Tsukumodo:Volume 2 Eyes of Death

The eyes are as eloquent as the tongue.

The proverb is used when the eyes reveal everything even when it's not put into words.

That said, it's naturally not so easy to read someone's mind just by looking into their eyes.

In by far the most cases, words are necessary to convey things, and we can't really read someone's thoughts off their eyes.

In the first place, not all people show their feelings in their eyes. Some of them don't even show them on their face.

My workmate is like that. She only alters her mien so slightly that it's impossible to tell whether she's happy or angry, and when someone gets to see her deadpan for the first time, he almost certainly shrinks back. But even though she's unable to even just put on a friendly smile, she feels a vocation to attend to customers. I have not the slightest idea what's going on in her head.

Although I feel that I'm slowly starting to get the knack of understanding her thoughts.

Or is that just me?

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Not only your brain remembers things.

Your ears remember sounds,

your nose remembers smells,

your hands remember touches,

and your eyes remember scenes.

Have you ever felt familiar with something on hearing, smelling, touching or seeing it even before your mind reacted?

One theory says that that's because your subconscious mind has memorized it, but I feel otherwise.

I believe that our ears, our noses, our hands and our eyes can also remember things.

Among those, I'm especially intrigued by the memories of the eyes.

If you see what a person has seen in his life, you know his life.

Others' lives are very interesting; but once you hear about them, they quickly become boring.

That is because of subjectivism—bragging, exaggeration and lies.

But it's the life itself that's interesting, without any bragging, exaggeration or lies.

Therefore, I watch for myself.

I watch others' lives through their eyes.

As I did on any other day, I took a look at the empty seats in the first wagon.

There tended to be comparatively many empty seats in the first wagon of this train.

I wasn't exhausted; I was going to be sitting for hours later at work anyway. That notwithstanding, it was a daily exercise for me to sit in this wagon.

But before taking a seat somewhere, I looked around at the people on the other side.

There was a sleeping person, a reading person, a person applying make-up, a person playing a game, and many others. But among them, there was a girl who was looking out of the window. She was probably still in high school.

I sat down opposite of that absent-minded high school girl and started observing her.

She was wearing the uniform of a private school that was three stations from here. If my memory doesn't fail me, it was a quite famous all-girls school. The school badge on her collar was colored green, so she was a third-year student. Judging from the scratch she had in her kneecap, she either belonged to a club that did sports, or she had made that injury during PE.

After finishing that evaluation, I corrected the position of my glasses and looked at her—or more precisely, at her eyes. She noticed me and returned my gaze. I sharpened my eyes, projecting my consciousness.

Her eyes lost their focus for a moment.

Connected, I smirked in mind.

Looking at others means connecting to others to me. Once connected, I would go deeper. I would get the feeling of being drawn into their eyes when gazing at them. But in fact, it's the opposite: I throw myself into there of my own accord. Into those eyes, and into whatever lies beyond them.

I could see; I could see something—the memory of her eyes.

The things she had seen showed in my eyes, as though as her eyes had become mine.

The first picture her eyes had memorized appeared.

It was an alarm clock. Its clock hand was indicating 09:00 am. The field of vision extended for a moment, and then zoomed in on the clock. It was set to ring at 07:00 am.

(I see. She's indeed a bit late for a high school student. Looks like she overslept.)

Most likely, she had taken a second look at the alarm clock in surprise. Unable to accept the reality, she did so for nearly a whole thirty seconds, even though she would have been better off hurrying up already.

(Oh, that wouldn't be of any use anyway, I guess?)

When she went to the kitchen and ignored the breakfast prepared for her, her mother wasn't at home anymore. After that, I only saw how she prepared for school in a hurry. At first, anyway. To my mild amusement, she grew slower and slower as time went by, apparently feeling that it was of no avail.

I wanted to peek a bit deeper, but the girl stood up because the train had arrived at her station. Our connection broke off immediately. If the connection was as weak as that, I couldn't see any more than that.

Well, it was a good pastime before work, I comforted myself.

That's not what I really wanted to see. I was convinced that there must be more interesting things hidden behind others' eyes.

I let my disappointment out as a sigh and got off the train.

Would I come across an interesting sight today?

Suddenly, I heard the emergency break of a train.

I quickly turned to the origin of the noise. I was positive that I had heard something get squashed. A few seconds later, a scream echoed through the station.

There was a wave of people that assembled at a certain point of the opposite platform, and one that went away from there.

I rushed to that point.

"Somebody's fallen on the rails!"

"Somebody got run over! Hey, call the station staff!"

Confusion and horror could be heard from everywhere. Upon arriving, the station employees started to disperse the crowd with aggressive-sounding roars.

I dived into the crowd.

It was an express train that was never scheduled to stop at this station, thus only the last wagon was still more or less by the platform as the train had come to a halt. Something sticky could be found on the rails the train had passed.

"Don't push! Step back!"

The moment I heard an employee yell so, I felt my body leaning forward.

"Huh?"

Pushed by a wave of onlookers, a few people and I fell together from the platform. The pain of the impact ran through my body. Because I had fell on another person, however, there was no serious injury.

The clamor welled up again, and the station employees pushed the onlookers away from the rails. "Are you all right?" someone yelled from above, upon which some people stood up and others stayed on the ground.

I shook my head slightly. Not to the level of a cerebral concussion, but my head was aching a little.

I pressed my hand lightly against my forehead, but the moment I did so, I noticed a sticky touch on my face.

I automatically looked at my hands.

They were blood-red. Did I injure my forehead? I calmly tried to explain it to myself, but I immediately realized the truth.

There was not only blood around me, but also all kinds of repulsive things somewhere between liquids and solids that I had never seen before in my life.

Exactly. The victim had been run over about where I was sitting.

I shrunk back in terror and put my hand behind me.

However, that hand touched something.

"!"

My brain instinctively tried to picture what it was.

I was already familiar with that sticky touch. I imagined the thing twining around my fingers as black and longish. There were a few possibilities I could think of to explain the substance that was entering the gaps between my fingernails, but I was unable to determine it exactly.

I turned my head around and cautiously looked at my hand.

Its form was far from what I was used to see. It looked so grotesque that I would classify it as ugly anytime if asked to decide between nice and ugly.

My hand was touching something that would usually be called a "head."

That head was lacking an important part that made it look most awkward to me. It was not the parts below the neck.

There were no eyes.

"Are you all right?" a station employee yelled from above. I removed my gaze from the head and nodded. "We're bringing a ladder right now, please hold on for a second!"

The employee ordered his colleagues to bring a ladder and started to get in contact with every person that had fallen onto the rails. Fortunately, nobody seemed to be seriously injured.

I could see a bunch of men rushing toward us with a ladder from afar.

I looked again at my hand.

Not because curiosity had gotten the better of fear; I just wanted to take a proper look to make sure what had happened to the eyes.

A thread of sorts was sticking out from the eye sockets. The nerves? Or a thread of sticky blood, perhaps?

But there was nothing ahead of them. What should have been there was...

—in sight.

The eyeballs were lying right behind the head.

"Are you all right? Can you stand up?" asked a station employee as he climbed the ladder down. He was almost here!

I became nervous.

Why would I become nervous?

I only had to wait for help and climb back onto the platform. There was nothing to worry about. Despite that, I didn't want the employee to come yet.

I hadn't come to decision yet.

I was in need of more time.

But he was almost here. Now that he wasn't looking was my only chance.

Once he was here, there would be no chance anymore.

But common sense and my conscience slowed made me waver.

Only a few steps until he would get off the ladder and come to me.

(I won't be getting such a chance anymore.

If I let that chance slip, I will regret it for the rest of my life.)

Nobody had noticed my intent.

Nobody was taking heed of me.

And certainly nobody would care if that went missing.

I reached out my hand and picked it up.

And then I stuffed the eyeball into my pocket—

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