The lightbulb flickered.
My eyes closed again.
12
…Pain.
I hurt all over.
How could a ghost get hurt? Was this phantom pain arising from a relic of the flesh?
It wasn’t a sharp pain, but an unpleasantly throbbing ache pushed into my mind, and once I’d noticed it, there was no blocking it out.
I opened my eyes, and my left hand opened to reveal a small rock I’d been holding for some reason. When had I grabbed that? A completely black stone…Was it a piece of coal or something?
Zzzzz…Zzzzzzt…
The high-pitched sound of wings again, filling my mind.
Zzzzz…Zzzzzzt…
There really were flies circling around inside the room. And not just one—several. Lots. Maybe dozens…
I felt disgusted, irritated, and I blindly hurled the stone in my left hand at them. The sound didn’t stop, but instead—
Spluch!
There was a different sound.
Somewhere deeper inside.
Something placed deeper in the room (…what could it be?) hit square by the rock I’d thrown.
13
The lightbulb flickered. I had the feeling that each time it flickered on and off, the time it was off was growing longer…
I shut my eyes hard, then opened them again.
In the dim reaches of a shadowy corner of the room, I saw the outline of a bed or sofa or some similar piece of furniture. So that’s where the stone had struck.
I drew closer to it warily.
It had a backrest and armrests, so I suppose it was a sofa. A large cloth was draped over the entire thing…Ah, there’s a bulge. Yes—a bulge just the size of a person lying beneath it.
…So that’s it.
So the thing lying there was my corpse.
14
Once again I closed my eyes firmly, then opened them.
When I did, I saw a small rectangular table beside the sofa. I warily drew even closer and realized there were two objects on the table.
One was…Was it a camera?
It was the single-lens reflex camera I/Teruya Sakaki had so cherished during life. One of the lost items that Mei Misaki had wondered about yesterday.
The other was also one of the lost items. The daily planner that had vanished from my desk drawer in the library—Memories 1998.
This is where it had been?
I picked the planner up and flipped through the pages. I checked whether anything had been written anywhere about May 3—that day three months earlier.
I found it almost at once.
May 3, the very day itself.
The following sentence, in a frantic, sloppy hand:
This is long overdue, but now I can be connected with everyone.
I wish for nothing but this.
15
I stood before the cloth-draped sofa.
That same awful sound. That same awful smell. That same pain all over. Aching, throbbing. Nausea and a suffocating feeling added to by dizziness…I couldn’t stop trembling. Trembling in my body. Trembling in my heart.
But…
As the lightbulb flickered out I once again closed my eyes hard, then opened them. Then I told myself:
…It’s here.
It’s here under this cloth.
The body I’d been searching for.
My body.
16
I reached a trembling hand out to the cloth covering the sofa.
My eyes registered the deep black stains all over the fabric, of blood or something else. No, there was no question. Under this cloth was my…
With trembling fingers, I gripped the edge of the cloth. I tried to fling it back all at once boldly. But my strength failed me—
Flmp. The cloth slid to the floor.
Blrp. There was a disgusting noise.
An overwhelming stench assaulted my nose, and unable to bear it, I pulled my hands from the cloth and pressed them over my mouth…and I saw it.
A corpse.
My corpse.
My lifeless shell, tragically altered.
17
The human shape of it had been preserved, but it was a hideous, nauseating thing that could no longer be called—that I didn’t wish to call—human.
Rotted skin.
Rotted flesh.
Rotted organs…
The buttons had fallen off the shirt it wore, exposing the chest. The undergarments were full of holes and even ripped in places. As if ravaged by insects…But no, that was what had really happened. They had been literally devoured by insects or something of the kind. And seeping out, overflowing from below the underclothes—
Rotted skin.
Rotted flesh.
Rotted organs.
I could also make out the tatters that remained of them, clinging to exposed bones.
The strange smell filling the air had, indeed, been the stench of rot coming from the corpse. I understood that dead bodies rot, but human beings are different from things like fish and birds. I had thought it would take more time. That the corpse of a large adult could have turned into this, after being in this place a mere three months at most…
The face was the same.
More than half had peeled away from the skull. There was almost nothing left of the forehead, nose, or flesh of the lips. The eyeballs were already gone, leaving only the reddish-black eye sockets…And something was moving inside them.
Wriggling and crawling, squirming out, intertwining with one another…
I choked back a moan. “Urk—”
…They were maggots.
So many maggots, crawling out from the eye sockets…Ugh.
They weren’t only in the eye sockets. They were coming out of the nose, and the mouth, and from inside the tiny bit of flesh remaining in the cheeks.
The light flickered.
Zzzzz…Zzzzzzt…
The high-pitched whine of the flies’ wings filled the room.
Zzzzz…Zzzzzzt…
The light flickered rapidly.
“Whoa!”
Crying out, I shook my head nonsensically. Batting my hands around at random, I tried to shrink away from the scene. But just then—
My feet skidded over the floor and I lost my balance.
Right before it happened, I had a sensation of something being crushed beneath my foot, which was presumably the bugs crawling all over the floor. My foot had slipped on their crushed corpses and bodily fluids.
Worse still, I wound up falling forward. Unable to catch myself, twisting around, I fell—onto the sofa. Straight at the corpse laid out there.
Rotted skin.
Rotted flesh.
Rotted organs.
All reduced to tatters, they came to the very tip of my nose, choking me with an overpowering stench.
I flung my hands out in front of me, which landed near the body’s rib cage. There was a shlurp and a nauseating sensation. The force had torn through the webwork undergarments, and the maggots and other vermin that had ravaged the rotting flesh came swarming out…crawling up at me. Up my hands. My arms. My shoulders.
“Aagggh!!” I shouted, desperately flailing my entire body, trying to shake them off. The rotting flesh that had stuck to my hands. The stench of decay that had wrapped itself around me. The wriggling of the disgusting insects.
“…No.”
After my bout of screaming, my voice slipped out of me, defeated, in a faint whisper.
“…This is wrong. This…not this.”
The light flickered slowly…And then.
Without a sound, it ended in darkness. The bulb had burned out.
“No…”
Once more within the utter darkness I had first entered, I again shook my head nonsensically. I again flailed my hands around at random.
“No. This is wrong. This…”
My voice was wrenched, cracking, from my body. And I gave forth another prolonged cry.
“…Help me
!!”
18
“Help me,” “help me”…I think I kept on shouting that, over and over again, for quite some time.
Who was I hoping would save me? How? What could anyone do for me? Even I didn’t know.
Worn out from my shouting, at last I sank onto the floor. I hugged my knees and lay like that, on my side, curled into a ball—
“…No,” I gasped out, fighting back the suffocating sensation, the nausea. “Not this…not this…”
My own body that I had lost track of after dying. My own body that had been hidden away.
If only I could find it, I had thought.
See it with my own eyes, touch it with my own hands…If only I could confirm “my own death” that way and come to accept it. If only I could do that.
I had thought, Then, for sure I’ll be released from this unnatural, unstable situation. I would take on the form that was proper to death and thereby connect with everyone else…
However…
Maybe that had all been my own ignorant mistake. Maybe I had been mistaken about some fundamental aspect.
Would I go on lingering here, in this darkness, with this horrifying corpse?
Even when the corpse had rotted away completely, its skeleton exposed, and even the bones had finally crumbled away to nothing, I would be here, like this…Never going to heaven or to hell, never to pass into nothingness, let alone melting away in a sea to become connected to everyone, I would instead be like this, for all eternity…
…I thought I was losing my mind.
No, maybe I already had. I…
As I remained curled up in a ball in the darkness, impossible visions rose up before me and died away one after another.
This place—this of all places—might actually be hell. Yes, of course. That could be it.
That night three months ago, after I had written that suicide note in my daily planner, I had tried to take my own life. In the end, my death had transmuted into a fall to my death following a struggle with Tsukiho, but that didn’t change the fact that my original intent had been “suicide.”
Suicide was a deadly sin—as preached in Christianity, for example.
Suicides go to hell.
And so I had gone. Here. To hell.
(…forget)
All of a sudden, someone’s voice rose somewhere in my mind, and I became so confused that I thought my brain would rupture. Not knowing what was happening, unable to take the slightest action…
(Everything…that happened tonight)
Who…was this?
(…You need to forget)
Who…were they talking to?
Who…
“…Enough.”
My own voice slipped out faintly, without my willing it.
“I don’t want to. Please…help me.”
My feeble voice, barely audible from moment to moment…I was weeping.
“Somebody…help me.”
Boom!
That was when a sudden, momentous sound shook the darkness.
19
Boom!
The noise continued, and I reflexively covered my ears.
The earlier delusion that This is hell…was still vivid in my mind.
Boom!
That some chimerical, terrifying thing was coming this way. A terrifying evil beast dwelling in hell, coming to inflict even more pain on me…
Boom!…Kroooom!
The sound was coming from behind me.
Shut up in the darkness, I couldn’t see anything, but I think it was coming from behind me, from the wall to the room.
Boom!
I uncurled and rose to my hands and knees, turning to look in the direction the sound was coming from. I found myself backing away from it slightly, but I couldn’t keep up my energy and sat down on the floor, hugging my knees to my chest.
Boom!…K-krooom!
It sounded like the wall was being pounded from the other side. Was it the hell beast? Or could it be…? No—
It couldn’t…Before my thoughts had taken any more shape than that—
B-boooom!
Almost simultaneously with an incredibly violent boom, there came a new sound, crack! What could that be? Like lumber snapping…
Crack!
The same sound came again. And then…
…A light.
A single ray of light piercing into the darkness.
20
The sound persisted, reverberating intermittently, while at the same time the light streaming into the room gradually increased.
The single ray became two. Then three and four…and eventually they all joined into a single band of light. Into a swath of light.
The wall was crumbling. It was being broken down from the outside through some person’s efforts.
At last, the silhouette of whoever it was came into view in the spreading white light.
It had the form not of a beast, but of a person—a human being. A person I recognized…in the form of a young girl of petite build. It was—
It was.
It was…Mei? Mei Misaki?
She was holding something in both hands. Unsteadily, she swung it over her head, then swung it down. When she did—
Boom!
The sound of it striking the wall.
Crack!
The sound of lumber snapping.
Mortar and fragments of wood scattered to the ground. The edges of the hole she had made in the wall crumbled completely and the shaft of light grew even wider…
“…Oof.”
I heard her heave a sigh. There was no mistaking it—it was her voice: Mei Misaki’s voice. Her rough, ragged breathing, “Huff, huff, huff…” She continued panting for a while, then once she’d regained composure—
“I know you’re in there,” she called out.
Independent of the white glow of the fluorescent lights illuminating the hallway outside, the beam of a flashlight was aimed in my direction.
“You are in there, aren’t you, Mr. Ghost?”
There was a clatter, followed by a hard, heavy noise. Like she had tossed aside the tool she’d used to break down the wall.
A hole big enough to enable a person to pass through had been broken open in the wall, and she climbed through it. But partway through she froze and made a sickened noise.
“Smells awful…Oh.”
The light from the flashlight piercing through the darkness fixated on me as I sat huddled on the floor and—
“I knew it,” Mei Misaki said. Her face was completely obscured by the light behind her. “I thought I could hear your voice.”
“My voice…?”
At my reaction, she nodded.
“Mm-hm. You said, ‘Help me.’ From the other side of this wall. So…”
Then Mei slowly ran the light of her flashlight over the dark corners of the room. Before long, the movement of the light jerked to a stop.
“…That’s awful.”
She had found the corpse lying on the sofa.
“That’s…”
“…It’s mine.”
My voice shook as I answered.
“It’s my…”
“Let’s get out of here,” Mei said.
When I failed to respond, she turned her flashlight on me.
“If you’d rather not, I could just leave you here, too. Do you want me to close the wall back up again? You’re a ghost, so you ought to be able to leave anyway.”
“Oh, I…”
…Yes. She was completely right. I should have been able to and yet.
Mei Misaki then aimed her flashlight at the sofa in the back once again. With its light illuminating the horrifying dead body.
“That’s death—” she said, as if to push it away.
I looked not at the body, but at her. I could tell she had covered her right eye with her empty right hand.
“I see the color of death,” Mei went on. “Though I don’t exactly need to see it. This really is terrible…Come on, you shouldn’t st
ay in here. The body isn’t going anywhere.
“Right?” she said and reached her right hand out to me. “Hurry up.”
Unsure what to think about anything, I rose unsteadily to my feet. And Mei Misaki gripped my left hand in her right.
Her right hand, slightly moist with sweat and a little clammy.
21
Mei pulled me out of the room by my hand.
Through the hole she had broken in the wall at the end of the hall in the basement, just as I had thought.
A dusty pickax lay on the floor outside. This was—
I was sure this was the pickax that had been in the garage. She had used this just now on this wall to…
“Are you okay?” Mei asked. “Can you move?”
“…Yeah.”
“Okay, then let’s go upstairs,” she urged me. “This…isn’t a good place.”
She led me toward the stairs, turning back once to look at the hole in the wall.
“It’s only natural it turned into that when it’s been sitting there for three months in this weather. Rotting and eaten by bugs. Maybe it’s even better that it got that bad. Had you pictured what your body would be like?”
I couldn’t answer and simply hung my head. I had lost almost all strength to move under my own power.
With Mei still pulling me along by the hand, we climbed the stairs. As we climbed, she spoke in a matter-of-fact tone.
“The power is cut off to the second floor. It looks like a breaker was tripped.”
The power…to the second floor?
“That’s why the battery was dead on that phone handset in the library…And that computer.”
The computer…in the library?
“So of course it didn’t turn on when I pushed the power button. Right?”
When we emerged from the stairwell into the first-floor hallway, Mei Misaki continued on toward the grand entry. Only some of the fixtures on the wall were lit, dimly illuminating the foyer. I could hear a strong wind blowing outside.
When we reached the center of the hall, Mei Misaki let out another sigh.
Another Episode S / 0 Page 14