Boogiepop and Others Read online

  But why did I have to meet her?

  Kyoko, who was actually part of it, was running away as fast as she could. That was the more natural reaction. Anyone normal would do the same.

  I was clearly a third party, and I had nothing to do with anything.

  But I didn't like that.

  Five years ago, things had all happened without me knowing about them. I only found out when everything was finished. My own will played no part in the matter.

  If there was danger, I wanted to see it.

  That's why I had chased after Boogiepop, even though there was clearly no such thing. It was all the same to me. I didn't care what it was...I just wanted to confront something.

  (No more blissful ignorance for me.)

  Kirima Nagi might really be a witch. I hoped she was.

  ***

  “... Uh?”

  I was standing on the right street, but there were no apartment buildings, only houses.

  I checked the address again and again, but I was clearly in the right place.

  But I couldn't find any house with the name “Kirima” on the gate. Checking the directory again, I noticed that it had “Taniguchi” written in very small characters next to it. She must live there.

  (... must be that guardian with the different name.)

  There was a house with “Taniguchi” on the gate, and the numbers seemed to match.

  It was a really normal-looking home, a ready-built house like any other. A little on the wealthy side, but normally so.

  Unable to connect it with Nagi's bizarre appearance during our earlier encounter, I hesitated, debating for a long time before I pushed the buzzer.

  When I finally did, it made a half-hearted, ultra normal ding-dong sound.

  “Who is it?” the voice from the intercom said, surprising me. It wasn't Nagi’s voice, but rather that of a boy.

  “Um, is, uh... is Kirima-san...?” I stuttered, all flustered.

  “You're Nagi's friend?” the voice said quite cheerfully.

  A moment later, the door swung open. The cheery boy stood in the doorway. He was taller than either Nagi or me, but younger, probably in Junior High. And that smile...it was friendly and warm.

  “Come on in. But Nagi's not home yet, I'm afraid.”

  “O-oh, urn...”

  “Come in and wait. She should be back soon.”

  He led me to the guest room.

  The inside was normal too.

  There was even a set of little dolls in the shape of the zodiac signs sitting on top of the cabinet.

  “Here,” the boy said, putting a cup of tea and a plate of cookies in front of me.

  “Uh, thanks.” It was really good. I know nothing about tea, but I'm pretty sure this was what they called good tea.

  “Gosh, I don't think I've ever met a friend of Nagi's before,” the boy said airily.

  “Y -you are...?” I asked.

  “Her brother,” he replied. They looked nothing alike.

  “Urn, I'd heard Kirima-san lived alone, so... “

  “Yeah, I got here about six months ago. I lived abroad with my parents until last spring, but I've got entrance tests for high school next year, so I thought that I ought to get used to Japan first.”

  “Your parents...”

  Nagi had parents after all. But why was their name Taniguchi?

  At this point, we heard a voice call out, “I'm home,” from the entrance. It was Nagi.

  “In here,” her brother said as he stood up and went to meet her.

  “You brought another girl home?” Nagi said.

  Her brother laughed. “This one's yours. She's been waiting for you.”

  I nearly yelped when Nagi came in.

  She had changed into her school uniform, like she'd just come home from school.

  “Oh, it's you,” Nagi said quietly as I stood there speechless. “Let's go upstairs.”

  Following her lead, we went upstairs to her bedroom.

  The polar opposite of downstairs, her room was free of decoration; nothing but computers and books. One bed, two desks. One was for studying, apparently, since the surface was empty. The other desk was for her computer -- or, should I say, computers. It was kind of hard to tell just how many she had. There were multiple boxy computer towers and an assortment of other machines attached to them. She had three different monitors, all lined up next to each other. At first, I assumed two of them might've been televisions, but the screen savers were a dead giveaway. Worse, the pile of machinery spilled out onto the floor, filling nearly half of the ten-mat room. It felt less like a girl's bedroom and more like some mad hacker's secret lair. Much to my surprise, there were no signs of any black magic books at all. All the books that lined Nagi's shelves were merely an assortment of reference books and difficult looking hardcover tomes. Still, Nagi's collection of computer software boxes looked to have her book collection beat.

  Nagi pulled the chair out from the study desk, and offered it to me. “Sit.”

  “Okay,” I said, and did.

  “Surprised?” Nagi grinned.

  “Hm?”

  “By Masaki. Everyone thinks I live alone.”

  “Urn, yeah. I didn't know you had a brother.”

  “He's not my brother. We're not related,” Nagi replied, shaking her head. “He's my mom's second husband's son from a previous marriage. He's a good kid, but a bit too good at manipulating me. Gonna grow up to be a real Don Juan. Sad.”

  “So, that's why his name's...?”

  “Right, my mom's husband's name. I kept the old one.”

  “Hmm... why?”

  “'Cause I've got a father complex,” Nagi replied. I couldn't tell if she was joking.

  “Your father is...?”

  “I thought you'd know. Kirima Seiichi. Wrote a lot of books.”

  “Ehhhh?!” I interrupted rather loudly. “You’re kidding!”

  “Nope.”

  “But... the writer, Kirima Seiichi?!”

  Of course, I knew him. I'd learned most of what I knew about criminal psychology or depth psychology from his books. The Scream Inside -- Multiple Personality Disorder, or When a Man Kills a Man, or Where the Killer's Mind Changes, or A Nightmare of Boredom, or The Proliferation of “Dunno", or VS Imaginator, and so on. He'd written far more summaries, essays and commentaries than novels. In fact, I'd never read any of his actual novels, just his scientific writings. He called himself a modern day enlightenment thinker, which is kind of hokey, but he did write an incredible number of books.

  “That's my dad. He's dead now, though.”

  “Yeah, I knew that... but really? No, I mean really, really?”

  “Why would I lie?”

  “I know... but still...”

  “You didn't think I had a strange name?”

  “Never occurred to me. Wonder why not?”

  Even as I asked, I knew the answer. I had unconsciously convinced myself that Kirima Seiichi or any other writer was hardly likely to live near me. Perhaps I wanted the people that I admired so much to live in some higher realm of existence than I did.

  “Basically, I'm living off of the inheritance. Can't really beat it, either. Pays for school.”

  “Really? But your mother...”

  “She wasn’t married to him anymore. I got everything. She tossed her half away on her own. She was already a Taniguchi, and she didn't want anything to do with Kirima. That took care of taxes, so I pay rent here.”

  Here I was, just some normal girl from a typical middle-class nuclear family, and I'm sitting here, listening to the Fire Witch herself talking about her atypical life! Her whole situation just felt sort of unreal to me. It's no wonder that she acts the way she does. She'd hardly even been brought up in anything close to a proper environment.

  Even so, there was something that I had to ask. “Urn, so...”

  “What? The reason?”

  “Yeah. Why'd you save Kyoko?”

  “My, my. You call that saving?” Nagi looked ple
ased.

  “She told me everything. She got on some weird drug. You saved all of the girls from that, right?”

  “Maybe I did... maybe I didn’t.”

  “Why? How'd you find out? What did you do about it?” I was relentless.

  Nagi simply stared back at me.

  I felt my heart beating. She was certainly pretty. I felt like she might actually say, “I used magic.”

  What she actually said was, “My father died when I was ten.”

  “R-right,” I stuttered, feeling like I should make some response. She carried on as if she didn't care if I was listening or not.

  “My mother had already left us when he died, so there were only the two of us in the house. He never drank and he never chased after women. All he did was work. One day, I came home from school and found him lying on the floor. I called an ambulance, but all I could do was wait next to him as he spit up blood.

  “He asked me, ’Nagi, what do you think about being normal?’

  “I didn't know what he meant, so I shook my head.

  “He said, ’Normal means you leave everything as it is and nothing ever changes. If you don't like that, you've got to do things that aren't normal. That's why I--’

  “Those were his last words. He passed out and never woke up again. The cause of death was gastric perforation leading to dissolution of the internal organs. Disgusting way to die. I even heard that when the doctor cut his stomach open during the surgery, the smell was so bad that veteran nurses just started puking all over the floor.

  “So what? I don't know. I just kind of gave up living normal after that.”

  She stopped.

  When I said nothing in response, she added, “It's a messiah complex.”

  “R -really?”

  From her face alone, you would think her a demure beauty. I found myself staring at her kind of thin lips, somehow unable to meet her eyes.

  “I'm a psycho, all right. Got all the childhood trauma anyone could want, right here.”

  She said disturbing things so easily.

  But she didn't look like a monomaniac to me.

  “But that's-” I started to say, but Nagi turned towards the computer behind her, cutting me off. She logged into one of the computers, loaded up some program, and hit a few keys.

  A list popped up on one screen. It rolled upwards from the bottom of the screen. It appeared to be a list of people's names with numbers after them.

  “Here,” she said, pointing at the screen.

  It read: 2-D-33 Suema Kazuko 8:25 AM - 3:40 PM

  “That's...” I said, realizing that it was my very own attendance record.

  “I'm logged into the school's network. You can get a basic outline of a student's movements with this. I noticed Kinoshita's group was suddenly getting worse, so I checked it out. Hit the drug story.”

  I was horrified. “Isn’t this illegal?”

  “Course it is,” she said readily.

  My mouth moved, but nothing came out.

  “I have to,” she said quietly. “Schools are kind of isolated from the rest of society. It's a strange environment where the police can't do jack. Something violent happens, whether it's caused by a student or a teacher, and the first thing that they do is try to cover it up. Even if someone dies, they'll take a cue from the times, and claim that it was a suicide caused by bullying, find some students who look like bullies, and just expel them for it... and that may well end up being enough, half the time.”

  “T-true, but...”

  “I know it's wrong, but someone's got to do it. We sure as hell can't expect the teachers to.”

  “That's not what I mean, but...”

  But who was this girl, who would intentionally get herself suspended to do any of this?

  A messiah complex-

  That was a creepy type of megalomania, in which you believed yourself to be some sort of savior.

  In Kirima Seiichi's books, there was a case where a middle-aged man believed himself to be Batman, put on a costume and attacked an acquitted murder suspect. He wound up being killed himself, and the killer walked a second time, pleading self-defense. If the suspect had truly been innocent, the whole thing was a tragedy based on absurd principles, but if he had been guilty, then it was a tragedy in which justice had been utterly defeated by evil. Either way, it was a sad tale to recount.

  This is how Kirima Nagi saw herself.

  Certainly, Kirima Seiichi spent most of his time analyzing sinister phenomenon in the underbelly of the human mind, putting out books and articles on the distortions of reality that made people commit crimes, so if you wanted to, you could certainly make a case for him having a messiah complex as well.

  That his daughter, particularly one who diagnosed herself as having a father complex, was the same, was not particularly odd, but-

  When I sat there in silence, Kirima thrust a phone at me. Not one on the house's line, but undoubtedly one taken out in her name and paid for out of her own pocket.

  “Call.”

  “Er... who?” My eyes widened.

  Much to my surprise, Nagi replied, “Your house, of course. Tell them you're bringing a friend home for dinner, and that they should make extra.”

  4.

  The next day, Nagi came to school, off her suspension. Kyoko avoided her, and despite chasing us down the day before, Nagi acted as if she didn't even know us. Right from the start of first period, she was slumped over her desk, sleeping soundly. The teachers said nothing, apparently letting sleeping dogs lie.

  Nagi stood up to go to the bathroom once during break, and I slid out after her without letting Kyoko see me.

  “Urn, Kirima-san,” I said.

  “Mm?” She looked back remotely, clearly still half asleep. “Oh, you again. Sorry, but I'm gonna be up all night tonight, so I need to get some sleep while I still can. Talk to you later, okay?” Her business finished, she returned to class and went straight back to sleep.

  “........“

  I was itching to talk with her more about yesterday, but any attempts that I tried to make were clearly going to be thwarted.

  I had ended up taking Nagi home for dinner the night before.

  Why? Because she said, “Your folks are probably excessively worried when their daughter comes home late, with what happened before and all. Tell them that you met me, and that you invited me over, since my parents are off on holiday.”

  Since she was right, I did as I was told.

  Her non-blood relative brother said, “Come again,” as we left the Taniguchi house. It was pitch black, the sun having long since set.

  We set off on foot, with Nagi silently following after me.

  Unable to stand the silence, I asked a foolish question. “Don't you ever show your soft side, Kirima-san?”

  “Sure. I'm careful not to be too hardcore. When I want, I can play a normal girl.” Her voice went up an octave as she said this, and she forced the corners of her mouth upwards into a dubious looking smile. Since she was a pretty girl, so it wasn't all that unnatural looking.

  “Well, good,” I said, laughing. It wasn't what I really wanted to ask her.

  As I squirmed, she asked, “You're smart, aren't you?”

  “I suppose...” I wasn't sure how to take this, coming from the girl who was the top scorer on the entrance exams and the top student in the school, as far as make-up test were concerned.

  “I think so. That's why I explained to you what I did, you know?”

  “Yeah. I won't tell anyone.” I meant it. After all, no one would believe me.

  She shook her head. “That's not what I mean. About Kirima Seiichi.”

  “Hm? What about him?”

  “You've been studying from his books, yet his daughter is doing this kind of stupid shit all the time. In other words, get out while you still can.” Her shoulders slumped.

  I stopped in my tracks and just looked at her. “Why do you say things like that?”

  “Why? That mess five years ag
o has nothing to do with you. Let go of it. It'll come back to haunt you. It'll warp your personality... just like it has mine!”

  “Why?”

  “Why...” Nagi looked slightly irritated. “Do you want to end up like me?”

  Her eyes glared at me, her face that of the Fire Witch. But I didn’t pull back. I wasn't afraid any more. I glared right back into those eyes.

  “How did you know that I was almost killed five years ago? I never told anyone.”

  Nagi stiffened. She'd made a mistake. “Urn, I... that is...”

  “You’ve barely spoken to anyone in class, so you must have assumed that Doctor Murder’s past was public knowledge. But nobody knows. Just the people who were a part of it. Just my parents and the police.”

  Nagi turned her head to the side to avert her gaze.

  “Oh my god.”

  Nagi remained silent.

  “So it was you. You saved me.”

  They told us the killer hung himself. But that explanation had never sat all that well with me.

  She had taken him out. Just like she had saved Kyoko.

  “It...it's not important. It was a long time ago,” she said, sullen.

  “It's pretty dang important to me! I've been over this hundreds of times. Why am I still alive? I'm only alive because the killer went and killed himself? Yeah, that makes me feel real good, knowing that. That means that the only way that good things happen is if you just sit and wait for bad things to self- destruct. What kind of explanation is that?! It sucks.! And you know what else sucks? That there's nothing we can do to make the world a better place.”

  Yes.

  That was it.

  Justice might well prevail in the end, but ordinary people like me had no guarantee of surviving that long. We might get killed on the whim of some serial killer first.

  But even then, if we at least knew that there were some people fighting for us, it'd make things a lot easier to bear. If we knew these people had saved us, we’d feel much more alive than if we only survived because the bad guy just up and killed himself.

  “That wasn't me,” Nagi said coldly.

  “Liar.”

  “That was Boogiepop. Ultimately.”

  Suddenly presented with the name of a fictional character, an urban legend, I was put off my stride. “Hunh?” I said, dazed.