We already knew what was in here. But now that we were the ones entering it, it was really scary. I held the flashlight, and Toriko held her gun, as we proceeded down the corridor. The first room had a mannequin torso lying on the floor. In the light of the flashlight, it didn’t even look human-shaped, but it still gave off an ominous aura that made me want to run away immediately. Once we checked that there was no one in the room, we continued down the hall.
The second room had a urinal lying on its side. There had definitely been a murder in here. The feeling of an incident of violence hung in the air, even suggesting that the killer might well still be in the room. I couldn’t turn my back on this place until we had cleared the whole thing, down to every dark corner.
The third room had a vinyl curtain hanging from the ceiling, dividing the room into two. The once-transparent sheet was dark and dirty, making it look like someone was standing on the other side. When the curtain swayed, the person even seemed to move...
It really feels like they’re moving.
I perked up my ears, and I heard slight breathing, and the rustle of clothes. There was someone else here!
“Runa?” I called out.
Toriko’s gun was still lowered. We couldn’t pull the same kind of stunts we would on the Otherside here.
“Ahh... You finally made it,” came a muffled voice from the other side of the curtain.
“Tsuji-san?” I called out.
“You’re both late.”
I cautiously pulled back the curtain, and sure enough, there was Tsuji. Oddly, she wasn’t facing this way. It gave me flashbacks to my mujina encounter. I kept the flashlight focused on her.
“Are you really Tsuji-san? Turn and face us, please.”
“Uh... What?” Tsuji slowly turned...then raised her hand towards the light. “Whoa, you’re blinding me.”
I lowered the flashlight, relieved. Tsuji had a normal face.
“What’re you doing?” I asked.
“I woke up to find Urumi-kun walking away on unsteady feet, so I followed. And when I did, this is where she led me. I was scared here, all by myself, until you arrived.”
“You say that like you knew we would be coming,” Toriko said, mystified.
“Uhh, yeah. Because I called you.”
“You called us?” Toriko looked down at her left hand, then back at Tsuji. “That was you, Tsuji-san?”
“Yeah. It was a tulpa. So technically not me, but something peeled off of me.”
After saying all of this in a tone that suggested she wasn’t all there, Tsuji turned her back to us once again. Her eyes were on the stairs that were in this room. These concrete steps, which had suddenly been installed in the Cattle Barn, were the only route up to the second floor.
“Where is Runa? Upstairs?” I asked.
Tsuji slowly nodded. “She is, yes, but...there’s something abnormal about her.”
Something abnormal...?
“I felt threatened, so I put off going up there. I had a feeling it could get bad without some expert help.”
I followed her gaze to the top of the stairs. The second floor was pitch-dark. If Runa was in that darkness, then I could assume she wasn’t in any normal mental state...
As I thought about it, gazing upwards, the lights on the second floor went on like someone flipped a switch. A pure white light, like the sort that came from fluorescent lights, shone down the stairs. The change wasn’t like the power had suddenly come on, but more like our impression that the second floor was dark had been instantly removed.
“Did you match channels?” Tsuji said, seeming to have understood from the surprised looks on our faces. “Well, take a moment, and tell me what you think. I’ve never seen anything like it before.”
Tsuji was half smiling, but there was an undeniable tension underneath that smile.
There were lights on the second floor of the Cattle Barn, yes, but only LED lights that we had rigged up using power cables, like on the first floor. They weren’t the kind of lights that cast a thin, even light over whatever they shone on. Besides, this was way more light than they could provide.
So what is this light, then...?
Toriko and I nodded, then started up the stairs. My flashlight was meaningless at this point. I focused with my right eye, climbing one step at a time. Tsuji followed behind us.
When we poked our heads out onto the second floor, we looked around as if in a daze for some time.
It was huge. No, endless. It was a pure white space that seemed to stretch out to infinity. The floor and walls all shone white. Was there even a ceiling at all? There were no boundaries in the white space, so it started to feel like we were floating in it.
We climbed the remaining steps. The floor was solid under our feet, at the very least, but it didn’t feel like standing on wood or concrete.
Originally, the only things in the Cattle Barn were a single hallway connected to the stairs that went down to the lower level and a number of rooms with incomplete gates. That was all there should have been. Even if you knocked down all the walls, it wouldn’t have been this large.
Runa was there, in that space. She sat on the floor, messing with things that were scattered around near her. Like a child playing with toy blocks. We were close enough she could have noticed us, but she didn’t turn around.
“What do you make of it?” asked Tsuji, who had come up behind us. “This space... What do you think it is?”
I had no more of an idea than she did. The most I could venture was that maybe it was some type of interstitial space.
“Did you call Runa’s name?” I asked.
“Not yet,” answered Tsuji.
“Well, let’s start by trying that.”
I called out at the top of my lungs. “Runa! What’re you doing in a place like this?!”
Runa made no move to respond. My voice echoed until it was absorbed by the endless space around us.
Guess we’ve gotta go...
I stepped forward hesitantly. It was hard to judge distance in the vast whiteness, but I reached her in about ten steps.
“Hey, Runa. What’re you doing?”
I peered over her shoulder. What she was playing with...looked like a toy house to me. It wasn’t put together well enough to really call it a house, but a three-dimensional floor plan was about the only thing I could think that the scraps of metal and wood on the floor might represent. It wasn’t that far from my initial impression of toy blocks.
“There was a Buddhist altar here, you see,” Runa said all of a sudden. “This was dad’s room. And this was grandma’s. And this was my room. And mom’s bookshelf was here.” Runa went on as she added parts to the floor plan.