“Say what?”
My head tilted to one side reflexively. Mei’s reaction was about the same.
“Could I get a little context?”
“Look, I’m just asking you a question. Do you know who Kazami is? Could you describe him?”
Repeating his question, though, Teshigawara’s voice was as serious as I’d ever heard it.
“Sure, I know him, but that’s not—” I answered his question, the weight of a terrible premonition closing in on me. “He’s the class representative for the boys in Class 3. Your friend from way back.”
“Oh-h-h ma-a-an…”
Teshigawara’s face twisted and he groaned.
“…What about you, Misaki? Do you know him?”
“Of course I know who he is.”
Teshigawara groaned, “Oh man,” again and then feebly murmured, “Y-Yeah, of course.”
His knees buckled and he collapsed into a squat. Pale as he was, his face lost even more color and a fine tremor played across his lips.
“Come on, Teshigawara, why are you asking? What happened?”
He stayed squatting on the floor, but when I walked up to him, his head swung haggardly back and forth. “This is bad,” he answered in a voice like a smashed toad. “Something real bad…”
“What are you talking about?”
“Maybe I was wrong…”
“Wrong? About what?”
“I…Look, I was convinced he was the ‘extra person.’ So just now, I…”
“‘He’? You mean…”
Was he talking about Kazami?
“Kazami.”
“…You didn’t.”
“I killed him.”
He killed him? Had he really murdered Kazami?
“You can’t be serious.”
“Why would I lie about that?” Teshigawara cradled his head in both hands. “I’ve been checking into him lately, on the sly. Talking to him about all this stuff from when we were kids, seeing if he remembers it or not, you know. And he…”
“No…Really?”
“He was acting weird, I swear,” Teshigawara appealed to us, his voice almost a sob. “I asked about this place, our secret base by the river where we played all the time when we were third-years in elementary school, and he just said, ‘I don’t remember that.’ I asked him about the summer of our fifth year in elementary school, when we wanted to ride our bikes all the way to see the ocean, but in the end we gave up as soon as we were outside town. And he said ‘That doesn’t sound familiar.’ So…”
“So what?”
“I wasn’t really sure whether that was a sign or not, at first, but then I thought about it and thought about it, and it started to seem suspicious…So I thought he wasn’t himself. That the real Kazami had died a long time ago and this Kazami was the ‘extra person’ who’d snuck into our class this spring…”
Wow, I mean—Teshigawara had seriously misunderstood things. The “extra person”/“casualty” probably wasn’t going to act like that.
As far as I understood from Mei’s and Mr. Chibiki’s explanations, you couldn’t ask if it was the “real thing” or a “fake.” It was the “real thing” through and through: The actual person who’d died came back to life without any awareness that they had already been a “casualty” and slipped back into the world. So it didn’t mean anything if they could remember stuff from when they were little. It wouldn’t be a clue or give you any proof to help you identify them. And yet…
The kinds of childhood experiences Teshigawara was talking about were memories that might have faded or disappeared for anyone. And yet…
“And then tonight, a little while ago, I…tricked him into coming with me.”
His voice thickening now and again, Teshigawara described what had happened.
“I was sharing a room with him, but I didn’t want anyone in the next room to overhear, so I took him somewhere else. I’d found a rec room at one end of the second floor, so I said we should go check it out…
“When we got there, I psyched myself up and then I tore into him. You’re not the real Kazami, are you? You’re the ‘extra person’ in our class, aren’t you? He got all shaken up, then he panicked, and then finally he blew up at me. So I thought, man, look how guilty he’s acting. And like it said on that tape, if he dies…I had to return him to Death to save everyone.”
“…So you killed him?” I controlled my voice, which was threatening to turn a little hysterical. “Really?”
“At first it was like a shoving match with a bunch of arguing. I didn’t think ‘Okay, time to kill him’ and then start hitting him or anything…Aggh, I don’t even know what I was thinking. Somehow we wound up outside on the balcony. And then before I realized it, he…”
“He fell?”
“…Yeah.”
“Did you push him?”
“…I might have.”
“And that killed him?”
“He was lying on the ground, and he wasn’t moving. His head was bleeding, too.”
“Okay…”
“But right then, I got spooked. I couldn’t stop shaking.”
Teshigawara lifted one knee to his chest and dug into his sweaty hair with both hands.
“I ran out into the hallway…and came here. ’Cause I knew you were coming to Misaki’s room. I thought I should tell you guys first.”
“What about Mochizuki?”
“You can’t rely on that guy.”
“…In any case, why did you ask us those questions?”
“’Cause of that tape. Remember?”
Teshigawara lowered his hands from his hair and looked up at my face. His bloodshot eyes were rimmed with tears that seemed ready to pour down his face any second.
“Like Katsumi Matsunaga said, after he killed the ‘extra person’ on the camping trip fifteen years ago…You heard what he said, right? As soon as the ‘extra person’ died, he ceased to exist. No one in the whole class remembered that he’d ever been there, except for Matsunaga, ’cause he’s the one who did it. That’s why I…”
“You wanted to make sure if Kazami was really the ‘extra person’ or not.”
“Right. But you said you know who he is.”
Teshigawara’s shoulders heaved. His voice desperate, he asked me, “Did I really get it wrong? Sakaki—did I?”
Searching for a way to answer him, I saw two possibilities at this point, when considered calmly.
The first was that the “extra person” was not Tomohiko Kazami, just as Teshigawara feared. In other words, the possibility that Teshigawara had “gotten it wrong.”
The other was the possibility that even if the “extra person” was Tomohiko Kazami, he wasn’t dead yet. As far as I knew from what Teshigawara had told us, he hadn’t gone down from the balcony to check if Kazami was truly deceased. So he might still be…
“He might not be dead.”
“What?”
“Falling from the second story wouldn’t necessarily kill him. He could still be breathing but just unconscious.”
“Oh, man—”
Teshigawara got unsteadily to his feet and turned to the window. He reached out, practically pitching forward, to open the window and stepped out onto the balcony. I hurried after him.
A humid breeze blew against us. In the sickly light of the moon, pouring down between the clouds…
Pressing his chest against the railing of the balcony, slippery still from the rain, Teshigawara stretched his right arm out diagonally ahead. To the left of the front door, on one end of the building’s second floor…There we saw the cloudy glow of several lit windows. That must have been the rec room.
“There…It was over there.”
Teshigawara pointed in that direction.
“Argh. I can’t see him from here. It’s on the other side of that bush…”
It was at this point that I took my cell phone from my pocket. I was planning to call the police or an ambulance. Spotting my movement, Teshigawara said, “H-hey,
Sakaki. You’d sell your friend out to the cops?”
“Don’t be stupid!” I replied, my mind flashing back to that detective I’d met.
That older detective who’d questioned me about Ms. Mizuno’s accident, and whom I had run into once on the street outside the school. His name was Oba. He’d told me he had a daughter in elementary school. He’d written his cell phone number on the back of a business card and told me, “If you ever think I might be able to help…” I had put the number in my address book, in case there was ever anything. If we told him what had happened, he would probably understand, to a certain extent.
I moved away from Teshigawara and rushed to try the number. However…
It didn’t go through.
When I checked the screen, I saw a single bar. But the phone wouldn’t connect.
“Sakakibara?”
I heard Mei’s voice. She was looking through the window at me, not coming out onto the balcony.
She was quietly and yet emphatically shaking her head. And then she told me, in a low, controlled voice that Teshigawara wouldn’t hear: “It’s not Kazami.”
“…Oh.”
So her “doll’s eye” had told her “it’s not Kazami.” The “extra person” was someone else.
“Teshigawara!” I called, with force. “First of all, we need to go find out if he’s still alive. If he is, he needs first aid right away. Agreed?”
“Y-yeah,” Teshigawara replied without conviction, pulling his chest away from the railing.
Faced with the sagging defeat of this bleached puppet, I said, “Don’t give up and throw yourself over yet.” And I didn’t mean it as a joke.
“Um, right.”
“Hurry up. Let’s go.”
6
When we ran out of room 223, we headed straight for the front door. We ran down the corridor on the second floor until we reached the staircase in the center of the building, then ran down the stairs to the foyer. And on the way there…
I got a sudden strange feeling.
A premonition, a feeling in my bones…No, it wasn’t quite that. Thinking about it rationally, there was no way it could have been anything as supernatural as that.
An echo…Yes. I felt an echo of something.
A strange kind of echo. An unsettling echo. A terrible echo. Thinking about it rationally, it had to be because of something I’d glimpsed in my quick scan of the area when we came down the stairs.
Teshigawara and Mei headed for the front door without a backward glance. I was the only one whose feet came to an involuntary halt.
I was in the foyer late at night, with the main lights all turned off. The hallway stretched away as if being sucked into the gloom. And there…
A single door stood open, though only a few centimeters. That’s what I’d glimpsed.
The door to the dining hall?
No light spilled from within. It was darker even than the darkness of the hallway. Deep within the darkness visible through the gap in the door, I sensed something—something intensely disturbing. I suppose that was the origin of the “echo” I’d felt.
I was reluctant to call the others back. I drew nearer to the door without them and took the dully gleaming knob in my hand.
I felt it slip.
Was it sweat? No, this wasn’t sweat. It was…
I took my hand off the knob and turned my palm up to squint at it. In the darkness, I could just barely make something out. It wasn’t sweat. It was something darker that stained my palm. It was…
…Blood?
Blood? But why?
I had the option to withdraw and go after the others, who had rushed out ahead of me. But I couldn’t do it. Before I’d even thought everything over, I had pushed the door open and moved into the dining hall. It was too dark to be able to see much, so I was moving ahead one step at a time, feeling along the wall, when…
“Ack!”
I let out a wild cry because, out of nowhere, something grabbed my ankle.
“Agh! Wh—”
What was that? Who was it?
I leapt back.
Something—someone was lying facedown on the floor. Since my eyes had adjusted to the darkness, I could make out the shape thanks to the frail beams of moonlight slipping in through the windows at the back of the room.
“Wh…What the?”
I spoke to it, terrified.
“Who is it? What are you…”
It looked as if they were dressed in a student’s summer uniform. And they were wearing pants, so it was a boy’s uniform.
Since he was lying facedown, I couldn’t see his face. I didn’t know who it was. His right hand was thrown out in front of him. He must have grabbed my ankle with that hand. I’d been totally surprised by how sudden it had been, but the force behind the grip was incredibly feeble.
“Are you okay?”
I went back to his side and laid a hand on his shoulder.
“Hey, are all right? Why are you…”
His body twitched in response to my voice. I clamped my hand around his outstretched right hand. And then…
The same slippery sensation I’d felt on the doorknob was on his hand, too.
“Are you hurt?”
He groaned in a low, strained tone.
I put my hand back on his shoulder and tried to pull him up. But…
“Don’t bother…”
A reedier voice than any I might have imagined escaped his lips.
“It’s no use…”
“Why not?” I asked, when finally I noticed. On the white shirt he wore, a dark stain ran down his back to his hips. The shirt was soaked with blood.
“You…Were you stabbed?” I asked. I pressed my own cheek against the floor to get a look at his face. The dark and the fact that even his face was smeared with blood made it hard to recognize him, but…
“Maejima?”
Maejima, who’d been the one untiringly rubbing Wakui’s back when he suffered that asthma attack after dinner. Maejima with the small frame and baby face, who was for all that actually a warrior in the kendo club. I was almost positive it was him.
“How did this happen?”
I brought my mouth close to his ear.
“Did someone stab you? Did someone…”
He gave another low, pained moan, and then finally spoke in panting intervals. Almost as if he was using up the last of his strength.
“P-pulled a kitchen…kitchen knife…”
“A kitchen knife? What happened?”
“Pulled it…Th-the care…taker…”
“The caretaker?” I shook Maejima’s shoulder. “Mr. Numata? What did he do?”
I asked him question after question, but I got no further answer. I looked into his face, and this time his eyes were closed.
He must have lost consciousness. Or could he have died? I couldn’t calm down and get myself together enough to check…
I lifted myself up and, battling the fear that had crystallized all in a moment, I started walking. Even without finding a light switch, just by the light of the moon I could make out the door to the kitchen all the way at the back of the room.
That old guy is so fishy.
The comments Teshigawara had treated me to only a few hours earlier in this very room played over again in my mind.
Ever since we got here, he’s had this scary look in his eye when he’s looking at us, y’know?
No…It couldn’t be.
I bet you there are tons of old men who just lose it one day and kill their own grandkids or whatever.
He couldn’t have…
Better not take your eyes off that guy.
When I’d reached the door to the kitchen, yet again I felt a strange hint of something. This time it wasn’t due to information I’d gotten visually. It was auditory and olfactory…
I could hear a faint, unusual sound from behind the door; I didn’t know what.
I could smell a faint, unusual odor—yes, from behind this door, but I didn’t know w
hat.
But…
You shouldn’t open it. Don’t open it. Defying the internal warnings, I reached out for the doorknob.
Instantly, my palm felt heat. Luckily it wasn’t bad enough to burn me, but the knob itself was surprisingly hot.
Maybe I should have given the idea up at that point. But without hesitating, I turned the knob and then forcefully kicked the door the rest of the way open.
In that instant, I realized the source of the odd sound and of the odd smell. It was a fire.
Flames were burning through the entire room.
Intensely hot air and smoke billowed out at me, and I retreated hastily. I raised an arm in front of my face and stopped breathing. Even as I did it, in that same moment…
I caught sight of something, obvious in the light of the flames.
The form of that man lying in the kitchen, surrounded by flames.
His head was pointed in my direction. The fire was threatening to catch on his clothes any second. Even so, he didn’t even flinch, possibly because he was already dead. Several objects plunged deeply into his neck and face were probably the immediate cause of death…And, if I wasn’t mistaken, those objects were the metal skewers we’d used at dinner.
The flames raged. Even if there had been a fire extinguisher handy, it didn’t seem as if that would stop them.
I ran back to where Maejima was lying, and shouted at him over and over. “Hey! Maejima! It’s bad! There’s a fire…Come on! If we don’t get out of here, we’re going to die!”
7
Maejima was breathing. I saw a tiny movement in response to my voice.
I was worried about his wounds and the amount of blood he’d lost, but there was absolutely no way I was leaving him here. I urged him, “Stay with me now!” over and over again in order to keep him alert, and somehow I managed to lift him up and drag him out to the hallway. The flames in the kitchen were already spreading into the dining room by that point.
I was pulling the door closed, thinking, If I can just stop the fire from advancing, even for a second…when—
“Where’d you go, Sakakibara?”
Someone called to me from the foyer. It was Mei. She must have come back to look for me since she’d lost sight of me.
“Why are you in—what the…?”
Another, Novel 02 Page 18