Tale of the Dead Town by Hideyuki Kikuchi Page B

the Knight house, did you see anything?”
    “What do you mean by ‘anything’?” The sheriff laughed, showing a lot of yellow teeth.
    “Were there any unusual items? Strange drugs, papers with formulas or equations? Special
     creatures? Anything like that.”
    The sheriff snorted loudly, “Of course there wasn’t a damn thing like that.”
    “Then I have another question for you. Why did the Knight family leave town?”
    “You might wanna ask the mayor that.”
    “Did the whole town drive them away, or—”
    “Or what?”
    “Or were they glad to leave? Which was it?”
    “You come here looking to start trouble, buster?!” Sheriff Hutton snarled. The two
     deputies braced themselves for action. The sheriff started to rise from his oversized
     chair. His rear was only about an inch out of the chair when he stopped dead in his
     tracks. D was standing right in front of him. He was just standing there, an unearthly
     aura radiating from every inch of his body. That alone kept not only the sheriff but
     his two deputies as well from moving a muscle.
    “Answer me straight,” said D.
    “You—you gotta be fuckin’ kidding me,” the sheriff blustered, but his voice quivered
     nevertheless.
    “In that case, you leave me no choice.”
    Raising his left hand, D pressed it against the sheriff’s forehead. The same vacuous
     expression seen on a mental defective spread across the sheriff’s face. Eyes covered
     with a semitransparent film and drool coursing from the corner of his mouth, the lawman
     stared vacantly into space.
    “Why did the family leave town?”
    A reply wasn’t soon in coming. No doubt a battle was raging in the sheriff’s mind,
     a battle between his own ego and D’s words. The only question was how it all would
     end.
    “That family . . . was doing freaky experiments . . . Don’t know all the particulars
     . . . ” The words were clearly being torn from the sheriff. And it went without saying
     the power of D’s left hand was to blame.
    “You knew that, and still you did nothing?” the Hunter asked.
    “Wanted to . . . but then . . . mayor stopped me.”
    “The mayor?” D’s eyes shone. “Why would he do that?”
    “Don’t know . . . But I had official orders . . . Wasn’t supposed to do anything .
     . . about that family . . . ever . . . Seems the sheriff before me . . . had the same
     orders.”
    “How long had it been going on?”
    “From way back . . . Roughly two hundred years . . . ”
    According to what the mayor had said, that was right around the time the eerie stranger
     had come on board.
    “And their strange experiments had been going on all that time?”
    “I . . . I wouldn’t know . . . ”
    “Was the Knight family run out of town, or did they leave of their own accord?”
    “They . . . ran away . . . ”
    “Ran away?”
    “Night before they run off . . . mayor gave me orders . . . I went to their house
     . . . Knights were there . . . Arrested ’em on the spot . . . just like the mayor
     told me to . . . Threw ’em . . . in jail . . . Daughter was with them, of course .
     . . Mayor never did tell me . . . why we had to do that . . . Just said they’d committed
     a serious offense . . . against the whole town . . . and that was all.”
    “I see.”
    The “offense,” then, was experiments the Knight family had been conducting for generations.
     But what reason would the mayor—who’d always supported the Knights—have for ordering
     their arrest? And what could they have told the mayor?
    “How did Mr. and Mrs. Knight seem?”
    “I don’t know . . . They weren’t scared . . . at all . . . The two of them . . . looked
     to be giving some serious thought to something . . . What it was . . . I don’t know.”
    “How did they get away?”
    “The next day . . . I go for a look . . . and the cell wall . . . was melted away.
     Mr. Knight was a chemist . . . Figure he had something hidden on him . . . Acid or
     something . . . ”
    “I’ll be