Published at 31st of August 2019 12:57 am

Volume 1, Part II: The First Homicide Inquiry - IV

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I wake up to a perfectly good Sunday morning, the first Sunday of Feb- ruary in fact. After washing my face and brushing my teeth, I head to the dining room, and am surprised to find Daisuke there, waiting for me.

“Why are you here?” I ask, in the manner of my usual morning cranki- ness.

“Well, good morning to you, too. I missed the last train, so I came over for a while. I gotta go to work in a while, though. Savor school life while you’ve got it, Mikiya. When you grow up, working harder just translates to less vacations.” A yawn punctuates the last word in his sentence. His drooping shoulders and tired voice tell me just how much sleep he’s been getting. That only means two things: the investigation on the serial killer has either ground to a solid halt or they’ve gotten a new lead.

“Oh yeah, you were talking about coming to my school last time we talked. Did anything come of that?”

“Nothing, really. Lots of people lose school emblems, after all, and test- ing it turned up nothing on the offender database. But it might be back to your school for me.” He sighs, rubbing his eyes. “Truth is, a sixth body turned up three days ago. Signs of a struggle this time, which was different. The victim had long nails, and she probably clawed at her killer. Found about three centimeters of skin beneath the vic’s nails.”

Now this was surprising. I haven’t even heard about this on the TV or the papers. Yet, even in the face of such grim news, my mind couldn’t help but drift off to Shiki and the conversation we had recently. She’d been talk- ing about murder as well. A picture forms in my mind, of Shikistanding atop a bloody corpse, holding a knife…

“So that means the killer was wounded?” I blurt out.

“Um, yeah? Unless the victim was scratching her own damn self. Lab team thinks the skin is from the elbow, so I’d expect the killer’s nursing some pretty deep wounds thereabouts. The blood is being analyzed, and if it gets a match on the database, it’s checkmate.”

Daisuke stands up after that, says a quick goodbye, and leaves. I sud- denly find myself without the power to stand up, and I collapse on one of the chairs. It was only three days ago when I talked with Shiki in the sunset- lit classroom, and the day after that, I could’ve sworn there was a fresh bandage on her elbow.

Past noon, I make up my mind. Just thinking and worrying about it isn’t going to do any good, so I figure if I ask Shiki herself, and she tells me she has nothing to do with the killings, then that’ll be enough. At the very least, it’ll do something to calm my nerves.

I rifle through my school’s student registry book, and find Shiki’s name and home address a few moments later. Her house is on the outskirts of town, and when I finally find it, the better part of the night had caught up with me. The Ryōgi estate’s periphery is populated by bamboo trees in every direction, a veritable forest, and the estate itself is built like an old 18th century mansion. The walls surrounding the grounds went on for so long, I don’t think I could have guessed the size of the place just by walking. I would’ve needed an airplane to get a better picture.

A path leads me through the bamboo forest to a large gate. The entire thing looks like a relic left over from the Edo era, but despite this, I find an intercom beside the gate, a little anachronistic quality that gives me some small relief. I push the button and state my business, and in under a minute, a black-suited man opens the gates and comes out to greet me. He looks like he’s in his early thirties, and seems about as high-spirited as a ghost would be.

“Welcome, young man.” he says with impeccably practiced politeness. “My name is Akitaka, a servant of the Ryōgi household and of the lady Shiki. Unfortunately, the lady is absent now and cannot meet you. If you would like, you may enter the mansion and await her return.”

“Er…no, thanks. I think I’ll just come back another time.”

Truth is, I don’t think I have the courage to go inside the mansion alone. “As you wish. Goodbye, then.”

He goes inside the gates again, and it closes behind him with a sound of finality. Because it’s already dark, I decide to go home for today. I keep thinking about Shiki, and what she could be doing at such a late hour. I decide not to assume the worst. It’s the easiest way to a slippery slope of crippling anxiety.

The walk to the station takes me an hour, but right at the station entrance I meet my former upperclassman. He invites me to dinner in a restaurant, and, not being one to refuse, I go with him. We end up talking until the hour hand of my watch is pointed at ten o’ clock. Unlike my friend, I’m still a student, so I needed to get going soon. After saying goodbye to him, I buy a ticket for the train inside the station. The hour hand of my watch is creeping closer and closer to 11, but before I put the ticket on the turnstile, I allow myself to wonder, for a moment, if Shiki was home already.

“God, what the hell am I doing here?” I say to myself, while walking through the unfamiliar residential neighborhood. The streets are empty with no signs of life, unsurprising given the hour and the circumstances, but I tried to pay it no heed; Shiki’s house was nearby. I know I won’t be able to meet her now even if I went there. But still, I just want to see the lights on in her house, in her room, just to know that she’s there, so I’m taking this short side trip back to the Ryōgi estate.

The freezing winter air puts a strain on my shoulder muscles, and my ragged breath is keenly audible in the still night. Soon, the residential dis- trict is behind me and I face the tree line of the bamboo forest surrounding the Ryōgi estate for the second time tonight. The trees part for the little path that goes towards the front gate. No wind sings through the trees at this hour, and no light but the moon’s illuminates the path; far from making the forest less menacing, the silence only serves to accentuate my anxiety.

I wonder what would happen if I got attacked here. As soon as the thought enters my mind, I regret it immediately. Though I was only half- joking with myself, my brain is now working overtime to exaggerate the fleeting image, even as I try to put it out of my mind. When I was little, I was afraid of monsters. I mistook the silhouettes flitting to and fro in the midst of the bamboo trees for ghosts and other horrors. But now, I’m scared of other people, people who you imagine will just jump out from behind the brush and attack you. What age was I when I started to replace the ghosts with people?

Every step I take worsens the thought in my head, and I keep remem- bering the terrible image I saw when Daisuke told me about the recent murder. And while I try to exorcise that disturbing thought, I come across something in the path that makes my feet stop of their own volition.

A few meters ahead, a white shadow of a person was standing. Her kimo- no is so white it seemed as if to shine in the moonlight, but it is speckled and sullied with something, and it continues to spread over the kimono’s surface. Something in front of her is spraying red liquid in all directions. Venturing forward a few steps, it becomes clear that the woman is Shiki. As for the object which I first took for some sort of fountain?

A corpse, its form too mangled and bloody to identify at first sight. Somehow, I’m neither shocked nor surprised. Perhaps it’s because the same terrible premonition lingered in my thoughts just moments before, and in an instant, it turned into reality. Now my mind is blank.

The body is fresh, otherwise it wouldn’t bleed profusely like that. The fatal wound starts at the neck, and continues down at an angle towards the body in a single, clean cut, like some macabre stole.

Shiki stares at the body, standing still like a statue.

The rich, red color of the spraying blood is enough to make me faint, but the organs seeping forth from the gaping wound makes the body look less like a human and more like a twisted facsimile of one made by someone mad. It repels and disgusts me so much that it’s hard to look at.

Yet Shiki only continues to stare, unperturbed and placid.

Red butterflies take flight from the wound, and descend lightly on Shiki’s

face, and on her ghostly kimono. Her blood-soaked lips twist into a shape...

is it of fear, or of pleasure? Is she Shiki or Shiki? I try to say something, but my voice stops, and I fall to the ground just because of the effort of trying to talk.

I vomit, my stomach retching out all its contents, all the bile. I wish it retched out this memory as well, but no such luck. I vomit so hard I start to cry. But that doesn’t make me feel any more relieved. The overwhelming smell of the blood is so rich it drowns my brain. And finally, Shiki notices me. She turns her head to look at me, and I see now that the twist on her lips earlier was a smile, a kind of warm, motherly smile that is so at odds with the scene that it makes me shiver.

I can feel my consciousness start to leave me as she walks closer to me. Before I faint, she utters something at me.

“Do be careful, Kokutō. A terrible premonition echoes a terrible reality.” I guess I was too optimistic. I refused to even think about this outcome

until I was face to face with it.

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