On your side too, Ms. Toé added.
Too─so Miss Gaen was an expert yokai exterminator, the big boss of them all, on this side as well?
That was sort of comforting…being one of the few things this world and the other had in common─though it was hardly a feel-good moment when you analyzed Miss Gaen’s reasons for choosing such a path.
“It’s a question of how you face your other side,” Ms. Toé went on. “It might be your flip side, but you shouldn’t stand back to back with it─that’s what I think. How you see your own back.”
She began scrubbing my back even harder, with her bare hands. I didn’t know when, but at some point, she’d stopped using her towel.
A far cry from Tsukihi’s gentle touch, this was more like being scratched─hard. At this rate, I was going to end up as a scratchboard.
“Your own back? Unless you’ve got a real long neck, you’ll need a mirror,” I said.
“Right. Mirrors make you face yourself from various angles─that’s its function as a device, after all, and the Rainy Devil was my mirror.”
“But didn’t you get rid of it by giving it that name? You didn’t just face it, you defeated it…”
“While the Kanbarus took Suruga in, there’s no question that she has Gaen blood in her. She’ll end up facing herself just like my sister and I─maybe I did hope the paw would help. That left hand is just one part of the Rainy Devil, and it’ll simply vanish if there’s no use for it.”
“Now that you mention it, I forget when, but Oshino─Mèmè Oshino was wondering where the rest of the Rainy Devil was. Um, at least in my world, Kanbaru only inherited that left hand…”
“I scattered them all around. They’re safe as long as they’re not together, but it might be dangerous if someone collects them. It’s my avatar, you see.”
“What a casually scary remark.”
“Oh, no. I say that, but they’re mummified. It’s the corpse of an aberration, really─neither poison nor medicine, just a corpse. Don’t be too worried, but if you happen across them, could you dispose of them for me? The sins of the mother are visited upon the daughter, but they also say that kids grow with or without parents… Tell Suruga for me when the time seems right, will you? Tell her there’s no need to cherish it for life, that I really only wanted to tell her one thing─don’t turn out like me.”
“I could never. Not that. As a mother’s words to her daughter?”
“Listen to yourself, an eighteen-year-old boy preaching about motherhood? What exactly do you think you know about being a mother?” Ms. Toé teased me, and I had no reply─I’d never been a mother, I’d never be a mother, I even had a strained relationship with my mother.
“…”
“Keheheh, sorry. You’re right, it’s a heavy message to ask someone else to deliver. I take it back…but if Suruga ends up facing herself and seems stuck, do lend her a hand, will you?”
At this point, Ms. Toé was speaking purely about the other side─what a mysterious person. I was beginning to see why even someone like Miss Gaen chose her words carefully when (and only when) it came to her big sister.
Reaching past my head to grab the showerhead, Ms. Toé began rinsing my back─torture time must’ve come to an end.
My back had been going numb, but now it burned─the hot water stung. Was I bleeding?
“If you can’t be medicine, be poison. Otherwise you’re nothing but water,” Ms. Toé said over the noise the water was making. “That’s what I told her, raising her─I wonder how much of my point got through? Maybe I just thought I was speaking to her, but was actually trying to get through to myself. She saw me as her parent, and my sister saw me as her big sister, but looking back─I was just a crybaby and a devil.”
A weakling, she said. She sounded her usual self, so maybe it was just my impression, but was she whining?
“The best I could manage was to defeat that devil, while you, Araragi─protected your double. In which case, stick to your path. Darkness or light, that’s your partner for sure.”
“Partner?”
I looked behind me at that word.
Partner.
Find one, Black Hanekawa had told me─maybe it was sheer coincidence, but if Ms. Toé was using that word now, I had to ask what she meant.
I had to but didn’t get the chance.
Because when I looked, I found no one there. Just as the mirror had shown, I was alone in this room with a cypress bath.
Since when? Or was it from the beginning?
Toé Gaen was gone, leaving behind just her towel─the showerhead lying on the floor.
“…”
I quietly placed it back on its hook, shut off the running water, and picked up the towel.
Well, at least the towel proved that our conversation wasn’t just a fantasy I concocted once it became clear that Koyomi Araragi wasn’t going to establish comms via any cypress bath─an excuse to give to Ononoki, but hey, while we’re at it, I guess my smarting back was also proof?
It tingled and throbbed to the point that I honestly wondered if I was bleeding… Not to underscore my dialogue with Ms. Toé and needing a mirror to face my back, but I stood up to do just that. Then─
I gasped.
In the reflection I’d twisted my neck to see, my back wasn’t bleeding, but there were welts all across it as if I’d been sentenced to a lashing─and they formed words.
In proper, mirrored characters.
There in the looking glass, they were easy to make out.
“NAOETSUHIGH”
It seemed I had my next destination.