Once upon a time, I fell in love with a delusion.
I believed in it back then, but it turned out to be nothing but a result of my wishful thinking.
At the fall of order and the economy, my parents' jobs required that we move into the secluded city of Rimona, a lively yet near-lawless place run by whoever had the most followers. I would later find that you could kill someone and get away with it quite easily, but anyway. Everything about it felt like a movie, from the lush green fields at day to the glimmering stars overhead at night. Of course, they kept all the mess underground. The fightings, the killings and anything to do with the city's inner workings were well hidden from the public eye, and for well-founded reasons too. However, I hadn't been told back then, nor had I been told what business my parents had there. I was a naïve sixteen year old who believed that there were no crocodiles when the water was calm...
No, no, no. Narrating the tedious details of my pathetic teenage life is not only cliché, but also does no justice to what happened at Rimona. To hell with all that — What matters to me is Akito. Akito Cross, the black-haired green-eyed boy who somehow ended up solving the city's greatest mystery of the decade despite being a mystery himself. So let us skip past the trivial events leading up to my arrival at Rimona, and adjust the clock's hands to the next afternoon when I hung out with the other kids after school.
We were still clad in our black and red uniforms, loitering by an abandoned bridge that connected one section of Rimona to an overgrown island of sorts on the other side of the wide, fast-flowing river. Ruins as far as the eye could see. That was the only way I found myself able to describe the areas surrounding the bridge, the water peeling off a bit of black and yellow tape every time it lapped at the rocky banks. Danger. Do not enter. Those were the very words scrawled all over the plastic, but apparently no one gave a damn. Standing by the bridge's crumbling railings, a blonde boy with the name of Hizumi turned to me, pointing into the pile of rocks only a few meters away from where we were.
“Few years back, a girl from class 9-A climbed over the railings and jumped. They say this place is haunted,” he paused for a moment, pressing his hands against my shoulders and making me flinch unwillingly, “by Anneke's ghost. That day, a boy saw her body and called the cops, but they found nothing when they arrived. Not a strand of hair, not a drop of blood. They never saw Anneke again either, and the boy transferred out of Rimona in fear.”
“Then why are we here?”
Why was I being told this? For what reason was I given a tour of someone's site of suicide? It sounded like a reasonable question in my head.
“Because even years later, people want to solve the mystery behind her body's disappearance. Some say she was murdered and the body was dealt with, and others say she was spirited away by a curse. And we're just here to prove that it isn't haunted.” He shrugged nonchalantly.
“Oh...” I looked down at the water far below, and the rocks that could be seen under the clear surface. To be completely honest, I half expected myself to face something occult, something on the rocks that would scream death.
A few years ago, Sage. She died a few years ago and there'd hardly be any evidence of it now, even if there ever was any to start with.
“It's alright, I won't let you get killed by some psychotic murderer,” he added in a teasing manner, though it sent a sharp chill down my spine nonetheless. I shook myself free of Hizumi's grip and looked at him oddly, turning towards the far side of the bridge where the small wasteland lay.
“Sage! Hey, Sage!” A girl waved at me, standing on the hood of a disfigured car as if she were a pirate conquering new land. Her ashen hair was done up in high twintails, long bangs blowing into her face as she smiled warmly at me. Kirihana. I remember when she first introduced herself with the sole letter 'K', and that was how it remained for a long time. The remaining seven letters took a while for me to wheedle out, but even then it was an alias. Why she called herself that was barely my business at all — Only a minuscule fraction of people were content with the name their parents picked out, and even then only a handful of those went by the full title.
I waved back at K, lumbering across the garbage dump that consisted of metal boards and wooden planks. Refrigerators. Old televisions. Odd bits of material that you'd expect at someone's half-arsed garage sale. I didn't question their existence, weird things happened at Rimona and Anneke's suicide was proof enough of that.
Then I tripped. I tripped on a deflated tyre tangled with bits of withering rope and who knows what else, my hands fumbling frantically to break the fall. I groaned as my palms splashed into a murky pool of liquid.
Blood. I inspected my hands knowing that something must have gotten scratched upon the harsh landing, but I certainly wasn't expecting my fingertips to be soaked in crimson. The heat was everywhere with the scorching sun overhead, so so I wasn't sure if the blood was fresh or stale. Not like that was on my list of worries at that moment.
Oh my god, where did this blood come from?
My heart raced. I turned to look, but K called out to me first.
“Sage! Sa — Damn, let me look at you.”
She stood right over me, despite being about ten meters away just moments ago. It merely took her two nifty leaps to get across the mess. I hid my hands from view, wiping them clean on a tattered piece of cloth.
“Ah... Shouldn't have landed that way,” I made a lame attempt to laugh off the matter.
“Look around before you blunder about like that, dumbass!”
“Am not...” I frowned, pulling myself back onto my feet and ignoring the immediate protest at my hip. “Besides, it's not like you're the most careful person, either.”
I eyed K's arm, a few scratches here and there that made it seem like she herself had done some tripping about. It was bound to happen of one were to jump around in a place like this.
“Well...” She turned away, taking me by the sleeve of my jacket and dragging me further up the dump. “That's besides the point!”
I sighed and sat down on the battered vehicle, swinging my feet and banging my heels against the metal intermittently. It felt strangely satisfying. The maelstrom in my mind had just began to settle, and I managed to work out how I could get a few answers.
“Where does all this mess come from, anyway?” I asked after a short eternity of silence, jumping onto a pile of rocks sandwiched in between the cupboards.
“Wherever you are, there's always a rubbish dump, Sage. People need places to pile their abandoned shit. The one at Rimona just happens to be more open, you know?”
“So that's how it is...” I hadn't been paying attention to what she said, really. It was besides my interests. Instead, I took a few cautious steps towards the blood-filled tyre, taking extra care in coming off as casual. The blood. My curiosity calls for me to confirm that sight, whatever it is.
“Sage? Don't go wandering around on your own again, you're obviously gonna trip and land badly.” K looked at me from head to toe, bringing herself to crouch on one of the rocks. She had an arm wrapped around her knees, the other planted on the rock's surface for balance. There and then, I realized that I wasn't going to see the tyre again.
I lowered my gaze in disappointment, standing rooted on the spot and looking around my feet instead. Hammers, screwdrivers and the like. I guess furniture wasn't the only thing that lay around, but what my attention decided to be attracted to was what lay beneath all that. Through the web of utensils I saw a hand.
A hand.
A full hand, that couldn't possibly have been anything else but a hand.
I bent down to inspect it, but then a shadow loomed over me before I had a chance to get any results. Turning my head around, I came to face K's silhouette, her body obscuring the sun that shone on the horizon behind her. There was an air of menacing confidence around her short frame — She stood with one foot a measly seven inches away from me, the other raised and placed firmly on a plastic barrel as if to crush it right beneath her. Her hands were behind her back, but even then I saw the hatchet.
I put two and two together even if the numbers were from the wrong equations, and shoved her into the mess with all the explosive force I could muster from my crouching position.
Then I screamed.
My mind screamed. My body screamed too, for that matter. I took off from my small perch, streaking down the pile and jumping until my feet found the bridge again. Did I care that I just shoved a girl head-first into hellhole? Probably not. I was grateful though, that I didn't trip despite my senseless running. Funny thing adrenaline does. I didn't stop at the bridge though, and instead I tore right across it with Hizumi giving me me a befuddled look.
Hahaha... Psychotic murderer, huh?
I sprinted right out of the bridge's area, onto the main road. I wanted to go home. It wasn't that far, and my parents would at least provide some sort of comfort.
“Sage! Wait!” K called after me, making her own way towards the safer end of the bridge. Don't run away! I can explain! Her pleading cries sounded almost as panicked as the ones thundering in my own mind, but I knew better than to stop and turn back.
Oh hell to the no. She was obviously about to murder me with a hatchet. I was two seconds short of becoming one of the corpses up there.
A hundred meters; two hundred. I didn't stop, and neither did K. Goddamn it, girl. I tore onto a pedestrian path and then onto another road, running purely on hyper drive. I wanted to get as far away from the rubbish dump as possible, and erase the whole thing from my memory if I could at all. I wanted to put more distance between me and the girl who held a hatchet, who paid attention to my every move and thought. The neighborhood was already in view, there was no longer a need to panic. I ran across another road, just as a car turned around the corner.
Bad move.
I gasped, and K screamed. The wind was knocked right out of my body with a firm blow that reverberate down my chest. I felt my feet leave the floor, my head tossed back as I sailed through the air for a moment. I wasn't sure when I landed; it all happened in a moment. The world did a flip around me like one of those slow-motion scenes in a silent movie, and I knew I was glad that an episode of Rimona's nightmare had ended.
Good memories and nightmares.
A/N:
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