Volume 4 - CH 5.3

It was the sound of rain drumming on an umbrella.

Shizuka stared ahead with wide eyes.

“…Asato-san?” she breathed in confusion.

The fox was looking down at her, holding a blue parasol.

A cold silence descended. The fox did not offer her any kind words, but there was no hint of contempt in his eyes. Only coldness.

They held each other’s gaze.

The fox smiled, slowly.

Shizuka regarded the fox’s face vacantly.

He gave a knowing nod.

“I-I just want him to like me!” Shizuka exclaimed.

Her words sounded like a confession, cutting through the sound of rain.

Her scream was both sincere and deranged.

Thin fingers dug into the ground.

Scraping her skin against stones, she cried, “I want him to love me. I want him to like me. I like him. I love him. I want to protect him. I want to stay with him forever. I like him. I like him so much. I want him to love me. I want him to love me. I want Tsutomu-san to love me!”

The rain drowned out her cries. Shizuka exhaled heavily, and she raised her hand from the ground. Deep finger marks remained on the wet dirt.

Shizuka extended her muddy and bloody arm.

“That’s all I want,” she said softly.

How heavy her wish was.

She let her hands fumble in the air, as though asking for forgiveness.

And the fox took her trembling hand.

Click.

“And that is the end of the first story.”

The rain froze mid-air like glass balls. Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of tiny spheres floated in the air. In the middle of them stood a child wearing a fox mask. He was staring at me, arms in his sleeves.

“She wished to be loved. That was all she wanted. She loves, so she wished to be loved. The two are similar, but completely different things.”

The fox-masked child shrugged and turned its head. The glass balls that hit his mask shattered. The child tilted his head, bathing in the sharp, needle-like shards.

“So, what did the fox really want?”

Click.

The next instant, all the glass balls shattered. Countless needles flew through the air and stabbed my retina. It felt like electricity jolting through my eyeballs. Blood oozed out, and the world was once again dyed red. Then it gradually turned darker. I thought my eyes had been crushed.

I smelled antiseptic. Lights from equipment lit up in the darkness, slowly illuminating the surrounding.

Someone was lying in a bed. A number of tubes jutted out from a slender body. A woman with her eyes closed, surrounded by life-supporting equipment. The electrocardiogram’s beeping sounded awfully faint. Suddenly, the woman’s eyes opened. Her empty mouth opened and shut.

She flapped her mouth like a fish. The ventilator turned white from the inside out.

She wasn’t conscious.

All that was here was the body. Her soul was nowhere to be found.

She had left it behind in an abandoned building far away.

Her soul should be on the rooftop where her sister pushed her, waiting for the time when she could kill herself.

Her eyeballs rolled, and she caught sight of someone behind the plastic curtains. She extended a hand longingly. Her pale arm trembled. Bent fingers dug into the plastic curtain. Then it tore violently.

The fox grabbed the hand tight as it dropped.

The ashen hand suddenly turned red.

The fox was holding a bloody arm. Coated in red, it came from under a truck. A girl was desperately reaching out her hand from under the vehicle. The lower half of her body, wrapped in a white skirt, was stained red. There was nothing below her thighs. Her legs had been crushed by the huge tires and had fused with the road.

A distasteful metaphor came to mind.

With her legs gone, the mermaid princess needed replacements if she wanted to live.

Even if failing to fulfill the conditions would result in her bursting like a bubble.

“…Help,” she begged.

A simple, but heartbreaking plea. Copious amounts of blood pooled on the road. With her life in danger, she pleaded.

“Help me.”

Wine can’t go back into a broken bottle.

Nevertheless, the fox held her hand.

Suddenly the hand grew in size.

The fox was holding a man’s arm. His hand had no nails, and his fingertips were crushed. The man didn’t seem aware of the fox’s presence.

“I… I killed her,” he said, his eyes tinged with madness.

He repeated this over and over to the void.

“Misaki… Misaki…” He called her name, even when it was pointless.

The man breathed out. Large tears streaming down his face, the broken man whispered his only wish.

“Please come home.”

The man’s arm was trembling. The fox gripped his hand tightly.

Abruptly the man’s hand shrank.

The fox was holding a young arm. A child’s hand grabbed his. A skinny girl was sitting in front of a cabinet.

“Can you see?” she asked softly.

She sounded in disbelief. Behind her was a cabinet left ajar. A body was crammed inside. The body had rotten away, as though it had been buried in a coffin. Only bones remained inside.

It was the corpse of a friend she stuffed when she was a little girl.

“You can see her too?”

Large tears continued spilling from her eyes. She pointed at the cabinet. Under normal circumstances, no one should be able to see it. Until now, no one could understand her.

No one believed her when she said she killed someone.

No one punished her. No one cried with her.

The fox, however, nodded. The girl tried to say something, but swallowed back the words. Her mouth moved a few times. The fox gave her a seemingly compassionate look.

The girl sank down on the floor.

“…Help,” she murmured, not understanding what she said herself.

Her friend was dead.

She killed her with a knife.

The dead don’t come back to life.

She was well aware of that, yet she couldn’t stop herself from uttering the words.

“Help her.”

The fox agreed. He squeezed the small hand back tightly.

A bandage suddenly wrapped around the hand.

The fox was holding a hand in bandages. The girl, barely conscious, held on desperately at the arm before her. She was lying on the ground, blood oozing from her small belly. The rain beat against her body. A car was burning fiercely behind her, and there was a smashed guardrail above.

Bright flames tore through the black night.

Her face contorted under the light of the fire.

“Help… Help Higasa…”

There was a man inside the burning car. His head was hanging through the window glass, swinging idly. His neck was split in the shape of a crescent. He was already dead.

“It’s… It’s my fault,” the girl said. Her eyes were empty. “It’s all my fault.”

Large tears streamed down her face.

And so she begged the fox. Asked for what shouldn’t be asked.

“Please.”

The fox agreed, then told her the conditions.

Her hand changed shape again. Faster, this time.

The hand in the fox’s grip shrank, stretched, swelled, was bathed in blood, turned into a child’s, wrinkled, turned into an adult’s. Various faces pleaded to the fox. Their voices meshed together into grating noise that sounded like insects buzzing.

Images flashed before my eyes at the speed of light.

Over and over again, people told the fox their sorrowful wishes.

In the fast-forwarded footage, I glimpsed a family plopped down at the dining table. Haruhiro’s stunned, wide-eyed face faded away, replaced by someone else’s.

Colors dissolved, hands unraveled and crumbled. Unable to keep up with the speed of the images, my eyes began to ache from the pressure. A sharp sound abruptly stopped the frenzy.

Click.

My vision turned black, as if a curtain had been dropped.

Darkness blanketed everything. The child wearing a fox mask was standing in front of me. The space was enveloped in blackness. Everything had vanished.

He alone stood still.

“Outrageous prices. Unreasonable conditions. Uneven scales.”

The fox-masked child was no longer dressed in a kimono. He was looking at me, dressed lightly in a shirt and jeans.

On his shoulder was a blue parasol.

“But most blessed are the chosen ones,” the child whispered softly. “For even their fleeting dreams can be extraordinarily beautiful.”

Lacquered mouth curved into a smile.

It looked tender, yet mocking at the same time.

There was a cracking sound. The fox mask snapped in two. The lower half of the mouth dropped then froze. The child spoke as the mask’s mouth opened and closed.

“Do you understand now? The wishes, the farce. Were they not all the desires of others?”

He sounded like he was questioning me. The blue parasol spun. White floral patterns lost their color and vanished from sight.

“The child had no desires from the day he was born. He was shaped by his mother’s desires, and raised accordingly. Thus the child became someone who granted the wishes of others. He was blessed with supernatural abilities. He was a different monster than Mayuzumi Azaka. He used his powers to fulfill people’s desires. But there was a limitation to his ability. He could make any wish come true, but only the wishes of men. Oh, how utterly foolish, laughable, ridiculous.”

The fox-masked child clapped his hands loud. The parasol, propped on his shoulder, was still spinning wildly. The child spread his arms wide.

In a sonorous voice, he declared, “Had they not made a wish, no one would have died.”

Numerous corpses rolled on the ground like stiff, broken puppets.

Blood seeped out from the fox’s victims, slowly painting the ground crimson.

The world switched to red once again.

“Unreasonable wishes will destroy you. The fox had no desire to begin with. He had no such thing as gross desires as Mayuzumi Azaka claimed.”

Mayuzumi once said that the fox’s obsession with the Mayuzumi Azaka name was all his. But the fox-masked child denied that.

“Life without desire is boring. Going about your daily routine without wanting anything is meaningless. That’s why the fox used people’s desires to entertain himself. What is wrong with not fulfilling wishes that cannot be fulfilled?”

Clack.

The mask’s mouth slammed shut. Quiet descended. We faced each other in silence. In the red world, the blue color stood out vividly.

The parasol traced a beautiful circle.

Watching him closely, I said, “I have a question.”

Clack.

The mask’s mouth opened once more.

“You may ask me anything.”

Inside the lacquered mouth was a jet-black darkness.

I couldn’t see anything beyond it.