Case 00: A Person Who Is Nothing (1)

A and M’s faces were pale, as they dizzily walked on.

The old man tried to hide the terrible spectacle downstairs by covering their eyes with both hands as they left the mansion, but it was impossible for him to accomplish that completely. Leaving aside the mother in the storage room, they immediately ended up noticing the father hanging from the center of the living room.

Seeing her father's figure, A screamed out loud; M was merely in shock. Unable to do anything, I merely hung my head down. The old man forcefully carried the two out of the mansion. Still, he had trouble with A who was screaming frantically; With his left hand he forcibly pulled M, and with his right hand, he at last managed to carry A on his shoulder. With a dizzy gait like that of a doll, M merely followed.

The old man's car was at the end of a side street around three-hundred meters below the mansion. By the time they arrived there, A had gotten quiet, but it was as if she had fallen unconscious with her eyes still open, or as if the thin line of her consciousness had been cut off. I merely watched her from inside the stuffed frog that M continued to strongly hold on to.

The old man opened the car door, made the two sit in the back seat, and sat down in the driver's seat himself.

He then moved to grab a cigarette from the dashboard, before stopping his hand with the click of his tongue. He might have hesitated to smoke in an enclosed space with children present.

“...I'm not sure how I should go about explaining it--but listen carefully.”

The old man began to explain as he gazed at the two sisters in the rearview mirror.

“You already saw it, so I'll just say it. Take it in. Your papa and mama... have passed on to the next world. It was not by choice. In short, they were killed. If you were to ask who did it, it was something called ‘Yoishi’. And ‘Yoishi’ is not a living person.”

Having spoken that far, the old man scratched his stiff gray hair.

“You might be thinking, ‘What is this old man saying?’ but -- ahh, the younger sister will understand. It's the thing that was inside Kii-chan. That thing moves from person to person. And, it destroys the people it possesses and the people around them. The incidents that have been occurring in your town were probably the work of ‘Yoishi’. And right now, it's inside your pet dog.”

“...In Leo?”

Thereupon, M finally asked in reply, and the old man nodded bitterly.

“That's right, it's that dog Leo. Leo isn't the Leo from before anymore. From now on. If that dog appears before you again, you must not approach it. If you see him, tell me immediately.”

It was not possible to understand or accept such things after they were explained in rapid succession. Tears gradually began to flow from A and M's eyes once more.

(--Ah…I’m powerless…)

Inside the stuffed frog, all I could do was blame myself as such.

I knew this was going to happen more than two weeks in advance. I knew it would happen, and yet I could do nothing. I wanted to protect this family somehow, but all I could do was let this day come. Right now, I had no idea what to say to the sisters with the reality in front of me. The words I could offer would be too little to the sisters who ended up seeing that gruesome spectacle. I didn't entirely know what was happening, and I didn't know what would happen from now on. And what's more, neither my hands, nor my words, would reach anyone. All I could do was snuggle close up to A and M.

However, it was the same for the old man who was alive in this world—

“For the time being, let's go to a nearby police station.”

The old man eventually moved his eyes away from the sisters to turn and face forward once more, and he turned the car’s ignition key.

And, as the engine was about to sputter and turn on -- “Ah”.

Hearing that voice, I too, looked beyond the windshield.

In front of the car was a familiar, tall and slender man.

--S, Sako?

Sako Takito stood still there, dressed spiffily in a black hakama over white clothes along with tall wooden clogs. His long black hair seemed to shine wet with luster as it was combed down. His face, which had always seemed pale and in poor health, looked to be even paler than usual.

“Yo.”

Sako spoke, causing the old man to push his face out of the window and yell.

“Don’t act so casually! Where the hell have you been?”

“To many different places.”

“What do you mean different places? Anyway, just get in! Let's get away from here. ‘That thing’ is in the dog right now. And it's still around here somewhere.”

“It's about that actually.”

Sako spoke after giving a brief glance to the thicket in his surroundings.

“Don't you find it a little strange?”

“What did you say?”

The old man, who probably didn't hear him over the noise of the car, turned off the engine for the time being and angrily got out. I, too, came out of the frog after taking a glance at the sisters who were still in a daze. I approached Sako together with the old man.

“What did you say just now?”

“I said, aren’t we acting a little too conveniently for ‘Yoishi’?”

“What do you mean? It’s inside the dog. Besides that--”

Thereupon, the old man looked back at the car once before lowering his voice.

“The mother is in pieces. The father is hanging by the neck. I thought for a minute that it might have been one of the sisters, but that wasn't it. I peeked in the house through the window every morning, but a while ago, that dog was just staring at the father hanging from the ceiling, and it looked back and sneered. After that it deliberately went to the storage room and sneered again. Where in the world can you find a sneering dog?”

“However, even if you were to say that it was inside the dog -- then it wouldn’t explain the entirety of the horror that unfolded in that mansion.”

Sako spoke with his hands in his pockets as he declared dispassionately.

“All ‘Yoishi’ can do is to possess. The only thing it can use is the body it possesses. Based on the size of a dog, it can't use large tools that a human can. It couldn't have dismembered the mother, much less hung an adult male from a beam with the body of a Yorkshire terrier.”

“Then, what does it all mean?”

“There is only one answer. ‘Yoishi’ is not present inside the dog.”

Astonished by those words-- the old man looked back in the direction of the car once more. As he stared at the sisters with their heads hung down in the back seat, he asked Sako.

“Are you saying that it's inside one of the two sisters?”

“No-- we still have three humans who are possible here. Me, you, and the guardian spirit that is probably here.”

….Eh…?

“And there is one more thing that is a matter of concern. Why, exactly, is Yoishi doing something like this? The Tengu incident in S-town, the headless incident in K-town. Looking back at the circumstances of those two incidents, Niizawa-san was hung from a height of around four meters above the ground in S-town. Nagami-san from K-town had his head chopped off with enough force to launch it far beyond the window. Don't you think they were experiments conducted for the sake of the present? Weren't they a little too elaborate to merely be done ’just for fun’?”

“…”

“To us humans, this series of murders were extremely brutal occurrences of sadness and gloom-- however that is, to the very end, a psychological phenomenon of the human world; Shouldn’t we look at it from its perspective, that of a ghost with some unknown objective? That’s what I believe. Until we grasp that, we cannot deal with what is to happen from here on.”

“…Then, what are you saying we should do?”

“For now, let’s return to that mansion.”

“What did you say?”

“There's something I'm curious about. I want to try doing at least one thing that is beyond its expectations.”

The old man glared motionlessly at Sako’s pale face, before eventually spitting once and returning to the car.

He then opened the back seat and informed the sisters, “He's alright.”

“That man is a priest; He solves various things for me, so just wait here.”

A and M both looked back at the old man in a daze, but their faces were hopeless. And more so than M, A looked at the old man with a clinging gaze as she grabbed the sleeve of his worn-out suit. He gently wrapped his hand around hers, and hugged them both with both hands as he talked to them.

“I'm sure there's a lot you don't understand. But trust me. I'll definitely come back. Lock the doors, you’ll be safe here.

“Do you have a phone?”

A and M timidly took out the PHS from their pockets.

“Alright. This is my number. If something happens, call me. I'll come running right away.”

Saying that, the old man handed over a scribbled memo, and placed his large hand on the sisters’ heads one after the other.

“Listen to me all right. The one thing I can tell you right now is, that your parents ended up going to the heavens, but they are still close and still love you. It might be a while, but you'll definitely see them again one day. And you guys have to live your life to the fullest from here on out, so that you don't have to be ashamed when that time comes.”

The old man's words moved my heart deeply as I merely stood and watched. I thought he was doing a good job, and that the old man’s broad back was quite dependable. However, at that moment, I suddenly looked in Sako’s direction – and was taken aback.

For some reason, Sako’s face looked pale.

His narrow eyes were wide open, and his eyeballs flickered as if they were chasing something that was not here.

That was as if—

He had noticed something hidden in something he had overlooked up until now, and despaired of the darkness of where that possibility could lead to.