A Small Charred Face Read online

  A Small Charred Face

  HONTO NO HANA WO MISE NI KITA by Kazuki Sakuraba

  Copyright © 2014 Kazuki Sakuraba

  All rights reserved.

  Originally published by Bungeishunju Ltd. in 2014.

  English Translation © 2017 VIZ Media, LLC.

  Cover Illustration by George Cotronis

  Cover and interior design by Adam Grano

  No portion of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from the copyright holders.

  HAIKASORU

  Published by VIZ Media, LLC

  P.O. Box 77010

  San Francisco, CA 94107

  www.haikasoru.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Sakuraba, Kazuki, 1971– author.

  Title: A small charred face / Kazuki Sakuraba ; translated by Jocelyne Allen.

  Other titles: Hontåo no hana o miseni kita. English

  Description: San Francisco : Haikasoru, 2017.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017020679 | ISBN 9781421595412 (paperback)

  Subjects: LCSH: Vampires—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Romance / Gothic. | FICTION / Horror. | GSAFD: Horror fiction. | Gothic fiction.

  Classification: LCC PL875.5.A39 H6613 2017 | DDC 895.63/6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017020679

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  First printing, September 2017

  Haikasoru eBook edition

  ISBN: 978-1-4215-9913-7

  CONTENTS

  1.

  A SMALL

  CHARRED

  FACE

  2.

  I CAME TO

  SHOW YOU

  REAL FLOWERS

  3.

  YOU WILL GO

  TO THE LAND OF

  THE FUTURE

  About the Author

  Bamboo

  The snow danced through the air. A dance of death. I alone was motionless, my fingers numb with cold. My hands, my feet.

  My teeth began to chatter, pebbles clacking up against each other. If they had been flints, flames would have sprung to life in my mouth.

  Was I going to die too?

  I could hear the warm blood flowing out of Mama’s body from where she lay in the hallway, her long legs splayed. The slow oozing had been echoing in my ears like the trumpets of the apocalypse. My teeth were chattering in time with the music. My tears froze solid on my cheeks.

  The glass doors leading out to the terrace had been left open; huge drifts of pure-white snow gusted in. The heavy velvet curtains flapped threateningly in the direction of the gilded Japanese-style floor desk under which I hid.

  From the neighboring hall, I heard my older sister start to scream. I squeezed my eyes shut. My shaking started to take on a noticeable rhythm.

  The men’s feet on the hard floor reverberated throughout the house.

  In between wailing sobs, my sister groaned, “Kill me, kill me.”

  “This is some house!” I heard one man say.

  “Take a look at that! This fucking fancy piano,” another commented. “The sofa. And these sculptures!”

  “I can’t take it. Kill—”

  An irritated gunshot cut my sister off.

  Instantly, my eyes flew open. The sky said evening. The blue-gray light of late winter, colored with despair, poured into the room. The snow grew heavier. I curled into a ball, clutched my knees, tried to make myself almost impossibly small.

  I heard the echoes of rough footfalls.

  “Said to kill everyone?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We’re done here then. The woman and the kids. Three servants. A cook, a cleaning woman, and a washerwoman. Five people.”

  “There’s still the son. He’s like ten or something. I’ve seen him before. No one’s come across him, huh?”

  “He’s probably out somewhere. We’ll wait downstairs. One shot through the door when he comes back and we’re done.”

  “Ten, huh? If he’s as cute as his mother and sister…”

  “Pft! You do what you want.”

  The men’s footfalls faded down the stairs. The curtains fluttered up again in the wind, a gust mixed with icy snow, the breath of the god of death.

  They were getting drunk downstairs. The bodies of the servants were still there in the kitchen.

  On the other side of the window, dusk was falling too slowly, taunting me. It felt like a hundred years had passed already.

  This town was nothing but organization men and people under their thumbs. Even if I did manage to somehow make it out of the house, there was nowhere for me to run. Nowhere in the world. This was the end.

  Night finally fell, painting the other side of the window a chilly ultramarine. Shivering, I crawled out from under the low writing desk. An unflinching farewell.

  Sister.

  The thought of trying to walk without making any noise set me to trembling so badly I couldn’t stay on my feet. Crawling awkwardly on all fours, I went out into the hallway and slipped slowly past Mama into the hall beyond her. My sister’s eyes were wide open and glassy; she was dead. Her hands were clenched into tight fists, and she wasn’t wearing any clothes. Her prestigious junior high uniform, the dream of every girl, was currently spread out all over the room, strewn across the furniture.

  I crawled over to her. With a shaking hand, I closed her eyelids. I touched a finger to the hole between her eyebrows. Her eyelids were cold already, but the wound opening still held a faint warmth.

  My sister…

  I heard a sound and quickly looked over my shoulder. It couldn’t have been the men coming back up here. They were talking about something downstairs.

  I strained my ears. The glass doors? Had someone come in through the open doors in the next room?

  The chattering of my teeth stopped. I listened with my whole body, with every suspicious, wary nerve ending.

  The faintest of footsteps. Feet shuffling. Feet dragging? Who?

  Whoever it was cut across the room, stumbled upon the desk I had only recently been hiding under, and then came out into the hallway.

  I drew closer to the hallway and peered out quietly. There was someone in the shadows. The light of the winter moon carved out the silhouette of a young man—not too tall, with broad shoulders. In the time it took me to blink, he crouched down soundlessly. Right where Mama had fallen.

  I squinted harder into the darkness. Held my breath. And then…

  Slp, slp, slp. I heard the sound of drinking. Blood.

  In my mind’s eye, I saw Mama half-naked, her gold blouse stained red, striped miniskirt ripped. The man pressed his mouth to her neck and slurped up her blood.

  This…this wasn’t someone from the organization. The clothes he wore, the way he looked were just too different. I mean, he wasn’t even human.

  I remembered a scary story my second papa had told me a long, long time ago about a race of monsters that came from deep in the mountains of China. They were called the Bamboo. And true to their name, they were monsters of those tall grasses, carnivorous plants that drank the lifeblood of humans and ate their still-living flesh. They were nearly human in appearance. But unable to stand under the light of the sun, they walked the night…

  That’s why you weren’t supposed to go out walking alone after the sun set. The Bamboo would find you and eat you.

  Mama had looked at me shaking in fear and laughed in her high-pitched voice. “Isn’t that just a story to frighten children?”
/>   And now Mama was dead, crumpled on the floor like a marionette with its strings cut, and something was eagerly lapping at her blood.

  I heard a noise like a blade slicing through flesh. It was that…thing lifting his face. My whole body shook. My teeth started chattering like crazed castanets again.

  The man seemed sincerely surprised to find a living creature before him. I couldn’t see his face. Only the blood around his mouth was visible, glistening in the dark.

  “You.” Was he smiling? “You’re seriously good at making yourself invisible, boyo!” Surprisingly, the voice fell somewhere between that of a boy and a young man. It was teasing and unexpectedly gentle.

  “Who are you?”

  “Bamboo.”

  “Do the Bamboo really exist?”

  “What? You’ve heard of us?”

  “You walk at night! Drink lifeblood! Eat flesh!”

  “Dummy. We don’t drink lifeblood. We have laws, y’know.”

  “Laws?”

  The men downstairs stopped talking abruptly. The Bamboo held his index finger up to his lips. Shh! That finger also glistened with fresh blood.

  I stared at him, bewitched. Strangely, I wasn’t frightened, even though I had cried so hard when my second papa had told me the story. I mean, I was going to die either way.

  Downstairs, the men started speaking again.

  The Bamboo in front of me slowly began to move his mouth once more, and something—hair wet with blood—bobbed up and down. “The smell of blood called out to me. I mean, this town constantly reeks of blood, y’know? All the different organizations fighting all the time. They never get sick of it. But what’s the big hubbub here?”

  “My papa slept with the boss’s woman, and they found out,” I replied, my voice absurdly calm. “He took the woman and the money and the goods and ran off. So they killed Mama and my sister and me tonight, as a lesson.”

  “Huh, makes sense. But you’re still alive, aren’t you?”

  I closed my mouth.

  There was a group of hitmen downstairs now, happily drinking the night away. Probably everyone in town knew by now that the only one they hadn’t taken out yet was the son. I could never trust a living human being again.

  But if I could choose the method of my death in a last moment of selfishness… Please, God. I took one step, then another, walking toward the unearthly monster.

  “Huh? What?”

  I reached out both hands. I wanted to be released from my terror! I’d had more than enough of this tired human instinct to survive working on overdrive, ordering me to run away, to push back against destiny, to fight desperately to live right up until the last, all despite the fact that the end result would be the same, no matter what I did—I would lose the battle and die. The finish line was the same. But somehow, I was supposed to fight, to resist. Any god that would order me to do something like that was a thoughtless, spoiled brat.

  I heard muffled laughter—heh heh heh—and opened my eyes.

  He was looking down on me, his own eyes large and turned downward at the corners, his eyelashes thick and long. In the darkness, his eyes and the red blood around his mouth alone seemed transparent; they shone with an eerie clarity.

  “Meat on a plate then! Blood that flies into the cup! First time I’ve seen that!”

  “Don’t…make fun of me,” I protested, my voice trembling. Don’t laugh at my last hope.

  The Bamboo stopped his snickering. And then he crouched down and met my eyes. “Hey, you’re shaking.” He touched my shoulders lightly, playfully exasperated.

  “Okay, boyo,” he said, kindly. “Listen up. We Bamboo have rules. Y’know? We have our own—well, I guess it’s something like a government. It’s different from the country you human beings have made, but it’s ours. And we have our own strict laws. Or maybe you’d call them precepts? I dunno how it was in China in the beginning. I dunno anything about way back then. But for the Bamboo living in Japan right now, it’s a thing that you’re only allowed to eat the dead. Like, we can only drink the blood of the dead.” The Bamboo cocked his head to one side slowly. “But maybe this is all over your head?”

  “What happens if you break the rule?”

  “You get locked up for sixty years! They stuff you in a barrel and bury you in the ground!”

  “You’d be an old man after that!”

  “Huh? Would not. Why would I?” the Bamboo retorted, curiously.

  Now that he mentioned it, my second papa had said that the Bamboo were young forever. They never aged. And he said that, just like bamboo, just once, when they’re around 120 years old, they bloom, bursting into a spray of white flowers. Then they disappear into nothingness.

  The one who had left this morning with the boss’s woman and money and stuff was my fourth papa. He had come to Japan from somewhere in Latin America. He’d joined one of the organizations in this town, the one for people from the same place as him, and had moved up through the ranks. After my poor Japanese mama had latched on to him, life in our family had suddenly gotten a whole lot easier. But that had ended this morning.

  The wind whirled and carved out a circle, winding through the room. In the blink of an eye, the Bamboo was sitting on the edge of the open window. He waved. “Later, kid!”

  I cocked my head to one side and stared at him. The icy light of the moon illuminated his face for the first time. His large eyes were dry like desert sand. His eyebrows were thick, and a beard covered the lower half of his face. His clothing was oddly neat. It wasn’t expensive like the stuff Papa and Mama wore, but it was well cut, and he wore it with dignity. With his sharply defined features, he looked half-Latino and half-Japanese. The way the moonlight caught his dark skin made me think, Aah, if only he didn’t have that beard, he could be one of those beautiful boys the girls love.

  But if the Bamboo had a rule, I guess that was that. I smiled. Goodbye, Bamboo. So the story about the bloodsucking grass monsters was true, after all. I wouldn’t tell anyone, though, just because I’d seen one. I mean, I had no tomorrow.

  Perhaps the men had heard our footsteps; there was an intent silence coming from down below, like they were straining their ears, listening. This was followed by the sound of feet climbing the stairs. The rustling of guns being drawn.

  The Bamboo twisted his face up.

  The footsteps came closer.

  My teeth chattered. My whole body shook again.

  My sister’s wide-open eyes. Her scattered uniform. Her trampled dignity. Would I also tell them I couldn’t stand it and beg them to kill me? The warmth of the wound between her eyebrows. My sister. The footsteps reached the hallway. My terror made me a stone statue. I closed my eyes.

  Do the weak not even get to choose the way we die? Preyed upon, tormented, we die.

  “The rule’s absolute,” the Bamboo muttered, almost like he was making excuses. “I’d get more than the barrel underground for sixty years for this. I mean, punishment by fire’s no joke, y’know? It’s pretty much the most painful way for us to disappear from this world. So it’s a no-go. Sorry, ’kay?” For some reason, the words that followed sounded like he was whispering right in my ear. “I don’t owe you anything. Right? Yeah?”

  What was he talking about?

  The men approached from the hallway. They entered the room, moved to turn on the light and banish the pitch-black dark.

  “Aah, dammit… Goddammit! Quit making that face at me!” The Bamboo clicked his tongue surprisingly loudly. “Quit crying!”

  Click. The lights came on. I knew even with my eyes shut that they were painfully bright.

  Aah, they’ve finally found me. It’s the end of today, of tomorrow, of yesterday, of forever.

  And then the wind was roaring in my ears.

  When I opened my eyes, I was flying through the night sky, the snow fluttering down like a lie, li
ke a dream. It was beautiful.

  Was I dead? It was surprisingly comfortable. I felt no pain, no shame. It felt somewhat anticlimactic.

  I looked to one side. I was wrong. I wasn’t dead. The Bamboo was clutching me for some reason; we flew through the air in a wobbly fashion that did not inspire confidence. The chill sky was painted ultramarine. The cold clung to everything. I slowly looked back over my shoulder.

  The peninsula jutted out into the Pacific Ocean. It looks just like Santa Claus’s boot, eh? my sister used to say, giggling. A little place in eastern Japan. Several narrow roads wound around the hill toward the ocean like capillaries. At the top was the domain of the very wealthy, where we lived. Mansions gave way to shacks and huts the closer you got to the ocean. There was basically no movement between the town at the top of the hill and the slum at the bottom. Almost like they were separate countries.

  I had been convinced that I’d never get out of there alive. But the sumptuous estate, complete with pool, gradually receded from my sight, along with the luxurious town laid out like some kind of Shangri-la.

  “So you saved me?” I asked the Bamboo’s face in profile.

  “Swear your loyalty to me.”

  “Let me think about that.”

  “You cheeky brat! And you’re a crybaby on top of that!”

  A warm relief spread through me, although the core of my heart was still frozen with terror. But, bit by bit, I was finding my way back. And then an abnormally powerful desire to sleep, like an evil spirit, assaulted my consciousness.

  “Hey!” I said, rubbing my eyes.

  “Quiet! I’ll drop you, y’know. I’m trying to concentrate on flying here!”

  “You have a name?”

  “Course I do.”

  “I’m Kyo.”

  “Mustah.”

  “…Mustah!” Murmuring the name, I clung tightly to his solid chest. It was cold like a corpse’s. The temperature of the night. The faint green scent of bamboo clung to him.

  This is my Bamboo! I’ll swear my loyalty. Not out loud, though.

  I hugged him tightly.

  My Bamboo was unfortunately not very good at flying, it seemed. If he were driving, he would have had one of those new driver stickers on the bumper to warn others on the road. Or maybe it was because I was too heavy? Mustah swung dangerously back and forth, threatening to drop me into the abyss at any second as we floated awkwardly toward the bottom of the peninsula shaped like Santa Claus’s boot, toward the impoverished town near the ocean.