Another, Vol. 2 (11 page)

I’m one of her dolls, see.

Which reminded me of the way that Mei had described her relationship with Kirika. It was…

I’m alive, but I’m not the real thing.

Feeling incredibly confused somehow, I couldn’t figure out anything to say in response. Moving calmly away from the coffin, Mei asked, “Anyway, what’s going on?”

She changed the subject smoothly.

“You called me up out of nowhere. Was there some kind of crisis?”

“Were you surprised?”

“A little.”

“Actually, I met up with Teshigawara and Mochizuki a little while ago. They asked me to come out to this café Mochizuki’s sister runs.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“And then…Well, I thought I should talk to you.”

Teshigawara’s smarmy grin floated through my mind, seeming to say
You’re bringing Mei after all, eh?
Inwardly, I glowered at him…while I told Mei the “new information” I’d learned at the “Inoya” café.

Once I’d run through it all, there was a brief silence before Mei spoke.

“Where’s he going to look for it?”

“The old school building,” I answered. “The classroom in Building Zero, the one they used to use for third-year Class 3. You said that’s where they get the old desk for the one who’s ‘not there,’ right?”

“Yeah. The rules say you’re not allowed to go up to the second floor of that building, you know.”

“Well, it’s summer break…We said we’d pick a time when there probably wouldn’t be anyone around and then try to sneak up there. Though who knows what we’ll find—maybe nothing. But we have to try.”

“Hm-m-m.”

Mei sighed and brushed back a lock of hair.

“You’re not going to tell Mr. Chibiki? I bet you he’d help if you did…”

“Yeah, I thought we ought to tell him, too. But Teshigawara…I don’t even know. He’s in this weird adventure mode now. He was saying we should do this on our own and I don’t think anything’s going to change his mind.”

“Oh” was all the response Mei gave before falling silent.
No way she’s not interested…
I thought, and then asked, “So then, did you want to come?”

“To search the old school building?”

A faint smile came over Mei’s lips. “I’ll leave the search to you boys. You can’t have too many people involved in something like that anyway.”

“You’re not interested? Don’t you wonder what’s hidden in that classroom?”

Mei replied, “Yeah, I do,” without any posturing. “So if you find something, let me know.”

“Well, sure…”

“Anyway, I have to leave for a little while, starting tomorrow.”

“Leave?”

“My father’s back.” Mei’s face darkened a shade. “He wants to go to our vacation house with my mother. I’m really not thrilled about it, but this happens every time, so I can’t exactly say no.”

“You have a vacation house? Where?”

“By the beach. It takes about three hours to get there by car.”

“Outside Yomiyama?”

“Well, yeah. There’s no beach in Yomiyama, is there?”

“So you’re making a break for it?”

At that, Mei shook her head firmly.

“I’m coming back in a week.”

“So then…”

“I haven’t told anyone in my family about the ‘disasters.’ And I intend to go on the camping trip after I get back.”

“…Oh.”

After that, I talked for a time about all the stuff I’d been doing. Mei was basically silent, her right eye occasionally crinkling in a cool smile as she listened to me talk.

“You got
that
convinced that you might be ‘the casualty’ all over again?”

That was the first thing Mei asked me after everything I’d said.

“How seriously did you question it?”

“…Pretty seriously. Once you start thinking about it, you just spiral out.”

“You work through all your misgivings?”

“Enough, yeah.”

Seeing my ambiguous nod, Mei turned languidly around. Then she disappeared beyond the black coffin without another word.

What’s she doing?
I thought, hurrying after her. Was she going upstairs in the elevator that was back there?

As I started around the coffin, I let out an involuntary cry. “Oh!” I hadn’t noticed it this whole time, but something was different from before.

Before, a deep burgundy curtain had hung directly behind the coffin, but now the coffin was placed much farther out. And in the space created between the coffin and the curtain—

A second coffin had been placed.

The same size, the same shape…Only the color wasn’t black: this coffin had been painted red. It had been set back-to-back with the black coffin in front of it.

I heard Mei’s voice say, “She’s working on a new doll up in her workshop. I guess she’s planning to put it inside this one.” Her voice seemed to have come from “inside this one,” as she’d put it.

There was still a little space left between the red coffin and the curtain, rustling in the flow of the air-conditioning. I slowly moved forward. Twisting my upper body to push aside the curtain with my right shoulder, I peeked inside the red coffin.

Mei was inside it.

Mimicking the doll in the black coffin. It was much too small for her, but her knees were bent slightly and her shoulders hunched a little.

“…You’re not ‘the casualty.’”

Her face was only centimeters from my face as I peered into the coffin. She’d taken the eye patch from her left eye, though I don’t know when she’d done it. The “doll’s eye” resting in the socket was fixed on me, blue and empty.

“Relax.”

Her voice was a whisper, and yet somehow forceful. Seeming somehow unlike her own.

“It’s not you, Sakakibara.”

“Y-you…uh…”

She was too close. I scrambled backward, off balance, trying to put some distance between us. My back ran up against something hard right away: the steel door of the elevator hidden behind the curtain.

“What about your mom’s photo?” Mei asked, still resting inside the coffin. “That group photo from after the graduation? You said it might be at your grandparents’ house. So did you find it?”

“No, not yet…”

I’d asked my grandmother and she was in the process of looking for it.

“When you find it, would you let me see it?”

“Sure, no problem.”

“In that case—”

Finally Mei came out of the coffin and moved into the center of the room. Yet again, all I could do was chase unsteadily after her.

“Here.”

Mei turned around and held something out to me. It was—

“If anything happens, call this number.”

It was the size of a business card, with the contact information for the gallery printed on it. The number she referred to was written on the back in pencil.

“This is”—I accepted the card, then looked at the numbers written on the back—“a phone number? For a cell phone?”

“That’s right.”

“Your cell phone?”

“Yup.”

“You have one? I thought you said they’re awful machines?”

“They
are
awful.” Mei’s right eyebrow bunched in consternation. “It feels gross being connected by radio waves twenty-four hours a day. Really, I wish I didn’t have it.”

I looked hard at her face.

Mei repeated, “I wish I didn’t have it, but…,” then continued in a depressed tone. “She makes me use it.”

“You mean…Kirika?”

“Apparently she goes crazy worrying sometimes…So she’s the only person I ever talk to on it. I’ve never once used it except with her.”

“Huh.”

The whole thing felt surreal as I looked down once again at the cell phone number written on the card. Mei put her eye patch back on to hide her “doll’s eye,” sighing softly.

“If you find out anything with your search or that photo, let me know. Direct, at that number.”

Before I started elementary school, back when I can only barely remember, I saw a video called
Dracula
. It was one of the most famous movies by a British company called Hammer Film Productions, filmed way, way before I was even born. It was the first time I remember watching a horror movie. After that, I constantly watched—or, should I say, was forced to watch—videos of the Dracula series my father had collected because he adored it so much.

Despite my age, I had some deep-seated questions back then, when I was little.

Why does the sun set as soon as the main character visits Castle Dracula?

Dracula is a scary monster, but he has so many weaknesses. Chief among them, weakness to the light of the sun. In the middle of the day, he wouldn’t be any problem at all. So then if the main character is going to fight Dracula, why does he head out for the castle when he’ll only get there right before the sun goes down?

I understand it perfectly now. The answer is “in order to advance the plot,” obviously. But still.

It sounds strange, but when Teshigawara, Mochizuki, and I hammered out our plan to sneak up to the second floor of Building Zero, that was the very first thing I thought of.

Purposely waiting until nighttime to go was crazy. We weren’t heading out to fight vampires or anything, but even so, we had to avoid the sun going down while we were up there at all costs. I guess it was kind of a personal obsession.

In contrast, Teshigawara wasn’t convinced about going in the middle of the day. And sneaking in early in the morning “doesn’t sound right, either,” he had declared.

It wasn’t purely a question of what we liked better, though. We had to choose the right time of day for three third-year boys to be wandering around the school grounds during summer break, or else we’d probably stand out in a bad way. That was a concern, too. And so—

After compromising between all of our different schedules and opinions and whatever else, we decided we would go at three o’clock in the afternoon on July 30. Sunset was going to be before seven o’clock, so it probably wouldn’t get dark outside while we were searching the room.

In the end, we never consulted with Mr. Chibiki about our plan. And of course I didn’t tell my grandmother or Reiko about it, either. Maybe Teshigawara’s influence had gotten me caught up in the idea of “a secret adventure over summer break.”

On the day of action, we gathered at the art club room on the western end of the first floor of Building Zero. Mochizuki had opened the room up for us ahead of time, since he was in the club.

We didn’t want to stand out, so all three of us wore our uniforms. We had decided that if we happened to run into a teacher who said something to us, we would get out of it by saying the art club was having a meeting.

Then, after three o’clock…

The three of us headed up to the second floor of Building Zero, according to plan.

A rope hung across the entrances to the stairwells on the east and west ends of the building. A piece of cardboard hung from the center of the rope, with three words written starkly across it: “Do Not Enter.”

We checked to make sure there was no sign of anyone nearby, and then slipped under the rope one by one. Then we stealthily ascended the normally untraveled stairs.

“Does this old building not have any of the ‘Seven Mysteries of North Yomi’?” I asked Teshigawara partway up the stairs, half jokingly. “Like maybe the number of stairs changes sometimes? This place is just screaming for something like that, don’t you think?”

“I dunno,” Teshigawara answered harshly. “I couldn’t really care less about the ‘Seven Mysteries.’”

“Well, excuse me! When you and Kazami were giving me the tour of the school, you sure seemed into it.”

“That was, I mean…Look, that was because I had no idea how to tell you about the special situation of third-year Class 3. I was trying my best.”

“Huh. So then you really don’t believe in that stuff?”

“In ghosts or curses, you mean?”

“Right. That stuff.”

“To be honest, I don’t think that stuff can possibly exist. Except for this one thing with third-year Class 3.”

“So what about the predictions of Nostradamus? Didn’t you say you thought they were going to come true?”

“How are they gonna do that?”

“Man.”

“If I really thought that stuff was going to come true, I wouldn’t be getting myself all worked up over this right now.”

“Good point.”

“The best-known of the ‘Seven Mysteries’ in Building Zero”—just then, Mochizuki cut in—“has to do with a secret in the secondary library.”

“The secondary library? Is something in there?”

“There’s a story that says you can sometimes hear a person moaning quietly in there. Did you ever hear it, Sakakibara?”

“Never.”

“The rumors say there’s a sealed underground room beneath the library. There’s supposed to be a bunch of old papers hidden down there with secrets about the school and the town that absolutely cannot go public. And in order to guard the documents, an old librarian was supposedly sealed up inside the room a long time ago…”

“So that guy’s still alive underground and people can hear him? Or does the voice belong to the old guy’s ghost?” Teshigawara asked, and then snickered. “
Not terrible
for a ghost story, but…come on. Compared to the ‘disasters’ that are actually happening to our class? Stories like that just sound cute.”

“…That’s true.”

We stepped out into the hallway on the second floor.

Light from outside shone through the bank of windows on the north side of the hall, making it much brighter than I had expected. But the fact that this place had been off-limits and unused for years and years was obvious from the grime and damage we could see here and there. The dust that had collected on the floor worked with a peculiar stagnant odor to fill the place with an overwhelming feeling of abandonment.

The room that had once been used as the classroom for third-year Class 3…

It was the third room from the western end.

This was information Teshigawara had verified with Kazami. He said Kazami, who was also serving as a tactical officer, had taken on the role of going to the old classroom with Akazawa and some others at the start of May to get the desk and chair for the one who’s “not there.”

The door to the room wasn’t locked and, at last, fearfully, the three of us stepped into the classroom.