Inwardly, Mikado chided himself for taking it too far. After their long conversation, he’d gotten so engaged that he ended up telling her something he would normally have kept to himself. He watched her reaction, half-afraid she would explode with anger—but she seemed neither angry nor upset.
“Yes, I suppose so… Thank you,” she smiled sadly.
Mikado thought to himself, How pretty must Mika Harima be if she’s using this girl to make herself look better?
It was probably more of a foil for personality than for looks, but Mikado couldn’t help but wonder.
“Um, thank you very much.”
Anri bowed to Mikado again as they said good-bye. Mikado wanted to pay for their order at the café, but she insisted, and they split the bill. The shadows were stretching long across 60-Kai Street, and the deepening sky silently stared down at the two.
“No, it’s okay. This was the first time we ever talked, but now that we’re the representatives of our class, I guess we’ll be seeing a lot more of each other.”
Anri smiled kindly and nodded.
“Actually, Ryuugamine, I’ve known about you for a while.”
“Huh?”
“When I came to deliver my enrollment form to the office, they checked it against a list of names. I spotted a cool-looking name on the list, and no sooner had I noticed it than someone came and checked it off…”
Something weird was happening. Mikado gave her a bland affirmative, trying to dispel the feeling of dread welling up in his chest.
“And now…the owner of that very name has helped me out of a bind.”
Just a second.
It was starting to sound exactly like the situation between Mika and Seiji. Anri was smiling at him, her face a mask over her true intentions.
Uh, crap. I don’t think I’m ready for a stalker… But would it be so bad if it was a really cute girl like her? Yes, it would. What if she ends up stabbing me?! Or she might set my house on fire or take my family hostage… But if it turns out she’s cool, then I wouldn’t mind her stalking me… Wait, no! If she’s a stalker, that rules out the possibility of being cool entirely! Then again, if I really had to choose yes or no…
After three seconds of wild, circular speculation, Mikado realized he had no idea how to react to his classmate.
Anri noticed his discomfort and giggled. “I’m joking.”
“Uh…”
“I’m sure you don’t want someone like me hanging around and bothering you. But don’t worry, I’m not a stalker.”
Along with the realization that she was teasing him, Mikado felt a deep shame at having been so obvious—as well as an even greater sense of guilt.
“…Sorry.”
“Huh? N-no, don’t apologize! I’m the one who was teasing you!” Anri stammered, wide-eyed, clearly not expecting an apology.
They both cast about awkwardly for something to say, and Mikado broke the silence with a simple “Well, see you tomorrow.”
“Yes, I suppose we’ll be seeing plenty of each other.”
She might have a bit of a sneaky streak to her, but she’s a good person at heart, Mikado thought as he headed back to his apartment. She wasn’t the otherworldly spirit he originally imagined, just a normal girl with an awkward life.
Maybe it’s kind of like my relationship with Masaomi. He’s the one who always tugs me around, and it’s how I came into contact with my new world here.
Mikado shook his head, reminding himself that he shouldn’t be thinking that way. Instead, he remembered the girl named Mika Harima, who had disappeared after her crush rejected her advances.
“He must have really shut her down hard. But if that’s all it took to make her give up, maybe she wasn’t that bad of a stalker to begin with,” he mumbled to himself.
Then again, according to Anri’s story, Mika had picked the lock of her crush’s apartment—while she was in middle school. Would she really give up on her “man of fate” because of a little police threat?
Mikado realized he was spending serious thought on a stalker he’d never met. He rolled his head back to the sky and sighed.
I know I was hoping for some wild stuff to happen, but not these disappearances and stalkers.
He swallowed his melancholy and stopped walking, hoping for a change of pace. Maybe he could find a hundred-yen shop to browse through on the way back home.
A sound that bridged reality and fantasy hit his ears.
An engine rumble like the whinny of some living animal. It groaned and growled in fits and starts, sounding more agitated than ever before.
“The Black Rider!”
Mikado couldn’t stifle his rising curiosity and excitement—he never expected to hear the bike so close to the crowded station. He raced off in the direction of the sound.
Just one turn at the next intersection and it should be in view. He tried not to let the moment take control of him, pulled right around the corner—
And into a scene from an old-fashioned manga.
“… Oh ho. So you ran into a beautiful girl rounding a corner, and she just so happened to be running from a bad guy on a motorcycle, plus she has amnesia. And you want me to accept each and every one of those details at face value.”
“What can I say? It’s all true.”
“If there’s one thing amongst all that truth that doesn’t make sense, it’s the mystery of why she ran into you around that corner instead of me.”
Mikado and Masaomi were arguing in the midst of a cramped apartment room measuring just four and a half tatami mats—less than a hundred square feet.
Mikado’s new apartment contained no other appliances than a PC with onboard TV tuner and a rice cooker. It was one of the cheapest rooms in his building—the only one cheaper was the three-tatami room next door. It was only because that spot was taken that Mikado had to take the more expensive option. But apparently that tenant was a cameraman who was typically out on location, so most days it was empty.
He felt he could have taken that tiny room, but now that he had a guest over, he realized just how small four and a half already was and thanked God that he hadn’t tried for a three-mat room given the current circumstances.
Unlike Mikado’s wild confusion over said circumstances, Masaomi was calm and cool.
“Now, it would have been really trite—er, tight—if you were running late for school. It would have been marvelous if she turned out to be a new transfer student to your class. And it would have been perfect if she was a queen from a far-off country…and your long-lost childhood friend to boot!”
Mikado rubbed his chin, completely ignoring Masaomi’s ideas.
I know I asked for the extraordinary, but this much of it makes me wonder if it’s all a dream. I hope it’s a dream.
Masaomi continued goofing around, despite Mikado’s silence.
“Did you pick up on that pun with trite and tight?”
“There’s nothing less funny than explaining your own joke.”
Mikado looked down at the girl lying next to them, feeling like he had just said that not long ago. He couldn’t tell how old she was, but she looked older than him. She slept in total peace, wearing plain pajamas that looked like they came from a nearby hospital.
When they collided just around that corner, she asked him for help. He stood there in confused disbelief until he noticed a black motorcycle was heading straight for them.
The rest he did not remember. Apparently he grabbed her by the arm and pulled her into the train station. The motorcycle couldn’t follow him down there, and they left from a different exit, then ran to Mikado’s apartment.
“It sounded like she lost her memory, and she said not to call the police…so I didn’t know what else to do…”
“Just have to wait it out, I guess,” said Masaomi, watching the sleeping girl. “She is beautiful, though. Almost doesn’t look Japanese… In fact, is she Japanese?”
“Well, she was speaking Japanese…”
They decided
that waiting until tomorrow to ask her more was the best plan. Normally, the circumstances dictated that such a person be turned over to the police for help, regardless of what they said, but Mikado had no intention of doing that.
Yes, it might be a well-worn development, but it was still a scene right out of a movie or comic book. This was the exact kind of adventure he wanted.
The only thing that caused him concern was the fact that the Black Rider might now be able to recognize him. He’d grabbed the girl and safely gotten away, but he still had no idea why the black motorcycle would be chasing her. If he had to survive in the big city knowing that the urban legend Black Rider was after him…
He hated normal, boring stuff. He wanted a different life than the one regular people had. Perhaps that was why he’d chosen to harbor this mysterious girl.
But escaping the ordinary required the assumption of risks.
Was the Black Rider my risk?
Mikado’s imagination set him shivering as Masaomi said good-bye.
There was one thing Mikado kept secret from his friend.
A bandage was currently wrapped around the girl’s neck. It hadn’t been there before Masaomi came over to visit, but once Mikado got a good look at her, he noticed something very striking.
Below her head, in a clean circle running completely around her neck, was a series of needle marks resembling medical stitches.
As though a saw had taken her head right off, and someone had sewn it back on.
Chapter 9: Double Heroine, Wounded Girl
We rewind the clock.
Right around the time that Mikado and Anri walked into the café, a “pawn” elsewhere in the neighborhood lurched into motion.
Research lab, Yagiri Pharmaceuticals
A dull thud echoed off the walls of the Lab Six meeting room.
“What do you mean…escaped?”
Coffee streamed across the table out of the tipped cup next to Namie Yagiri’s clenched fist. The scalding liquid burned the skin of her hand, but she didn’t bat an eye. Her fist trembled only with quiet rage and panic.
“If the police find out, we’re done for! All of us!”
She scanned the faces of her subordinates, anger and haste glittering in her eyes.
“So you played nice and quiet while you were looking for your chance to escape…”
Eventually she bit her lip to hold the rage inside. Her tongue was painted a darker red than just from her lipstick.
“…Very well. I want our full street-level forces in action. No more skulking around in the shadows now, use every possible resource—and if any trouble arises, have it taken care of promptly.”
“Shall I order them not to harm the target?” asked one of the men at her side.
Namie thought it over briefly, then gave the order in unequivocal terms.
“It would be quite a shame—but in this case, I want our property returned, dead or alive.”
Seiji Yagiri sighed as he made his way to the research lab where he would find his sister.
Yes, this is love. A love that cannot be stopped.
Seiji first met “her” five years ago. As a ten-year-old boy, his sister snuck him face-to-face with his uncle’s secret.
“She” was like a sleeping beauty in a fairy tale, waiting for the arrival of her Prince Charming within that glass case. Despite the grisly appearance of a severed head, Seiji felt not the least bit of fear or disgust. His boyish heart was completely bewitched by the majesty of the object.
As he grew older, Seiji developed reason. But his sense of reason originated from, and revolved around, her head, and she eventually ate away at his mind. The head did not cast a conscious spell on him, nor did it use some kind of brain waves or pheromones. The head just lived. And in the act of staying true to his heart, Seiji Yagiri fell completely in love with her.
Just as Namie Yagiri looked to her brother for love, that brother sought love from a mute head. And that pure desire spurred him into motion.
When his sister took the head away under the guise of research, Seiji thought, I want to set her free from the prison of that glass case. I want to show her the world.
He believed that she would want it that way and waited years for his chance to strike. He stole his sister’s security card, memorized the patrol guards’ routes, then knocked them out with a stun baton. Seiji felt no guilt—he only wanted to see the joy on her face. But even after taking her out of the lab, she did not wake.
The head did not return his love. But that was because his love was insufficient, he told himself. Thus did Seiji continue to believe that his utterly one-sided infatuation was in fact an eternal bond.
Why does love once gained and then lost feel so dear? Seiji lamented, like some preteen in love with the idea of love, as he strode toward the laboratory with severe purpose.
“I know I told sis to handle it…but I just can’t let her be alone in there. Plus, it’s just too cruel to cut open her head and peer inside, even if it is for the sake of science,” he muttered to himself, completely unaware of the dire nature of events. Seiji passed through the entrance doors of the lab.
“I shouldn’t have given her back. I should have fought and argued. As long as I show them the truth of my love, sis and Uncle will understand eventually. And if that doesn’t work, we can just elope.”
They were the words of some star-crossed nobleman hoping to marry a commoner, but there was no hesitation or doubt in Seiji’s intent. By all appearances, he seemed to be a perfectly normal, optimistic teenage boy—but that very ordinariness turned horribly, grotesquely wrong when his love interest was revealed to be a living, sleeping head.
Even worse, however, was the fact that the entire existence of Mika Harima was completely, permanently gone from his mind. She had impacted him directly, but he could no longer recall her face or the sound of her voice. As an obstacle to his love, Seiji had eradicated all traces of her from his memory, and a man who lived on love alone had no need to recall the obstacles he had eliminated.
If I have to, I’ll just steal her keycard again, Seiji thought as he watched a cleaning van race out of the laboratory’s parking lot.
Seiji knew they were not cleaners, but the so-called “underlings” of the lab: kidnappers doing its dark bidding. And not kidnappers involved with slavery rings in some far-off country, but the kind dealing with illegal human experiments.
On top of that, Seiji knew that they got into this abduction business because of their research on her. They ran experiments on the kidnapped victims using the cells, genetic data, and even liquids they extracted from her. It baffled him why they needed to go to these paranoid, urban legend lengths to study an actual head that really existed, but it probably had to do with the pressure being put on Yagiri Pharmaceuticals by that Nebula company. At least, as far as Seiji understood it.
Apparently the experiments were not cruel, grisly vivisections, but conducted after using anesthetics to put the subjects into a coma. Once they got the data they wanted, the victims were released alive in a park or some other location. They would choose victims that couldn’t otherwise go to the police about their abduction—illegal immigrants or criminal types without the backing of one of the powerful mobs—but there were also rumors that the underlings would kidnap runaway girls and other lucrative targets to make their own money on the side.
The bastards make me sick. Have they no respect for human life?
Seiji glared at the van as it passed, filled with a righteous anger—then noticed that someone was stuck to the rear door of the van.
The thing—no, the person—clinging onto the back of the vehicle had a scar running around her neck.
And above that scar—was the head of his dearly beloved.
The lightless motorcycle sped down the street outside the train station without a sound.
It passed directly in front of the police box, but the officers did not notice the dark, silent vehicle. At worst, the occasional pedestrian looked on in conf
usion at a motorcycle emitting no engine sound. It was trying to stay relatively inconspicuous in that very public location, so it wasn’t reckless—if anything, the rider was careful not to let its darkened bike cause other vehicles to collide. When it did speed up, it let the engine roar a tiny bit, just to alert the people around it of its presence.
The headless horse—the Coiste Bodhar—could frighten people with its roar, and that had not changed since its spirit had been transferred to a motorcycle, but occasionally it had the opposite effect, drawing the excited interest of onlookers instead. Despite her alarm at the varied nature of the humans around her, the dullahan had learned how best to ride through the town over the years. She just didn’t realize that she had become the stuff of urban legend.
When she didn’t have any work, Celty wandered around the town searching for her head—but naturally, she never just happened across a severed head lying on the ground, so it was an essentially meaningless activity. The dullahan understood that perfectly well, but she couldn’t stand the idea of just sitting around doing nothing, and so she wandered.
To her surprise, she had seen essentially zero fairies or spirits aside from herself since coming to Japan. On very rare occasions, she might sense the tiniest sliver of something from the trees lining the center of a park or along the entrance to 60-Kai Street, but she had never seen them for herself. She had felt many more of her kind back in Ireland. Celty thought it would be better to have another dullahan along to help her look for the head, but that was out of the question now. Twenty years later, the security around ship stowaways and smugglers was far stronger. It would take the presence of that very head of hers to leave Japan at this point.
It eventually dawned on Celty that it might be completely impossible for her to find supernatural entities like herself within the limits of her abilities here.
That’s just the world of man for you. I suppose it would be the same in New York or Paris. Perhaps if I looked in the forest of Hachioji…or just traveled all the way to Hokkaido or Okinawa, where there’s more nature…
Durarara!!, Vol. 1 (novel) Page 11