Once again, the three of them were standing at the door of the haunted mansion.
Chris was well-behaved this time, not agitated the way he’d been the day before.
Mayuka brushed the vines aside and pressed the button on the intercom. After a minute, the door opened, and an unfamiliar man peered out at them.
“Yo! We’ve been waiting for you.”
“Umm…” Mayuka hesitated. But Hinata recognized the man’s voice. It was…
“Oh, sorry, sorry. I was all done up in zombie gear yesterday. It’s me, Yuuma. C’mon in.”
“Sheesh! I thought you were a different person!” Mayuka exclaimed.
They followed him inside. Unlike the gloomy atmosphere from the day before, the entrance hall was now brightly lit. There were lights along the wall, and a chandelier hung from the high ceiling. The upstairs handrail and above were no longer shrouded in darkness.
“We finally got the power back on. It’s really hard to do anything without electricity.”
Huh? Something about the man’s statement nagged at Hinata. They had used the intercom yesterday. It wouldn’t have worked without power, right?
✦ ✦ ✦
Yuuma’s long, oval face was beaming as he guided them to the door in the back.
Instead of the zombie makeup from last time, he was now wearing a casual button-down shirt over a tee and skinny jeans. His upturned hair was a mix of black and dyed brown, and there was the faintest hint of a beard on his chin. The only element that remained from the previous day’s costume was the skull ring on his left middle finger. The eyes of the skull glittered in the chandelier’s light; there were little bits of black glass embedded in the sockets.
“I didn’t know you were so fashionable. You look even better now than you did as a zombie,” Mayuka said. This made Yuuma double over with laughter.
“Ha-ha-ha! Well, I sure hope so. If someone said I looked better as a zombie, I’d never recover,” he said as he reached for the doorknob. “The club’s all here working on the video today.”
Yuuma pulled open the door. Hinata recalled that it had been locked last time.
Inside, a rather wide room spread out before them. It was dusty here, too. There were large, dirty windows on the wall across from the door, offering a distorted view of the backyard beyond.
On the right side of the room was a long table, where four young people were busily working on something. Each one either had a computer or smartphone at their fingertips. Pieces of paper scrawled with text littered the tabletop. Compared to how old-fashioned the rest of the mansion looked, this place seemed like an alternate dimension—as though they’d just walked through a rift in time.
One of the people stood up and smiled at the newcomers.
“Welcome…”
It was Akane. Her skirt bounced as she came around the table. Like the day before, she was dressed all in black.
“Um, what were your names again?”
Mayuka raised her hand up to cheek level and said, “Mayuka and Hinata. And the dog is Chris.”
“Mayuka, Hinata, and Chris… I’ll have to commit those to memory. I tend to be a bit absent-minded,” Akane said, tapping her head with a finger.
Yuuma, who had been smiling at Akane as she spoke, then pointed to the other three people at the table. “Those are my buddies from the Media Studies Club. We’re figuring out the script, composition, and sequencing of our video right now.”
The others briefly looked up and nodded, but at the moment, they seemed absorbed in their computers and phones. Every now and then, someone scribbled something on a piece of paper.
“Where are your cameras and stuff?” Mayuka asked.
“We haven’t brought in the equipment yet. Plus, I want it to look as amateurish and unprofessional as possible. Only natural light. We might even use our smartphone cameras to film it,” Yuuma explained. “When the footage is grainy and rough, it looks more real, doesn’t it? The viewers feel like they’re really infiltrating a haunted mansion. The plan is to do a fifteen-minute short. Of course, it takes a whole lot longer than fifteen minutes to film it…”
“Because you do a bunch of takes and only use the best ones?”
“See? You know how it works, Mayuka. Want me to film you with my smartphone?”
Mayuka squealed with excitement. Hinata, meanwhile, had his attention focused elsewhere.
There was a round table against the back wall. A clear hamster cage sat atop it. When Hinata walked closer, he saw that the table was wiped very clean, and there were bags of food and litter next to the cage.
Hammy was curled up into a ball inside a tiny hut within, sound asleep. The hamster was a white-and-gray Djungarian, with a short little tail. Its round, poofy butt rose up and down as it breathed. The hamster wheel that had made so much noise the previous day was now at rest.
“Your family runs the vet clinic,” said Akane, approaching him with a smile, “so I bet you know a lot about animals, don’t you, Hinata?”
“Y-yeah, a little,” Hinata admitted. Chris sidled up closer to Hinata’s legs. He seemed nervous, and his eyebrows were drawn together slightly.
“What do you think of this setup? I made it a special table just for Hammy.”
“I—I think it’s very nice. And it’s not in direct sunlight…”
“I’m glad to hear you agree,” Akane said as she bent over and squinted to peer into Hammy’s tiny hut.
Suddenly, Hinata remembered the message Rui had entrusted him with.
“Um, m-my friend wanted to say hi…”
“Hmm? Who’s that?”
“Um, he was in the waiting room at our clinic yesterday. He was watching you the whole time. The boy with the cat.”
“I’m sorry; I really am absent-minded…”