The person he had just buried had a name—such an ordinary thing to just now realize. The girl in the ground had parents, who had given her a name and raised her with love. And he had just buried alive the target of that love.
Sweet intoxication filled Saeki’s mind, like sugar water seeping into a cotton ball. Aboveground, the girl he had beaten was terrifying—but underground, out of sight, he felt his fear changing to bliss.
Then Saeki heard a voice, faintly—the wind almost drowned it out, it was so small.
Saeki looked at the bamboo poles again. The pale moonlight picked them out of the shadows around them, sending black lines across the garden to the porch where Saeki was sitting. Four of the bamboo poles were thicker than the others.
The tiny voice he had heard came from two of those thicker poles. Saeki stood up, slipped on his shoes, and stepped directly from the porch into the garden. He walked across the garden, feeling like he wasn’t moving at all, like he was a sleepwalker drifting through an unreal world. There was no light save that of the moon, and the trees around his garden loomed like dark shadows on either side, staring down at him.
He stepped onto the scattered straw, approaching the bamboo poles, which came up to his chest, and peering down into them. There was nothing inside but darkness, darkness like his hollow heart, across a diameter as wide as his thumb. He could just make out the girl’s trembling voice, carried up the pole to the world aboveground. Her voice was very weak, and the wind snatched it from the end of the poles, scattering it like smoke.
One of the poles was louder than the other. There were two poles in the coffin, but one was at her feet. The other was near her face, and when she spoke inside the coffin, the pole near her face carried her voice better.
“Hello?” she said feebly. Her cut lip must’ve made it hard to speak loudly. “Let me out …”
Saeki went down on his knees, his palms against the earth between the bamboo poles. He had just buried her, and the earth under the straw was still soft.
The girl’s voice was coming from under his hands. He knew it was just his imagination, but the ground felt warm, as if he were feeling the body heat of the girl buried there.
Poor thing. How helpless she was, trapped down below his soles, breathing through a pole in the ground. He pitied her. Knowing she was buried beneath him, unable to do a thing, he felt so superior. He felt the same as he did when looking at a puppy or a kitten.
“Can you hear me?” he asked, standing up. His voice traveled through the darkness inside the poles, reaching the girl.
“Who … who’s there?” he heard her say. Saeki said nothing, and her voice rose up again. “You shut me in here, didn’t you? Then you buried me underground.”
“You know you’ve been buried?” Saeki asked, taken aback. If she had just now woken up inside the coffin, there was no way she should know anything but the fact that she was trapped in a small, enclosed, dark place.
The girl said nothing for a moment. Then, “I heard the dirt hitting the lid.”
“You were pretending to be unconscious?”
He had thought she’d been sleeping since he’d knocked her out. When had she woken up? He had never tied her up. If she had been awake before he put her in the box, she would’ve tried to run.
“Are your legs injured? Is that why you didn’t run?” he asked. The girl said nothing. Maybe his guess was right.
“Let me out!” she said angrily.
Her sudden anger took Saeki by surprise. She didn’t cry and plead—she was giving orders. He couldn’t see her underground, but he could sense how strong she was. But even in her strength, she was powerless.
“No, I’m afraid not. I really am sorry,” he said, shaking his head, even though the buried girl couldn’t see him. “If I let you out, you’d tell everyone what I did to you. I can’t let that happen.”
“Wh-who are you? Why are you doing this?” Her questions echoed in his heart.
Why had he buried her? He could find no exit from that question. It led him directly into a dead end. But he decided there was no reason to be polite and answer her, so he stopped thinking about it.
“That doesn’t matter.”
“Where am I? The mountains?”
“No, you’re in my garden. This is your grave.”
The girl fell quiet. He tried to imagine what her face must look like in that tiny, dark space.
“Grave? You’ve got to be kidding. I’m still alive.”
“Burying dead people isn’t as much fun,” Saeki said, feeling like that was extremely obvious.
It seemed to leave the girl speechless for a moment. Then she growled, “If you don’t let me out, you’ll be in trouble.”
“You think someone’s coming to save you?”
“I know someone who will find me!” she suddenly roared. Then she yelped in pain and fell silent again. He could hear her breathing heavily. Maybe her ribs were injured and they hurt every time she spoke. Saeki thought there was a surprising passion in her words.
“This friend you trust so much … a boy?”
“Yes,” she said, but with a confidence that made it clear she was talking about her boyfriend.
“May I ask his name?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“Curiosity.”
There was a long silence, and then the girl said the boy’s name. Saeki branded that name into his memories but privately wondered if she was lying. There was a possibility that no such person existed, but Saeki had no way of verifying the truth.
“I’m going to have to buy some binoculars.”
The night sky was filling with clouds drifting across the face of the moon. Tomorrow it might well be overcast.
“Do you know why?” Saeki asked. The girl remained silent. “To watch him mourn your loss from a distance.”
He was sure his voice had reached the girl’s ears, yet she said nothing at all. Saeki said a few more things, trying to draw a response, but she reacted to nothing. She just lay there silently in the dark.
Assuming he had made her mad, Saeki left the garden. Her mood would change in the morning.
He went to the garage and cleaned the backseat of the car. He could leave no trace of her presence there. In the car, he always kept a small pillow, which he’d placed under her head when he’d laid her down. All her blood had soaked into it, so there were no stains on the seat. Saeki took the pillow out of the car and gathered up all the long black hairs from the floor.
When he was done cleaning, he went inside, checked the clock on the wall, and discovered that it was already past two. He went up to his room, laid down on his futon, and tried to sleep. He lay there with his eyes closed, searching for the entrance to the land of dreams, his thoughts on the girl locked in tiny, isolated darkness.