The Devil's Disciple Read Online Free PDF Page A

long I had stocked Sueko’s house with all the things I needed on a daily basis.
    But then the moment came. The way to kill Tsuyuko came to me like a dark suggestion, and it came right out of Tsuyuko’s own mouth.

VIII
    It was the 25th March. For the first time in ages I had left Sueko’s and come back to my wife’s place. I don’t know what was going on in her head but like always she didn’t complain. We sat facing each other after this long absence and once I’d finished eating the shitty meal she’d prepared I dived back into my research on murder.
    At the time I never got to sleep before midnight so I told Tsuyuko to go to sleep without me. Always the obedient wife, she slipped into the futon without a word. I thought she’d gone to sleep there beside me but before long she started to cry. Not again, I thought, and felt myself getting irritated as usual. I kept silent but then she started whining.
    â€˜Eizō, honey, I’ve been having trouble sleeping lately. I didn’t get a wink of sleep last night and I’m still not even tired.’
    â€˜Is that so?’ I said, just to get her to shut up. I could not have cared less whether she could sleep or not.
    But then I replayed her words in my mind.
I’ve been having trouble sleeping lately.
It was like a bolt of lightning. ‘That’s it!’ I screamed into the night. And I didn’t care who heard. Of course! This was it. All my thinking, all my planning had been leading up to this all along. She’d given me the answer herself.
    Tomorrow your life is over bitch. Tomorrow your suffering will come to an end. Tomorrow night I’ll put you out of your misery!
    Before I go on I should fill you in on how much sleeping medication I needed to get to sleep and how I got my hands on it. As I’m sure you can imagine from your own experience, the regular sleeping medication they have at the pharmacy doesn’t have the slightest effect on me any more. So much so that the idea of committing suicide with Calmochine just makes me laugh.
    After trying one medicine after another without any success I ended up in the office of a famous doctor who prescribed me a certain sleeping medication in powder form. But he told me that in cases like these (of insomnia) it’s better that the patient not know what’s in the medicine he’s taking. Apparently it doesn’t work nearly as well if you know the ingredients. So he said he wouldn’t tell me under any circumstances and had it prepared specially by a pharmacist in the neighbourhood. All I could gather was that it was a kind of cocktail, a mixture of several different kinds of medicine. At first I dutifully picked up three days’ worth of the medicine at a time and took it as the doctor prescribed.
    You’ve been an insomniac longer than I have, so you know that this kind of relationship with the pharmacist doesn’t last long. Six months passed and a single day’s dose was no longer enough. I thought about it and figured I’d try a double dose. It worked like a charm. But then I had to go back to the pharmacist for more. I needed an excuse so I used the one that all of us insomniacs stumble upon eventually. You know what I’m talking about.
    â€˜I spilled the package.’
    This fooled him the first time but I could hardly do it again.
    â€˜I’m going on a trip for a week.’
    That got me another batch, so I was able to take two or two and a half times the daily dosage. I couldn’t get to sleep without it. But pharmacists are businessmen after all. I’d been going to this one for quite a while so he trusted me all right. I would go through a ten-day supply in three days and he kept quiet about it. Before long I was taking scary amounts of the stuff just to get through the night. Once they get to this point insomniacs have to have extra medicine on hand or they get really anxious. The more money I handed over