In exchange for her help with the plan, Celty got to meet the girl with her head earlier in the evening. She approached the girl, neck covered in gruesome stitched scars, and simply asked for her name. It was a fatalistic question—she assumed the girl would not remember—but the answer was the worst thing she could have imagined.
The girl stared at Celty’s helmet with awful, empty eyes and said just one word.
“Celty.”
That cleared my head.
As soon as the word registed in her mind, she felt a deep despair, as well as the invigorating rush of being set free of some kind of curse.
Celty gazed down on Namie’s squad, isolated from the enormous crowd—and announced her presence by letting her Coiste Bodhar roar.
All at once, the crowd of Dollars looked away from Namie and up at Celty on the top of a looming high-rise building.
Satisfied, she spread her arms—
And dropped vertically down the outer surface of the building.
Before the screams started down on the ground, the shadow that enveloped her expanded to its maximum, an even blacker cloud against the black of night. The shadow eventually covered the bike, weaving its way between the tires and the wall so that both rubber and steel seemed to draw the other in as it raced breathless and vertical.
The Dollars and Namie’s group, gathered below on 60-Kai Street, were getting a glimpse of a world where physics held no sway.
The bike leaped away from the building and landed on the opposite side of the Dollars, trapping Namie’s group in the middle.
It was like a scene from a movie. Some held their breath, some quaked in terror, and some shed tears without knowing why.
And without a care for the public attention on her every move, Celty drew the shadow from her back, forming the giant pitch-black scythe.
As Namie trembled, one of her henchmen approached Celty from behind and smacked her collarbone area with a special police baton. The helmet fell off of her neck, exposing the empty space.
Shouts and screams arose, while those at the rear of the pack couldn’t see or react to what happened. Panic shot through the crowd.
But Celty had not an ounce of doubt or hesitation.
Yeah, I have no head. I’m a monster. I don’t have a mouth to speak my case or eyes to convey my passion to others.
But so what?
So damn what?
I’m right here. I am here, and I exist. If I don’t have any eyes, you will simply have to observe all of my actions instead. Let your ears take in the screams of those who have felt firsthand my monstrous wrath.
I am right here. I’m here. I’m right here.
I am already screaming, screaming.
I was born here—so that I could carve my existence into this city…
And then, they heard. The sight turned into a tremendous noise in their brains.
The scream of the dullahan, a sound they should never have heard, painted the main street in the color of battle.
Last Chapter: Dollars, Closing
At first, the Dollars were nothing more than a silly idea.
On Mikado’s suggestion, a number of friends on the Internet decided to work together. They created a fictional team in Ikebukuro and spread the tales solely on the Net. They added story upon story, claiming Dollars’ responsibility for any real event that happened. None of them ever claimed to be a member of the Dollars but spoke of them as tales they heard from others. When people asked for the source of the information, they were ignored. Sometimes the group even set up fake websites to back their claims.
When the tale of the Dollars began to gain legs of its own, Mikado and his friends got a little carried away and created an official Dollars site. It was password protected, and they wrote a huge mass of “member posts” within. Then they began to leak the address—if anyone wanted the password, they’d send it along in an e-mail, claiming they got it on the down low from a friend within the group.
In this way, they created a fake organization. The only rule was listed on the website: “You are free to claim membership in the team.”
Of course, at first people claimed there was no such team in Ikebukuro. But strangely enough, over time posts appeared that called out such opinions as the work of trolls or accused them of never having been to Ikebukuro in the first place. None of Mikado’s original group were making these posts. In other words, people who weren’t in on the original joke were speaking up to defend the Dollars.
At first, they were delighted over this development, but that soon gave way to subtle unease and chilling alienation.
Yes, it was a silly joke at first. They intended to put work into building up the story, then let it sit, like a little prank. But then things started getting weird.
The Dollars, which had begun as an empty prank, began to wield actual real-world strength.
Whose work it was did not surface, but gradually, people began to join the Dollars in real life, through face-to-face communication, not on the Internet. The story was growing larger and larger beyond their control. At that point, they didn’t have the option of coming out and claiming it was all a big joke, and Mikado’s friends began to drift away from it. They preferred to simply fade away and forget about the whole thing.
Only Mikado kept up the act.
Now that the organization actually had true power, someone had to take control, to ensure it was safe. He couldn’t deny that a part of him was elated over the illusion that he was in control of such a massive group, but he kept it entirely secret—and the next thing he knew, he was in fact the head of the Dollars.
The leader atop the Dollars, a person no one had ever seen, a person no one would have guessed was only in middle school. And the group only picked up speed from there.
Finally, tonight, the organization born from a lie took on absolute substance.
“Boy, that was something,” Izaya muttered, watching the aftermath of the festival.
In less than three minutes, Celty crushed ten men, then disappeared in pursuit of the fleeing Namie.
The crowd seemed to treat the entire display as an illusion, breaking off into smaller groups and continuing on their ways home. It was like the draining of some tremendous tide, and the mob was gone as though it had all been nothing more than the product of a dream.
All that was left was a few cars parked on the street and the same old night bustle that had been in place before the event.
“Were there really that many people here just now?” Kadota asked Izaya Orihara as he got out of one of the vans on the street. He hadn’t seen Izaya in ages.
“Nice to see you again, Dotachin. For the number of people they hold, the twenty-three wards of Tokyo are surprisingly small. It’s the densest city in the world for a reason. You can show up anywhere and disappear anywhere.”
As they chatted, Celty appeared at the entrance to the street nearby.
“By the way, Izaya…what is that? I’ve seen it before. It’s not human, is it?”
“You saw it, right? It’s a monster. Make sure you call it that out of respect,” Izaya joked, then walked over toward Celty. “Seems like you lost your target, huh?”
His tone was as casual toward her as ever, despite having just witnessed the majesty of her combat in person. Celty trudged back to her motorcycle in fatigue, clearly upset about losing Namie.
“Well, at least you cleared your head,” he noted cheerfully, looking straight at the cross section of neck remaining.
Damn. So he knew I didn’t have my head all along.
Izaya was cool as a cucumber even without Celty’s head present. Meanwhile, Yumasaki and Karisawa were still positively buzzing with excitement, chattering a slight distance away.
“No way, no way, you serious? Is this for real? It’s not just my eyes playing tricks on me? Wait, does that mean the Black Rider’s all CG or something?!”
Celty grew tired of their stares, so she walked over to pick up her fallen helmet.
“The
thing that makes ghosts scary is that they skulk and hide around before popping out to spook you. But after that grand entrance back there, nobody around here’s going to be afraid of you for quite a while,” Izaya teased her, then added, “And you didn’t even kill anyone, huh? Can’t your scythe cut anything?”
She ignored him completely and brushed the dust off of her helmet. The scythe she’d produced just now was fashioned to be safe on either edge. If anything, it was more of a bludgeon.
If I’m planning to live in this place for a while, it won’t do to make the town infamous for murders.
But she wasn’t going to admit such a shabby reasoning to anyone. She slouched her shoulders in embarrassment and put the helmet back on top.
Before they parted, Izaya approached Mikado.
“To be honest, I’m amazed,” he said pleasantly, but there was not a drop of sweat on his face to support that statement. Mikado couldn’t begin to guess where he had been in the crowd.
Meanwhile, Izaya praised the young man. “I knew there were a ton of people identifying themselves as Dollars on the Net. But I never thought you could call a meeting out of the blue like this and get so many people all at once. Ahh, humanity always surpasses one’s imagination.”
He shook his head softly. “But while you may be dreaming of a life outside the bounds of normality, life in Tokyo will become normal after you’ve been here for a year. If you still want the abnormal, you’ll need to either move somewhere else or get into drugs, prostitution, or whatever lies even deeper underground.”
At that point, Mikado understood. If he did the same thing again, seeking the same high of excitement he was now feeling—or perhaps if he publicly and completely claimed leadership of the Dollars—what would become of him? If he was unhappy with his life now, would he just keep searching for a new life forever?
Izaya smiled in absolute understanding of Mikado’s thoughts.
“Life becomes normal even for the people on the other side of the tracks. Take the plunge for yourself, and you’ll be used to it in three days. And people like you can never bear that.”
It was painful how well he understood what Izaya meant. But why was he saying these things to Mikado? There had to be some ulterior motive, but Mikado had no answer while he was ignorant of Izaya’s true intentions.
“If you truly want to escape the ordinary, you’ll simply need to keep evolving—whether what you seek is above or below.”
To finish off, he patted Mikado’s shoulder and said, “Enjoy your normality. Out of respect, I’ll let you have Namie Yagiri’s phone number absolutely free. And I’ll even refrain from selling the intel that you’re the founder of the Dollars. It’s your organization. Use it when you want to use it.”
And with that, he walked off in Celty’s direction. Mikado wasn’t quite sure how to process all of this, so he simply bowed toward Izaya’s back.
However, Izaya suddenly stopped and turned back, adding one last thing that had just come to him.
“Just so you know, I’ve been observing you on the Net this entire time. I just wanted to catch a glimpse of the guy who actually created something as dumb as the Dollars. That’s all! Hang in there, Tarou Tanaka!”
But how did he know that name, something Mikado had chosen as a username exclusively for certain areas online? And on a similar note, hadn’t he called Kadota “Dotachin” just a few moments earlier?
He thought back to what Izaya had just said—he was observing the creator of the Dollars on the Net, tracking his online behavior.
Then Mikado remembered one of his chat partners, a person who had invited him to a specific chat room, and claimed to know various things about Ikebukuro and the Dollars.
Can it be? Can it be? Can it be?!
Eventually, the police came to sweep 60-Kai Street, but Mikado in his school jacket hid in the shadows of an alleyway with Celty. If the police found him wearing proof that he was in school, he’d be punished for certain.
The passersby and karaoke bar solicitors unrelated to the Dollars no doubt witnessed the raucous scene from earlier, but no one spoke up to tell the police what happened. Either they decided that nothing so freaky was a good idea to get involved with, or they assumed they’d hallucinated the entire thing.
But for some reason, even after the police had left, the unease sat heavy in Mikado’s heart. He felt that he must be forgetting something important. Meanwhile, Celty, her helmet back on her shoulders, walked over to the van in which her head was sitting.
She no longer held any longing for her head, but it seemed appropriate that she say a final farewell of some kind. But as she approached the van—
Shudd.
A dull shock ran through her back as she reached for the car door. A moment later, the sensation repeated, slightly higher.
Huh? Isn’t this the same thing that happened to Shizuo yesterday…?
The shock instantly turned to pain, and Celty fell to her knees. She looked behind her to see a tall young man wearing a school jacket. There was a large scalpel in his hand, probably taken from a laboratory.
After a brief silence, enough time for the wounds to heal and the pain to fade, the boy mumbled, “Hmm, I guess that’s not enough to kill.”
Seiji Yagiri examined the blade, noting there was no blood on it, then hopped right into the van.
Wait, where are you going?
Celty instantly forgot about being stabbed in the back. She wasn’t sure how to handle this unexpected arrival. As far as she could remember, this was Yagiri, who’d been chasing her head—the younger brother of the woman from earlier. As with the time that he stabbed Shizuo, she was struck by how normal he was, and that made it all the harder to know how to respond.
Seiji Yagiri stepped into the van without hesitation and boldly carried his heroine out.
“Huh…?”
At a distance, Mikado had to squint to see what happened.
He thought he saw a man wearing a blazer get into the van, and then just moments later, he got right back out, pulling with him a girl with scars on her neck.
Seiji had a dazzling smile on his face as he pulled her by the hand. With a powerful look in his eye, he led her away from the van.
No one, not Karisawa in the car, or Celty nearby, tried to stop him. No one could.
His actions inside the van were too simple and too bold. At first, Karisawa took him for one of Mikado’s friends. He was wearing the same uniform, and there was no hesitation or doubt in his eyes.
And with that pure look of devotion on his face, he reached out a hand to the scarred girl.
“I’ve come for you. Let’s go.”
If that was all that happened, Karisawa or Celty could have stopped him. But the next moment took them completely by surprise.
“…Okay.”
The girl with the scarred neck took Seiji’s hand without a second thought. As though he completely expected this answer, he nodded and pulled her out of the vehicle. It happened so naturally, it was as though fate had ordained that moment from before they were ever born. The glowing night street was like their wedding aisle.
“Huh? What?”
Despite his bewilderment, Mikado couldn’t take his eyes off of the unnatural scene.
Kadota and Yumasaki, too, seemed to think that Seiji was Mikado’s friend, given the same school uniform, and they watched him go without much consternation. Izaya, on the other hand, did understand the meaning of the events, but he was content to watch the scene play out with a smile on his lips.
Eventually Seiji noticed Mikado on the street, and he approached with the girl in tow.
“Hey.”
The greeting was so ordinary—and therefore eerie, given the circumstances—that Mikado had no response. Seiji continued, not bothered in the least.
“I really owe a lot to both you and my sister. If it wasn’t for my sister, I’d never have found her. And if it wasn’t for you, she’d have been trapped in that lab forever.”
And wi
th that, he walked right past Mikado. The boy watched them pass with shock, but then he noticed the expression on the face of the girl. She averted her eyes, but he thought he caught a hint of fear.
Mikado glared at Seiji and asked a very important question.
“I’d like you to answer something for me. I tried to get an answer out of your sister earlier…”
“Asking if I had killed someone? It might have happened.”
Mikado felt a slight chill run down his back. Seiji did not change his expression. He pointed the scalpel right at Mikado, who stood in his way.
“Now move it. If it’s gotten out that I killed that stalker chick, me and my lady here have to run for safety before the police show up to haul me in.”
Seiji’s eyes were not filled with madness, nor transported with the lust of violence.
“But that doesn’t mean—”
“What do you know? I’ve been watching her, gazing at her, ever since I was a little kid. I wanted to release her, free her from the prison of that cramped glass case. I wanted to live with her out in the free world. That’s all I ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever thought about.”
His eyes were never anything but normal and full of justified intent. This must have been the “ordinary life” that he chose for himself, but from the outside, it was impenetrable and terrifying.
“Hey, what are you doing?”
Izaya, Kadota, Yumasaki, and the others noticed the scene unfolding and gathered around them. Seiji simply stood his ground and shook his head.
“Oh, come on. The power of love cannot be stopped by anyone.” Even surrounded by menacing figures, his expression was absolutely ordinary. He spun the scalpel and held it high, then turned to Mikado and shouted, “So what does that make you? Both then and now, you rely on simple numbers and make no extraordinary effort of your own. You’re like a third-rate villain. I bet you’ve never been in love.”
“And you can’t even be third-rate if you don’t understand the effort it takes to gather these numbers,” Mikado replied.
Durarara!!, Vol. 1 (novel) Page 16
