Chapter Two: The Boy in the Tree
"You're WHAT?" Yuki asked. She, Eri, and Ayumi sat across from Kagome in a cafe between the Higurashi shrine and school. Eri and Ayumi were Kagome's other two best friends. The four girls were, as many of the students in the area, regular customers. Several other patrons looked to their table upon hearing Yuki's incredulous exclamation. Kagome sat, alone, on her side of the booth. Her hands knitted together on the tabletop, and she tapped her feet. The fidgeting didn't help to dispel her nervous energy.
"I'm going to a school in the Youkai Sector as part of the Outreach Program," Kagome repeated.
"What? When? Why?" Eri asked, firing the questions off one after the other and giving Kagome no chance to answer. Her voice was sharp as ever, and her brow was furrowed as she stared Kagome down.
"You're not moving, are you?" Ayumi cut in. Though softer than Eri, she still couldn't keep an accusatory tone out of her voice.
"Can I talk, please?" Kagome said.
"Fine, but make it snappy," Yuki muttered. Kagome took a deep breath and launched into a story she'd been aching to tell her friends for months.
"Back in November, when they first announced the Outreach Program, I thought it was crazy—we talked about it, remember? We said that no matter how much school the youkai paid for it was too risky. Well, I wasn't going to apply. But then I was going through some of the stuff in the storage shed at the shrine."
Kagome wasn't going through the storage shed willingly, that was for sure. Her grandpa had guilted her into the yearly chore, right after a new shipment of merchandise came in. He played the 'bad back' card, followed by the sore feet excuse, and finally dredged up a dry cough that would 'only get worse in the dust'. So Kagome got stuck with cleaning the shed. She pulled all the cardboard boxes of old merchandise, family trinkets, and questionable ancient artifacts, then started sorting them into piles for keeping and throwing away. Two dozen fake Shikon Jewel keychains? Keep and sell at the next festival. Mummified monster hand with supposed healing powers? Definitely pitch. Of course, her piles got all mixed up when Grandpa decided to periodically 'check in' on her progress. After the third time she moved all the junk back to its original placement in the throw-away pile, she exiled Grandpa to the house. So by the time she got to the boxes of her dad's stuff, she was irritated and liable to pitch anything without a 'Made in China' sticker.
—"What does any of this have to do with demon school?" Yuki asked.
"I'm getting to it!" Kagome replied.—
So she was looking through the boxes of her dad's stuff. After her dad died, her mom had taken all his pictures and put them in an album which she kept on her nightstand. Most everything he owned, save for his clothes and a few trinkets, were already in use by the family. That meant that after donating most of his clothes and giving his baseball cards to Souta, the only things left to stow away were his research files and a small wooden box that he kept under his bed. Kagome's dad had been a small time journalist. He had a steady job at the local paper writing about community events. But he also did occasional consulting work for freelance papers in stories involving the Japanese feudal era, which was the subject of his research. In the cardboard boxes were a large number of books written by human scholars who studied the ancient times, as well as diaries from the era. There were several memoirs written by youkai stashed in there as well. These books were rarer, and could fetch a price at the antique store downtown. Kagome, who had by this time created several sub-piles in the keep section, added the books to the 'sell' district of her little knickknack village. There were also folders upon folders of looseleaf papers, which included scanned in primary resources like paintings and tapestries from the era. Kagome hesitated, but added them to the pitch pile—recycling district, beside the old programs for the Sacred Tree festival. When she was through emptying out the five whole boxes of books and papers, she then turned to the wooden box that used to live under the bed. It was about the size of a cigar box, and was decorated in intricate geometric patterns on each side. Kagome tried to lift the hinged lid, but found it locked. She frowned, then examined the box more closely. There was a keyhole in the front, practically hidden in the pattern on the box.
"Great," Kagome muttered. She ran a hand over her forehead, wiping away sweat and dust. This was the last thing to sort through, but if she couldn't get inside, she had no idea what to do with it. She could just stick it back in the shed, but then she'd have to find it again next year and not know what to do with it. This would repeat, year after year, with her never knowing what to do with it and in her current exhausted state Kagome just couldn't handle the thought of having a mystery box in the shed for the rest of her life. She hauled herself to her feet and walked into the house, just in time to catch Grandpa trying to sneak out again.
"Don't touch that stuff in the yard," she warned him.
"Oh, what? What did you say dear?" her grandpa replied.
"You heard me. I know where everything is out there, remember that Grandpa," Kagome said. She then walked through the kitchen and ran up the stairs to find her mom.
"Hey mom?"
"Yes dear?" her mom replied. Kagome walked into her mom's room and found her mother folding laundry. Kagome held up the box.
"Do we have a key for this?" she asked. Her mom glanced at the box and looked quickly away.
"Grandpa cheated you into cleaning?" her mom asked.
"Yeah, he started coughing," Kagome replied. Her mom chuckled, folding pairs of socks together and throwing them into a basket on the bed.
"How's it going?"
"Fine. This is the last thing, then I can start hauling trash down to the curb," Kagome said. Her mom looked up at the box again, narrowing her eyes as she searched back into the depths of her memories.
"We used to have a key. Your dad wore it on a green cord around his neck," she said.
"Where'd it go?" Kagome asked. Her mom shook her head.
"I don't remember," her mom replied, "He never used to take it off. We may have buried it with him, for all I know." She fumbled with the socks and they fell onto the bed.
"I'm sorry mom," Kagome said quietly as her mom picked the socks back up. Her mother shook her head again.
"No, honey, it's fine," her mom said. She dropped the socks into the basket and held out her hand.
"Can I see?"
"Yeah."
Kagome handed her the box, and her mom examined it closely for a minute. She then went to her nightstand and opened the top drawer, pulling out a little glasses fixing kit with a screwdriver and pair of pliers.
"What's that for?" Kagome asked. Her mom didn't answer, but turned the box around so she could see the hinges and started to push at the hinge pins with the screwdriver. She managed to push the hinges out of place enough to grab them with the pliers and pull them out of the hinges entirely.
"There we go," she said, and handed the box back to Kagome. Kagome waited for a second, watching her mom go back to folding laundry.
"Do you want to see what's inside?" Kagome asked. Her mother shook her head.
"No thank you, dear," she replied. Kagome lingered a moment more.
"Okay," she then said, and headed back outside to find Grandpa hovering around the throw away pile.
"Gramps! Back inside!" she snapped. The old man threw up his hands and mumbled some excuse, then shuffled back into the kitchen. Kagome waited for the door to swing shut before she sat down and opened the box. Without the hinges, it opened about a quarter inch on the back side, even without the key. Kagome tried pulling it further, but the locking mechanism seemed to be made of a sturdier material than she thought and it didn't budge. She held the box up close to her face, trying to see its contents. As she shifted the box around, she heard something sliding across the wooden interior. Kagome turned the box on end and shook it, and a small flash drive slid out and bounced on the ground. She shook the box again and other things rattled inside, but nothing else fell out. She pulled at the lid, trying to get her fingers into the crack, but nothing seemed to work. Annoyed, she dropped the box onto the ground and picked up the flash drive instead.
After dinner Kagome fled to her room with the box and the flash drive. She pulled her laptop out of her backpack and booted it up, tapping her fingers by the touch pad as the old model gave her a lingering loading screen.
"Come on," she said to it, but the inanimate object didn't respond. Finally it gave her a lock screen so she could sign in. She plugged in the flash drive, and tried to pull it up on the computer, but a little box popped up asking for a password. Kagome frowned. She didn't even know flash drives could BE password encoded. She tried the standard family password, but it didn't work. She tried her mom's name, which didn't work either. When she'd exhausted family names and birthdays, she sat on her bed wracking her brain for what it could possibly be. Whatever was on the flash drive must have been something worth hiding. Kagome assumed it wasn't anything to do with the fluff pieces he wrote for the paper, and a password was a little far to go to hide embarrassing family photos. As far as she knew, the only things worth hiding in her father's life were related to his feudal era research—though even that was a stretch.
A wordless portion of a thought flashed through Kagome's mind. The image of one of the boxes she'd cleaned out earlier jumped into her head. Kagome leapt out of bed and pulled on a coat, then slipped out of her bedroom and down the darkened staircase. Padding through the kitchen on tiptoes, she walked, barefoot, out into the yard. Once she'd made it out of earshot of her family, she ran across the yard to the recycling bin full of papers she'd stuffed in there earlier. She opened the lid carefully, being sure not to let it bang against the back of the bin and alert her family to her dumpster diving. Then Kagome started to sort through the bundles of papers. At first she tried to just push them out of the way, but they started to slide and fill back in where she was searching. Kagome got frustrated, and started grabbing folders by the handful and dropping them on the ground beside the bin with a heavy slapping sound. As she pulled more papers out, she had to stand on her tip toes to bend over the side of the bin. It tipped towards her a little, and Kagome tried to step forward to rebalance. Her foot slipped on one of the papers she'd dropped to the ground and suddenly she and the recycling bin were tumbling to the ground with a loud crash that, doubtless, attracted the attention of her family. Kagome froze, looking up to her mother's darkened room. The light didn't come on. Kagome counted to ten, waiting for any sign of life. When none came, she let out a relieved breath and then returned to sorting through the papers that were now splayed out across the ground in front of her. As she made her way through the recycling, she heard a voice behind her ask:
"Sis? What's going on?" Kagome whipped her head around at her brother's voice. Souta stood behind her in the yard in his pajamas. He looked sleepy, and confused.
"Hey Souta, I accidentally threw something away today, I'm just gonna find it. I'm sorry I woke you," Kagome said. Souta frowned and walked over to her, sitting beside her on the ground. He started pulling at some of the pages.
"What are you looking for?" he asked. Kagome sighed. She supposed her brother might as well help if he was here.
"A sticky note," she said, "It's green, and it's got some numbers and letters written on it." She'd found the damn thing stuck to the bottom of one of the boxes, and just tossed it without thinking twice. Kagome and Souta sorted through the papers wordlessly for a few minutes, before Souta made the discovery.
"Found it!" he said, now more awake and excited at finding the mystery note first. He held it out to Kagome, who grabbed it eagerly.
"Thanks Souta!" she said. Souta beamed.
"What's it for?" he asked. Kagome stuck the Post-It in her coat pocket and stood, pulling the recycling bin back onto its feet.
"It's just an old password I need," she said. Souta stood by as she started picking up papers and dropping them back into the bin.
"What's the password go to?" Souta asked. Kagome paused, looking at him and considering telling him about the drive.
"An old email," she said.
"Oh," Souta said. He seemed let down. Kagome closed the bin, and put her arm around Souta's shoulders.
"Come on," she said, "You should get back to bed."
When Kagome had Cindy-Lou-Who'd her brother back to bed, she returned to her laptop and pulled the sticky note from her pocket. On it was a series of numbers and letters, which she suspected was the password for the drive. She typed "MX47DII29" into the blank space, and hit 'Enter' decisively. The password box disappeared, and was replaced by a folder with a series of files inside.
"Yes!" Kagome said aloud. She felt the discovery in her veins. It coursed through her, the excitement and satisfaction, and she eagerly began to open up the files in the sealed folder. They were all .jpeg files, images in a series. There were four total, labelled Goshinboku_1 through Goshinboku_4. Kagome opened the first photo in the series. It was a scan of an old black and white photograph. The focus wasn't quite right, and at first Kagome had trouble making out where the photo was taken. But as the blocks of black and white slowly assembled themselves into buildings in her head, she realized she was looking at her family's shrine. But the shrine wasn't the main object in the picture. The picture's focus was the Goshinboku, the sacred tree on the Higurashi property. Though Kagome recognized the tree, she didn't recognize the figure in front—no, attached to it. What looked like a human, possibly a boy with long hair, seemed to be tied to the tree, facing the photographer. Kagome zoomed in on the boy in her picture viewer. In the blur that was his face, she thought she could make out that his eyes were closed. A thin scratch of white extended from his chest. It could just be damage to the original photograph that her father must have scanned in on a computer, but it was pin-straight and ended as soon as it hit the boy's chest. It looked kind of like a stick. Kagome couldn't see any ropes that would hold the boy in place, but his feet were clearly not resting on the ground. Instead they hung limply from his legs. His whole body seemed limp, as if he were asleep, though he appeared to be floating in the air.
Kagome zoomed back out, and spotted a date at the bottom of the frame. It looked like it had been written in silver Sharpie directly onto the original photograph. The date read: June, 1852.
"What?" Kagome said aloud. She wondered: Were there even cameras in 1852? The word 'hoax' jumped into her mind. She opened the second jpeg in the file, hoping it would provide some clarity. The second photograph was also of the Goshinboku, but had no mysterious boy pinned to the tree. The date at the bottom read: August, 1854.
The third jpeg was a picture of a painting. It looked similar to a Sesshū piece, black ink on a plain white background with bold strokes and simplified shapes. More importantly, it featured the image of a young man in traditional dress pinned to a tree. An arrow shaft, complete with feathers, extended from his chest. Kagome pulled the first picture up alongside the painting, and now saw the single white scratch could easily be an arrow shaft. She looked back to the painting. Upon closer examination, she saw two little triangle shapes extending from the boy's head. She couldn't tell what the triangles were supposed to represent, but it could be some sort of hat, maybe a religious garment.
The fourth picture was clearly more recent. Taken on a city street, it showed a group of men standing around a person laying on the ground. Kagome felt a chill push through her veins as she saw a red liquid spreading out from the prone figure. It was blood. Some of the men wore Japanese police uniforms, but others simply had badges with various crests pinned to the sleeves of their shirts. Kagome recognized this scene. Everyone living in Japan would. Dozens of Japanese reporters were at this crime scene, snapping pictures of the then most recent murder by the Youkai Killer. The men standing around the body were the famed special task force made up of human police and youkai private detectives. The man on the ground wasn't a man at all, but a toad demon. He was 272 years old, or 33HE years. He had a wife and two children. He owed no debts and had no criminal connections. He owned a restaurant that served traditional youkai food. All of these facts had been drilled into Kagome's head in her years of schooling. It was this string of murders that, in 1986, forced the Youkai Sector to open its gates to humans for the first time since its founding.
Kagome pulled up the other three pictures and arranged them side by side on her desktop. The last was clearly the odd one out. She scanned it again, looking for any reason that it would be in a folder with pictures and a painting of the Goshinboku. A figure at the very edge of the frame caught her attention. He was in profile to the picture, just barely in the image at all, but his red clothes stood out among the other bystanders watching the crime scene. He was a young man with long white hair and—get this—white triangular ears. Kagome could only see the one facing the camera, but thought it was safe to assume there were two. She looked back to the little triangle shapes on the painting. They could be ears. With the simplistic painting style, there was no way to tell for sure, but they could definitely be ears.
Checking the time, Kagome found it was well past midnight. As soon as her brain realized how late it was, her body quickly caught up. Within minutes, her eyelids felt heavy and her limbs felt tired. Curiosity still burned within her, but was quickly overtaken by her need for sleep. She shut down the laptop and went to sleep. In her dreams she chased after the shadowy figure of a white-haired boy.
"But WHY do you want to go through the Outreach Program?" Eri asked. Eri, Yuki, and Ayumi had sat patiently through the whole story, but were still looking at Kagome from across the table like she was crazy.
"Because he's there! The boy in the pictures and the painting is in the Youkai Sector," Kagome said. Her friends' expressions didn't change as they failed to connect the dots.
"So?" Yuki asked. Kagome sighed.
"Look, in 1852 he was pinned to the tree at my family's shrine with an arrow, but by 1854 he was gone. Do you know what happened between 1852 and 1853?" Her friends tried to recall their various history classes, but were having little luck.
"Commodore Perry came from the U.S. and made us take a letter from the American President," Kagome said, answering her own question. Expressions of recognition flitted over her friends' faces.
"And that's why the demons formed the Youkai Sector and closed it to all humans, sure, but what does this have to do with a random youkai?" Yuki said. Kagome reached into her shirt and pulled out the flash drive with the pictures, now hanging on a cord around her neck. She held it up, shaking it for emphasis as she spoke.
"My dad locked this away before he died. Whatever he was researching has to do with these pictures and that boy. If I can find the boy, maybe he can tell me something. And to find him, I've got to get to the Youkai Sector," Kagome said. Her friends were all silent for a long minute, taking in her words. Yuki was scowling, Eri was concentrating very closely on her hands, and Ayumi was biting her lip. Ayumi was the first to speak, and she did so hesitantly.
"Kagome," she said, "I understand that this is really important to you...but just remember, your dad's car crash was an accident." Kagome leaned back in her seat with a huff, crossing her arms.
"I'm just saying," Ayumi continued in an annoyingly reasonable and caring tone, "You've always said that there was—that there had to be some...you know...reason for his...passing. But it was ruled as an accident. I don't think you'll find what you're looking for—" Kagome cut her off.
"I'm just looking for why he had these pictures on a flash drive. Besides, I want to be a journalist, and this could lead to a good story. That's it," Kagome said. Ayumi nodded.
"Sure, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to say...I mean...you know," she replied.
"Yeah," Kagome said.
