The Night of the Bakeneko (1)

“Remember that run-in we had with the Diogenes Club?”

I moved my Gashadokuro four spaces in the direction of Akiha’s base camp, the maximum number of spaces allowed for a yōkai of this level. My intention was to cut off my opponent’s supply lines.

“Those guys who lived in the walls of the school? That was over two weeks ago. Why bring it up now?”

Akiha didn’t even look at me as she spoke, her hand hovering indecisively over the piece which represented her Tengu. I knew that she was contemplating whether to have him retreat from the battlefield so that he could intercept my Gashadokuro who was going to reach her base camp during the next phase of play.

“I just thought of this now,” I replied. “Haruhi’s nickname is Holmes, and the Diogenes Club, as we learned, was founded by her brother. Isn’t that ironic?”

Her Tengu, flanked by two Furaribi whose blazing wings illuminated the tenebrous plains, traversed the entirety of the battlefield to where my Gashadokuro was situated. This vivid imagery, of course, was my own imagination giving life to what was otherwise cards and model figures placed on flat cardboard.

“I don’t understand what you’re saying at all,” she said, ending her turn.

If you understand the card game, which also happened to utilise a board and model figures as well, known as Yōkai-Yo!!! then my next move was immediately obvious – I had to summon the Kappa card in my hand and order it to attack her Furaribi.

Although Kappa was not a particularly powerful yōkai, the fact that it was a water-element card meant that it had a natural advantage against fire element yōkai like Furaribi.

“In the short stories Sherlock Holmes’ brother, Mycroft, is the cofounder of the Diogenes Club. You see why it’s ironic now?”

Without its two avian attendants, Akiha’s Tengu was weaker than my Gashadokuro. Unless she had a strong enough support card in her hand, her supplies were as good as gone. I smiled maliciously - a free lunch was the high stakes we were playing for.

She seemed to realise this as well, as droplets of sweat began to formulate on her brow. My question went unanswered as she scrutinised the field of play for a way out of her current predicament. Her right index finger quivered over the cards she held in her left hand.

Just as Akiha was about to make her move, Haruhi suddenly appeared and pushed our gameboard to the opposite end of the long table. The model figures toppled over and the cards, which were protected in plastic sleeves that made them particularly slippery, spilled across the table.

Our intricate fantasy world was in disarray!

I scrambled to move the pieces back to their original places, but Akiha put a stop to that as she scooped up the cards belonging to her and put them away. Haruhi, seemingly oblivious to our ruined game, placed a piece of paper on the table and was straightening it out with both hands.

“I was going to win, you know.”

“Under the present circumstances,” Akiha was beaming, “I think we should call it a draw.”

“Save it for the Board Games’ Club,” Haruhi interrupted, jabbing her finger at what I now discerned to be foolscap paper. “Another mystery has presented itself.”

I titled my head slightly; written on the paper was various dates in the month of June spanning the previous four years. Additionally, four items, seemingly unrelated, were also listed out and each one corresponded with one of aforementioned four years. I began to read them out loud.

“¥5,000,000 in cash, a trading card of Han Saadaki worth ¥13,000,000, a diamond encrusted ashtray that belonged to Marquis Yanagi, and a scroll containing an original haiku written by Ryōkan… what is all this?”

“These were all stolen from people living in the Ichikawa District in the past four years,” Haruhi explained. “And these robberies always happen to occur in the same week in June. This week, actually.”

“Ichikawa…?” my voice trailed off. Where had I heard that name before?

“It’s that affluent area just outside of Kamijousaki City. You know the one with the massive houses and the big gates?”

It was Akiha who had spoken, and her clarification did more than remind me of what Ichikawa District was. It brought to mind a road trip that I had taken with my family a long time ago – we had driven through the Ichikawa District but were forced to take an incredibly convoluted route through the area so as to avoid trespassing on private land.

To me, that spoke volumes of just how affluent and wealthy this district was. Its inhabitants were the type of people who owned their own roads and got into arguments with local governments over easements and other property rights; in other words, the type of people whom I tended to regard cynically.

“Who cares if some fat cats got robbed, Holmes?” I declared.

Akiha whistled. “Don’t get worked up, Robin Hood,” she said teasingly.

“Mystery solving is our business,” Haruhi replied plainly. “And there’s a mystery here. Also, I should tell you that our services were personally requested by Miyazawa Saburo himself. He is incredibly worried that he might be this year’s victim.”

“Services?” I balked at the idea. “We’re just a school club.”

“He’s got a point,” Akiha backed me up. “And Ichikawa District is faaaaar. I’ve got my part-time job to think about, you know?”

“You can sit this one out then.”

Haruhi was glaring at her. I hadn’t been present at the time but apparently she did go talk to President Sawamura about Akiha’s membership in the club. To her credit, she didn’t have any actual issue with the new girl herself but rather was upset that she hadn’t been consulted beforehand.

As she often liked to tell us, she was still the Vice President.

The end result? She begrudgingly accepted Akiha as the fifth member of the New Wave Mystery Society. She also seemed to have a shorter fuse when dealing with Akiha’s casual impertinence; and, unlike me, Haruhi hadn’t given her a nickname purloined straight from the Sherlock Holmes’ canon.

My attempts to rectify this disparity by calling her Irene Adler did not catch on. Haruhi would glower at me, and even Akiha would give me a confused stare. After a few days of futility, I dropped the issue altogether.

“Well, let’s not be so hasty,” I laughed. “You haven’t even heard the details of the mystery yet, Mochizuki.”

The subtle reminder that there was a mystery on the horizon instantly put Haruhi in a merry mood; without any further encouragement, she began to recite the perplexing details behind the string of bizarre robberies.

“The victims are, as you might have already noticed, elderly people who live in the affluent Ichikawa District. All of them are sprightly, the kind of people who still have active social lives despite their old age – although they all employ domestic workers of some sort, none of them are live-in. Like I mentioned, they’re still quite healthy, so they don’t have full time nurses or anything like that.”

“Basically,” I said, “they live alone?”

“Exactly,” Haruhi nodded. “So, they’re pretty easy pickings for burglars, but here's the interesting thing… like a portend of impending tragedy, ‘demons’ always appear right before the crime happens!”

“What do you mean by that?” Akiha chimed in.

“Take the case of Maeda Daichi. He was walking to his car after attending a reunion dinner in the city when he realised he was being followed. He went to confront his stalker when he noticed that instead of a human face, he was looking straight into the eyes of a ring-tailed lemur!”

“It has to be a mask of some sort,” I theorised.

“I agree, but Mr. Maeda is adamant that he was looking at a bipedal, human-sized, ring-tailed lemur. If it was a mask, it was certainly a custom made job. In any case, he was terrified. He ran back to his car and drove away immediately. Once he was on the dirt roads outside of the city, however, he noticed that there was a car following him…”

“And in the side mirror, he noticed that the car was being driven by a ring-tailed lemur?” I chuckled. I felt like I already knew where this was going.

“No,” Haruhi answered, much to my surprise. “It was being driven by a pug. The ring-tailed lemur was in the passenger seat. He didn’t get a good look obviously, being in another vehicle, but Mr. Maeda insists that the pug was a pugman, and not a man in a pug mask.”

I was at a loss for words, but Akiha still had questions.

“Didn’t this old timer get a good look at the car’s licence plate in the rearview mirror? The police could have traced it or something.”

“He did. It turned out to be a rental,” Haruhi replied, as though this were a trite line of inquiry. “The police traced it to a Frenchman named Remy Merabet, who had rented it immediately after touching down in Tokyo. He says the car was stolen during his five-day stay in the capital, and he reported it as such before coming to Kamijousaki via train. The police verified his ticket stubs, and there are witnesses that say they saw him on the train too.”

“Oi, oi,” I began to say, “this sounds pretty serious. These guys are proper criminals…”

Haruhi merely smiled. When no questions were forthcoming, she continued her explanation of Mr. Maeda’s plight.

“He didn’t want to lead these people back to his home so he drove back to the city – specifically, he went to the police station. He was so frantic that they agreed to give him a police escort back to his home, but the other car never reappeared. It was discovered two days later in a Tokorozawa suburb, burnt to bits. Anyway, while Mr. Maeda was out, his house had been burgled and the only thing left behind was a shattered window, and hoof prints leading to and from the house…”

“Hoof prints?! Like a horse?” Akiha gaped in amazement.

“In western literature, the devil is often portrayed as having hooves instead of feet, so maybe that’s why they’re referred to as demons.” I postulated.

“The rigid logic of a man who reads but does not reason,” Haruhi sneered. “What do we have? A ring-tailed lemur, a dogman and hoof prints… it’s obvious that a horse was in league with them and that they carried out this caper together!”

“We absolutely should not get involved,” I reiterated, ignoring her joke.

“Lady Fujiwara Chikako and her chauffeur drive into a police roadblock on the dirt roads leading to the Ichikawa District. Unusual place for a roadblock, but they didn’t question it. They’re approached by two officers who, as they walk through the headlights, are revealed to be bipedal, human sized lions. They make the chauffeur exit the car and drag him away, screaming… by the time Lady Fujiwara can muster up the courage to leap into the driver’s seat and drive herself home, she finds that she has also been burgled.”

I had every intention of protesting but found myself enthralled by the curious happenings that Haruhi was relating to us. Bipedal animals who stalked elderly men, beat up chauffeurs and robbed people’s homes?

It was too fantastic to be real, I thought and, more than wanting to keep my friends out of what was clearly a dangerous business, there was a part of me that also wanted Haruhi to shine a light on this mystery.

If I was there to protect her, then maybe it would be OK…?

“The other two victims have similar stories. Do you want to hear them?”

I glanced at my watch. If there were really demonic animals on the prowl this time of year in Kamijousaki, then it was probably advisable for us to finish up soon.

“Tell us tomorrow. It’s getting late, and they’ve got me working the night show,” Akiha beat me to the punch. She was groaning at the prospect of having to go to work.

“Tell me one thing first,” I said to Haruhi. “You told us that Miyazawa Saburo himself personally requested our services because he’s afraid he’s going to be this year’s victim. Why isn’t he going to the police?”

“What good is the police going to do?” she scoffed. “No crime has been committed yet, and it’s not like Miyazawa is some important official. He’s just a wealthy old man.”

“A private security company then,” I suggested.

“We are the private security,” she thumped her chest.

“Why would he ask high school kids to protect him instead of professionals…?”

“I made him that old miser an offer he couldn’t refuse,” Haruhi grinned. “I told him we’d do it for free.”