Book Girl and the Undine Who Bore a Moonflower Read online

  Maki leaned forward.

  In the roar of the wind blowing through the window and the sound of the rain, Uotani told us the next part in a hard voice.

  “Mitsukuni Himekura broke the promise and set fire to the house, trying to burn it down. Like you, he tried to tear down Miss Yuri and Mr. Akira’s house and eradicate it.

  “Grandma had been watching the Himekuras the whole time. And she damaged one eye of the Himekura who set the fire and made him renew the promise in exchange for saving his life.

  “That as long as Shirayuki existed, he would never again touch the mansion.

  “I’ve heard stories about Miss Yuri from Grandma ever since I was little. After Grandma died, I inherited Shirayuki from her.”

  What could she mean?

  Thinking of the long years that had passed, my head spun.

  “As long as Shirayuki exists, you will neither demolish the house nor destroy the pond.”

  What thoughts had gone through Uotani’s grandmother’s mind while she protected the estate as Shirayuki?

  Putting on a white wig on moonlit nights, haunting the house and pond, and making the villagers think that Shirayuki was still present in the land.

  When someone threatened to develop the mountain or destroy the house, she caused accidents and spread rumors that it was Shirayuki’s curse.

  And after she died, her granddaughter, Uotani, had done it.

  Thus, each time plans were brought forth for development, Shirayuki appeared, and when he heard of it, the Himekura master knew the promise lived on and put a stop to the development.

  It had happened time after time through eighty whole years!

  Maki’s grandfather had sent her here knowing all of this.

  In order to test how much his successor could do in this place where the power of the Himekuras didn’t reach?

  Or underestimating her, assuming that she would be unable to do anything or to discover his secret?

  Whichever it was, Maki had been in the palm of his hand.

  Her jaw taut, Maki asked, “You were the one who threw the threatening letter in at me and the one who dumped blood and fish guts on me, too.”

  “That’s right! I’ll protect this house in Grandma’s place!”

  A powerful spark came into Uotani’s eyes, and she pushed the muzzle of the gun into Maki’s neck until it dug in.

  “Now, you promise! Then I’ll spare you.”

  Her voice and expression were heavy with intent that said this was no threat—she meant it.

  Even so, she was actually scared. She probably also had questions and hesitated. Her hands trembled ever so slightly as she held the gun.

  If we tried to stop her clumsily, the finger on the trigger would shift and the bullets seemed likely to rip through Maki’s throat. I couldn’t move.

  I was sure Tohko was in the same frame of mind, swallowing a lump in her throat and watching this exchange closely behind me.

  “Go on! Make your decision! If you refuse, I’ll shoot you to death right here!”

  The heat drained from Maki’s face rapidly. She dropped her eyes in apparent boredom, and in a horribly cold voice she whispered, “…Ridiculous.”

  Uotani’s eyes widened in shock.

  I couldn’t believe what I’d heard, either. What was Maki saying, especially now, with the barrel of a gun pressed against her throat?!

  “Is that what the promise was? My grandfather wanted to hide something so trivial? He avoided demolishing this one tiny house over the fact that the young Himekura lady was the one who committed the ruthless murders eighty years ago? That’s all?”

  Uotani’s arms and shoulders shook even harder and more obviously than before.

  At the same time that hatred showed on her young face, confusion and uneasiness and fear did, too, as if she was looking upon something incomprehensible.

  Maki lifted her gaze. She was like the dragon princess imprisoned in the pond—her eyes glinting with repressed bitterness, her beautifully sculpted eyebrows bristling, and in a voice filled with irritation, she asked, “Despite the fact that the Himekuras have always been a family painted in blood?

  “Are you telling me that there hasn’t been a single murderer or criminal among the Himekuras before now?

  “While sitting majestically on high, without sullying their own hands, they look down calmly upon people being murdered like pigs for the feast without raising an eyebrow. That kind of shameless arrogance has been rank in the Himekuras, now and in the past. It would make you sick to know how often.

  “I’m sure Grandpa himself has used thoroughly questionable methods to get where he is and crushed the people who got in his way. And yet he couldn’t allow something like this? Are appearances that important to him? Are the Himekuras supposed to be some pure and just noble family that nobody points the finger at behind their backs?

  “It doesn’t shock me to hear that Yuri killed everyone.

  “This promise is a farce. I would die of embarrassment if it weren’t so pathetic.”

  “Maki!” Tohko shouted, as if to say, “Don’t say another word.”

  Uotani bit down on her lip and pulled the trigger.

  My brain went all white with pain, as if my beating heart had been shot out.

  There was no more avoiding the nightmare laid out before me—

  But no bullet was released from the gun.

  Uotani jerked her finger again and again in a panic. There was only the clicking of the trigger and nothing happened.

  Watching Uotani do this with cold eyes, Maki informed her, “That gun only holds five shots. You wasted too many.”

  The sweat that had broken out on my body chilled all at once.

  Maki roughly slapped away the gun that was shoved into her neck with one hand.

  Uotani was flabbergasted and she stiffened.

  Then a look of fear came suddenly over her face and she began quaking. A true monster stood before her, leaping with pale flames of rage and trying to bring judgment down on a foolish human.

  Just as Uotani’s legs seemed ready to crumple beneath her, a white hand touched her from behind.

  Uotani looked up over her shoulder in surprise and found that the book girl with the long braids, who was still dripping water from her raincoat, was the one gently supporting her arms.

  Her clear gaze, which seemed to purify the dark and stagnant air, looked straight at Maki.

  The light of her flashlight made the water droplets on her raincoat glisten, making it seem as if Tohko were wreathed in stars.

  “You realized from the start that Sayo was Shirayuki, didn’t you?”

  Maki looked back at Tohko with a tightly grim expression.

  Maki had known Shirayuki’s true identity? Uotani looked flabbergasted again.

  I gasped, too, as if the very core of my brain had been struck.

  The cold sound of rain filled the room, which had fallen into silence.

  Tohko’s voice flowed smoothly into it.

  “The name Chiro comes up a lot in Yuri’s diary. ‘I went for a walk with Chiro,’ ‘Chiro got bitten by Baron’—from reading that, you might think that Chiro is a cherished pet, but on the night of the slaughter eighty years ago, Chiro’s body wasn’t in the house.

  “That’s because Chiro was the girl who was the sole survivor—Hiroko, Sayo’s grandmother. Chiro was her nickname.”

  Chiro—

  Hiro—

  The two names rose up in my mind. The puppy Chiro and the human girl Hiro. The two of them melded together to form a girl of eight who resembled Uotani.

  Uotani’s grandmother had been Yuri’s companion the whole time!

  “Toward the end of the diary, it says that Chiro got bitten by Baron and was badly hurt. Around the same time, Hiroko went back to her family in the country. Couldn’t that have been in order to recover from her injuries? And then when she came back, she discovered that Yuri’s lover Akira had been killed and Hiroko took revenge.”

 
Uotani hung her head, tears in her eyes. I guess Tohko’s “imagination” was accurate.

  “Maki, you read the diary before we did. And you had this same ‘imagination.’”

  Maki answered frigidly, “I didn’t imagine it, I logically deduced it. A mass murder happens in a house and only one person survives. It’s obvious to suspect the one who survives as the perpetrator. Plus, Hiroko happened to be on the scene at the fire fifty years ago. No way that’s a coincidence.”

  “Hiroko had a secret—you concluded that. And you imagined—I mean, deduced that Hiroko was Shirayuki.”

  But why would Hiroko pretend to be Shirayuki? And why were the Himekuras afraid of her? I didn’t understand it.

  “Shirayuki and the Himekuras—was there not a hidden promise between each of them? Did that not relate to the incident eighty years ago?

  “That’s what you thought, and so you decided to draw out the nature of the promise from Shirayuki.

  “Hiroko passed away last year. So you summoned Sayo, Hiroko’s granddaughter and the next Shirayuki, to the house where the incident occurred eighty years ago.”

  Uotani looked at Maki, her face blanching.

  Maki listened to Tohko’s story with a haughty look that no longer registered Uotani’s presence.

  “Everything was devised to flush Shirayuki out.

  “You built your set and arrayed it with a butler, a cook, a housekeeper, a gardener, a maid, a dog—and even a young lady, a student, and a goblin, exactly like eighty years ago. And to top it off, you acted like you were going to demolish the house and manipulated Shirayuki into appearing.”

  Tohko went on.

  Shirayuki had appeared exactly as Maki had planned. Uotani had been the one who sent the threatening letter and dumped water with fish blood in it off the roof. Overjoyed by the signs of movement, Maki had caused an uproar herself in order to draw Shirayuki out even further.

  “The fish scattered around the book room and making Shirayuki appear was a performance, wasn’t it? It was impossible for Sayo to manage all of that. But you could have done it, Maki.

  “You inflicted it on the other actors—the butler and all the others. The Shirayuki that night was a projection you set up in the room ahead of time and made lifelike.

  “The arms reaching through the window were real, but that could be done by someone pretending to run out of the room, then hurrying around outside and breaking the window and sticking their hands through.”

  I recalled the terrified faces of the butler and all the others.

  And then the whispered conversation I’d heard through the door.

  “But we’ve kept the promise!”

  The promise had been a contract between Maki and them.

  Had they known that eighty years ago their relatives had been the aggressors rather than the victims? Or had they simply been employed by Maki without knowing anything? Could their cowardly eyes filled with fear have been…? No, whatever the case, they were actors who had behaved in complete accordance with Maki’s script.

  “Sayo was confounded by the appearance of a Shirayuki other than herself and got frightened. In such a situation, she couldn’t keep her promise to her grandmother. She could hear the rhyme her grandmother had taught her playing on a loop in her mind, and it haunted her to the point that she couldn’t sleep that night.”

  “The promise…it’s…,” Uotani had murmured as she turned pale and trembled. Uotani had been utterly filled with terror at that moment.

  “And then to top it all off you called Konoha away with a fake letter and made it look like he’d gone back to Tokyo. When I went to look for Konoha, that figured into your calculations, too, right?”

  Maki’s face turned a little bit sour.

  “I didn’t plan on Ryuto Sakurai coming. Because of him, I had to accelerate my plans.”

  Takamizawa had said the same thing. That he had intended to go and get me, but the plan had changed slightly. He had been playing the role of the one who “comes to get” me from Tokyo the whole time.

  Tohko made her eyes stern and asked, “You were also the one who fed poison to Baron, aren’t you, Maki?”

  A smile cold enough to make me shudder came over Maki’s face.

  “Yes, he devoured his food without question. That was the guard dog’s failing—for the Baron of eighty years ago and the Baron of today.”

  She couldn’t mean it—was she saying that dog had been set up in order to kill it? In order to make her prey, Uotani, think of Akira being fed poison and dying? For that reason only without the slightest hesitation?

  “Ah…augh…!”

  The gun fell from Uotani’s hands. She put both hands to her mouth as her face twisted in fear, and she trembled.

  She had inherited her grandmother’s drive and had protected the house with everything she had, but it had all been a ploy.

  Plus, the opponent she had been trying to fight had been an even more ruthless Shirayuki than she herself.

  Witnessing that coldness—that mercilessness—Uotani lacked the energy to resist her anymore.

  I felt Uotani’s despair and my spine trembled, too. Maki, who had calmly orchestrated this cruel play, was so terrifying it made it hard to breathe in her presence.

  “The curtain is falling…and it was an unbelievable farce.”

  A creature murmuring as her eyes glinted coldly, mocking people—she was Shirayuki.

  “What a sad excuse for a trump card…It truly is unspeakably ridiculous to be bound by immaterial things like family or bloodlines or promises.”

  The coldness of her look, the frigid tone of her voice, the waves of crazed rage that radiated from her entire body seemed to freeze us as we watched her. Like the fish in Demon Pond who can only quail at Shirayuki’s rage.

  “Whatever becomes of a human life, it is no concern of mine!”

  “Ancestors are ancestors, and parents are parents; they toyed with promises and vows as it suited them. When a human grows aged and slights the promise, what is there to fear in my breaking that vow one moment sooner?”

  “But these are Himekuras,” Maki went on muttering distantly. “They imprisoned their daughter in the heart of the mountains and had her lover murdered for the sake of the family’s honor. And the girl managed to slaughter people for the sake of revenge… Even now, this house, this land, is shackled by fear… Hardly a noble family. We’re a cursed clan washed in blood.”

  Out of nowhere, flames leaped into her eyes and she shouted an assault.

  “I wish the world would end and destroy everything!”

  The sadness inside her ferocity made my chest burn.

  Outright loathing. Unending frustration.

  It would go on as long as Maki was a Himekura.

  She was a Shirayuki who had lost her Yuri in Hotaru.

  The dragon princess who lost her source of consolation raged and caused floods and didn’t stop until she had swallowed up the world.

  The moon cracked and flowers fell.

  Beautiful illusions transformed into nightmares.

  When it seemed that we were about to be swallowed up by an inky nightmare, a voice rang out like light cutting through the darkness.

  “No. The curtain hasn’t fallen yet.”

  Tohko looked at Maki with noble eyes.

  We gasped as the book girl shed her raincoat and walked toward the dragon princess before our eyes.

  In the light of her flashlight, the water droplets glinted golden and fell away.

  The unsullied coolness reached Uotani’s face, and her eyes widened in surprise.

  Tohko’s posture as she stood swathed in her white dress was wispy and gentle, filled with the peace and purity of a priestess who drives away evil.

  “Maki, you haven’t heard the other story. The tale of Yuri and Akira isn’t a revenge story. Even if it seems that way on the surface, underneath that I, as a book girl, imagine a different story.”

  Once she’d fixed her strong, unwavering eyes on Mak
i, she put on a warm smile and turned to Uotani.

  “Sayo? I want you to hear the story I’m going to tell now. Listen all the way to the end without getting scared or losing hope.”

  At some point the rain had lessened to a drizzle.

  Turning back to the ferocious dragon princess, the book girl wove her tale in a gentle voice.

  “The story of Yuri and Akira begins with a book.

  “It was Kyōka Izumi’s Demon Pond, which Akira’s mother had lovingly transcribed word by word and embroidered the cover of with brilliant thread. It was the only one of its kind in the whole world.

  “The story features a couple named Akira Hagiwara and Yuri and a dragon princess named Shirayuki. Shirayuki is a cruel and capricious creature who causes droughts and floods, but she watched over Akira and Yuri tenderly.

  “There was a Shirayuki at the real Yuri’s side, too.

  “Yuri feared Shirayuki’s devilish nature and Shirayuki was aggravated by Yuri’s timidity, but for some reason the two stayed together.

  “It was impossible for them to be apart—after all, Yuri herself was Shirayuki.”

  I’d thought that might be the case. Because Shirayuki appeared on the water’s surface at night, through windows—always somewhere that would reflect Yuri’s face.

  Maki had probably confirmed that at least. And Uotani had known because she’d heard it from her grandmother.

  “Why did Yuri need to live in a villa deep in the mountains? In her diary, Yuri writes that it’s because she’s an oracle and she’d made a promise to her father.

  “The Himekura family tree began with an oracle, too.

  “In the heyday of the imperial court, there was an oracle with the blood of a dragon in her veins, and they say that she protected the country through her use of a ghoul who glowed white. She was granted noble rank for her good results, and the Himekuras secured their success in the import business by being a clan that presided over the waterways and achieved remarkable wealth. Isn’t that true, Maki?”