The Girl in the Video (ARC)

by Michael David Wilson

“Going around like that in broad daylight—Christ almighty, what’s wrong with you?”

  “Twinkle, twinkle, little star. How I wonder what you are.”

  “If anyone sees you, you’re getting arrested.”

  “Up above the world so high, like a diamond in the sky.”

  “I did everything you asked,” I repeated, trying to sound more reasonable.

  “Maybe. But your bitch of a wife didn’t!”

  “Leave Rachel out of this, she’s done nothing wrong.”

  She sighed. “I’d have been so much better for you, Freddie. And I really really wanted to kill her. Like, I actually dreamt about it. Many times. Maybe dream is the wrong word. Fantasy, perhaps, because I often woke up wet. Sometimes I’d stab her which was especially exciting—much more satisfying than a gun. With a blade, you really feel it, there’s a weight to what you’re doing, you know? It wasn’t always like that. Sometimes I was more passive, poisoning her food and drink—classic stuff. But you want to know my favourite? Pushing her in front of a moving train. That was a real thrill.”

  “What do you want?”

  “But no matter how much I think about it, the conclusion’s always the same, I just can’t kill her. Because you love her.” She spat on the ground. “Ugh, so silly. You love her, even though she can’t give you what you want, and I can. But, whatever, this is the next best thing.”

  She took the stairs up to the first floor of an old building, heading towards the rented room in which I’d taught a handful of classes.

  “I don’t understand. You’re not making any sense.”

  “Soon you will.” She held the machete up in front of the camera.

  I prayed this wasn’t what it looked like. That she wasn’t that fucking stupid.

  “There could be kids in there,” I said, anger once again diminished, my voice a shrill husk.

  “Yeah.” Another laugh.

  I fumbled with my phone, needed to record the call, in case she did something truly awful, evidence for the police. I’d heard of people recording FaceTime calls before but there were no obvious settings.

  Fuck.

  I had to stop her, to reason with her, to keep her talking—that’s what they do in the films and television shows, they keep the would-be criminal talking so they don’t do anything rash.

  “Just hold on a minute. Just stop. Make me understand. Help me understand.”

  “That’s what I’m doing.” She held the machete so close to the camera I could see the light reflecting off of its thick sharp blade. “Patience please.”

  “Not like this, there has to be another way.”

  “Not anymore. We’ve exhausted all possibilities.”

  “This doesn’t make any fucking sense!” So much for reason and calm. I was attracting quite the crowd as I screamed my voice hoarse, concerned passers-by glancing in my direction. If only they’d known, perhaps they wouldn’t have been so apathetic.

  There were still two police officers across the road, outside Harajuku Station. I pushed forward through the crowd, waited for a gap in the traffic to cross.

  “I’m going to the police,” I said. “Right now, I’m going to the police. You hear me?”

  “She already did. That was your final mistake.”

  She? Rachel. Oh Christ . . .

  “I told her not to,” I said as if the girl would give a shit. “You have to believe me.”

  The girl slammed her fist against the classroom door.

  “Don’t open the door! Don’t open the door! Don’t open the door!”

  “They can’t hear you,” the girl said, so cool and so calm.

  I crossed the road, practically threw myself in front of the two policemen. “Look! Look! Mite! Mite!”

  One of the cops placed his hand nearer to his right trouser pocket. To his gun? I forced my phone into the hand of the taller of the two policemen who looked at the screen.

  We all did.

  We all saw as the twenty-something fresh-faced man with the crop of blonde hair opened the door. Baby-faced and energetic, a beaming smile to greet all of his students. We saw, too, as that smile reversed. As warm enthusiasm turned to cold fear. Saw his eyes widen and his face age years in seconds. Saw his song of innocence transformed into a scream of experience as the blade plunged into his stomach.

  Then the call disconnected.

  ***

  I don’t want to think about what happened next. I relive it every day, the news footage burnt into my mind’s eye, perpetually playing.

  ***

  As soon as I revealed the girl’s location, police were dispatched to the school. But they were too late.

  There was no girl.

  Just remnants of a massacre.

  Pools of blood on the floor and spatter up the wall.

  Reading about each death and seeing the photographs broke me then and breaks me all over again with each recollection, but I’ll lay it out as best as I can. There were seven fatalities, one adult and six children, which was about as much information as the mainstream newspapers gave, but I uncovered the rest, including the names of the victims, via the Dark Web. Matthew McCain, aged twenty-four, lay motionless in the entranceway, his smartphone in his hand, ‘110’ on the screen, dead before he’d hit ‘call’. Next to the whiteboard lay Akito and Takeo Suzuki, aged seven and eight, little hand in little hand. Hanging over the window ledge, like she was trying to escape, was eight-year-old Momoka Oshima. On the ground below lay the youngest victim, Miyu Suzuki, aged six, clutching a bloodied My Melody teddy bear. The final victim, Hiroki Yamada, aged eight. My heart sank. I’d known him, had a drawing of his on my fridge. He’d locked himself in the bathroom. The lock, a rusted single latch, had been busted off. Sitting on the toilet, in soiled clothes, his decapitated body. Neither reports nor videos of the crime scene revealed the location of his head.

  The following was written on the whiteboard:

  I want to go to Disneyland.

  I want to eat ice cream.

  I want to be happy.

  If there was a God in this world, if there was justice, that’s where they were and that’s what they were doing.

  But how anyone could reconcile a God with a scene like that I did not know.

  ***

  The police took me to the station for further questioning as they tried to trace the assailant and uncover the identity of the girl in the video. I rang Rachel who was quick to join me. It turned out she’d arrived in Harajuku a little after one o’clock and had been using ‘find my iPhone’ to track my whereabouts all day—had been just streets away when she’d phoned.

  “Please don’t be mad, darling.”

  But I wasn’t mad.

  How could I be?

  I was empty.

  Numb.

  Shell-shocked.

  Broken.

  But not mad.

  She told me, too, that after finally getting through to Hillary, she’d visited our local police box that morning. Armed with copies of the videos and messages—copies she’d made while I was getting showered and dressed—she explained everything as best she could. Of course, the police hadn’t taken her seriously. At that point what was there to even take? The death threats had been via the telephone call, of which there was no record. The videos and messages were disturbing and at times aggressive—“Don’t fuck with me! I can be dangerous. You don’t know who you’re dealing with”—but nothing explicit.I didn’t know if there was even really a crime. Something related to stalking or harassment, perhaps? Though how seriously either was taken here I wasn’t sure. Still, to their credit, the police took notes. Notes which would later help identify the girl in the video. Though how the hell the girl knew Rachel had contacted the police remained a mystery.

  As the days became weeks became months I learnt more about the girl in the video. Though why she’d done what she’d done, why she’d chosen to send me the videos, and why those specific videos, wasn’t so clear. I could speculate and had speculated, but t
he answers were never wholly satisfying.

  The girl in the video was Yuki Yamanaka. After that day, she was never again ‘the girl in the video’ or ‘the Hello Kitty girl’, both of which sounded far too cutesy. Nor was she simply Yuki, which suggested a closeness we didn’t have, or a human side I doubted. Yuki Yamanaka was a twenty-year-old university student living with her parents in Yamato, Kanagawa prefecture. It came out that for a brief number of months, some years back, I’d been her after-school English teacher, though the name was unfamiliar, and I couldn’t recognise her from the photographs that appeared in the media, though I’d never forget her again. She had distinctive wide eyes with a depth that frightened me. She was the nail that stuck up and refused to be hammered down.

  I might not have remembered her, but, as her internet history would reveal, she remembered me.

  Though remember wasn’t quite right.

  I had never receded into her past, had always been a part of her present. She’d checked out my social media accounts several times per day for getting on four years. Had visited profiles of my friends and family with lesser privacy settings, presumably in the hopes of glimpsing a photograph, video, or insight into my life. It turned out that she’d visited both Portugal and England, though whether the videos in each location had been recorded personally was not confirmed.

  Yuki Yamanaka was neither caught nor seen after the Yamato School Massacre, as it was soon known, and various theories spread which Rachel and I discussed but never wholly bought into. Some said Yuki Yamanaka’s parents were in on it and were harbouring her someplace, others said she’d fled the country, and others still theorised she’d soon turned the machete on herself, unable to live with what she’d done to those kids. The latter stunk of big-time bullshit, how that would happen without a body made no damn sense—and a machete suicide? Come off it! This wasn’t hara-kiri—Yuki Yamanaka had no honour. Still, I’d gone over the practicalities of that one numerous times with Rachel. Like, if Yuki Yamanaka was really gonna kill herself, how would she go about it? We settled on an overdose, hanging, or simply throwing herself off a tall building. Though if she wanted to go the scenic route there was always a god damn mountain. I’d started reading up on it and scanning the newspapers and web for unidentified suicide victims, just in case. You jump off something just three times your height and it’s fatal fifty percent of the time.

  Three times your height.

  That’s all it takes.

  Yuki Yamanaka hadn’t taken her life. Not as far as I knew.

  Besides, I had an inkling that true monsters like Yuki Yamanaka were incapable of such remorse.

  Amongst the horseshit and speculation, there were even whispers it had been a terrorist attack perpetrated by the Islamic State. Though for once ISIS didn’t rush forward to claim responsibility and a thorough search of Yuki Yamanaka’s home uncovered no evidence to support such a theory.

  Some fucking imbeciles even said there had never been a massacre, that the entire thing had been staged alongside Matthew McCain, who was not only the teacher at the school that day but, so it went, Yuki Yamanaka’s lover. It had been a ploy to allow the two to elope to a distant island and start a new community with the children. Not only was there nothing to suggest that Matthew McCain knew Yuki Yamanaka, let alone had been her lover, but the grieving parents and bloodied bodies painted a different story.

  Rachel and I soon moved north of Tokyo, to Tochigi prefecture, where we attempted to start life afresh. Not taking any chances, we deleted all our social media accounts, sold our computers, phones, and anything else which could connect to the internet. We did our best to erase our digital footprint, though of course it was impossible. With time, I built us a basic computer, we only went online to Skype family members, via a VPN, and new nonsense-name account. We bought basic prepay phones for emergencies.

  I developed a deep fear of technology and the connected world we live in and at times was close to walking out and going truly off-the-grid, afraid that even having a registered address, bank account, and health insurance was too much. But as strong as my fear was, I couldn’t put Rachel through it.

  I’d already done enough.

  Too much.

  So I saw a therapist, which helped lessen the nightmares and sleep paralysis, but knew I’d never fully recover because I was incapable of unseeing or un-experiencing what had gone before.

  I considered leaving Japan, thought it would be for the best, but Rachel reminded me that living in Japan had been our dream and if we left, Yuki Yamanaka won.

  But she had already won, or at least I had lost, and I was all out of dreams.

  I stayed put for Rachel.

  Kenichi was born in October of that year giving me a sense of purpose and joy I hadn’t experienced in months. Rachel and I both enjoyed glimpses of happiness that had been long absent, albeit more tired and fatigued than before. I’d quit teaching after the YamatoSchool Massacre and, with an infant son to look after, settled into the role of full-time house husband, citing Kenichi as the reason for my teaching hiatus, though we both knew my social anxiety and fear of leaving the house were the real drivers.

  ***

  WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 18, 2017

  I’d been getting better—leaving the house more, taking long walks in the park, attempting small talk with strangers in cafes. Occasionally I’d even reason that the Yamato School Massacre wasn’t my fault, that I couldn’t have foreseen or prevented it. But those thoughts were quickly replaced with other darker images—bloodstained teddy bears, headless children, unfulfilled dreams set in ink on the whiteboard. If I’d just played along, if I’d just told her what I wanted, and given her what she wanted, this could have been prevented. Or if I’d not opened the messages, if I’d not clicked the links, if I’d not . . .

  But I had.

  I had done all of those things and more.

  Which brings me to today: Kenichi’s first birthday.

  Like I said, I’d been getting better, right up until half an hour ago, when I opened the door to discover a shoebox-sized package on the doorstep. There were no signs of the deliverer and at the time I didn’t think much of it, scooping the package up and placing it in the living room next to the other presents, ready for the grand opening as soon as Rachel and Kenichi returned from the supermarket.

  Then I saw the Hello Kitty sticker next to the address.

  Lightheaded, I steadied myself against the television stand, and counted my breath—which I’ve finally gotten good at—to save from passing out.

  I tried to convince myself that the Hello Kitty sticker was just a trigger, that the package was perfectly innocent. After all, it was addressed to Kenichi and Hello Kitty stickers were hardly difficult to come by.

  And yet the only people who knew our address were close relatives and Rachel’s employer.

  Presents from family had arrived weeks ago.

  I ripped open the package, shards of brown paper decorating the floor like confetti.

  The box was empty, save for a single DVD inside a transparent case which sat on a bed of bubble wrap.

  Scrawled across the disc in black pen: Bitly.

  With trembling hands, I took the disc from its case and pushed it into the PlayStation. The video played automatically.

  White text on a black screen: ‘I want you to want me.’

  The scene opened in a white-walled room.

  Bare, save for a single chair in the centre.

  A girl skipped into the room wearing a Hello Kitty mask—the Hello Kitty mask, now infamous. Positioned over her right shoulder was an acoustic guitar.

  Yuki Yamanaka.

  She sat on the chair, cleared her throat, and strummed the guitar.

  “Happy birthday to you.

  “Happy birthday to you.”

  I tried not to think about the faces of the children she’d slaughtered, to stop everything from coming back, to suppress the self-hatred, the shame, the guilt of it all.

  But the thing ab
out trying not to think about something is you always think about it.

  “Happy birthday dear Kenichi.”

  I was close to hurling. Couldn’t get six-year-old Miyu Suzuki out of my head, her My Melody teddy bear daubed in blood, held so tight and so close to her little lifeless body.

  “Happy birthday to you.”

  After her performance, she threw her head back and cold unfeeling laughter filled the room.

  Laughter I hadn’t heard in a long time.

  And laughter I had never stopped hearing.

  She placed the guitar on the floor, stood up, strolled towards the camera, and leant forward so that the Hello Kitty mask took up the entire screen.

  Her voice a whisper. Like it was our little secret. “I still have something on you, Freddie. Better play nice this time.” She stood back, picked up the guitar, and squealed. “Bye for now.”

  Resumed her playing, her singing, her dancing. Skipped across the screen: a deranged Eminem.

  “Guess who’s back?

  “Back again.

  “Kitty’s back.

  “Tell a friend.

  “Guess who’s back, guess who’s back, guess who’s back, guess who’s back, guess who’s back, guess who’s back . . . ”

  The video faded out.

  Must have been the way the morning light from beyond the frosted patio sliders caught the box but there appeared to be something else glinting beneath the bubble wrap. I turned the box upside down. The bubble wrap tumbled out and I saw it fully.

  Frayed at the edges and worn, the Hello Kitty mask.

  Dark maroon specks peppered its white cheeks.

  I thought I was gonna hurl, but managed to keep it down, to remain composed.

  I stood up, surveyed the living room, noting everything Rachel and I had built together, stopping at the photograph in the olive frame next to the television. The three of us. Kenichi in my arms, Rachel by my side. All smiles in Arashiyama forest, surrounded by gorgeous towers of luscious bamboo, greens of every shade. My favourite place in the world with my favourite people in the world.

  Everything I ever wanted.

  The reason I returned to Japan.

  My life’s purpose.

  But as long as Yuki Yamanaka was alive it wouldn’t be enough.