Goth (20 page)

Sweet intoxication filled Saeki’s mind, like sugar water seeping into a cotton ball. Aboveground, the girl he had beaten was terrifying—but underground, out of sight, he felt his fear changing to bliss.

Then Saeki heard a voice, faintly—the wind almost drowned it out, it was so small.

Saeki looked at the bamboo poles again. The pale moonlight picked them out of the shadows around them, sending black lines across the garden to the porch where Saeki was sitting. Four of the bamboo poles were thicker than the others.

The tiny voice he had heard came from two of those thicker poles. Saeki stood up, slipped on his shoes, and stepped directly from the porch into the garden. He walked across the garden, feeling like he wasn’t moving at all, like he was a sleepwalker drifting through an unreal world. There was no light save that of the moon, and the trees around his garden loomed like dark shadows on either side, staring down at him.

He stepped onto the scattered straw, approaching the bamboo poles, which came up to his chest, and peering down into them. There was nothing inside but darkness, darkness like his hollow heart, across a diameter as wide as his thumb. He could just make out the girl’s trembling voice, carried up the pole to the world aboveground. Her voice was very weak, and the wind snatched it from the end of the poles, scattering it like smoke.

One of the poles was louder than the other. There were two poles in the coffin, but one was at her feet. The other was near her face, and when she spoke inside the coffin, the pole near her face carried her voice better.

“Hello?” she said feebly. Her cut lip must’ve made it hard to speak loudly. “Let me out …”

Saeki went down on his knees, his palms against the earth between the bamboo poles. He had just buried her, and the earth under the straw was still soft.

The girl’s voice was coming from under his hands. He knew it was just his imagination, but the ground felt warm, as if he were feeling the body heat of the girl buried there.

Poor thing. How helpless she was, trapped down below his soles, breathing through a pole in the ground. He pitied her. Knowing she was buried beneath him, unable to do a thing, he felt so superior. He felt the same as he did when looking at a puppy or a kitten.

“Can you hear me?” he asked, standing up. His voice traveled through the darkness inside the poles, reaching the girl.

“Who … who’s there?” he heard her say. Saeki said nothing, and her voice rose up again. “You shut me in here, didn’t you? Then you buried me underground.”

“You know you’ve been buried?” Saeki asked, taken aback. If she had just now woken up inside the coffin, there was no way she should know anything but the fact that she was trapped in a small, enclosed, dark place.

The girl said nothing for a moment. Then, “I heard the dirt hitting the lid.”

“You were pretending to be unconscious?”

He had thought she’d been sleeping since he’d knocked her out. When had she woken up? He had never tied her up. If she had been awake before he put her in the box, she would’ve tried to run.

“Are your legs injured? Is that why you didn’t run?” he asked. The girl said nothing. Maybe his guess was right.

“Let me out!” she said angrily.

Her sudden anger took Saeki by surprise. She didn’t cry and plead—she was giving orders. He couldn’t see her underground, but he could sense how strong she was. But even in her strength, she was powerless.

“No, I’m afraid not. I really am sorry,” he said, shaking his head, even though the buried girl couldn’t see him. “If I let you out, you’d tell everyone what I did to you. I can’t let that happen.”

“Wh-who are you? Why are you doing this?” Her questions echoed in his heart.

Why had he buried her? He could find no exit from that question. It led him directly into a dead end. But he decided there was no reason to be polite and answer her, so he stopped thinking about it.

“That doesn’t matter.”

“Where am I? The mountains?”

“No, you’re in my garden. This is your grave.”

The girl fell quiet. He tried to imagine what her face must look like in that tiny, dark space.

“Grave? You’ve got to be kidding. I’m still alive.”

“Burying dead people isn’t as much fun,” Saeki said, feeling like that was extremely obvious.

It seemed to leave the girl speechless for a moment. Then she growled, “If you don’t let me out, you’ll be in trouble.”

“You think someone’s coming to save you?”

“I know someone who will find me!” she suddenly roared. Then she yelped in pain and fell silent again. He could hear her breathing heavily. Maybe her ribs were injured and they hurt every time she spoke. Saeki thought there was a surprising passion in her words.

“This friend you trust so much … a boy?”

“Yes,” she said, but with a confidence that made it clear she was talking about her boyfriend.

“May I ask his name?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“Curiosity.”

There was a long silence, and then the girl said the boy’s name. Saeki branded that name into his memories but privately wondered if she was lying. There was a possibility that no such person existed, but Saeki had no way of verifying the truth.

“I’m going to have to buy some binoculars.”

The night sky was filling with clouds drifting across the face of the moon. Tomorrow it might well be overcast.

“Do you know why?” Saeki asked. The girl remained silent. “To watch him mourn your loss from a distance.”

He was sure his voice had reached the girl’s ears, yet she said nothing at all. Saeki said a few more things, trying to draw a response, but she reacted to nothing. She just lay there silently in the dark.

Assuming he had made her mad, Saeki left the garden. Her mood would change in the morning.

He went to the garage and cleaned the backseat of the car. He could leave no trace of her presence there. In the car, he always kept a small pillow, which he’d placed under her head when he’d laid her down. All her blood had soaked into it, so there were no stains on the seat. Saeki took the pillow out of the car and gathered up all the long black hairs from the floor.

When he was done cleaning, he went inside, checked the clock on the wall, and discovered that it was already past two. He went up to his room, laid down on his futon, and tried to sleep. He lay there with his eyes closed, searching for the entrance to the land of dreams, his thoughts on the girl locked in tiny, isolated darkness.

†

The next day, it was almost noon by the time Saeki woke up. It was Saturday, but where he worked, weekends meant little; he often had to work on Saturday and Sunday. But this week, he’d been lucky: Saturday was his day off.

He opened his window and looked outside. When he was a child, he’d been able to see the city from there, but now the trees were in the way. Above the treetops, he could see a gray sky. A cold wind shook the trees, brushing past Saeki’s cheeks.

Wondering if the girl had simply been a dream, Saeki went downstairs and out onto the porch. He looked toward the wall, and only then was he sure that it had really happened.

There were four thick bamboo poles among the thinner rods. Four poles meant two coffins. He had buried a girl last night, next to Kousuke. Confirming this came as a relief.

What was going on next to the park, where he had pushed the girl into the car?

She had screamed. Had someone reported it? Had the buried girl’s parents grown worried about their missing daughter and called the police? The police might’ve been able to use those two pieces of information to figure out that the girl had been kidnapped on the road next to the park.

Saeki put on his sandals and stepped down into the garden. He was hungry, but he wanted to chat with the girl a little before he ate. In unusual circumstances like this, he usually wasn’t able to eat—but for some reason, he felt very hungry and alive.

He stood next to the bamboo poles. He didn’t speak immediately but listened, trying to hear if any sounds were coming from belowground. There were none, so he said, “It’s morning. Are you awake?”

The night before, she’d refused to answer him. He’d been worried she would keep that up this morning—but after a moment, he heard her voice again.

“I know it’s morning. It’s dark in here, but …”

The pole the voice was coming from shook slightly, despite the earth packed around it. She must have touched the end of it, which ran through the hole in the lid of the coffin.

“There’s this pole sticking in next to my face. I was feeling around and found it. This is so I can breathe? I looked inside, and I could see white light on the far end—which means daylight?”

The poles were not fixed in place—they simply passed through holes in the lid. If Saeki wanted to remove them, he could do so easily. Likewise, if she grabbed the end inside the coffin and shook it, it would wave back and forth merrily.

“Let go of that. Those poles should never move. Someone might see and think it looks suspicious. If you move that again, I’ll pull them out. And then you won’t be able to breathe.”

The pole stopped moving.

“What’s your name?” the girl asked.

“Saeki. And you are Morino, yes?”

There was a long, thoughtful silence, and then the girl whispered, her voice full of disgust, “Saeki, I don’t know why you’ve shut me in here, but this is evil. You should let me out—or the black bird of misfortune will settle on your shoulder.”

Not only was this girl not afraid of him, she was casting some sort of curse on him. Did she fully understand her predicament? Saeki felt himself growing a little angry.

“What can you do down there? I could drown you at any moment.”

“Drown … ?”

He explained in as much detail as possible how he could kill her using a hose to pump water into the coffin, making it very clear that there was no hope of her surviving, trying to break her will.

The girl wasn’t able to turn her eyes away from the black pit of despair before her. Or perhaps she was simply too tired to maintain her anger. Either way, her voice trembled. “I will end my own life before you have a chance to kill me. You didn’t check my pockets—a fatal mistake. I’m sure you’ll realize just how careless you were in time. I have a mechanical pencil in my pocket, and I’ll stab that into my jugular.”

“Perhaps you think committing suicide before I kill you would protect your pride, but that isn’t true. It’s all the same. Once you kill yourself, your body will rot away down there. No one will ever find it. You’ll remain alone, isolated underground forever.”

“No, I will not. I will not go undiscovered forever. The police aren’t stupid, and they’ll catch you one day. It may be a few days from now, or it may be a few years from now. And I know one thing for sure: I will not die alone.”

“You won’t?”

“My death will not be ‘isolated’!”

“You mean someone will die with you? The boy you spoke of yesterday?”

“He won’t let me die alone.”

Was she crying in her grave? Her voice sounded a little moist, but there was still an absolute sense of conviction behind it.

Saeki had asked about her boyfriend, intending to scoff. They were high school kids, and it was only puppy love. But now he found himself getting nervous. There was a black cloud in his head, heavily laden with rain.

“I can’t understand … how you can talk like that, in these circumstances. “Morino … you will die there and rot away underground, lonely … and alone. No other fate is possible,” Saeki said, and then he left her.

When he heard her words, he’d remembered the question the young woman at work had asked him—if he would ever marry.

He was cut off from any deep bonds, the kind family and close friends shared.

He had to remain that way to survive. He could smile at other people and engage in shallow conversations, but his soul must never touch theirs. The girl’s words had driven that home, unsettling him.

He decided to eat something and calm himself. He had lost his appetite, but if he ate, he would feel better.

He decided to eat out. He pulled his wallet out of his suit pocket and put on a jacket. Then, as he slipped on his shoes at the door, he noticed something odd.

Saeki had a work badge that he always kept on him. The ID card was held in a brown leather case, and it was always in the same pocket as his wallet. He never went anywhere without it. But he hadn’t seen it since the night before.

Saeki took off the one shoe he’d managed to get on and went back into the house, where his suit jacket was hanging. He reached into the pocket where his wallet had been. There was nothing inside, so he checked the other pockets. No sign of his badge. He looked around, making sure it wasn’t on the floor somewhere. He picked up all the magazines on the table, even lifting up the futon covering his
kotatsu
to look for it. Nothing.

When had he last seen it? He knew he’d had it at work. Had he dropped it somewhere?

Saeki soon arrived at the answer, an answer that made him rather dizzy. The more he tried to dismiss the idea, the more certain he was.

If he had dropped the badge, it would’ve been when he’d fought with the girl … last night, next to the park, when the girl’s scream had shattered the night, and the girl’s elbow had struck him in the ribs—knocking the badge out of his pocket.

He could hear bird’s wings flapping in the garden. The trees around his house drew a lot of birds. He could hear them singing in the morning, and when he walked through the garden, they would fly away in panic. But today the sound of their wings felt ominous, like a harbinger of destruction.

They had cleaned the leaves on that road yesterday. The badge hadn’t been there when they cleaned, but if it were found today … then they’d know the owner of the badge had passed that way that morning or the evening before.

It would be easy to determine to whom the badge belonged. Saeki’s name was written inside. He had no way of telling how many people would connect the fact that he had been there with the girl’s scream and her disappearance, but it seemed like a good idea to go out and find the badge before anyone else did.