Interlude (2)
At the very base of every sane mind lies the desire to be acknowledged. Born social animals as we are, that hunger for approval is nearly impossible to suppress — the craving to be exalted by others, to carve oneself into their memory as something better.
For a creature like that, what is the word special? You might call it a magic word that gratifies that hunger for recognition in a single stroke.
I imagine that if a woman I loved had said such a thing to me, I truly would have been delighted. The problem was that the person who'd said it to me was a man — and, moreover, a madman.
"Special," he says?
Back in my own room, I stared blankly into nothing. It was late, but I'd slept straight through from morning to noon, and the words I'd heard were shocking enough that sleep refused to come easily.
Me?
Was he mocking me? That was hard to believe — the mood had been deadly serious. I couldn't begin to fathom what he'd meant by it. If the Rihardt of before had been a beast whose behavior I could roughly predict, the Rihardt of now was, you might say, steadily morphing into an unpredictable monster.
What did I do wrong? What had I done to provoke him? No matter how I turned it over, nothing surfaced. If I was guilty of anything, it was only of having done my very best. Scowling, I scratched irritably at my head. I pulled at it, too. There was nothing — no mistake anywhere. I'd done everything I was told! So why was he doing this to me?
"Whew."
Steadying my ragged breathing, I dragged a hand down my face. From Rihardt's standpoint he had merely tossed a pebble, but for me it felt like my skull was about to split open. How could it not be exhausting? Only a few days had passed, yet the stress I'd accumulated was worth months at the very least.
By this point I'd sunk so low I was doubting my own judgment. Becoming his accomplice — perhaps I'd misjudged that after all.
I shook my head. I'll say it again: back then, latching onto Rihardt had been the best way to survive. Having seen the basement of Rihardt's, how was I supposed to walk out of that place unscathed? There was no way. Think about it however you like — there simply wasn't one.
The timing of my possession had just been terrible. What if I hadn't been dropped into such an extreme situation — what if I'd arrived through some more ordinary course? I could have quietly observed how things developed, lived modestly in the manor, and vanished the moment a decent opening appeared. What an effortless plan that would have been. I wouldn't have needed to rack my brain over how to slip free of Rihardt's clutches like this!
But it was all empty fantasy. I had possessed Lucy — the girl who saw Rihardt coming out of that basement. From the very first stitch, the knot had been tied wrong. Even the Gordian Knot was probably less snarled than this one.
"Haha."
A hollow laugh spilled out of me. Of course it did. A madman had called me special — how was I supposed to keep a straight face?
Even in the novel, Rihardt was the one character never once described as regarding anyone as special. A man who stopped at nothing — no atrocity too grotesque — in pursuit of stimulation, and he considered me special? If that wasn't a red alert, I didn't know what was.
I knew all too well what kind of deranged pursuits the grown Rihardt indulged in. This was a world where potions — universal panaceas capable of restoring even the gravest, most precarious injury at a stroke — existed. Of course there was no such thing as a brake.
He'd tried everything under the sun, starting with bestiality and crossbreeding with other species. Later on, he even pitted his 'toys' against one another in competition. He would set a theme and a set of rules, and whichever side broke them paid a penalty. The penalty varied wildly according to Rihardt's mood that day, ranging from comparatively light to dangers that left the body permanently ruined. Shall I recount a few that stayed with me?
Branding crude, obscene tattoos into bellies and groins with a hot iron — marks no one could erase in a lifetime. Slicing off nipples and feeding them to their owner by hand. Piercing clitorises with honed awls. Using inhuman creatures in the full throes of rut to force them to conceive the offspring of monsters. Pulling every tooth and every nail, then having iron spikes driven into the empty sockets.
And yet somehow the most absurd part was that going outside wearing nothing but a collar and mating with a dog in front of a crowd ranked among the mildest of those penalties.
Stimulation, by nature, raises its own threshold the longer it continues. And this was Rihardt years down the line from the boy I served now? Safe to say he'd tried everything there was to try. With his threshold inflated so absurdly, ordinary things simply stopped thrilling him — that had to be why he went hunting for such extreme stimulation.
So should I count myself lucky I arrived in the early days? Honestly, whether that was a blessing or a misfortune remained to be seen. Who could guarantee the Rihardt of today wouldn't end up that way? For all I knew, meeting me might have made his condition worse.
The thought sent my heart plunging. How long could I hold out? I didn't harbor so much as a vague hope that I'd never become his toy — I considered it only a matter of time. His capricious heart could never be satisfied forever. And even if I could satisfy him without fail, that would be its own problem.
There's no law saying his affection would do me any good. Have you ever seen a treasured keepsake grown old and worn? I don't mean durable things — rings and precious metals. I mean the perishable sort: clothes, shoes, dolls. Things whose usefulness should have run out long ago, but which someone loved so dearly they carried them on regardless. The state of such objects was, as a rule, no different from rags.
If even an ordinary person's love weighed that heavy, what would a madman's be like? And what if the object of it were me? The mere thought raised gooseflesh. This was a man who might behead me and set my head beside him as an ornament. A man who might very well eat pieces of my flesh while murmuring that we'd be together forever.
Smack.
I struck my cheek hard — hard enough to make it burn red.
You're being far too negative. Get a grip.
Fearing Rihardt blindly would earn me nothing. He might even grow bored of a cowering, terrified me and lose interest. For now, at least, he could hold a rational conversation, and the terms he offered were more or less reasonable. In his own way, he even seemed to weigh how I was being treated.
The truth of it was, I had boarded a runaway locomotive named Rihardt — and only two destinations remained to me. Ride it with him to the very end, or find some transfer point along the way where I could get off.
Knock, knock.
Just as my thoughts were settling into some semblance of order, a knock sounded at the door. However recently I'd woken, it was a very late hour.
"Who is it?"
No answer came.
"Is that you, Young Master Rihardt?"
It occurred to me that, knowing him, he might well pull exactly this sort of stunt — and, puzzled as I was, I opened the door anyway.
Click.
"...Mr. Sean?"
Contrary to my expectation, the figure at my door was not Rihardt. It was Sean, the stable keeper — a middle-aged man with brown hair. That someone with whom I had no real point of contact had come looking for me startled me all the more. Seeing my flustered expression, he bowed his head.
"Miss Lucifer, I'm sorry to come calling so late at night."
"It's quite all right. But might I ask what brings you here?"
"I meant to wait and be patient about it, but I found I simply couldn't anymore."
"Wait for what, exactly—"
"Have you found any trace of Bianca?"
I'm sorry — what? Why was he asking me that? I worked hard to keep my expression under control. Sean's eyes narrowed to slits as he studied my reaction.
"You did say there was someone you suspected, didn't you?"
I said that? When? I have no memory of any such thing — was he lying to me, or...
No.
Wait.
Don't tell me.
If my guess was right, then the one who'd said that to Sean was Lucy herself. The only catch being — that Lucy was the 'Lucy' from before I possessed her.
So it hadn't been mere coincidence, her witnessing Rihardt come out of the basement.
She must have been searching for Bianca's whereabouts at Sean's request, and somewhere along the way she learned that the girl's disappearance was connected to Rihardt.
That was why Lucy had seized the gap while Rihardt was absent and tried to search his room for traces of Bianca. Without a story like that behind it, the original Lucy would never have set foot in Rihardt's room uninvited.
And in the original telling, Rihardt would have discovered all of this while tormenting her. The original 'Lucy' surely hadn't the steel to hold her silence through his cruel games.
A prickling sensation crawled over me, fine hairs rising one by one. How was I supposed to know about any of this backstory?
With me failing to produce a proper answer and only rolling my eyes in thought, Sean ventured a conclusion of his own.
"Judging by that reaction, whoever it is can't be spoken of carelessly. As I thought—"
Stop. Don't dig any deeper. You'll put yourself in danger too.
Sean, as it happened, did not finish the sentence. Or rather — no voice reached my ears.
His mouth was moving.
— Was it Young Master Rihardt who abducted Bianca?
For a long while his gaze and mine stayed tangled, each trying to read the other's intent. Then, in a tone sunk several degrees lower, I spoke to him slowly.
"Have you ever breathed that suspicion to anyone?"
"Not a soul. Not yet."
I let out a breath of relief.
"You would do best to keep it that way. No one would believe you regardless."
"And if I had proof?"
"Then before that proof could ever make the trouble grow, you yourself would be disposed of, Mr. Sean."
"And am I to simply stand by and watch, then? When I've finally found a thread leading to my daughter?"
"I never said any such thing."
And then what? What was I supposed to do with this situation? My mind spun at a furious pace. The move I had always intended was to hand all of this over to Rihardt. And yet that would amount to nothing less than baring my own secret for him to see.
Say I told him everything, exactly as it happened.
"So you had a purpose of your own all along, didn't you, Lucy?"
The phantom of that skin-crawling voice came to me as if he stood right beside me, speaking directly into my ear. "Things seemed to have gone wrong, so you pled to become my accomplice — was that all an excuse? You've been deceiving me?"
A tremor ran through my body. If I knew Rihardt at all, those were exactly the words he would say — and more.
Damn you, Lucy.
Why did you have to leave me holding a mess like this?