Goth (38 page)

My fear was actually the cause of my inability to trust people. Fear of being deceived. Fear of being lied to. My fear of people was stealing from me the freedom of thought.

Could I live my whole life like this? Or would something change if I could trust the boy right here and now? As I cradled my head in the driver’s seat and curled into myself, I heard the boy’s voice almost in a whisper.

“I know Rosalia too.” His voice was very gentle. “The most adorable corpse in history.” There was even an intimacy to it, as though he was speaking to family.

How far can I trust you?

I knew what I had to say. I had to trust a living person.

I’ll make this deal with you, so let’s not have anything to do with each other.

I just had to say it.

But.

“I’ve always wanted to trust people. But I’m scared. I can’t help it.” I didn’t really know what I was saying. But I wanted to confess, like I was seeking salvation from him.

The boy had a response. “That’s fine, no need to change. You don’t have to trust these creatures, these people. They only lie—it’s smarter not to trust them. So then, let’s do this. You can just think of me as not being a person. I’m not human, so you don’t need to be afraid of trusting me.”

“Absurd.”

“I warned Morino and had her leave her cell phone there so we could make this deal. So that you wouldn’t come after her anymore.”

When I hung up, the only sound inside the car was the vibration of the engine. No train crossed the tracks before me. No other cars came along to pass me. It was simply dark outside the car. The deeply suffocating, cavernous darkness of night. I imagined that eventually this darkness would smash through the front windshield and even compress me to the size of a milk bottle, just like the water pressure of the deep ocean crushed everything. What exactly was this boy? Morino said that he and I had the same air. I peeked in the rearview mirror and stared at my own face, but I couldn’t see it. Soon, I became afraid that the amorphous, concentrated darkness outside the car was perhaps the boy himself, and I suddenly wanted to hear a human voice. I turned the radio back on.

Before I started the car, I remembered something. Opening the driver’s side door, I shone my flashlight on the darkness. I collected the snowy-white bandage from the branch where it was still caught and stared at it. The tiniest bit of blood had soaked into it. I held it to my chest and wept.

I started driving and soon entered the town in the foothills. I slid through the flat band of fields and came out into an area with plenty of oncoming traffic. I passed by several signs for 24-hour convenience stores. The sound of the radio didn’t make it into my brain. As I drove, I remembered the exchange with the boy.

†

“Right from the start, I didn’t believe in the rumors. The ghost didn’t even remotely look like the victim reported seven years ago, or her clothes. I knew that. That’s why I wasn’t surprised when I saw that girl Morino.” Right until I hung up, I denied having committed the act.

“If that’s true, then I must apologize for keeping you so long on the phone with me.” The voice betrayed no information.

“I’m more annoyed by everyone else.”

“What do you mean?”

“If they hadn’t all believed in these ghost stories, you wouldn’t be suspecting me right now.”

Seven years earlier, the body of a high school girl had been discovered on the mountain pass. Now, a ghost appears in that spot. The ghost wears a black sailor-style uniform and has long hair.

“All of them neglected to check the facts. The people of the world, the person who started the rumor. It’s so obvious that someone who doesn’t want that waste disposal facility to go up planted the rumor.” They had no doubt been trying to tap human emotion—which logic can’t touch—to stoke the desire to fight the government.

“Oh no, that’s not it.” The boy curtly rejected my suppositions.

“How would you know?”

“I’m the one who started the rumor. I started posting it online, regularly, about six months ago. I made up all the stories about seeing a ghost. I was preparing for when Morino and I went to the place where the body was discovered. I was supposed to go too. I thought I might get lucky and see the person who did it, maybe.”

I needed time to digest what I had just heard. Did this mean that the boy had circulated false information and set a trap to find the murderer? Even the fact that the rumored ghost looked exactly like the girl Morino was part of the boy’s plan?

“I don’t know about lucky. But why would you want to see the murderer?”

“The same mentality that makes us go to the zoo to see the lions.”

“How much did that Morino girl know about this? Did she know that you were the one who started the rumors about the ghost?”

“She knows nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“She probably thinks you just happened by and were trying to pick her up.”

“So she knew nothing, but still called you and ran away when you told her to?”

“Exactly. Because we’re friends.”

Friends.
The instant I heard the word, a shiver went up my spine, and I broke out in goose bumps. Because the boy’s voice held no emotion at all. He spoke as though he didn’t recognize the existence of even the concept of friendship. So why try to protect that girl then? Maybe he had romantic feelings for her?

“And, for the sake of argument, had I been the murderer and had I killed Morino and taken her picture, what would you do?”

“I would find you.”

“You’d get revenge?”

“No, I’d probably ask you to show me the photos.”

“And after that?”

“Nothing.”

I couldn’t see a shred of this thing human beings define as love in this boy. I remembered the look I saw on Morino’s face in the car. That sad air—there was something quite human about it—in contrast with the way this boy talked.

I hung up the phone and didn’t talk to the boy again.

†

Giving up on the girl Morino broke my heart. But if I went to look for her, I would end up meeting the boy somewhere along the way. I got the impression that nothing good would come of tangling with him. The more time passed from the moment I hung up the phone, the more this vague feeling turned into a certainty. I would have to give up on that mysterious girl, reminiscent of a wood at night just as the characters that made up her name suggested. But the longing for her face in death was as strong in me as it had been before, perhaps stronger now, seeking the ineffable feeling that Rosalia Lombardo provoked in me. The deal with the boy was that he and the girl would not concern themselves with me as long as I didn’t get involved with them. In other words, the boy had been telling me to find some subject other than Morino if I wanted to take my pictures.

That night, I didn’t go back to my apartment. I drove to a shopping district, started talking to a bored girl in the lobby of a bowling alley, and invited her out. We played a claw crane game, I treated her to a juice from the vending machine, and I got her into my car. The photo shoot was finished that night. The fact that this girl had black hair was not unrelated to my meeting Morino.

A week went by, and the police still hadn’t forced their way into my apartment. For my part, I had also not attempted to look into the identities of Morino or the boy. I turned the power off on the cell phone and kept it, together with the bandage.

Moreover, when I photographed the other girl, I came full circle to being glad I hadn’t been able to make Morino my subject that day. If I had photographed her face in death, my oeuvre would have, at that moment, been complete, and I would have spent the rest of my life simply admiring those photos. I chose to be more positive, taking the attitude that this sense of loss, my dissatisfaction no matter how many photos I took, could be transformed into my passion.

That said, I did wonder if Morino had made it home safely that day. When I had free time, I would remember her as I looked through my album of dead faces.

When you run, go in the direction of the setting sun. I checked a map. There should be houses that way.

That’s what the boy’s email said, but the sun was already starting to set then, wasn’t it? The temperature had also dropped significantly. But it would have been on the news if she had gotten lost and frozen to death in the mountains. The fact that it hadn’t meant that she’d managed to get out safely.

Although even if she had managed to make it to the nearby houses without incident, she could have been mistaken for a ghost because of the rumor the boy had started; she might have had a fair bit of trouble getting help. Had she tried to hail a passing car, the driver might have screamed and driven right past her. I suddenly saw her clucking her tongue at ending up in such an absurd situation.

She knew nothing.

Not that she might have died that day.

Not that the person walking with her on that path in the woods was a murderer.

Born in 1978 in Fukuoka, Otsuichi won the Sixth Jump Short Fiction/Nonfiction Prize when he was seventeen with his debut story “Summer, Fireworks, and My Corpse.” Now recognized as one of the most talented young fantasy/horror writers in Japan, his other English-language works include the short story collections
Summer, Fireworks, and My Corpse/Black Fairy Tale
and
ZOO
(Haikasoru).
GOTH
won the Honkaku Mystery Award and was adapted into a feature film starring Rin Takanashi. The English-language edition of
ZOO
was nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award.

HAIKASORU

THE FUTURE IS JAPANESE

THE OTSUICHI LIBRARY

ZOO

A man receives a photo of his girlfriend every day in the mail … so that he can keep track of her decomposition. A deathtrap that takes a week to kill its victims. Haunted parks and airplanes held in the sky by the power of belief. These are just a few of the stories by Otsuichi, Japan’s master of dark fantasy.

SUMMER, FIREWORKS, AND MY CORPSE

Two short novels, including the title story and
Black Fairy Tale,
plus a bonus short story.
Summer
is a simple story of a nine-year-old girl who dies while on summer vacation. While her youthful killers try to hide her body, she tells us the story—from the point of view of her dead body—of the children’s attempt to get away with murder.

Black Fairy Tale
is classic J-horror: a young girl loses an eye in an accident, but receives a transplant. Now she can see again, but what she sees out of her new left eye is the experiences and memories of its previous owner. Its previous
deceased
owner.

ALSO CREEPY:

APPARITIONS—MIYUKI MIYABE

In old Edo, the past was never forgotten. It lived alongside the present in dark corners and in the shadows. In these tales, award-winning author Miyuki Miyabe explores the ghosts of early modern Japan and the spaces of the living world—workplaces, families, and the human soul—that they inhabit. Written with a journalistic eye and a fantasist’s heart,
Apparitions
brings the restless dead, and those who encounter them, to life.

WWW.HAIKASORU.COM