When I showed everybody Ririka Nishizono’s “Bottom of the Dark Water,” they all freaked out.
Sarai, especially. It took 30 minutes to stop him from going home.
“Stay away from me, you pervert high-schooler!”
“Why? Are you calling me a homo? Takes one to know one!”
“How many homo-friends~ ♪ can Gamotan make? ♪”
“I didn’t realize you were into that, Gamo... I don’t really understand, but every person is different. I won’t say that it’s wrong. Good luck with it,” said Myu-Pom.
“Right, right. Showing half-hearted understanding is the most hypocritical thing you can do! And I’ve been telling you for a while now, I’m not gay!”
I like normal ero-doujin!
“More importantly, listen to me! This ero-doujin isn’t a normal ero-dojin!”
“Right. It’s a gay doujin, right? You told us that.”
“It doesn’t matter if it’s gay! This book foretells Dr. Hashigami’s death!”
“What?”
“Huh?”
“Poyah?”
Everyone finally shut up.
Jeez... they didn’t need to freak out so much just because they saw a gay doujin...
“What do you mean?”
Sarai looked confused, so I opened up the doujinshi and showed him the inside. I’d opened the book to the middle of the five stories, the third one.
“See that guy lying on the ground with his tooth yanked out?”
“Hold on. You’re not telling me that something like that makes it a ‘prophecy,’ are you?”
I could see the words “waste of time” written on Sarai’s angry face. Since it was his own father we were talking about, maybe that made sense.
“No, no! It’s not just that. A small part of the internet’s noticed this. But there’s one more thing that I saw.” I turned the page again. “Look here. At the right hand of the victim, as he lies on the ground. Doesn’t it look like his index finger is strangely extended?”
“Depending on how you look at it, maybe...” Myu-Pom was tilting her head, unconvinced.
“If you draw a straight line from where his finger points...” I quickly grabbed a straw off the counter and used it to make a line on the page. “Look at what the man’s pointing at. It’s some kind of strange object in a frame.”
“Cola! ☆ Colon! ☆”
“Ryotasu, look closer.”
“Poyaya?”
“What is this...?” Only Sarai seemed to notice.
“When you look closer, this doesn’t say ‘COLA,’ it says ‘CODE.’”
“...”
“CODE. I told you about it, right Sarai? It was Dr. Hashigami’s dying message that I found at the scene.”
The only people who could’ve known this were me, the killer, the mystery man who’d come in after me, and the police. And all of that was after the killing. And the police, for some reason, had hidden the fact from Sarai that his dad left a dying message.
“This doujinshi was published at winter Comiket. You get the rest, right?”
That meant that this book had the same word as the dying message the professor had left.
“Gamo, I’m sorry to interrupt, but don’t you think it’s just a coincidence?”
“Huh?”
Sarai nodded at Myu-Pom. “It probably is. CODE is a very common word. And it’s more likely the author changed what it said for copyright reasons. This isn’t enough evidence on its own. Unless there are a minimum of three commonalities, a coincidence is just a coincidence.”
Grr...
There actually was another thing that the book and reality had in common. The man’s tooth had been torn out and carried off. But I couldn’t tell them that.
My fingers suddenly moved to the gold tooth key in my pocket.
If I told Sarai and the others about this, they’d lose even more faith in me as a person. But I didn’t have a choice. Otherwise, they wouldn’t believe that Ririka Nishizono was suspicious.
Come on, tell them! Tell them everything! They’re the only allies you’ve got right now...!
“A-Anyway, I think you should take a closer look at it. Y-You might understand a little of what I’m talking about... maybe. Hahaha.”
Oops...
In the end, regardless of what I wanted to do, I didn’t say it. I was a little shocked at my own wimpiness... Just trying to bring up the courage to talk about it made my heart beat like a drum.
“I-I’m begging you, guys...”
I couldn’t look Sarai in the eye. Sarai sighed and flipped through the doujinshi. I would’ve preferred he read it carefully, instead of just skimming it.
“Are you trying to tell me this is synchronicity? But that hasn’t been explained in the scientific sense. Synchronicity is just the result of assuming several coincidences have meaning. The world is filled with coincidences. Trying to bring meaning to every coincidence is how conspiracy theories got started. It would be better to say that human curiosity and imagination make the world more complicated than it should be. Delusions amplify a person’s imagination. That’s exactly what’s going on with the sexual depictions in this book. They’re very different than reality.”
God, shut up... I went to put my hands over my ears in annoyance.
“Are you sure about that?” Master Izumin, who’d been quiet, interrupted. He’d heard our whole conversation from behind the counter, so it was strange that he hadn’t said anything until now. Evidently he’d finally run out of patience. “Sure you’re not just being cynical, Sarai? Conspiracy theories exist. It’s more fun to believe that.”
I appreciate the support, Master Izumin, but Sarai’s not going to believe that...
“I have no intention of denying the existence of every conspiracy theory, but you can’t deny that their proponents are constantly making impossible logical leaps in their arguments, can you? And simply ignoring anything that would go against their theory.”
Sarai’s counterattack shut Master Izumin up completely. It didn’t seem like he had anything he could say. There was nothing I could say, either. Maybe I was wrong about Ririka Nishizono being the real killer...
“...Hmm? Wait a second. This is—” Sarai suddenly stopped flipping through the pages. His eyes were on a certain page.
...What was it?
“What’s wrong?”
“This... number...”
I peered over at the doujin. He had it open to the last page. Even when I tried to follow the story, the last page had nothing to do with what came before it. It was weird. Instead of the end of the story, there was just a picture of a car.
Had Sarai... found something on this page?
“Do you recognize that car?”
“No, that’s not it. It’s not the car—”
Sarai’s fingers were shaking.
“What is it? Tell me! What did you find?!”
His finger was pointing at—
“The license plate?”
Unlike a Japanese license plate, this one consisted of seven numbers.
“3315728...?”
“What’s wrong with the number?” Myu-Pom was looking at the doujin, too.
Sarai, however, had closed his eyes and was mumbling to himself.
“That’s right... That’s it... You can use Baudot code. So that was it...”
“Come on, Sarai, tell me!”
I grabbed his shoulders and shook him. He opened his eyes and slammed his fist down on the paper in front of him — the picture of the holes in the study ceiling.
“It’s ‘EEQTUWI.’”
“Huh?”
“It’s the ‘EEQTUWI’ that I couldn’t decode! Baudot code can be used for numbers as well as the alphabet! ‘00001’ is the letter E, but if you look at the conversion chart... it’s also the number 3.”
“You’re not saying...!”
“EEQTUWI can be converted to numbers. And those numbers are...” Sarai adjusted his glasses in an attempt to calm down. “3315728. It’s the same as this license plate!”
“...!”
The number on the license plate... matched the one in the professor’s study!
“Hey, Gamon! Who wrote this book?!” Sarai whacked me in the chest with the doujinshi. “Who is Ririka Nishizono?”
“S-She’s an ero-doujin author! I’ve never met her!”
“You’re not telling me she really prophesied the future, are you? That’s impossible! That’s too occult for me to believe. If there’s some explanation that doesn’t involve the occult, it’s—”
“It’s that Ririka Nishizono is the killer. Right?”
“...” Sarai’s expression was getting sterner. He’d finally realized how dangerous this doujinshi was.
“There’s contact info in the afterward. Did you try contacting her?”
“No...”
There was an email address written there, but I hadn’t had the courage to contact her.
“Gamon, I’m sorry for doubting you.” Sarai bowed. “Whether or not this is a prophecy, I’ve taken an interest in Ririka Nishizono. I’ll investigate this EEQTUWI matter myself. Was there anything else that you saw?”
“Huh? Um...” I couldn’t tell him about the gold tooth key, but—
“Are you hiding something?”
“Huh? Huh?”
“You’ve been refusing to look me in the eye. And you keep saying ‘Huh?’ That’s evidence that you understand my questions and are pretending not to. Is there something you’re feeling guilty about? Something else you haven’t told me? You keep putting your hand in your pocket. What’s in there? You just looked away again. If you’re hiding something, then my reaction is, ‘Knock it off, asshole.’ I showed you my dad’s study. You need to show me everything you’re hiding.”
“Uh...”
He was so observant! His super-powers felt even more real than Myu-Pom’s.
He was glaring at me and I couldn’t even move a finger.
It felt like even the smallest twitch would betray to him what I was hiding.