I thought I remembered Clarice preparing a meal for her mother as well, but—
But apparently, she didn’t feel like having stew for lunch. The stew and the note were untouched on the table, and she was chewing away on a simple salad made of chopped vegetables.
“You must be Elaina?”
She urged me to have a seat. Though I thanked her and sat down, I was still anxious about why she knew my name. But before I could ask, she said, “Yesterday, Clarice talked to me about you through the door. She said you were staying here, starting last night,” as she shoved more salad into her mouth.
Even as she ate her food, her eyes still had no life in them. But at least she seemed capable of holding a decent conversation.
I was slightly relieved.
“Did Clarice say anything about me?” she asked me suddenly.
I immediately shook my head. “No.”
If anything, she seemed to want to avoid talking about you.
When I answered, she just nodded. “Oh.”
“Is there something the matter with you, physically?”
Illness is the first reason I can think of to explain why someone would avoid human contact and stay confined in their room.
But she shook her head slightly.
“My body is the picture of health. It’s not as if I can’t go outside because I’m injured in some way.”
“……”
“But when it comes to my mental instability—well, if you’ve been here since yesterday, then you must know.”
You would say that about yourself ?
It certainly was true that hearing the voice and the noises through the wall had been enough to make me wonder if Clarice was keeping some horrible monster as a pet, but—
But now that I had met her face-to-face, she seemed like a totally ordinary woman.
“In addition to my mental instability, all the townspeople, including Clarice, think I’m a broken person, so I get incredibly strange looks no matter what I do or say. That’s why I can’t leave the house.”
She told me all this in a detached tone. Before I could ask her about the meaning behind her words, she tilted her head and asked, “You’ve been out into the city already, right?”
“…Yes, I have. I just got back.”
“How was it?”
“……”
I was silent, and she looked up at me.
“It was a creepy place, wasn’t it? Night or day, the people and Clarice, it’s all so creepy.”
She told me that at night, the dead roamed the streets, and the people all shut their windows up tight.
During the day, all the people spent all day doing nothing but praising Clarice. Anyone who opposed her was mercilessly eliminated.
There had been a prevailing sense of indescribable discomfort about all the sights I had seen in the city, and if I was going to express it clearly in words, sure enough—
“It was a little creepy.”
I would say it’s a creepy city.
It was as if the whole place existed only for Clarice’s sake.
“It wasn’t always like this, you know—at least, about a hundred years ago, way in the past, there were still plenty of people who had varying opinions about the dead and about Clarice. There were a number of voices speaking against Clarice and the Crescent Moon Company.”
“……?”
A number of voices in the distant past?
“But with time, starting with the most sensible people, they all left town, one after another. The people who remained lost the courage and willpower to run, and now they’re all puppets whose only reason for living is to cling to Clarice. I can’t even tell anymore which people are the dead, the ones who wander around town during the day or the ones that wander around at night. That girl has controlled our days and our nights for such a long, long time.”
“……?”
Hang on, what exactly are you saying here?
“Um…? From the way you said that, it sounds like Clarice has been alive for a very long time, but…?”
What are you saying?
I cocked my head to convey my question, and she cocked her head right back, as if to say, “What are you saying?”
“…Oh? You don’t know?”
“Know what?”
“Clarice has been living here for three hundred years.”
“……”
So that means, in other words, she must be…
“She’s immortal?”
Which must mean that you, her mother, are immortal, too?
“No, that’s not it.”
According to her, strictly speaking, Clarice was not immortal. She was a normal human who could get injured and who did age.
If that’s true, how has she been living for three hundred years?
The answer Clarice’s mother gave to this puzzling riddle of a problem was plain and simple.
She said—
“Have you ever heard the word reincarnation?”
She told me that over the past three hundred years, Clarice had died and been reborn countless times.