by Nisioisin
“Isn’t that sweet. The candy I mean, not you.”
I felt around in my pocket and took out a fifty-yen coin that happened to be there. If it had been a hundred-yen coin, I would’ve said keep the change, but tough luck, Mayoi Hachikuji.
“So, what’s the story? Let’s hear it.”
“Right. Um, it’s a story about sand.”
“Sand?”
“Right. Well sand or─oh, but before I get to that, may I ask you something?”
“Hm? What.”
“It’s about Mister Oshino taking off… Now that he’s left the cram school, what’s become of this vampire I keep hearing rumors about? This newfound lost child, Miss Shinobu Oshino? I doubt Mister Oshino took her along with him…”
“Ah, well, she’s─”
I looked down at my shadow as I spoke.
My deep, dark, pitch-black shadow.
“Sorry, if I stay to hear your story, I’m already barely going to slip in under the bell as it is.”
I’ll tell you next time, I dodged.
003
Hachikuji had said “sand,” but more specifically it was a “sandbox”─the sandbox in a certain small park.
It wasn’t the same one where I’d first encountered Hachikuji. True, apart from parks where I’d played as a child, they all pretty much seemed the same to me. But unlike the one where I’d met Hachikuji, the one with the name I couldn’t read, the smallish grounds of this park were packed with a wide variety of playground equipment including a seesaw, a jungle gym, and monkey bars.
And of course, a sandbox.
It was at the bottom of the slide─though the slide was just a slide, and the sandbox was, in that sense, nothing but an ordinary sandbox, nothing strange or clever about its construction.
That only went for the design of this sandbox, however─there was definitely, as Hachikuji had said, something abnormal about the sand.
An abnormal phenomenon.
A bizarre phenomenon.
That may sound like an exaggeration─but if you’d suddenly been shown this in the middle of the night, if you’d witnessed it, I guarantee you’d be shaken up.
“Yeah, I was all shook up,” Hachikuji had said. “Or do I mean shook down.”
“Someone robbed you?”
“I shook it off.”
“You should’ve been shaking in your boots.”
Sandwiched though it’d been between our playful banter─Hachikuji’s explanation had been, largely, clear and comprehensible. She has yet to contract Senjogahara’s disease of feeling the need to attack me with literally every other word.
Though she’s bound to catch it before long…
Once they’ve taken hold, diseases like that are almost impossible to fully cure, so prevention is the key.
The first bell had already rung by the time she’d finished telling her story, but I’d managed to slip into the classroom before the final bell. After that I lived the life of the diligent student for six hours or so, and after that, on the way home from studying for finals at Senjogahara’s house, I headed to the park that Hachikuji had told me about.
It was nighttime.
The dead of night, you might say.
Hachikuji didn’t actually know the name of the park, and I didn’t see anything like a sign when I entered─still, as soon as I saw the sandbox in question, there was no longer any doubt in my mind that she’d meant this park. Like they say, seeing is believing.
It was obvious at a glance.
That this was the sandbox.
“Seeing is believing, but I can’t be leaving just yet…”
Despite the darkness, I had my vampiric sight, or its after-effects─and they were serving me well now. It was as if I’d been fitted with a high-res night vision scope.
As far as I could tell from looking through it─some kind of “picture” had been drawn on the surface.
Had been drawn, or.
Had emerged.
I don’t know, this might sound ironic, coming from someone who was only seeing it thanks to the after-effects of being a vampire─but it looked downright demonic.
A monstrous portrait.
As if the sand itself─were an aberration.
“What was it that Oshino said…the simulacrum phenomenon? How people can end up seeing human faces in anything…”
Sure, I got that.
But what about when it’s a demon’s face instead of a human’s? Well, okay, spirit photography, provided it’s not done with CG, is mostly some incidental combination of light and shadow, or haze, or dirt, which just ends up looking “that way”… Hachikuji had been walking around looking for a bizarre and mysterious phenomenon to sell me─and under those circumstances you might very well see something mysterious in the topography of a perfectly normal sandbox.
Perhaps, having heard her story, I had a preconceived notion of what I’d find─and ended up getting the same impression.
The stone statue back in April.
The bouquets back in May.
They’d been more or less like that─so it made sense to suspect this, too, was such a case. But only if Hachikuji and I had at least seen the sandbox on the same day.
This wasn’t a stone statue or a bouquet of flowers.
Each individual grain of sand may have solid form, but sand as a whole is a shifting mass─was it really possible for us to see the same “demonic face” on different days?
Not to mention sweet nothings written by lovers on the beach, basically all it takes is a gust of wind for sand to change its shape. That’s why sandboxes are great places for kids to play.
Surely, in the almost half a month between when Hachikuji saw this demon “drawn” on the surface and today, when I came to check it out, a parade of kids had played in this sandbox.
Making mountains, tunneling through those mountains, digging holes…or perhaps calling on all the skill at their command to construct a castle.
Could a sandbox, having undergone all that─really display an identical aspect to me as it had to her? It meant that whatever changes had been wrought upon it, however much it had been moved around and turned over, the sand contained in this sandbox─shifted back into a demon.
A remonstrating monster.
As if the sand had─a will of its own.
“Was there any kind of sand aberration? The Sand-Throwing Hag? Though in that case the hag is the monster, not the sand…”
He wasn’t a monster, but I did recall a relevant superman from the Kinnikuman manga called Sunshine─even so, I very much doubted this sand was about to take on human form and suddenly attack me.
And yet, I’d almost died twice at the hands of aberrations recently… The mere thought set off alarm bells.
“…”
Well.
Having confirmed that the info Hachikuji sold me for fifty yen wasn’t bogus, what now? Not that I came here just out of curiosity.
If there really was a threat, I couldn’t just leave it alone, if for no other reason than that it was in a public park─it was the kind of thing that doesn’t bother you if you don’t know about it, but now that I did, I could spare at least a little time to look into it. Ridding myself of a bizarre worry simply by stopping by on my walk home from Senjogahara’s for a few minutes would be a dream come true.
…Maybe not a dream come true.
Man, my vocabulary is pretty weak.
Anyway, unlike my disagreeable little sisters, I’m not the kind of person who goes around intentionally looking for trouble, but when trouble sideswipes me, I can’t just let it be.
Such a dicey, or…
Enigmatic sandbox which, worst case scenario, might curse the children who play in it, was no laughing matter─if I were going to look into it, I’d better do it right away.
Though a high schooler playing in a sandbox in a deserted public park at a time that could be called “the dead of night” might seem even dodgier than an aberration.
“That said…it’s probably just someon
e’s idea of a prank. Someone like, for instance, a high schooler playing in a sandbox in a deserted park in the dead of night.”
When I actually put it into words, this supposed prankster struck me as a pretty far-fetched character, but if you left out the high schooler part, it didn’t seem like an impossible explanation. In fact, it seemed pretty plausible. Drawing a face on the surface of the sandbox to scare away kids who were trying to play there…or no, maybe it wasn’t a prank.
Maybe it was the work of their so-called guardians.
Some parents don’t want their children playing in places like sandboxes, where their clothes and hands will get dirty. Maybe they made this “drawing” to keep their kids away from the sandbox, to scare them, to frighten them off… And even if they weren’t so high-strung, there was always the possibility that it was just a question of supervising the park at night.
Like how Naoetsu High put bouquets on the roofs─to keep people away…nope.
I promised Senjogahara I’d forget about that whole thing. I shouldn’t be remembering it here.
That aside, chances were this was a man-made phenomenon─not to parrot Oshino’s oft-stated frustration with everyone blaming aberrations every time something goes wrong, but when something does happen, it makes the most sense to accept whatever explanation seems to be, on the whole, most likely.
When something goes down, blaming humans rather than aberrations will yield a much higher success rate─though coming from someone who’s still saddled with the after-effects of having been a vampire, that sounds somehow supercilious, or weirdly pompous, or just unconvincing.
After all, ever since Hachikuji had told me, I’d harbored my fair share of doubts about this “sand,” even before getting here.
“Now then…”
With that, I got into the sandbox. For a moment I debated taking off my shoes, but I’m pretty sure there’s no rule about having to go barefoot in the sandbox.
Mmmm.
My investigation had a serious goal, but my inner child couldn’t help being stimulated… Since the beginning of middle school─or even the last year of elementary school, boxes of sand have essentially only been for doing the long jump, not for playing.
This return to childhood made me want to try sliding down the slide into the sandbox, but that was taking the merrymaking too far.
I could think of excuses for investigating a sandbox, but it’d be a catastrophe if anyone saw me swooshing down into it.
Why were you doing that?! they’d ask.
It was an aberration, an aberration made me do it! I’d answer.
And in that case, it wouldn’t be the police station they would haul me off to…
“…Hm.”
I squatted in the center and gingerly scooped up some sand. The demonic face had gotten messed up the moment I set foot in the sandbox, but now I helped it along further.
I called it investigating, but I was destroying the object of study. Then again, I couldn’t hope to match Oshino’s armchair omniscience.
Carrying out any kind of Nondestructive Examination was off the table.
In detective novels, they always say that preserving the scene exactly as it was is fundamental to investigations, but a layman can’t be expected to do it without disturbing things…
“Seems like normal sand. True, I’m no expert when it comes to sand…”
Ordinary sand from a sandbox in a public park.
In fact, thanks to me “playing in the sand” under the guise of an investigation, the “demonic face” or whatever had disappeared without a trace─and was failing, of course, to revert to its original form in an instant, or anything like that.
“…”
As a test, I formed a small mound.
I thought maybe if I played in the sandbox like a child, there’d be some sort of “reaction”─but there wasn’t.
A shabby little mound of sand took shape, that’s all.
After a minute or so lost in thought, I knocked it over and smoothed it back the way it had been. Then, brushing the sand off my hands, I stepped out of the sandbox─and once outside, I noticed that even though I hadn’t played, er, investigated all that vigorously, my shoes were filled with sand.
Not just sand, anything made up of tiny grains will get in everywhere, no matter what you do… Taking off my shoes, I shook them one at a time, dumping the sand back into the sandbox.
Thanks to my vigorous trampling, it looked like an ordinary sandbox─but once I saw it in that state, I realized just how difficult it was to recreate that “demon.”
Even making a little mound was harder than I thought─never mind making, transforming, the whole sandbox into a face, demonic or otherwise. You needed to be able to grasp the whole sandbox as a canvas, or…
To put it simply, it required some modicum of painterly ability. Though I guess it was three-dimensional, so a sculptor-ly ability?
At any rate, it was an impossible task for a guy like me who couldn’t even construct a decent shed. Perhaps one of the parents, or pranksters, who lived nearby had a flair for the fine arts…
Actually, was it done as an art project in the first place? Maybe it wasn’t just here, maybe the sandboxes in all the parks, up to and including Unpronounceable Park, were inscribed with similar pieces of art. The sandbox would be an odd medium to choose, but that very transience might make it art─I didn’t get that way of thinking, but I did get that it existed. About as well as I got writing sweet nothings amid the breakers at the seashore, at least…
Although it was night, I cast a shadow in the moonlight. I looked at that shadow─just a shadow, and muttered, “Well, if I can play in this sandbox without incident, vampiric after-effects and all─then it seems like there’s no urgent issue here.”
I couldn’t help sounding like I was looking for reassurance. I knew perfectly well there’d be no reaction, but I just had to.
Even knowing there’d be no response, I’d continue addressing my shadow anyway.
“Honestly, it doesn’t speak highly of whoever’s doing it─whether it’s a prank, or art, or a parent over-parenting, but I don’t think I need to intervene, or interfere. It’s not like I can get involved at the drop of a hat every time there’s an aberration, so the work of a human being?”
With that, I put the park in my rearview mirror.
Calling it a mistake might be a little too hard on myself─but if there was a mistake I made here, it was assuming that if something wasn’t the work of an aberration, it had to be a man-made phenomenon─and conversely, that if something wasn’t a man-made phenomenon, it had to be the work of an aberration.
If this assumption had reached Oshino’s ears─I’m sure he would’ve laughed it off, as always.
Though.
Who knows─maybe he would’ve scolded me.
004
“Tut!”
“…”
Oshino may or may not have scolded me, but Hanekawa did, unambiguously.
Tut!
I hadn’t been scolded in that way since kindergarten… It happened right after I got home from the park.
I got a phone call from Hanekawa.
Currently, not one but two model students, Senjogahara and Hanekawa, were helping me with my studies, which made me extremely lucky. Since Senjogahara had been on duty that day and our work had been successfully concluded, I had no idea why Hanekawa was calling me─but ignoring a call from my great benefactor was hardly an option, so I answered it.
“Hello?”
“Hey, Araragi? Sorry for calling so late─it’s just, something’s been on my mind. Is now an okay time?”
“Sure, now’s fine…”
Actually, I wanted to wash off the dirt from the sandbox, but I’m not enough of a clean freak to put off Hanekawa in favor of a shower.
“I just received Senjogahara’s regular report…”
“Regular report?! What the hell?!”
It sounded terrifying!
Wait, so, afte
r our study sessions, Senjogahara reported to Hanekawa about how it went? A debriefing about whether or not I was studying properly?
Gaaah…
A serious lack of faith…
“Oh, no, this wasn’t for the Araragi Rehabilitation Program, it had more to do with the Senjogahara Rehabilitation Program─but forget about it.”