Late that night, I got up and put on my coat.
I picked up a toy rabbit from my shelf. I had loved this toy when I was little. I brushed its head, feeling how soft it was. It had been in my room since I was very young. Now I said goodbye to it. I placed it back on the shelf, and I put my sister’s lipstick in my coat pocket; I was bringing it with me so I wouldn’t lose my resolve.
I also took a flashlight, and then I left the house quietly, making sure my parents didn’t notice. If they had called out, I would never have been able to leave. But no voices came.
The abandoned hospital where my sister’s body was found was twenty minutes away by bicycle. I rode along a small road with no streetlights. It was dark all around, the light on my red bike the only break in the darkness.
My sister and I had shared this bike. One of us had crashed into something, and the basket was bent. I didn’t remember crashing, so it had probably been her fault. It was a red bike, which reminded me of Little Red Riding Hood. It was like I was that little girl—only I was going to my grandmother’s house knowing full well there was a wolf waiting for me there.
The sky was brighter than my surroundings. I could see the divide between the sky and the earth distinctly. The asphalt road was headed toward the mountains, and it soon gave way to gravel. I got off the bike there. As I walked, I found a fence with a sign that read, NO TRESPASSING.
The hospital was beyond that fence, but too far away for my flashlight to reach.
The light vanished, swallowed by the darkness. There were no houses or shops around, no little points of light in the distance—nothing but dry grass. Without wind to shake that grass, it was utterly quiet.
I parked my bike and made my way toward the fence, carrying only the flashlight. Gravel crunched underfoot. My breath produced white clouds, which faded quickly. There was a gate in the fence across the road, which opened easily when I pushed it. I stepped through.
The night my sister died, how had she arrived here? Had she walked in through the gate like I just had? Maybe the boy had held a knife to her and forced her to. Or had she been unconscious? Carried here, helplessly? The road to this hospital had been a one-way street for her, leading to her final destination.
Had this been a parking lot once? It was big enough. The long beam of my flashlight stretched across dry earth and gravel. In the distance was a massive white lump of concrete—two stories, hulking against the night sky. The building had once been a hospital, but now only the frame remained—like a dinosaur fossil, reduced to bones alone.
I stepped in through the entrance. Once there had been glass doors here, but now there was just an empty square mouth. I ran my flashlight around the lobby. I could barely recognize the benches, and there were lumps of concrete everywhere. The round beam picked walls out of the darkness, tracing the shapes scrawled there in spray paint.
My breathing had grown very shallow, and I felt out of breath. The ceiling above me went on forever, and it seemed to be pressing down on me from above. There were traces of the light fixtures here and there, with broken florescent lights underneath. I didn’t notice until I stepped on one and heard the glass shatter underfoot.
The hallway went on into the darkness. I moved forward, headed for the room where my sister had died. I had a general idea where it was: on the first floor, in the back.
It had been the operating chamber. I followed signs pointing to that location. My footsteps echoed off the walls, shaking the cold winter air.
I finally found the room at the end of the hall. The doors were gone, replaced by a square hole that opened onto darkness. I stepped through, and there was another empty doorway immediately behind it. Beyond that was empty space.
I ran the flashlight beam around the room. It was cold and lonely enough to freeze one’s very heart. It was so quiet that even the sound of a pebble rolling echoed. I felt like I could almost hear an isolated soul crying softly in the darkness.
There were long, thin sinks along the side of the room, for washing hands. And there were several doors leading to smaller rooms along the wall. Beyond those were the operating chambers—smaller rooms, three in all. I checked them each with the light.
There was no one here. The smaller rooms were only about fifteen feet wide. The first two were completely empty, but when I opened the third door, the farthest one, I froze in my tracks, sensing something sinister.
It was darker than the other room—much darker. The walls and ceiling and floor were all black, as if there’d been a fire.
I stepped into the room, making sure there was no one there. The door was constructed to swing shut on its own if you didn’t hold it, so it closed behind me as I stepped in. There was a row of cylinders along the wall, chained in place to keep them upright. In the center was a rusty metal bed: an operating table.
It was then I realized that the walls and ceiling hadn’t been burned. That black stain started from the central table, spread out to the floor under my feet, covered the floor of the room, and reached out under the door.
Before I knew it, I had my back to the wall, my free hand over my mouth, and I was trying not to scream. That black stain was the blood that had flowed out of my sister two months before.
In the darkness, I had almost seen her, the pieces of what had once been my sister, the ones the police had been forced to clean up.
Natsumi …
Will you ever hear this?
Suddenly, I heard my sister’s voice, right next to me. They were the first words from the first tape. I turned my flashlight toward the door of the room. In the round beam, I saw the door closing, as if someone had just stepped through it.
“Kitazawa Natsumi.” The boy’s voice came from the other side of the operating table, from the far wall. The entire area suddenly lit up, blinding me.
Against the light stood the boy—not in his uniform, but still dressed head to foot in black. The light in his hand was much more powerful than my flashlight. His other hand held a tape player, a tiny little thing. My sister’s voice was coming out of that.
He said he would deliver this message to you. He wants to enjoy seeing how you react to my words.
My sister’s voice played on, very loudly. Her ragged breathing echoed a little off the concrete walls, filling the bloodstained room. I looked at the operating table in the center of the room, where the bloodstains were darkest. It was a dark shadow across the otherwise empty room.
“Hiroko recorded this tape while lying on this table.”
The boy put the light and tape player down in the corner and moved over to the table. He stroked the black stain with his hand, lovingly.
“Why did you make me come here?” I asked, my voice trembling.