Mitsuhiro had said yes, but both his body and mind were utterly exhausted. The pain had subsided for now, but he knew it’d flare up again soon. Nothing could have drained his motivation more. But if he slacked off now, his father—and the hole—would be furious with him. He didn’t want to think about that hole taking Sae and Miyoko away. He had no choice but to get up. He grabbed his phone from the table, put it in his jacket pocket, and tried to stand up, holding his bag with his right arm.
The wound on his left hand began to throb.
Hang in there.
He heard his father’s voice. But it didn’t sound like his father smiling in front of him.
Hang in there.
Mitsuhiro looked at the bag he was holding. He finally realized that the voice he had heard so many times before was coming from inside of it.
“What are you doing? You have to get to work, don’t you?”
Mitsuhiro didn’t leave. The pain in his left hand was still there, but strangely, it didn’t bother him.
He placed the bag on the table, opened it, and peered inside. It was too dark to see clearly with only the ambient light, so he reached inside with his right hand and took out everything he could touch, laying it all out on the table.
There was a tablet he had left in the bag, forgetting to charge it. His wallet. His business card case. A plastic bottle with about a third of its contents remaining. A spare key to his home.
A worn Rubik’s Cube came out. He couldn’t remember when he had put it in there. He stared at it intently.
There was a phone with the power turned off. It belonged to Mole Unit-01, who was there when he first took Yoshikazu Hara to the basement. He couldn’t remember why he had left it in his bag or why he had taken it in the first place.
“What are you wasting time in here for? The hole will be angry. So will your dad.”
But Mitsuhiro didn’t care. He was more concerned about the wad of newspaper at the bottom of his bag. He took it out and placed it on the table. The bag should have been empty now.
But when he looked inside, it wasn’t. He saw something small and shiny, half-wrapped in white cloth.
Mitsuhiro reached for it.
His father’s face contorted, and his voice was more terrifying than it had ever been as he shouted, “Don’t touch that!”
But Mitsuhiro could hardly hear him. The shout reached his ears just as his fingers touched the item in the bag. It was a white handkerchief, a memento from his father, with the initials “KM” embroidered on it. Mitsuhiro could feel not only the softness of the cloth but also the hardness of what was wrapped inside. It was something sharp, reminiscent of a small fruit knife. He felt around with his thumb over the handkerchief and detected a complex pattern carved into it.
No, it wasn’t a pattern. It was part of an engraved name. A piece of his father’s name.
“Mitsuhiro!”
He realized that his father was yelling furiously in front of him.
Mitsuhiro looked at him, this person he thought was his father. No, the person he’d been made to believe was his father. His whole body was charred beyond recognition. He was covered in boiling blood and the smell of burning flesh. Mitsuhiro, overcome with shock, thrust what he was holding toward the eerie shadow.
There was nothing there.
There was only a chair with its back pressed tightly against the edge of the table. This was the one chair the three-person family usually never sat on. They usually put their things on it.
Mitsuhiro took a deep breath and placed what he was holding in his right hand on top of his left.
The cut on his left hand hardly hurt anymore. When he unfolded the handkerchief, the name “Kosuke Matsunaga” in stone crossed it diagonally, forming a handle. The thinly cracked part extended out like the blade of a fruit knife, just like he had assumed it was at first. But it was a piece of the gravestone, an even smaller piece of it. All those hammer blows must’ve put a crack or two into it after all.
He had forgotten about the handkerchief in his agitation when the stone hit Araki’s leg. That cloth, plus the small stone, had been wrapped in newspaper this whole time…or maybe they resisted being thrown away by Mitsuhiro.
“…Dad?” he said, stroking the stone with the fingertips of his right hand.
Air rushed into his lungs. Suddenly, his body relaxed, his chest muscles loosened up, and he felt his lungs expand. His legs had grown numb from sitting in the same position for so long.
Mitsuhiro, unable to make sense of this, took several deep breaths, waiting for the blood to return to his legs. All the while, he continued to smell that terrible odor. The smell of dry ash filled the whole place.
When his legs were useful again, Mitsuhiro stood up and turned on the lights. He still held the piece of stone in his left hand, along with the handkerchief. Now that it was bright, he noticed a lot more than just the smell. There was a thin layer of white powder on the floor and table.
Even from the dining room, he could hear a crunching sound as the stains on the hallway walls gradually spread. He thought it sounded like a person’s skin cracking under high heat, and then he wondered how his mind came up with that analogy in the first place.
Miyoko was right. Something strange was going on. Not just in this condo but with himself as well.
Mitsuhiro looked at the things on the table and picked up the dead phone with his right hand. He connected it to the charger and waited patiently for it to turn on.
Before long, it came back to life. It wasn’t locked, so Mitsuhiro launched Twitter from the list of apps on the screen. The page for Mole Unit-01 appeared. He searched for the messages he had exchanged with the guy, but for some reason, they had been deleted. No, wait, he had deleted them himself for some reason.