“What? Why?!”
Mitsuhiro grabbed his head with both hands and let out a pitiful groan. There was no way this should be happening. Nothing this strange should ever be happening.
—Think!
He desperately ordered himself, pressing his back against the wall at the bottom of that dark hole, hoping against hope that something would come to mind from somewhere in his confused head. But nothing did. There was no answer to be found. The realization that nothing could explain what was happening filled him with an overwhelming sense of anxiety, and he began to writhe in agony.
The man who had been Yoshikazu Hara just a moment ago—the man who had to be Yoshikazu Hara—was now lying on his back in the light of the flashlight, head hanging upside down. He was bathed in intensely bright light, but he didn’t blink, and nothing came out of his half-open mouth. The wrinkles in his clothes, stiffened as he bent backward, did not move at all. There was no sign that he was breathing.
“Why did this happen…?”
Mitsuhiro stamped his feet like a child. Why was this man no longer Yoshikazu Hara? He was overcome with a feeling of helplessness he had never experienced before, unable to believe his own eyes, his own mind. Tears began to spill down his cheeks. He felt like he had been transported back to his childhood and locked in a dark room with no way out. It brought him to the verge of madness.
But after a period of sobbing, Mitsuhiro finally came up with a theory from some corner of his mind that sort of made sense.
—This guy was already here.
That’s right. He was at the bottom of the hole from the beginning. He was there before Mitsuhiro came with Yoshikazu Hara.
He must have just been mistaken when he concluded that Yoshikazu Hara had fallen into the hole. When he lost his footing in the darkness where the flashlight couldn’t reach, Mitsuhiro had only assumed he had fallen into the hole.
While Mitsuhiro hurriedly climbed down, Yoshikazu Hara got frightened and ran away. He’d abandoned his duty here—no, he forgot his duty, because of his dementia. And then he just ran off, no clue what was going on. Mitsuhiro didn’t even register in his mind any longer.
And while Yoshikazu Hara was disappearing into the darkness where Mitsuhiro couldn’t see him, Mitsuhiro’s gaze had landed on this man. Thanks to that, it looked like Hara and this stranger had switched places, as if by magic.
That was the only reasonable explanation. At least, he couldn’t think of anything else at the moment. What else could it be? Was he going crazy? Did he bring some random person here, thinking he was Yoshikazu Hara, and then push him into this hole and make him completely limp like this? That was ridiculous. There was no way that could be true. There’s no way that could have happened. This guy was here before they ever showed up. Mitsuhiro wanted to shout it out. But there was no need.
Way to figure it out, Mitsuhiro. His father was right next to him. This guy’s been covered in ashes for a long time now. Look. They’re piling up on his body.
Mitsuhiro wiped away his tears, moved away from the wall, and looked closely at the figure. At some point, his hair and face had been covered with a thin layer of white powder. That familiar powder, Mitsuhiro realized, was now covering the wide-open eyes that had frightened him so much. His motionless chest, stomach, arms, and legs, as well as the ground around him, were covered with ash that had fallen from seemingly nowhere. He looked like a large, silent statue.
Relief welled up from the bottom of his heart at the sight. Tears formed in his eyes again.
This isn’t anything you need to take the heat for. Mitsuhiro kept nodding in the direction of his father. You were just doing your job. An important job. Better hurry, now. Take what he has and clean it up.
Mitsuhiro wondered for a moment what he was meant to take, but soon he realized. A phone had fallen out of the man’s breast pocket and was lying next to his white-ash-covered face. Strangely, there was no ash on the phone, so Mitsuhiro gingerly approached it and picked it up.
The screen lit up. It wasn’t protected by a passcode. Smartphones hadn’t been around for very long—just a few years—so the idea of putting a passcode on it wasn’t as common back then. Mitsuhiro saw it as a must for company equipment due to confidentiality requirements, but he also felt that putting a passcode on your personal phone so no one else could use it was all but admitting you wanted to hide something.
Thanks to that, Mitsuhiro had no problem accessing the man’s phone. From the call history, he found out that the man had made previous contact with not only Mitsuhiro himself but also Okuyama from Helping Hands.
He opened the Twitter app, checking its post history. It was logged in, of course, to the Mole Unit-01 account. He tried to delete the tweets attacking the East Wing, along with the private messages he exchanged with him, but he couldn’t. He wondered why, but soon realized it was because there was no reception this deep down.
He’d have to go back to the surface to clean this up. Resolving to do just that, he thrust the man’s phone into his pants pocket. Suddenly, his eyes were drawn to the man’s limp hands. They both had gloves on, and like the phone, there was no ash on them.
Mitsuhiro bent down, took the gloves off his hands, and put them in the other pocket of his pants. Now he’d be able to return with all the equipment from the office. The man had probably borrowed them from the storage room anyway, so there was no harm in returning them on his behalf.
Mitsuhiro didn’t look at the man on the floor again as he staggered back to the stepladder, body aching, and carefully climbed up one step at a time. He emerged up top on all fours, heaving a languid sigh. He even thought about lying down and sleeping there, but he was worried about Sae, who was still at home. His father was watching over her, but considering her recent health scare, he couldn’t stay here all night.
Mitsuhiro stood up and turned around, about to force himself to pull the stepladder back up, when he was suddenly blinded. A bright light froze him in place. Someone was standing on the other side of the hole, shining a large flashlight at him. The glare prevented him from seeing the person’s face. He thought for a moment that Yoshikazu Hara had come back, and he almost smiled.
But the next moment, the flashlight was lowered, and a different man appeared.
It was Sota Araki from Tamai Construction. He stared suspiciously at Mitsuhiro on the other side of the hole, then noticed someone at the bottom and shone the light there. His eyes widened.
“Oh, that’s not Yoshikazu Hara, either,” Mitsuhiro said, obvious disappointment in his tone.
“What?” Araki replied in surprise. His voice seemed to echo loudly, maybe because of the hole between them.
“I brought Yoshikazu Hara in here, but then he went crazy on me out of nowhere. He hit me with his helmet and ran away.”
Araki shone the flashlight on Mitsuhiro, walking around the hole to get closer to him.
“So who’s that in the hole?”
“I don’t know,” Mitsuhiro said, in the tone of one trying to insist he wasn’t lying.
“You don’t know…? Didn’t you bring him here?”
Araki stopped and shone his flashlight on the man lying at the bottom.
“He was here from the beginning.”
“The beginning?”
“After Yoshikazu Hara got away from me, I noticed that person in the hole. He was already there when the two of us went inside.”
Araki stretched out one side of his lips in a sneer, then the other, as if thinking about something.
“The bone ash that came out of the seal is returning to the hole.”
“What?” Mitsuhiro had no idea what he was talking about.
“This might be someone who was cursed while working here.”
“Cursed?”
“Yes. He left the site, but then he got called back to the hole. Just the other day, the previous head of Tamai told me to be careful in case something like this happens.”
Araki stroked his hair back and sighed softly, as if expecting to be scolded by this former president later. Mitsuhiro couldn’t understand any of this, but the important thing was that whoever was in the hole had been there from the beginning. Araki didn’t seem to question that, which was a huge relief.
“Well, I’m the supervisor of this site, so I’ll handle matters from here. You can go ahead and return home, Mr. Matsunaga.”