“Things didn’t turn out well, I’m afraid. She died three days ago without regaining consciousness.”
“I see. That’s really too bad.”
“Thanks for asking, anyway.” That was all he had to say.
Out in the corridor, Kotaro thought his legs were about to give way. He was close to tears again, but for a different reason.
He couldn’t rely on the detective anymore. He really was alone now.
Kotaro was at a dead end. All he could do was wait.
But for what? For Galla to return? For someone completely new, someone he’d never met, to appear suddenly with new information?
He attended classes. He worked his shifts at Kumar, monitoring for drug-related activity. He gave Kaname a muffler in thanks for covering for him. He’d never seen her happier.
He returned to everyday life. He stopped posting about Galla, circles, and regions. He’d run out of things to say anyway.
February came, and the first day of spring according to the old lunar calendar. Kenji was gone. There was no news from the police about their investigation.
Galla was missing in action. On waking, Kotaro always checked his window for a huge handprint. But there was nothing.
It had all been a dream. A hallucination. Maybe Shigenori was right. Maybe leaving it at that was the best thing.
The key to the tea caddy building that Kotaro had received—confiscated—from Shigenori stayed tucked in a pocket of his backpack. Shigenori hadn’t even asked about it.
The TV news programs kept up their coverage of the serial amputator, milking it for everything it was worth, but the story was getting stale. If some new scandal broke or a disaster loomed, the media would lose interest in a heartbeat.
It had just been a bad dream. A hallucination.
Sure, that’s it. Just go with the flow. You can’t beat it anyway. Give up. That’s a lot easier.
But a small, intractable voice always pushed back whenever he tried to see things that way. He could never quite stamp out that resistance.
His Saturday class was canceled for the long National Foundation Day weekend. His shift at Kumar started at six.
Suddenly, Kotaro remembered Mana. He wanted to see her one more time. Why not today? They’d thought she was mute, but the last time he’d seen her, she’d spoken to him and no one else.
Is a monster.
The sky.
What was she doing now? If he could see her one last time, if he could see she was getting along well, he’d be ready to consign his experience on that rooftop to the crazy bin, just as Shigenori had. If Mana had broken out of her silence, that would be enough. If he could see her laughing happily, the weight on his mind would finally be lifted.
He decided to dispense with formalities and go straight to the Nagasaki mansion without calling. He gave his name through the intercom at the front door, and in moments Hatsuko appeared.
“You’re that student who visited before. Come in, then. Come in, come in.” She kept talking as he went inside.
“I’m so glad you came. It would’ve seemed odd for us to ask you here. My brother and I were wondering what we should do.”
“Did something happen?”
“No. That’s what we’re worried about. She still won’t speak to anyone. We consulted a child psychologist. He told us cases like this don’t usually improve quickly. He said we shouldn’t push her.
“Then we told him about you, that Mana did speak once, just to you. He said we should try to get your help if possible. But you’re not a specialist in anything, are you? Just a college student. You’re not a friend of the family. We couldn’t make up our minds. We asked Mr. Ohba for his opinion, but he said it wouldn’t be good for us to depend on someone without special qualifications. Or good for you, for that matter.” This was commonsense advice, but it just made the Nagasakis’ dilemma worse.
“Mana is alone right now. She’s drawing pictures again.”
Just as they had that first time, Hatsuko and Kotaro padded down the long corridor in house slippers.
“My brother and Ms. Sato are meeting her father today. They’re trying to work out when he can take over custody. The man simply refuses to make up his mind. My brother hasn’t been able to make any headway with him, so we decided to see if Ms. Sato might be more persuasive.”
The nursery door was open. As before, the room was filled with sunlight. Hatsuko called to Mana in a friendly voice.
“Mana-chan, you have a visitor. It’s that young man who came before. You remember him, don’t you?”
Mana sat at the little round table with a sketchbook in front of her. Crayons were scattered over the table. Everything was the same as when Kotaro first met her, other than the clothes she was wearing. The hand holding the crayon stopped as soon as Kotaro stepped into the room. She turned to look at him.
Hatsuko whispered in his ear. “She hasn’t drawn a picture of that strange creature since the day she met you.”
“Hello, Mana-chan.” Kotaro sat down on the floor across from her and looked closer at the sketchbook. She was drawing a colorful picture, a procession of baby chicks. There was a book open on the table with the same picture. She was using it as her model.
“Those chicks are very pretty.”
Mana peered steadily at him and nodded once. “Um-hm.”
Hatsuko gave an exclamation of surprise.
The girl’s pupils were clear pools of black. Those eyes had seen Galla. A woman warrior descending onto the roof of the tea caddy building at the height of a storm.
“Did you stop drawing that monster?”
She nodded once, again. “Umm.”
“That makes sense. You drew it so many times, you must be tired of it now.” At this, her gaze wavered slightly. Kotaro looked up at Hatsuko. “Do you think I could be alone with her for a few minutes?”
She seemed ready to leap into the air with astonishment. “But of course, of course. It’s three, time for her snack. I’ll fix it. We’re having pudding today, Mana. You love pudding, don’t you?” She motioned to Kotaro to keep talking and padded out of the room.
He slid over next to Mana. She cocked her head toward him trustingly.
“Mana?” Kotaro lowered his head and whispered against her smooth cheek. “I saw the monster too. I met her.”
She blinked once, hard. Her tiny nostrils flared slightly. Her lips began to move. She whispered back to him. “Were you scared?”
They shared the same secret now. They could communicate.
“At first.” Kotaro nodded. Mana nodded back. “She came down from the sky again. She had big black wings.”
Mana kept on nodding. When he touched her cheek lightly, she stopped.
“But you know what I found out? The monster can talk. I talked to her, just like we’re talking now.” He pointed to Mana, then to himself. “And you know what? She apologized.”
Mana was five. Kotaro decided he’d better rephrase that. “She said she was sorry for making you feel scared.”
Mana looked down at the table. The skin of her eyelids was so thin he could almost see through them to the eyes beneath. Her eyelids and fine, tiny lashes were trembling. She leaned closer to him and whispered in his ear.
“Did the monster take Mama?”
When Mana saw the monster, her mother had been hurrying toward death. Death had been in the room with them. For Mana, the terror and foreboding she had felt were wrapped up in her mind with that extraordinary being descending from the sky. That being must have taken her mother away from her.
Mother and child had been cut off from society. There’d been no one to help them. They’d been living in that apartment with only each other to rely on. Mana had never attended nursery school or kindergarten.
But her mother did a splendid job of raising her, showering her with love and t
eaching her everything she could. Mana’s heart would grow tall and strong.
Then how should Kotaro answer her question? He looked into her eyes and wondered.
“It wasn’t the monster’s fault that your mother went away.”
Her mother had died of pneumonia. She was not like Morinaga or the homeless people who disappeared. Kotaro didn’t know what Galla had done to them, but she’d had nothing to do with Mana’s mother. That was the all he could say with certainty.
“The monster didn’t take your mother.”
She blinked and looked up at him. He nodded back at her. “She won’t do anything to frighten you ever again. She won’t come and take you away. You don’t have to be afraid anymore.”
This didn’t seem to reassure her. Instead, her tiny face relaxed into sadness.
“Where’s Mama?” She pointed a tiny index finger toward the ceiling. “Is she in the sky?”
“Why do you think that?”
“Auntie and Uncle said so. Uncle Ohba too.”
“They’re right, Mana. Your mother is in the sky. But she’s not where the monster is. The sky is a very big place, you know.”
Kotaro was suddenly seized by doubt. Could he really be sure that the place Galla was from—“the birthplace of the souls of words”—was not the afterlife as human beings conceived of it? After all, no one knew anything about the world of the dead. No one could say he knew anything about an afterlife.
Of course, some said they did. They said they had traveled there and seen it. But the words they used to make their claims were the only foundation those claims had. Wasn’t that what Galla meant by the birthplace of the souls of words? That the world of the dead brought the words of living human beings into existence?
No, he had it backward. The world of the dead existed because of the words of the living. It was not the source of those words.
But if Galla could imprison people in the blade of her scythe, it meant she could manipulate not only their bodies but their souls. And a place where the soul existed separately from the body—wouldn’t that be the world of the dead?
“Is Mama coming back?”
Kotaro opened his eyes wide. It was the only way he could keep from averting them.
“I don’t know.” It was a gutless answer, with no value other than being honest. “But if I find out, I’ll tell you. I promise.”
He presented an upraised little finger. Mana instantly did the same. Her tiny, slender, warm finger hooked around his.
Kotaro sensed someone at the door. He turned to see Hatsuko peeking in. She was holding a tray with cups and bowls.
“May I come in?”
Kotaro smiled at Mana. “See? It’s snack time.”
Mana looked from Kotaro to Hatsuko. She blinked once and said, “Pudding.”
Hatsuko burst into tears.
Later, Kotaro realized that for the first time in his life, he had sealed a promise with a pinky swear. He had never done it before, even as a child. Maybe boys just didn’t do it. Or maybe his parents had never cared for hocus-pocus customs like that.
If I find out, I’ll tell you.
He’d made an unbreakable promise.
I’ve got to find Galla. I have to know where she came from, what kind of world her “region” is. Is it in another dimension? A parallel world? The world of the dead?
And what is the Circle?
3
The lecture was over. Kotaro had joined the crowd walking up the aisle in the lecture hall when he made eye contact with a girl sitting in the top row.
For a split second he thought it might be Kaname. She had the same pale complexion and long ponytail. But Kaname had bangs cut evenly across her forehead, almost hiding her eyebrows. She was self-conscious about her slightly protruding forehead.
The girl in the back row didn’t try to hide her forehead. Kaname would never have done that. Kotaro blinked once and looked away.
The class just ended was part of the required course load and had a huge lecture section. With everyone trying to leave at once, the hall was like a crowded theater after a movie. The audience moving up the aisles slowed to a crawl.
Kotaro glanced around casually. Once again his eyes met those of the girl in the back row.
This time he made a calculated effort to look away casually, then surreptitiously glanced back at her out of the corner of his eye. She hadn’t moved. He could see her staring straight at him.
He looked down at his beat-up sneakers, then at the sneakers of the student just ahead of him, who wore them with the backs crushed under his heels. Kotaro wore Nikes, the other guy wore Adidas. Kotaro’s mother washed his sneakers in special sneaker soap. She insisted on it, because she didn’t want the smell lingering in the entryway. The guy ahead didn’t seem to have ever washed his sneakers.
By the time Kotaro was finished with his sneaker analysis, he’d reached the last row of seats. He looked up. The girl was nowhere to be seen.
No big deal. He’d been thinking too much.
He emerged from the building onto the quadrangle. The sun was warm. The quad was bordered on one side by a compact grove of plum trees. He’d heard the trees were pretty when they bloomed. Winter had been exceptionally cold, and the blossoms were not quite ready to open.
He had half an hour to kill before the next lecture. It was a class in the history of science, an elective that counted toward the general education requirement. Kotaro had hoped it would be interesting, but the lectures were straight out of the textbook; he could’ve found something more intriguing in any bookstore. The class was pure boredom, but he didn’t have to make a special effort to attend. Oh well, may as well blow it off and get to Kumar early. First he would pick up a sandwich or something at the cafeteria—
“Are you the guy who wants to know about circles?”
Kotaro spun around. He was almost into the plum grove on a path that led to the cafeteria and the library.
The girl from the lecture was a yard away from him. He pretended he’d never seen her before. “Are you talking to me?”
“Why do you want to know about circles?”
She peered at him fixedly and came a step closer. Kotaro reflexively took a step back. He felt suddenly flustered.
Up close she was even prettier than he’d thought. Kaname was pretty too, of course, but this girl’s “pretty” was more like “hot,” his ideal type but refined to a higher degree, with the addition of a certain something, some sort of essence Kotaro couldn’t quite put his finger on. With apologies to Kaname, but it was true.
“Why are you asking me?” he pointed to himself.
The girl laughed lightly, dissolving his wariness and suspicion instantly. It was like a spring breeze.
“Why else? You’re the one who keeps telling everyone you’re desperate to learn about circles. That was you, wasn’t it?”
Kotaro went from flustered to heart-pounding mode.
“I did a web search,” the girl said. With a trace of a smile, she came and stood next to him. She was a head shorter, with narrow shoulders and a graceful figure.
“You’re not a student here,” Kotaro said. She was clearly still in high school, probably on the cusp of her first and second years.
“Yep,” the girl said crisply. “Universities have such big campuses!”
She was wearing jeans and a parka under an oversize fake leather jacket, topped by a crossover body bag. Her thick-soled boots were leather and must have been fake as well. The classic style was long out of date and the material had a fetching patina of age. They can’t be real, Kotaro guessed. Otherwise they’d be unbelievably expensive.
“What are you doing here? It’s not orientation season.”
“I’m here to meet you.”
“You? You personally?”
The girl looked away for a moment, as though t
rying to hide how hilarious this was. “Yes, me personally. I thought bringing my associates along might be a little much.”
Before Kotaro could ask what this meant, she added, “Not playmates. And not, you know, bad people. Not friends either. Collaborators might be the best way to put it.”
That didn’t explain anything.
As he was struggling to figure out what she meant, Kotaro noticed the girl’s pendant. It was a strange, curved object on a heavy silver chain. The end was sharp.
A fang. It had to be. An animal fang.
Knew it. She’s some kind of delinquent. She’s in a gang or something.
The girl must’ve followed his gaze, because she touched the pendant lightly with a fingertip. “This is my amulet.”
“Not many girls have something like that.”
“I’m not like many girls,” she said casually. Kotaro’s heart-pounding mode shifted to something more like anxious arrhythmic mode.
“Listen, um, I’ve got to—”
He was about to beat a hasty retreat when she touched his arm lightly—or at least that’s how it seemed at first, until he felt her grip. She was strong!
“I came here because I had to see for myself what kind of person you are. I’m glad I came. I can see you’ve had contact with a being from another region.”
Kotaro was paralyzed. The girl suddenly leaned in close and stared into his eyes, almost the way Kotaro had peered at Mana, but without the gentleness. Instead, her eyes communicated intense curiosity and wary urgency.
“I know what the Circle is, and what regions are. That’s how I know they’re not something to mess around with casually. But you want to know, too. That means you might be a threat. Or something terrible might end up threatening you.”
The words came in a rush, clear and dancing, in the same cute, high school-girl tone.
“Maybe I can help you, or maybe I’ll have to eliminate you. I’m asking so I can decide which one it is. Why are you looking for information about the Circle? What kind of creature from another region did you contact?”
To his utter embarrassment, Kotaro was trembling. “Before that …”
The Gate of Sorrows Page 25