Goth (7 page)

I had long been a proponent of the theory that the wrist cutter was preserving the hands. I had no basis for this—it was merely what I would have done. I had been right.

I picked up one of the hands, a woman’s hand. Red nail polish was flaking away, and the hand was cold and heavy in my palm.

I was touching dead skin. No, not dead—all his victims were alive, each living with a missing hand … but it made sense to refer to the part that had been cut off as dead.

There were right hands and left hands. There were the hands with nails that had turned black and hands with skin that was still beautiful.

I stroked several of the hands. I felt like I was peering into the depths of Mr. Shinohara’s heart. Regular people wouldn’t have understood, and I was sure Mr. Shinohara was convinced that no one would ever understand him. But it was easy for me to picture him alone in this kitchen, stroking his collection of hands.

The hands were in his refrigerator, so Mr. Shinohara must be the wrist cutter—but I had no intention of telling the police. Perhaps I should have, but that did not interest me. I had a different goal in mind.

I too wanted a hand cut off of someone. Touching Mr. Shinohara’s collection made me want it even more.

I looked around the refrigerator. There were all kinds of hands in there. I could take any of them. Not just any hand would do, though; I knew exactly whose hand I wanted. But I put all the hands in front of me into a bag that I’d brought with me.

†

It was dark by the time Shinohara arrived home from the high school where he worked. He had stepped into the house and was headed for the living room when he noticed something was wrong: the window had been broken, and glass was scattered across the floor. The window itself was open as well, and cool night air was pouring into the room. Someone had broken in.

The first thing Shinohara thought of was the hands in the refrigerator. He went directly to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator door—and couldn’t believe his eyes. All of the hands that had been keeping cool in there that morning were now gone. Human hands, dog and cat hands, even the doll’s hands—they were all gone, and the refrigerator was almost completely empty. The only thing left was the small quantity of food Shinohara had kept in there with the hands.

Something was nagging at his mind, but he couldn’t quite figure it out. He knew he needed to clean up the glass in the living room, but his mind was full of the missing hands, so he couldn’t think straight.

He went upstairs, turned on his computer, and sat down in front of it.

Someone had broken in and stolen his hands, taking all the hands away.

A clear drop of liquid fell to the surface of the computer desk. It had fallen from his cheek … Shinohara suddenly realized that he was crying.

His entire life, he had never exchanged words with any human as intimate as the contact he had felt with those severed hands. If anyone else had seen him with them, they would have thought he was simply sitting there in silence—but Shinohara knew he had been communicating with those cold, silent hands—through the bumps and grooves, the elasticity.

Anger washed over him in waves so intense that he couldn’t breathe. He was too afraid to call the police, but his desire to get revenge on whoever had taken the hands from him was much stronger than his fear.

The thief who had taken his hands must be punished. He had never killed anyone, but he’d make this thief the first exception. He would catch this thief, Shinohara swore it. He would cut off the hands to save them, and then he would strangle the thief—or stab the thief through the heart until death came.

But how would he find the thief? Shinohara rested his elbows on the desk, thinking.

The keyboard was dirty. He reached for the can of compressed air he always kept next to it. Then he froze—his eyes had found something on the keyboard.

No doubt about it—the thief had dropped it. No other explanation made sense. It was very small and easy to overlook, so it was something of a miracle that Shinohara had even noticed it.

It was then that Shinohara remembered the inside of the refrigerator. Something had been bothering him, and he understood it now. The hand thief had made a mistake, a very careless mistake—one that had foolishly revealed the thief’s identity …

iv

The next morning, Shinohara went to work with a meat cleaver, the same one he always used when cutting off hands. It fit neatly inside his bag. As he greeted the other teachers in the office, none of them guessed what was in his bag.

It was always hectic in the mornings. Outside the teachers’ room, students hurried past. First semester midterms were coming up quickly, and tests were being constructed on a number of different desks.

One of the other teachers asked how Shinohara’s test was coming along. He smiled back and answered. Shinohara often believed his life consisted entirely of these feigned smiles. They annoyed him immensely.

Hands. Hands. Hands were more important than the other teachers. First, there were hands, and then the human followed. There was no point in talking with the human.

He had morning classes, so he couldn’t yet go to see the thief who had stolen his hands. But he knew who it was. He had to catch the thief and demand to know where his hands had been hidden.

Only one night had passed—he desperately wanted to believe the hands were somewhere safe. When he knew where they were, then he would have to cut off the thief’s hands with his meat cleaver. It would never do to let the hands die with the rest of the body, so he’d have to make them his.

The last session he taught that morning was his homeroom class. All those hands copying what he wrote on the blackboard … There were forty-two students in his class—and eighty-four hands.

Shinohara explained what the midterm would cover, but his thoughts dealt only with the stolen hands. The thief had left his food, taking only the hands. Shinohara hadn’t noticed it right away, and it didn’t make any sense.

At last, the bell rang and class ended. All morning classes were over, and it was time for lunch.

Shinohara left the room. The bag with the meat cleaver was in the teacher’s office, and he was going to get it. The halls were at their noisiest and most crowded—but to Shinohara, it was all a dim roar.

He waited in the teachers’ room for a few minutes, and then he headed for the chemistry lecture hall.

†

I headed for the chemistry lecture hall as soon as lunch started. When I opened the door and checked inside, I found it empty, so I went in, closing the door behind me. Instantly, the noise outside was cut off; the air inside was completely still, as if time had stopped.

I measured my pulse: it was beating like I’d just been running as fast as I could. My skin felt taut. I was very tense.

What had Mr. Shinohara done last night after he had arrived home? What had he thought when he noticed the hands were gone? Had he been too angry to think? I could only guess.

I hadn’t seen him that morning—and if I had, I would’ve pretended to know nothing. He couldn’t notice me; if I did anything strange, there was a strong risk it would ruin everything. I was pretty sure he didn’t know I had stolen the hands, but that might’ve been nothing more than wishful thinking.

It was possible that I had made some terrible mistake without realizing it—but there was no way for me to know. If I had, and Mr. Shinohara came after me looking for revenge, then there was a strong possibility that my life would be in danger.

As I stood in the dark, deserted lecture hall thinking, I heard someone standing outside the door.

†

Shinohara opened the door of the lecture hall. There was one student inside, and the moment he saw that student’s face, a surge of emotion ran through him.

He wanted to beat the student to death, but Shinohara stomped down those emotions, forcing himself to call out a friendly greeting instead. He planned to pretend to know nothing.

The student looked up. “Hello, Mr. Shinohara.”

It was like always, nothing out of place—yet Shinohara knew the student was laughing at him on the inside, enjoying the performance and being around him like this. Yes, the student had come to the lecture hall to watch Shinohara squirm, knowing that his hands had been taken.

Hiding his nauseous rage, Shinohara drew closer. He must not betray his plans. He must not reveal that he knew the student to be the thief.

The foolish thief suspected nothing and didn’t try to run. Shinohara was able to stand directly behind the student without arousing suspicion.

The thief had taken away the doll’s hands—but nobody should have recognized those as hands. The doll was too small, and there were no fingers on those hands—they were just balls of cotton covered by a half sphere of cloth. Yet the thief had taken them with the rest of the hands.

The only person who would’ve known those were hands and taken them … was someone who had accidentally found the handless doll. The moment that person found the doll, the thief must’ve guessed that the chemistry teacher was the one behind the Wrist-Cut Case.

Shinohara put his hand on the shoulder of the student in front of him. Her shoulder shook. She turned slowly around, looking at him. “What is it?”

She was good at acting, Shinohara thought.

He had placed the handless doll in the wastebasket in the chemistry office. There was only one person who would have had a chance to see it—Morino, the girl who had been in the lecture hall while he’d been cleaning the chemistry office, while the office trash was sitting in the lecture hall. The male student who had been helping him would never have had time.

“Please take your hand off me, Mr. Shinohara. You’re interfering with my reading.”

This girl was always reading in the corner of the lecture hall. Her eyebrows twitched—more expression than he’d ever seen from her before.

When Shinohara had noticed the dirt on his keyboard the day before, he’d also found a long black hair between the keys. It had been sheer coincidence that the hair had landed there, out of all the places in his house it could have been. Shinohara’s hair was short, so it couldn’t be his—meaning the intruder must have had long hair.

And the bookshelves … On his shelves was the follow-up to the book the girl was reading. And it had been pulled out, ever so slightly. He always kept his spines aligned, yet this one had been jutting out a full five millimeters. This girl had found it and looked at it.

There was no doubt in his mind: she had stolen his hands.

Shinohara tightened his grip on her shoulder, squeezing as if to break it.

Morino winced.

“Tell me where you hid the hands,” he ordered, as politely as he could manage.

But Morino just tried to push him off, complaining that he was hurting her. The book she was reading fell to the ground.

“Where are the hands?” he asked again, loosening his grip and making sure she heard him. Her usual, expressionless mask had crumbled, and she shook her head as if she had no idea what he was talking about.

Pretending not to know, Shinohara thought. Instantly, his hand wrapped itself around her slender throat, squeezing.

Morino’s eyes opened wide, staring up at him in shock as his fingers sank deep into the soft flesh of her neck. He was going to kill this girl, but there was no help for that. His grip tightened.

In a minute, she would stop moving. As he mused on that, out of the corner of his eye, he spotted a small cylinder in her hand—some sort of spray. By the time he noticed, it was too late: the spray was aimed right at his eyes.

There was a hiss of compressed gas, and his eyes began to burn.

†

Morino had been carrying around a can of pepper spray. She unloaded it in Mr. Shinohara’s face, and then she hit him in the head with her chair before she began shouting for help. She did not scream—she just called out, calmly but loudly.

A minute later, several students and teachers came running. Mr. Shinohara lay at the center of the crowd, clutching his throbbing eyes.

I could not leave my hiding place beneath the podium until the crowd dispersed.

epilogue

Mr. Shinohara was arrested—but not as a culprit behind the Wrist-Cut Case. Instead, he was convicted by society for a much lesser crime. No one knows his real crime, even now.

He’s no longer a teacher and has since moved away. There have been no new victims in the Wrist-Cut Case.

The hands I stole from his house are buried in my backyard. I didn’t need them. I didn’t care about hands the way he did.

I had wanted to convince him that Morino had stolen his hands.

When I saw the hands in the refrigerator, I knew he was keeping them all, just like I had predicted. Even before I entered his house, I had been planning on using that fact and the doll hands to lead him to suspect Morino. I was glad he was smart enough to figure out the clue about the doll hands. He simply didn’t know that I had switched the trash bins, sifting through the contents afterward.

I also left behind a long black hair—the same type of hair Morino had. It was my sister’s hair, which had come in handy. I had remembered Shinohara cleaning his office keyboard with compressed air, and so I figured the hair stood a good chance of being discovered if I were to place it on his computer keyboard at home.

Moving the book he had mentioned to Morino had been insurance.

If he had determined that Morino was the thief, causing him to cut off her hands and kill her, my plan would’ve been complete. I only would’ve had to wait until her severed hands were in his fridge, and then I could’ve gone to steal them. Of course, there were a number of holes in this plan: there was no guarantee he would’ve taken her hands home even if he had killed her … but there was a good chance he would’ve.

The only hands I had wanted were Morino’s pale, beautiful hands.

“Will you teach me how to smile like that?” she asked me the next day. It was the first time Morino had ever spoken to me.

Whenever I talked to someone else, I smiled. But inside, I had no expression—and Morino had somehow picked up on that. The performance that no one else had ever seen through was no match for her.