Case 06: Rororo (7)

"I've been listening to the conversation about mid-way through, and I'm wondering if you're really that stupid."

"....What?"

"It's troublesome, so I'll only say it once."

But in my dark world, where I had shut my eyes tightly--

That voice sounded somewhat kind.

"You being you, means your guardian spirit won't abandon you so easily."

"No...but... I'd already chanted that thing that was like an incantation."

"That, was a lie."

"...A lie?"

"Everything's in reverse. That kind of sutra does not exist. 'Agyousansagyougo' is just a series of phonetic characters – without doubt, they were used as taboo words to destabilize your mind.”

Hearing those words spoken in indifference, I slowly managed to open my tear-stained eyes.

Beyond the hazy darkness, her figure emerged.

Yoishi Mitsurugi… was there. With her long black hair, and doll-like beauty. Dressed in the dark uniform of the attached high school, she sat on the edge of a table, her pale face gazing quietly at me.

“Y…Yoishii…”

My voice was already a snotty, teary mess.

“B-by lie, do you mean…? Is my guardian spirit still there? I didn’t commit a dishonor?”

Yoishi silently nodded in response.

“What do you mean by phonetic characters? What was it all about?”

Yoishi looked at me somewhat annoyed, and said:

“You still don’t get it? 'Agyousan-sagyougo' simply means the third syllable of agyou and the fifth syllable of sagyou.”*

…Huh?

The third syllable of ‘agyou’, and the fifth syllable of ‘sagyou’…Huh?

“…Lies(uso)?”

I turned my gaze back towards Sako as I held my trembling knees, he was merely concerned with stifling his laughter.

“It’s what they call a nocebo effect.”

Yoishi stood up, and walked up to me.

“For example, being made to believe that a non-existent fire is burning your hand, resulting in a burn scar, or if you're blindfolded and given a light pain at the tip of your feet while being made to hear the sound of dripping water, you'll be made to think you're bleeding and you'll really die. It's a psychological phenomenon where the body manifests what the mind believes -- an elaborately constructed 'taboo word'."

"Just as I expected."

Sako's voice was mixed in with laughter as he spoke:

"I was so close."

I was completely befuddled. I mean, how much of it all was a lie? I understood that the story about the incantation making my guardian spirit leaving me was a lie, but was the ominous presence that hung over the reading room just my imagination? No, more so than that, what about the book that kills you if you read it: 'Rororo'? And what about the guy who killed himself, Kouhei Niijima? Was it all, just a part of Sako's lie?

I asked in a trembling voice to Yoishi, who was staring at her surroundings -- and then her eyes began to shine, as if she had just noticed it for the first time.

"There's a lot of them. So many."

That somewhat happy look on her face -- it made me shudder in horror.

"...H-hey, Yoishi. I don't get it. Explain it to me properly."

I took out the notebook I had stuffed in my back pocket and held it out. I opened the notebook Kouhei Niijima had left behind in front of Yoishi.

"It was just like you said. The guy who wrote that memo -- Kouhei Niijima, he was dead. He was just...interested in this girl here in the library. He was just in love. Why did he end up killing himself? Isn't the cause this 'Rororo' book this asshole's been talking about? Isn't that why there are so many suicides in this school?"

Taking in the torrent of questions with her dark eyes, Yoishi opened the pages of Kouhei Niijima's notebook that I held out to her, starting from the beginning. Tucked inside were the two notes that I had first found torn up. While Yoishi read them with the light from her phone, I scowled at Sako's white face as much as humanly possible. It’s scary that there are ghosts here, but it's even scarier that this guy was trying to bring them all down on me. I mean, is this guy a sociopath? Or a living demon? I glared at his white face with such thoughts, but Sako merely wore a thin smile on his white face and waited patiently for Yoishi to finish reading the note.

"...Hmmm."

Eventually, Yoishi muttered out loud, so I quickly asked her:

"Look, I need an explanation that makes sense. Did you get it? Why did Kouhei Niijima die? And what the hell was he trying to tell me? That 'Rororo' thing he muttered about, that's the 'Rororo' book, right?"

Yoishi stared at Sako. Sako shrugged his shoulders slightly, and after that, she stared at me. Finally, she spoke in a voice that sounded like she was making fun of me.

"You really are so naive."

"...What the hell are you saying?"

"That's why you were conveniently used as a catalyst."

"T-this bastard!"

--Yeah, I know already. I know it so well it makes me sick to my stomach. And I'm sorry for my stupidity. Even a fool like me finally understood that this bastard Sako was trying to bring out the countless things here by using me as bait. However, the problem was the original reason for the sticky air in the reading room, which was making it hard to breath even for someone like me, who couldn't see ghosts. Why does this school have such a closed-off air about it? How did a guy like Kouhei Niijima end up committing suicide? Was it all because of the book called 'Rororo'? And like Sako said, was there really some sort of crazy psychopath who wrote that book?

When I asked, Yoishi silently shook her head.

"That's not it."

"...What?"

"What you don't seem to realize is that this person was, after all, the second one to use you."

--Huh?

"Well, that's true." Sako gave a complacent smile once again.

"I said it, didn't I? Being possessed once or twice, It's all the same."

...Huh? Hey! What the hell are these two maniacs talking about? Once or twice is the same? I don't get any of it. Or should I say... I'd always assumed Yoishi was my ally, but was that really the case? Isn't she herself, like Sako, a walker in the depths of darkness? Wasn't she the type of person who never read the situation and would expose everything, no matter how cruel the truth might be? In the midst of this darkness being surrounded by the presence of countless creepy presences, isn't it just that the number of demons that I thought was only one has now grown to two? Ah -- that's what it looks like. The glow in Yoishi's dark eyes is growing. From now on, she's going to spout some decisive words. And those words will undoubtedly crush the foundation of the reality I believe in. They'll turn everything upside down.

"Y-Yoishi, wai--"

Wait, wait a second.

I was about to say -- but...

Yoishi's large eyes widened, and with an expression of ecstasy, and one without mercy, she declared it out loud:

"You've already been possessed for a long time."

"...Ugh."

I groaned out loud. Yoishi's words caused an intense surge of vomit to rise from the pit of my stomach. Now I became aware of a heaviness in my body that I hadn't noticed for a long time.

"It's... It's really him then? Kouhei Niijima?"

"No."

With a bewitching light in her eyes, Yoishi shook her head.

"A far, far more wicked ghost than him."

The reading room, which was already dimly lit, seemed to grow even darker.

The ground shook violently. My footing suddenly became unsteady. I desperately put strength into my lower body to cling to the world of the living. I grit my teeth, trying not to get caught up in the rapidly intensifying atmosphere of the world beyond.

"Just now, you said that the deceased Kouhei Niijima was in love."

"....W-what about that?"

"What kind of person was she?"

"What kind -- It's written right there, isn't it? She was tall, intellectual, shoulder-length hair, a bookworm --"

"Where does it say that?"

"..."

"This notebook has no description of any woman."

I felt a rush of goosebumps at her words. I recalled the uncontrollable presence inside me that had once thrust me down into the depths of terror.

"What...are you saying...?"

"The depiction of the girl that took shape inside your mind unnoticed -- that is the real form of 'Rororo'."

All of a sudden--

口口口口口口口口口口口口......

I definitely heard those voices. A series of countless, muffled human voices. And, I already knew what they were saying. It was – ‘Rororo’. Each and every one of them were muttering in unison with their mouths: ‘Rorororororororororororo’, like a prayer to Buddha*.

Someone – somewhere, was laughing.

It was the thing clinging to the old woman in the clock tower, the one that took the name of Miiko and lived with me, the one that stared at me through the frosted glass in the club building, and the one who jumped off the school building and disappeared -- Those countless fuzzy fragments of memory melted at that moment, and were reconstructed into the coffee shop on that rainy day, with the tall girl quietly reading a book.

Now, in this microcosm of the library, it was just me and the slender girl. In a space surrounded by bookshelves, the girl was sitting a little further away, simply staring at me. Her shoulder-length hair swayed slightly. Her white face, devoid of any expression. And her eyes, which had seemed so intelligent, looked like mere holes. She continued to stare at me with those eyes that were like dark, bottomless wells.

Those eyes were nothing but darkness.

An entrance to a world that, once peeked into, could never be left again. And the second I felt as if I saw something beyond the darkness ---

“Hey, are you feeling scared right now?"

Yoishi asked me.

“Is this scary?”

Yoishi asked with her pale, shapely face drawn so close to mine that our noses were almost touching.

The expression on her face - her eyes – she was in pure ecstasy. I'm sure this is how excited Schliemann must have felt when he finally found the ruins of Troy, which had never left the realm of legend.

With that monstrous look on her face, as if she was about to eat me --- I finally became convinced.

I can't do it. I can't stay with her. To be near the girl named Yoishi Mitsurugi, is to stand face to face against the world beyond.

However, Yoishi looked around and shouted with glee.

“It’s all going crazy! Everything in this school is going perfectly, completely, 100% crazy!”

With eyes wide open and an ecstatic look on her face, she declared to no one in particular.

“J-just stop it already!”

I shouted and tried to push her away, when –

Something began to fall down.

The universe collapses, the bookshelves collapse, and a terrific amounts of books collapse. Works of Stendhal, Shakespeare, Ozaki Kōyō and Maeterlinck, dance in the air – Les Miserables, The Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, Iliad and The Gold-Bug, all dance. The mushy dogma in countless other books I'd never read was raining down incessantly like a stream of internal organs. The ceiling collapsed, giving way to an open gray sky, but even that sky ruptured. Countless books, a rain of words, poured down in a torrent aimed right at me. However, the polished, well-crafted words of those countless authors were somehow distorted. As soon as I noticed that the polished words had lost their original luster, had turned reddish-black and reeked of decay, I felt a surge of gastric juices well up inside my stomach. In this world where I couldn’t tell night from day, nor which planet I was on, I perceived the truth of the things that kept falling to and rebounding from the ground in succession. They weren’t books. They weren’t words. They were countless fish. They were frogs, nails, and pieces of meat. They were old coins, and birds with whitish feathers. All of them were squashed by the impact of the fall, staining the ground in red. Corpses. Corpses. Corpses. Corpses. Corpses. Corpses – Only corpses that had finished their lives rained down to fill the entire horizon. Decomposing into blood, flesh, and bodily fluids, all signs of life had disappeared. One after another, they continued to explode at my feet, as if to declare that living things are nothing but sacks of blood. That graphic and thunderous sound continued to ring out.

In that nightmarish world on the verge of collapse – someone’s mere laughter continued to echo.

Did that laughter belong to the person who had set up ‘Rororo’ in this room? Was it Yoishi? I didn’t know anymore. In this warped world, countless voices kept reverberating. I heard someone’s scream from somewhere, and the moment I realized it was my voice –

"Shall we leave?”

A sharp voice rang out, and my arm was grabbed by Sako’s cold hand.

At the same time, I started running like crazy. I had no idea where I was running to. At any rate, I must have gone back the way I came, running out of reading room number one onto the floor and down the corridor. But I'd like to think that the thing I saw when I ran out of the reading room number one was a hallucination caused by my clouded consciousness. In Yoishi’s hands, running right behind me, was an old black book. And, as if trying to snatch back that book, a long white arm stretched out from the darkness.