Brave Story - Miyuki Miyabe [93]
The phone rang.
The phone was sitting in the far corner of the living room. It was a large unit, with a personal fax machine attached to it. Mitsuru’s aunt got up from the sofa to pick it up.
Wataru’s vision wavered, and he had a sudden feeling of dread. The summer before, he had gone with his father to a large art museum and seen the painting Cypress Trees by Vincent van Gogh. It was a bright, pretty painting, but he remembered being struck by the sky the most. It was filled with strange and crooked swirls. When he left the museum later that day, those swirls still turned behind Wataru’s eyes. When he looked up at the real sky, it seemed like it was spinning. And when he got on the train, the handrails were spinning. Everything was spinning! That night, when his dad took him to a restaurant for dinner, he was still obsessed with that van Gogh painting—he could barely eat a thing. That’s how it felt right now. If he looked out the window, at the sky, maybe he would see those swirls—a churning, swirling energy, flowing into everything, filling the world.
Mitsuru’s aunt seemed to be clinging tighter and tighter to the receiver as she spoke.
Wataru began to worry that maybe, by talking about school, he had tripped a flag.
In role-playing games and adventure games, the story typically followed a set course. Usually, you would have to ask a particular person a predetermined question to advance to the next stage of the story. Programmers set up flags to keep track of which of these turning points the player had passed. Once a flag was up, you were free to go on, but sometimes you could get stuck in the same part of a game for weeks, unable to find the event that would trigger the flag, scratching your head without a clue how to proceed.
That’s what Wataru’s conversation just now with Mitsuru’s aunt had felt like. Wataru knew things and she knew things that neither of them were telling each other. They were talking, but the story wasn’t going anywhere…until Wataru, unwittingly, said whatever the key word was that she had been waiting for. It had set off a flag. They were going to the next stage.
Mitsuru’s aunt hung up the phone. She looked pale. “Three kids in the sixth grade are missing,” she said, her voice trembling. Before Wataru could even nod, she ran over to him and grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him violently. “Why didn’t you tell me? Wataru, you knew, didn’t you? Kenji and his friends were stalking Mitsuru—that’s why you came looking for him when you heard they had gone missing, isn’t it? What if Mitsuru did something to them? Well? Why don’t you say something? Answer me!” she shouted, then shoved Wataru away. She covered her face with her hands and slumped to the ground. Wataru felt dizzy, but not on account of the shaking. It was the swirling behind his eyes, the swirling in his heart.
What if Mitsuru did something to them?
It was one of the first questions out of her mouth—and she had sounded terrified. Wataru didn’t think she was worried about Mitsuru, either. She was worried about Kenji.
Who would think that?!
Did she know he could use magic? Did she know he could chant incantations and summon monsters to harm his enemies? She must. How else would she get the idea that Mitsuru could do anything, three to one, against Kenji’s gang. What do you know, Ms. Ashikawa?
“There were a lot of television reporters at school,” Wataru said in a quiet voice. “A lot of helicopters too. One of the girls in class told us that on the news, they were saying two of Kenji’s friends had been found. They were alive, but it was weird…”
Mitsuru’s aunt looked at him through her fingers. “Weird?”
“They couldn’t remember anything about the night before.”
Mitsuru’s aunt dropped her hands and stood. “Well, Mitsuru can’t do anything like that.” She spoke in a flat, even tone, as though she had resigned herself to some fate already and was just waiting for the pieces to fall into place. “But if the television crews were there—then I’m afraid he’s finished. They’ll find out he ran away, and they’ll come asking