—1—

They weren't all found. No; they weren't all found. And from time to time wrong assumptions were made.

—2—

From the Irusu Weekly News, June 19th, 2005 (page 1):

MISSING GIRL PROMPTS NEW FEARS

Jirou Kyoka, of 73 Cherry-blossom road, Irusu, was reported missing last night by her mother, Jirou-Ishii Naoki, and her step-father Ishii Zen. Kyoka is eleven. Her disappearance has only fanned the flames of fear for Irusu's youth that has been enveloping the town since last December.

Mrs. Jirou-Ishii says that her daughter has been missing since June 17th, when she failed to return home after a day out with her friends.

When asked why they had waited over twenty-four hours before reporting their daughter's absence, the couple refused to comment. Police Chief Okumura Isao also declined comment, but a Police Department source told the News that the Jirou girl's relationship with her step-father was not a good one and that she had spent nights out of the house before. The source speculated that an argument with her step-father the morning of the incident may have played a part in the girl's failure to turn up.

"I hope the disappearance of this girl will not cause unnecessary fears," Chief Okumura said last night. "The mood of the community is understandably uneasy, but I want to emphasize that we log thirty to fifty missing-persons reports on minors each and every year. Most turn up alive and well within a week of the initial report. This will be the case with Jirou Kyoka."

Okumura also reiterated his stance that the murders of Toshinori Eri, Hado Nejire, Asui Tsuyu, Shimano Katsuma, and Hagakure Toru were not the work of one person. "There are essential differences in each crime," Okumura said but declined to elaborate. He said that the local police, working very closely with the Prefecture's division, were following up on a multitude of leads. Chief Okumura Isao declined comment when asked if any arrests had been made.

From the Irusu Weekly News, June 22nd, 2005 (Page 1):

COURT ORDERS SURPRISE EXHUMATION

In a surprise twist in the case of the missing Jirou Kyoka, the Irusu district court Judge Minami Reiko ordered the exhumation of Kyoka's step-sister, Ishii Mai. The court order followed a joint request from the District Attorney and the Prefecture Medical Examiner.

Ishii Mai, who lived at 73 Cherry-blossom road, with step-mother Jirou-Ishii Naoki and father Ishii Zen, died at the age of nine in May of 2004 by what was ruled as "accidental causes" The girl was brought into the Irusu local Hospital suffering from multiple fractures, including a fractured skull. Ishii Zen, the girl's biological father, was the admitting person. He stated that Mai had been playing on a stepladder in the garage and had apparently fallen from the top. The girl died without recovering consciousness three days later.

Jirou Kyoka, eleven, was reported missing Wednesday. Asked if either Mr. Ishii or Mrs. Jirou-Ishii were under suspicion in either the younger girl's death or the older girl's disappearance, Chief Okumura Isao declined comment.

From the Irusu Weekly News, June 24th, 2005 (Page 1):

ISHII ARRESTED IN BEATING DEATH

Under suspicion in unsolved disappearance

Chief Okumura Isao held a news conference yesterday to announce that Ishii Zen, of 73 Cherry-blossom road, had been arrested and charged with the murder of his daughter, Ishii Mai. Mai had died of "accidental causes" in the Irusu local Hospital on May 31st of last year after three days of unconsciousness. "The medical examiner's report shows that the girl had been badly beaten." Chief Okumura said. Although Ishii Zen claimed his daughter had fallen off of a ladder she was playing on, the district medical examiner's report showed that she had been severely beaten by a blunt instrument of some sort. When asked what kind of instrument, Okumura said: "Right now, we believe it to have been a hammer. Right now the important thing is the medical examiner's conclusion that this little girl was struck repeated blows with some object hard enough to break her bones. The wounds, particularly those in the skull, are not at all consistent with those which might be incurred in a fall. Ishii Mai was beaten within an inch of her life and then dumped off at the local Hospital's emergency room to die."

Asked if the doctors who treated the Ishii girl might have been derelict in their duty when it came to reporting either an incidence of child abuse or the actual cause of death, Okumura said, "They will have serious questions to answer when Mr. Ishii comes to trial."

Asked for an opinion on how these developments might bear on the recent disappearance of Ishii Mai's Step-sister, Jirou Kyoka, reported missing by Ishii Zen and Jirou-Ishii Naoki four days ago, Chief Okumura responded with: "I think it looks much more serious than we first thought, don't you?"

From the Irusu Weekly News, June 25th, 2005. (Page 1):

TEACHER SAYS JIROU KYOKA WAS "OFTEN BRUISED"

Kishi Ai, who has taught grade five at Irusu Elementary for over thirty years, says that Jirou Kyoka, who has now been missing for over a week, often came to school covered in bruises. Mrs. Kishi said that Kyoka came to school the week before the early summer closing with "both eyes nearly swollen shut. When I asked her what happened, she said that her step-father had "gotten on to her" for being late for dinner."

When asked why she hadn't reported this to the police due to her status as a mandatory reporter, Mrs. Kishi simply stated: "I've been a teacher for a long time. The first few times I had students with parents confusing beatings with discipline, I took it to assistant principle Hirayama Ken'Ichi, who told me to "drop it." He told me that when school staff gets involved with suspected child abuse, it always comes back to haunt the school come tax season. I want to Principle Igarashi Yumi, and she told me the same thing and that I would be reprimanded if I continued to push the matter. I asked if a reprimand like that would be put on my teaching record, and she said that reprimands did not have to be recorded. I got the message." Both Assistant Principle Hirayama and Principle Igarashi declined to comment on the accusations from Mrs. Kishi.

Asked if the attitude in the Irusu school system remained the same now, Mrs. Kishi said, "Well, what does it look like, in light of this current situation? And I might add that I would not be speaking to you now if I hadn't already put in my retiree notice."

Mrs. Kishi went on; "Since this thing came out, I go down to the Shinto Shrine in Ukiyo park and pray that Jirou Kyoka just got fed up with her step-father's abuse and ran away. I pray that when she sees the news that Ishii Zen has been locked up and sent away for good, she'll come back home."

In a brief TV interview, Jirou-Ishii Noaki adamantly refuted Ishii Zen's charges. "Zen never beat Mai, and he never beat Kyoka either." She said, "I'm telling you that right now, and I will continue to say it until my dying breath."

From the Irusu Weekly News, June 28th, 2005 (Page 2):

DADDY HAD TO "GET ONTO ME BECAUSE I WAS BEING BAD" ISHII MAI TOLD TEACHER ONE WEEK BEFORE DEATH

Grade three teacher, Kojima Ryuu, told a news reporter yesterday that his nine-year-old student came to school with bad sprains in her right thumb and three fingers one week before her purported ladder fall.

"It was hurting her so much that she couldn't grip the crayons to color-in part of her math assignment." Mr. Kojima said. "Her fingers were swollen up so big they looked like sausages. When I asked Mai what happened, she said her father [Ishii Zen] had "gotten onto her for being bad"- he had bent her fingers back because she'd walked across the newly mopped floor her step-mother had just finished. I felt like crying, looking at this poor girl. She wanted to color so badly, so I checked her file to make sure she wasn't allergic, and gave her a baby aspirin and let her color while the others read their reading assignments. She loved coloring, and now I'm so glad I was able to give her a little bit of happiness that day. When she died, it never crossed my mind that it could be anything other than an accident. I guess at first I must have thought that she couldn't grip very well with that hand and that's why she had fallen. Now I think that I just couldn't imagine an adult being capable of hurting an innocent child. I know better now, but I wish I didn't."

Mai's older step-sister, eleven-year-old Jirou Kyoka, is still missing. From his cell at the Irusu Police station, Ishii continues to deny any involvement in the death of his daughter and disappearance of Kyoka.

From the Irusu Weekly News, June 30th, 2005 (Page 5):

ISHII ZEN QUESTIONED IN DEATHS OF HADO, ASUI, AND HAGAKURE

Provides unshakable alibi's, sources claim.

From the Irusu Weekly News, July 6th, 2005 (Page 4):

ISHII TO BE CHARGED WITH ONLY THE MURDER OF DAUGHTER IISHI MAI, OKUMURA SAYS

Step-daughter, Jirou Kyoka, is still missing.

From the Irusu Weekly News, July 28th, 2005 (Page 1):

WEEPING FATHER CONFESSES TO BLUDGEON DEATH OF DAUGHTER

A dramatic turn in the district court trial today when Ishii Zen broke down during the cross-examination and confessed to the murder of his daughter, Ishii Mai. He confessed to beating the nine-year-old girl to death and burying the hammer used to do it in the back garden of their home on 73 Cherry-blossom road, before taking the girl to the hospital.

District Attorney, Araki Chiyo, who lead the cross-examination, was stunned into silence along with the rest of the courtroom as Ishii Zen, who had previously admitted to "occasionally" beating both girls, sobbed: "I don't know what came over me. I just saw that she was playing on that damn ladder again, and I was filled with a rage so intense it was almost like I was being possessed. I grabbed the hammer from the bench it was laying on and just- just started to use it- [on Mai] I didn't mean to kill her. I swear, I didn't mean to."

"Did she say anything to you before she passed away?" Araki asked him.

"She said, "Stop daddy, I'm sorry, I love you," Ishii replied.

"Did you stop?"

"Eventually," Ishii replied and then began to weep so hysterically that Judge Minami Reiko had to declare the trial paused for the time being.

From the Irusu Weekly News, September 18th, 2005 (page 16):

WHERE IS JIROU KYOKA?

Her step-father, sentenced to a term of 13-18 years in the Sharitori Detention House for the murder of his daughter Ishii Mai, continues to claim that he has no idea where Jirou Kyoka is. Kyoka's mother Jirou-Ishii Naoki, soon to be divorcee, thinks that he is lying.

Is he?

"I, for one, don't think so," says Horiuchi Nao, the director of Prisoner Activities at Sharitori. He reports that Ishii is a very well-behaved, and dedicated man, and never causes any issues. "He's admitted to the beatings and the murder of his biological daughter but has stayed consistent with his claim that he doesn't know where Kyoka is. If he has done something, then I don't think he knows he has. I've spent almost every day for the last fifteen years with prisoners, and I think by now I'm a pretty good judge of character. If he did do something to her, he doesn't remember it- that much I'm certain on."

How clean Ishii's hands are when it comes to the disappearance of Jirou Kyoka is something that's plagued the residents of Irusu for a while now, however, he's been almost unanimously cleared in regards of the other child-murders that have taken place here. He was able to produce airtight alibi's for the first four and was in jail when six others were committed in late June, July, and early August.

All ten murders remain unsolved.

In an exclusive interview with the Weekly News last week, Ishii once again repeated that he knows nothing of Jirou Kyoka's whereabouts. "I beat them both," he said in a painful monologue which was often cut off by sobbing episodes "I loved them but I beat them, I don't know why- just as I don't know why Naoki let me, or why she covered up for me when Mai died. I guess I could have killed Kyoka as easily as I killed Mai, but I swear to everything that I didn't. I know how it looks, but I swear to every deity out there that cares to listen that I didn't kill her. I think she just ran away, and if she did then that's the one good thing that came out of all of this mess."

Asked if he is aware of any gaps in his memory large enough that he could have killed Jirou Kyoka in, he said this: "No, I'm not aware of any missing memories or anything like that- in fact, I'm all too aware of what I've done [the murder of his daughter, Mai] and I plan to spend the rest of my life trying to make up for it."

From the Irusu Weekly News, January 27th, 2007 (Page 1):

BODY NOT THAT OF JIROU KYOKA, OKUMURA ANNOUNCES

Police Chief Okumura Isao states that the badly decomposed body of a little girl around Jirou Kyoka's age found in Nayoro is "definitely not her." The body was found buried in a gravel pit. Both the local Nayoro police and the Hokkaido prefecture officers theorized that it might have been Jirou Kyoka, who disappeared in the summer of 2005, believing that she might have been picked up by a child molester after running away from the Cherry-blossom road home where her younger step-sister had been beaten and killed.

However, dental charts showed that this wasn't the case. Jirou Kyoka has now been missing for nineteen months.

From the Hokkaido Shimbun, July 19th, 2014 (Page 1):

CONVICTED MURDERER COMMITS SUICIDE IN SAPPORO.

Ishii Zen, who was convicted of the murder of his nine-year-old daughter nine years ago, was found dead in his Sapporo apartment late yesterday afternoon. The parolee, who had lived and worked quietly in Sapporo since his early release from Shartori detention center in 2013 was found dead by his landlord, Mr. Ishii's death has been officially ruled as suicide.

"The note he left indicates an extremely confused state of mind," Assistant Sapporo Police Chief Go Hideaki reported. He refused to divulge the contents of the note, but a reliable source at the department said it read: "I saw Kyoka last night. She was dead."

The "Kyoka" he was referring to may have well-been his step-daughter Jirou Kyoka, daughter of his ex-wife Jirou Naoki and had disappeared shortly after Mr. Ishii murdered his biological daughter Mai. It was Jirou Kyoka's disappearance that eventually lead to the conviction of Ishii Zen. The elder girl has been missing for nine years. In a brief court proceeding in 2010, Jirou Naoki had her daughter pronounced legally dead so she could hold a "closure" funeral and begin the healing process.

—3—

—
Irusu, Japan

June 13th, 2005
—

Jirou Kyoka was dead, alright.

She died the night of June 13th, and her step-father had nothing to do with it. She died as Sero Hanta was getting screamed at by his mother for having the audacity to ask her if she was alright, while Kirishima Ejirou's mother Akemi felt his head for signs of her favorite ailment, "phantom fever", as Todoroki Shouto's father- a man who bore a striking resemblance in temperament to Ishii Zen- back-handed him for playing videogames with his brother Natsuo, as Kaminari Denki got called a "faggot" by a high school boy (that would one-day sire one of the homophobes convicted of murdering Auyoma Yuga) from a beat-up blue Toyota as he rode his bike down the street past the farm owned by the crazy Shigaraki family towards his own, as Iida Tenya finished his third re-typing of the last paragraph of his summer reading book report, as Bakugo Katsuki watched the credits roll for a horror movie his parents told him he wasn't allowed to see, and as Midoriya Izuku chucked his dead half-sister's photograph album at the wall in horrified disbelief.

Although none of them would remember doing so later, all seven of them looked up at the exact moment Jirou Kyoka died... as if hearing some distant cry.

The Irusu Weekly News had been absolutely right about one thing: the fight Jirou had gotten in with her step-father that morning had been enough to keep her from going back. Her mother and her step-dad had been fighting a lot that month, also. That always made things worst. When they got going like this, Ishii would first beat her mother, and when he got tired of that he'd turn on her, and before her death, when he got tired of Kyoka, he'd turn it on Mai.

These shouting matches came and went in cycles. They were most common at the end of the month when the bills came in. A policeman, called by a neighbor, might drop by once or twice when things were at their worst and tell them to tone it down. Her mother never said anything about the abuse, Jirou assumed she was scared to, and so the cycle continued.

Her step-dad was afraid of the cops, Jirou thought. He always got nervous and fidgety when they came by, it was the only time he ever looked scared.

She'd lay low during these periods of stress. If she didn't, well- look at Mai. She didn't know the specifics and didn't want to, but she had an idea about what had happened to her step-sister. She thought that Mai had been in the wrong place at the wrong time: the garage on the last day of the month. She had been told that Mai fell off the stepladder; "If I told that girl to stay off that damn thing once I've told her a thousand times," her step-father had said- but her mother wouldn't look at her, and when she did so by accident, she'd have this horrified look in her eyes that Jirou didn't like. Ishii just sat at the head of the kitchen table with a six-pack of beer with-in arms reach and didn't say anything more. Jirou kept out of his reach, when Ishii yelled you knew things weren't gonna get too bad- it was when he stopped that you had to begin worrying.

Two nights ago he had thrown a stool at Jirou when Jirou got up to grab the remote from the other side of the room-just picked up one of the barstools, swept it back over his head, and let fly. It hit Jirou in the small of her back and knocked her over. Her back still ached, but she knew it could have been worse: it could have been her head.

Then there had been the night when Ishii had suddenly gotten up and rubbed a handful of mashed potatoes into Jirou's hair for no reason at all. One day last September, Jirou had come in from school and foolishly allowed the traditional wood door to slam shut behind her while her stepdad was taking a nap. Ishii came out of the bedroom in his billowy boxer shorts, hair standing up in corkscrews, cheeks grizzled with two days of weekend beard, breath grizzled with two days of weekend beer. "There now, Kyoka," he said, "I got to get onto you for slamming that fuckin door." In Ishii Zen's lexicon, "getting onto you" was a euphemism for "beating the shit out of you." Which was what he then did to Jirou. Jirou had lost consciousness when the old man threw her into the front hall. Her mother had mounted a pair of low coathooks out there, especially for her and Mai to hang their coats on. These hooks had rammed hard steel fingers into Kyoka's lower back, and that was when she had passed out. When she came to ten minutes later she heard her mother yelling that she was going to take Jirou to the hospital and he couldn't stop her.

"After what happened to Mai?" Ishii had asked her mother, "Might as well book yourself a room too."

That was the end of that.

She helped Jirou to her room, where she lay shivering in her bed, her forehead beading with sweat, earbuds jammed into her ears. The only time she left the room during the next three days was when they were both gone. Then she would hobble slowly into the kitchen, groaning softly, and get her stepdad's whiskey from under the sink. A few nips dulled the pain. The pain was mostly gone by the fifth day, but she had pissed blood for almost two weeks.

And the hammer wasn't in the garage anymore.

Oh, the craftsman (standard, typical, everyday hammer) was. It was the Scotti recoilless which was missing. Her stepdad's special hammer, the one she and Mai had been forbidden to touch. "If one of you touches that baby," he had told them the day he bought it, "you'll both be wearing your guts for earmuffs." Mai had asked him shyly if the hammer was really expensive, and he had responded with "sure fuckn' is." And proceeded to threaten the two of them again.

Now it was gone.

Jirou thought she knew what had happened to that hammer. She was almost positive that Ishii had used it on Mai, and then buried it in the yard or threw it into the canal- it was the sort of thing that happened in the horror manga she so frequently read.

She walked closer to the canal, which rippled inky blackness under the starless night sky. A streetlamp's pale yellow light flittered across a small portion of its surface, the only source of light in the surrounding area. Jirou sat down next to the canal, swinging her legs over the concrete siding, MP3 player screaming hard rock into her ears. The last few weeks had been quite dry, and the water flowed about nine-feet beneath the beat-up soles of her black and purple combat boots. But if you looked closely at the Canal's sides, you could read the various levels to which it sometimes rose quite easily. The concrete was stained a dark brown just above the water's current level. This brown stain slowly faded to yellow, then to a color that was almost white at the level where the clunky heels of Jirou's boots made contact when she swung them in time with the heavy bass of her music.

The water flowed smoothly and silently out of a concrete arch that was cobbled on the inside, past the place where Jirou sat, and then down to the covered wooden footbridge between Ukiyo Park and Irusu High School. The bridge's sides and plank footing-even the beams under the roof-were covered with an intaglio of initials, phone numbers, and declarations. Declarations of love; declarations that So-and-so was willing to "suck" or "blow'; declarations that those that discovered sucking or blowing would lose their foreskins or have their assholes plugged with hot tar; occasional eccentric declarations that defied definition. Typical, silly, teenager stuff Jirou didn't know, nor care enough to learn, about.

Jirou didn't go to the kissing bridge tonight; she had no urge to go over to the high school side. She'd probably sleep in the park, or possibly head over to Kendou's and see if she could crash there for the night, but for now, she liked just sitting there listening to her hard rock and heavy metal- both of which she'd used to comfort herself over the years.

She liked the park and came here whenever she needed to think. Sometimes there were people making out in the hidden groves dotted around Ukiyo, but Jirou left them alone and they left her alone. The park was a peaceful place, and she thought the best part was right here where she was sitting. She liked it in the middle of summer, when the water was so low it chuckled over the stones and actually broke up into isolated streamlets that twisted and turned and sometimes came together again. She liked it in late March or early April, just after ice-out, when she would sometimes stand by the Canal (too cold to sit then; your ass would freeze) for an hour or more, the hood of her old faded parka, now two years too small for her, pulled up, her hands wrapped in the warmth of her skeleton gloves, unaware that her skinny body was shivering and shaking. The Canal had a terrible, irresistible power for a week or two after the ice went out. She was fascinated by the way the water boiled whitely out of the cobbled arch and roared past her, bearing sticks and branches and all manner of human trash along with it. More than once she had envisioned walking beside the Canal in March with her stepdad and giving the bastard a great big motherfucking push. He would scream and fall in, his arms pinwheeling for balance, and Jirou would stand on the concrete parapet and watch him get carried off downstream, his head a black bobbing shape in the middle of the unruly whitecapped current. She would stand there, yes, and she would cup her
hands around her mouth and scream: "THAT WAS FOR MAI, YOU ROTTEN COCK-SUCKER! WHEN YOU GET DOWN TO HELL TELL THE DEVIL THE LAST THING YOU EVER HEARD WAS ME TELLING YOU TO PICK ON SOMEBODY YOUR OWN SIZE!"- It would never happen, of course, but it was an absolutely grand fantasy. A grand dream to dream as you sat here by the Canal, a g-

A hand closed around Jirou's ankle.

She had been staring across to the other side of the canal, lost in the daydream. The soft yet strong grip had caught her so off guard she nearly lost her balance and tumbled into the canal.

'It's one of those homeless perverts mom always warned about,' was Jirou's first thought, but when she looked down her mouth dropped open. Her violent eyes widened in sheer horror, and tears began to leak unwillingly out of her eyes. It wasn't a homeless pervert at all.

It was Mai.

It was Mai as she had been buried. Mai in a delicate, soft-pink dress that's ankle-length skirt sparkled prettily in the summer afternoon light- only now Mai's dress was in wet, muddy, tatters, sticks and dead leaves clung to the skirt that no longer sparkled, a plastic ringlet stuck to the bottom of her right ballet slipper. Mucky water dripped down her thin frame from her long black hair- and oh, god- Mai's head- something was terribly wrong with it. The left side of it sunk inwards as if it had been caved in- and somewhere in the back of her mind Jirou noted that that's exactly what had happened.

Mai was grinning.

"Kyokaaaa" Mai called to her step-sister, just like one of those zombies that were always coming back in horror manga. Mai's grin widened, yellow teeth gleamed. Somewhere way back in there, Jirou could see something dark and black squirming.

"Kyokaaaa... I came to see you Kyokaaaa..."

Jirou tried to scream. Waves of grey shock were rippling through her entire body, and she had a curious sensation that she was floating. The hand on her boot was a sickly white and looked puffy and bloated, some animal had taken a bite out of Mai's heel.

"Come on down, Kyokaaaa... come on down and float with me... don't you miss me, Kyokaaaa?"

Jirou couldn't scream. Her lungs didn't have enough air and her brain wasn't working fast enough. That was alright, in a second or two her mind would snap and none of this would matter anymore. Mai was tugging her gently towards the concrete edge of the canal.

Jirou reeled back, something somewhere in her mind crying out to her that that wasn't Mai. The Mai-look-Alike let out an angry hiss and Jirou felt the hand leave her foot, and for the first time since that Mai-creature had shown up, she could think clearly: 'That wasn't Mai. I don't know what it is, but it's not her.' And then adrenaline flooded through her thin body and she was scrambling up, trying to run before she was even on her feet, breaths coming in shaky, wispy, whistles.

Paper-white hands appeared on the concrete lip of the Canal. There was a wet slapping sound. Drops of water flew upward in the lamp-light from dead pallid skin. Now Mai's face appeared over the edge. Dim red sparks gleamed in her sunken green eyes. Her wet hair was plastered to her skull and down her back. Mud streaked her cheeks like warpaint.

Jirou looked back once- needing to see how far the Mai-creature was- and ran right into a Birch-wood tree.

It felt as if someone- her-step father for instance- set off a dynamite charge in her left shoulder. She fell backward and hit her head on the ground hard, stars exploding in her peripheral vision. She she managed to gain her footing again after a few dazed eternities. A groan escaped her suddenly to-dry lips as she tried to raise her left arm. It didn't want to come. Felt all numb and far away. So she raised her right and rubbed her fiercely aching head.

Then she remembered why she had happened to run full-tilt into the birch tree in the first place and looked around.

Nothing. Nothing at all.

She tried to begin running again, but another shock of pain rocketed through her arm and she bit back a pain-filled cry. She needed to get out of there before the Mai-creature came back.

She knew somehow that she should be getting over her fright by now, calling herself a stupid little baby who got spooked by a reflection or maybe fell asleep without knowing it and had a bad dream. That wasn't happening, though; quite the reverse, in fact. Her heart was now beating so fast she could no longer distinguish the separate thuds, and she felt sure it would soon burst in terror. She couldn't run but when she got out of the groves surrounding the birch tree's base she did manage a limping jogtrot.

Her violet eyes fixed on the streetlamp illuminating Ukiyo Park's main entrance, and made a beeline towards it as fast as she could manage, her left arm hung uselessly at her side, and her ears burned from where the earbuds connected to her MP3 player had been ripped out during her scramble away from the canal's edge.

Something was following her.

Jirou could hear it bludgeoning its way through the birch-wood tree's grove. If she turned she would see it. It was gaining. She could hear its feet, Splish-splashing as it reached the stone path she was struggling down, squelching. She would not look back, no, she'd fixate on the light ahead. She was nearly there-

It was the smell that made her look back.

The overwhelming smell, as if fish had been left to rot in a huge pile that had become carrion-slushy in the summer heat. It was the smell of a dead ocean.

It wasn't Mai chasing her anymore, no, now it was the Creature from the Black Lagoon. The thing's snout was long and pleated. Green fluid dripped from black gashes like vertical mouths in its cheeks. Its eyes were white and jellylike. Its webbed fingers were tipped with claws like razors. Its respiration was bubbly and deep, the sound of a diver with a bad regulator. As it saw Jirou looking, its green-black lips wrinkled back from huge fangs in a dead and vacant smile.

It sloshed towards her, and it was then that it clicked in Jirou's mind: It wanted to drag her down into the canal never to be seen again.

She put on a burst of speed, ignoring the pain in her arm. The dim light at the Park's entrance grew closer, she could see the bugs buzzing around its opaque yellow globe. A truck drove by, and it was then that Jirou was struck with the sudden, horrific, realization that people all around the world were going about their nights without any idea that a little girl might be dead soon.

The stink. The overwhelming stink of it. Gaining. All around her.

It was a park bench she tripped over.

Some kids had casually pushed it over earlier that evening, heading toward their homes at a run to beat the curfew. Its seat poked an inch or two out of the grass, black metal, almost invisible in the endless velvety dark. The edge of the seat smacked Jirou in the shins, causing a burst of glassy, exquisite pain. Her legs flipped out behind her and she thumped into the grass.

She looked behind her and saw the creature bearing down on her, it's white eyes glassy and drippy. Slime oozed down its scales into the grass, it's gill's opened and closed with every breath. Jirou crawled forward, fingers hooking desperately into grass and weeds, trying to get away.

In the second before the Creature's fish-smelling horny hands closed around her throat, a comforting thought came to her: 'This is a dream; it has to be. There's no real Creature, no real Black Lagoon, and even if there was, that was in South America or the Florida Everglades or someplace like that. This is only a dream and I'll wake up in my bed or maybe in the leaves under the bandstand and I-'

The scaly hands of the Creature closed around Jirou's neck; as the creature turned her over the chitinous hooks which sprouted from those hands scrawled bleeding marks like calligraphy into her neck. She stared into its drippy white eyes. She felt the webs between its fingers pressing against her throat like constricting bands of living seaweed. Her terror-sharpened gaze noted the fin, something like a rooster's comb and something like a hornpout's poisonous backfin, standing atop the Creature's hunched and plated head. As its hands clamped tight, shutting off her air, she was even able to see the way the yellow light from the streetlamp cast a smoky green as it passed through that membranous headfin.

"You're... not... real," Jirou choked, but clouds of grayness were closing in now, and she realized faintly that it was real enough, this Creature. It was, after all, killing her.

And yet some rationality remained, even until the end: as the Creature hooked its claws into the soft meat of her neck, as her carotid artery let go in warm and painless gout that splashed the thing's reptilian plating, Jirou's hands groped at the Creature's back in a bewildered daze, feeling for a zipper. They fell away only when the Creature tore her head from her shoulders with a low satisfied grunt.

And as Jirou's picture of what It was began to fade, It began promptly to... to...

(change into something else.)

—4—

Across town, unable to sleep after being plagued by a night full of bad dreams, a boy named Kaminari Denki threw his leg over his bike and rode off into the night.