Johnny Joestar

Rain poured from the sky. Everyone in town stayed inside their houses, and there was nothing around but thunder and rain. A few shouts had broken through, but they were soon drowned out by the raindrops. An old man hurried along the sidewalk. He was a little hard of hearing and kept stopping to look this way and that. The rain had plastered his few remaining strands of hair across his face, covering one eye. He wore shabby gray clothes and no shoes, and kept muttering, “Oh, my darling, Kate, Kate… Where are you? Come out, come out, let’s go home… Mike, Joss, and the others are waiting for you…” The old man’s name was Johnny Joestar, and he was one of the least noticeable people in Wentubao. This was not because there was nothing about him to attract attention, but because people deliberately avoided and ignored him. Nobody knew whether he was sixty or fifty. All they knew was that an old man called Johnny lived in the woods away from the main street, spent all day at home, almost never went out, and never spoke to anyone first. If you asked people what impression they had of him, they would all certainly say, “He’s a monster. He’s completely mad.” When Johnny first moved there, he had a car loaded with wooden crates of all different sizes, a strangely large number of them. Although he was a new neighbor, people felt no hostility toward him, until a group of mischievous children peered into his home through a gap in the door. One summer afternoon, sunlight fell through thin clouds onto the ground. A group of seven- and eight-year-olds were playing on an empty patch of land beside Johnny’s house. They had always been curious about this mysterious house and wanted to explore it, but Johnny kept his curtains tightly drawn. This time, though, the children found that his front door was not quite shut. Through the gap, they saw that his living room was filled with glass tanks, large and small, stacked neatly on top of one another to form a wall. The tanks were full of reptiles of every kind: lizards, snakes, and so on. The children had never seen anything like it. They were amazed, and could not understand why the owner of the house would do such a thing. While they stood there in amazement, Johnny came out of the dark hallway, looking completely different from the man people saw on the street. He was smiling, his eyes were kind, and his steps were light. In his hand he held a struggling wild rabbit. Turning toward the hallway, he shook the rabbit and said, “Come on, my child, come on. Your favorite.” As soon as he finished speaking, the sound of claws scraping the floor came from deep inside the hallway. The eerie sound drew nearer, and a huge gray creature crawled out, seized the rabbit in Johnny’s hand with its jaws, and shook it hard twice. Johnny smiled with satisfaction. The children had never seen anything like it. It was different from the crocodiles they had seen. Terrified, they screamed and ran home. Fear of the unknown lingered around the people of Wentubao. To them, that creature was like an evil spirit that had crawled out of hell. After that, news about Johnny began to drift through the slowly warming air of Wentubao. It came from several distant villages and towns, and before long, people had pieced together the old man’s story from scraps of information. Johnny had grown up in a prosperous small city. His family was wealthy, with a large house in the city and extensive land on its outskirts. His parents’ marriage was presumably a match between families of equal standing, but for some reason neither of them showed any happiness, inside or out. The unhappiest person in a family like this must have been little Johnny. Luckily, his family was well off, and at school he still had a little sunshine and happiness. One day, a green lizard began appearing on his shoulder, accompanying him to school and along the streets. Before long, people noticed that the skin on his fingers was cracking, as though large scales covered his hand and were turning it into a claw. At almost the same time, his mother lost her footing during an argument with his father, fell down the stairs, and broke her neck. His father lost his mind over it. People connected these events, which had happened so close together, and said that Johnny carried a curse. He kept company with things from hell and would bring disaster. Years later, Johnny’s father died. Johnny sold all the family property and began moving from place to place. Whenever he moved, his possessions consisted of nothing but one strange wooden crate after another. Though oppressive, gray, and dreary, Wentubao was still a town of gentle people. The solitary Johnny, living with his reptiles, caused only a brief panic. He did not bother anyone, and nothing else strange happened, so people neither attacked him nor drove him away. They simply kept their distance, had no dealings with him, and deliberately ignored his existence. After all, no one wanted those terrifying, twisted reptiles to appear in their minds whenever they mentioned him. Wentubao became the place where Johnny lived the longest. Looking even more of a wreck after the rain and muddy water, Johnny staggered home. He had not found Kate, but he could not go on searching forever. There were many other darlings at home to look after, and most of all he could not be sure whether he had locked the door when he left in the storm. The thought made him even more panicked and anxious. Beyond the worry and sorrow of his recent loss, a greater terror threatened to crush his world. He could never let that terror return. Though it was a feeling from his earliest childhood, it had never been far away. Whenever it appeared, it made him tremble without stopping, as though he would suffocate and die. He had been born in a grand house, but for as long as he could remember he had been alone. His parents had never held him or kissed him, or even spoken a single word to him. They despised him so much that, had they not been Catholics, they would have had him killed before he was born. They had never shouted at him or beaten him. On the contrary, he had plenty of food and fine clothes. Yet he often felt shut inside a gray-black space, with his parents as blurred, moving objects of the same gray-black color. The space was boundless and silent. He had walked until he was frantic without finding a way out. However he shouted, he could not hear his own voice; however he hit himself, he could feel nothing. Johnny, still only a small child, was in terrible pain and terrible fear. Then one day, as he lay on the dusty attic floor, trapped once again in that enclosed gray-black space, he suddenly felt something cool and ticklish on the back of his hand. He gave a start. My God, he could feel something besides his fearful thoughts. The gray-black space began to change. Colors and sounds appeared. He looked down and saw something like a little sprite crawling onto his hand: a gecko, with small, bulging eyes. Oh, it was a living thing with a look in its eyes, not a moving object! Johnny spoke to the little gecko, and it responded. He could feel its body slowly growing warmer. He warmed it; it needed him. They needed each other. The little gecko often crawled into cracks in the wall outside and would not come out, so Johnny went into the woods to find more small lizards and snakes. All these living things could be warmed by Johnny’s body. They were darlings that needed his warmth, and sprites that drove away his gray-black world. Johnny needed them. They needed each other. Though he found a little comfort at school, the world with these animals was far more colorful. So Johnny decided to take his prettiest little lizard to school, show it to the girl who was kindest to him, and share his world with her. Clearly, Johnny’s attempt at sharing failed. No child would come near him again. The whole city kept away from him. Nor did he hear people saying that he was possessed by an evil spirit. The house and the whole city joined into one gray-black space, but it no longer had anything to do with him. Johnny’s darlings grew in number. They lit his world, making it bright and warm, full of birdsong and the scent of flowers. They needed Johnny, and he needed them. From then on, Johnny never again entered that terror without sound, color, or feeling.