“It feels safe,” I said, turning to look at Toriko.
But as I did, I thought I heard something, and we both reflexively looked down the stairs.
“There was a noise just now...” I said.
“Yeah.” Toriko nodded.
I listened closely. There was no doubt about it. In the silence of the Otherside, I immediately picked up noises that hadn’t been there before.
The distinct sound of footsteps.
I heard the hard soles of leather shoes striking concrete at a steady pace. They were coming towards us.
Someone was coming up the stairs.
Whoever they were, they must have heard us talking, and yet they approached without a word. That wasn’t a good sign...actually, hearing footsteps on the Otherside already felt wrong.
“Who’s there?” Toriko demanded loudly, pulling out her gun.
There was no response. The footsteps kept climbing at the same pace. I got up from the stairs and pulled out my gun too. Then, suddenly, we heard them downstairs. Voices. A group of men and women, chatting as they climbed the stairs. But there was still only one set of footsteps.
“...-ssan, where do you...”
“...I think. That place is...”
“...no, no. Ha ha ha...”
“...but you know, that sort of thing...”
“...even so, I’m not sure...”
The voices were getting closer, but I still couldn’t hear what they were talking about. It was like someone had extracted just the vibe of a peaceful, everyday conversation. If I were to offer an analogy, it was like a number of people had left the office for lunch break, and were discussing where they should go.
We backed away, guns still in hand. The voices and footsteps grew closer, and we could tell they were on the floor below us now. As I focused my consciousness into my right eye, so I was ready to shoot at any time, the owner of the footsteps finally appeared from the stairs.
First, we saw a bizarrely shaped mass. It was longer vertically than a human head, and transparent like glass, letting us see whatever was on the other side of it. It had this lumpy and swollen shape, like a mass of mushrooms that had been allowed to continue growing well past when it was time to harvest them.
There was a human body underneath that mass. It wore a white shirt and gray pants, with brown leather shoes on its feet. It had clumps of dried mud on it in various places, as though it had been lying on the ground. The hands protruding from the sleeves of its shirt were misshapen, having become transparent masses like its head. I couldn’t even tell where the fingers were supposed to be.
As it crested the stairs and stood on the seventh floor, it looked at us—not that I knew for sure that it had the sense of sight. It just felt like we were being seen.
Toriko gulped.
“Sorawo, we may’ve seen this guy before.”
“Huh?! Where?”
“When we went Kunekune hunting, there was a guy collapsed on the ground—no?”
Her mention of it brought the memory back. She was right! A long time ago, when Toriko invited me to come to the Otherside and we had entered the marshlands to hunt Kunekunes, we’d seen a dead guy who looked like this. His head had been invaded by transparent fungi, and he’d thrust his fingers into his own eyes...
The man had clearly been dead, but here he was in front of us now. The transformation of his head had progressed far beyond where it was the last time we’d seen him. Perhaps his hands had been affected by it too.
The indistinct voices I’d been hearing suddenly cut out at some point. Were the flashes of light I was seeing inside his head the result of light that shone into it being refracted inside?
What’s he going to do? Will he attack us? Or will this one try to talk to us too...?
While I kept him in my right field of vision, considering whether it might be best to act first and open fire, the guy abruptly turned to the side. He then advanced two or three steps, before turning his back to us.
Then he floated into the air.
“Huh?” I blurted out.
For no reason that I could understand, he stepped on the air, and continued climbing. Almost as if there were stairs there that we couldn’t see.
Toriko’s mouth hung open. As we watched, he turned around at an invisible landing, and continued climbing further. The soles of his leather shoes continued treading on the air above us. I thought his head would hit the ceiling, but he continued through it without resistance, then disappeared up to the floors above.
Where was he going...? We hurriedly raced to the step ladder. Despite our haste in climbing it, there was no longer any sign of the man. We still heard that sound which mimicked conversation from the floors above, though, and it was gradually getting further and further away.
When we went back to the roof, that sound had vanished too. The man was nowhere to be seen. There was a little dried mud that had fallen in front of the elevator, and I thought that it might have been left by the man, but I couldn’t be sure.
What was that all about? The two of us discussed it. Maybe someone who worked in this building wandered into the Otherside, then got taken out by a Kunekune. They could have been trying to return to the surface world.
It had nothing to do with us, though, and there was no way we could check, so it was all speculation.
“What was with those air stairs?” asked Toriko.
“Maybe when that person wandered in, there were still stairs in the building,” I suggested. “If they’re still moving according to old memories, they might have climbed stairs only they could perceive... I mean, you know how Otherside structures can change when you aren’t looking at them. It was that way with the Mayoiga too.”
“Yikes. If this building goes and resets itself after all the hard work we’re putting in, I’m gonna cry.”
“That, or it could be like the revolving observation platform, where a slight shift in the other side can change the details.”
“You think...he passed through another phase, and returned to his original world?”
“Who can say...?”
I don’t think he got out into the surface world. If a guy like that showed up, there would have been a whole kerfuffle about it. But then where did he go...?
It seemed Toriko was getting a little melancholic, imagining a scenario where someone who had been lost returned from the Otherside, but I had severe doubts whether returning to the world he came from in that state would be anything to be happy about.