Durarara!!, Vol. 4 (novel)

by Ryohgo Narita

  The first instant the cameraman caught sight of it, he mistook it for the ostentatious insignia flags that motorcycle gangs waved as they rode. Such was the size of the pole the mystery rider held.

  The scythe, which looked like the one Death held on his tarot card, was huge and menacing and as black, black, black as a shadow against a wall cast by a car’s headlights.

  “Is it a social outcast gleefully seeking to shock the public? A daring member of some motorcycle gang? Even the police have no answer yet.”

  The answer was clearly beyond those tame descriptors, but the dignity of a serious news program prohibited them from using words like monster or ghoul. Yet it was clear from a simple glance that this was not an attention seeker or a biker gang member or even a human being—it was something else.

  Many people could bring themselves to recognize that this was “something beyond the realm of human understanding,” but none of them could accept it.

  Which was why half of the media was desperate to attach some kind of meaning to it. The other half got busy trying to bring acceptance to the unaccepting and made a business of it.

  It was a true example of the grotesque brought to modern times.

  People on opposing sides—those who sought to bring about another cyclical boom of interest in the occult and those who denied its otherworldly cause—set about to reveal the true nature of the Headless Rider for their own ends.

  Thus, the media found itself chasing after the mysterious Headless Rider. Among the journalists, some claimed it was a “true monster.”

  The footage from the TV cameras was so vivid, it looked for all the world to see as though the rider’s head was gone.

  The image was too raw to be faked, and this peculiar persuasiveness led to the propagation of a rumor: that the Headless Rider existed in the space between reality and urban legend, a being born of the spread of public rumor itself.

  An urban legend that anyone could spot if they just lurked around Ikebukuro for a few days.

  On this night, the liminal being was being pursued by many such curious onlookers.

  But without definitive proof for the public to see, the Headless Rider became a prototypical “modern mystery” with no actual answer, an otherwise accepted part of society.

  As for the mystery herself…

  She was stuck at a part-time job in a corner of Nerima Ward.

  Nerima Ward

  Bright light hugged pale skin.

  Beneath a light so powerful it seemed to blend the boundary between reality and fantasy lay a woman’s naked body. Two shapely mounds rose above finely chiseled abs, and a finger frolicked fishlike through the soft cleavage.

  The finger belonged to another woman, her blond hair shining in the vivid light. She was dressed as a doctor or researcher, and her golden eyes stood out on her young face, somehow clashing with the white coat that covered her body.

  It wasn’t just the uniform that clashed with her face, but the body beneath it, which was even more curvaceous and inflammatory than the naked one on the bed. The uniformed woman was unconsciously writhing and squirming with pleasure.

  If the blond woman’s body was a personification of pure, heady lust, then the woman on the table exuded a more wholesome eros. Together, the two figures shone in stark, desirable profile within the light.

  The finger tracing the naked woman’s breasts slid down to her abdomen to lightly circle her navel.

  If these were the only details examined, it would be quite an erotic sight, but one particular oddity ruined the effect and turned the scene into something extremely abnormal.

  In fact, it was so unlikely and freakish that that the word oddity was wholly inadequate to describe it.

  Because the naked woman lying on the bed had no head.

  The cross section at her neck was so smooth and natural that it looked like less of a severance than that there had never been a head there to begin with. The cross section was shrouded in black shadow that covered up the esophagus and backbone that would normally be visible there.

  But if that odd shadow was ignored, it looked like nothing more than an examination of a dead body—a white doctor performing an autopsy on a mutilated corpse.

  The absence of a head turned it into an utterly unsexy scene. But when the woman in the lab coat took her hands off the headless “body” and spoke, her voice had no hint of either husky lust or scientific examination.

  “I have finished to conclusion! There is much thanks for your accomplicing!”

  Her bizarre version of Japanese was followed by something even more jarring.

  The headless woman’s hand writhed and issued a black something. It was less of a gas than a kind of liquid that seemed to blend into the air.

  The substance was the kind of black that actually stole the light it absorbed, closer to shadow or darkness than a color. This shadow issued forth and then enveloped the entirety of the naked body, clamping to the skin in a way that was nothing short of sentient.

  The woman dressed in white watched this process with obvious interest, but no surprise in the least. In no more than a few seconds, the headless woman on the bed went from totally naked to covered in a pitch-black riding suit.

  The one element that hadn’t changed was her total lack of a head. She sat up from the bed, not bothered in the least by the absence of a skull, and picked up a PDA sitting on the nearby desktop.

  The bizarre creature coolly typed a message into the device and showed the screen to the woman in the lab coat.

  “It’s not ‘accomplicing.’ What you meant to say is ‘cooperation.’”

  “Oh dear. I have apologized. I am terrifyingly sorryful.”

  “…Well, I can tell you know enough to read kanji… You aren’t speaking this messed-up Japanese for the sake of being memorable, are you?”

  “That is totally undeniable lack of truth. Ring-a-ding-dub,” she said with an innocent smile.

  The Headless Rider shrugged and typed, “I can’t tell if you’re confirming or denying that accusation… Listen, Emilia. Just give me this week’s pay. Also, I think you meant ‘Rub-a-dub-dub.’ ‘Ring-a-ding-ding’ is the theme the Robapan bakery trucks play.”

  “It is so shrewd and abacusing of you to leap right to reward. It is better to improve cuteness by demure shyness, such as the traditional Japanese way, yes?”

  “How can I be a traditional Japanese woman when I’m from Ireland?”

  The woman the Headless Rider called Emilia pouted and cried, “Now you are Ikebukuroican! And it is appreciated to the nth degree to call me Mother. Mommy is also allowed. Mamma mia.”

  “Uh…well, I’ll admit that I’m considering my future with Shinra, but the concrete topic of marriage is a ways off. Besides, you’re younger than both me and Shinra, so calling you mother would be weird.”

  She twisted her body in apparent shyness, but without cheeks for blushing, the motion made her look more like a writhing zombie with its head blown off.

  “Just give me my pay! It’s the only reason I’m going through with these unpleasant medical tests. And what was that last physical examination for?”

  “Oh, the boiled-egg skin is so beautiful and smooth, I simply wished to engage in pleasures of fondling closely.”

  “…I’ll pretend not to be angry if you just give me my week’s worth of money.”

  “Yes, yes, please to be calm. Haste make waste, broke as joke,” Emilia said distractingly and produced a heavy envelope.

  Inside the brown manila folder, which had “Payment—Celty Sturluson” handwritten on it, was a stack of a hundred ten-thousand-yen bills, each with the face of Yukichi Fukuzawa on it.

  The Headless Rider utilized a myriad of little shadow tendrils to quickly count the total, then happily turned and typed a message with a few extra symbols into the PDA.

  “Looks good! Thanks for your business! ”

  With an absolutely outrageous week’s pay in hand, the headless woman, Celty Sturluson, trotted gleefu
lly out of the lab.

  When she reached the underground garage, Celty turned to the motorcycle parked in the corner. It was totally hidden by a rain cover, but oddly enough, the material was not the usual silver, but the same featureless black that covered Celty’s body.

  She put a hand to the cover, and it dissipated instantly, the tiny black particles melting into thin air. The action looked like some kind of sorcery, but Celty sat on the bike without a second thought and put the helmet hanging on the handlebars onto her neck.

  A Headless Rider in the dark of night, riding a black bike without lights or license plate.

  Without the slightest shred of understanding of the effect this combination had on the rest of society, or of the mystery her own existence posed, Celty gunned the engine with a sound like a horse whinnying and rode out into Ikebukuro.

  Celty Sturluson was not human.

  She was a type of fairy commonly known as a dullahan, found from Scotland to Ireland—a being that visits the homes of those close to death to inform them of their impending mortality.

  The dullahan carried its own severed head under its arm, rode on a two-wheeled carriage called a Coiste Bodhar pulled by a headless horse, and approached the homes of the soon to die. Anyone foolish enough to open the door was drenched with a basin full of blood. Thus the dullahan, like the banshee, made its name as a herald of ill fortune throughout European folklore.

  One theory claimed that the dullahan bore a strong resemblance to the Norse Valkyrie, but Celty had no way of knowing if this was true.

  It wasn’t that she didn’t know. More accurately, she just couldn’t remember.

  When someone back in her homeland stole her head, she lost her memories of what she was. It was the search for the faint trail of her head that had brought her here to Ikebukuro.

  Now with a motorcycle instead of a headless horse and a riding suit instead of armor, she had wandered the streets of this neighborhood for decades.

  But ultimately, she had not succeeded at retrieving her head, and her memories were still lost. And she was fine with that.

  As long as she could live with those human beings she loved and who accepted her, she could live the way she was now.

  She was a headless woman who let her actions speak for her missing face and held this strong, secret desire within her heart.

  That was Celty Sturluson in a nutshell.

  Highway, Ikebukuro

  As she raced toward the center of the city, Celty eagerly contemplated the near future.

  Wow, who’d have thought I’d make a million yen in short-term income in just a week? I should use this to buy Shinra some new glasses.

  Shinra was the black-market doctor who was Celty’s romantic partner and roommate. He was an odd fellow who loved her for both her mind and her appearance, and she loved him back with all of her heart.

  The image of her beloved eccentric lighting up with joy made Celty even more excited. She considered other ways to spend the remainder.

  I could use a new mini laptop… Oh, right, and I really need a new helmet.

  The job she just left was a sudden, unexpected source of income, which made this windfall a bit of a personal bonus unrelated to savings.

  She normally made her money as a courier, but nearly all of the proceeds from that business went to savings for the future.

  This new venture started about a month ago, when she first met Emilia, who came to Ikebukuro following Shinra’s father. Emilia worked for a major pharmaceutical company overseas and boldly demanded to play with Celty’s body.

  Naturally, Celty refused at first, only accepting with reluctance once she had been assured there would be only a minimum of open surgery or cell sampling and the only contact would come from female researchers.

  But mostly, it was the amount of pay that Emilia mentioned that sealed the deal.

  In the past, I would have no choice but to leave all of the money with Shinra. But now you can buy pretty much anything with anonymity online. Long live modern civilization.

  It was not a typical line of thought for an inhuman spook, but Celty was too busy indulging in crass materialism to care.

  In my case, it’s helpful that I don’t need to spend money on my bike. All I need to buy are brushes to keep Shooter’s mane in line. He even hates the idea of stickers on his body.

  That had to be the nickname of her Coiste Bodhar. She patted the bike, which also happened to be her trusty headless steed. The normally silent motorcycle engine whinnied in apparent delight, startling nearby pedestrians.

  Hee-hee, you adorable scamp, she thought, already looking forward to spending her million yen, the way a child looks forward to buying candy the day before a field trip.

  I’ll still have seven hundred thousand yen left over. Maybe I’ll buy that DVD recorder I’ve been wanting. The kind that dubs straight from a video deck. Then, I’ll have a more compact storage solution for all the episodes of Gatten, Mysterious Discoveries, TV Investigations, Monday nine PM dramas, Partner, Antique Appraisers, and all the other shows I’ve been taping.

  Also, let’s see… Right, I can buy some gourmet food for Shinra to eat. He did say he wanted to try sagohachi-style pickled sandfish sometime. Is this even the right season for sandfish?

  In mid-April, sandfish season was long over. The bigger problem for Celty was how to cook the dish. Having no head naturally meant having no tongue. The shadow that her body produced functioned somewhat like a radar, giving her sight, hearing, and even smell through some means unknown.

  But there was a problem: Because she didn’t need to eat for whatever reason, she had no sense of taste and no way of knowing if the scents she was picking up were the same things Shinra smelled.

  So if she followed a recipe when cooking, it might look right, but there was no way for her to check the actual flavor.

  With long years of training, she had gradually learned how to cook certain egg-based dishes to Shinra’s liking, such as crab omelets or scrambled eggs. But for other food, she could only make it by following the recipe to the letter, and given that she couldn’t detect when she’d accidentally used sugar instead of salt, it was always a surprise until Shinra finally tasted it.

  I ought to find a good cook and take serious lessons from them. I wonder…if Anri or Karisawa are any good at cooking? she wondered, thinking of her closest female acquaintances, but neither of them seemed to have that cooking air about them. Emilia wouldn’t know the first thing about Japanese food, and the other women she knew were all the eccentric type.

  I have a newfound respect for the housewife, the monster thought in admiration. She looked up at the night sky and shrugged. The stars were nearly invisible behind the light of the city. The only object that made its presence known was the moon.

  I suppose being able to think about this topic is a sign that my life is good. Not that I was confident of that last month, after Emilia showed up…

  By all accounts, Emilia was freeloading in their apartment, but she spent most of the week staying over at the lab, which meant she was almost never home.

  Instead, the abnormality of that visit turned into everyday experiments, but that ended up with a minimum of suffering and more than enough reward to make up for it.

  The light turned red and she came to a stop, reflecting on the sheer humanity of her life with relief.

  This is it. This is what I wanted.

  Peaceful days with the one she loved.

  As an abnormal, headless knight, she understood just what a rare bliss that was and was acutely aware of the warmth enveloping her emotions.

  In fact, I might just call Emilia “Mother” after all. I wonder how Shinra would react.

  She felt a peaceful feeling come over her as she imagined her lover’s flustered face and waited for the light to change.

  But…

  Humanity did not know or care of the goings-on in Celty’s daily life.

  It wanted nothing more than to plunge her into hell as the sym
bol of the abnormal.

  “Excuse me, may I have a word?”

  Hmm?

  Celty made a show of swiveling her helmet around as her otherworldly senses focused on the surroundings. A portly man was holding out what looked like a mic toward her as she waited for the light.

  Me? What does he want? Why is he holding a mic out into the middle of the street?

  The man was standing on the other side of the guardrail, holding his mic over it into the road where she waited, a deadly serious look on his face.

  “I’m Fukumi, a reporter for Daioh TV. I’d like to ask you some questions.”

  Oh no.

  Celty noticed another man with a TV camera standing a slight distance away and even more men in plainclothes standing around beyond him. She understood Fukumi’s intentions at once.

  “We’re currently filming for a news special here in Ikebukuro… I’ve noticed that your motorcycle has no headlight or license plate. This is clearly illegal, is it not?” the reporter asked, which was a perfectly correct observation. Unfortunately, the light was not going to turn green anytime soon.

  Damn, I forgot that this is a long light.

  In a way, it was rather silly that a motorcycle rider without a headlight or license plate was obeying a traffic light, but the reporter did not crack a smile. “May we assume that the Black Rider witnessed over the years is you? What is your purpose in engaging in such dangerous traffic activities?”

  For an instant, the bike growled. It was a low, menacing grrrl, like an animal sending a warning signal. The reporter flinched momentarily, disturbed by the motorcycle’s lack of an ordinary engine rumble, but he regained his cool immediately.

  “Please tell us something. Are you aware that you’re committing a crime?”

  Oh… What do I do now? If I clam up, it’ll only make me look worse to the rest of society.

  It’s not a huge deal to me, but I don’t like the idea of those I associate with being treated like criminals, too… Then again, I can’t possibly get licensed, and Shooter doesn’t like wearing a headlight…

  Celty was no closer to finding a solution to her quandary. As a courier, she had naturally been involved in ferrying items that ran afoul of the law. There was no denying that her vehicle broke a number of traffic regulations.