We stood by the waterside, looking down into the lake in silence for some time.
“Jusui...?” I wondered aloud.
“Was that French?” Toriko gave me an inquisitive look.
“Huh?” I said, confused.
Bewildered, Toriko tried again. “Did you just say ‘Je suis’?”
“I said ‘jusui’... It’s written with the characters for ‘enter’ and ‘water.’”
“Ohh... Err, I assume it means to enter the water and drown?”
“More or less. It means to commit suicide by drowning yourself.”
As I explained this, I started to question the likelihood of it. Would those two really have thrown themselves in there? Not just the human, but the dog too?
“It doesn’t make sense, huh? No matter how strong the bond of trust between them was.”
Toriko nodded in agreement. “If Todate-san went in the water, I think Hana would have stopped her.”
There was no way a human and dog cast themselves in there together; there must have been some external factor. Were they being controlled? Were they hallucinating? Or was there no water here yet at the time when they came?
Was it because they encountered the master of the Mayoiga?
The last time I came, I was horrified by the thing that arrived in the parking area. It made me think of the concept of the master of the Mayoiga.
There was no such element in the original story. But wasn’t it something that anyone would imagine? Whether the empty house in the mountains was inhabited by a god, or a monster, it would be some being beyond human understanding. If a human entered that house and ran into the owner, what would become of them? Wouldn’t that fear cross most people’s minds?
If I thought of the Mayoiga standing on the hill not as an object of folklore from the Tono Monogatari, but as a structure created by the Otherside, then it might be a phenomenon that included those unspoken fears. It had been a fear of mine, at least, and Todate—and perhaps even Hana—might have feared it deep down too. I was pretty sure that any person squatting in a house worried that its owner might return. I was less confident about how dogs felt, though.
Well, what if they met it, then? What if the master returned and found them?
I dunno. Once they encountered it, that was it. Ghost stories could work that way. What they saw, and how scary it was, all of that could be left to the imagination. In fact, imagining the things left unsaid could actually be scarier. Todate and Hana went missing. The end.
But we had come along after; Toriko and I were peering into what came after the ghost story. If we stepped into the realm of the untold, the untellable, and encountered them, what would become of us? As that fear crossed my mind—
“Ah.” I lost my balance, and clung to Toriko.
“Sorawo?”
“Sorry, give me a moment...” I apologized, barely articulate, but my mind wouldn’t stop.
It was the same sensation as when we thought about what was on the other side of the Otherside. Whenever we thought about them, it was like there was a switch that got flipped in our brains, redirecting the flow of our thoughts. There was some sort of circuit like that in there. Since becoming aware of it, I’d learned to cut off those suspicious thoughts and get back to normal, but...what had caused it this time? Thinking about the master of the Mayoiga? Was that it? Did that basically mean that my sense of the concept of a master of the Mayoiga was practically the same as my sense of them? If so, it all fit!
There were a lot of ghost stories that ended with the encounter. If you look it in the eyes it’s over, if you talk to it it’s over, if you hear it it’s over, if you touch it it’s over, if you look at its face it’s over, if you understand it it’s over... “It’s over” could mean vanishing, death, madness; essentially your removal from the human world. In other words, it was a transit from the real world to the spirit world. As for why it was that way, once you learned about the other side, there was no choice but to go there.
“Sorawo, what’s up? Are you okay?!”
Toriko shook me, breaking the flow of my thoughts out of this unfamiliar circuit. I’d apparently kept my grip on her arm, murmuring to myself the whole time. Resisting the thoughts that were trying to drag me down into the darkness, I raised my head. As I looked at Toriko’s face, I felt my sanity slowly return.
“This is, y’know... Contact.”
I managed to put that much into words, and the conversation I had with Kozakura the first time we met came back to me.
“Hynek divided close encounters with flying saucers into the first, second, and third kind.”
“The first kind are simple sightings, the second kind are incursions, and the third are encounters with a living creature.”
“The fourth kind refers to cases in which the encounter has an effect on the body.”
“As the degree of contact deepens, people are entranced by the other world. They get addicted, and some never return...”
Well, what was beyond that?
Was there something beyond contact of the fourth kind?
What happened with contact of the fifth kind?
“Kamikoshi-kun, you’re probably at the forefront of first contact.”
Tsuji had said that to me. The woman at DS Research who called herself a magician.
I see. So that’s what this was. That was where we were right now.
“I see now! I get it!” I clung tightly to Toriko, desperately, to convey what I’d learned. The words rushed out of my mouth unbidden. “Todate-san and Hana made contact! With them! That’s why they couldn’t be here anymore! They had to go to the other side!”
The moment I saw a look of understanding dawn on Toriko’s face as she looked down at me, there was a sound from the direction of the lake. It was an unsettling voice, like the crying of an infant, or the yowls of a cat in heat.
We both turned in surprise. The light attached to Toriko’s AK raked across the surface of the water. There was something, indistinct in shape, floating there.
It looked to be about the size of a sleeping bag. I reflectively associated it with a full body bag. But the mass moved, quickly dispelling that idea. It was covered in hair, glistening in the water. This was no sleeping bag, and no body bag either. It was alive. It moved like a jumping fish, flopping around on the surface of the lake.
“Sorawo, what’s that?!” Toriko took aim with her AK, keeping the creature in the circle of light. Thanks to that, I was able to get a good look at it despite its continued intense motion.
My overall impression was of a huge caterpillar, bigger than a human. Firm hairs covered its entire body, so hard that they might have been closer to a porcupine’s quills. As it twisted around, I caught a glimpse of its head. There was a gaping hole in it, with three short stalks growing out around it. The stalks were positioned in a triangle, with glassy spheres attached to the end of them.
“It’s a Shishinoke,” I said hesitantly.
The monster was like a massive slug covered in needles. Those three stalks were likely eyes. I knew this creature well from internet horror stories. The first person to tell their story encountered it while camping with their dog. If this thing was following the text of a horror story, then had Hana’s presence brought it here?