Occultic;Nine Volume 2

by Chiyomaru Shikura

  site 25: Yuta Gamon

  Wednesday, February 24th

  The edge of the knife in my hands glistened a slick red. I wasn’t sure if that red was the color of the knife itself or the color of the blood.

  I laughed.

  I laughed very naturally. I tried to hold it back, and it turned into a chuckle.

  Heh... heheheh... gwahah... I laughed a creepy laugh as I stabbed the red knife into Dr. Hashigami’s chest again and again. I could feel the dull sensation of ripping flesh beneath my hands. It was terrifying, but at the same time, joyful.

  This was necessary, I could hear myself saying again and again in my head. This was how I could get a scoop for Kirikiri Basara that even the media couldn’t get. I’d get more hits. My name would spread all across the internet, and I’d have a ton more fans.

  I imagined it, and I laughed again.

  The bones were getting in the way, and the knife couldn’t cut too deep. I tried plunging it in a little harder. The knife sliced right between the gap between the bones and ripped through the flesh as it dug deep, deep inside.

  The professor wasn’t moving, but his eyes were slick, shiny, wide-open, and staring right at me. Our eyes met.

  Impulsively, I pulled the knife out from his body. I could hear him moan. I didn’t want to hear it, so I stabbed the knife back into the same place I’d put it a minute ago. I pulled it out. Then I stabbed him again. And again. And again. And again. And again.

  His chest was turning red with blood. My hands were turning crimson, too. And the whole time, I could see my face reflected in his eyes. I could see myself, laughing—

  “No, that’s not me!” I screamed. “I wasn’t the last thing the professor saw before he died! I just happened to be there! I didn’t do anything! When I found him, he was already dead! I wasn’t the one who killed him—”

  “There’s no point in making excuses.” I could hear a girl’s husky voice in my ear.

  And at the same time, the feeling of the floor beneath me vanished. My vision turned dark black, and the professor disappeared as well. I couldn’t tell if I was floating or falling. I even thought I might be floating in the water. I reached out my hand, but there was nothing for me to grab. The only thing with me in the darkness was the girl’s voice.

  “You’ve got to live with a pain that’s MUCH greater than death. That’s your punishment, you understand?” Zonko appeared in the darkness before me, her tiny body floating amidst the black.

  “I don’t understand.” I shook my head. “Help. Help me. Tell me this is all some kind of illusion...” Dr. Hashigami was dead. He’d been killed. Who did it? I had no clue. It wasn’t me. I’d done nothing.

  “Really?” As she floated, Zonko’s cold voice stabbed into my brain stem. She was just a key chain. How could she talk to me like that? “Are you sure you didn’t kill him? Who could prove it?”

  Prove it? I didn’t know. But I didn’t do it. I didn’t do it!

  “Sorry, but you...” Zonko floated right up to my nose and whispered, her expression unchanging. “You killed the professor in a horrible, brutal way.”

  When I woke up, I was lying face-down on my bed. The only things I could hear were the creak of bedsprings, and rain outside the window.

  I looked at the clock, and it was almost midnight. The room was dark. But it wasn’t absolute darkness, like it had been before. Beyond the rain-slick windows I could see the darkness of the Kichijoji night, and the hazy lights of the buildings and streetlamps.

  “A dream...” I sat up. My body felt heavy. I looked down and saw that I was still wearing my duffel coat. It was soaked with rain. That’s right. When I’d come home, I’d fallen into bed without bothering to change.

  As I tried to take it off, my hand slipped into my pocket. And there it was. A tiny, cold lump. I took it out fearfully. It was a gold tooth. It wasn’t just a gold tooth, though. It was joined with a key.

  I remembered the overwhelming stench of blood and felt like I wanted to throw up. My voice was a cross between a whisper and a moan. “Dr. Hashigami is dead.”

  It wasn’t a dream, a hallucination, or anything else.

  site 26: Shun Moritsuka

  Wednesday, February 24th

  I felt like complaining to someone. Today, at long last, my patience had run out.

  The darkness inside the university was torn apart by dozens of red lights. They looked blurry in the rain that had started a few hours ago.

  I’d taken a look at what there was to see, and then come outside of Seimei University Building 10. I shivered from the cold rain. The courtyard in front of me was filled with police cars. By tomorrow morning, the grass where the students relaxed would be torn apart by tire tracks. I was surrounded by police officers, forensics people, and medical personnel that were rushing in and out of the building.

  So, anyway. About why I was pissed off. I was pissed off because someone had committed a crime in the middle of the damn night. I wanted to tell every criminal in the entire world to knock this crap off. I wanted to yell and scream at them. Thanks to whoever did this, it was almost midnight when we cops arrived here. How come criminals never thought about our needs? It just wasn’t fair.

  But wait a second. This crime had happened hours before the body was found. Forensics had told me that the estimated time of death was six to eight hours ago. That meant that if anyone was to blame, it wasn’t the killer. It was whoever had discovered the body first.

  “Christ! Whoever it was, I wish they would’ve thought about the time some more.”

  The body was discovered by a middle-aged security guard employed by the university. Supposedly, the reason that it had taken so long to find the body was that finals were over and the school was on spring break. Personally, I wished he could’ve held off a little longer and found it in the morning. Then I could’ve spent today working on rebuilding my Vanguard deck. What if I end up losing to a middle school kid? What then?

  This really was a pain in the butt.

  “Moritsuka.”

  I looked up and saw Kozaki and Shinoyama, two more detectives from the Musashino Police Department, jogging over to me. The looks on their faces told me that they’d been woken up from bed, and had hurriedly changed into their suits while their wives had complained to them. This work was tough on a married man.

  “How was the scene?”

  “Section 1 from the Tokyo Metro Police kicked me out halfway.” I shrugged as I answered, and both of them looked up at the sky in exasperation. They’d completely lost any desire to go visit the crime scene.

  “What’s going on in there?” Asking that question was all they planned to do. I’d hoped that I could do the same thing, but I was unlucky enough to be the first detective from the Musashino Police Station to arrive on the scene.

  “The victim’s name is Isayuki Hashigami, fifty-one years old. A professor at Seimei University’s School of Science and Engineering.” I smirked a little as I said the name, but neither Kozaki nor Shinoyama seemed impressed. “Huh? Did somebody already tell you the victim was Dr. Hashigami, the TV guy?”

  “Yeah, I guess.” Shinoyama nodded, and Kozaki looked down at my notebook.

  “Moritsuka, your handwriting is shit.”

  “Hahaha... my mom tells me that a lot. I know it’s lame.”

  “Can you even read that?”

  “Of course. It’s like shorthand, you know.”

  Both of them regarded me suspiciously. They didn’t seem interested in it any more, and motioned for me to continue talking.

  “Um... The crime scene was his lab. It’s on the sixth floor of Building 10 here. The estimated time of death is between 3:00 and 5:00 PM this afternoon.” All the details would be shared wh
en we put together a joint investigation task force later, so I decided just to give them the basic outline for now. “Um, the cause of death is... we’re not sure at the moment.”

  “We don’t need the ‘um.’”

  “Oh, sorry.” I laughed and nodded. Shinoyama was the old, burly type of detective, and he loved to impress his ways on others. He could be a hassle to deal with. He was a talented detective, but for people from my generation, he was difficult.

  “What do you mean, you’re not sure?” Kozaki tilted his head. “Is that what forensics said?”

  “There were wounds all over his body. He might’ve been tortured. His legs look like they were bound, for one thing. And his trademark long hair was literally ripped off his scalp, or something.”

  Both of them wrinkled their brows in thought. Their detective’s intuition told them that this might not be an ordinary killing.

  “Was the murder weapon found?” Kozaki was still glancing at my notebook as he spoke.

  “Oh, yeah. There was a bloody knife left at the scene. And in a really obvious place.”

  “An obvious place?”

  “Yeah. Like the killer was trying to say, ‘This is the murder weapon!’”

  “Any fingerprints?”

  “There were, I guess. Really clear ones, too. You can ask forensics for the details.” They had to take the weapon back, get the fingerprints off it, and match them with the database. It would probably take them a while to figure out whose fingerprints they were. “Oh, and forensics was saying something else weird, too.”

  “Out with it.”

  “One of the victim’s teeth had been removed, supposedly.”

  “One of his teeth?”

  “It was one of those artificial teeth. Implants, they call ‘em. Usually they’re buried in pretty deep, so they’re not supposed to be easy to remove. You’d need a pair of pliers or something to do it. And if you tried to rip one out, it would be so painful that the person would pass out.”

  “When was it taken out? Before or after his death?”

  “We don’t know. But we know it happened today.”

  “Hmm... sounds pretty brutal.”

  “Makes it seem like the motive is a personal grudge, if you ask me.”

  “Anyway, it seems like us local police are supposed to go around and talk to witnesses.” To be honest, I wasn’t happy with the idea of going around questioning people in the middle of winter like this. The two of them must’ve agreed, because I could see a small look of disgust on their faces. “Oh, right. There’s one more thing. This is a result of my personal investigations!”

  “Your personal investigations?”

  “Yes, you see, there’s this particular doujinshi...”

  “What’s an, um... doujinshi?”

  “Shinoyama, you don’t know what a doujin is? Man, you’re behind the times.” I giggled a little, and Shinoyama’s eyes narrowed. It felt like he was mad, so I decided not to drop it. “A doujin is to manga as an indie band is to music.”

  “Manga doesn’t have anything to do with this.”

  “You’d think so, right? But it does. Nobody else has noticed this yet, but when I heard about this case, I thought of it immediately. That’s something that only an otaku could do. Heheheh.”

  “Did you find this doujin manga thing at the scene?”

  “No, no. That’s not it. This murder scene is almost identical to a scene from a certain doujinshi. That particular manga is an adult publication for women. Its author is a woman named Ririka Nishizono. Oh, if you need it, I can bring it to the station later. So in this manga, after this man’s corpse gets raped, the rapist takes out his artificial tooth with a knife, as a memento, you see, and carries it home lovingly...”

  “This is a waste of time.”

  “Moritsuka, what you just said is seriously creeping me out.”

  “Huh? Wha... Wait!” Shinoyama and Kozaki quickly ended the conversation and entered Building 10. I was left alone in the rain. “Sheesh. And I was nice enough to give them my big scoop, too. Didn’t they learn when they were kids that you should let people talk until they’re finished? A detective’s whole job is supposed to be listening to people.”

  Well, maybe it made sense that they wouldn’t take me seriously. After all, I was a loser otaku who took his anime more seriously than his work. Ahaha. Anyway, I guess that meant my work was done for the day. I could let the elite detectives of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police, as well as my co-workers, handle this, and go home. Oh, but first I had to make a call.

  I took out my phone and dialed the usual number. They picked up after the first ring. They must’ve been waiting for me to call.

  “Agent Moritsuka,” I said, in my very best English.

  “You can speak Japanese.”

  “I’m Agent Moritsuka!”

  “Are these EM waves secure?”

  “Don’t underestimate an otaku. This line is perfectly scrambled. No one can break this perfect algorithm.”

  They must’ve felt a little better after hearing that, because the voice on the phone chuckled a bit. “What’s the situation?”

  “The rain’s pissing me off. I should’ve made a teru-teru bozu.”

  “The weather report says it will stop by tomorrow.” I was joking, but they took me seriously. “Did you get the list?”

  “No. I couldn’t find the thing itself. But...”

  “But?”

  “I did find something.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The list we’ve been seeking for so long may not actually exist.”

  “What do you mean—”

  “Code.” I interrupted them mid-sentence. I could hear them gasp. “He had it written out in a damn dying message, of all things.”

  “That’s bad.”

  “Of course, it’s not a problem. I erased it before they saw it. I’m just glad I was the first one at the scene.”

  “I see.”

  “They haven’t realized that the list they want to get rid of so badly has been coded.”

  “Does the list exist?”

  “Yeah. But they went to the trouble of encoding and camouflaging it. I don’t think it exists in paper form at all anymore. The professor’s not that stupid.”

  “There’s no time. Find the list.”

  “Time, huh? You mean the time limit of life? Still... there’s too many of them to be just guinea pigs, right? I mean, 256 people?” I stopped and looked up through the rain at Seimei University Building 10. “But in the end...”

  The voice on the phone fell silent. After a moment, the call ended.

  “You probably can’t change the future.” My words melted into the cold rain.

  site 27: MMG

  The room was deep in the back of a long, long hallway in a sub-basement, a place where even people who were allowed to be there rarely went. In that windowless room, the men were sitting once more in a circle. The man across from them, the only one in the room who was standing, was wearing his usual dark crimson suit.

  “Why were the police called?” Dr. Matoba, in his white lab coat, asked angrily. “Takasu, don’t you think that you were far too careless in this matter?”

  Takasu, the man in the dark crimson suit, said nothing. Matoba tried to question him further, but Representative Hatoyama, who was sitting at his side, motioned for him to stop.

  “There’s no need to worry about the police. I had a little chat with him.”

  “But Mr. Hatoyama...”

  “What’s more important is the fact that the list still hasn’t been found. What’s going on with that?” His voice was as calm as it was when he spoke at the Diet, but his eyes weren’t smiling at all.

  Matoba interrupted before Takasu could answer. “You weren’t able to learn anything from that nuisance Dr. Hashigami, were you?”

  “Correct. The professor didn’t say a word.”

  “And in the end, you killed him. How could you be so careless? Don’t tell me it was just a
simple mistake. I want explanations, and I want good ones—”

  “There’s a chance that the list may no longer exist on paper or as data.” Takasu cut him off. “We ‘investigated’ Dr. Hashigami’s house, but we couldn’t find the list.” Everyone here understood instantly that the ‘investigation’ he referred to was an illegal one. And, of course, no one pointed that out.

  “However...” Takasu turned around and took a document off a serving cart next to him. He held it up at head height so that everyone could see. “There was a single locked drawer in the professor’s desk. Inside, we found something interesting.”

  The men eagerly waited for him to say he’d found the list, but he silently shook his head. “Unfortunately, it’s not the list. It’s a draft for an article he was writing for a certain magazine.”

  “What of it? That sort of minor detail isn’t what we’re interested in.”

  “Let me finish, Mr. Hatoyama. The title of this draft is something of extreme interest to us.”

  “Extreme interest? You’re certainly building this up, aren’t you?”

  “Hahaha, that wasn’t my intent. The title is... ‘Time and the Spiritualizing World.’”

  But even after Takasu’s big reveal, the reaction of the listeners was less than positive. They were quiet, brows furrowed in confusion. The whole room was as silent and still as the surface of a placid lake.

  What broke the silence wasn’t the men sitting. It was a voice from a dark room that was sealed off by curtains. “‘Spiritualizing,’ you said?” When they heard the flat, emotionless voice, all the sitting men froze in surprise. No one — Takasu excepted — expected the speaker to be here, let alone intervene in the discussion. “And you’re telling me that this is a clue to escaping the Prison of Time?”

  Takasu turned towards the speaker. “Yes, most likely. I’ve already gathered RIKEN’s primary members and am preparing for clinical trials with the information we’ve gained.”

  “The key to the prison, huh? Heheh...” There were no more words from behind the curtain.

  “Eternal Life for the Bavarian Illuminati!”

  “Eternal Life for the Bavarian Illuminati!”