Part I
The Door
Chapter One
Lee
Present day
Chiran, Kagoshima Prefecture, Japan
In the house behind the sword ferns, there was a man, and a murderer, and a stain.
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.
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.
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.
Bloodstains in kitchens belonged on counters and floors and sinks—places where cooking knives sliced down on fingersinstead 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.
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.
Lee scraped the rest of the blood away with his thumb and watched it flake onto the tiles.
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.
Perhaps it was morbid, but Lee found it easier to picture James as a rotting corpse than as his roommate.
James had let Lee copy his astronomy homework without even asking, had brought him an extra slice of pizza when he came back from dinner with the crew team, had unlocked the door as quietly as possible when he came home drunk at 4 a.m. He was more careful around Lee than most people, as if he’d always known what Lee really was.
James had green eyes, which looked like entire planets.
James had green eyes, past tense, because Lee smashed them until they burst.
That was another anomaly, another truth that Lee still couldn’t decipher. Because he liked James’s green eyes, and he liked James, and he’d killed James, and those words didn’t make sense together, but they were still true.
There must have been a reason.
No one killed without a purpose, even if that purpose was something awful like “death excites me” or “I wanted to see how it felt.” But Lee hadn’t wanted to know the taste of James’s blood, hadn’t wanted to hold this awful feeling inside him, like the collapse of an entire star system inside his rib cage. Lee was full of dead stars and empty universes now. There was a reason, but he couldn’t remember it.
Lee reached into his left pocket, but it was empty. He’d left the bottle of Ativan in his backpack. He had a few more doses of Benadryl in the blister pack in his right pocket that he could use in a pinch, but they weren’t as effective. He hoped he could find more medicine in Kagoshima. It was very important that he did.
“Are you... sucking your thumb?” his father asked.
Lee quickly pulled his finger out of his mouth, then stuffed his hands into his pockets before turning around to face his father.
“Just biting off a hangnail,” Lee said, shrugging.
Lee’s father didn’t believe him. Even with all the sedatives in his blood, Lee wasn’t stoned enough to miss this. His father had a way of wincing at Lee like he was a sharp ray of sunlight. That was why his father never looked at him for very long—Lee would burn shapes into his eyes, then steal his sight altogether.
Lee knew the problem: He looked too much like his mother, who no longer existed—the same dark curly hair, the same eyes that were pinched a bit too close together, the same starvedexpression. Like a python who wanted to cram the whole world inside its jaw and eat and eat and eat, and it wouldn’t fit but he would make it fit because people like Lee and his mother were people who devoured.
Lee’s father looked more like an old silver screen star—classic American jawline, Ivy League, broad shoulders, strong nose. He’d taken Lee for a paternity test when he was a bug-eyed toddler who looked like a cursed changeling. But the test had proved that, for better or worse, Lee was his son.
Lee turned away so his father wouldn’t have to look at him anymore, then dug into the box on the counter. “Do you want coffee?” Lee said, already pulling out the hand grinder and the beans, searching the drawers for a measuring spoon.
