“What you said was ‘tsu’ and ‘ki’…” Mei folded her arms gravely. “I think it’s a stretch that you were saying ‘Lake Minazuki.’”
“…Yeah. In which case, I suppose I was saying ‘Tsukiho’ after all.”
But…why?
“I don’t know…,” Mei murmured. She looked like she was going to say something else, but then changed her mind and once again transitioned: “Also—that clock over there…” She looked over at the hall clock. “It struck eight thirty, and then you said you heard someone’s voice, right? A voice calling your name, saying ‘Teruya’?”
Yes. Someone calling my name in a soft cry (…Stop it).
“Do you know whose voice it was?” Mei Misaki asked. “Like, was it Tsukiho’s voice?”
“No.” I shook my head. “No, I don’t think it was her.”
“So then…”
On that night three months ago—
The sight of myself in the mirror, edging toward death. Seeing the shape of the “someone” who had spoken reflected in one corner. It was…
“It was Sou,” I answered. “Sou was at the bottom of the stairs that night…His eyes open wide, staring vacantly. And he said my name, ‘Teru…ya’…”
Yes.
That night, it wasn’t just Tsukiho who had come to the mansion. Sou was there, too. He must have witnessed my death.
So maybe that was why one of the times I had appeared at the Hiratsuka house, I had talked to Sou in my thoughts as he lay on the sofa.
It wasn’t just Tsukiho.
Sou—you were there, too, that night…
“Sou’s forgotten.” Mei seemed almost to be speaking to herself. “Because what he saw and heard here was such a shock.”
2
We went up to the second floor.
After checking the railing where it showed signs of repair, Mei said, “I’d like to take a look in the library one more time,” and I assented.
My mind flashed back to the scene on the afternoon three days ago when I had unexpectedly encountered her and I rested a hand on my chest. I was arrested by a strange feeling, as if in this body that was no more than a relic of life, the beating of a heart that was itself no more than a relic of life was thudding through my palm. Lost in this sensation, I preceded Mei into the room, then waved her in.
That afternoon three days ago—
It shouldn’t have been possible to see me, but she had; it shouldn’t have been possible to hear me, but she had. When I understood that she had this power, I was shocked. Utterly shocked and utterly confused…but I think at the same time, I was as happy as anything else. Joy, as if I had been rescued, if only for an instant, from the isolation that seemed likely to continue into eternity…Yes. That was how I had felt. And so—
No doubt that was why I had gone on to tell her everything about myself, without the slightest hesitation. This girl a full ten years younger than me.
Just at that moment, the owl clock above the decorative shelf announced the time. Four in the afternoon.
After sweeping her gaze around the room in the same way she had in the grand entry, Mei Misaki took several quiet steps up to stand before the desk. Her eyes went to the computer on the desk; then, after tilting her head slightly, she reached out to the framed photo.
“A photo that brings back lots of memories, hm?” she murmured, then her eyes fell on the slip of paper resting beside the frame.
“That’s you…and Yagisawa, Higuchi, Mitarai, and Arai. And of them, Yagisawa and Arai are dead, right?”
“Yes,” I answered solemnly.
Mei looked at me. “And yet you got a phone call from Arai, who’s supposed to be dead?”
“Yes…I did.”
“That’s odd.”
Mei put the frame back on the desk and puffed out one of her cheeks.
“Is this Arai person a ghost, too? One of your peers maybe?”
Next, Mei’s eyes stopped on the low chest of drawers arranged next to the desk. A handset for a cordless telephone was lying on top of it. It was part of a set with a charging stand.
Without a word, she picked the handset up.
As I was thinking, What is she doing? Is she going to make a call? she nodded and made a satisfied noise and put the handset back on its stand.
“So that’s what it is.”
“—Meaning what?”
Completely ignoring my question, Mei asked me, “You said there are a couple rooms here on the second floor that are locked, right? I’d like to take a look inside them. Since I still have my physical body, do you think I’ll be able to?”
“Well…um, sure.”
I pointed at the shelf at the back of the room.
“There’s a box over there with a couple keys inside. You should be able to open the doors with those.”
3
There were two locked rooms. Both were at the very back of the second floor.
After taking a quick look around the other rooms—the bedroom and closet I used, several long unused spare bedrooms, a “hobby room” with audio equipment and cameras in it—I led Mei to those two rooms.
Using one of the keys she’d brought from the box in the library, Mei opened the door.
We could tell at a glance that the first was simply a storage room. Various cabinets and dressers were lined up against the wall, and several large boxes like hope chests were arranged in the remaining space.
“This room…”
Mei cocked her head, so I explained.
“I kept my parents’ old things here.”
“Your mother’s and father’s?”
“My mother died eleven years ago. In Yomiyama in 1987 as part of the disasters. When we evacuated from Yomiyama before summer break, my father put her things in this room…”
I told her the story, tracing out my memories of the past, the outlines of which had no lack of indistinct patches.
“After that, we moved to a different house, but my father left this room the way it was. Then, when my father died and I came to live here six years ago, I put his things in here. I thought it would be nice to put them together.”
“I see,” Mei Misaki responded shortly, her right eye crinkling. “Your mother and father were close, huh, Mr. Sakaki?”
“…”
“You loved them.”
She let out a gloomy sigh, then asked, “Your body isn’t in here, is it?”
“No.” I shook my head limply. “At least, it wasn’t. I looked inside the cabinets and the boxes, but I couldn’t find my body anywhere.”
The next room Mei Misaki unlocked was also a room from the past, in a different sense from the first one.
As soon as we stepped in and saw the interior of the room—
“Oh…”
A voice that could have been surprise or a groan slipped from her mouth.
“…This is—”
I already knew what I would see, but even looking around again, the sight was bizarre in a way.
The room wasn’t all that big, but other than the one wall with the windows, every wall was covered in newspaper and magazine clippings or photocopies, photos, large pieces of simili paper covered in handwriting, and more. At the center of the room stood a long, narrow desk on which a jumble of newspapers, magazines, notebooks, and binders rested.
“This…”
Mei stepped gingerly over to a wall and leaned her face in close to one of the clippings hanging there.
“‘Violent Death of Middle School Boy at School. A Tragic Accident Amid Preparations for Culture Festival?’…Did this happen at North Yomi? October 1985…So thirteen years ago.
“This one’s even older.”
She turned her gaze to another article.
“December 1979. ‘Christmas Eve Tragedy. Home Destroyed by Fire, One Dead.’…The fire was caused by the candles on a Christmas cake? And it looks like the person who died was a student at North Yomi. In 1979, that might be one of the years that Mr. Chibiki was the head teacher for C
lass 3.”
“Who’s that?”
“He’s a librarian now, but at the time he taught social studies. You never heard of him?”
“—I don’t remember.”
“Oh.”
“The article about the bus accident in 1987 is over there.”
I pointed at where the article hung.
“The other articles are all about past incidents that happened in Yomiyama, too. There are also some from after 1987. The handwritten stuff is a bunch of tables I wrote to summarize each year. I could only get my hands on so much information out here, so I doubt they’re complete.”
“And the photos? Did you take them?”
“Oh yes. Sometimes I went to the site of the accidents or nearby to see it with my own eyes…That’s when I took them.”
“Ah…,” Mei murmured again, and wrapping her arms around her thin shoulders, she shuddered. After that, she walked along the wall for a while, her eyes running over each item hanging there, but in the end she let out a deep sigh, as if trying to calm herself.
“You collected all of this, Mr. Sakaki?” she said by way of acknowledgment. “You were gathering information and documents about the disasters at North Yomi.”
“Something like that, yes,” I agreed, but I didn’t feel any visceral reaction to it. You could almost say the sensation had withered away. Surely this was an aftereffect of my postmortem memory loss.
“I think I mentioned this before, but I suppose I’ve been dragging out my experiences in Yomiyama from eleven years ago ever since. Still, that doesn’t mean that I was trying to somehow stop the disasters that kept happening at North Yomi after that or that I felt like I should or anything…I’m not sure how to put it. I felt like it had nothing to do with me anymore, but I still couldn’t forget about it, couldn’t get it out of my mind…so…”
—I couldn’t forget about it, couldn’t get it out of my mind…so…
“Like you were trapped by it?”
Mei’s words had a sharpness to them. I lowered my gaze.
“Trapped…Maybe that’s it.”
“By the disaster that befell you eleven years ago. The death you witnessed back then.”
—Trapped…Yes. Maybe that’s it.
“Then your focus broadened from there, to the entirety of the disasters that have been going on at North Yomi since twenty-five years ago…”
—Yes…That might be it exactly.
“You were trapped the whole time. Still held prisoner.”
“—Maybe so.”
After a little while, we left this archive of the disasters, but as we did, Mei Misaki turned her eyes to the wall beside the door and came to an abrupt stop. There, in black oil-based ink, written directly on the drab, cream-colored wallpaper—
Who are you?
Who were you?
Unmistakably written in my/Teruya Sakaki’s hand.
4
“When you died on the night in question three months ago, on May 3,” Mei began as we headed downstairs. “You’re sure that Tsukiho was here?”
“Well…Yeah. I was having a conversation with her…I can still sometimes hear our voices. They sounded heated for some reason. I’m positive it’s from that night…”
“I wonder why she came to see you.”
“I think because it was my birthday.”
I voiced the first thought that came to me when asked.
“That day was my birthday…So I figure that she brought Sou and some sort of present over. And then, Sou was with her when…”
The sight of Sou reflected in the mirror…
The boy’s voice calling my name, “Teru…ya,” calling softly. His face horribly surprised, horribly frightened…his eyes wide and glassy.
“So the two of them came over. Where were you and what were you doing when they came inside the house, Mr. Sakaki? Just what happened there?”
Her tone suggesting she was half speaking to herself, Mei watched for my reaction.
“So you still don’t remember?”
“…”
I remained silent, neither nodding nor shaking my head…
(…What are you doing?)
(What are you doing…? Teruya?)
(…Stop it.)
(…Don’t worry about it.)
(You can’t…Don’t do it!)
(Don’t worry about it…)
(It’s…too late for me.)
I purposefully dredged up the words Tsukiho and I had exchanged that night and tried to grasp the meaning behind them.
Considering it anew in a calm light, there was one thing meaningful about it. That being— But wait.
That was nothing more than a conjecture, a guess. I couldn’t manage to get the feedback/realization that “I remember that.”
“Is there anything else missing besides that diary?” Mei Misaki asked after alighting in the grand entry.
“I’m not sure…”
I stumbled over my answer, and she fixed her eyes on me.
“Like maybe a camera?
“There were a bunch of cameras in the hobby room on the second floor, but they looked more like a collection of antiques, right?”
“Oh, that could be.”
“Last summer, when I met you on the beach, you had a single-lens reflex camera, right? It looked like it got a lot of use, like it was your favorite one. I don’t think I saw it up there. And I didn’t notice it in the library or any of the other rooms…”
In all honesty, I didn’t really know. Because it was an issue I had never really thought about in that way till now.
When I remained unable to answer, Mei cut across the room with a movement that seemed to say, “Fine. Whatever.
“The library’s that way?”
She pointed deeper into the house.
“I’d like to take a look…Then the basement after that. Please stick with me a little longer, Mr. Ghost.”
5
“…Wow. This is like the school library. You have so many different books.”
As she walked around the towering built-in bookshelves, Mei Misaki now spoke like the fifteen-year-old girl she was, voicing her thoughts with artless innocence.
“My father had a sizable collection to get me started.”
“There are lots of hard books here, too. Did you ever feel like just by being in here, you could understand all the world’s secrets?”
“I’m not sure,” I replied, following along after Mei. “It would be impossible to understand them all. But…yes, I felt something sort of like that now and again.”
“Whoaaa.”
Mei turned around, and inclining her head slightly to one side, she looked straight at me. For some reason, that flustered me.
“Uh, I mean…Is that weird?”
“Not really,” she said, blinking her right eye. Then a faint smile crept over her lips. “I’ve experienced things like that myself.”
After a bit more time, we left the library and—
“This way.”
We returned to the grand entry and entered a hallway connecting to the rear entrance. Despite being the middle of the day, when no lights should have been needed, due to the dimness of the hall, we almost didn’t see a dark brown door that stood partway down the hall.
“Here,” I called Mei over. “This is the way down to the basement…”
When I turned the antique-looking knob and opened the door, at first glance it looked like an empty closet, but at the back was a flight of stairs leading down to the basement.
I turned on the lights for Mei and took the lead to descend the stairs. Still limping slightly on my left leg, the relic of life.
There was another door at the bottom of the stairs, which opened onto a short hallway. The floor, walls, and ceiling were all coated with hard gray mortar, giving the space a rather bleak appearance.
Two doors stood slightly apart from each other on one side. A jumble of old furniture was heaped at the end of the hall.
“It looks like you
’d stopped using this place very often,” Mei Misaki said. “It’s cold, and there’s so much dust…”
She pulled a handkerchief out of a pocket in her shorts and held it to her nose and mouth. She put her cap back on her head, pulled it low over her eyes.
Then we opened each of the two doors in turn and looked inside.
“This looks like a storage spot for total junk.”
The room before us was just that.
Light from outside streamed in through a row of skylights opened in the back wall near the ceiling, so the room was dimly lit even without turning on any lights. Just as I had said, the floor was littered with the very definition of junk…dirty buckets, a washtub, a hose, scrap lumber, bits of rope, and for some reason pebbles and bricks.
Mei only peered in from the hall and didn’t venture into the room.
“Your body wasn’t here, either, right?”
Once that was confirmed, we left the door to the room open.
“What about this other room?”
“Probably about the same, I’d guess,” I replied and opened the second door.
Like the room beside it, it was dimly lit thanks to the light outside streaming in. But unlike the room next door, I could see evidence on the line of skylights near the ceiling that this room had once been used for a specific purpose.
There was a curtain rod above the windows.
And heavy black curtains at both ends of the rod.
“A dark room…,” Mei whispered. “Did you develop photos in here?”
“A long time ago,” I answered and stepped forward. “Photography was a hobby I inherited from my father originally. My father turned this basement into a darkroom a long time ago, and he would develop and print his own film…”
“Did you use it, too, after your father died?” Mei asked, moving into the room.
“Only for a little while right after I first moved into the house,” I answered. “At the time, I was still taking mostly monochromatic photos. So I developed them here. But I moved on to taking color photos exclusively.”
“So you didn’t develop color photos yourself?”
Another Episode S / 0 Page 11