Chapter Two: The Return of the Fire Witch
1.
Recently, a strange rumor, or rather, a bit of a ghost story, has been spreading among the girls of the second year classes.
It’s something about the mysterious Boogiepop.
Boogiepop is short, wears a black cape, and has a tall hat that’s sort of like the one Maetel wore in Galaxy Express 999, only narrower. He’s an assassin, and he can kill people instantly, without pain. He always does so when you are at your most beautiful, before you start to wither away, before you grow old and ugly.
Nobody knows where he’s from, but most people seem to agree that he has something to do with the string of missing high school girls in the area.
Everyone wants to believe that the runaways were killed by an assassin that wanders in the shadows, fleeting like the morning mist, instead of running off to Tokyo or some other grim reality.
Reality is always rather dreary. When people vanish from it, it’s natural to want to connect them to some sort of fantasy, to some other world.
One day, shortly after summer vacation, I was eating my lunch when the girl in front of me, Kinoshita Kyoko, looked up from her crossword puzzle and asked, “Hey, Suema, what was the actual case that inspired The Village of Eight Graves?”
“The Tsuyama Thirty,” I said, without a second’s thought.
“Hunh, Tsuyama Thirty—hey, it fits. Thanks.”
Everyone eating with us was staring at me. “How did you know that?”
“You are obsessed.”
“Don’t be stupid, everyone knows that.”
“We don’t! Nobody does!”
“There was a book on it out last month,” I replied, in a knowing manner as if to brush them off.
“We didn’t read it! Why would we?”
“You’re a little scary, Kazuko.”
Everyone cackled.
“What kind of person can murder someone?” Kyoko asked, suddenly looking up from her crossword again.
“What kind? All kinds.”
“I mean, like, who in this class seems likely to?” she said, lowering her voice.
“Oooh, do tell, do tell!” Everyone leaned closer.
“Uhhh, someone a little stiff, like they’re off in their own little world and are kinda stubborn when it comes to stuff?” Even as I said it, I knew I might as well be saying her name.
“So…Kirima Nagi?” Yep, first name out; the most notorious student in our class. She was skipping today, apparently; no sign of her all morning.
“Hmm, well, she’s not normal, that’s for sure.”
“Not normal? The Fire Witch is six kinds of crazy!”
“She’s skipped two days since the new term started. Wonder if she’ll even bother coming tomorrow…”
“She might as well not. Even when she does come, she causes trouble the moment she steps through the gates and gets herself sent right back home.”
“Kya ha ha! Sounds like her!”
“So far as killing goes, I hear she actually is.”
“How so?”
“You know, one slip and you miss your period…”
“Ah!”
“Then she gets herself suspended before anyone notices and takes care of it…”
“I believe it!”
There was no evidence at all, but that didn’t stop them from talking.
Everyone was laughing, though, so I laughed with them.
I didn’t hate her like they did.
Sure, she was trouble. But there was something about the way that she looked at people that was pretty cool; the way she didn’t seem to care whether you were older or even a teacher, but just looked straight at you.
“She’s got no parents, right?”
“Yeah, like, they live abroad or something? You heard she was the top scorer on the entrance exam, right? But she wasn’t the speaker at the entrance ceremony. Know why?”
“Why?”
“Her guardian’s name isn’t Kirima.”
“She’s illegitimate?”
“Yeah. She just gets money and lives by herself in some apartment.”
“No way…”
“So, she can do whatever she wants. Bring a different guy home every day, or like Suema says, ‘Start killing.’ She could have a mountain of bodies at her place, and no one would ever know.”
“In the freezer?”
“All frozen up.”
“Thaws them out and cooks them!”
“Ew, gross!”
Everyone laughed again.
I went along with them.
We laughed a bit too loud and Yurihara-san, who was sitting nearby, looked up from her study guide and glared at us. She was the best student in the class…and in the running for top of the school. I’d heard she’d taken practice tests at her cram school, and outscored students from the best schools in town three times running. She was also beautiful…and a little stuck up—meaning that she had no friends in our class. Even though she might’ve felt a little out of our league, she somehow knew that all it took was a cold glance to quiet us down.
“Maybe Nagi is Boogiepop?” Kyoko said.
“Ew, no. Boogiepop’s a beautiful boy.”
At the time, that was my first encounter with that name, so I felt myself compelled to ask about it.
“You don’t know? But he’s a killer!”
“It’s not like I know everything.”
They filled me in, but I’m into criminal psychology, and this was just some school horror story. God, it was beyond absurd. They made it out to be less of a serial killer and more like some crazed monster.
“Hmm… That’s kinda scary.” Everyone was watching, so I had to pretend to be alarmed.
“Kind of a turn-on, huh? Wonder how he kills them?” With that, they all started babbling away, swooning over this fantasy man of theirs.
Did he strangle them? Run them through with a knife? They kept suggesting rather time-consuming methods of killing, and I started to get irritated.
“Can we get your expert opinion?” Kyoko asked teasingly, suddenly turning to me.
“Sure…poison gas.”
“Ew, like Sarin?” They all said at once.
“Nah, hydrocyanic acid gas. It’s colorless and invisible, but very poisonous, and it kills you instantly. You can spray it on someone, and it vanishes quickly, leaving no evidence. The body isn’t even dirty. Smells like peaches.”
“Hunh…?” Everyone was staring at me, slightly creeped out.
Oops, I thought.
I’d done it again. I knew full well this kind of knowledge wouldn’t interest them.
At this point, the class lady killer, Kimura-kun, came over and said, “What’s up?” Everyone replied, “Nothing…” Apparently the Boogiepop stories were being kept secret from the boys.
A myth only the girls knew. It seemed I was the last one in class to hear about it.
I always am.
“………”
That depressed me a little, so I only half listened to their conversation, nodding when it seemed appropriate.
My interest in criminal and abnormal psychology stems from a personal experience I had.
Five years ago, in seventh grade, I was almost killed.
There was a serial killer hiding in our town, and he killed himself just when the police were about to catch him.
The killer took sexual pleasure in killing, which is freaky enough, but among the notes that he left behind was one with my address and a detailed account of the route that I took to school.
Had he not killed himself, it turns out that I would’ve been his next victim.
The police investigated my family to see if they had any connection to the killer, just to be certain. Of course, we’d never even seen him before. My parents tried to keep it a secret from me, but I found out when the police started questioning me directly.
I would be lying if I said it wasn’t a shock.
But more powerful than the shock was the unreal feeling that it gave me.
My life had been in the hands of someone with no connection to me at all. I just couldn’t wrap my head around the idea, which is exactly how I got interested in that sort of thing to begin with.
I never told my friends why.
I knew they would look at me differently if I did. “The psycho liked her,” they would say, which is more than a good enough reason to put me on the bullied list. It was a bit too harsh of a truth to laugh off.
But just being interested in that sort of thing was enough to make me different, and the class tends to treat me like Doctor Murder, but it’s a far cry from being bullied.
***
After lunch, we all went off to our fifth period classrooms.
Even though I was in the science program, my next class was Modern Japanese, a subject that automatically got on my nerves. Our school let you choose between science and humanities concentrations in your second year, but even so, we had to complete one course from the other program during our second year. An absurd requirement, if you ask me.
A friend from another class who was also forced to take Japanese walked across the covered walkway with me. Usually, there were three of us, but Niitoki-san was at a meeting for the discipline committee today.
As we walked, the PA came and said, “…Miyashita Touka, second year, class C. Please, return to the infirmary at once. Miyashita Touka, second year, class C…”
“Hunh, wonder where Touka went?” the girl next to me asked. She was in the same class.
“She was in the infirmary?”
“Yeah, she got sick at the start of fourth bell…”
“Faking it?”
“Mm… She is dating a senior…”
“Skipping out for a date?”
“Maybe. But dating is against the rules, so don’t tell Niitoki-san,” she said, putting her finger in front of her lips.
I grimaced back at her. “I would never.”
“They’re probably on the roof or something now…” she said, glancing out the window. Suddenly, she let out a piercing shriek.
Startled, I asked, “Wh-what?”
“Th-th-th-there!” She pointed out the window, her finger trembling.
“What?”
“Boogiepop! On the roof!”
“Eh?” I stuck my head out the window.
But there was nothing.
“Nothing there.”
“There was! I saw it! It moved away!”
“You sure it wasn’t somebody else? Miyashita-san?”
“I don’t think so! It had a black hat on! Like a pipe!” she said, still in a panic.
Clearly, she was seeing things, but nobody believes that when it happens to them. Reverse psychology was more effective. If I pretended to believe her, she would start listening to me.
“Okay. Let’s go see,” I said, and she spun to stare at me in horror.
“Hunh?”
“If Boogiepop is real, then I want to see him.”
“No! Don’t! It’s dangerous!”
“Don’t worry. Go ahead, I’ll meet you in class.”
I headed for the roof.
I ran up almost all of the stairs, and I was pretty out of breath by the time that I reached the door.
But the door to the roof was locked. Oh, right; they had belatedly sealed it off after someone had thrown themself off.
I peered out the window. I could see most of the roof, but there was nobody there.
When I got down the stairs, she was waiting for me, looking worried.
“Wha-what happened?”
“Nothing there.”
“Really?”
“Yep. I looked everywhere.”
“Hunh. I guess I must have imagined it…” she said, relieved.
“I guess,” I replied, surprised to find myself disappointed. As we headed to class, it occurred to me that there was a fire escape at the back of the roof, and if someone had gone down that, I wouldn’t have been able to see them. But it was too late to go check now.
Nothing like that happened again, and our peaceful, safe lives dragged on.
2.
“Say, Suema, what are murderers thinking?” Kyoko suddenly asked me, one day late in fall, as we were on our way home from school.
“Eh, why?”
The two of us were walking along the bank of the river. Kyoko and I were the only two members of our circle of friends that walked to school, so we always went home together. Most students take the bus to school. Hardly anyone walks, so there was no one but us on the street.
“Oh, no reason,” Kyoko dried up.
“You’re always asking me stuff like that recently. What’s up?”
“Oh, nothing. Never mind.”
But there had to be a reason for it.
“Tell me.”
“You see…” Kyoko whispered very quietly.
“Yeah?”
“She’s suspended now, right?”
“Hunh? Oh, you mean Kirima-san?”
Two weeks ago, she’d been suspended for smoking on school grounds. She was due back the next day, though.
“Do you think…she would really kill someone?”
“Hah?” I doubted my own ears. Sure, she was the odd girl out, but Nagi was still our classmate. She hardly deserved to be called a murderer.
“What are you talking about?”
“You said it yourself—when was it? We were eating lunch…”
That had been a long time ago. I had completely forgotten.
“Uh, did I? I might have…”
“Do you really think so?” Kyoko was creepily serious.
“Even if I did say that, it was just an example,” I hastily explained.
Kyoko’s expression didn’t change. “The girl is scary.”
“Well, I’ll grant that she’s not easy to get to know…”
“She did something to this girl I know. She hasn’t been the same since,” her voice trembled. She meant it. She wasn’t kidding.
“Something? What?”
“Threatened her, I think.”
“For money?”
Kyoko shook her head. “No, not money. She’s rich, you know.”
“Yeah. She has her own apartment. Then what?”
Kyoko didn’t answer.
Like anyone on earth would, I told her that I could keep a secret, but she still didn’t say anything, so I asked, “Does it have anything to do with why Kirima got suspended?”
“I don’t know…”
“You don’t know?”
“I feel like she got herself suspended because of it…” Kyoko said, but I didn’t follow.
Come to think of it, Nagi had not been suspended for smoking, but for having a cigarette in her lips.
And the place she’d been caught—the teacher’s restroom. It would have been extremely strange if she had not been caught. A female teacher had found her, and Nagi had glared at her so fiercely that the she fled and got a male teacher, making quite a fuss.
She made no excuses. Or apologies.
She never did.
I had never once heard her say “sorry” during all the times the teachers had yelled at her.
One time, a teacher scolded her for staring out the window, and Nagi had curtly quipped, “You’re boring.” However, her grades were too good for the teachers to take any drastic measures.
Still, she skipped a lot.
We’re not just talking leaving a bell early, either. No, she would drop the whole day; never even come to school…for three days running! Yet when she came back, she knew everything that we had covered while she was gone, and she could answer any question that the teachers threw at her.
Nobody knew what she did when she wasn’t in school and no one ever had the guts to ask.
She was enigmatic and more than a little scary, so somewhere along the line her nickname became “The Fire Witch.” Word had it that this was because she knew some form of black magic, like the “Karma Dance,” which sounded plausible enough.
Even so, it was hard to imagine that she had intentionally gotten herself suspended. Suspensions went on your permanent transcript.
“That’s going a bit overboard,” I told Kyoko, but she didn’t answer.
She stared up into the air, muttering, “She’s gonna kill me…”
This I could not ignore. “Why? What for?”
Suddenly, Kyoko’s entire body shuddered once, then froze. “Eeeeee!”
I followed her line of sight.
There was a girl standing on the road a short distance from us. She had been sitting on the bank, and stood up when we approached.
She wore an old, worn leather jacket and thick leather pants. There were metallic guards on her knees and elbows, like what bikers wear. Her slightly wavy hair was bound in a bandanna, and beneath her eyebrows, her eyes were less glittering than gleaming. She glared at us…at Kyoko.
“I’ve been waiting for you, Kinoshita Kyoko,” she said, in her distinctive manly voice.
It was the suspended Kirima Nagi, in the flesh.
“No! Ahhh!” Kyoko screamed.
She fled behind me, shoving me towards Nagi.
Reeling, I almost smacked right into Nagi as she ran towards us.
But Nagi slid by me without so much as a glance in my direction and took off after Kyoko.
“W-wait!” I yelled as I hurriedly gave chase, but Nagi was fast. Looking closely, she was wearing big black boots. I thought they were rubber at first, but I was wrong. These were steel-toed work boots, the kind that construction workers wear. The kind that can’t be crushed, even if several tons fall on them. Kick someone with these, and they might as well die.
This was clearly not a fashion statement. It was a level beyond biker wear or air sneakers.
The bag on her back was strapped to her body, and didn’t budge as she ran. It was like…
(…like she was dressed for combat?!)
No normal high school girl would ever dress like that. Not even a gang member.
She looked more like a hitman.
“H-help me!” Kyoko yelled.
Nagi snarled back, “You call for help, and you’ll have to talk to the cops!”
That shut Kyoko up. She stopped in her tracks.
That was enough for Nagi; she closed the distance between them, and tackled her mercilessly from behind. Both girls hit the ground, sliding down the river bank.
Wheezing, I caught up to them to find Nagi twisting Kyoko’s arm behind her. It looked just like a hold from something I’d seen on TV, like judo or kung fu. Kyoko couldn’t move a muscle. We clearly hadn’t learned this sort of wrestling at school.
“Ow! Ow! Ow! Let go!”
“Want me to go ahead and break it? Even you’ll take some time to heal then, eh, Manticore?!”
I have no idea what she meant by that.
“No, don’t! I’ll never do it again, I swear!” Kyoko shrieked.
“Stop that, Kirima-san!” I cried, jumping on her, but she kicked me away.
She spoke to Kyoko again, “It’s not just me. Echoes is looking for you too! Keep pretending and you’ll lose an arm! And then, you won’t have any hope of winning!”
What on earth was she talking about?
“I swear! I swear to God I’ll never do drugs again! Please don’t! Please!” Kyoko sobbed. Drugs?
“I know you killed Kusatsu Akiko! Don’t lie to me!” Nagi roared.
I thought my heart was gonna stop.
Kusatsu Akiko—?
That was the name of a first year girl who had gone missing.
“I didn’t! I didn’t! It wasn’t me, I swear! She just gave me the drugs!”
There was an unpleasant popping sound from Kyoko’s arm.
Kyoko’s eyes rolled up in her head.
“…Damn, you’re normal!” Nagi snarled and let go.
Kyoko rolled down the bank.
“Kyoko!” I shouted, racing over to her and putting my arms around her.
“Don’t worry. I stopped before the joint was destroyed. It’ll hurt for a few days and then be fine,” Nagi said.
Kyoko was trembling.
“What’s going on?!” I screamed.
“You should ask Kinoshita herself, Suema-san,” Nagi replied, her voice completely serene.
Kyoko’s teeth were chattering. She’d been scared half to death. Understandably; so had I.
“This is going too far!”
“But it’s better than getting arrested, right, Kinoshita?” Nagi said. Kyoko stiffened. “I hope you learn from this. Next time, you’ll know better than to do stupid shit just because your friends do it.”
She turned to leave.
“Wait!” I yelled.
Nagi looked at me, and said, “Suema-san, maybe it’s time to let go of what happened five years ago. Get too hung up on something like that and it’ll come back to haunt you.”
Her gruff voice matched her boyish face perfectly. But that wasn’t the problem.
“H-how did—?”
How did she know I’d nearly been murdered five years ago?!
“H-hold on a minute…” I tried to stop her, but the Fire Witch stalked away without another word.
3.
I had to swear to keep it a secret before Kyoko would tell me anything.
“We…we were at the same Junior High,” she said. “We were all on the table tennis team. Even in Junior High, we hung out together. Kusatsu was one of us, but a year younger. She was team captain when we were third years, so we sort of stopped thinking of her that way.
“So, three months ago, Kusatsu called to say she had something good, and that everyone should hook up with her.
“It was a weird sort of drug.
“No, not uppers; I think it was something else. It was a sort of bluish, see-through liquid. You took a sniff of it, and it was like your head opened up, like you became transparent, like every corner of your body was washed clean.
“Glue? No…I don’t know, but it didn’t have that strong of a smell.
“Kusatsu didn’t tell us much, but she said some pharmaceutical company had created it as a test product. Yeah, it was probably bullshit. But, hey, it was free, so we all tried it out…
“Right. She never charged us anything.
“She was never exactly a generous person, so I’m not sure why…
“And a little while later, people from our group started running away.
“No, I don’t know where they went! They didn’t tell anyone. They just, you know, vanished. Yeah, girls from other schools too.
“And then, Kusatsu vanished. By this point, the rest of us were starting to wonder if it had something to do with the drugs. We didn’t know where she got it, but maybe it was something nobody was supposed to know about it and they were taking us out. Then suddenly one of us announced that she wasn’t gonna have anything to do with us anymore.
“This made us nervous. We had to know why.
“She said Kirima Nagi had threatened her. Somehow, she had found out about the drugs, and she had told her to never touch them again…
“Not just the one, though. She hit every girl…in order. I was the last one.
“Started two weeks ago, right after she was suspended. That’s why I said she had intentionally gotten herself suspended—so she would have a good reason for not coming to school, and so that she could move freely.
“No! I’m never touching drugs again!
“Hunh? No way! Why would I know Kirima Nagi?! I’ve always avoided her up to now.
“Please, don’t tell anyone, Suema! Keep it a secret! I probably should never have told you either. But I had to. I just had to!
“Keeping quiet was just too frightening…it was crushing me…” She trailed off.
I held Kyoko, comforting her until she stopped crying. Then we killed some time in a booth at First Kitchen, so that her face could return to normal before I took her back home.
It was night by then, and as I walked through the darkened streets, I thought things over.
Her fragmented story suggested that she had only seen a small part of what was really going on. I couldn’t guess much from what she’d told me, but it sounded like she hadn’t been one of the ringleaders of this group of ex-table tennis team players. More like she did whatever the much less stable girls told her to; just a third wheel, hanging on to the cool kids.
She wasn’t even a victim. She was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Nagi had said Kusatsu Akiko had been killed…
And she knew about my past.
But…how?
Who was she?
Should I tell the school…or the police?
(But I promised Kyoko…)
If word got out that Kyoko had done drugs, that would be it for her—she’d be finished. It wouldn’t end at suspension, either; she’d be expelled as an example to the other students. I didn’t want to do that to her.
It was very dark outside.
The streetlight above me had clearly not been changed in years, and it was flickering madly.
“…………”
I stopped walking.
I opened my bag under the unsteady light, and thanks to my bad habit of carrying far too much stuff around with me all of the time, I had the class directory with me. It listed not only phone numbers, but also addresses.
I looked up the address of the person three names before my own.
Somewhat surprisingly, Kirima Nagi, like me, lived close to school. I could walk there.
(Okay, let’s do it!)
I snapped my bag closed and walked as fast as I could in that direction.
But why did I have to meet her?
Kyoko, who was actually part of it, was running away as fast as she could. That was the more natural reaction. Anyone normal would do the same.
I was clearly a third party; I had nothing to do with anything.
But I didn’t like that.
Five years ago, things had all happened without me knowing about them. I only found out when everything was finished. My own will played no part in the matter.
If there was danger, I wanted to see it.
That’s why I had chased after Boogiepop, even though there was clearly no such thing. It was all the same to me. I didn’t care what it was…I just wanted to confront something.
(No more blissful ignorance for me.)
Kirima Nagi might really be a witch. I hoped she was.
***
“…Uh?”
I was standing on the right street, but there were no apartment buildings, only houses.
I checked the address again and again, but I was clearly in the right place.
But I couldn’t find any house with the name “Kirima” on the gate. Checking the directory again, I noticed that it had “Taniguchi” written in very small characters next to it. She must live there.
(…must be that guardian with the different name.)
There was a house with “Taniguchi” on the gate, and the numbers seemed to match.
It was a really normal-looking home, a ready-built house like any other. A little on the wealthy side, but normally so.
Unable to connect it with Nagi’s bizarre appearance during our earlier encounter, I hesitated, debating for a long time before I pushed the buzzer.
When I finally did, it made a half-hearted, ultra normal ding-dong sound.
“Who is it?” the voice from the intercom said, surprising me. It wasn’t Nagi’s voice, but rather that of a boy.
“Um, is, uh… Is Kirima-san…?” I stuttered, all flustered.
“You’re Nagi’s friend?” the voice said quite cheerfully.
A moment later, the door swung open. The cheery boy stood in the doorway. He was taller than either Nagi or me, but younger, probably in Junior High. And that smile—it was friendly and warm.
“Come on in. But Nagi’s not home yet, I’m afraid.”
“O-oh, um…”
“Come in and wait. She should be back soon.”
He led me to the guest room.
The inside was normal too.
There was even a set of little dolls in the shape of the zodiac signs sitting on top of the cabinet.
“Here,” the boy said, putting a cup of tea and a plate of cookies in front of me.
“Uh, thanks.” It was really good. I know nothing about tea, but I’m pretty sure this was what they called good tea.
“Gosh, I don’t think I’ve ever met a friend of Nagi’s before,” the boy said airily.
“Y-you are…?” I asked.
“Her brother,” he replied. They looked nothing alike.
“Um, I’d heard Kirima-san lived alone, so…”
“Yeah, I got here about six months ago. I lived abroad with my parents until last spring, but I’ve got entrance tests for high school next year, so I thought that I ought to get used to Japan first.”
“Your parents…”
Nagi had parents after all. But why was their name Taniguchi?
At this point, we heard a voice call out, “I’m home,” from the entrance. It was Nagi.
“In here,” her brother said as he stood up and went to meet her.
“You brought another girl home?” Nagi said.
Her brother laughed. “This one’s yours. She’s been waiting for you.”
I nearly yelped when Nagi came in.
She had changed into her school uniform, like she’d just come home from school.
“Oh, it’s you,” Nagi said quietly as I stood there speechless. “Let’s go upstairs.”
Following her lead, we went upstairs to her bedroom.
The polar opposite of downstairs, her room was free of decoration; nothing but computers and books. One bed, two desks. One was for studying, apparently, since the surface was empty. The other desk was for her computer—or, should I say, computers. It was kind of hard to tell just how many she had. There were multiple boxy computer towers and an assortment of other machines attached to them. She had three different monitors, all lined up next to each other. At first, I assumed two of them might’ve been televisions, but the screen savers were a dead giveaway. Worse, the pile of machinery spilled out onto the floor, filling nearly half of the ten-mat room. It felt less like a girl’s bedroom and more like some mad hacker’s secret lair. Much to my surprise, there were no signs of any black magic books at all. All the books that lined Nagi’s shelves were merely an assortment of reference books and difficult looking hardcover tomes. Still, Nagi’s collection of computer software boxes looked to have her book collection beat.
Nagi pulled the chair out from the study desk, and offered it to me. “Sit.”
“Okay,” I said, and did.
“Surprised?” Nagi grinned.
“Hm?”
“By Masaki. Everyone thinks I live alone.”
“Um, yeah. I didn’t know you had a brother.”
“He’s not my brother. We’re not related,” Nagi replied, shaking her head. “He’s my mom’s second husband’s son from a previous marriage. He’s a good kid, but a bit too good at manipulating me. Gonna grow up to be a real Don Juan. Sad.”
“So, that’s why his name’s…?”
“Right, my mom’s husband’s name. I kept the old one.”
“Hmm… Why?”
“‘Cause I’ve got a father complex,” Nagi replied. I couldn’t tell if she was joking.
“Your father is…?”
“I thought you’d know. Kirima Seiichi. Wrote a lot of books.”
“Ehhhh?!” I interrupted rather loudly. “You’re kidding!”
“Nope.”
“But…the writer, Kirima Seiichi?!”
Of course, I knew him. I’d learned most of what I knew about criminal psychology or depth psychology from his books. The Scream Inside—Multiple Personality Disorder, or When a Man Kills a Man, or Where the Killer’s Mind Changes, or A Nightmare of Boredom, or The Proliferation of “Dunno,” or VS Imaginator, and so on. He’d written far more summaries, essays and commentaries than novels. In fact, I’d never read any of his actual novels, just his scientific writings. He called himself a modern day enlightenment thinker, which is kind of hokey, but he did write an incredible number of books.
“That’s my dad. He’s dead now, though.”
“Yeah, I knew that…but really? No, I mean really, really?”
“Why would I lie?”
“I know… But still…”
“You didn’t think I had a strange name?”
“Never occurred to me. Wonder why not?”
Even as I asked, I knew the answer. I had unconsciously convinced myself that Kirima Seiichi or any other writer was hardly likely to live near me. Perhaps I wanted the people that I admired so much to live in some higher realm of existence than I did.
“Basically, I’m living off of the inheritance. Can’t really beat it, either. Pays for school.”
“Really? But your mother…”
“She wasn’t married to him anymore. I got everything. She tossed her half away on her own. She was already a Taniguchi, and she didn’t want anything to do with Kirima. That took care of taxes, so I pay rent here.”
There I was, just some normal girl from a typical middle-class nuclear family, just sitting and listening to the Fire Witch herself talking about her atypical life! Her whole situation just felt sort of unreal to me. It’s no wonder that she acts the way she does. She’d hardly even been brought up in anything close to a proper environment.
Even so, there was something that I had to ask. “Um, so…”
“What? The reason?”
“Yeah. Why’d you save Kyoko?”
“My, my. You call that saving?” Nagi looked pleased.
“She told me everything. She got on some weird drug. You saved all of the girls from that, right?”
“Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t.”
“Why? How’d you find out? What did you do about it?” I was relentless.
Nagi simply stared back at me.
I felt my heart beating. She was certainly pretty. I felt like she might actually say, I used magic.
What she actually said was, “My father died when I was ten.”
“R-right,” I stuttered, feeling like I should make some response. She carried on as if she didn’t care whether I was listening or not.
“My mother had already left us when he died, so there were only the two of us in the house. He never drank and he never chased after women. All he did was work. One day, I came home from school and found him lying on the floor. I called an ambulance, but all I could do was wait next to him as he spit up blood.
“He asked me, ‘Nagi, what do you think about being normal?’
“I didn’t know what he meant, so I shook my head.
“He said, ‘Normal means you leave everything as it is and nothing ever changes. If you don’t like that, you’ve got to do things that aren’t normal. That’s why I—’
“Those were his last words. He passed out and never woke up again. The cause of death was gastric perforation leading to dissolution of the internal organs. Disgusting way to die. I even heard that when the doctor cut his stomach open during the surgery, the smell was so bad that veteran nurses just started puking all over the floor.
“So what? I don’t know. I just kind of gave up living normal after that.”
She stopped.
When I said nothing in response, she added, “It’s a messiah complex.”
“R-really?”
From her face alone, you would think her a demure beauty. I found myself staring at her delicate lips, somehow unable to meet her eyes.
“I’m a psycho, all right. Got all the childhood trauma anyone could want, right here.”
She said disturbing things so easily. Still, she didn’t look like a monomaniac to me.
“But that’s—” I started to say, but Nagi turned towards the computer behind her, cutting me off. She logged into one of the computers, loaded up some program, and hit a few keys.
A list popped up on one screen. It rolled upwards from the bottom of the screen. It appeared to be a list of people’s names with numbers after them.
“Here,” she said, pointing at the screen.
It read: “2-D-33 Suema Kazuko 8:25 AM-3:40 PM”
“That’s…” I said, realizing that it was my very own attendance record.
“I’m logged into the school’s network. You can get a basic outline of a student’s movements with this. I noticed Kinoshita’s group was suddenly getting worse, so I checked it out. Hit the drug story.”
I was horrified. “Isn’t this illegal?”
“Course it is,” she said readily.
My mouth moved, but nothing came out.
“I have to do this,” she said quietly. “Schools are kind of isolated from the rest of society. It’s a strange environment where the police can’t do jack. Something violent happens, whether it’s caused by a student or a teacher, and the first thing that they do is try to cover it up. Even if someone dies, they’ll take a cue from the times, and claim that it was a suicide caused by bullying, find some students who look like bullies, and just expel them for it…and that may well end up being enough, half the time.”
“T-true, but…”
“I know it’s wrong, but someone’s got to do it. We sure as hell can’t expect the teachers to.”
“That’s not what I mean, but…”
But who was this girl, who would intentionally get herself suspended to do any of this?
A messiah complex—
That was a creepy type of megalomania, in which you believed yourself to be some sort of savior.
In Kirima Seiichi’s books, there was a case where a middle-aged man believed himself to be Batman, put on a costume, and attacked an acquitted murder suspect. He wound up being killed himself, and the killer walked a second time, pleading self-defense. If the suspect had truly been innocent, the whole thing was a tragedy based on absurd principles, but if he had been guilty, then it was a tragedy in which justice had been utterly defeated by evil. Either way, it was a sad tale to recount.
And that was how Kirima Nagi saw herself.
Certainly, Kirima Seiichi spent most of his time analyzing sinister phenomena in the underbelly of the human mind, putting out books and articles on the distortions of reality that made people commit crimes, so if you wanted to, you could certainly make a case for him having a messiah complex as well.
That his daughter—a daughter who had diagnosed herself as having a father complex, no less—was the same, was not particularly odd, but—
As I sat there in silence, Kirima thrust a phone at me. Not one on the house’s line, but one undoubtedly taken out in her name and paid for out of her own pocket.
“Call.”
“Er… Who?” I asked, my eyes widening.
Much to my surprise, Nagi replied, “Your house, of course. Tell them you’re bringing a friend home for dinner, and that they should make extra.”
4.
The next day, Nagi came to school, off her suspension. Kyoko avoided her, and despite chasing us down the day before, Nagi acted as if she didn’t even know us. Right from the start of first period, she was slumped over her desk, sleeping soundly. The teachers said nothing, apparently letting sleeping dogs lie.
Nagi stood up to go to the bathroom once during break, and I slid out after her without letting Kyoko see me.
“Um, Kirima-san,” I said.
“Mm?” She looked back remotely, clearly still half asleep. “Oh, you again. Sorry, but I’m gonna be up all night tonight, so I need to get some sleep while I still can. Talk to you later, okay?” Her business finished, she returned to class and went straight back to sleep.
“……”
I was itching to talk with her more about yesterday, but any attempts that I tried to make were clearly going to be thwarted.
I had ended up taking Nagi home for dinner the night before.
Why? Because she said, “Your folks probably get excessively worried when their daughter comes home late, with what happened before and all. Tell them that you met me, and that you invited me over, since my parents are off on holiday.”
Since she was right, I did as I was told.
Her non-blood relative brother said, “Come again,” as we left the Taniguchi house. It was pitch black, the sun having long since set.
We set off on foot, with Nagi silently following after me.
Unable to stand the silence, I asked a foolish question. “Don’t you ever show your soft side, Kirima-san?”
“Sure. I’m careful not to be too hardcore. I can play a normal girl,.” Her voice went up an octave as she said this, and she forced the corners of her mouth upwards into a dubious looking smile. She was a pretty girl, so it didn’t look all that unnatural.
“Well, good,” I said, laughing. But what I’d asked her wasn’t what I’d really wanted to know.
As I squirmed, she said, “You’re smart, aren’t you?”
“I suppose…” I wasn’t sure how to take this, coming from the girl who was the top scorer on the entrance exams and the top student in the school, as far as make-up test were concerned.
“I think so. That’s why I explained to you what I did, you know?”
“Yeah. I won’t tell anyone.” I meant it. After all, no one would believe me.
She shook her head. “That’s not what I mean. About Kirima Seiichi.”
“Hm? What about him?”
“You’ve been studying from his books, yet his daughter is doing this kind of stupid shit all the time. In other words, get out while you still can.” Her shoulders slumped.
I stopped in my tracks and just looked at her. “Why do you say things like that?”
“Why? That mess five years ago has nothing to do with you. Let go of it. It’ll come back to haunt you. It’ll warp your personality—just like it has mine!”
“Why?”
“Why…” Nagi looked slightly irritated. “Do you really want to end up like me?”
Her eyes glared at me, her face that of the Fire Witch. But I didn’t pull back. I wasn’t afraid any more. I glared right back into those eyes.
“How did you know that I was almost killed five years ago? I never told anyone.”
Nagi stiffened. She’d made a mistake. “Um, I—that is…”
“You’ve barely spoken to anyone in class, so you must have assumed that Doctor Murder’s past was public knowledge. But nobody knows. Just the people who were a part of it. Just my parents and the police.”
Nagi turned her head to the side to avert her gaze.
“Oh my god.”
Nagi remained silent.
“So it was you,” I said. “You saved me.”
They’d told us the killer hung himself. But that explanation had never sat all that well with me.
She had taken him out. Just like she had saved Kyoko.
“It… It’s not important. It was a long time ago,” she said, sullen.
“It’s pretty dang important to me! I’ve been over this hundreds of times. Why am I still alive? I’m only alive because the killer went and killed himself? Yeah, that makes me feel real good, knowing that. That means that the only way that good things happen is if you just sit and wait for bad things to self-destruct. What kind of explanation is that?! It sucks! And you know what else sucks? That there’s nothing we can do to make the world a better place.”
Yes.
That was it.
Justice might well prevail in the end, but ordinary people like me had no guarantee of surviving that long. We might get killed on the whim of some serial killer first.
But knowing that there were some people fighting for us—that would make things a lot easier to bear. If we knew these people had saved us, we’d feel much more alive than if we only survived because the bad guy just up and killed himself.
“That wasn’t me,” Nagi said coldly.
“Liar.”
“That was Boogiepop. Ultimately.”
Suddenly presented with the name of a fictional character, an urban legend, I was put off my stride. “Hunh?” I said, dazed.
“Never mind. The point is, you have nothing to feel responsible for,” she said roughly. Her tone seemed to imply that she had been joking a moment before, evading my question.
“But I…”
“Please, I don’t want to talk about it,” she said, and bit her lower lip.
And so we walked on, without my having said the most crucial thing.
***
As third period began, Nagi was still asleep.
I found myself staring vacantly at the curve of her back.
She looked so isolated, so lonely.
I imagined saying so much to her. Stuff like, Kirima-san, all I wanted to do was thank you. Thank you for saving me. If you can’t repay the person who saved your life, then there’s something wrong with the world. Right?
Sadly, I couldn’t imagine how she would respond.
Her body twisted on her desk. As she did this, she moaned aloud.
The teacher finally lost it and shouted, “Kirima!”
Nagi’s head rose slowly from her desk. “Wha—?”
“What did I just say? On second thought, prove this formula!” The teacher slapped the blackboard behind me. His handwriting wasn’t legible at the best of times, and having it rubbed away in places didn’t help matters. All this made it next to impossible to read the whole equation if you hadn’t taken notes during his lecture.
Nagi narrowed her eyes, staring at the board for a moment, and said, “a<b, ab>c. When c is a rational number, x=24, y=17/3, z=7.” Then she flopped back on her desk.
The teacher’s face turned beet red. She was right.
We all giggled, but Nagi ignored us and went right back to sleep.
It was just another typical school day.
Her oddball behavior might be her way of preparing for her next fight, but to the casual onlooker, she just seemed insolent.
She stirred in her sleep again, moaning. The moan sounded oddly girlish, and I stifled a laugh.
After all, the Fire Witch had finished her suspension, and was back among us.
Interlude
Echoes wandered the town. The clothes he’d procured a week before were now mere rags, and the police had nearly arrested him as a suspicious character, even though all he’d really done was just walk down the street. He’d been saved by some mysterious boy in a black hat, and managed to escape without hurting a soul. On the way here from the mountains, he had already been forced to seriously injure six people.
He knew the Manticore was near.
But human towns were built too close together, and the people living in them all seemed to congregate together. He had no idea how to find the Manticore here.
“…………”
As the sky grew darker, he found himself in a back alley, and once more, he collapsed on the ground.
This time, there were no people around. The alley smelled of rancid water.
“…………”
He looked up at the evening sky, but he couldn’t see the stars here. In the mountains, he had been able to see them even in broad daylight.
But he couldn’t cry any longer. The boy in the black hat had told him, “You’re chasing something. Cry when you have found it.”
This was true.
He could not rest here.
He had to stop the Manticore’s slaughter. The Manticore was made from him. It was his child.
She had the power of communication that even he lacked, not to mention the powers that let him blend in with this planet’s ecological system. This “transformation power” in particular could do untold damage to the environmental balance of this planet’s primarily human civilization and prevent him from carrying out his main objective.
His objective—
He had to fulfill it. That was why he had been created. But the Manticore’s existence was a hindrance to his objective, to his decision.
He had to make a decision, one way or the other.
That decision had to be rigorously balanced. Like him, the Manticore was alien to this planet and should not exist here. He had to dispose of her.
“…………”
He staggered to his feet.
There was a scream. A young women had come into the alley and caught sight of him.
He waved his hands trying to show that he meant no harm. But he didn’t need to.
“What are you doing here?” the woman asked, coming towards him. It had not been a scream of terror, but simply surprise. “Oh no, you’re hurt! How did this happen?”
On closer inspection, the woman was still a girl.
Without any reluctance, she wiped the blood from the wound on his head with an expensive looking designer handkerchief. The wound itself had long since healed, and he felt no pain from it, but the blood was still there, dried to his skin.
“H-hurt…” he said, trying to explain that it did not need tending. But there were few words in her speech for him to return and he could not produce a phrase with meaning.
“What should I do? Call the police?”
“P-police…” was all he could say.
But somehow the girl understood what he meant from this.
“No police, hunh? Okay. Where’s your house? Nearby?”
He picked some words from her speech, forcing a sentence. “No—hou-house.” When he spoke to people, he could only return words they had spoken, so as to not provide them with information beyond the limits of their understanding.
“Homeless? Looks like you’re in some kind of trouble.”
He nodded. He waved his hands, telling her to back away from him.
She patted him gently on the shoulder. Body language for “calm down.”
“No way, José. I leave you here and I won’t be able to sleep at night.”
Somehow, she seemed to understand what he wanted to say, even though he could not speak directly.
“Hmm, let me see… For the moment, let’s put you in school. There’s a card reader at the gate to get in, but I think I know a back way in.”
“Sch-school…”
“Yeah, I live in an apartment building, but there are prying eyes everywhere. See? You aren’t the only one with problems,” she said jokingly, and grabbed his arm, pulling him forcibly to his feet. Then she dragged him after her.
He didn’t know what else to do, so he followed her.
Who was she? he thought, and almost instantly she answered, “Me? My name’s Kamikishiro. Kamikishiro Naoko. I’m a senior at Shinyo Academy. You?”
“Ah… Oooh…” He couldn’t answer. He was not allowed to provide humans with information about himself.
“You can’t talk?”
“Can’t…ta-talk.”
“You’re talking now. Hmm… They call you Echoes? Strange name. Almost like it was made for me to call you by.”
Kamikishiro giggled. She had not yet noticed that she was understanding things that he had not said.
She smiled at him. “Don’t worry. I know this kooky girl named Nagi. Anytime there’s trouble, we talk to her and she usually takes care of it. Assuming you aren’t a bad guy, Echoes,” she finished with a wink.
She pulled out a cell phone, thumb flying over the keys, dialing this Nagi person with a practiced motion.