What the Raincoat Hid
"……Whether we have a doctor look at it, we'll decide tomorrow, once we see how it goes."
Anna, who had not so much as stirred, kept pulling at his attention. Elliot had been putting the first-aid kit away; he hesitated, then lifted a hand and carefully stroked her hair.
"If you're really that bored, I'll find you a dog. One ought to do."
Anna's head lifted a little. Beneath the hand in her hair he caught a glimpse of those sullen pale eyes, and a faint smile touched his mouth. Seen like this, she was nothing but a pitiful child.
Astonishingly, the mad dog that had bitten Anna's hand came back that very evening.
"Gorgolio!"
Anna had been lying on the living-room sofa as usual, staring blankly out the window, when she suddenly cried out and bolted into the garden. Elliot abandoned the meat on the fire and rushed to the window, and what he saw was Anna, laughing wide open, gathering the stray into her arms.
"You came back after all. I knew you would!"
Elliot only watched in silence as she rubbed her face against the stray's muzzle.
The Anna who was always expressionless, who sometimes wore a sneer and sometimes a sulk, was nowhere to be seen. There was only a girl of nineteen, breaking into happy laughter.
Elliot climbed over the windowsill into the garden and went to where she had plopped down on the grass.
"You like it that much?"
Anna clutched the dog tighter, wary. Elliot gave a dry little laugh.
"I'm not going to take it. What's so wonderful about that filthy dog?"
"Don't insult Gorgolio."
"If it's filthy, you call it filthy. What else am I supposed to—"
He broke off and slowly tilted his head.
"That dog's still shaking, isn't it?"
It had been the same a moment ago. Unwilling to leave her arms, and yet, the closer it drew to Anna, trembling violently and thrashing.
Anna looked down at the stray shivering little by little against her, her eyes full of affection.
"It's all right. It came back, didn't it? That means I'm not only something to be afraid of."
She looked up at Elliot and smiled, bright as anything.
Under the reddish dusk her face slowly took on the color of the sunset, and Elliot watched her for a long time without a word, afraid, in spite of himself, of what this heartbeat kicking out of time might be an omen of now.
The hour came early.
The next day Elliot was in the middle of lunch, sautéing clams in oil, when he called for Anna, who ought to have been idling in the living room.
"Anna. Would you set the forks on the table?"
No answer.
"Anna?"
He craned his neck to look. The living room was empty. He turned the flame down and glanced around, puzzled.
"Where's she gone this time."
Honestly. She couldn't sit still for a single moment.
He let out a heavy sigh and headed for her room. The instant he laid a hand on the door to knock, the door—already a little ajar—slid quietly open under his touch.
No one was inside.
Elliot gazed into the room, bright with noon sun, then took a few steps in. Through the half-open window, where a white curtain stirred, Anna's laughter drifted faintly.
"……Good boy, Gorg……"
Playing with the dog again, by the sound of it. He couldn't see what was so lovely about that wretched creature.
Shaking his head, he went to the window. He was about to call her in to eat when the fountain pen, perched precariously in his shirt pocket, dropped to the floor. Before he could catch it, it rolled away and vanished beneath the bed.
"Of all places……"
Swallowing a sigh, Elliot knelt and bent his head. It had gone in deep. He reached under the bed and felt along the dusty floor, and suddenly his fingertips met something strange. He didn't hesitate. He pulled it out.
What came from under the bed was a pitch-black cloth. Turning it over in his hands, he soon realized it was the raincoat Anna had been wearing the first time they met.
"Why is this here……"
His hands, carefully unrolling the bundled coat, stopped dead. Fingertips trembling faintly, he lifted the dress that had been hidden inside it.
It was no mistake. The white dress was soaked through with crimson blood.
Thud.
A ball the size of a fist rolled to his feet. He forced up a neck gone rigid with dread. He didn't know when she had come, but Anna was standing stock-still outside the window.
He couldn't bring himself to speak. Afraid of what might burst out if he opened his mouth, he bit his lips desperately shut. Anna stared at him—at those tightly bitten lips—then let her gaze slide down to the dress in his hands.
She studied it a moment, then met his eyes with that same blank face. And as if none of it mattered at all—
A flicker passed through Elliot's eyes.
The heartbeat that had been kicking out of time was suddenly a drum, booming until it filled his ears. The ground beneath his feet gave way, and a black ringing swallowed the world.
"This is all the newspapers we have. A few years ago there was a fire in the stacks, and most of them were lost."
The librarian set a box of papers on the desk. Elliot lifted the lid a little. Checking even this much looked as though it would cost him a sleepless night.
"Will there be anything else?"
"No. Thank you."
Once the librarian had gone, he took the newspapers from the box and sat down. Page after page turned with a soft rustle, and the green eyes skimming only the bold headlines began, little by little, to cloud.
"What— what is this, exactly?"
He alone had been struck dumb by the blood-soaked dress found without warning beneath the bed. Anna, waiting outside the window only for him to throw the ball, soon vaulted the sill and came into the room.
"Anna. I'm asking you what this is."
She held her silence even as he pressed her again and again, then bent and picked up the ball that had rolled to his feet.
"My dress."
"You think I don't know that—!"
"It's what I was wearing the first time I met you."
His face twisted strangely.
"You were hurt like this, back then?"
If it were someone else's blood, it could not have spattered this way. Even being drenched to the face in another person's blood could not account for it. The dress still bore, unmistakably, the marks of a deep wound.
"……Who did this."
"Who else would it be. My grandfather."
A voice as calm as if she were singing. Strength gathered of its own accord in the hand gripping the dress.
"When Grandfather gets drunk, he beats me. He's always telling me to prove it. That day I took the whip, so it hurt a little, but……"
"……"
"Why are you angry?"
Noticing the dress creased in his fist, Anna tilted her head. He wasn't angry. He had been whispering fast through clenched teeth; lost in confusion, he dragged a hand down his face, utterly blank.
"Why didn't you tell me? If I'd known you were hurt like this—"
"Even if you knew, nothing would have changed."
Perched on the edge of the bed, Anna swung her legs, bored.
"I hid it on purpose. I know how ordinary people react."
That all-too-plain gaze turned on him. He only worked his dry lips.
The whole way from Castleleigh, wandering the long road until they reached Winsmore. That the girl who had done nothing but doze like a sick hen had been hiding a wound like that inside a black raincoat—not even a little had he imagined it.
"……The wound. The wound, first."
When he barely managed to drag his locked voice up, a long sigh came back to him.
Anna silently held out her bandaged hand. When he didn't understand, she indicated it again with her eyes. Hesitant, he began to unwind the bandage. One layer, then another, and just as the end came into sight—
"……That's impossible."
He could not go on.
He still remembered the bloody hand torn open by the stray's sharp fangs. On the fingers where the flesh had been ripped away, the tooth marks had been plain, and the blood running out of them would not stop.
There was no way it could have healed clean in a single day.
All at once a snow-white finger drew near. Anna slipped quietly off the bed, sat down at his feet, and in a flash ducked up beneath his chin.
"What a curious face."
The touch of fingertips against his cheek was sharp and clear. Elliot, rigid as a stone statue, looked quietly down at the face risen to just under his jaw.
"If I'd known you'd be this shocked, I would have shown you sooner. It isn't some pointless trick."
"……"
"Well? Do you feel a little like asking, now?"
Anna's lips parted slightly. A strange smile spread over the whole of her pale face.
He could not get out a single word. As if his entire body were bound, he could not move so much as a fingertip.
What in the world was that girl.
The moment he came to himself, he had run to the only library in the village. I don't want to know. I don't want to interfere. Beyond the veil he had avoided so carefully with that resolve, the matter was now urgent. Only now did he understand it was not a problem he could keep fleeing for no better reason than that he wished to flee it.
This was an age in which superstitious wonder had vanished long ago. What ruled the world now was science, and logic, and reason. Like everyone else, he had lived faithfully along the lines common sense laid down. The track of his life until now had been an endless straight line.
But Anna was a being who, simply by existing, threw a life's track out of true. She was a curve, a figure without form. A being that science could not explain and that stood outside common sense—how was he ever supposed to understand her?
"Do you feel a little like asking, now?"
The newspaper beneath his hand crumpled without mercy.
Feel like asking? Nothing of the kind would ever arise in him, not for the whole of his life. Pushed down to his hometown by an old friend, he had only wanted not to be swept into some pointless maelstrom. Knowing a thing in order to avoid it, and knowing it in order to be caught up in it—those were plainly not the same.
So he wished she would expect nothing of him. He wished she would stop looking at him with eyes that always wanted something, eyes thirsty and burning with it.
Already frayed to tatters, he had no corner left in which to let another soul in. A place where only the dead drifted like ghosts—what was there worth coveting, that she should look so closely, and want it so much?
Elliot braced his forehead in both hands and let out a deep sigh. Into eyes opened in gloom, the letters he had been searching for all this while wavered slowly into sight.