I suppose that, as the guardian and savior of the city, she could never reveal the true story to anyone.
Long ago, when her mother first died—
—she had felt an intense desire for revenge against the dead that had stolen her only family from her.
She wondered how she could possibly dispel this feeling. She pondered how she could eradicate those ghouls from the world.
Clarice, who had just turned ten years old, dedicated the rest of her life to honing her skills. She spent night after countless night hunting the dead.
However, that did not dispel her feelings.
No matter what she did, her mother, who had died in front of her eyes, was not coming back. Even so, she dreamed of a day when she might feel better, and she continued hunting the dead almost every day.
Eventually, she started to get together with other people who had similar goals.
Eventually, their group came to be called the Crescent Moon Company.
Before she knew it, Clarice had turned fifteen.
Through all the days of endless fighting, she always held in mind the image of her gentle mother. And her pitiful end. She felt it was her duty to keep those creatures from threatening her people ever again.
But the dead were, so to speak, the deceased coming back to this world again. And that meant as long as people were dying, the dead were sure to keep appearing.
And there was also a possibility that her mother, who had previously died in front of her eyes, would reappear as well.
“Ahh…uhh…”
Then one day, Clarice was out subduing the dead as she always did.
Just like always, she was slicing through the translucent entities that appeared on the streets with her sickle.
“—Ah.”
That was the day that her hand, which swung the sickle day after day, over and over, finally came to a stop.
She recognized one of the ghouls, wandering through the streets just like all the others, continuously spilling wordless noises from its mouth.
It was the figure of her mother, whom she had lost five years earlier.
She looked just as she had when she’d died in front of Clarice’s eyes.
“……”
Clarice readied her sickle.
If she was being honest, standing in front of the image of her mother did shake Clarice’s determination. There was hesitation in her hands.
But no matter what form they took, the dead were the dead. If she didn’t deal with her mother there, she was sure to go attack someone else, and that would just give rise to another new ghoul.
Kindness and naïveté would only spur on a never-ending series of tragedies.
So Clarice readied her wand and closed the distance between them in one go.
Then she swung her sickle down.
With a squelch, the body of the ghoul she had cut into collapsed.
“Ahhh…uhhh…”
One by one, each part of the body lost its form and disintegrated. Arms and legs vanished like so much fog.
And the head floated gently up into the air.
“Ah—Clarice.”
“Mother—,” Clarice mumbled. “I’m sorry—”
“Clarice, Clarice—”
Clarice’s mother’s face looked down at her as it drifted up into the sky and disintegrated.
And then—
—her mother spoke.
The remains of her kind mother, her mother who had always helped her with her school work, spoke to Clarice.
“I wish you had never been born.”
When she heard those words, at first she doubted her own ears.
But when Clarice looked up at the thing that had been her mother, it repeated itself. “If only I had never had you! He and I could have been together!” Over and over, it shouted, “If only you had never been born! He and I could have been together!” Again, and again. “If only you didn’t exist! I wish I had never given birth to someone like you! You! If you weren’t here! I would have been free!”
Clarice wondered if she was dreaming.
There was no way her beloved mother would say such cruel things. Surely, after becoming one of the dead, after transforming into an inhuman creature, she had started saying things that were not in her own heart.
“I’ve got to help my mother—”
Before she knew it, Clarice told me, she had a change of heart.
After that, she began her research on the dead.
The very first thing she did was to look into their ecology.
“The dead are nothing more than an aggregation of people’s strong emotions,” she told me. “Right before you die, what do you figure people think about? People who are hanged must surely think about it being hard to breathe, or about wanting to breathe, or something like that. People who are stabbed to death are probably crying about how badly it hurts. For every human death, the conscious thought that is etched into their mind in those last moments must be different.”
“……Well, sure, I guess that’s right.”
“According to the results of my research, the dead are composed of nothing more than people’s thoughts combined with magical energy.”
……
“And if my theory was correct, that meant my mother—”
Wouldn’t that mean your mother was holding a grudge against you? I was about to ask, but Clarice shook her head.
“Do you think people who died by hanging were thinking about it being hard to breathe twenty-four hours a day, every day?”
In a detached tone, she told me, “Those things are each the size of a human being, but they’ve only got a single thought rattling around inside them. They’re mostly empty. That’s the reason why so many of the dead are constantly mumbling nonsense.”
And when the results of her research came to light, there was one more thing that became clear.
Over the course of several years, certain ghouls reappeared wandering around town, again and again.