. Finally, without saying a word, he jerked his chin at the family across the aisle.

  “You were looking at them a moment ago?” The infant girls were laughing at each other.

  “You were remembering the past, thinking about how much those girls are like you and Hiroko were? It brought back fun memories of your own childhood, and you stared at them the way you would a precious treasure.”

  “Stop it …”

  I wanted to clap my hands over my ears to stop from hearing his voice. It was like he was climbing into my mind without even taking off his shoes.

  “I have a sister myself. A dozen years ago, we must’ve gone out to dinner, much like that family. I don’t remember it, but we must have done so. Does that surprise you?”

  With each word he spoke, my heartbeat grew faster. It was like I was rumbling down a slope into an abyss, going faster and faster.

  “Look at that little girl—carefully, though, so she doesn’t see you looking,” the boy said softly.

  I took my eyes off him, glancing sidelong at the little girl in the seat across from me. She was sitting in the booth, her innocent eyes staring into the distance, her little fingers clinging tightly to her mother’s clothes. I didn’t know the girl, didn’t know her name, but I found her lovable anyway.

  “Natsumi, do you think that girl will kill someone, ten years from now?”

  My heart froze. I turned back toward him to protest, but before I could say anything, he continued.

  “She might kill her parents, or her sister. It isn’t impossible. She may already be planning to do so. Perhaps she’s only pretending to be childish. Perhaps she really wants to grab the knife off that hamburger plate and stab it into her mother’s throat.”

  “Please … stop it. You’re insane.” I lowered my head, closing my ears tightly, fighting his words. Each word turned to pain as it reached me, like the words were slapping my cheeks.

  “Natsumi, look at me … I’m kidding. That child most likely won’t ever kill anybody. Everything I just said … described me.”

  I looked up and stared at him. He shimmered—there were tears in my eyes.

  “That’s the way I was born. When I was as small as that girl, I didn’t understand that, but by the time I started elementary school, I knew I was different from other people.”

  “What are you talking about?” I stammered.

  He explained, not looking the least bit annoyed. “About how I was destined to kill. That’s the only way I can look at it. Just as a vampire has no choice but to drink human blood, I have no choice but to kill people. My fate was already decided the moment I was born. I wasn’t abused by my parents and scarred mentally. I have no ancestors that were murderers. I was raised in a very ordinary household. But whereas ordinary children play alone with imaginary friends and pets, I spent my time staring at imaginary corpses.”

  “What are you?” I could no longer see him as human. He was something much more hor
rible, much more horrifying.

  For a moment, he was quiet. Then he shook his head. “I don’t know. I’ve thought about why I have to kill people, but I’ve found no answers. And I’ve had to keep it secret, pretending that I’m normal. I’ve been very careful not to let anybody see inside my heart.”

  “Not even your family?”

  He nodded. “My family believes I’m an ordinary, normal boy. I’ve been extremely careful to carve that position out for myself.”

  “Your … whole life … is a lie?”

  “Meaning that I could only believe that everything else was a lie.” I didn’t understand this.

  He explained further, “I couldn’t believe that the conversations my family had or the friendly attitudes of the people I knew were genuine. I was certain there had to be a script somewhere—and once, when I was very young, I searched the house for it. I wanted to read the same words everyone else was saying. But there was no script. The only thing that ever felt real to me was death.”

  “That’s why I long … for human death.” I saw him mouth those words.

  “That’s why my sister … ?”

  “That night, I was out walking, and I saw her sitting in front of a vending machine. She’d been crying, so I asked if she was all right, and she flashed her canines and thanked me.”

  He killed her because he’d liked those canines, he said. He claimed it was a twisted kind of love.

  As I listened to him, I felt like I was tied to the restaurant booth. I looked at his hands where they lay on the table: white hands protruding from his black uniform sleeves, thin fingers, neatly trimmed nails. Those hands were clearly human hands. But seven weeks ago, those same hands had killed my sister.

  “Because you liked her canines?”

  He nodded, and then he took something out of the bag next to him: a small rectangle, small enough to fit in the palm of his hand.

  “I set them in resin. I thought you might like to see.”

  He set the thing down on the table. It was a clear block. Inside were twenty little white things in a row. Two curved rows, one on top of the other, were suspended in the block.