Case 10: The Invisible Friend (1)

A guy in my high school who was really into movies said that; I wonder how he’s doing nowadays.

The ‘Yoishi Mitsurugi Rehabilitation Plan’ had gotten off to a hopeless start, but I was instantly comforted when I remembered this line and that film buff's boundless, radiating smile. I reassured myself, thinking I’d only just started. Having said that, I had realized something: The only thing besides the occult that brough a faint glimmer to Yoishi Mitsurugi’s eyes, was movies.

She’d sometimes wander off to the rental store, borrow a few films and watched them alone on her computer. What types of movies did she watch? …Well, it was obvious. She wouldn’t be watching anything like a teary-eyed drama about human relationships or a thrilling action adventure that made you scream with excitement. One day, she was watching a splatter horror film with intense concentration that had more blood 'splattering', rather than 'gushing', I asked her if she’d ever been moved emotionally by anything, and she looked at me with a curious expression.

“Animals… you said you had no interest in them. Then, look, what about kid stuff? Wouldn’t it be refreshing to be a child again?”

“The world of children is much crueler.”

Her words suddenly made me bitter as they reminded me of the incident from the other day, but I refused to back down.

“But even you might have kids one day.”

“I will not - I will never do anything to leave my genes in this world.”

Yoishi asserted flat out, without losing her expression.

I’m still a long way from seeing her smile, I thought, but when I heard that, I also had a deep feeling of relief somehow.

That was in a way, a declaration of Yoishi’s chastity, a declaration of her virginity. I think I was somewhat relieved to know she was a virgin. No, it wasn’t because I was into virgins or anything like that, it was just a sense of relief that the cause of her twisted nature was not a result of sexual abuse suffered at the hands of a close relative, like what might have been for Ayana Takamura, who disappeared in the underground place of the Koumei institute.

It's been about half a year since I met her. But Yoishi was yet to even speak of her family. It was actually difficult to ask her, since she was emitting a hundred-meter aura in every cardinal direction suggesting that if you were to ask about her family, she’d put a curse on you with all her knowledge. That’s why I didn’t ask, and I felt I would probably never have the chance to.

“But – saying that.”

It was also true that it would be a problem if I don’t ask some day.

After all, someone else's daughter was living -- or rather, parasitizing - in the loft of my apartment. Whenever I’d see Krishna-san, she’d persistently ask: “When are you going to resolve the situation?”, and moreover, this was not a normal situation.

I mean, was it my fault?

When I think about that day again, I still get angry.

In the first place, when Yoishi came to my apartment, it was bad enough that Karasu-san happened to be there. Karasu-san was from the old guard and a regular visitor to the occult site ‘Ikaigabuchi’. She was a beautiful woman whose age was unknown, and her actual profession was being a fortune teller, but she had a propensity to be too easy going or too mischievous, to think everything is fine as long as it's funny and to take no account of the trouble she caused to those around her.

She babbled something incomprehensible like:『There, there, it’s fine, isn’t it? It’s better to live together first than to get married out of the blue.』wearing a grin on her face; At that time, I was pinned down with my legs tied. During that period, Yoishi finished shifting her things in the blink of an eye. Even though I say she shifted her things, she took out from her bag what seemed to be the only possession she had brought along: her laptop, and threw all my stuff down from the loft, but that was the start of her life as a parasite in my home.

But they say, ‘There’s no use crying over spilled milk’, and it’s not in my nature to grumble about things that have already happened. Yes, even if it’s a misty hope behind the fog, the journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step. It's all about action, determination.

Having said that, I was painstakingly working to improve Yoishi’s eating habits, and trying to change her life cycle to a daytime one every day. I made her clean up after herself, made her habitualize taking a bath, and hoped that one day – I could fill in the blank pieces of Yoishi Mitsurugi that existed inside me. I hoped that a day might come... when she would finally smile.

And thus, it was on a Sunday in December.

“Yoishi! Lunch is ready!”

It was in the afternoon that day, I had cooked Chinese style fried rice with lettuce and pork for two people and called out to Yoishi in the loft, but there was no reply, nor did she come down.

“Heeeey, Yoishi!”

I called out once more, but there was no reply; I clicked my tongue and climbed up the ladder.

There, I found her lying in her permanently laid out futon wearing her school uniform, she had headphones on and some sort of video was playing on her computer. It was a little unusual to see her excited with eyes wide open. I crawled up to the loft and stood next to her, wondering if she had rented a hit film, when I realized…

The LCD panel of her computer wasn’t playing a movie. It looked like some kind of amateur home video. It appeared to be an event at some kindergarten. It showed smiling children marching in a line in an auditorium-like building, with their parents around them, creating a very congenial atmosphere.

“What is this--? A video of someone you know?”

I asked, but Yoishi silently put her index finger to her lips.

“It starts now.”

“…Huh?”

Yoishi unplugged the wire from the headphone jack, and the audio started playing through the computer speakers. I had no choice but to sit down next to Yoishi in my apron and peered into the screen with my face up close.

Mixed in with the noisy cheers of the crowd was the frolicking voices of the kindergarten children. The slight camera shakes and frequent panning of the camera in search of a subject truly did resemble a home video. The cameraman’s focus seemed to be the children in their yellow uniforms for most of the time – but at certain points, the camera was panned to the left as if they had suddenly noticed something. The camera wanders through the parents as if looking for something, or rather, someone. But after doing so for a while, the camera abruptly returns to the march of the school children once more.

“Why did it turn to the left just now?”

Yoishi operated the computer in silence and rewound the footage again.

The footage starts to play once more. The cheerful kindergartners. The smiling parents looking at the camera. And the camera suddenly pans to the left once again. It lingers for a while in search of a subject, then returns to focus on the kids in the front again—

“Huh?”

I suddenly noticed something strange.

“Show it to me once more.”

Yoishi rewinds the video once again. The video pans left from the marching school kids. In the far back rows of the parents --Ah, I knew it. There was a kindergartner dressed in a yellow school uniform and a hat. It was too blurry and far away to determine if it was a boy or a girl… but, that child alone stood still in the corner of the parents' section, with their head down, looking like they were the only one not taking part in the fun event.

“Why is that child… not taking part in the march?”

As I uttered that, Yoishi rewound the video again and played it back once more. This time from the point the camera panned to the left. It showed the figure of the lone kindergartner amidst the parents, and that was when I finally felt a sense of unease. For some reason, a shiver ran down my spine.

“…P-play it once again, please.”

After a few more replays, I finally realized what that was.

More so than I saw earlier, no, the more I replayed it…. The more different that kindergartner’s body leaned. It seemed as if their body was turning towards us slowly. At the same time a shivering cold took over me, and I remembered.

It was something I had seen on the internet, a famous ghost story among occult enthusiasts.

It began when a university film club snuck into a train station late at night to film. They wanted footage of an empty station, but after they finished filming and checked the footage, they somehow found a woman on the platform with an umbrella on the next platform across the tracks. The student who was director among them seemed angry on why no one had seen her during filming, but as they replayed the footage, someone noticed.

Why was the woman there alone at the station after the last train had departed?

Moreover, each time the footage was replayed, wasn’t the woman turning her body towards the camera, little by little?

Everyone laughed in the beginning, thinking such a thing wasn’t possible, but after ten replays, everyone started to go quiet. The woman whose back was clearly turned away from the camera, had turned her body far back enough that her face was visible. With long black hair and head hung down, her movements which indicated she would soon look up and face the camera, made everyone tremble with fear, and the film was sealed and burnt in a temple. After that, it was said that the film crew members met with strange accidents and died – I didn’t know the details. I think there might have been some embellishments as well.

Suddenly recalling that story, I panicked and stopped the video.

“….Ooo, Oi, Yoishi…This, it can’t be…?”

Yoishi, who was close enough to catch my breath, spoke happily.

“It’s the real thing.”