“Don’t worry about it…”
Teruya tried to shake free of Tsukiho’s grip.
“It’s…too late for me.”
“No!” Tsukiho shouted sharply, resisting.
It was at this point that Teruya’s movements and strength, which evidenced a lack of self-control, brought disaster down on him. He flailed and managed to shake Tsukiho off, but the movement was wild and he staggered, falling with his back against the corridor railing standing open to the foyer.
No doubt due to the extreme age of the railing, it was already fragile, and unfortunately, it snapped under the impact. Without so much as a moment to catch his balance, Teruya’s body tumbled head over heels and he fell toward the first floor…
…
…This.
This was the truth behind my/Teruya Sakaki’s death, apparently. Well.
The moment the thought occurred to me, the vision dissipated.
I stumbled slowly down the corridor and checked the state of the railing. It had returned to its present state of repair with a new piece of wood patched onto it. When I looked down over the railing, the fallen form of Teruya was nowhere to be seen…
“Teruya.”
It was at this point that I heard a voice. It belonged to Tsukiho.
I turned and saw her at the far end of the long corridor. She was standing in front of a door (the one—yes—the one to my bedroom)…
“Teruya, are you in there?” she called out worriedly.
Oh, this is…this wasn’t the continuation of the earlier scene obviously. Not a continuation, but instead something even earlier than what I had just witnessed…
Time had wound backward again.
Tsukiho had brought Sou with her to visit the mansion and had come up to the second floor looking for Teruya…And she had guessed that he was in his bedroom. No doubt this was the scene immediately after.
“Teruya?” Tsukiho called again and opened the door.
As soon as she had peeked into the room, there was an echoing cry of surprise.
“Oh! What’s wrong? What happened?”
I ran down the corridor, following after her figment as she ran into the room. She had left the door open, and I took a somber look around the room. Which revealed—
A white rope hanging from a beam in the ceiling.
A loop had been made at the end of the rope, big enough for a human head to fit through…It was obviously intended for a person to hang himself.
A chair had been placed directly beneath the rope. Teruya/I stood upon the chair. He held the loop of the rope in both hands, on the verge of placing it around his own neck…
“Stop it, Teruya!” Tsukiho shouted, running over to her younger brother. “Stop that right now. What are you thinking? Come on, come down from there…”
A powerful smell of alcohol filled the room. Looking around, I saw a bottle and a glass on the bedside table. As well as the plastic bottle I remembered with pills spilling out of it.
The alcohol was whiskey. The pills were probably the sleeping pills I had been using constantly at the time. In a blurred state after taking the two together, Teruya/I had tried to end his own life that night.
Was it fortunate or not that Tsukiho came just at that moment and put a temporary stop to her younger brother’s plans, given what would follow…?
“…No, stay out there!” Tsukiho said, turning back to look at the door. “Don’t come in here, Sou. I need you to stay downstairs, all right?”
Hearing that, I, too, turned to look at the door. Sou was already gone.
So Sou had come up here, too, following after his mother. But when she asked him to, he had gone back down to the hall on the first floor by himself. And then…
When I returned my gaze to the room, everything had vanished without a trace.
Tsukiho and Teruya. The rope and chair. The whiskey bottle, the glass, and the bottle of pills on the table. Even the smell of alcohol that had filled the room…
The sunlight piercing through a gap in the curtains was extremely faint. Frigid shadows were spreading slowly all over the room, engulfing me as I stood rooted to the spot.
3
It was past six P.M. and Mei Misaki had not appeared. The sun was setting at last, fading from twilight into dusk…
Alone, almost melting away in the prevailing shadows, I lost myself in thought.
If only I were dead…I had often thought this during my life. I had even spoken the words aloud to Tsukiho and Sou.
—If only I were dead, things would be all right.
—If only I were dead…
For example, I rarely let people ride in a car I was driving. Because…as Mei Misaki had pointed out yesterday, cars reminded me of the bus accident eleven years ago. Because that had been such a terrible accident.
—Because it was a terrible accident.
I could never forget that tragic scene…
—I could never forget…
No matter how much attention I paid to driving cautiously, the risk of getting into an accident would never go away. Nor would the risk of a person dying in the accident. So—
I had disliked letting people ride in my car. If by some chance I got into an accident and the person were killed…Just thinking about it was frightening. Very frightening.
Despite being so affected by my experience eleven years ago, I owned a car and drove it around like other people. Giving it some thought, that was probably because I was already constantly thinking, If only I were dead…
If only I were dead, things would be all right.
It wasn’t just limited to automobiles, either. It was always the same whenever I rode in something, whether a train or an airplane. I was always supremely aware of the risk of an accident or death. But in every case, I wasn’t afraid of dying myself. It doesn’t really matter as long as it’s just me. I think that’s how I felt.
In other words…that’s why.
I had, all that time, been imprisoned by death.
Even as I bore the scars of the past and intensely feared the risk of death, on the flip side I was somehow attracted to it—I think that’s what was happening. Over many long years, those thoughts passed through several more stages and transformed into a concrete desire to kill myself…
…That day, three months ago.
That night before my twenty-sixth birthday, at long last I had tried to fulfill that wish.
Using rope, I had tried to hang myself in my bedroom on the second floor. With my mind bludgeoned into a haze by alcohol and pills in order to tamp down the terror when I actually went through with it. But then—
At just that moment, Tsukiho had…
I had just witnessed…No, I had remembered the details of what came after.
In the end, it had been an accident.
Tsukiho had been placating me, unsteady as I was with drink and drugs, trying to reason with me, and it had turned into a scuffle, which resulted in…But wait.
Tsukiho might have thought it was her fault.
That she had made her younger brother topple from the corridor. That it was the same as committing murder.
Was that why?
Was that why afterward, she had…?
…
…
…
…Afterward.
After my last breath had left me, as I watched myself in the mirror. After I had been dragged into the hollow “darkness that follows death,” into that perfectly blank space in my memory. Somehow, it seemed that I could see something there…in hazy outline. It seemed I could hear something.
It was…
…
…
…
(…here)
“Here…,” she had said that day.
(At least…here…)
“At least here…”
(…In this house…)
“…In this house…”
When it reached the point where my body had to be hidden somewhere in order to cover up my/Teruya Sak
aki’s death, she—Tsukiho—had said those things during a discussion with her husband Shuji Hiratsuka.
So that meant my body had to be…
4
Mei Misaki still hadn’t come. Maybe she never would. I—
I suppose I really am alone.
5
The ticklish unease I had felt when Mei Misaki and I had conducted our “search of the haunted house” yesterday. It was…Yes, I had felt it in the basement room we had gone down to search last of all.
What had that sense of apprehension been about?
Questioning myself anew, I realized the truth, albeit dimly. Once it occurred to me, I was astounded that I had never noticed it until now—it was…
That wall at the end of the corridor…
That gray wall in front of which all kinds of old furniture had been stacked haphazardly. Had that always been that way?
I groped through my memory, but couldn’t feel sure either way.
Was that because the memories had been swallowed up by the “amnesia that follows death”? No, on further reflection, I had hardly ever gone down to that room in the basement during my life, so…perhaps my knowledge of it had always been vague.
I was at a loss as to what to do, but in the end I decided to try going outside first. I had a reason for this.
It was the picture Mei had shown me yesterday. The sketch she had made of the mansion last summer break…
“Don’t you sense anything when you look at this picture?” she had asked me yesterday.
“Compare this picture with how the building looks from here right now. It’s not a photo, so it’s not a perfect representation, but even so…”
Because I remembered that conversation.
Because I remembered she had gone on to ask: “Those windows on the bottom there, are they skylights for the basement?”
6
I stood alone in the shade of the same tree as yesterday, in the eastern garden of the house.
I no longer had a good idea of what time it was. The sun had already sunk below the horizon and night had fallen, and Mei Misaki had never come…The wind was blowing. A strong, uncomfortably warm wind.
I couldn’t see it from where I stood in the shadow of the building, but it looked like the moon was out. The sky above the roof was faintly glowing. The glittering of the stars peeked out from rents in the flowing stream of clouds.
I took a look at the mansion, as I had done yesterday.
I needed to focus on…Yes, the row of windows at a low spot on the first floor. The line of windows that had been provided as skylights for the basement.
I think Mei Misaki had been trying to point out the number of windows yesterday.
The sketch from last year and the building this year had a different number. There were plenty of spots where it was hard to tell due to the overgrown weeds, but when compared closely, had the number of windows decreased since last year? Had she had that doubt and suspicion then?
Now that I was aware of it and taking another look…how did it look?
The windows on the left, small and lined up at a height barely above the ground, probably belonged to that room in the basement facing the stairs, the junk storage room. I could make out that much.
Then, the windows to the right belonged to that room that had once been used as a darkroom for developing photos…
What about the windows farther to the right?
Reliant on the faint illumination provided by the moon and stars, I squinted my eyes.
Farther to the right…That would put it up against the right edge of the building. Half buried in the overgrown weeds, I could see something dull white.
That ornament? The statue of the angel. Mei had said, “I don’t think this was here last year.”
Because it was placed right next to the building, I couldn’t see past it. It could be a “screen” put there for exactly that purpose.
My only option was to take a closer look.
On the other side of the angel statue—I couldn’t find a single window on that part of building below the first floor. The only thing I saw was a blank mortared-over wall…But hold on.
In Mei Misaki’s sketch from last year, this angel statue hadn’t been here and a window had been drawn on this part of the building. I was sure of it. Which meant—
There had originally been a window here, too.
So of course there had been a room on the other side of the window.
A third room built in the basement of the house.
That sense of unease I had felt when we’d gone down to the basement yesterday. If the reason for it had been the way the wall at the far end of the corridor looked…My memory was infuriatingly vague, but maybe the door to the “third room” had been in that wall. It was gone now, and all kinds of old furniture had been piled up in front of the wall, probably as camouflage…
If that were true…
Tsukiho’s words that day: “At least here…” “In this house…”
According to those words, my corpse had been hidden in the third room in the basement of this house. After it was hidden, the door had been sealed and painted over with mortar, and the line of windows serving as skylights facing the yard had been sealed up in a similar way, leaving them as I now saw them…
This angel statue had been put here to obscure the fact that there were fewer windows, when viewed from the yard. That seemed like a safe bet.
The wind had been growing stronger and stronger.
At the same time, the rustling of the trees and grass had grown more fervent, and the rustling of the entire surrounding forest amplified the sound so that the night began suddenly to show an eerily threatening aspect. The ceaseless noise of insects had stopped, but in its place the cry of a crow rang out, despite nightfall. The area grew abruptly dark, as if the streaming clouds had covered the moon.
I shuddered intensely and pressed both my hands against the spot on the building’s wall where the windows seemed to have been painted over.
There was a sealed room on the other side of this wall. And my corpse was hidden inside it. Ah, that’s why…
…
…
…
After a while…
With an unexpected shock, I was swallowed up in heavy darkness.
7
…I can’t see anything.
Inside a darkness as absolute as the word implies, I felt myself in turmoil. Frightening turmoil.
I can’t see anything—but I feel.
I feel all sorts of things. All kinds of somehow bizarre…Ah, is this—?
In the very midst of my confusion, I barely managed the question.
Where is this?
What is this blackness?
A bizarre density, utterly unlike the hollowness of the darkness that follows death. A bizarre oppressiveness. A bizarre prickling and the discomfort that goes with it. A bizarre…
…Truly awful feelings in some indescribable way.
A truly awful sound.
A truly awful smell.
Truly awful…to the point that when I began to notice it, it became almost impossible to bear. Truly awful, like nothing I had ever before experienced…
My turmoil continued. My terrible confusion continued. But—
Somehow, even in the midst of this, I held my ground at the very edge of endurance and once again asked myself:
…Is this…?
8
This place…Ah, I know where I am. I think I know.
Slowly, slowly, I pulled the answer in.
I died and became a ghost…and I’ve been looking for my corpse, which had gone missing. I finally realized where my corpse was located. Once I knew that, there was no reason to believe I couldn’t go to be with it, as its owner. Even if it’s in a sealed room with no entrance…That’s why.
That’s why I was here; it was a natural result.
In the blackness of the basement’s sealed third room.
9
…A ligh
t.
A light burned in the pitch-darkness.
Light from a bulb dangling from the ceiling. A feeble light flickering unstably.
I cautiously looked around.
There wasn’t enough light to be able to see into every nook and cranny, but this place was exactly what I’d thought it to be—it seemed certain that I was in a sealed room in the basement.
Dirty walls. Dirty floor and ceiling. All kinds of junk scattered about. Quite clearly the look of a room left to ruin…
…
…
…A sound.
Zzzzz…Zzzzzzt…
A high-pitched sound, like something flying around.
Shff…Shffshffshff…Shffshff.
An indistinct sound, like something moving hastily.
The thing flying around…could it be flies? The wingbeat of flies?
When I looked in the direction the sound of rapid movement had come from, I saw several tiny shadows flee into the darkness. The pitch-black, nauseating shadows of insects.
…The unsteady flickering of the lightbulb.
As it flickered, I, too, shut my eyes, as if I might escape the things I had just seen and heard.
10
…A smell.
Something smelled truly awful.
I know something that smells like this. But it was the first time I’d smelled a stink—a fetid stench this intense, to the point of making me retch.
When I closed my eyes, it seemed a hundred times worse.
This almost unbearable stench.
This must be…No. Even that wouldn’t be so…
11
Unable to stand it, I opened my eyes and…just then.
I noticed the presence of some sort of large, old apparatus.
It was probably a large, old…boiler or stove of some kind.
Shff…Shffshffshff again.
I heard the awful sound again faintly.
I saw a swarm of black bugs skittering under the boiler or stove or whatever it was. Unconsciously, my throat tightened with a “hurk!”
Another Episode S / 0 Page 13