Fuminori Nakamura - Evil and the Mask

I left the room and headed for the hill out the back.

Carrying a flashlight, I went out the back door, crossed the garden and crawled through the hole in the fence. The trees rustled in the breeze as though moving of their own volition. Insects brushed against my cheeks and when I heard a dog barking I halted. There was faint moonlight, but the night was dark and cold. Until then I’d always climbed the hill in the late afternoon, while it was still light, but I had to conquer my fear.

My earliest memory was of Father. The servant girls were chasing me and laughing. I was laughing too as I waddled away from them, always on the verge of toppling over. I felt like I was floating in mid-air, perhaps because I’d just started walking and didn’t have full control of my legs, and because my line of sight was suddenly higher. On the dirt wall I could see a large green circle, an after-image of some kind. I tried to move forward once more but ran into something that felt like a pillar. I raised my eyes, and there was Father. Somehow I knew who he was. Stony-faced, he swept me aside with his foot, as if it was a nuisance even to kick me.

My flashlight illuminated the dirt path through the weeds. I was relieved. If I’d come this far, the hole was nearby. I shouldn’t have been afraid, though, because it was my mountain. I remembered the first time I’d found my father’s underground room. The house had an enormous cellar and over the years a huge hoard of furniture and other old junk had been stored there. When I was in fourth grade I got lost in there, and since then I’d explored it in secret. In the basement I’d discovered an entrance to an even deeper level. After moving aside some worn tires and lifting an ancient cloth that looked out of place, I found a square hatch in the floor. When I opened it I could see a narrow set of stairs with a door at the bottom.

My instincts immediately told me that this was bad. This was a place I should not enter, I felt. If I went in there my life would change forever. The door handle was almost entirely free of dust. I held my breath and pushed down the lever. There was no lock.

Inside, I was hit by an overpowering darkness. I’d never seen such an impenetrable black. Its density, actually heavy enough to feel, continued to bombard me, the intruder, even after my eyes had grown accustomed to it. It reminded me of my father. He was purely the embodiment of terror, and whenever he spoke my hands, my feet, my heart, even my temples went numb. I was a thing to be brushed aside with his foot, and as such I could be crushed by a change in his mood as easily as I could crush an insect in my hand. Out of the corner of my eye I could faintly make out a white switch in the darkness. When I turned it on, blades of light struck my eyes. Beyond the glare, in the center of the room, stood a bed.

My mother was sleeping. That was the first thought that popped into my head. No one was there, though, and the empty bed was the only furniture in that confined space. It had a white quilt and pillow, and sheets covered the mattress. Even though, like the door handle, the room was almost free of dust, it felt deserted. On top of the bed were four long ropes. Clumps of old hair were strewn on the pillow and duvet, an extraordinary amount.

I didn’t know what it all meant, but I sensed that this place was the center of something. A side of my father that I wasn’t supposed to see. I didn’t have the courage to touch the ropes or the hair. From that day on, that bed in that black room haunted my dreams. Sometimes I heard a woman’s voice coming from underground, but that was impossible. The room had been soundproofed for some reason, and no matter how much noise was made inside, it would never be heard.

Perhaps the reason I started making regular trips to the mountain was to fight back against that darkness in some way. To protect myself by building up my own darkness. At that age, however, I hadn’t formed such a theory. Still, I think I went there with that vague idea in my head.

On that day, when I was climbing the hill with a flashlight in my hand after my stickers were burned, I still couldn’t have put those thoughts into words. I just forced my feet to move, telling myself that I mustn’t be afraid of the darkness. In front of me I could see a hole in the cliff, covered in wire netting. I didn’t know what it was for. Feeling the menace of the darkness and the surrounding trees, I tried to convince myself that I was calm.

I walked along the fence, moved aside a sheet of plywood in the thick foliage, and picked up a small, concealed cage. Inside were lizards and snails that I had captured before. I grabbed a lizard, reached through the fence and abruptly opened my hand. Without a sound, it was swallowed up by the darkness. I didn’t hear the noise when it hit the ground, but I imagined it. I took a snail, reached through the netting again and dropped it too. Through their sacrifice, I believed, my own darkness would become deeper. Deeper than my father’s. Bigger and stronger than that terrifying, incomprehensible figure.

THE SERVANTS DRESSED Kaori in an assortment of clothes. A yellow, patterned cardigan, blue denim shorts, a plain white skirt, a cream coat. A pink hooded sweatshirt with pale blue pinstripes, a thick white sweater. Kaori always said that she didn’t want expensive clothes. She preferred to wear the same as her classmates. She was using a dirty old bag and umbrella until the servants noticed.

We entered sixth grade.

I watched her in her various outfits, looking away whenever she seemed about to catch me at it. After my tutor left she always came to my room, never noticing my discomfort. She would sprawl unguardedly on the bed, her legs sticking out from her skirt. Let’s play cards, she’d say, laying them out on the covers. Looking at her while trying my best not to, I found it hard to breathe.

Once she found my porn magazine. When I came back from the bathroom she was in my room, and the large drawer of my desk was open. The magazine was chock-full of pictures of naked women, and I’d gone to a lot of trouble to get a hold of it. Kaori was studying it earnestly, and she cried out when she saw me. Usually I put it inside a city directory at the bottom of the drawer, under an atlas, a name list for the kids in my class and a pile of thin files, but on that particular day I hadn’t hidden it properly.

I was confused and ashamed, but Kaori laughed and called me a dirty old man. Suddenly I thought of a boy named Iijima who sat next to me at school. I put all the blame on this poor kid, making up a story that I’d borrowed it from him, that he was the real pervert. Kaori pointed at the breasts of one of the women in the photos, exclaiming how big they were. Then she cupped her hands in front of her own chest.

“So, you’re interested in things like these?”

“No.”

“Do they turn you on?”

“No.”

She looked at me, grinning.

“You never lift up the girls’ skirts like Yazaki and the others, so I thought you were a nice boy.”

It was true I didn’t do that, but I always had a good look when Yazaki and his friends did.

“So, do you want to lift mine, then?”

She laughed again, raising the hem of her own skirt.

IT WAS ABOUT three months later that she found my box of hair and fingernail clippings, when she was looking for my porno mag again. Kaori had gone into my room without telling me, and when I came back she was staring at the open box with a puzzled frown.

It was filled to the brim. The tangled old hair was bone-dry and the nails were shriveled and curled. Their color had changed to a dark red as they dried, as if to show that they once were human. Even from where I was standing in the doorway it was obvious that it wasn’t all old stuff, that some of it had been harvested recently.