The ambulance siren faded into the distance.
The onlookers watched as the ambulance took the young college student away, their eyes following the red light as it lapped at the surface of the road. There was no real curiosity in the villagers’ eyes, let alone any hint of commiseration with the victim or even anger at the perpetrator. Their relieved expressions seemed so inappropriate for the scene of an accident. The villagers remained where they were, pleasant smiles upon their faces. I pushed my way past, searching for a gap in the crowd. It felt like swimming in a dark sea, the opposite shore nowhere in sight. After working my way through the gap between two shoulders, I bumped into the back of a woman who was standing still.
“Oh, excuse me…”
The woman, in her late fifties, turned around and nodded softly. The smile lines around her eyes and mouth deepened.
“It was touch and go there for a moment. But he was able to smile at the end! What a relief…”
I stared down at the woman’s hollow smile, completely forgetting to apologize for having bumped into her. The inside of my mouth went dry. I was having trouble forming words.
“He’s a good boy; that must be why the mermaid showed him the dream. Now we can rest easy if he doesn’t pull through.”
“So you know the young man who was on the motorbike?”
The woman looked at me in shock for a moment, before suddenly pressing the back of her hand against her chin in a strangely coy gesture. She smiled again.
“Know him? Why, he’s my son. I’m the boy’s mother.”
The blood creeping along the asphalt pooled against the woman’s shoes, staining the white cloth of her sneakers a brownish red. The smile remained on her face, even as her feet were covered in an eddy of her own son’s blood.
Turning around, I saw a tense look on Miyaki’s face.
“This place. Do you think…?” She didn’t finish her question.
I lowered my voice as I nodded and whispered back.
“I do. Of all the strange villages I’ve been to, this place takes the cake.”
As the sun began to sink over the coastal road, the tourist shops on either side began to cast shadows onto the pavement. The world turned indigo blue, as if at the bottom of the ocean.
I filled Miyaki in on what Susaki had told me, careful to avoid the villagers’ prying eyes.
“I figured it was something like that,” Miyaki whispered, nodding several times. “But if the mermaid was killed and eaten by the people of this village, I doubt she’s rewarding them with anything so great as eternal life.”
“No. If I were the mermaid, I’d want to find a way to curse them, even in death.”
“But if the mermaid’s flesh brought a curse instead of a blessing, why do the villagers here die with smiles of happiness on their faces?”
I pursed my lips and tried to think. It all seemed connected, but we were still missing something crucial. It was impossible to reach a conclusion.
“Also, if the people who ate the mermaid flesh were the same generation as that girl’s grandfather, there can’t be that many of them left at this point, can there? But even that college kid on the bike was smiling earlier. Does that mean the curse extends to future generations as well?”
“Who knows? But just because they’re smiling doesn’t necessarily mean they’re happy. Who knows what’s really going on inside their heads? Regardless, whether it’s a blessing or a curse, it’s clearly not real immortality.”
Miyaki placed her chin in the palm of her hand for a moment, lost in thought.
“Speaking of which,” she said suddenly, snapping her fingers. “I don’t know if this is related or not, but apparently, they still bury their dead in this village. That’s rare in Japan these days.”
“They…bury their dead?”
“Yes. I had some free time while you were in that motel, so I struck up a conversation with a family who were on their way to visit a loved one’s grave. According to what they told me, they used to cremate the deceased, just like elsewhere, but they switched to burials so that people would be able to sleep for a little while longer, peacefully dreaming of the mermaid.”
“It sounds like you’ve been busy.”
“I can’t let you work this whole case all by yourself… Speaking of which, you didn’t do anything else while you were in that motel, did you? Other than talk?”
“What else would there be to do?”
Miyaki pursed her lips, smiling suggestively. This was still better than the smiles of the villagers, though, whose eyes were fixed on less corporeal sights.
Glancing down the beach past the line of roofs, I saw a sunken dip in the earth where the ground seemed to have recessed. Peering closer, I was able to make out a dense cluster of small stone rectangles. Gravestones.
“Let’s go.”
Miyaki nodded. The sea breeze was growing cooler.
“By the way…,” Miyaki said, lifting her face as if she had just remembered something. “You know they say that some people smile instinctively when they’re scared.”
“Gee, thanks for sharing.”
The breeze that crawled up from the sea and swept over the road was fetid with the stench of rotting fish. Our backs, damp with sweat from climbing the hill, were just beginning to cool in the winter air as Miyaki and I arrived at a small cemetery surrounded by a concrete block wall. Without light from the harbor, the cemetery was not much different than that of any other backwater. Above us, crisscrossing, mummified branches formed a dome in the sky.
The tombstones were filthy, littered with limescale and brown pine needles. Beyond the old and weathered block wall, I could see a bulldozer parked halfway up along the roughly gouged surface of the mountain. My guess was that they were building another hotel for tourists. The sky was layered in indigo and orange.
We began walking, weaving our way between the gravestones.
“I don’t know what I expected us to find. It’s not like an arm is going to suddenly shoot out of the ground like in some zombie flick,” Miyaki said, shrugging.
Among the half-withered bouquets entwined around the ladles for sprinkling water on the graves, I saw there was at least one new, though faded, flower. Or so I thought, until I noticed the flower was fake. I spotted a curved shadow past the rows of stiff stone rectangles.
Directing my eyes that way, I saw a gravestone that was shaped like a mermaid sitting on a rock. Her spine was arched backward as if she were howling at the sky, and her tail fin peeked out from a cascade of long wavy hair around her ears. Naturally, I began to walk in that direction.
Just then, I heard a loud crash. The thick scent of dust and grit invaded my nostrils. No sooner had I turned around than a shower of concrete fragments from the collapsing wall rained down all around me in a plume of ashen smoke, just like a breaking wave. My brain went haywire as I processed my impending death—
—“I don’t know what I expected us to find. It’s not like an arm is going to suddenly shoot out of the ground like in some zombie flick,” Miyaki said, shrugging. Among the half-withered bouquets entwined around the ladles for sprinkling water on the graves, I saw there was at least one new, though faded, flower. Or so I thought, until I noticed the flower was fake. I spotted a curved shadow past the rows of stiff stone rectangles.
Directing my eyes that way, I saw a gravestone that was shaped like a mermaid sitting on a rock. Her spine was arched backward as if she were howling at the sky, and her tail fin peeked out from a cascade of long wavy hair around her ears. I felt like I had seen this somewhere before.
Naturally, I began to walk in that direction. Just then, I heard a loud crash—
“—I don’t know what I expected us to find,” Miyaki said, shrugging.
I felt like I had heard her say those same words and had seen her shrug just like that somewhere else before.
“What’s wrong?”
I came to a halt. Among the decaying flowers that had been left before the graves, there was one, that synthetic flower, covered in a layer of dust.
“This is our first time here, right?”
Miyaki looked puzzled.
Glancing around, I saw one gravestone past the other rectangular stone markers that was shaped like a mermaid.