Japanese Gothic

Chapter One Lee

Present day

Chiran, Kagoshima Prefecture, Japan

In the house behind the sword ferns, there was a man, and a murderer, and a stain.

The house was nearly two centuries old, its walls accustomed to drinking up soot from charcoal burned through the long winters.

Its tatami mats had darkened from the sting of sunlight, hiding the footprints of the last family who lived there. The cypress

walls with tobacco varnish should have swallowed even the darkest stain whole, kept it safe and secret.

But there it was, all the same—a dark, narrow line, as if red wine had splashed and then dripped down, or perhaps a thin finger

had smeared it like a tally mark.

Lee Turner pressed his thumb to the stain, scraped a bit of it onto his nail, then brought it to his lips and licked. He could

taste the wood varnish more than anything else, but yes, that was definitely blood, in a place it shouldn’t have existed.

Bloodstains in kitchens belonged on counters and floors and sinks—places where cooking knives sliced down on fingers instead of carrots, or ungloved hands reached into a soapy sink full of sharp objects.

But this stain was just above Lee’s eye level—too high for anyone to wield a cooking knife.

Even worse, it marked the thin strip of wood between the oven and the open door into the corridor, far from where anyone would have prepared food.

Normally, for Lee, all the jagged puzzle pieces of the world lay tight and flat against each other. But sometimes, Lee found

anomalies—like this stain—where dark chasms opened up between what he saw and what he knew to be true.

The truth was that this house hadn’t been occupied for a century, and his father had only moved in yesterday, so there shouldn’t

have been any stains that Lee could still taste. And the other truth was that whatever had happened here was no accident.

Lee scraped the rest of the blood away with his thumb and watched it flake onto the tiles.

There had been so much blood in the stairwell back at school, but Lee had done a much better job at cleaning that up. His

dorm had a communal cleaning closet with bleach and rags and giant trash bags. Lee had cleaned the landing and the railing

and even the floor on the lowest level because he knew how far the blood had dripped. Then, once James’s body was gone, Lee

had mopped the stairs just to be sure he hadn’t missed a spot. Lee Turner never would have left a stain like this behind.

Perhaps it was morbid, but Lee found it easier to picture James as a rotting corpse than as his roommate.

James had let Lee copy his astronomy homework without even asking, had brought him an extra slice of pizza when he came back

from dinner with the crew team, had unlocked the door as quietly as possible when he came home drunk at 4 a.m. He was more

careful around Lee than most people, as if he’d always known what Lee really was.

James had green eyes, which looked like entire planets.

James had green eyes, past tense, because Lee smashed them until they burst.

That was another anomaly, another truth that Lee still couldn’t decipher. Because he liked James’s green eyes, and he liked

James, and he’d killed James, and those words didn’t make sense together, but they were still true.

There must have been a reason.

No one killed without a purpose, even if that purpose was something awful like “death excites me” or “I wanted to see how

it felt.” But Lee hadn’t wanted to know the taste of James’s blood, hadn’t wanted to hold this awful feeling inside him, like

the collapse of an entire star system inside his rib cage. Lee was full of dead stars and empty universes now. There was a

reason, but he couldn’t remember it.

Lee reached into his left pocket, but it was empty. He’d left the bottle of Ativan in his backpack. He had a few more doses

of Benadryl in the blister pack in his right pocket that he could use in a pinch, but they weren’t as effective. He hoped

he could find more medicine in Kagoshima. It was very important that he did.

“Are you... sucking your thumb?” his father asked.

Lee quickly pulled his finger out of his mouth, then stuffed his hands into his pockets before turning around to face his

father.

“Just biting off a hangnail,” Lee said, shrugging.

Lee’s father didn’t believe him. Even with all the sedatives in his blood, Lee wasn’t stoned enough to miss this. His father

had a way of wincing at Lee like he was a sharp ray of sunlight. That was why his father never looked at him for very long—Lee

would burn shapes into his eyes, then steal his sight altogether.

Lee knew the problem: He looked too much like his mother, who no longer existed—the same dark curly hair, the same eyes that were pinched a bit too close together, the same starved expression.

Like a python who wanted to cram the whole world inside its jaw and eat and eat and eat, and it wouldn’t fit but he would make it fit because people like Lee and his mother were people who devoured.

Lee’s father looked more like an old silver screen star—classic American jawline, Ivy League, broad shoulders, strong nose.

He’d taken Lee for a paternity test when he was a bug-eyed toddler who looked like a cursed changeling. But the test had proved

that, for better or worse, Lee was his son.

Lee turned away so his father wouldn’t have to look at him anymore, then dug into the box on the counter. “Do you want coffee?”

Lee said, already pulling out the hand grinder and the beans, searching the drawers for a measuring spoon.

“The day I turn down coffee is the day I die,” Lee’s father said with a smile. He walked around the counter and pulled out

a drawer, then handed Lee a tablespoon and patted him too hard on the shoulder before going back to the couch.

When his father turned his back, Lee pulled out a bag of decaf from the cabinet. It was supposed to be for Hina—his dad’s

girlfriend—but his father wouldn’t know the difference. Lee opened the bag of coffee beans and scooped out a spoonful, but

his hand stilled before he could dump it into the grinder.

The coffee had no smell.

He shook the beans around and breathed deeper, just to be sure, but could smell nothing at all.

“It’s a Japanese brand,” his dad called from across the room, misunderstanding why Lee had frozen with his nose in the coffee

bag. “It might smell different. I’m still figuring out the best one.”

“Yeah, it smells different,” Lee said quickly.

His arms worked on autopilot to scoop out the coffee beans, then he sealed the bag and stuffed it into the depths of a cabinet.

And here was another anomaly—the bag was already open, so Hina had already made coffee, and if she’d thought something was wrong with it, she would have thrown it away.

Lee was the only one who couldn’t smell.

Lee Turner did not have allergies, or a cold, or a deviated septum. He knew that loss of smell either meant there was something

wrong with your nose, or your brain.

He ground the beans, then filled the French press with exquisite carefulness, worried his shaking hands would spill the coffee

or knock the whole thing over. He flipped the hourglass timer, mumbled something about the bathroom, and slipped into the

hallway, where he took another Benadryl even though it would probably put him to sleep. It was too much, too soon, but he

had to drink coffee with his father, who would notice if Lee’s hands were shaking. He took a steadying breath, then turned

back to the kitchen and watched the grains of sand in the hourglass fall and fall and fall.

He poured his father a cup, added cream until it was medium brown, then stirred in two spoonfuls of sugar. Lee made his own

coffee exactly the same way, not because he liked it, but because he hated the taste of coffee no matter what it was mixed

with, and he might as well make his father think they were alike in this one particular way.

Lee placed the two coffee cups on the table and sat exactly one cushion away from his father on the couch, close enough that

the distance felt friendly, but not so close that Lee looked clingy—his father only liked affection if it was quiet.

Lee’s father took a sip and nodded in approval. “Thank you, Lee,” he said, not looking at him.

Lee made a sound of acknowledgment and sipped his own coffee, which tasted like nothing at all.

Here, in the silence, Lee let himself pretend that this was enough, that this was fine, that he was the kind of person who could sit and silently drink coffee and not feel like he was trying to hold back a tsunami from spilling out of his ears, his mouth, his eyes.

He would drown the world one day. He was sure of it.

When he sat this close, he could hear his father’s heartbeat.

Too fast, sometimes stuttering, like it was trying to escape from something, someone.

You can’t hear other people’s heartbeats , his father once said. Maybe he couldn’t, but he didn’t know what Lee was capable of. After all, he was sitting here next to Lee, calmly drinking coffee

instead of calling the cops to have Lee thrown in jail.

The doctor said his father’s heart condition was under control, but they couldn’t hear what Lee could. They didn’t have the

same sense of impending doom that Lee could taste in the air the way animals could sense storms.

When Lee was fourteen and learned that stress could exacerbate his father’s condition, he took it upon himself to block all

the news stations from the TV, to sweep up the kitchen and wipe the counters with lavender oil before his father got home

from work, making sure his father never tripped over a shoe in the hallway or pulled an expired bottle of dressing from the

fridge or had to make his own cup of coffee. Now that Lee was in college, his father’s girlfriend could take care of him,

but Lee still made sure to only ever give his father good news, good grades, good behavior.