“In addition, the name is considered to be a pun: Although the characters used to write the word are different, the ‘hima’ in ‘himamushi’ can be interpreted as the word for ‘idleness,’ while ‘mushi’ is a homonym for a word that means to spend one’s life in vain, doing nothing. To that end, Sekien interprets it as ‘what one who spends their life being terribly lazy and useless becomes after death.’
“Cockroaches lurk in the darkness, avoiding the light, and infest others’ homes. They creep through the house behind its residents’ backs, scavenging their leftovers and finally consuming the house itself. And…” Odoro glanced down at the young man at his feet. From the expression in his eyes, he could have been looking at an actual insect. “Like a cockroach, this man crept into Suzu’s house. During the day, while she was at the park or the supermarket, and at night, when she’d taken her medication and was sound asleep, he’d nap in the living room, use the bath and the toilet, and graze on the deli leftovers in the kitchen. He was a parasite in her home.”
From the look of the guy, he was probably homeless.
He’d somehow gotten his hands on the key to Suzu’s house. Adjusting his habits to match its resident’s daily rhythms, he’d infiltrated her house and used it to partially cover his needs for food, clothing, and shelter.
“It was the alarm clock that gave him away. If Suzu was telling the truth, she was in the habit of turning the knob on the back and setting the alarm before going to bed every night. However, that doesn’t make any sense.”
“Huh? Why?”
“If she woke at seven every morning, there should have been no need to reset the alarm.”
An involuntary “Oh” escaped Seiji. That was true: If she always got up at the same time, she shouldn’t have had to do anything except switch the alarm on.
“I presume that when he crept in during the day, he folded a floor cushion in half, put the clock inside it, and napped. He set the alarm to wake him just before Suzu left the park, at five fifty PM. That is why Suzu was compelled to reset her alarm every night.”
I see.
“It’s likely that the dogs were killed because they threatened his parasitic lifestyle. Every time Suzu mistook a dog for ‘Chi’ and brought it home, he killed it during the night and hid it beneath the floor.”
Suzu had assumed the missing dog had run away, and she’d walked all around the neighborhood, searching for it for days and days, months on end. Until at last she grew so worried that she went to a detective agency for advice.
“…How cruel,” Seiji murmured.
Behind him, there was a shriek. The young guy had bolted up and was sitting weakly on the tatami, clearly confused. His lips were trembling.
Slowly, Odoro turned his head. On seeing the man, he gave a mocking smile. There was naked, brutish sadism in his expression.
Then he thumped the end of his walking stick on the floor.
“Come.”
With a bang, the doors of the under-floor storage space flew open.
The shadows of four-legged animals leaped out. There were four of them. Each one was small—so short, it didn’t even come up to Seiji’s knee. Their ferocious, gaping mouths were filled with long black fangs.
Howls went up. The creatures sounded like hounds, bellowing to announce the start of the hunt.
It was a terribly surreal sight, and the young intruder stared in shock.
“Wh-what are those? What the hell are those?!”
“Sunekosuri. Originally, each was a dog you killed. Even if you die, I won’t let you claim you’ve forgotten.”
Odoro snapped his fingers.
“Hunt.”
He had just passed judgment. A fall into Hell, to punish the guilty.
“Eep— EeeeEEEEE!”
With a confused, terrified scream, the guy sprinted out of the living room. Passing right by the shoe cupboard in the entryway, he lunged for the doorknob, then dashed into the street.
The pack of dogs took off after him.
They disappeared the moment they raced through the front door, but their footsteps were still audible. So was their rough panting as they ran with all their might.
Invisible dogs, dashing down a street half hidden by a downpour: That was probably what sunekosuri were really like.
And then…
“…Huh?”
Sensing a presence, Seiji turned. A small shadow had emerged from the living room and was making for the front door on unsteady feet.
There’s the fifth one.
“Hm. That was probably the first. The Chihuahua mix whose corpse was not under the floor. Even if its body isn’t there, something like the emotions it felt when it died seem to have remained. It’s what one would call a ghost.”
“Then that’s…”
Was this “Chi,” Suzu’s original dog?
Resentment or anger—a thirst for revenge on the one who’d killed them—was probably what was driving the five dogs. Something so intense that even killing the guy wouldn’t be enough.
It serves him right…probably.
Seiji shook his head, feeling dismal, and then…
“Oh!” he yelped. In what felt like a flash of intuition, a possibility had struck him. “W-wait… Wait just a minute!” Forcing the wheels in his head to turn, Seiji desperately groped for words. “That guy—he might not have been all bad.”
Come to think of it, considering the circumstances, that man had probably been napping when Odoro demolished the back door. A suspicious pair had tromped into the home of an old woman who lived by herself while she was out, without even bothering to take off their shoes. They were clearly thieves or robbers. If he was thinking of his own safety, running would have been his first choice. In fact, since he’d had his shoes on, he might have originally planned to flee through the front door.
And yet…
Ultimately, he’d chosen to grab the clock from the dresser and hide in the washroom. He’d actually turned and gone back into the house.
If he did it for Suzu…
The man had known Suzu left the park when the “Yuuyake Koyake” chime played. He must have realized that if she came home unawares, she’d run right into the intruders.
Was he…worried about her?
If that was why he’d stayed in the house—to see how the situation played out, just in case—it would mean he’d been trying to save her.
When he heard Seiji’s argument, Odoro raised an eyebrow. “I see.” And then he spat, “What of it?”
Hauling Seiji up by his shirtfront, he pushed his face in close, like a beast about to snap at Seiji’s nose.
“Yes, you’re right. That man may have meant to save the old woman he was sponging off of. So are you implying that I should forgive his crime and grant him an opportunity to atone because of it? Like that half-breed would? Ha! You two are most definitely the heretics here.” His voice was threatening. “As a rule, Hell’s punishment doesn’t require the possibility of mercy. In the face of the sin that has been committed, there is no room to make allowances.”
In contrast, his eyes were endlessly sober, so devoid of emotion that they seemed hollow.
“After all, to its victims, a crime is always just a crime. No matter how the sinner atones, it’s essentially impossible for the sin and its penance to balance each other out. For that reason, all sinners have a duty to be punished.”
After all, the one thing no one could ever do was resurrect the dead. That was why those who had been victimized prayed, At least punish the one who did this.
“If an apology were enough, there would quite literally be no need for Hell.”
Seiji had no response to give him. Odoro was right: There were sins that could never be mended, no matter what. No matter how much room for sympathy there might be in that man’s case, the dogs he’d killed wouldn’t come back to life.
Even so…
Knocking Odoro’s hand away, Seiji retrieved the shoes he’d kicked off at the back door and ran out into the rainy street. He had no idea which way the man had gone, though.
I really do get it, Seiji murmured to himself. He slapped his cheeks, shaking off his hesitation.
Odoro was undeniably in the right here.
However, even if everyone else cursed the guy as a dog killer and threw rocks at his back, Seiji couldn’t just look the other way. He’d been that guy once.
If he hadn’t met Shiroshi, he was sure he would have ended up as something similar. He couldn’t rationalize this away as someone else’s problem.
After all, somebody saved me.
Desperately hoping for some kind of hint, he got out his phone and opened its browser, but a search for “sunekosuri” turned up very little.
Something like a dog that slips through the legs of passersby on rainy evenings.
That was it.
“Gaaaah, dammit!”
With a yell that was very like a howl, Seiji dashed off into the rain.
…Alone.