Beautiful Blood

I know you are there

I took the subway to Shibuya on Saturday afternoon, after school. Keiji asked me to go to the cinema with Chiaki, Ken and him but I refused politely, saying I had some other thing to do. I did not tell anyone I was going to Shibuya to meet Andou, in her apartment. I guessed it would be weird for me to visit the detective that was working on my case in private. My case...If it was even my case. I was alive. So, it was the case of all those women that died.

On Wednesday afternoon, I thought as I was sitting on the train next to a guy with short green hair listening to a song I also knew and liked, on the evening news, the police department finally issued an official statement about the bodies discovered in and around the well.

They found a hundred bodies of murdered women. What was the most creepy part was the fact that some of the bodies were over a century old, others 50 or 20 years old, and finally some several months old. I wondered what that meant. Who was kidnapping and killing women for over a century? As the train stopped on my station I realized I was convinced all the murders were committed by one person.

Which would mean the person is a over a hundred years old, I told myself as I went out. But, that should not be too strange considering that creature that attacked me.

For the first time after the accident, I thought about the being in that dark room. As I was crossing the street, the image of that thing came back to my mind. What was that thing? I knew how it looked like, if I could draw, I’d draw it pretty well. I could describe it to the smallest of details to someone who wanted to draw it. But, no matter what, I had no idea what it was.

At least I knew what it was not: a human or an animal. But, it seemed as a strange mixture of the two. All the organs that I could see were humane. The rest of him looked like a mutilated wild animal. And not to mention the bat-like wings.

‘’Look look, mommy, I’m a vampire.’’

I jerked and looked at the child wearing fake vampire teeth and grinning at its mother; it was a small boy, probably not older than five. The mother smiled and told him something. I did not hear since someone was yelling at me to stop blocking the way. I kept walking, my thoughts drifting back to the creature.

A vampire, I thought and shook my head. It did drink my blood but it was not a vampire. Right? It could not have been. Such things do not exist. But...what made me so sure? I saw a demonic creature attacking me and almost killing me. So, why should vampires not exist?

Before I could linger on the thought further (and scare the hell out of myself), I was in front of Andou’s building. I went inside and took the stairs to the first floor where she lived. She opened the door a short moment after I rang the doorbell.

It was usual for me to see her wearing some old black pants she probably only wore around the apartment and in a white T-shirt with short sleeves, two times bigger than her size. I wondered if the T-shirt belonged to her boyfriend or something like that.

‘’Come in.’’ She said.

I walked inside. The apartment smelled like lavender.

We made ourselves comfortable in her living room; she brought some cake and coke and then sat in front of me, on an armchair.

‘’Do you want to get to the point or?’’

‘’Yes. I don’t have much time, I need to be back home by 5.’’ I nodded sipping the coke eagerly, I was very thirsty.

‘’Alright.’’

‘’Tell me, how and why...did you see that hand?’’ I asked.

She formed a rather crooked smile, pleased that I immediately got to the point of all the points right now ‘’It’s a long story.’’ She said, then continued a second later ‘’When I was five years old, my grandmother died; my mother’s mother. I was rather close to her and her death got to us all, especially because it was sudden. At the time, I did not know what death was and what it meant to the living. And the dead. You see, my grandmother was killed by a thief that wanted to rob her apartment. She tried to stop him but as old as she was, she could do almost nothing except cling onto him. He had a gun. He fired and killed her instantly.’’ She lit a cigarette ‘’I was very sad. That day, I could not stop crying. Even on the funeral, my mother and I were the ones to cry the most. I wanted to see her once more, like the adults did but my parents thought it was not a good idea for a child to look at dead bodies.’’ She inhaled a smoke and then exhaled it slowly, the smoke disappearing in the air around us ‘’I wanted to see her once more really badly. So, I sat in the corner and waited for the right chance to go inside the room where they held the coffin. However, I was outsmarted that day. She knew how much I wanted to see her. So, she came to me. I closed my eyes for a second, thinking it was the right time to get up and go there. And, when I opened them, there she was: sitting next to me as if nothing happened. I was a child, so I did not have time to be scared. I did not think of her as a ghost or a spirit. All I saw was my grandmother. When I tried to hug her, she told me to stop. She knew I could not touch her so she stopped me before I saw what she was.’’