Case 13: Spiritual Paths (3)

The man I met at the front gate of the university the following day could only be described as such.

I was walking along the road and saw a limousine with tinted glass parked next to a row of Zelkova trees in front of the main gate of Koumei university, and as I walked past it, I stared at it and thought to myself, ‘What an amazing car’. When suddenly, the rear passenger door opened, and that man stepped out. The man was tall and lean, his hair was brushed back, and he looked good in a stylish navy-blue suit.

However, apart from that, it was as if there was nothing to remember him by, like he had no distinct features, and had a strange face which made his age hard to discern.

“You must be Nagito Yamada-kun, right?”

He called out to me in a low tone of voice, and I replied ‘Yes’ back to him, but from there, the man didn’t even try to follow up with any comment. He merely looked down at me expressionlessly, like a robot. I too looked back at the face of that noh-faced man – but it was as if I couldn’t get a read on his emotions at all, although for some reason, I had a feeling I saw his vacant gaze somewhere before.

“Umm…Who might you be?”

I asked as if to go against his heavy, intimidating air.

“You’ve been taking care of that.”

The man spoke in a manner where his lips didn’t move.

“…That?”

“My adopted daughter as per the family register.”

…….?

I was flabbergasted, not quite knowing what he was talking about, when the man turned towards the Koumei institute.

He then took out an expensive looking silver colored lighter along with a foreign cigarette from his pocket and lit it. Of course, he didn’t bother to ask me, and I didn’t have time to tell him that this was a no-smoking area of the campus.

“It’ll soon be a year huh? It’ll be a long time for that to have stayed in the same place.”

“Um.”

A sweet fragrance drifted in the surroundings, and I asked while choking a little.

“Who is this girl you’re talking about?”

In response, the man turned his body slightly towards me and shifted his focus to me once more. He stared at me motionlessly once more with eyes like holes in a Noh mask. It felt as if he might have laughed slightly, but it might have just been my imagination.

The man exhaled a sweet ectoplasmic smoke from his mouth, and silently took out a business card from his pocket. I ended up grabbing it reflexively, but all that was written there was his name, ‘美鶴木志洲’ and a phone number. There was no job title, address or anything else. So I had no idea who he was.

“Shi…Shishu Mitsuru…gi?”

“It’s read as Shijima Mitsurugi. It doesn't matter, you won't get a chance to call me by my first name.”

He spoke in a low whisper, but—something rang inside me hearing the word ‘Mitsurugi’.

Mitsurugi? A girl--? Huh…?

As I opened every single drawer in my memory, searching for the identity of the string of intense nostalgia, anxiety, slight fear and countless other emotions that came from that name, the man looked at me as if he were licking up all my emotional transitions.

“It seems you’ve forgotten everything completely.”

“Forgotten--?”

I was about to ask, ‘Just who the hell are you?’ But I stopped as the man tsked at the back of his mouth. I felt disgusted by his presence, as if he were disciplining a misbehaving dog, as if he was used to always making people follow his orders.

“If you've forgotten, you shouldn't force yourself to remember. It's a capacity that's not given much importance you know, to forget, but it's one of the most useful weapons of a healthy human being. It was an incident that people shouldn't know about, and your involvement in it was like a random accident. There are fatalists in this world who connect everything to the inevitable, but you don't want to live that way because it's exhausting.”

The man who had the image of being silent and expressionless like a robot suddenly became talkative.

However, was he embarrassed of himself? He once again fell into silence for a while after that. I didn't know what I should do at that point. I was troubled with something hazy hanging over my heart. If I were to take stock of things--and, if this man wasn't mistaking me for someone else, then I knew of a girl named ‘Mitsurugi’ and had completely forgotten about her. The question was, who was she, what relationship did I have with her, and how did I end up forgetting her?

Was it because of the accident? The doctor said I had hit my head hard, so was it an after effect of that?

I was absent mindedly lost in my thoughts,

“Are you still going to repeat it?”

The man muttered a few inexplicable words.

“... Good grief, it's so difficult to anticipate or deduce. It would be fine if you would just act obediently -- but you're still going to repeat it? Just like the disciples of the witch?”

“Hey, what do you mean by the witch?”

I asked, and thereupon, the man seemed to have realized that he had let a part of his thoughts slip out of his mouth. For the first time, something resembling emotion appeared on the man's face, and he clicked his tongue in disgust.

“A long time ago—there was said to have been a university for witches.”

“...Huh?”

“There, the disciples of the witch would be made to do the same thing over and over again —a recurring theme of my professor when I was a university student. I was told this persistently when I was a student. I guess he wanted to tell me to get back to the basics.”

He spoke that much as if he had accomplished his responsibility to explain, then the man turned his sharp jaw up to the heavens.

“At any rate, I just wanted to see the face of the one that took care of that.”

Saying that, he extinguished the cigarette in a black leather ash disposer, and opened the door of the black limousine. After he climbed in, he looked back at me once more.

“I'm glad you’ve forgotten everything. You saved me a lot of trouble.”

“…What do you mean by trouble?”

In response, the man gave one cold look at me,

“If you’re unfortunate enough to remember something – call me immediately.”

Thereafter, he once again reverted to a low, mechanical tone, bereft of any emotion.

“Next time, I will come to erase it.”

I had forgotten something.

Or rather, I had forgotten someone.

Could it be that I had lost part of my memories since the accident? No, the doctors didn't say anything like that. I woke up in the hospital room that day, and next to me was Krishna-san, and even that bastard Sako was there, then I found out that Akane Nanamori had died, and that Karasu-san had died – and after that, what happened?

After the man had left, I closed my eyes with my finger stuck in my head, as I desperately traced back into my memories.

It felt... As if I had screamed in the hospital room. That's right, I remember seeing something and trembling with fear, and then I screamed. The shrill voice from that time still clung to the back of my ears. I shouted at someone, “You monster”. At the same time, a tremendous pitch-black feeling of regret seeped deeply into my chest.

But that was as far as it went. I have no memory of what happened after that. I couldn’t recall who it was that I had called a ‘monster’. They had vanished from my memory as if they had been sealed away.

I suddenly got scared and started running.

I jumped onto my bicycle, which I had parked in the bike park, and hurried back to my apartment.

The Houdate apartment building was about a 20-minute bike ride away from my university--my crib in Tokyo that Karasu-san had introduced to me: a cheap 10 square meter apartment with an attached loft. I opened the lock and tumbled inside, and focused my eyes on every corner of the apartment.

Sunlight poured into the apartment through the half open curtains, and dust faintly glittered in the light. Familiar clothes, luggage, and bags were carelessly thrown about in the living room. The same state they were in when I left in the morning. I looked around the entire apartment, and I noticed that this apartment had a loft. For some reason, I hesitated to go up there, but after gulping once, I placed one foot on the ladder. I climbed up slowly, step by step, and the moment I looked inside, something glittered faintly in the corner of my memory. However, it disappeared before it could take shape, as if it sunk away somewhere.

The loft was cramped, with a low ceiling and a wooden floor of about 5 sqm.

Of course, nobody was there.

Strangely enough, there was nothing there.

...Why, did I not store my luggage here?

...Why, was this space alone so empty?

And right now, why was I—

Crying this much?

These tears that overflowed from both my eyes without stopping, who were they for?

In the end, my yearend holidays passed by without returning to my parents’ home, and I spent them just doing my part time job.

My father and sister kept nagging me to ‘Come back home’, but I felt that if I returned home, something precious that was on the verge of disappearing from my memories would be lost forever, so I stubbornly stayed in Tokyo.

When I was hospitalized, my elder sister was the only one who came running, 『You little… there are limits to paid holidays you know, and it takes a high level of confidence to take them so don’t keep worrying me!』She was shouting at me about that, but I was honestly happy. However, I thought she would stay for a while, but perhaps because she saw Krishna-san close by, she became relieved, 『Sorry for always causing you trouble』as she bowed her head, 『Well, see you Nagi. I have very few paid holidays left. See you on New Year’s.』She ended up leaving with those words. Well…that’s how things went, and she must have thought that I would head back home for the new year as a matter of course. On New Year’s Eve, when I called them to tell them that I wouldn’t be coming back after all, my father and sister grappled for the receiver of the black rotary telephone to chaotically shout at me. But my elder sister, perhaps sensing that my voice had a heavy, cold emotion behind it—suddenly asked.

『…Hey. Are you okay?”』

I fell silent, and my sister also fell silent for a while.

『….Umm…Nee-chan, I…』

When I finally began to open up,

『No, it’s fine.』I was simply told.

『You don’t have to say it. You’ve always been a wuss and a crybaby, but when your switch gets turned on, you become impossibly reckless. At any rate, you went too far, and things became complicated, right?』

『……..』

『I mean, I'll only say this once so you'd better remember it, Nagi. If you think it's seriously dangerous, call me. Call me right away. Without hesitation. Even if it’s dawn or midnight, I’ll come running straight away.』

I felt a prick at the back of my nose.

『But I only have one day of paid vacation left, so.』

『….Alright. Thanks, sis.』

That was all I managed to reply with. My sister was still on the other end of the line, she said something to pacify my father, and the call went dead. My sister must have sensed that something serious was going on. I had a vague feeling, that if I didn’t do that something now, that it would end up changing shape into something that could not be undone. Even just putting it into words would be enough for it to shift and become something else, then I wouldn’t be able to follow it anymore. I was just thankful that she was able to understand my urgent thoughts.

Yes, I had, indeed, forgotten someone. It felt as if that accident wouldn’t be over until I remembered them properly. The bandages had been taken off, and my right elbow which was in bad shape had healed quite a bit, but a stinging pain would still come at times. I couldn’t help but feel that the pain was Karasu-san being angry at me. In her case, she wouldn’t yell at me, but she would instead smile and place her hand on my shoulder, and say something like, “What are you doing? Get yourself together”.

Whenever my elbow ached at my part time job, when I was alone in my apartment, when I was wandering around town, those were the times I felt Karasu-san’s marked presence.

I, myself, wanted to get it together. But how could I tell anyone about these vague signs of lacking memory? Of course, I talked to Krishna-san about my situation in as much detail as I could and asked her. However, the baby-faced occult website manager simply said, “It's because you've been in an accident recently”, and she scolded me, “You have to go back home and show your folks that you're safe.”

Krishna-san seemed busy during this period. It seemed she had decided to continue to graduate school after graduating. I hadn’t seen her at university much recently. The top page of the largest occult website in Japan had changed to ‘Under construction’. The message board where everyone excitedly talked together about ghosts, and the pages dedicated to investigating paranormal phenomena of the past were no more.

At times, I would catch sight of ‘Ikaigabuchi’ members on occult threads of a certain large message board, but compared to ‘Ikaigabuchi’, the posts there were a little ill-mannered, and they almost never went into deep thought. I guessed that everyone would eventually end up nostalgic about how cozy ‘Ikaigabuchi’ was. Gradually, I began to see less and less posts on the Internet from people who seemed to know each other.

Then one day-- my neighboring room, room 101, suddenly became vacant.

Some contractors suddenly came and carried away the large collection of Krishna-san’s creepy things. After that, I peeped inside a little when the interior designers entered: the wallpaper had already been reupholstered and disinfected, and the talismans and the shimenawa had disappeared. I had my doubts about whether the negative energy left behind by all those relics would disappear by doing that, but I suddenly thought to myself then.

All the memories I had slowly accumulated in the span of the past year: exciting memories, memories that were terrifying yet nostalgic, they were slowly being swept away by the wind. I felt like someone was saying to me: “They’ll come back to you naturally.”

My heart didn't clear, and a month passed, and then two— it was March, when the plums blossom.

It was the time of year when freshmen filled with hope would soon be entering university in large numbers. I took a peep at an internet occult forum I hadn't looked at in a while, and found that post.

『I found a haunted mansion.』

That was the title of the ghost story. The contents were a record of the exploration of an abandoned house. 『It was a two-story Japanese style house that has been empty for a long time.』『Nevertheless, laughter can be heard late at night.』『Someone was peeping through a tear in the shoji on the second floor.』『Something like a metallic sound would ring out at times.』I laid down in my room and continue to read until late at night, when I suddenly had a flashback.

Come to think of it, in the farewell drinking party for ‘Ikaigabuchi’, wasn’t something like a ‘metallic sound’ mentioned in someone's ghost story? That's right, someone -- or rather, a woman - was peeping through the shoji on the second floor when that story was told. I intently continued to follow the letters as the strange congruent nature of the two stories clawed at the back of my head. It seemed it was an abandoned house where no one had lived for a long time, and luggage was strewn everywhere as if they had run off in the night. In the back of the house was a Buddhist family Chapel, and a child was said to be there. I didn't know how authentic it was, but it seemed that you shouldn't look at the child, or so it said.

The latter half was a little different, but wasn’t this the ‘Overlapping house’ that came up as a topic at that time. Based on researching locations on an old map, it was a house built in a place where six ‘spiritual paths’ overlapped.

I sat up before I realized.

A terrible, damp sweat welled down my back, down my sides.

I read through it once more, but the location wasn't mentioned anywhere. However, back then Suu-san and the others…. that’s right, they said something about a ruined stationery store at the back of City Hall.

My throat stung with thirst, and I gulped once. My heart throbbed violently like it was about to break.

More so than fear, it was as if I alone ended up finding the key to an unopened treasure chest -- and I had a hunch that something precious was inside the treasure box that I needed to take back.

“—Say, don’t you want to go and take a look?”

I swung back in surprise, feeling as if someone had suddenly whispered into my ear.

However, there was nobody in the room. I had been alone in the room since the beginning. All I could hear was the faint sound of cars on the main road outside.

Without pause, I shoved my phone in my jumper pocket. Then I suddenly came up with the idea to take a pocket light out from my luggage. I checked to see if it worked, pocketing it as well, and flew out of my apartment.

Even though spring was approaching, it was still quite cold and dark outside. And it was almost three o'clock in the morning, when the darkness would be at its deepest.

In the cold air, I sped my bike towards that house.