Black Fairy Tale

by Otsuichi

  Give me courage.

  The car stopped. We were on the side of the road not far from the gate of the house.

  “Are you ready?” asked Sumida, his face ashen.

  I nodded and stepped out of the car.

  3

  Two stone gateposts as tall as myself stood on either side of the road leading to the grounds of Shiozaki’s house. The rusted iron doors of the gate had been left open. Ducking our heads a bit, Sumida and I passed through it.

  We emerged from the narrow bush-lined path to see the blue brick house before us. Although you could easily find taller buildings, its two stories were large enough to envelop the sky. The tip of its gabled roof pointed straight up at the low gray clouds.

  The house seemed like a giant demon pregnant with darkness. As I looked at it, some helpless little thing within the deepest reaches of my soul began to tremble. No matter how positive and true my feelings were, the moment I saw that house I couldn’t help but realize I was just one solitary person.

  Blue is the color of darkness and loneliness. As you descend deeper into the sea, you enter depths where light cannot reach. The blue of the water’s surface and the darkness of the sea below are not two separate things. The color of the house before me was cold testament to that fact.

  Though it was still afternoon, clouds covered the sun, making it dark outside—maybe dark enough that you’d need to have the lights on inside.

  But the windows on this side of the house revealed only a still darkness. It didn’t seem like anyone was there.

  In front was a large gravel drive for cars to park. Shiozaki’s black car was there. Alone.

  “I wonder if Shiozaki is still home,” I said to Sumida. I was nervous and my voice sounded stilted to my ears.

  “He might have left his car when he fled.”

  We were half hidden in the woods that surrounded the house. The forest was so quiet I could hear ringing in my ears. Occasionally a bird would flap its wings somewhere; that was the only sound.

  As I stood, enthralled by the quiet, I saw a lone raven on the roof. It was just a black dot, like someone had taken the tip of a needle and poked a hole in space. The bird was keeping watch, swiveling its black neck in search of intruders.

  We decided to start our search by circling around the outside of the house from opposite sides.

  “Sumida, you go to the right. I’ll search the left.”

  “If anything happens,” Sumida said with a worried look, “scream.”

  He moved, hiding himself between the trees. Doing the same, I advanced through the forest toward the left-hand side of the house.

  Separated from Sumida, I suddenly felt very alone. Sumida wasn’t strong—rather, his thin frame and arms made him look frail. But having someone around was a comfort.

  The blue brick wall shot straight up from the ground, and with each step closer, I felt it loom ever higher. When I finally reached the house I looked up. The wall occupied over half the sky above.

  As I stared silently at the wall, my eyes went out of focus and I started to feel dizzy. The orderly rows of bricks buried themselves deep into my mind, and from their other side I sensed screams of agony and terror.

  Waves of nausea and anxiety swept over me. I steadied my hand on the trunk of the tree next to me and closed my eyes to calm myself down. Struggling to breathe, I gulped for air.

  With my entire body I sensed the forest and the house. Cold fingertips of air brushed my cheeks. I could feel the tension all across the surface of my skin as it took in the isolation and the cold.

  Had Kazuya felt like this too? When he came to rescue Hitomi and he searched around the outside of the house, had he been afraid?

  After he first saw Hitomi, had he come like this to investigate before the day he tried to break the window? He might have. After all he had come with that screwdriver hidden in his pocket, prepared to break in.

  Now I’m doing the same things he did. I have inherited his purpose and am reenacting Hitomi’s rescue.

  My breath steady, I opened my eyes.

  I had stood there with my eyes shut for around ten seconds. That was all the time I had needed to find the handful of courage it took to step forward.

  I moved out from between the trees and pressed my body against the wall. Careful not to make any sound, I moved along the side of the house.

  Had I been noticed? From atop the house I heard the flapping of the raven’s wings as it flew away

  4

  —An Author Of Fairy Tale

  Miki was in the study. He had finished most of his packing, and all that was left for him to do was seal off the cellar and leave. With the help of an acquaintance, the house would easily pass to a new tenant.

  He would leave behind the desk and the chair, the clock and the curtains and such. The house would be almost as it had been when he came to it. Only his personal belongings would come with him.

  Suddenly remembering something, Miki opened the desk drawer. He took out the object inside and looked at it for a time. It was the object the visitor had dropped outside the house.

  Just then, Miki thought he heard the flapping of a bird’s wings outside.

  If it were any other time, he wouldn’t have thought anything of it. But right then, as he was about to make his disappearance, the sound was disconcerting.

  He slipped the object into his pocket.

  He looked out the study window—nothing out of the ordinary.

  Miki left the room and walked down the second-floor hallway. The open stairwell at the top of the stairs looked down on the first floor. The hallway around the stairwell made an L-shape, terminating at a window.

  Miki approached the window and put his face to the glass, looking out the southern side of the house. Not wanting to make any noise he didn’t open the window, but with the window closed he couldn’t see directly below.

  And yet, for an instant, just beyond the very edge of the windowsill, he saw the shoulder of someone moving around to the back of the house. Whoever it was was pressed against the brick wall, moving around the side of the house, searching.

  Miki moved. Quietly, he descended the staircase.

  A sack of bricks and plaster had been left at the bottom of the steps. He had brought them from the cellar a little bit at a time.

  Chance put the hammer in Miki’s hand. He had left his toolbox at the bottom of the stairs just in case he needed it to seal off the basement; the hammer was inside. The head of the hammer was covered in rust, but heavy enough and perfectly suited for smashing.

  Miki headed for the visitor.

  5

  I walked along the walls of the house. I figured that if I hugged the walls, I wouldn’t be easily seen from the second floor. I kept my shoulders and palms against the bricks as I moved. The walls were cold and dry. My white breath brushed the rows of rectangular bricks and faded into the air.

  The house wasn’t shaped like a simple four-sided box. Sections where rooms jutted out made sharp corners of the exterior walls. At each turn I held my breath, frightened that Shiozaki would suddenly appear before me.

  I carefully peeked into the windows one by one. Nearly all of them had their curtains closed. Shiozaki isn’t here after all. There was a feeling of emptiness only found in a vacant home.

  Here and there along the sides of the house were a few brickwork planters. Not much grew within them—just some dead brown grass. Sometimes thin dry branches poked out of the dirt, signs that shrubs had once grown there. Now, their leaves had gone and only withered stems remained.

  The southwest corner of the house most closely matched the memory I’d seen in my left eye. The last time I’d come, I’d been convinced that Kazuya had been here.

  Again I stood in that spot. But sure enough, the cellar window Kazuya had seen was gone. At the intersection of the wall and the earth wasn’t a window but a planter.

  I dug into the dirt inside the planter, but the earth was frozen, hard to dig into with my bare hands.
The bricks of the planter were set with mortar and wouldn’t come apart.

  This must have been built hastily sometime in the past two months. There might be a weakness in it somewhere. If there was I never found it.

  I stopped thinking about it. I wanted to avoid staying in the same place for long.

  Continuing around to the back, I saw the shed I had noticed before. It might have been built along with the house. The wooden boards from which it was made were old and starting to rot. Apparently they had once been white, but the paint had peeled off, revealing stains from the rainwater.

  Some boards were starting to come off in places, allowing the darkness inside to peek out. I gripped the shed’s door handle and tried to open it, but the door wouldn’t budge. I put my strength into it and it gave. Nothing was inside. Empty.

  That was when I noticed the window.

  The window was in the wall shared by the shed, a little bit above me. It didn’t seem to have closed curtains. I don’t mean to say there weren’t curtains—there were, but they were cinched open on either side, allowing an unobstructed view of the home’s interior.

  I looked around to make sure I was alone.

  The window was high up. Because the house was built on a slope, even windows on the same floor ended up being at differing heights outside.

  I peered through the shed window to get a look inside the house. I slipped my toes between the boards on the side of the shed, gripped the windowsill, and lifted myself up.

  My nose came up to the windowpane.

  I looked inside.

  6

  —An Author Of Fairy Tale

  Miki came out through the front door and walked along the walls of the house. The figure he’d caught a glimpse of from the second floor seemed to have been moving around the west side of the house; he was right behind.

  Miki thought about the visitor. This wasn’t the first time someone had sniffed out his secret.

  He’d never really taken any care to hide his crimes.

  Not even his first murder, when he’d suddenly shoved the woman who’d asked him for directions off a cliff. Looking back at it he still didn’t know why he’d done it. He never thought about the consequences of getting caught. He felt like he wouldn’t even mind being captured.

  But if Miki could get away with it, he intended to. If he could silence the visitor who had come to his house, he would.

  Hammer firmly in hand, he crept forward. Finally, after passing a number of places where the walls jutted out, he stopped.

  From around the next corner had come a glimpse of clothing. His latest visitor was there.

  The visitor seemed unaware that the master of the house was watching. Still hidden, Miki hushed his breath.

  It’s what always happens. How many have come to this house now?

  It had been the same at the last place he’d lived. He recalled what had happened then. A housewife had been the visitor that time. She’d seen me walking outside and had looked at me suspiciously. Maybe I’d seemed strange for avoiding all contact with my neighbors. I buried two people in the mountains when I lived there. Had she suspected me? I could have killed her, but I chose another option since her family might have made a fuss over her sudden disappearance. In the end I thought it would be simpler to just move someplace else before she could find conclusive proof.

  And so Miki had come to Kaede.

  He pressed his face and shoulders against the brick wall and looked again at the visitor.

  White clouds of breath hung in the air as the visitor peered through a window.

  Miki searched his memory for what might be on the other side of that window. He remembered what he had left there at once.

  And he knew it was time for him to act.

  Hitomi had said she wanted to see the sun.

  If she hadn’t made that request, Miki might not have needed to silence the visitor. All he’d had left to do was seal off the cellar and leave.

  But Hitomi was on the other side of the window. He had laid her down there with his own arms.

  The visitor seemed to have seen her.

  Although it was small and restrained, the visitor let out a cry of surprise.

  7

  There wasn’t much of anything on the other side of the window, just a bookshelf lined with the spines of oversized books—art books, perhaps. Several paintings leaned, unhung, against the side of the bookcase. Shiozaki must have been using the room for storage.

  Not sure whether I should feel relieved or bewildered, I lowered myself from the shed. Is Shiozaki really not here after all?

  Suddenly, a shadow fell in my path. I was about to scream when I realized it was Sumida. I felt my strength drain from my body.

  “Was there anything?” he asked.

  I shook my head.

  We decided to go inside.

  We tried the front but it was locked and wouldn’t open. But Sumida had found a back door on the northern side of the house. When I turned the handle it opened quietly, unlocked.

  The inside was dark. Not only was it cloudy outside, but we were on the northern side of the house. I couldn’t rely on my eyes to see anything and I debated whether or not to turn on the lights, thinking it might be dangerous if Shiozaki was around. But Sumida, unconcerned with such thoughts, quickly flipped the switch.

  “It’s fine, there’s nobody here.”

  “We need to be more careful,” I said, but inside I was feeling the confidence of having the two of us together again.

  The back door had led into the kitchen.

  The small, dim light revealed an old refrigerator and cabinets. Within the quiet, I could hear the low hum of the fridge.

  The sink was free of dirty dishes and refuse, and there were no signs that anyone had cooked there recently. But rather than having been well cleaned, the kitchen might just have been in disuse.

  We checked from room to room, but found nobody anywhere.

  In one room that might have been in use as a studio, a halffinished work had been left—a painting of the house’s yard. On a table smeared with paint sat a cup holding paintbrushes.

  The clothes Shiozaki had said had belonged to his wife were still there, and more women’s clothing had been neatly folded and packed into a semi-transparent storage box.

  None looked the right size for Hitomi to wear; more than that, they all looked like clothes an adult would choose.

  After we had looked inside an empty bathroom, Sumida said, “Nobody’s here.”

  If he was still nervous it didn’t show. He even seemed doubtful that Hitomi was being held here, that Shiozaki was her kidnapper. He didn’t come out and say so, but I could tell from his tone.

  We walked the dim hallways in search of a door we hadn’t yet opened. There had to be an entrance to the cellar, but we found no doors that looked like one.

  In the hallway Sumida said, “Nami, let’s go. Something must be wrong with your theory.”

  I was downcast. I didn’t see how that could be. But I was unsure of what to do and had no reply.

  “There’s still the second floor,” I said.

  “I won’t go.”

  He put his hands on his hips and stood fast.

  I went up the stairs alone. At the top, a hallway wrapped around the stairwell, with several doors along the walkway.

  One led to a room that looked like Shiozaki’s bedroom. Another had an old wooden desk.

  In the room with the desk I started feeling more and more unsure. No matter where I looked—nothing.

  Just moments before, when Sumida had started doubting me, I’d felt angry. But now I could see that his questioning me wasn’t so strange.

  As I searched each room, my fear of the house began to fade. From the outside it had seemed like a demon’s lair, something grotesque within. But the more I saw things like Shiozaki’s painting of a dog running through a meadow, the television in the living room, the labeled video cassettes, the more my dread faded away.

  Why isn�
��t there an entrance to the cellar? Why haven’t I found anything I could use as evidence? Bewildered, I walked through the rooms.

  My eyes landed on a window. If the curtains had been shut, I might never have seen it.

  From here I could see the forest. And on the side of a mountain a little ways out stood another building that looked like the house we were in.

  That house also appeared to be built from brick. But its walls were a different color. Shiozaki’s house was made from blue bricks; the one out the window was red.

  That could be Kyoko’s house. Hadn’t Kimura said that Kyoko also lived in a brick house?

  The location seemed right. But since I’d never been near her house this was the first time I’d seen it.

  A theory formed inside me, one I hadn’t thought of before.

  What if Kazuya had been wearing blue sunglasses the day he tried to save Hitomi?

  Even if it were a different color, the image of the house could have burned into his left eye as blue.

  No, that shouldn’t be true. In what I saw there had been no hint he’d been wearing sunglasses. I rejected the idea.

  But somewhere a part of me wasn’t certain enough to laugh it off entirely. Rather, my anxieties were growing.

  That’s right. In Kazuya’s memory, the cellar had a window. But Shiozaki’s house doesn’t have one—only those planters.

  I had been assuming that the planters had been hastily built in the past two months. But in that short a time, could the dead grass have grown in the dirt within? It’s winter. Could the grass have grown from nothing and then died? Besides, wouldn’t it be more logical to assume the planters had been here from before?

  I stood frozen in the room on the second floor. If the window Kazuya had seen was in the cellar in Kyoko’s house, I’d made a terrible error.

  I left the room. I didn’t have the patience to go down the stairs. Leaning over the railing above the stairwell, I looked down at the first-floor hall.