Until summer vacation ended, life carried on as normal for Rukana. She took care of her summer homework well in advance and didn’t skip a single one of her lessons. Her family went on vacation to Okinawa, as well. Kogarezawa didn’t have a smartphone, so the two of them couldn’t text, but he did have computer access, and he sent her e-mails once every few days or so. Sometimes Rukana would reply; other times, she wouldn’t bother.
Then when summer break came to an end and Rukana was about to leave for school, a terrible pain welled up in her stomach. Her mother brought her to their usual clinic, and the doctor prescribed her stomach medication. It helped a little, but the next morning, Rukana couldn’t even get out of bed.
She ended up taking several days off from school. Her classmates and friends from her lessons sent her all sorts of messages, but every time she tried to reply, she felt too sick to finish typing out a response. Kogarezawa e-mailed her as well, but Rukana didn’t feel like replying to him.
By the time she finally made it to school, a whole week had passed. Her classmates made as big a fuss over her return as they would have over the arrival of a transfer student—with the exception of Itoha, who simply sat at her desk with her nose in her field guide, ignoring the ruckus.
The next day, Rukana stayed home from school again. She didn’t eat or even drink water. It felt like too much of a bother. She just slept all day long. She stayed home the next day as well, but partway though, her mother roused her from her slumber.
“You have a visitor,” she said. “A girl named Hiiragi is here to see you.”
“Can’t,” Rukana replied. That was all she said.
The moment her mother left the room, Rukana leaped out of bed. She dashed to the front door, but by the time she got there, Itoha was gone. Then, as Rukana confronted her mother, screaming “Why did you send her away?!” she woke up. It was all just a dream.
Eventually, Rukana had spent so long away from school that her homeroom teacher paid her household a visit. That night, she heard her parents arguing with each other. They took her to a hospital that their family physician had recommended and had her tested for all sorts of conditions. In the end, she was diagnosed with dysautonomia. Later, when she looked the condition up on her phone, she determined her problem must be something else. It couldn’t be an illness like that.
“You think so, too, don’t you?” Rukana muttered.
The only place she felt comfortable anymore was in her own room, in her own bed, with the curtains drawn and the lights out. She didn’t want to speak with her parents. She didn’t even want to see them. There was only one person whom Rukana wanted to talk to—though strictly speaking, they weren’t a person at all.
The four-limbed, four-eyed thing never said a word to Rukana. It just stayed by her side, quietly listening to everything she said.
Rukana tried going to school on three separate occasions after winter vacation and went home early every single time. Her classmates had become very cautious about interacting with her. Kogarezawa had long since stopped sending her e-mails. He didn’t even say hello when he saw her in the classroom. Itoha, meanwhile, was still constantly glued to her field guide.
The school year ended, and Rukana advanced to the sixth grade. The classes in her school shuffled every year, but she was once again placed in a class with Kogarezawa and Itoha. And there was no way she could go to school under those circumstances.
“You don’t have to force yourself to do anything you aren’t comfortable with,” Rukana’s father said to her one night. Her mother, also in the room, seemed to have aged considerably in a very short span of time.
Rukana had been using her smartphone while keeping it constantly plugged in for months on end and that had taken a toll on the device. She told her father she wanted a computer so she could learn to be a programmer—a story she’d made up on the spot—and the very next day he came home with a brand-new laptop for her. Rukana’s mother was livid, and the fight Rukana overheard that night was more explosive than ever.
Rukana had wanted to use the computer to play a game, but much to her dismay, the laptop her father had bought could only run it at its absolute lowest graphical settings. She couldn’t tell him she’d wanted something with higher specs, so she resigned herself to whiling away the hours watching videos instead. As it turned out, that wasn’t such a bad way to spend the time, and the computer’s screen was much bigger than her phone’s.
Rukana lay flat on her bed, staring at the laptop’s screen while the four-legged thing operated its touch pad. The video she was watching wasn’t particularly entertaining, and she decided she wanted to watch something else instead. The four-legged thing manipulated the computer for her.
“Awesome,” said Rukana. “You might be a genius.”
And using the touch pad was only the start. The four-legged thing soon learned to type, as well. Whenever Rukana wanted to look something up, it would type the question into the search bar for her with its armlike legs. To be honest, its feet were so dexterous, they were more like hands, so maybe its legs really were arms after all. But if it walked around on them, surely they were legs. It could even walk on vertical surfaces, climbing freely up and down the walls and clinging to the ceiling with ease.
“Just what are you?” Rukana asked it.
It was always by her side. That was all it did—simply exist in her vicinity. But that didn’t feel unnatural to her. In fact, it felt as natural as could be. And the four-legged thing wasn’t alone.
Rukana hadn’t told Itoha the whole story. It wasn’t that she’d kept it a secret, really. She hadn’t lied to her. She just hadn’t brought up the fact that there were more of them. Every once in a while, very rarely, she’d see someone else with a bizarre thing following them around. Rukana could see them clearly, as plain as day, but nobody else seemed able to.
Needless to say, whenever Rukana found someone with a thing of their own, she would closely observe them. As a result, she came to a surprising conclusion: Even those people seemed unable to see the things that followed them. Rukana started to wonder if they were ghosts. Maybe those people were being haunted by entities only those like her—people with a sixth sense—could perceive. That would make the four-legged thing a ghost as well. But it always seemed to be watching over Rukana; it never caused her any sort of harm. Maybe it was a guardian of some sort. But the things seemed far too inhuman to be the ghosts of dead people or the spirits of ancestors watching over their descendants. Maybe they were more like spirit creatures, or fairies, or monsters.
The four-legged thing typed words into Rukana’s search bar at her behest.
ghost spirit fairy monster
ghost fairy difference
see invisible creatures ghost fairy
fairy monster guardian spirit
“…You’re a fast typer. Not bad at all. Is that what people mean when they talk about touch-typing?” Rukana commented.
She hadn’t named the four-legged thing. The purpose of names was to distinguish individuals from one another. In other words, if there was only one human on the planet, they wouldn’t need a name. Other beings like the four-legged thing existed, but to Rukana, it was still a singular creature. She was a special person, so of course her four-legged thing must be special as well.
“What’s this?” Rukana muttered as she looked over the search results.
One article described a type of presence often regarded as a psychic phenomenon. Apparently, it was thought that such presences were the basis of all sorts of mysterious creatures described in old folktales—fairies, monsters, and demons alike. Some particularly powerful ones had even been revered as gods. One researcher had previously referred to the presences as “phantoms,” but over time, they came to be known by a different name.
“Zingai…”