Mima felt her knees go weak. The only living things in the building were her, Rumi, and that man. If the sound wasn’t coming from her or Rumi, that only left one answer: him.
Mima forced strength back into her legs and kept crawling ahead, hand by hand and foot by foot. She moved as carefully as she could to keep from stirring up any noise that would give her location away.
But no matter how quietly she moved, she couldn’t silence the rustling of her clothes. In the pitch-black stillness, the sound of fabric brushing against fabric seemed to echo through the void.
Suddenly, that giant cockroach sound intensified. There was no doubt: it was closing in.
He had found her.
From somewhere behind came a voice that sounded like it was coughing up blood.
“Mi… ma…”
If she had had any doubts as to who it was, they were now gone. It was him. It was that skinless monstrosity crawling toward her through the dark.
Urged forward by that voice, Mima kept moving.
Out of nowhere, Mima felt her sense of balance leave her. Even though she was still crawling on her hands and knees, her head began to spin.
She tried to figure out why that might be, when she realized the answer. It was the floor. At some point, the floor had begun to slope. She hadn’t been able to see it in the darkness and the incline had upset her sense of balance.
Careful not to let herself become too dizzy, she proceeded up the slope. Eventually, she reached the top, and the floor became level again.
Still not sure where she was, Mima kept on going, propelled forward by the desperate need to get as far away from that man as she could.
At some point, she had lost her shoes, and just below the hem of her jumper dress, her kneecaps were covered in scrapes.
None of that stopped her. She kept moving forward, because moving forward was her only hope for survival.
For a moment, Mima’s heart froze between beats.
She’d felt something clammy and sticky touching her calf. The thing wrapped around her leg and began to squeeze.
Mima knew what it was at once. It was that man’s bloodied hand.
Mima kicked with her leg to try to free herself from his grasp.
The man’s voice pierced into her eardrums. “Mi… Mima…” As he spoke, his voice gurgled like a drainpipe. “You can make my desires come true. Please. Make my… make my…”
Mima kicked into the void with both legs and hit the man harder than she’d expected.
The man grunted in pain.
While he was stunned, Mima got to her feet and tried to walk forward a few more paces, but her foot met with air where the floor should have been. She gasped and recovered her balance. There was no floor
ahead.
Quickly, she realized why—or at least, she came up with a good guess.
The slope had led up to a stage, and this was the stage’s edge.
Mima momentarily considered leaping down. It might not be that long a fall. But Mima stopped any such thought.
Jumping down would be her last resort. Until then, she would try to fight the man on the stage.
Just as she resolved herself to fight, the man’s hands came down on her shoulders.
Rumi called out, “Yuji-san, over here! Is this the main breaker?”
Up on the wall, in a storage space filled with mannequin heads, lay a large breaker panel. Yuji came over and opened the green metal door. Bringing the lighter’s flame up close, he examined the dusty switches within. Toward the bottom right, one switch stood out as noticeably larger than the others.
“This must be it,” Yuji said, flicking the switch to the ON position.
Light flooded the building.
IV
Without warning, everything became too bright to see. Mima reflexively closed her eyes. With her vision adjusted to the total darkness, the light felt as painfully bright as if she’d stared directly into the sun.
Slowly, she cracked open her eyelids and saw a mass of red flesh in front of her. It was him. That skinless man. To her horror, his knife was embedded deep in his throat.
He opened his eyes and stared at her.
Mima shook his hands from her shoulders and tried to escape, but there was nowhere for her to go.
They were standing on a long, narrow stage with a slope at its far end. Including the ramp, the stage extended a few dozen meters. Mima’s back was to the opposite edge, where the surrounding floor opened to the basement below.
The man laughed, gurgling through the blood in his throat. “This is the end, Mima,” he said. “What a delight this is. At last, my dream is coming true. You look surprised, Mima. Are you wondering how I’m still alive? My skin has been cut off, I’ve lost all this blood, and a knife is even in my throat, and yet I still live. You have to be wondering how that’s possible. I bet you are.”
Mima nodded once. She really was wondering that.
“Well, Mima, I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you how I’m still alive, even like this. It’s because I want your skin. That’s what’s keeping me alive. I won’t die until I’ve cut off your skin!”
The man put both hands around the hilt of the knife and yanked it free. His throat made an inhuman, burbling, choking sound, and a blob of congealed blood came out along with the knife. The blood slid down the blade, plopping to the stage.
Grunting in a sound that wasn’t quite a voice, the man staggered toward Mima, as if mustering the last vestiges of his strength.