Boogiepop and Others Read online

  This is it. I'm going to die... !

  Just as that thought crossed my mind...

  Fwsh!

  It was the sound of something cutting through the air.

  And then... the Manticore's hand flew off, with a grotesque slicing sound.....

  It had been severed from her body and was now spinning through the air!

  (Wha...?)

  I saw something flash.

  Like string.

  It twisted like it was alive, and wrapped around the Manticore's neck.

  It tightened.

  “--?!”

  The Manticore's expression changed. She snatched at her throat with both hands. But she only had one, and the fingers of it tried to get a grip on the string wrapped around her throat.

  It wasn't a string. It was a horrifically thin metal wire.

  ‘Ah,’ I thought. I had my answer. The reason I had suddenly tripped and fallen was because this wire had been strung across my path.

  One end of the wire appeared to be tied around a tree.

  The other end led into the shadow of the school building. When I looked in that direction, I felt my brains pour out of my ears.

  “It can't be-?!” I shouted.

  There was a figure there, leaning backwards, pulling on the wire with black gloves. It wore a cape and a black hat shaped like a pipe. It was the very creature that all the girls in my class had been gossiping about.

  “... The wrist was charred enough for me to cut through, but the neck seems to be stronger,” it said.

  The androgynous voice, neither male nor female, was exactly as the rumors said.

  But the face... was...

  “M-M-Miyashita-san?!”

  Yes, it was clearly that of my classmate, Miyashita Touka.

  “Currently, I am Boogiepop,” she... no, he said clearly, in a boy's voice.

  “Gh...?!” gurgled the Manticore, eyes widening in surprise.

  She was no more able to take this in than I was.

  The wire was sunk deep into the skin of her throat. She was struggling to loosen it with her fingers, but it was cutting the fingers instead, and they were bleeding.

  “Ghh... ghhhh... !”

  “You call yourself the Manticore?” Boogiepop said quietly. “You are much stronger than a human, but I can make free use of the strength that humans unconsciously keep in reserve to avoid exceeding the limits of their flesh. Since I am only borrowing this body.”

  Then he suddenly shouted, “Now, Shiro-kun! Shoot it!”

  I had no time to ponder what he meant. No sooner had the words left his mouth than an arrow pierced the Manticore's chest.

  I knew that arrow.

  It was a duralumin arrow, that kind that the archery team used.

  I spun around, and behind me was Tanaka-kun, who had not run away after all, but holding a sturdy glass fiber bow, aimed at me -- no, at the Manticore.

  Her head was trapped. She couldn’t dodge.

  “Agh...”

  I wonder what the Manticore thought at that moment, when she knew that she had lost.

  She didn't look at the arrow in her chest, or at Boogiepop, or at the archer.

  I saw an expression steal over that empty face. To me, it looked like... relief.

  “Shoot her head!” Boogiepop said, showing no mercy.

  He killed her when she was at her most beautiful, before she had a chance to grow ugly; killed her without pain... just as the stories said.

  Tanaka-kun let go.

  The arrow was flung off the bowstring, and hit Yurihara Minako’s face dead center, smashing her head.

  For an instant, what looked like cracks ran all down her body, and then she crumbled, changing into a purple smoke.

  The smoke drifted in all directions, carried away on the wind.

  A little of it drifted past my nose. It smelt of horribly thick, fresh blood.

  ***

  “............”

  I couldn't stand up.

  Tanaka-kun came running over.

  “A-are you okay?”

  “Urn... y-yeah...” I shook my head, trying to recover some clarity.

  But Miyashita-san walked in front of me again in that Boogiepop costume, and my thoughts scattered again.

  “Wh-what is that?!” I asked Tanaka-kun, clinging to him like a toddler.

  He shook his head. “I don't know. He stopped me on my way back from practice, offered to help... you know him?”

  “I... kind of know... of him...”

  Boogiepop undid the wire from around the tree, and headed to the bushes where Kirima Nagi lay.

  “The Manticore said Echoes was surprisingly weak. I wonder why...” he muttered. He (or was it a she after all?) kicked Kirima Nagi.

  Nagi had been killed, her throat sliced open... but her body shook, and she sat up.

  She'd come back to life.

  “He gave you part of his life. You've escaped death again.”

  Tanaka-kun and I could do nothing but gape.

  Nagi moaned and clutched her forehead. She'd lost a lot of blood, and must be anemic.

  “Hello, Fire Witch,” Boogiepop said.

  “You again,” Nagi replied, not at all surprised. She sighed. “If you were out, why didn't you come sooner?”

  “Your actions finally allowed me to uncover the nature of the danger.”

  “I gotta be me all the damn time, but you only bother coming out when the shit hits the fan. You selfish bastard.”

  “Don't say that,” he replied. It sounded like they'd known each other for years.

  “Is... is it over?”

  “Yes. Thanks to Echoes’ sacrifice and the committee president's courage.”

  “I see... “ Nagi tried to stand, but wavered and fell over again.

  Boogiepop made no effort to help her, instead coming back in our direction.

  “I leave her in your hands. I'll take care of the cleanup,” he told us.

  “............ “ We made no response.

  Boogiepop picked up the Manticore's hand from the ground. He looked up at me, and made a strange expression, narrowing one eye, like he was smiling, but not quite. It was like he was playing dumb.

  “Niitoki Kei -- you certainly do have a strong will. It's because of people like you that the world manages to remain a halfway decent place. In the world's stead, I thank you.”

  It was like a speech from a play. I had no idea what it meant.

  Leaving me standing there stunned, he fled like the wind, turning the corner behind the gym and vanishing from sight.

  And that was how it ended.

  5.

  “But how did Boogiepop become a rumor? He's supposed to be a mysterious figure, his identity a secret. Who started all the legends about him?” I asked Kirima Nagi the next day after class.

  “Probably Miyashita Touka herself,” Nagi answered. We were alone in the room. Everyone else had already left.

  “Eh? What do you mean?”

  “Miyashita Touka is unaware that she has an alter-ego known as Boogiepop inside of her. But she knows it unconsciously. You know, like how you talk about yourself, but say it’s a friend of yours? Same principle, she just told other people about her other self.”

  “That’s it?”

  “You should probably ask Suema about it. Well, not specifically, but she can explain it way better than I can.”

  “Hmm... I don't really get it.”

  “I don't know much about that bastard myself,” she sighed. “Did everyone make a fuss when Yurihara Minako didn't show?”

  “The teacher asked if any of us knew anything, but nobody answered. It's too soon for anyone to realize she's actually missing, so not much is going on yet. But for a straight ’A’ student like her, skipping's enough to get the gossip going.”

  “Hunh...”

  I'd called Yurihara-san's house the day before, but the answering machine led me to believe that both her parents were off on business trips. Nobody knew she hadn't come hom
e. It looked as though the Manticore had deliberately chosen to make her move while they were out of town.

  But all hell would break loose in a day or two. Yurihara Minako would cause a lot more problems for the school than any of the other girls had.

  Saotome Masami would be buried under her shadow. His parents probably already knew he hadn't come home, but he was a boy, so they were unlikely to worry all that much if he was out all night.

  “When was the real Yurihara... when was she replaced?”

  “Not sure. But a pretty long time ago. She always had been missing.

  It was just that up until now, we simply hadn't noticed she was gone.”

  “I guess that's true...”

  We both hung our heads.

  It was a strange feeling.

  We couldn’t tell anyone the truth. If we did, it would just make things worse for all of us. And even then, if word about Echoes got out to the institution that made the Manticore, it would just be asking for trouble.

  “So, all it ultimately amounts to is nothing?”

  “It's better that way.”

  “Yeah...”

  We stood up.

  Most of the other students had gone home, and the sports teams and clubs were all in full session. There was nobody roaming the halls or stopped at the shoe lockers.

  We headed for the gates, and the girl on gate duty was very happy to see me.

  “Ah! President! Thank god you're here! Could you take over for me for a minute? I really gotta pee!”

  I smiled and nodded, and she bolted off into the school.

  “Everyone likes you,” Nagi grinned.

  “Or likes using me,” I grimaced. I remembered all the times that Kamikishiro Naoko had talked me into fudging the numbers to make her on time. Which is how we got to be friends in the first place.

  “Naoko-san is really...?” I said softly, suddenly horribly sad.

  “Yeah... I think so,” Nagi whispered sorrowfully.

  When Tanaka-kun had left us the day before, he'd said, “I don't know how to say this, but I feel like I should thank you all for Kamikishiro-san. Thank you.”

  He was almost crying.

  “Tanaka-kun, what did you really think of Naoko-san?” I'd asked.

  He looked at me sadly. “Truthfully, if we had found her, I would’ve told her that I wanted to break up. But now... I'm not so sure.”

  “Hmmm...” was all I said.

  I couldn't figure out what I should say to her other lover, Kimura Akio. We would probably never speak to each other. If someday someone were to tell him, that would be --”

  But we all had to return to our daily routine, just exactly as things had been before.

  “Naoko said something strange once,” Nagi said, looking up at the sky.

  “She said Echoes was an angel. That the lord of the heavens had ordered him to investigate, and make the final decision on whether mankind should be allowed to live, or if it should be destroyed. He came here to find out if humans were a benevolent existence, or a malevolent one. If we were the latter, he would end our history.”

  I was taken aback. “An angel?”

  “I mean, I'm pretty sure she was reading a lot into this. She had a tendency to blow everything out of proportion. My guess is Echoes and Manticore were both failed experiments in biotechnology. But if she was right...”

  “........”

  “We're still here. Looks like we're off the hook this time,” she smiled sadly.

  She had to say that. She couldn't let her friend's death be in vain.

  But I couldn't smile.

  Nagi hadn't seen the end of Echoes.

  But I had. Clearly.

  That light had made it as if Saotome Masami had never existed in the first place. It had turned the nearly immortal Manticore into a burnt crisp.

  That was no biotechnological experiment.

  It had beamed itself into space, but if something like that were fired at the earth over and over again...

  “Then the one who really saved the world...”

  “Wasn't me, wasn't Boogiepop... ultimately, it was that lonely little love-struck girl who was nice to Echoes. And we can't even thank her for it now,” Nagi sounded almost irritated.

  “............”

  I had no answer for her. I just stared silently at the sky.

  It seemed so far away.

  ***

  As Nagi and I stood there staring absently into the clear blue sky, a boy and a girl came walking together towards us. When I saw them, I couldn't stop myself from exclaiming, “Ah!”

  One of them was Miyashita Touka. The other one was a third year student with a promising career in design that I had fallen for and had my heart broken by, Takeda Keiji-sempai.

  He looked a little nervous when he saw me, so I spoke to him first, to show him that he needn't worry about it. “Oh, sempai,” I said as cheerfully as I could manage.

  “Hey,” he said vaguely.

  Suddenly, Nagi was standing in front of Miyashita-san. “Hmm. So you're Miyashita Touka,” she said. It seemed that this was her first time meeting this side of her.

  “Y -yes...” Miyashita-san said, nodding, in a cute little voice as far removed from Boogiepop's boyish tones as possible.

  “I'm Kirima. Nice to meet you,” Nagi said, and held out her hand.

  To an outsider, it must have looked like the school delinquent was out to get her.

  “Hey!” Takeda-sempai said, stepping up to protect her.

  But Miyashita-san shook her head. “You too,” she said, shaking Nagi's hand. Perhaps she understood this unconsciously as well.

  “See ya,” Nagi said, giving her a wry grin.

  The two of them went through the gates, and I let out a big sigh, and stared up at the sky again.

  I wasn't able to look Miyashita-san in the eye. I tried to smile at her, but I just couldn't. There are too many things that just aren't clear.

  It should be simple to smile at someone, but sometimes that's a terribly difficult and painful thing to do.

  “It's so hard to smile...”

  “Hm? What do you mean?”

  I shook my head. “Never mind. It was nothing.”

  Nagi looked at me dubiously, but eventually, she looked back up at the sky, and began to whistle.

  It was a song I knew. I sang along, softly.

  “Life is brief, young maiden,fall in love;

  before the crimson bloom fades from your lips,

  before the tides of passion cool within your hips,

  for those of you who know no tomorrow.”

  The autumn sky was so bright that it made my eyes water.

  ‘It'll be winter soon,’ I thought.

  "Boogiepop and Others" closed.

  Afterword:

  The School in Boogiepop

  These days, I rarely have them, but back in my early twenties, I often had dreams about high school. Dreams in which I was going to high school, not dreams about having gone. I'm talking about in the present tense, as a twenty something adult, putting on a uniform (the old kind with the clasp) and going to school. In the dreams, I knew clearly that I had graduated several years before, but I was pretending not to know and going anyway. Since it was a dream, this pretense was enough to fool my classmates. Not one of them ever noticed that I had no business being at school. Neither did the teachers. I sat in the comer of my class, in the dreams, thinking about how much I really shouldn't be there.

  The school in the dreams was not the Kanagawa Prefectural Noba High School that I had actually gone to. Rather, it was a school I had never seen. (For starters, Noba uniforms didn't have a clasp; they were blazers.) Nevertheless, I knew all kinds of things about that school. To make a long story short, the setting for Boogiepop and Others, Shinyo Academy, is that school from my dreams, the only part of this novel that is fantasy. The rest is something different.

  I think I failed miserably at being a teenage boy. I never once thought I was young, or had a futur
e. (I often do now.) I never actively participated in class or anything else. I just sat there, wondering what I was doing there, and after I graduated, I wondered why I had spent so much time thinking about those sorts of things. I don't particularly understand myself.

  So, even now, I don't really get the idea of going to school. I was twenty-eight when I wrote this novel, and over ten years have passed since I graduated. Even if I try to find the answer, I no longer have a school to go to, so the whole thing is permanently out of reach. It's all too late now. It's one of many, but this “what did I do in school?” question is a pretty big trauma for me. It's like my first love that I never asked out. Augh! I was a dirty little angst-ridden idiot without a single thought for love. I imagine the reason behind the dreams is my conviction that I would be much better at being a high school student now.

  Ultimately, school is a place where you have to be with others. That's all. It ends without you ever really under- standing much about each other, but even so, you bump into a lot of people and a lot of thoughts, and you still come back for more. Sadly, schools are not exactly set up to preserve that diversity. (Right, my readers in school?) I can't help but think that's a crying shame, but the entire world seems to work that way, and school isn't that unique of a place in the world. That's why, in my dreams, I'm always thinking, “God, I really hated that guy, but now I wish I'd known him a little better.” And I do all this while sitting there in the corner of the room.

  (This is less of an afterword than a confession, isn't it?)

  (Ah, whatever.)

  BGM “HEARTBREAKER” (live ver.) by Grand Funk Railroad.

  Seven Seas Notes:

  CLASS ROSTER

  First Year, Class D

  Kusatsu Akiko (F)

  Noguchi Sachiko (F)

  Saotome Masami (M)

  Tanaka Shiro (M)

  First Year, Class F

  Sakamoto Jun (M)

  Second Year, Class B

  Kimura Akio (M)

  Second Year, Class C

  Miyashita Touka / Boogiepop (F)