The room was a gloom-filled box.
The moonlight that filtered in through the latticed window was faint, and the drifting incense smoke was nebulous. The walls on either side seemed to be lined with books, and it looked as if there was a folding screen directly in front of him.
He was in the storehouse.
“Hm. I was told we’d be admiring the moon over sake, but…” The boy smiled wryly.
Behind him, there was movement in the shadows.
A figure stepped into the moonlight. It belonged to a woman with amber eyes and a pale, strikingly beautiful face. She tilted her head. “Yes. All night long, if you’d like. I thought sleeping by yourself might be lonely.”
“…That’s hardly the sort of thing to say to a child.”
“I’m saying it because you are a child.” She gave him a graceful smile.
“My.” The boy’s eyes widened in astonishment. “Did I look too young to sleep alone?”
“I’ll put you to sleep, if you wish. Perhaps you miss your deceased mother.”
“No, thank you. First of all, it would surely be a repeat of Ryutandan,” the boy shot back.
The woman’s eyes narrowed until they resembled sharp blades. “Oh, you’d noticed?”
“When it’s this blatant, one could hardly miss it. Although perhaps I should have picked up on it when I heard the inn’s name.” The boy gave a self-deprecating shrug. “‘Crimson the way ahead, crimson the path already trod’—that line in the journal was a pastiche of one from Kyoka Izumi’s Ryutandan. Oddly enough, the tale is a fantasy about a boy who’s spirited away and encounters an enchantress in another world. It’s set in a place called ‘Nine Echoes’ and shares its name with this lodge.” As he spoke, the boy knelt in front of the screen, with its picture of crashing waves. His white kimono gleamed brightly in the shadows; against it, the pale gray of his Shingen bag looked like a drop of ink.
“‘Azaleas the way ahead, azaleas the path already trod’—the original line refers to a hill of azaleas. In other words, the ‘crimson’ in the journal was meant to indicate azaleas, not red leaves. With every new season of snakes, the whole area is dyed red: That wasn’t late autumn, when pit vipers appear, but the end of spring, when snakes emerge from hibernation. May is when torch azaleas are at their peak. In short, the lodge known as Nine Echoes should by rights be located in a colony of azaleas. At the very least, this isn’t it. In other words…,” the boy continued. “This entire place is a counterfeit. I imagine it was a trap, and Mayuka’s journal and business card were the bait to lure us in. Am I wrong?” His gaze seemed to bore into the woman.
She gave an elegant shrug. “No. I borrowed an abandoned temple for a short while and cast a barrier around it. Where do you suppose the boundary was?”
“In all likelihood, the snake bridge before the stone steps. That marked the edge of another world. No doubt, the barrier covers the mountain itself. In other words, the moment we stepped over that snake, we were spirited away. That’s why our cell phones lost service. Now we’ve been cornered, unable to summon any help from the outside world. In short, we’re in a desperate predicament.”
“You’re quite perceptive. That’s a great help. Parenthetically, you’ve been rendered unable to summon a single one of your father’s yokai, let alone request aid from the Enma Ministry. The spell I cast on you ensures it.”
A red leaf appeared at her fingertips.
She twirled it, toying with it, then pressed it softly to her lips. It was a familiar gesture—the boy himself had done it just after arriving at the inn.
Then the leaf warped, turning into a small crimson snake. Starting from the tip of its tail, it dissolved into smoke and vanished.
I see. So the red leaf that fell onto my breast was a sealing spell?
“I suppose I should say, ‘You’ve tricked me,’ but… Why don’t we put an end to this farce, Ibara?”
“My.” The woman’s eyes widened.
Then she put a hand to her glossy black hairline and pulled off her wig, revealing hair of such a pale blond that it seemed white at first glance.
A white-haired revenant.
At the sight of amber eyes watching him through longish bangs, the boy felt an abrupt sense of déjà vu. Those, at least, were the same. They matched the eyes of the boy’s fated rival, Odoro Rindou, who claimed his twin had died.
Yes, this was Ibara Rindou.
He appeared to be in his midtwenties, but his delicate build and pale skin made him seem more fragile than the boy. He looked as though, if he were struck, even his bones would shatter like waxwork, promptly reducing him to a corpse. However, the strangeness and chaos in his eyes undermined that first impression.
He was a bewitching flower whose fatal aura grew ever clearer as the night grew later and the darkness deeper.
“I had heard you were twins, but you don’t really resemble each other.”
“Mm, no. The thought that I might have looked like him isn’t the least bit funny.”
The pair wore opposing colors.
White.
Black.
One seemed to be dressed for his own burial. The other wore what appeared to be mourning clothes.
The dead and the mourner.
“I see,” said Ibara. “From your expression, it looks as if you knew all along.”
The voice that issued from his thin lips had changed completely. It was a whisper so faint that it was barely there, yet it reached Shiroshi’s ears with an odd clarity. It was the voice of someone used to being obeyed.
“Yes, for about three months now.”
“Since the incident on that island in Nagasaki, you mean?”
“Because a certain someone resurrected my youngest elder brother, it became necessary for us to have the Enma Ministry inspect the registry of the dead. When they did so, a certain question arose. With the exception of Odoro, the sixth-born, all of Shinno Akugorou’s sons have died. However, there were signs that one of the records had been altered—yours.”
“And so you thought I’d come back to life?”
“Come back? There was no need for that. In all probability, you never died.”
According to the records, he’d committed suicide. At the end of an extremely bitter fight over the succession, he’d killed himself in front of his twin.
However, his corpse had never been found.
“This resulted in a private investigation. At present, suspicion is focused on Shinno Akugorou. They suspect he hid you, his true heir, by making it appear that you had died, then positioned your younger twin as the heir. While Odoro competed with me out in the open, you, at your father’s bidding, would attempt to do away with me covertly, from the shadows. That seemed the most natural way to interpret the situation.”
In fact, the boy had supported that theory himself.
…Right up until he faced this man in person.
“However, I really can’t see you as a filial son who’d submit to being his father’s puppet.”
A dry sound rang out.
In a theatrical gesture, the young man had clapped his hands.
“I see, yes. You do seem too much for my brother to handle.”
“Well, on principle, I only fight opponents I know I can defeat.”
The boy’s words made the young man’s smile deepen. “What a coincidence. I’m the same way.”
The expression had a mocking edge to it.
He clapped his hands again sharply.
The screen instantly vanished, exposing a coffin.
The corpse that lay inside it looked like a Japanese doll put away in a box. It belonged to a young woman dressed in a white burial kimono. Her glossy black hair was cut straight across at her shoulders, and a bluish mark like a snake twisted over her left cheek. Her face was so peaceful that she might have been asleep…though her hands clutched the ends of a thin red obi she’d wrapped around her neck like a cord.
She’d strangled herself.
“…This is Mayuka Asaka? So she committed suicide…,” the boy said, staring at the coffin.
The young man responded with a casual nod. “That’s right. Having heard the rumors of the man-eating inn, I called on her, and that very night, though I hadn’t asked, she confided her life story to me. Apparently, it was the forty-ninth night since her stepmother’s death, and they’d laid her ashes to rest that day. She died without waiting for the dawn—half a month ago.”
“What brought you here? Why now?”
“I thought it would make for a perfect riddle to lure you in. No doubt, it’s a habit for those who run proxy services for Hell: Once you hear of a crime for which there has been no judgment, you feel compelled to uncover the truth. Just like an animal who stumbles into a trap while following the scent of its prey.”
The young man shrugged casually. “Since we have the opportunity, why don’t we check your final answer? That young woman’s sin was the murder of her stepmother. She poisoned her by switching her blood pressure medication, making her death appear to be the result of her illness… And yet the sin your pet dog saw appeared as a jatai. How do you explain that?”
The boy lowered his eyelids. Keeping his eyes closed, examining each of his words carefully, he finally spoke in a subdued voice. “Since antiquity, the story of jatai and other tales of women becoming snakes have had one point in common. It’s particularly conspicuous in The Legend of Doujouji. A woman pursues a man who runs from her, until at last she transforms into a snake. She burns her beloved to death; then, feeling as if life without him would be pointless, she throws herself from a bridge, thus dying alongside him. In short, the tales of women who’ve become snakes are always tales of murder-suicide.”
His voice was as dispassionate and toneless as rain.