Johnny averted his eyes from the spectacle and turned back toward the house. What had started as a simple inquiry into why a pair of high schoolers had killed each other had devolved into an outright investigation—one he was not equipped to handle. With no particular background in criminology or criminal psychology, he had no well of knowledge to draw upon save the feeling in his gut.
“Don’t misunderstand,” Johnny said, keeping his eyes on the front door. “My contract here in Sonnerie is very specific. I’m here only to find out the reason behind the killings. Nothing further. What you decide to do or not do with what I find is entirely up to you. Well, not actually you. This is quite a bit above your pay grade. I’m sure you understand, don’t you, Chief?”
The slight hit its mark. Chief Oda straightened his shirt with a grimace and proceeded up the front porch. “Let’s just get this over with,” he said.
Johnny followed behind him, watching as he turned the knob and pushed the door open.
“Wait,” Johnny said. “The door was locked when I came here before.” His hand instinctively reached for the revolver at his side, but he stopped himself before drawing it out. No weapons in Sonnerie. That was the lie he had to preserve.
“Hmph!” Chief Oda shrugged him off and pushed through the entryway. “This is Sonnerie, Mr. Tokisaki. There are no ghouls or bandits hanging around every corner waiting to pounce upon us! Now are you just going to stand there, or are you going to show me this body you found?”
Johnny said nothing. Something was off. Someone had been here. The last light from an orange sunset filtered through the windows, giving its timid rays to the hall in front of him. He slipped ahead of the chief and took a deep breath, then slowly pushed open the door to the living room.
There had been three things that had caught his eye when he first entered this room not more than an hour before. The man in the violet suit standing in the kitchen, his dark eyes staring up at the hanging corpse in the living room. Mr. Mishima, whose pale, lifeless body swayed ever so slightly from left to right. And finally, the girl who he could only assume was Mari Mishima. A deluge of tears flowing down her cheeks. She’d screamed in a voice only Johnny seemed to hear.
But now, none of those things were present. The room was empty and sterile. Not even a hint of the despair that had swelled to a sudden fulmination remained.
“Well?” Chief Oda said, barging past him. “Where is he? Or is this your idea of a joke, Mr. Tokisaki?”
Johnny couldn’t respond. His mind raced for answers, but none were there waiting to be found. Beads of perspiration began to form at the edge of his hairline, ready to ambush the forehead beneath them.
“He was right here,” he finally said. “Right in front of the sofa. Another man was standing in the kitchen. I gave chase through the back door.”
Chief Oda stamped his feet over toward the kitchen, then to the back door. “It’s locked,” he called. “There’s nothing here.”
Johnny closed his eyes and tried to focus. There was a firm reality that he kept himself planted in at all times. Anything not conforming to that reality had to be expunged from the equation. He pictured the room as he had seen it before. “Mari is dead,” he said to himself, taking her out of the picture. “Whatever I saw wasn’t her, and doesn’t matter right now.”
He moved his inner gaze to the body of Mr. Mishima. Someone had come back to retrieve it, but who? He took the body out of the picture and moved over to the final piece; the man in the violet suit, standing alone in the kitchen. What was he doing there? What was he looking for? Johnny walked into the kitchen and stood where the man had stood, and began to search.
He opened every drawer. Rifled through every item. Amid a flurry of protests from the chief, he threw open the lid of the trash bin and dug through every chicken bone and rotten banana peel, then removed every item from the fridge and pantry until the floor was amess with perishables both fresh and rancid. After several minutes of this, he slammed his fists down on the kitchen sink in defeat.
“I’ll be having you clean up this mess before Mr. Mishima comes home, Mr. Tokisaki,” Oda huffed. “I should have known. I should have known. You’ve wasted my time and the time of the city. If it were up to me, I’d drag you to the back seat of my car and drop you off at the city limits!”
Johnny turned on the sink and let a rush of warm water clean the muck off his hands, then scanned the counter again for any clues he had missed. It was a horribly dull arrangement. To his left was a plastic rack to set drying dishes, and a well-worn egg timer in the shape of a white chicken. A couple of small glass jars with lids covered in dust sat on a flimsy spice rack, but nothing else. To his right was a bottle of dish soap, still half full, and beyond that was a wooden knife block filled with cutlery, and a small toaster plugged into the wall.
He turned off the sink and dried his hands on a towel hanging from the oven, then went back over each item until he came once again in front of the wooden knife block. He took out each knife one by one, inspecting them carefully before placing them back, then turned to the chief.
“You said that there were two knives, that the girls each had a knife and killed each other, didn’t you?”
“Mr. Tokisaki, please don’t waste any more of my time, I—”
“Tell me.” Johnny stared down at him. “You said there were two knives, right? You said the girls had made a pact.”
“I did.” The chief took a step back.
“Where’d they get the knives?” Johnny took a step forward.
“Well, obviously they brought them from home . . .” Oda took another step back.
Johnny grabbed the chief by the collar and pulled him over to the counter. “Obviously they brought them from home?” he scoffed. “Tell me, do you see any missing knives here?”
“Well, no, but . . .” The chief fumbled his words.
“But?”
“Well, maybe she bought one at the store on the way to school.”
Johnny threw up his arms and walked back toward the living room to where Mr. Mishima had been hanging just a short hour ago. The tender flesh on his right temple where he had been struck began to throb again. He wanted nothing more than to be at the bar in the hotel, sitting alone in the thick smoke of his own cigarettes, the bitter taste of a scotch highball on his lips.
The chief tugged on his ill-fitting uniform once again before straightening himself up. “I think it’s time for us to leave, Mr. Tokisaki.”
Johnny nodded. “There’s one item I left upstairs,” he said. “Let me go get it. I’ll just be a moment.”
Oda clucked his tongue and exited the room. “Hurry it up, will you?” he said as he passed through the living room into the hall.
Johnny jogged up the stairs that he had crept down earlier, then crossed into Mari’s room and looked around. It was much the same as he had left it—with one exception. In place of the diary that he had dropped to the floor was a small, wooden object, no more than an inch long and half an inch thick. If it had been in any other spot, he might have missed it, but it had clearly been placed with the intent to be found. Johnny bent down to pick it up.
Despite its size, it had quite the heft to it. The bottom of the piece was squared off and the top was pointed. Carved into the piece in brilliant red were two Japanese characters forming the word ryūma—dragon horse. A powerful piece that belonged to a greater collection that made up the game of shogi.
Before he could continue his inspection, the chief’s raspy voice echoed angrily from downstairs, interrupting his train of thought. He shook his head, shoving the small shogi piece into his pocket, then turned to exit the room. Whoever had been here had known Johnny would return. They had made the first move now, and the game was afoot.
Eleventh Movement
Komoriuta
Johnny unplugged the phone from the wall as soon as he returned to the hotel
. His first day in Sonnerie had come to a frustrating close, and the last thing he needed was further chiding from his overbearing benefactor. He undid his shoulder holster with his revolver still in it and hung it inside the closet, then threw the rest of his pockets contents onto the desk and returned to the first floor.
Unlike the vibrant and open cafe, the bar on the first floor was dimly lit and unfriendly. The two European gentlemen he had seen in the morning were present at a small table toward the back, but aside from them there were no other guests. Johnny took a seat at the bar and ordered a scotch highball.
“Long day?” a lanky bartender with a long face asked as he placed Johnny’s drink carefully in front of him. Johnny inhaled the beverage in one swift gulp and pushed the glass back across the counter.
“Another.”
He watched the bartender’s eyes shift about uncomfortably for a moment before he nodded and proceeded to mix another drink.
He repeated this sequence until he was sufficiently inebriated, then lit a fresh cigarette and took a deep inhale. The spot on his head where he had been struck still moaned, and after the fifth highball he slowed his pace and rested a frosty glass against his temple. The bartender made no further attempts at conversation, and returned to cleaning mugs and straightening out liquor bottles.
At some point, the two European gentlemen left, leaving Johnny alone with the long-faced barman.
“Another highball, sir?” he asked.
“Just the scotch. Put it on the rocks.” Johnny looked at him. “Are you a churchgoing man?” he asked.
The bartender finished pouring the drink and set it in front of him. “All of us in Sonnerie are,” he responded. “We give thanks to that which winds and unwinds.”
Johnny blinked twice and waited for him to continue, but when he offered nothing more, Johnny turned back to his glass and continued drinking.
“Mr. Tokisaki?” a voice from behind him called.
“Yeah?” Johnny said without turning around.
“Telephone for you, sir. Urgent.” He recognized the voice as the man he had seen earlier standing at the reception desk.
“I’m not taking calls right now. Ask her to leave a message and I’ll call her back in the morning.”
Johnny watched the eyes of the bartender move to meet the eyes of the man standing behind him.
“But sir,” he stuttered in protest. “The lady insists . . .”
“And I insist”—Johnny spun around, scotch in hand—“that you return to the phone and inform her that Mr. Tokisaki is otherwise preoccupied at the moment, and will return her call in the morning.”
He watched the visible discomfort of the receptionist build in the wrinkles on his forehead until it released in the form of a profound sigh.
“Very good, sir,” he surrendered, leaving the bar.
Johnny turned around and threw back the rest of his scotch, but the taste had bittered, and he ordered nothing further. He was fully drunk now, and despite meager protests from the bartender as he stumbled out the door, he managed his way back to the elevator and to his room on the fourth floor.
He kicked off his shoes and walked straight past his unhooked phone before collapsing in the chair at his desk. The world outside was dark, and the smell of the ocean just beyond Sonnerie wafted in through his open window. It was freezing, but his blood coursed hot with scotch, rendering him impervious to the cold.
After a few minutes of the world spinning around him, he retrieved his revolver and emptied the bullets from its chamber, then lined them in a row on his desk.
“My little witnesses,” he whispered as he stood each bullet up. “What do you make of this?”
He ripped out a page from his notebook before haphazardly folding it into six unequal pieces, then separated them from each other. On each one, he wrote a name.
Gabriel Itsuka
Mei Goto
Zachary Finch
Isshin Hanekawa
Grand Luminary Ninomiya
Mrs. Saito
He set a bullet upon each scrawled name, and pushed them away until they were at the far edge of his desk, nearly at the windowsill. It was early—still well before midnight—but the events of the day and his self-induced stupor sapped his energy, and he left the desk for the linen comfort of his bed.
Inebriated dreams are their own kind of hell. Uncontrollable memories bubbled their way to the surface, grabbing him by the back of his neck and forcing him to relive each torturous detail. It was the same dream. It was always the same dream. The hospital. The flowers in his hand. The doctor scribbling nonsense on a clipboard in the elevator with him. It stopped on the seventh floor and spilled out into a toothpaste green hall littered with white-robed nurses. He heard the sound of a baby crying from a room at the end of the hallway. The sweet sound of new life. But no matter how long he walked, he never reached the room. The path forward stretched into eternity. His heart was a jackhammer in his chest. At the climax of his panic, he would awaken and retch the contents of his stomach into the nearest receptacle.
When he awoke this time, it was different. Something weighed on his chest from above, and a sound not unlike a ticking clock rang in his ears. He was conscious, but his limbs wouldn’t heed him. His mouth was wrenched shut, and he could barely breathe. There was a presence with him, and it whispered a song he had not heard in many years.
Mori mo iyagaru, Bon kara saki nya
Yuki mo chiratsuku shi, ko mo naku shi
Bon ga kita tote, nani ureshi karo
Katabira wa nashi, Obi wa nashi
The voice of a young girl filled his mind, echoing the chords of a familiar tune. He could have sung the next verse with her, but she stopped midway and looked down at his disabled form.
“They say that sleep paralysis is caused by a demon sitting on your chest,” the girl said. He tried to regain control of his body, but only his eyes moved. The room was still dark, and spun with the intimate gravity of a scotch highball.
“They taught us that in school. My teacher said that even the Medieval Egyptians believed that it was caused by a jinn attacking its victim.”
He could only see the vaguest outlines of her figure. Long hair. Thin. Young. Johnny tried his best to calm his racing heart.
“You listened to my tapes. I saw you. The Jack Flanders adventures. I listened to them every night.” She leaned forward for a moment, then back again.
“Why did they take Daddy away?” she asked, shifting her weight off of him and coming to the edge of the bed. His breathing eased instantly, but control of his extremities was slow to return. It started with his lips, then the tips of his fingers, but no more than that for a long while.
The girl stood and approached the desk where Johnny had laid out his bullets on their primary suspects. Thin rays of moonlight illuminated the side of her face, and Johnny watched as she bent down and read the names.
“I told Ms. Goto I wanted to be a teacher like her someday. But she’s not going to be a teacher anymore, is she? They took her mind and locked it away.”
Feeling started to return to Johnny’s face. His mouth finally opened and closed, and his neck turned freely.
“You can see me, Mr. Tokisaki, I know. I’m scared.”
Johnny closed and opened his eyes a few times, slowly confirming to himself that he was lucid. “Mari,” he managed to whisper.
“I can’t stay,” she said. “If they find out, they’ll get mad.”
“Why—” Johnny tried to ask the question that was on his mind, but she cut him off before he could.
“I need you to do something for me first,” she said, turning toward him. “I want to see my body again. I want to know that I’m really there. Before they burn me all up, or take me downstairs.”
“Downstairs?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I wasn’t supposed to kno
w about it. About Inverness.”
From somewhere below, a door slammed, causing Mari to jump back in fright.
“She’s coming again. I’m sorry, Mr. Tokisaki, I have to go. I don’t know when I’ll be able to appear again.”
Johnny closed his eyes, but when he reopened them, she was no longer there. The apparition had faded, and once again, the room began to spin.
*
His sleep paralysis had waned by the time he woke properly the next morning. The clock on the wall read 5:45 a.m., and the sky outside had turned from pitch black to iron gray. The memory of Mari’s apparition was fresh in his mind, and he stumbled to the waiting notebook on his desk to write down everything that had happened. Before he got there, however, something in his gut told him to look around. Someone or something had been in his room, and they may have left some sign of their brief occupancy.
Though it was difficult to discern details in his post-inebriated state, he did his best to check for any signs of Mari’s physical presence. He checked the door first—still locked—then the bed and bedside table. His revolver was still in its holster hanging in the closet, as was the pack of cigarettes he kept in the pocket of his coat. When nothing made itself clear, he went back to the desk and sat down. His notebook was there and intact. No missing pages, no additional notes.
The moment he felt some semblance of relief that he had experienced no more than a waking nightmare, he looked across the desk at his witnesses, the six bullets that stood over six names.
Only now, there stood only five. A single bullet had fallen and rolled away. A bullet that had stood over the name Zachary Finch.
Twelfth Movement
Inquiries
“Mr. Tokisaki.” Mrs. Saito’s voice was like an insect burrowing in Johnny’s ear. She had called no more than thirty seconds after he had plugged the room phone back into the wall, as if she’d known the moment he had done it.
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