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

—On a news program:

“Today we pick up where we left off in the ongoing story of the serial attacks in Ikebukuro.

“As you see, the total number of victims has risen to fifteen as of now. As the attacks have all occurred at night, eyewitness details are scarce, and most of the victims’ reports are vague…

“Furthermore, a number of similar incidents happened five years ago, and as no culprit was ever identified, the police are investigating the possibility that the same person is responsible…

“There’s also the case of the so-called Headless Rider in Ikebukuro since last year, a figure running wild with a massive weapon, whom some citizens are saying could be involved.”

—On a different paranormal-related program:

“The Slit-Mouthed Woman, the Man-Faced Dog, the Woman in the Wall—Ikebukuro’s Headless Rider was nothing more than another of
these fanciful urban legends. But ever since last spring, this legendary figure has begun to feel all too real!

“The first sighting was more than ten years ago. So how did some segments of the media finally start reporting this story? It all starts from this footage.

“In the middle of filming this station’s program
Caught on Tape! 24 Hours in Ikebukuro
, our staff member riding in a police vehicle incidentally captured this image…”

“Oh my God, what is that?”

“Huh? Wait, look at that black scythe… Is it getting bigger over the course of the shot?”

“The hell is this? That movement shouldn’t be physically possible.”

“But it’s rumored that black motorcycle is related to the recent attacks—”

(after commercial break)

“We apologize for some inappropriate statements made earlier on this program…”

—Headlines from a weekly magazine:

“Eerie News! The Creepy Relationship Between the Headless Rider and the Street Attacks”

“Is It the Same Culprit As Five Years Ago?”

“Why the Police Haven’t Caught the Serial Slasher”

“A Modern-Day
Tsujigiri
? The Madness of the Katana”

“Evil Spirit? Motorcycle Gangster? Performer? Examining the Headless Rider’s Identity”

Night, Ikebukuro, late February

Damn
, the shadow thought quietly beneath the girder bridge a short distance away from Ikebukuro Station.

That wasn’t a figure of speech—she actually
was
a shadow.

Clad in a pitch-black riding suit, astride a motorcycle enveloped in darkness.

The headlight-less bike was completely black in every way, from its engine to its driveshaft to its license plate. The coloring made it look like someone had simply dumped black paint on a plastic model of a motorcycle. The black riding suit matched the color as well.

It was only the outline of the lights from the bridge overhead that cast her and her bike into profile and made them visible.

Damn, dammit.

The black rider, Celty Sturluson, was faced with a single street punk who trembled in terror.

The thug looked to be in his late thirties. But there was no hint of the dignity or presence that age should have given him. Celty had been in the presence of yakuza officers around the same age as this man, and it was a keen reminder that even after living the same number of years, individual human beings could be extremely different in nature.

Celty was a courier making her home in Ikebukuro.

She wasn’t able to advertise her services, given her lack of a license, but her skill and speed at handling illegal and/or dangerous payload, plus the benefit of leaving no traces on the off chance that she was actually caught—there was no official record of her presence in Japan—meant that she didn’t lack for clients. At times, she got benign, upstanding offers like delivering a manga artist’s finished draft to the printer, but given that her partner, Shinra Kishitani, was a black-market doctor, most of her jobs ended up being through his unsavory contacts.

She wasn’t strictly a courier, either; she took on requests to find runaway children and runaway debtors as well.

This particular case was another one of these “outside-the-bounds” jobs.

A thug terrified into paralysis. All she had to do was collect the money this poor slob ran off with. That was all she had to do, and it should have ended at that.

Damn, damn, damn
, she groaned to herself.

The thug was already on the ground. All she had to do was pick up the bag containing the money and that was it.

She had a giant black scythe and the thug had completely lost all intent to fight, over nothing more than a tear in his clothes. She just had to get off the bike and pick up the bag. She’d received no orders about the man’s custody. She could take him back with her, but she didn’t want more trouble, and she also didn’t want the risk of a face-to-face confrontation with the client leading to a possible murder.

One of her ironclad tenets was not to take any jobs involving killing. Part of it was the emotional toll of knowing that someone had died on account of her, but on a more practical level, she was getting by fine without resorting to murder.

She didn’t have to worry about living costs to begin with, thanks to the wealth of her partner, Shinra, but Celty always paid him her share of the rent. She didn’t want to owe him for something like that.

On top of that, this job should have earned her enough for this month’s rent.

It’s a simple job
, she’d thought.

But Celty was frozen still. She couldn’t get down off the motorcycle.

The reason was extremely simple.

A blade.

Without warning, a silver blade grew out of the arm that held her scythe.

At first there was just a physical shock. The pain followed.

For the first moment that she saw the gleam of steel protruding from her arm, Celty didn’t understand what happened—but her experience and instinct soon told her that someone had stabbed her from behind.

“A…
aiiee!
”

The thug seemed to have grasped the situation quicker than Celty did. He wailed pitifully as he stared over her shoulder.

Damn, dammit, damn.

Someone was behind her, piercing her arm all the way through with the blade.

Normally, she would spin around on instinct, but Celty’s sense of pain was much duller than most. More than the pain, it was the distraction of the katana erupting from her arm that kept her from turning around at once.

Surprisingly calm about the situation, Celty wasn’t sure whether or not to take her eyes off the thug before her, and that hesitation was what cost her.

Determining that the thug wasn’t capable of getting up and running off immediately, she spun the bike around. The moment she squeezed the handlebar, the motorcycle’s engine brayed like an organic creature, and it made a completely
in
organic 180-degree turn in place without rolling its wheels.

The next instant, the vein of light flashed.

The katana’s long blade reflected the light from above with a beautiful arc, and the glowing circle passed right through Celty’s neck.

In total silence, Celty’s helmet flew through the air, leaving only unspeaking darkness swirling above the neck of her riding suit.

“Ahyaaaaaaa! Hya! Hyaiii!” screamed the seated, terrified man.

The rider of the black motorcycle who had been trying to kill him (at least, in his mind) was abruptly beheaded by a new figure that had appeared from behind.

Though he couldn’t see it from his vantage point, the new figure struck as quick as lightning. It pulled the blade out of the rider’s arm as the bike rotated and swung in the reverse direction to catch her on the way around.

Like interlocking gears, the two rotations met up again, and in the next instant, the rider’s head was off her shoulders.

The slasher of Ikebukuro.

Both Celty and the street tough remembered the tabloid-fodder story and turned to the new figure.

“
Gweah!
” came an unnatural squawk as Celty tried to tell who this new attacker was.

What was that?!
she thought.
Yet another—

But when she cast her “gaze” back toward the seated man, he was staring at her, goggle-eyed.

“S-st-still m-m-moving?!”

Oh.

“N-n-n-n-n-no h-hea—head.”

And then Celty remembered.

She was the Headless Rider.

Celty Sturluson was not human.

She was a type of fairy residing in Ireland called a dullahan, a spirit that visited the homes of those who were soon to die, to warn them of their impending demise.

A dullahan carried its own severed head under its arm and rode on a two-wheeled carriage called a Coiste Bodhar drawn by a headless horse. If anyone at the home of the soon to be dead was foolish enough to open their door to the dullahan, they would receive a basin full of blood splashed over them. Thus, the dullahan, like the banshee, made its name as a herald of ill fortune throughout European folklore.

One theory claimed that the dullahan bore a strong resemblance to the Norse Valkyrie, but Celty had no way of knowing if this was true.

It wasn’t that she
didn’t
know. More accurately, she just couldn’t remember.

When someone back in her homeland stole her head, she lost her memories of what she was. It was the search for the faint trail of her head that had brought her here to Ikebukuro.

Now, with a motorcycle instead of a headless horse and a riding suit instead of armor, she had wandered the streets of this neighborhood for decades.

But ultimately, she had not succeeded at retrieving her head, and now she had partially given up and accepted her new life here.

Celty understood that society would never accept her for what she was, and in her heart, she yelled back,
So what?

Society might not be able to accept her, but there were some people who did—and that was the lonely, lively life of the headless woman, Celty Sturluson, in a nutshell.

The man’s scream brought her back to her senses, reminding Celty that she was just as odd a being as the slasher—if not more so—but she didn’t have time to calm the man down now. Not to mention that there was no
need
for her to calm him down.

In less than a second, she was back to her normal wits, and she turned to the shadowy figure.

Suddenly, the fluorescent light illuminating the underside of the girder bridge popped and went out.

?!

For an instant, Celty was disoriented, until she decided that the figure must have thrown something at the light to break it. Her sense of vision went black, but that vision wasn’t passing through eyeballs. Celty “saw” the world through a different means than human beings did, and her night vision was much better as a result.

But by the time she had adjusted to the darkness, the figure was already out of sight. It must have escaped while she was distracted by the light. Even with the distraction, it was clear that the figure had moved with abnormal speed.

Damn. Disadvantaged by my own toughness.

If Celty were a normal human, then even before the blow to her head, she’d have spun around instantly to keep an eye on the “enemy” or source of “fear” that was trying to take her life—and never taken her gaze off of it. But because Celty knew she was very unlikely to die here, she allowed her attention to be distracted by other things, and now the attacker had gotten away.

All that was left under the darkened bridge was an unconscious thug and a headless motorcycle rider.

Celty felt a strong
alien
sensation about her abrupt attacker. Not fear—something alien.

The instant the blade pierced her, it felt like some eerie presence was trying to get inside of Celty.

If the attacker wasn’t human but another kind of fairy or monster,
she would have sensed it before being stabbed. Possibly it
was
such a creature, just one that had learned to extinguish its presence, but Celty dismissed that as unlikely.

So what
was
that shadow, then?

The fight was so brief that she wasn’t able to identify the attacker’s features or even height, but there was one thing, one powerful memory that stuck out in her mind.

Just before the fluorescent light shattered, she saw the attacker’s eyes.

Unnaturally large, bloodred, distorting the light they reflected.

Remembering the inhumanly large, glowing red circles, the dullahan couldn’t contain a little shiver.

She remembered the eerie images of the little gray aliens she’d seen on the TV.

What if it was an actual alien?

The headless knight, a symbol of terror for humanity, imagined a cheesy Adamski-model UFO emitting some mysterious beam technology that split the earth in two and shivered.

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