“…Yeah, it would.”
Folding both arms over my chest and hugging tight, I nodded.
“Meaning that despite the fact that there were originally enough desks, the ‘extra person’ had already snuck into the class back in April, before I ever came to North Yomi…”
3
“So that’s why, then?”
After several seconds of silence, I asked the question timidly.
“When I said I was wondering if I might be the ‘extra person,’ you flat-out told me I wasn’t. You told me ‘Relax. It’s not you.’”
“…I did, yes.”
“Is that because you knew the ‘disasters’ had actually started in April? And since I wasn’t in the class in April…?”
“That’s part of it…But the main reason is something else.”
I felt as if I’d had some sort of premonition that Mei would answer this way.
“Meaning what?” I pursued. “What was your reason?”
“I…”
She started to answer, but then showed some hesitation. Her gaze slipped away into space and for a long moment she didn’t even blink, her body frozen and doll-like. Then, finally…
She seemed to have come to a decision. She got up from the bed and turned back to face me. She let me see the eye patch over her left eye, which had been turned away from my view this entire time. Then, with measured movements, she uncovered her eye.
“This eye…”
The special glass eye that rested in her empty eye socket. The “blue eye, empty to all” turned on me.
“This ‘doll’s eye’ told me it’s not you.”
I didn’t understand what she meant right away, of course. Still, I felt a vague foreboding somewhere inside me.
“How did it do that?” I asked, yet another question.
This was Mei’s reply, no longer hesitant: “I think I told you this before. This eye can see things that aren’t visible. Things that you wouldn’t expect to see; things that shouldn’t be seen; things that you wish it couldn’t see.”
“Things you wouldn’t expect to see? Things that shouldn’t be seen? Like what?”
“I think it’s…”
Mei lifted her right hand and with it she covered the eye that was not the “doll’s eye.”
“The ‘color of death.’”
She sounded as if she were intoning a spell.
“The color or the tint of something that’s on the other side, with death.”
I didn’t speak.
“Do you understand? No—I can see you don’t.”
To be honest, I didn’t know how I should respond. However—
“Under normal circumstances, I don’t think you could believe me, even after I explain it…But I may as well tell you everything. Will you hear me out?”
When she said that, I nodded deeply without a second thought. And then I looked straight back into the eye she had turned on me. The beautiful and yet utterly vacant blue eye…
“Let’s hear it,” I told her.
4
“At first, I didn’t really understand what was happening, so I was confused and upset all the time.”
Leaving her eye patch off, Mei sat back down on the edge of the bed. She told me the story in the same quiet tone she’d used all night.
“Obviously, I lost the sight in my left eye when I lost the eye. Even if you put a flashlight right up to it, I can’t detect even a flicker of light. If I close my right eye, I can’t see anything at all. I had the surgery when I was around four years old, so I’ve been this way as far back as I can remember. Even after Kirika made this ‘doll’s eye’ for me to put in, it was still like that for a while. But then…
“What was it at first? I’m pretty sure it was when one of my father’s relatives died and they took me to the funeral. It was either the end of my third year in elementary school or the start of my fourth.
“They said ‘This is good-bye’ and I put flowers in the coffin…And when I looked at the face of the person who’d died, I felt something really strange. My left eye shouldn’t have been able to see anything, but I felt like it was sensing something…Not a shape. More like a color.
“I was shocked. Since that was basically the first time I’d ever felt something in my left eye. And it was a truly strange sensation. When I covered my left eye up and only looked through my right eye, all I saw was the person’s face, completely normal. And yet when I used my left eye, too, there was some kind of weird color tingeing my vision, overlaying everything else…”
“What do you mean, a weird color?” I asked.
“I can’t really explain it,” Mei replied, shaking her head limply. “It was a color I’d never seen with my right eye…a color I never could have seen with it. I can’t express it with words like red or blue or yellow or any of the names for colors I know. None of those fit. It’s…a color that doesn’t exist in our world.”
“Not even if you could mix together any colors of paint that exist?”
“…Not even then.”
“And that’s the ‘color of death’?”
“I couldn’t have understood that at first…”
Tilting her head back to look at the ceiling, Mei gave a short sigh.
“No one would really talk to me about it. Doctors would examine me, but they never found anything abnormal. They told me I was just imagining it. I tried to believe them, too, but…Every so often, I kept seeing the same thing, and it didn’t go away. So—”
Mei slowly returned her gaze to me.
“Over the course of however many years, I’ve come to understand it. When I sense that color, it means ‘death’ is there.”
“You mean ‘death’ is there every time you look at a dead person’s face?”
“It happened once when I was at the scene of a car accident. There was a man trapped in the driver’s seat of a crushed car. His face was covered in blood…He was already dead. I could sense the same color in his face as I’d seen at the funeral.
“And it’s not just when I see something in person. Say, on the news, when they show clips or photos from the scene of accidents or wars. It almost never happens with TV or newspapers, but magazines have pictures of dead bodies in them sometimes. When I look at stuff like that, I see it.”
“That same color?”
“I’m not sure. There are lots of degrees.”
“What?”
“Sometimes I sense it clearly, and sometimes it’s hazy. You could call it different shades of the same color. When someone’s actually dead, it’s clear and when someone’s badly hurt and is going to die soon or they’re on their deathbed from a terrible illness, then it’s comparatively faint.”
“So it’s not just on dead people that you sense this color.”
“Right. In those cases, I think it’s because the person is close to ‘death.’ They’ve come closer to ‘death’ than normal, closer than necessary…And their essence is being pulled toward the side of ‘death.’ That’s why it’s faint. Less a color and more a shade…You know?
“I can’t stand big hospitals. Grandma Amane was hospitalized once to have surgery on a tumor, and she was okay because they’d found it early, but when we went to visit her…That was hard. I was scared. Without even trying, I could see all kinds of patients in her ward tinged by ‘shades of death’…
“It’s not prophecy or some kind of power like that. I can see the color on people who are badly hurt or seriously ill, but if I were to meet a person who’s going to die in an accident later on, I wouldn’t see anything. So I think maybe this is like detecting the ‘mortality’ component a person has in them.”
I couldn’t offer any response.
“To be honest, I wasn’t very excited going to the hospital to visit Misaki, either, because I would sense it sometimes. But I never once sensed it on Misaki. That reassured me; I thought she would be all right, and then…And then all of a sudden she—”
Mei bit down on her lower lip out of grief, or m
aybe remorse. Her lips were pressed together for a long moment before she went on.
“You must be wondering why this eye can see that sort of thing, how it got that way. I call it the ‘color of death,’ but I only see it on humans. I don’t sense anything for other animals…Isn’t that strange? It’s so weird.
“I wondered, too, and I was scared, and I hated it. I thought about it from every conceivable angle, but I don’t know. I don’t understand it, but I can’t escape it. All I can do is accept it. And so eventually I started to think of it like this:
“Maybe it’s because of the emptiness in dolls.”
The dolls are empty.
Ah…This, too, Mei had told me when I’d run into her in the basement of the gallery.
Dolls are emptiness. Their bodies and hearts are total emptiness…a void. That emptiness is like death.
“Dolls are empty, you know. They contain an emptiness that parallels ‘death’…Maybe that’s why this left eye that I share with them illuminates the ‘color of death’ in human beings. Or maybe it has something to do with my experience during my eye surgery, where I could have died.”
At the time, as I listened to her talk, I remembered feeling as if she had allowed me a glimpse of a secret underpinning the world.
“All I could do was accept that explanation. But there’s no way I could ever talk to anyone about this. I never even fully explained it to Misaki. I couldn’t. And then, at a certain point, I decided I would just keep this eye covered, especially around other people.”
“…I see.”
Even as I gave her a solemn nod, in the rational part of my mind I never stopped thinking it over. How seriously could I take this story Mei was telling me?
However, without revealing that to her, I wore an earnest expression as I asked, “So then, what about ghosts? Have you ever seen any? The spirits of people who’ve died, or anything like that?”
“No…Never,” Mei replied, her face just as serious. “I mean, I have no idea if those things exist the way everybody talks about them, or whether they haunt all these different places people claim they do. Though I think, fundamentally, they probably don’t.”
“What about paranormal photographs?”
Naturally, this was a question with a point.
“Not those, either.”
She didn’t move.
“Those photos they show on TV and in magazines, they all look so fake. But that’s why—”
At that point, Mei’s expression seemed to sharpen.
“That’s why I wanted to get a look at that photo from twenty-six years ago. I wanted to look at the real thing with this eye and make sure.”
“Sure. And when you saw it…”
The day before yesterday, when she’d come to my house and looked at the photos my mother had left behind, she’d taken the eye patch off her left eye. And then she’d asked me—
What about the color?
That question.
You don’t see a weird color?
“What did you see?” I asked. “Did you see the ‘color of death’ on that student in the picture, Misaki Yomiyama?”
“I did,” she replied instantly. That was the first time I’ve ever looked at something people said was a paranormal photo and sensed the color like that. So it has to be…”
My eyes fixed on Mei’s lips as she trailed off, and the memory came belatedly back to me.
I know that I’m not “the casualty.”
The words she’d spoken that day I’d visited her house and we’d had that long talk in her living room on the third floor.
When I’d pursued her claim and asked, So you can be sure that you’re not “the casualty,” huh? she had started to explain, I’m telling you…and then she had stopped herself.
“I hope that explains it,” Mei said, slowly rising from the bed once again. “When I take my eye patch off and look at you like this, I still can’t see the ‘color of death’ on you. So it’s not you. You’re not the ‘extra person.’”
“And you know that it’s not you, either, for the same reason.”
“Yeah.”
Nodding, Mei picked up her eye patch. She started to put it back in place and then stopped as if thinking better of it.
“If nothing else, I believe in the mysterious abilities of this ‘doll’s eye.’ But if I search deep down inside myself, I think there’s still a part of me that doesn’t totally buy it. I still find myself doubting it sometimes, thinking maybe it’s nothing more than a delusion.
“Maybe it is only a delusion, but I just told you ‘it’s not a prophecy or some kind of power like that,’ right? But I feel like, at least for me, it might be. If Death were to come after me sometime in my future, maybe I’d be able to tell somehow. If I could make the right moves, maybe in certain cases I’d be able to escape that Death…Remember that one time, you said you were worried about me going home alone? And I said I’d be fine? That’s why.”
…Right.
I did remember that.
“Let’s say I believe everything you just told me…”
As I replied, I also rose from my chair. The chills and goose bumps had stopped. Instead, despite the air-conditioning making the room as cold as it was, the back of my neck was slick with sweat.
I was a little over one meter from Mei. She had both her eyes open—left and right—and her gaze was fixed on me. Behind me, the window shook violently once again.
“Then that means you know who it is?”
Who is “the casualty”…?
“That you looked with your ‘doll’s eye’ and now you know who the ‘extra person’ in our class is?”
Mei shifted her head in an ambiguous way that neither confirmed nor denied what I’d said. Then she replied, “I’ve tried not to take my eye patch off when I’m at school.
“Ever since I started third year and found out the facts behind the ‘curse’ from all the rumors, even after the start of the new semester, I’ve never taken it off. Not even after what happened to Misaki, or after you transferred to our school…Not even after Sakuragi died and I finally started to believe that the ‘disasters’ were something real, I never…”
“Even though you wrote that message on your desk?”
Who is “the casualty”…?
“Even though you might have been able to tell who it was just by taking your eye patch off?”
“Even if I found out—even if I knew who it was, I didn’t think there was anything I could do about it. I didn’t think it would help anything to know. I wondered about it, but…You see?”
To be honest, I wasn’t much inclined to accept Mei’s response just then.
It was true, I’d never seen her without her eye patch on at school. But could she honestly say she had never once let it slip off? Had she never tried to discover the answer to her riddle—Who is “the casualty”? How could she ever stop thinking about it, otherwise?
But then…
Even if she had, that was in the past. Quibbling about it now accomplished nothing. The problem was in the present moment.
“In that case…”
I rested a hand on my chest and took a deep breath. Maybe it was the incredible stress, or maybe just my imagination, but I felt a slight pain that summoned back the memories of that obnoxious collapsed lung.
“What about after that? What about now?”
Now that she’d heard what was on that fifteen-year-old tape that Katsumi Matsunaga had hidden. Now that she could no longer claim there was nothing she could do if she knew who it was.
“Do you know? Can you see them? Is the person here on this trip?”
Mei’s eyebrows trembled, as if my barrage of questions had thrown her slightly off balance. She was reluctant to answer. I thought she might even put a hand to her chest and take a deep breath like I had done, when her perplexed gaze fled to one side and she bit down softly on her lower lip again.
Finally, she gave a terse bob of her head.
“The ‘e
xtra person’ is here.”
“…So they did come.”
Sweat rolled down my skin under my shirt. I fixed my eyes on Mei’s lips.
“Who is it?”
“I don’t…”
Just then, a loud noise came from the door to the room and put a stop to the discussion. Someone outside was pounding on the door. Not like a knock—more like someone’s body had crashed into it.
“Who’s there?”
Simultaneous with Mei’s question, the door was knocked open violently. The second I saw who came tumbling inside, I forgot what I’d been doing only seconds before and shouted loudly, “Teshigawara?! What happened?”
5
Just by looking at him, I could tell something was off.
His breathing was oddly labored, as if he’d just run flat-out all the way here. His shirt clung to the sweat coating his skin. His hair and face were dripping with sweat, too. And yet he was terribly pale. His expression was rigid and his eyes looked unfocused.
“What happened? Is there…”
When I moved closer to him, Teshigawara made a choking noise and he shook his head fiercely. Then he looked from my face to Mei’s and back again. Showing no reaction whatsoever to the fact that Mei had her eye patch off, he finally formed the words—between heaving breaths—“Y-yeah. Sorry. L-look, sorry to bust in here, but…Could I ask you guys a question?”
He wanted to ask us a question? That was weird. Unquestionably weird. You feeling okay, Teshigawara? What in the world was…
“I just want to ask something, real quick.”
His breathing still ragged, Teshigawara maneuvered past me and headed for the window. The window faced the inner garden, surrounded by the building on three sides, and had a balcony attached that allowed a person to stand outside.
He went up to it, then turned back to look at us.
“S-so, do you guys know anyone named Tomohiko Kazami?”
He threw the question out there.
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