Durarara!! - Volume 1 - Chapter 3

Chapter 3: Headless Rider, Subjective

National Route 254 (Kawagoe Highway)

This really sucks.

The owner of the black bike—the headless rider—was in a foul mood as it rode the highway in the middle of the night.

It was supposed to be a simple job. And what was my reward for showing a bit of mercy? I got hit by a car. Should have shut him up from the start.

The headless rider slowed its speed, reflecting on the job it had been doing.

Without signal lights, it had to hand signal a left turn down a narrow side alley. It stopped before the garage of an apartment building, got off the motorcycle, and stroked its handlebars.

The engine gave a faint purr, and the vehicle drove itself into the garage.

Satisfied, the headless rider walked up to the entrance of the building.

“Hey, welcome home.”

A young man in a lab coat greeted the rider inside an apartment on the top floor. He was a pleasant fellow in his midtwenties who matched the crisp coat, but there were no medical instruments to be seen inside the apartment. He looked quite out of place surrounded by the luxury furniture and electronics filling the room.

The shadow in the riding suit, looking equally out of place, stomped into the back room with apparent irritation.

“Uh-oh, someone’s angry. You need a higher calcium intake,” the man in the lab coat said, pulling the chair out from a computer desk in a corner of the room. He sat down and turned to the screen, and the sound of clicking keys came rattling from the back room.

Text appeared on the monitor in front of the man in the coat. The two computers were connected in a LAN configuration, arranged so that they could talk to one another.

“Am I supposed to eat eggshells?”

“Sure, why not? Then again, I don’t know much about nutrition, so I don’t know how much calcium is in eggshells or how efficient a means of intake that is. There’s also the question of how necessary calcium really is when I don’t know even know where your brain is. How do you eat, anyway?”

The man in the coat did not type at his keyboard, but spoke out loud to the headless rider in the back. The rider rattled the keyboard with another message, not bothered by this one-sided conversation.

“Shut up.”

This was apparently how the man in the lab coat and the headless rider communicated, a means of conversation that worked for both.

“All right, I’ll shut up. On another topic, staring at a computer monitor all day wears out a human being’s eyes. What about you?”

“How should I know?”

“Say, Celty. If you don’t have any eyeballs, how do you perceive the world around you? I keep asking, but you never tell me.”

“I can’t explain something I don’t understand myself.”

The shadow—named Celty—had no head. Therefore, it had no organs to sense sight or sound. But in Celty’s world, there was sight and sound and even smell. Celty could read the letters on the screen and make out even subtle color differences in crisp detail. The one difference was that Celty could see a slightly wider range of things at a glance than a human could. But only slightly—if Celty could see all around at once, that nasty collision with the car would not have happened.

Celty’s vision generally came from where the head would be, but it was also adjustable to come from any other part of the body. The only thing that wasn’t possible was a disengaged bird’s-eye view.

Even Celty did not know exactly how this body worked. And as Celty did not know how a human being saw the world, there was no good way to explain the difference between them.

Noticing Celty’s silence on the monitor, Shinra offered his own explanation.

“Here’s my hypothesis: It’s that strange, sci-fi-worthy, shadowlike substance that issues endlessly from your body. I’ve never observed this for myself, but I think you emit that into the environment around you, then reabsorb it when it reflects back toward your body, carrying information with it. Your shadow brings back light, sound, and smell. Like a radar. Naturally, things that are farther away will return less certain information. Perhaps that shadow you wear about you acts as a sensory organ, acquiring light, vibrations, even scent particles.”

“I have no interest in your nonsense. I can see and hear, and that’s all I need,” came the clipped, typed response.

The man in the lab coat shrugged theatrically.

“You’ve always been like this, Celty. I just want to know what the difference is between the world I feel and the world you feel… It’s not an issue of your eyesight. It’s an issue of your values. Not your human values…”

He paused for a breath, then continued callously, “…But the values of a fairy manifested into physical form in this city—a dullahan.”

Celty Sturluson was not a human being.

Celty was a type of fairy known as a dullahan that appeared to those close to death, signaling their impending demise. The dullahan carries its own severed head under its arm and rides on a two-wheeled carriage called a Coiste Bodhar, pulled by a headless horse. When it arrives at the home of the soon to be dead, anyone careless enough to open the door gets a basin of blood thrown upon them. Like the banshee, tales of this eerie messenger echoed throughout Europe for centuries.

This would not normally be known in Japan, but recognition of the dullahan exploded thanks to the influence of fantasy novels and video games. As harbingers of misfortune, dullahans were well suited to playing villains, and their image as ghastly knights of the dead made them popular among fans of games and adventure stories.

But Celty had come to Japan from Ireland, the ancestral home of the dullahans, unrelated to any of that development.

The details of Celty’s birth, why a basin of blood was necessary, and why humans needed to be told of their deaths were all things lost to the murky, unremembered past. And in order to get them back…Celty was now on this island nation halfway around the world.

About twenty years ago, Celty awakened in the mountains and realized that many memories were missing.

These included details such as the reason for Celty’s actions and any memory of the past beyond a certain point—all that Celty could remember was being a dullahan, the name Celty Sturluson, and how to use those powers. When the nearby headless horse came over for a pat on the back, Celty finally noticed that the horse wasn’t the only one without a head.

The first shock was, I’m not actually thinking with my head?! Next, Celty was surprised to realize that the head, wherever it was, was giving off some kind of vaguely detectable aura.

After further reflection, a conclusion formed. Celty’s consciousness was shared between body and head, and it was inside the head that those missing memories existed. Thus, Celty came to an immediate decision. The head that contained all the secrets, the reasons for existence, must be regained. For now, that was Celty’s reason for existing. Perhaps the head had strayed from the body of its own will—but that would not be known until Celty found it, either way.

The only option was to sense the faint traces of that aura in search of the head—which led Celty to a boat that crossed the seas. It soon became clear that the boat was headed for Japan, which was exactly the right destination. Celty had successfully stowed away—the problem was the headless horse and two-wheeled carriage.

These two things—possessed dead horse and carriage—were like familiars to a dullahan and could be erased if so desired. But where would they go after that? The knowledge was probably contained in Celty’s missing head. Given that drawback, it was difficult to go through with the act, even if Celty did know how to do it. The dullahan gave it some thought and proceeded to a scrapyard near the port.

That’s where Celty found the perfect replacement, something that looked like the fusion of carriage and horse: a black vehicle with no headlight and two wheels.

Twenty years had passed since Celty arrived in Japan. No clues yet.

The aura that Celty sensed was something like a faint smell—it would point in a very general direction, but once within a reasonable range of the target, it was no longer any help at all.

I know it’s somewhere here in Tokyo, Celty insisted and continued the search for the missing head.

Whether it took years or decades, Celty had no misgivings. The oldest surviving memories went back centuries. The ones still hidden in the head had to be even older.

Based on this knowledge, time was apparently relatively meaningless to a dullahan. The only factor that caused Celty to hasten was the uncertainty of what could be happening to the head.

Tonight, Celty would once again race through the dark streets of Tokyo.

While performing a side job as a courier.

“I presume you performed your duties with all due diligence?” asked Shinra Kishitani, the man in the lab coat, without a trace of irony at his alliteration. He was one of the few human beings who knew what Celty was and provided a variety of jobs to complete, offering a place to stay in return.

He was the son of a doctor who’d been on the ship Celty had snuck onto and had found the dullahan while they were at sea. His father had a simple request, delivered in writing.

“Let me dissect you just once, and you will have a place to live.”

Shinra’s father was an abnormal man. Faced with this unexplained, intelligent being, he did not cower in fear, but proposed a deal. Furthermore, he did not announce his findings to the scientific community, but kept them himself as a sheer sign of his own curiosity. Apparently Celty’s native healing power was phenomenal—the incisions practically knitted themselves closed over the course of the dissection.

Celty did not have much memory of the operation.

The shock of the dissection was probably to blame for most of that. They’d used an anesthetic, but the human concoction did not work on Celty. The pain of the incision was vivid and sharp, but Celty’s limbs had been tied down with heavy chains to prevent struggle. Apparently the dullahan had passed out in the middle of the dissection, as Celty did not remember anything after that.

“You do seem to have some sense of pain but much duller than a human’s. A normal person would have been driven mad by that,” Shinra’s father announced after the operation. Without any memory of the incident, Celty didn’t have the willpower to be angered by this anymore.

Based on the very quick recovery after being hit by the car tonight, it was certain that Celty’s body was very tough indeed. The dullahan looked over at Shinra.

Shinra’s father had seen to it that his son was present during the dissection. He put a glinting scalpel into the five-year-old’s hand—and ordered him to split open the flesh of what looked very much like a human being.

Upon learning this, Celty suspected that being raised by such a father would do Shinra’s personal development no favors—and he had turned out just as twisted as his predecessor.

At the age of twenty-four, Shinra styled himself as a traveling underground doctor, taking on patients that doctors aboveboard found inconvenient for various reasons—typically victims of gunshot wounds, as guns were illegal in Japan, or those who needed facial surgery they didn’t want public. He had extraordinary skill and standing for a doctor his age (in fact, most doctors couldn’t do what he did), but that was again all according to Shinra himself, and Celty couldn’t tell if any of it was true. Normally, properly licensed doctors had to serve as assistants in several hundred operations before they were allowed to be surgeons, and as far as Celty could tell, Shinra had achieved easily that much experience illegally assisting his father’s experiments. Like father, like son; by the time he graduated high school, Shinra had no qualms about what he did.

And now this man was asking Celty about the night’s work progress with a straight face.

“It was absolutely infuriating,” Celty commented to Shinra with a hint of sarcasm, then hunched over to start typing out the night’s events in earnest.

Tonight’s job had been a special one, and Shinra brought it up quite suddenly after night had already fallen.

There was a group of kids that hung out together in Ikebukuro, and one of them had been abducted. Normally this was the job of the police to handle, but time was of the essence, so the text came directly to them.

Abduction was the job of the lowest of the lowest of the low on the totem pole of any evil enterprise. They’d kidnap illegal immigrants or runaway kids, then hand them over to the next highest group in the hierarchy. The exact purpose of this scheme was unclear, but it was probably a business that required “human goods.” Perhaps their superiors’ superiors’ superiors needed them for human experimentation, or perhaps the superiors’ superiors wanted them for some kind of nefarious business scheme. Either that or the direct superiors simply hoped to sell them off somewhere else for a quick buck.

For whatever reason, their friend, who was staying in the country illegally, had been taken. The idea of this illegal immigrant friend didn’t appeal very much, but without a face or identity, Celty had no other way to work for a living than doing these jobs.

In the end, the abductors were solidly beaten and the van was spotted. After ensuring the victims were safe, Celty sent a text to Shinra. Following that, Shinra presumably contacted the group of friends directly. Whatever happened to the unconscious kidnappers after that was a mystery.

Why not just tell the group where the people were and let them do their own dirty work? But Shinra wanted it to be done stealthily, so the job fell to Celty. Rather than let it turn into a big, messy fight between two groups of people, have one experienced professional slip in and do the job clinically and quietly.

And because of that, Celty had been run over by a car. The dullahan didn’t end up killing anyone, but that shadow scythe had caused much pain.

Celty was wreathed in shadow at all times. Sometimes it took the form of armor, but through acts of willpower, it could be turned into that familiar riding suit or even simple weapons.

The idea of a shadow having mass was silly, but the shadow that wrapped Celty’s body was quite light and could be used to perform all kinds of stunts worthy of an action movie. But because the shadow had nearly no weight of its own, Celty’s strength was entirely responsible for the force of the blows. Still, the blade itself was perfectly sharp and tough—as far as Celty could remember, it had never chipped. It was like the sharpness and weight of an indestructible razor blade, with the size of a katana.

The shadow was no use as a bludgeon, but it held incredible force when shaped into a blade. But Celty chose not to cut the thugs with the scythe, knocking them out with a handle jab to the throat instead. Centuries ago, Celty could vaguely remember slicing up people back home who had shrieked about monsters when faced with the dullahan. But that was not an option in modern Japan.

In the past twenty years, Celty had learned Japanese and a kind of self-control to avoid killing foes. The best way to learn would have been an aikido, self-defense, or karate dojo, but none of those in the area would take a pupil who wore a helmet indoors.

As it happened, the scythe was not a convenient tool for a weapon. The menace it held in the hands of the Grim Reaper made it seem deadly, but in reality, swords and spears were much easier to use. But Celty continued to wield the shadow in the form of a giant scythe because, as Shinra put it, “You get your name out better that way.”

Even worse, Celty was gradually growing to like the shape of the weapon. But no amount of visual menace helped when you got run over by a car. The pain had long faded, but the irritation at the carelessness that caused it bubbled and boiled on the inside.

There was no knowing how much damage would actually be fatal. Celty had never tested it and never planned to. With that in mind, the dullahan reported the evening’s events to Shinra.

He merely grinned at the gruesome details of vehicular carnage.

“Well, you’ve earned a break for your good work. Speaking of which, one more thing.”

“Which is?”

“The reason we figured out where our target was being held so quickly was because I asked Orihara.”

Izaya Orihara. He was an information agent based out of Shinjuku, a man who sold various pieces of valuable information for great sums of cash. That apparently was not his main job, and no one knew what he got up to in private.

They’d taken on a number of jobs for him, and many of them left a bad aftertaste. Frankly, Celty did not think it a good idea to be involved with Izaya.

“Why him?”

“Well, we’d just gotten that call, so in exchange for the payment, I asked if he knew anything about the number of the car, and he came back with the location of that parking garage immediately.”

Celty ground nonexistent teeth at that. It was strange that even without a head, the sensation of gritted teeth should still be so vivid. The dullahan was wondering where that feeling was actually coming from when Shinra leaned over and clapped his hands on Celty’s shoulders. He’d walked into the back room during that idle contemplation.

“So, have you made up your mind yet?”

“About what?”

Shinra looked down at the screen to read the text, then smiled painfully.

“You know,” he continued before the next message was even typed into the computer, “you are an elusive and fantastical being, Celty. But at this rate, you may not reach your goal for eons.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“I’ll make it clear and simple. Give up.”

The sound of typing stopped, and the room was enveloped in an eerie silence.

“Forget about looking for your head. Let’s go somewhere together. Anywhere, really. If you want to go back home, I’ll do anything I can to get you there. And I’ll come with you—”

When Shinra stopped talking in fanciful vocabulary terms, it was a sign that he was sincerely engaging in the conversation.

“How many times must I tell you? I have no intention of giving up.”

“Everywhere around the world, there are myths and folktales of the headless wandering in search of their heads. There must have been more like you in the past. They even made a movie about the story of Sleepy Hollow, which means there must have been someone like you back in the 1800s. Maybe that was you, and you’ve simply forgotten your memory of it,” Shinra blabbered on.

Celty patiently typed out a response.

“Why would I want to kidnap a boring schoolteacher?”

“Wow, going straight back to the original novel…”

Celty continued touch-typing with no small amount of irritation, smacking his hand away.

“I don’t dislike you, but living with you like this is enough for now.”

Shinra stared down at the lonely text on the screen and murmured.

“In that case, you could at least stand to be a bit more feminine.”

A brief pause. The difference in warmth between them almost seemed to crack the air.

“Enough of this. I’m taking a shower.”

Celty showered alone in the steamy bathroom. Her body was as perfect as any model’s: shapely breasts and tight stomach. But because of that, it only made the lack of a head creepier.

She concentrated on the mirror as her soapy fingers caressed the silky skin. The sight of a naked, headless woman sudsing up was surreal, to say the least, but it did not bother her at all anymore.

Back in Ireland, she had never showered, but after coming to Japan, she steadily became accustomed to the practice. It had nothing to do with her body, and she never had to deal with sweat and grime, but in the sense of removing any buildup of dust, she couldn’t imagine not having regular showers anymore.

Maybe this is proof that I’ve developed the same values as humans.

Celty constantly wondered if her dullahan values were indeed coming to resemble a human being’s. She’d been constantly baffled after her initial arrival to Japan, but now she felt as though the Japanese mind-set had rubbed off on her.

Recently, she was viewing Shinra acutely as a member of the opposite sex more and more often. At first she was confused—but in time, she recognized that it must be the sensation of love. But Celty was not a girl trapped in the clutches of puberty, and this realization did not affect her daily life.

But she did notice the little things. It made her happy when they were watching TV and Shinra laughed at the same moments she did.

I have the same values as a human being. I have the same heart. And my heart can find common ground with a human’s—I think.

At least, that was what she wanted to believe.