Durarara!!, Vol. 4 (novel) (2 page)

In American cartoons, characters were often knocked clean out of a
scene by a hammer, and that was how Hollywood departed this one. The murder-machine’s wits were similarly knocked right out of his skull.

As he picked up the bills and notes that spilled out of the broken briefcase, the dreadlocked man who didn’t take part in the fight noted, “You won’t need to go for a second shot, Shizuo.”

The man with the park bench raised for the finishing blow, Shizuo Heiwajima, looked down at the immobile Caucasian and begrudgingly returned the bench to its former position.

“Dammit. What do these sneak thieves expect me to do, carry this cash around in my hands all night?”

“Um…do you really think they were sneak thieves?” the dreadlocked man wondered, but Shizuo was already walking toward the exit of the park.

“I’m going to go see if the Don Quixote has any briefcases,” he said calmly and abruptly, referring to a nearby discount store. Shizuo raced off to the park exit.

As he watched his money-counting partner trot away, the man shook his dreads and wondered, “Who would challenge Shizuo to a fight in this neighborhood? They must be from out of town.”

He looked down at the white man with half pity and half dismay. “Remember this: A bartender’s outfit in this town is a bigger warning signal than a red light. Too late to put that knowledge to use, though,” he said to the likely unconscious man, then turned on his heel. “By way of apology for the overboard treatment, I won’t tell the cops about you. So don’t hold a grudge against me, got it? And if you want to live, don’t hold a grudge against the bartender guy, either.”

The man briefly wondered about the red-eyed zombie that Shizuo knocked out with the bench, then waved his hand and said to the both of them, “Well, anyway. That’s what kind of city this is. Enjoy your stay.”

“Welcome to Ikebukuro. You both looked pretty impressive. You just had bad luck.”

A hit man and a killer appeared in the city.

But that was all.

Two sources of violence were instantly crushed by an even greater violence.

The chance meeting of those murderous figures should have been a big deal, but it was merely toyed with.

Ikebukuro slowly enjoyed its holiday.

It watched the various organisms contained within itself and their activities…

And the city stretched out to relax.

“The city of Ikebukuro knows no rest,” said the ominous narration on the TV, displaying the night city as filmed from inside a moving police car. “Since the serial assaults known as the Night of the Ripper two months ago, the populace has lived in fear. Yet Ikebukuro’s night continues to writhe with life.”

It was the kind of special program often shown at the end of the year, where film crews accompanied a police patrol to catch the decisive moment in an exciting case to show to the viewers in their peaceful homes.

In most cases, these weren’t shocking, nation-crumbling incidents, but simple local brawls, unlicensed or drunken driving, stolen vehicle crackdowns, and other everyday events that wouldn’t even get listed in a newspaper’s local safety section.

But because of the special immediacy of video footage, the programs succeeded in implanting a specific idea into the heads of its peaceful viewers: “Crime is nearby, and the city at night is dangerous.”

There was just one difference from the usual pattern in Daioh TV’s special program.

“On these streets, the very veins of our city, an eerie shadow dances in the darkness…”

The picture cut to the start of a now-famous video clip.

“A motorcycle entirely in black, with no headlight or license plate. This alone qualifies it as a public danger on the street.”

As usual, the place was Ikebukuro at night. But there was something different to the footage this time, something
off
.

In the center of the screen was a black motorcycle, racing down the street after a car. As the narrator said, it had no headlight or plate, making the vehicle look like a 3-D representation of a solid black silhouette.

There was the sound of gunfire, and the helmet of the bike’s rider shot backward, raising off its shoulders for just an instant. But it returned to its original position just as quickly.

It was creepy enough, the way it seemed to snap back into place with black rubber bands—but the real problem was what that momentary dislocation revealed.

The instant the helmet rose upward…there was nothing beneath it.

It wasn’t a trick of the eye, or camouflage from black hair, or anything of that sort.

The camera caught a clear glimpse of the shooter’s car in the space between the helmet and the rider’s neck.

The sight could be succinctly described thusly: “The rider on the pitch-black bike has no head above the neck.”

A black shadow that extended from the empty cross section of neck grabbed the base of the helmet and pulled it back into place.

It was already suspicious footage to start with, but the very cheap suspicion of it all, when combined with the straight-faced genre of news reporting, gave the scene an eerie reality.

There was one other unsettling feature about the rider. A tool, pure black with no highlight, as thick and pure as a midsummer shadow, that swung around just before the man shot at the rider.

It was too twisted and hideous to call a “weapon.”

The pole, a good ten feet long at least—twice the height of the rider—was connected to a sickle blade just as long.

The first instant the cameraman caught sight of it, he mistook it for the ostentatious insignia flags that motorcycle gangs waved as they rode. Such was the size of the pole the mystery rider held.

The scythe, which looked like the one Death held on his tarot card,
was huge and menacing and as black, black, black as a shadow against a wall cast by a car’s headlights.

“Is it a social outcast gleefully seeking to shock the public? A daring member of some motorcycle gang? Even the police have no answer yet.”

The answer was clearly beyond those tame descriptors, but the dignity of a serious news program prohibited them from using words like
monster
or
ghoul
. Yet it was clear from a simple glance that this was not an attention seeker or a biker gang member or even a human being—it was
something else
.

Many people could bring themselves to recognize that this was “something beyond the realm of human understanding,” but none of them could
accept
it.

Which was why half of the media was desperate to attach some kind of meaning to it. The other half got busy trying to bring acceptance to the unaccepting and made a business of it.

It was a true example of the grotesque brought to modern times.

People on opposing sides—those who sought to bring about another cyclical boom of interest in the occult and those who denied its otherworldly cause—set about to reveal the true nature of the Headless Rider for their own ends.

Thus, the media found itself chasing after the mysterious Headless Rider. Among the journalists, some claimed it was a “true monster.”

The footage from the TV cameras was so vivid, it looked for all the world to see as though the rider’s head was gone.

The image was too raw to be faked, and this peculiar persuasiveness led to the propagation of a rumor: that the Headless Rider existed in the space between reality and urban legend, a being born of the spread of public rumor itself.

An urban legend that anyone could spot if they just lurked around Ikebukuro for a few days.

On this night, the liminal being was being pursued by many such curious onlookers.

But without definitive proof for the public to see, the Headless Rider became a prototypical “modern mystery” with no actual answer, an otherwise accepted part of society.

As for the mystery herself…

She was stuck at a part-time job in a corner of Nerima Ward.

Nerima Ward

Bright light hugged pale skin.

Beneath a light so powerful it seemed to blend the boundary between reality and fantasy lay a woman’s naked body. Two shapely mounds rose above finely chiseled abs, and a finger frolicked fishlike through the soft cleavage.

The finger belonged to another woman, her blond hair shining in the vivid light. She was dressed as a doctor or researcher, and her golden eyes stood out on her young face, somehow clashing with the white coat that covered her body.

It wasn’t just the uniform that clashed with her face, but the body beneath it, which was even more curvaceous and inflammatory than the naked one on the bed. The uniformed woman was unconsciously writhing and squirming with pleasure.

If the blond woman’s body was a personification of pure, heady lust, then the woman on the table exuded a more wholesome eros. Together, the two figures shone in stark, desirable profile within the light.

The finger tracing the naked woman’s breasts slid down to her abdomen to lightly circle her navel.

If these were the only details examined, it would be quite an erotic sight, but one particular oddity ruined the effect and turned the scene into something extremely abnormal.

In fact, it was so unlikely and freakish that that the word
oddity
was wholly inadequate to describe it.

Because the naked woman lying on the bed had no head.

The cross section at her neck was so smooth and natural that it looked like less of a severance than that there had never been a head there to begin with. The cross section was shrouded in black shadow
that covered up the esophagus and backbone that would normally be visible there.

But if that odd shadow was ignored, it looked like nothing more than an examination of a dead body—a white doctor performing an autopsy on a mutilated corpse.

The absence of a head turned it into an utterly unsexy scene. But when the woman in the lab coat took her hands off the headless “body” and spoke, her voice had no hint of
either
husky lust or scientific examination.

“I have finished to conclusion! There is much thanks for your accomplicing!”

Her bizarre version of Japanese was followed by something even more jarring.

The headless woman’s hand writhed and issued a black
something
. It was less of a gas than a kind of liquid that seemed to blend into the air.

The substance was the kind of black that actually stole the light it absorbed, closer to shadow or darkness than a color. This shadow issued forth and then enveloped the entirety of the naked body, clamping to the skin in a way that was nothing short of sentient.

The woman dressed in white watched this process with obvious interest, but no surprise in the least. In no more than a few seconds, the headless woman on the bed went from totally naked to covered in a pitch-black riding suit.

The one element that hadn’t changed was her total lack of a head. She sat up from the bed, not bothered in the least by the absence of a skull, and picked up a PDA sitting on the nearby desktop.

The bizarre creature coolly typed a message into the device and showed the screen to the woman in the lab coat.

“It’s not ‘accomplicing.’ What you meant to say is ‘cooperation.’”

“Oh dear. I have apologized. I am terrifyingly sorryful.”

“…Well, I can tell you know enough to read kanji… You aren’t speaking this messed-up Japanese for the sake of being memorable, are you?”

“That is totally undeniable lack of truth. Ring-a-ding-dub,” she said with an innocent smile.

The Headless Rider shrugged and typed,
“I can’t tell if you’re
confirming or denying that accusation… Listen, Emilia. Just give me this week’s pay. Also, I think you meant ‘Rub-a-dub-dub.’ ‘Ring-a-ding-ding’ is the theme the Robapan bakery trucks play.”

“It is so shrewd and abacusing of you to leap right to reward. It is better to improve cuteness by demure shyness, such as the traditional Japanese way, yes?”

“How can I be a traditional Japanese woman when I’m from Ireland?”

The woman the Headless Rider called Emilia pouted and cried, “Now you are Ikebukuroican! And it is appreciated to the
n
th degree to call me Mother. Mommy is also allowed. Mamma mia.”

“Uh…well, I’ll admit that I’m considering my future with Shinra, but the concrete topic of marriage is a ways off. Besides, you’re younger than both me and Shinra, so calling you mother would be weird.”

She twisted her body in apparent shyness, but without cheeks for blushing, the motion made her look more like a writhing zombie with its head blown off.

“Just give me my pay! It’s the only reason I’m going through with these unpleasant medical tests. And what was that last physical examination for?”

“Oh, the boiled-egg skin is so beautiful and smooth, I simply wished to engage in pleasures of fondling closely.”

“…I’ll pretend not to be angry if you just give me my week’s worth of money.”

“Yes, yes, please to be calm. Haste make waste, broke as joke,” Emilia said distractingly and produced a heavy envelope.

Inside the brown manila folder, which had “Payment—Celty Sturluson” handwritten on it, was a stack of a hundred ten-thousand-yen bills, each with the face of Yukichi Fukuzawa on it.

The Headless Rider utilized a myriad of little shadow tendrils to quickly count the total, then happily turned and typed a message with a few extra symbols into the PDA.

“Looks good!
Thanks for your business!
”