Japanese Gothic

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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