Their meeting place was the bicycle parking lot at Nozomi Supermarket in Kibogayama Town.
“Goodness! I’m so sorry for gettin’ here a little late…,” said Kurebayashi.
Even though she was wearing a neck cooler, Kurebayashi was drenched in sweat. Her T-shirt had “Dance Club Life” printed on it—perhaps it was an old shirt from one of her children’s afterschool clubs.
“It’s hot out, so why don’t we find somewhere we can sit inside and get a bite? Would America be all right with ya?”
Yoshiki wondered why all middle-aged women seemed to have such loud voices. It wasn’t just that they were loud, either—it was that they appeared to push out a lot of air with each word. As if being pushed along by such a force, Yoshiki followed Kurebayashi.
A few minutes’ walk from Nozomi was a restaurant named “America.” It looked like a casual diner, but it was (probably) not a chain, and despite its moniker, neither the menu nor its interior had much of an American vibe.
Still, there was a supermarket and a drugstore clustered in this area of Kibogayama, meaning there was a high chance of running into someone you knew if you weren’t careful. Even after being seated in a spacious booth, Yoshiki couldn’t bring himself to remove his baseball cap.
“Oh my, my, my! They have a new jumbo parfait! Order whatever you like, Tsujinaka. Do ya like sweets?”
“Um…,” Yoshiki began, cutting through Kurebayashi’s cheerful, lively voice as if taking a scalpel to it.
This caused Kurebayashi, who had been looking at the menu, to close her mouth. Her boisterous mood suddenly disappeared, almost as if the whole thing had been a farce.
“So what happened? Can ya tell me?” she asked him.
Yoshiki wondered where he should even start and worried that, no matter how much he explained, he might not be able to convey the crucial parts of his story. He had spent a long time in bed the previous night thinking about these things.
He talked about his childhood friend, about how that friend went missing in the off-limits area on Nisayama at the end of January, and about everything that had happened since his friend had returned.
Kurebayashi listened in silence to everything Yoshiki had to say. She occasionally nodded to let him know she was engaged, but she did not interrupt him.
When Yoshiki finally finished, she smiled.
“Thank you,” she said. “Yer really tryin’, huh?”
At some point, Yoshiki had hung his head deeply. He could feel his nose running, so he hurriedly wiped it with the back of his hand.
“Why…do ya say that?” he asked.
He realized he must have been looking at Kurebayashi with such desperation.
“Yer really tryin’, but…” With her gaze still fixed on Yoshiki, Kurebayashi slowly but clearly shook her head. “Ya shouldn’t be feelin’ like ya deserve to be punished. Ya gotta keep it together.”
Kurebayashi’s firmer tone made Yoshiki catch his breath.
“Beatin’ yerself up ’bout all this only serves to ease the guilt you put on yerself. The dead don’t care a lick. Fact of the matter is, we’re the ones who’re desperately clingin’ on to the dead.”
“We.” I’m pretty sure she said “we” just now.
Unsure if she realized her little slip of the tongue, Yoshiki suddenly raised his head, and Kurebayashi laughed out loud.
“Sorry,” she told him. “Just forget about all that! Brought the mood down more than I needed to there.”
Kurebayashi continued to laugh, and Yoshiki couldn’t bring himself to ask her what she meant when she said “we”—especially after she shifted the tone of her voice, lowering it to at least half volume.
“I’ll get to the point,” she began. “Have you noticed things’ve started gettin’ strange around the town an’ village? There’s some sorta distortion that’s formed all throughout this area, and there’s been an uptick in suspicious incidents, too. Things that shouldn’t be are showin’ up. The town and village are slowly startin’ to get all screwy.”
Kurebayashi paused for a moment and then trained her eyes on Yoshiki.
“I think…whatever ‘it’ is that’s become yer friend is havin’ an effect on things.”
“‘It’…?”
“It feels like…a huge mass of something… Like Hell itself… As soon as I felt its presence disappear from the mountains, the distortion in this area suddenly grew larger. This is just a guess, but it might’ve been keepin’ the distortion contained in the mountains all that time. That’s how huge that thing is.”
The way she spoke was so abstract, but strangely enough, it didn’t bother Yoshiki.
I know what you’re talking about. Whether I want to or not, I know.
A huge mass of something. Hell itself. He could feel a similar sensation lingering on his eyelids, nose, and skin.
“There’s that unnatural death that happened recently in Kubitachi to consider as well,” said Kurebayashi. “There’s somethin’ terribly eerie about that, too… I feel like it’s related.”
Yeah, it’s related. No doubt about that.
“To be honest, it’s all so scary it makes me wanna leave this town. But my mother-in-law and daughter are here. My oldest—my son—left this place long ago, though. And my husband…”
It seemed like she had more to say, but she stopped there. Then Yoshiki felt confident enough to speak.
“Um… So, before, you said ‘we’…,” he ventured.
“…My late husband. He came back once, a long time ago.”
Kurebayashi smiled as she stared at her hands on the table. Her eyes were calm, as if she were recalling something very dear from her past. Yet deep within those eyes stirred a cold and brooding vortex of emotions.
“But it didn’t work out. In the end, he left my son with a scar on his body that will never heal for the rest of his life. It didn’t matter what he was. I just wanted to be with him again.”
Even though the restaurant had the air conditioning on, Yoshiki could feel the sticky heat of the blazing hot sun on his cheeks. It made him think of the sign at Yamahisa that read “Frusty-cold ice cream avail.”
Yoshiki realized that when Hikaru’s ominous “insides” had been oozing down half his face, Yoshiki had felt the same way Kurebayashi had—it didn’t matter what Hikaru was. Yoshiki just wanted to be with him again.
“Some part of you must know it, too. That you can’t keep bein’ with yer friend like this,” Kurebayashi said.
Yeah. I know, but…what exactly am I supposed to do about it…?
“Before, you said that I’ll ‘mix,’ but what exactly did you mean by that?” Yoshiki asked.
“While yer still alive, yer insides will get closer to whatever that thing is. It’s like ya become a part of it, and you’ll never be able to be separated. And who knows what will happen then?” she said. “Also, it might attract things from the other side toward ya more easily.”
Based on the expression on Kurebayashi’s face as she pressed her fingers to her temples and furrowed her brow, she didn’t appear to be exaggerating just to scare Yoshiki.
“Mix.”
“Get closer to whatever that thing is.”
“Become a part of it.”
Each time he repeated her words in his mind, Yoshiki’s left arm—the one that had been connected to Hikaru—tensed.
“I’m sorry,” Kurebayashi told him. “I don’t want ya endin’ up like me. And…I figured ya oughtta know so ya can move forward.”
Raindrops began to patter against the window. The sound grew louder until it turned into a downpour that seemed like it could wash the town away. Then a server arrived with the giant parfait Kurebayashi had ordered.