新月の殺人鬼

The New Moon Killer

I met him on my way home from high school. It was around 7:30 p.m. in early spring. I was not afraid at least of walking alone on the street at night. I was the tallest male student in my class, and I carried my long lacrosse stick on my shoulder. I had confidence in my ability to beat someone who dared make an attack on me. That was why I never thought of TV news on a serial murderer, who was called New Moon Killer because he always killed a person once a month under a new moon, even though I saw a new moon in the western sky that night.

When I came to a street near my apartment, I found a figure under a streetlamp. He was in a dark down jacket and a dark knit cap. He stood in a column of light with his both hands in his pockets. A man standing alone at such a late time? I thought him strange a little, but I was going past him without talking to him. When our shadow overlapped, I saw that he drew his hand from his pocket. A kitchen knife was in the hand. It was when I saw the pale light reflected from the knife that I remembered an article headlined “The New Moon Killer, the latter-day Jack the Ripper.” In the next moment, I said to him, “Well, look, that is not a new moon tonight.”

He opened his eyes wide in surprise. While he looked up in the western sky, I ran away from him and reached my apartment. My mother looked at my pale face and asked me what happened, but I said nothing. I couldn’t believe that it was a real thing. It was like a bad dream which I saw while remaining awake. I had dinner with my parents, took a bath for fifteen minutes, studied for an entrance exam, and went to bed around midnight. Everything was as usual except for sights in my mind. I remembered the sights again and again at the table, in the bathtub, at my desk and in my bed. A figure in the light column under the streetlamp, the dark down jacket and the dark knit cap, the pale kitchen knife reflecting the lamp light, and the intent eyes looking up in the western sky. At the very moment I fell asleep, I noticed that I threw out my lacrosse stick on the street.

Next morning, I saw from a window in my room some police cars going to a direction. When I went to school, a classmate who liked gossip told me a thing or two, and I learned that the killer seemed to murder another boy instead of me.

My lacrosse stick was taken to the school office as a lost property by someone, an office clerk said, in a dark down jacket and a dark knit cap.