Beyond a retro bead curtain, there was a tatami-floored room about ten meters square. It was a good old-fashioned living room, complete with a TV and a low tea table. There was a set of glass patio doors in the far wall; a slice of oddly vivid darkness showed through the crack between their closed curtains. The sound of the rain had grown louder. Apparently, it had started coming down in earnest.
“Um… Oh, there we go.”
Seiji tugged the string of the overhead fluorescent light, and the room brightened.
There was a sliding door in the wall to the left coming from the kitchen, with a small traditional chest of drawers at its edge. Odoro stood in front of it, gazing down at its top. When Seiji looked, it was thinly coated with dust.
…Huh?
There was a small clear rectangle in that dust. It was as if an object had been sitting there until just recently.
“Um, what’s…?” he was about to ask, when something abruptly started making noise.
Bzz-bzz-bzz-bzz-bzz.
Seiji jumped. Looking around, he spotted a floor cushion in the shadow of the low table, folded in two. The muffled alarm was coming from inside it.
“Huh? Don’t tell me…”
But when he pulled the object out, sure enough, it was an analog alarm clock. The alarm hand was pointing to a few minutes before six.
Five fifty—that was right now.
What was this about?
Seiji was pretty sure Suzu had said she set her alarm for seven AM every night. That would mean she’d intentionally reset it to this time. That was weird, though. It wasn’t as if anyone was supposed to be here right now.
Hm?
For just a moment, he thought he saw Odoro smirk faintly, but the expression was gone before he could even blink.
“Hey. Underdog.”
Dammit. Does he think I’ll respond to that or something?
“…What?”
“If you’re bored, go investigate the back, please. I’m going to step outside to place a phone call.” Taking his flip phone from inside his jacket, Odoro jerked his chin toward a second bead curtain. A gloomy hallway lay behind it.
Heck no. Screw that.
Seiji would have loved to respectfully decline, using those exact words, but he was too scared of what would happen if he did. With an earnest prayer in his heart—please let this jerk get chewed on by a nue again someday—he trudged out of the living room. The bead curtain rattled as he passed through it. There was a door set with a pane of frosted glass on the left side of the hall.
Um, that’s probably either the washroom or the bath.
Nervously grasping the knob, he opened the door slowly, peeking in through the crack.
A nasty feeling came over him.
Was it…eyes? He felt as if he were being watched. It was the same gaze he felt on his back from out of nowhere when he was washing himself before getting into the bath, late at night. In the end, it was always just his imagination, but…
For now, let’s get the lights on.
Desperately feeling along the wall, he flipped the switch. A fluorescent light flashed on overhead.
“Eep!”
There was a stainless steel sliding door in front of him, probably the door to the bath. In the frosted glass of the top half, he’d seen the vague silhouette of a figure.
But…
“…Oh. It’s me, huh?”
Realizing that the figure looked just like his own, he sighed in relief. The room on the other side was dark, and apparently, the fluorescent light had reflected off the frosted glass, turning it into an impromptu mirror.
Still, that really is creepy.
Only after he’d awkwardly turned his back on it was he able to focus on observing the room around him.
It was probably a combination dressing room and washroom. The wood-floored space was cramped to begin with, and it seemed just as cluttered as the kitchen. A big bottle of laundry detergent that looked as if it was probably for commercial use sat right in the middle of the floor.
On the mirrored washstand, there was a single toothbrush in a cup on the rim of the sink. He saw a tube of toothpaste that had been accidentally left uncapped and a hairbrush with some stray white hairs tangled in it.
There was a twin tub washing machine that looked like a relic from several decades back. A melancholy, forgotten load of laundry lay all dried up in the bottom.
He didn’t see anything particularly abnormal, though. Not that he had any idea what he was supposed to investigate or how…
I guess the bath is next?
He turned to face the sliding door at the back of the room again, and then…
“Huh?”
Somewhere in his head, an alarm bell began to ring.
Something was wrong.
He didn’t know what, though. These premonitions were more like wild instinct anyway, something far removed from intelligence or thought. However, unless you figured out what was causing them fast, they always ended in disaster.
“Oh.”
The moment he noticed it, he felt his temperature plummet.
There was no shadow.
The human silhouette that he’d seen in the glass wasn’t there now. It had definitely been there a minute ago, and Seiji had just assumed it was his own reflection, but…
…come to think of it…
…he’d heard that glass showed reflections because its smooth surface reflected the light, but the surface of frosted glass was covered in tiny bumps and dips. Could it even reflect anything?
Then was that…?
Had someone been standing in the bathroom, on the other side of that glass? Had they been looking through the upper half of the door, just as he’d done from this side?
Seiji swallowed hard.
Timidly setting a hand on the sliding door, he started to open it and peek in through the gap, when…
In the distance, a chime began to play. It was probably coming from the disaster prevention speakers in the park—a warped, cracked version of “Yuuyake Koyake.”
And then…
…the door rattled open, and an arm shot out and grabbed Seiji’s shirtfront.
It happened all at once, in the space of a moment so brief that he didn’t even have time to blink. What he saw seemed to move in slow motion.
The owner of the arm was a young guy about Seiji’s age. Bloodshot eyes glared at him through shaggy, overgrown bangs.
Suddenly, his assailant turned into a hideous man with a shaved head. Three hairy fingers raked the air hungrily, and a long tongue snaked out of his mouth.
Promptly reverting to normal, the arm yanked Seiji’s shirt, hauling him into the bathroom. Seiji pitched forward, reflexively planting his hands on the tiled floor.
Something whistled through the air.
Uh-oh. He twisted around to look up. The young guy was standing right above him, and he’d just raised something high over his head.
It looked like—a clock. A clearly retro, weighty, solid-looking clock made of marble. Right, the sort that could probably kill you with one blow to the skull.
“Don’t—!” Seiji rolled, evading at the last second, but the clock struck his shoulder instead. A pain like pins and needles lanced through his whole arm, and he groaned, clamping a hand over his shoulder. He didn’t even have time to thrash around on the floor, though. His attacker promptly grabbed his collar, hauled him up, and slammed his head into the edge of the bathtub.
A scorched smell flooded his nose, and his vision went black. He nearly passed out but managed to stay conscious.
He’d come down on his back, and the other guy straddled him and began throttling him for all he was worth.
The man’s thumbs sank into his throat, squeezing a croaking groan out of it. Blood churned in the depths of Seiji’s ears, roaring, and his whole face flushed hot.
Dammit, I have to get Odoro’s attention, and he’s outside!
He needed to scream or bang on something and call for help.
Except…
…Hang on.
Why had Odoro gone outside in the first place? To make a phone call. That sounded like a perfectly decent excuse, but would a guy like him care about fine etiquette like avoiding phone calls in public? Especially on a night so rainy that umbrellas were basically mandatory.
Don’t tell me…, he thought, as memory fragments began to surface, one after another.
That smirk on Odoro’s face, just before he’d told Seiji to search the back of the house. Had he been gazing steadily at that chest of drawers because he’d noticed the mark where the clock had been?
Did he know this was going to happen?