Right.
Mirrors reversed right and left, flipped front and back, turned everything inside out─it was probably the same no matter how you described it, but from my point of view, it was all very through a glass, darkly.
I thought this facing the mirror right in front of where I sat outside the tub as Ms. Toé washed my back─yeah, I had that realization because staring into the mirror was all I could do. A practical stranger was washing my back, even if I’d heard her name before, and I was nervous.
You see, I could place my palm against the mirror to high-five my reflected self, but upon closer inspection, there was a looking glass-deep gap between our hands.
We could never come into contact. The reflected me, on the mirror’s surface or not, existed on the other side of that glass─you might even say the mirror image was reflected on its reverse face.
Was the true essence of a mirror just its silver coating and the rest nothing more than a transparent sheet of glass? Was I looking at a mirror, a piece of glass, or myself? What is it that we see when we face a mirror?
Reflected light? Really?
Pondering these ideas wasn’t going to let me escape my predicament, but at least it helped me escape reality, which is to say ignore it, for the time being.
“You’ve got a nice, muscular back. That’s a young man for you.”
“Um, I have no idea what kind of back I have… Plus, the one simple trick behind my physique is that I was a vampire…”
“A vampire? Oh, okay, you did tell me about that just now. What a convenient fitness regimen. You wouldn’t believe how much work I put in to maintain this figure,” Ms. Toé said, scrubbing my back with her towel─it felt more like she was shaving my back than washing it.
Was she really using a towel? Wasn’t it a rough sponge?
What a world I’d gotten myself into─my little sister washing my face in the morning, my junior’s mom washing my back in the afternoon… Who was going to wash what part of me tonight? My instincts told me to be on the lookout for Oikura…
I needed to solve this before night fell.
To protect Sodachi Oikura!
From myself…
“Washing your back almost makes me feel like you’re my grandpa, but I guess the paw you wanted to talk about was a monkey’s.”
“U-Uh huh.”
Of course. That’s why I was submitting myself to this bizarre exercise─but in that case, there was another thing I wanted to ask: yes, I was letting her wash my back so I could hear more about the Monkey’s Paw, a vital item to us, but why was she so eager to wash it that it was what she got out of the bargain? If I were to believe her, it wasn’t because she enjoyed washing young men’s backs… I admit I’ve had my fun playing with the young, little, and tween girls that were Hachikuji, Shinobu, and Ononoki, but it was dawning on me that I too, legally speaking, would be classified as a minor.
“Right, I don’t want to sound out of line,” I said, “but from my perspective…speaking only based on my own values and about the world I came from, I’m not sure leaving Kanbaru the Monkey’s Paw was the best thing for her.”
In fact, that wasn’t limited to my world. Whatever happened─or didn’t happen─beforehand, the ill effects of the Monkey’s Paw had to be responsible for Kanbaru becoming the Rainy Devil here as well…
“Oh, it’s not like I had any clear intention in mind when I gifted it to her. I wasn’t trying to help her, nor was I trying to spite her─I think? The other me, too.”
“…”
A subtle reply. It was unclear whether the Ms. Toé with me now was alive or dead─but one thing was certain.
The mirror embedded in the Kanbarus’ bath wall, the mirror that had occasioned me to ponder its thickness, reflected me and only me.
Ms. Toé─wasn’t behind me.
It didn’t reflect her nude body. How to interpret the unexpected but clear fact facing me now.
Once, when I took a bath with my little sister, I was the one who didn’t appear in the mirror as we washed each other’s hair. That’s how I learned that my transformation into a vampire was progressing past a certain threshold… If Ms. Toé had no reflection either, did it mean she was a vampire?
No, I could rule that out. Vampires didn’t exist in this world─“here” was inside a mirror, and I needed to flip around my interpretation.
This was probably how her absence in what I saw as my original world, what this side saw as the other world, manifested itself─so then, was Toé Gaen dead in the other world but alive in this one?
Maybe she was a ghost who only existed in a mirror. I could imagine that sort of scary story, and if anything, the idea helped calm me down. It was a lot less stressful than my junior’s mom being here in the flesh, alive, and washing my back.
“The Monkey’s Paw, or rather its source the Rainy Devil, is actually my avatar, as you already know─it was my flip side, a flip side attacking myself. That’s the kind of family we Gaens have been for generations…experts at creating monsters.”
“Creating─monsters.”
“You know that my sorry excuse for a sister worked with some of her friends to create a corpse aberration, right? It was a variation on this theme─she’d deny it, but in the end, she’s the true inheritor of the gifts of our lineage. Even if the path she chose, for whatever reason, is to rid the world of monsters.”