“Maybe we should’ve gotten changed before coming after all,” Toriko said as we were heading down the footpath. I was in agreement with her on that; we were not dressed for walking around outdoors today. My outfit wasn’t so bad, but Toriko was wearing a frilly skirt that left her legs exposed.
“Why did you come in that outfit to begin with?”
“I mean, I figured we had to come here before the sun set.”
“Why?”
“It’d be scary if the sun set here, right?”
When she said that, it occurred to me—I hadn’t spent a night in the Otherside yet.
“When night comes, what happens?”
“Dunno.”
Her saying that so easily took the wind out of my sails.
“You’ve been here ten times now, haven’t you? Was it in the middle of the day every time?”
“Because I was told not to come at night.”
“By who?”
“A friend.”
“What happened to them?”
“They’re gone now.”
Toriko answered my questions in few words, without turning around. Had they come together? Why was that person gone now?
Was it Satsuki-san?
It made me wonder, but I was hesitant to ask again. I could see a stiffness in Toriko’s back as she walked in front of me, and I got the feeling she didn’t want to talk about it.
We trudged down the path in silence. A footpath—without someone coming and going, this sort of path wouldn’t have come to exist in the first place. If people stopped walking this way, it would be covered by grass in no time. That was assuming my common sense applied here in the Otherside, though.
The sky was blue, Toriko had no shadow, and the wind blowing through the grass was chilly.
I was alone with a person I didn’t know, setting foot into the unknown.
A woman in fluttering clothes, walking through a field of dry grass. I had a feeling I’d seen an image like that in a commercial before.
...What was I even doing? Where was this?
Watching Toriko walk on without turning back, I started to feel a little bit lonely. “Hey. We had only met once, so what was it that made you think you could trust me?”
Toriko responded without looking back. “Hmm. Well, you didn’t report me to the police, for one.”
“Huh?”
“About the gun. I was sure the cops were going to turn up. Why didn’t you report me?”
Don’t ask me why.
“I didn’t want to get involved.”
When I answered honestly, Toriko skillfully turned around while still walking and pointed a finger in my direction.
“That. That’s what I thought I could trust about you.”
“How so? I may not be the one who should be telling you this, but I don’t think that’s a quality you should be looking for in a friend.”
“But it’s perfect for an accomplice, you know?”
“...”
I remembered something that I had read somewhere. The words of a criminal who’d been to prison. When an amateur criminal was stuck in the same room as a professional criminal, the professional would ask them all sorts of questions, and then when they were released, they’d use the info to shake them down.
Was I being taken for an easy mark because I hadn’t gone to the police?
“Did you know? They say that being accomplices is the closest kind of relationship in the world,” Toriko said, still pointing at me, a smug look on her face.
“I don’t know. Oh, and don’t point at me.”
“Oh! Sorry.” Toriko quickly withdrew her finger. “Was I bothering you?”
When she sounded so uneasy asking that, I was at a loss for how to reply. Something like, Don’t say that now.
“Well, it’s fine, but...”
“Thanks.” Toriko nodded in apparent relief, then spun back to face forward again.
What was that response for just now? I hadn’t agreed to being her accomplice.
While I was struggling to find a response, Toriko moved right on to the next topic. “Oh, right. Now that I think of it, what kind of places was that Kunekune monster supposed to appear in?”
“Whaaa, you’re asking that now? We’re heading for the spot where you met me now, aren’t we?”
“Well, you know, I was just thinking that you’d probably know what sort of places it lives in, Sorawo.”
“I don’t know if it lives in them, but, hmm...”
I recalled the details of the internet horror story that I reread after returning from the Otherside last time. There were a number of famous encounters with the Kunekune, but the thing they all had in common was...
“...The countryside, maybe? I say that because a lot of the stories involve someone who’s visiting the countryside from the city encountering it.”
“There’s a lot of countryside. Could you be more specific?”
“Sandy beaches, or rice paddies.”
“Hmm. What even is that thing anyway?”
“I don’t know. Wait, shouldn’t that have been the first thing you wondered about?”
“You’re a specialist, aren’t you, Sorawo?”
“No, I’m not.”
“Can you budge on that a bit?”
Don’t be unreasonable. It wasn’t like I was particularly knowledgeable about it, either.
“Hmm... Before I learned about the Otherside, I had thought the Kunekune was a variant on a snake horror story. The name is kind of snaky, and it appears in the rice paddy, which is spot on. In Japan, snakes are a sort of harvest god, right? In some of the stories of the Kunekune, it was connected with scarecrows, which was super suspicious. You see, the kaka in kakashi, or scarecrow, means snake in Japanese. It comes from the kaga in yamakagashi, which is a type of snake. Though, now that we’ve actually met it, the Kunekune wasn’t snaky at all, huh. Come to think of it, there was another famous internet horror story set in the countryside: Hasshaku-sama. It’s about being attacked by a 240 centimeter tall woman wearing a white dress. Just from the name, which means eight feet, you can already see it’s pretty long, huh. It shares being white with the Kunekune, too, so I’m thinking that maybe it’s also a snake god. Maybe the same person created both...”
I rambled on about whatever came into my head for a while, then snapped back to my senses.
What was I doing? I was clearly talking too much. While I was thinking I’d probably weirded her out, Toriko suddenly came to a stop.
“...Sorawo.”
“S-Sorry.”
When she spoke in a low voice, I reflexively apologized.
“No, not ‘sorry,’ look...”
Toriko pointed up ahead of us.
“Uwah!”
When I looked where she was pointing, I let out an unintended cry of surprise.
About five meters ahead, I could see a human-like figure lying across the path. It was blocked by the grass, so it hadn’t caught our attention until we got close.
Even though we were close to it, it didn’t stir.
Cautiously, I gauged the situation. It looked like it was a man in a white dress shirt. Dead, perhaps? The arms were thrust into the air, bent, and reaching for his face. His skin was blanched. In contrast to his arms, his legs were thrown haphazardly outside the path. His face was hidden by the grass so I couldn’t see it.
“...He’s not going to attack us if we get close, right?”
I was joking a little to try and dispel the tension, but I immediately regretted it, as I imagined a vivid mental image of the desiccated corpse sitting up.
Toriko slowly walked forward.
“Wh-What are you going to do?”
“Investigate, what else?”
Cautiously, she approached the corpse. It didn’t spring into motion. Though I wondered just what kind of grotesque sight awaited, I peeked into the grass to see his face.
“...What is this?” I said in monotone.
I couldn’t make out the man’s face at all. On top of the fact he was covering his face with both hands, there were these twisted, see-through protuberances that seemed to have grown out through the gaps between his fingers with an incredible vigor. The things were a translucent white, long, and had rounded tips. In some places they also branched out, reaching further. They looked both like delicate glasswork and like fungal filaments. They shook each time the wind blew through the grass, and they sparkled.
“Never seen this before,” Toriko mumbled to herself in bewilderment.
They were so mysterious that I found myself staring intently at them despite how gross it all was. Though the translucent protuberances were like mushrooms growing out of the corpse, it seemed they hadn’t grown from the surface of the face, but had erupted through the skin from inside the head. The teeth peering through his blanched lips were translucent, and meshed together like some sort of complicated puzzle. If the bones of his skull were disfigured and then they grew at random, would it end up with a result like this?
That was when I came to a frightening realization and shuddered. The man’s hands weren’t only covering his face. They were poking deep into his eye sockets.
“Hm? What’s this stench?” Toriko twitched her nose. Then, a little later, I detected it. There was an intense smell of raw fish, wafting in from somewhere...
We both came to a total stop and looked at one another, gulping.
The wind had stopped. It was so silent you could hear the buzz of tinnitus in your ears.
When I timidly raised my face, there was a white wavering thing that was rising up in front of us. It was like a madly twisting humanoid figure on the other side of the heat haze produced by the road in summer.
The Kunekune... had come.