Another, Vol. 2 (18 page)

Certainly, I’d gotten an answer to the question that had so long been on my mind, but when I imagined what must be going through Mei’s mind, my heart clenched tight. It was hard to keep the tears from pouring down my face. However, at the same time…

A critical fact became inescapably clear.

“So she was never your cousin in the first place: You were sisters.”

Feeling an intense, tumultuous bewilderment, I reiterated the fact.

“Meaning that
you and Misaki were actually second-degree blood relatives…
”

“That’s right.”

“So that’s why you said what you did that day?”

My first day at school, the first time I’d encountered her there. During that conversation next to the flower bed where yellow roses were in full bloom, outside Building Zero…

You should be careful. It might have started already.

“When you told me ‘It might have started already’?”

“You’ve got a good memory. That’s right.”

“So it had started,”
I said, my eyes locked on Mei’s face.
“The ‘disasters’ for this year had already started in April.”

“…Probably.”

“Why didn’t you say so at the time?”

“I…Well, I…”

Without turning her eyes in my direction, Mei once again blinked, slow and sad.

“The fact that something like that had caused her—had caused Misaki’s death…I didn’t want to believe it. I could accept that something as irrational as a curse had caused it. So I…

“That’s why even when you asked me if I had any brothers or sisters, I couldn’t say yes. And when you asked me about Misaki, I could only say that she was my
cousin
. I didn’t want to say it.”

I remembered that.

After Yukari Sakuragi died as one the “deaths of May,” when I’d run into Mei for the second time in the basement of the gallery, she’d said,
I guess I’ve only ever half believed it, in the back of my mind
.

First that happened
, then in May you came to our school and I
told you all that stuff
, but I still didn’t believe it a hundred percent.

“First that happened” must have meant Misaki’s death in April. And then if “telling me all that stuff” had been an
allusion
to her saying that “it might have started already”…

Mei’s head was bent, her fists balled around the sheets on the bed where she sat. Even as I tried earnestly once again to imagine what she must be feeling, I compiled the
facts I had come to understand
and couldn’t help speaking them aloud, sounding out the truth of them.

“The ‘disasters’ for this year’s third-year Class 3 started in April, just like they did for all those other classes. When Misaki Fujioka died in the hospital, she became the first victim…The ‘death of April.’ Which means…”

The gusts of wind rattling the window barreled into my body and clamped sharply down on my body heat. When that sudden sensation assaulted me, a chill carved down my spine and raised goose bumps over my entire body.

Mei’s head moved as if to say,
I know…
She lifted her face languidly. “I thought of that, too.”

“Meaning what?”

“After you got out of the hospital, you first came to school at the beginning of May. That was when we realized there weren’t enough desks in the classroom, so everyone believed that
this year’s ‘disasters’ were erratic and starting in May
. But if Misaki was the ‘death of April,’ that would mean
we were wrong
…”

“…Yeah, it would.”

Folding both arms over my chest and hugging tight, I nodded.

“Meaning that despite the fact that there were originally enough desks,
the ‘extra person’ had already snuck into the class back in April, before I ever came to North Yomi
…”

“So that’s why, then?”

After several seconds of silence, I asked the question timidly.

“When I said I was wondering if I might be the ‘extra person,’ you flat-out told me I wasn’t. You told me ‘Relax. It’s not you.’”

“…I did, yes.”

“Is that because you knew the ‘disasters’ had actually started in April? And since I wasn’t in the class in April…?”

“That’s part of it…But the main reason is something else.”

I felt as if I’d had some sort of premonition that Mei would answer this way.

“Meaning what?” I pursued. “What was your reason?”

“I…”

She started to answer, but then showed some hesitation. Her gaze slipped away into space and for a long moment she didn’t even blink, her body frozen and doll-like. Then, finally…

She seemed to have come to a decision. She got up from the bed and turned back to face me. She let me see the eye patch over her left eye, which had been turned away from my view this entire time. Then, with measured movements, she uncovered her eye.

“This eye…”

The special glass eye that rested in her empty eye socket. The “blue eye, empty to all” turned on me.

“This ‘doll’s eye’ told me
it’s not you
.”

I didn’t understand what she meant right away, of course. Still, I felt a vague foreboding somewhere inside me.

“How did it do that?” I asked, yet another question.

This was Mei’s reply, no longer hesitant: “I think I told you this before. This eye can see things that aren’t visible. Things that you wouldn’t expect to see; things that shouldn’t be seen; things that you wish it couldn’t see.”

“Things you wouldn’t expect to see? Things that shouldn’t be seen? Like what?”

“I think it’s…”

Mei lifted her right hand and with it she covered the eye that was not the “doll’s eye.”

“The ‘color of death.’”

She sounded as if she were intoning a spell.

“The color or the tint of something that’s on the other side, with death.”

I didn’t speak.

“Do you understand? No—I can see you don’t.”

To be honest, I didn’t know how I should respond. However—

“Under normal circumstances, I don’t think you could believe me, even after I explain it…But I may as well tell you everything. Will you hear me out?”

When she said that, I nodded deeply without a second thought. And then I looked straight back into the eye she had turned on me. The beautiful and yet utterly vacant blue eye…

“Let’s hear it,” I told her.

“At first, I didn’t really understand what was happening, so I was confused and upset all the time.”

Leaving her eye patch off, Mei sat back down on the edge of the bed. She told me the story in the same quiet tone she’d used all night.

“Obviously, I lost the sight in my left eye when I lost the eye. Even if you put a flashlight right up to it, I can’t detect even a flicker of light. If I close my right eye, I can’t see anything at all. I had the surgery when I was around four years old, so I’ve been this way as far back as I can remember. Even after Kirika made this ‘doll’s eye’ for me to put in, it was still like that for a while. But then…

“What was it at first? I’m pretty sure it was when one of my father’s relatives died and they took me to the funeral. It was either the end of my third year in elementary school or the start of my fourth.

“They said ‘This is good-bye’ and I put flowers in the coffin…And when I looked at the face of the person who’d died, I felt something really strange. My left eye shouldn’t have been able to see anything, but I felt like it was sensing something…Not a shape. More like a color.

“I was shocked. Since that was basically the first time I’d ever felt something in my left eye. And it was a truly strange sensation. When I covered my left eye up and only looked through my right eye, all I saw was the person’s face, completely normal. And yet when I used my left eye, too, there was some kind of weird color tingeing my vision, overlaying everything else…”

“What do you mean, a weird color?” I asked.

“I can’t really explain it,” Mei replied, shaking her head limply. “It was a color I’d never seen with my right eye…a color I never could have seen with it. I can’t express it with words like red or blue or yellow or any of the names for colors I know. None of those fit. It’s…a color that doesn’t exist in our world.”

“Not even if you could mix together any colors of paint that exist?”

“…Not even then.”

“And that’s the ‘color of death’?”

“I couldn’t have understood that at first…”

Tilting her head back to look at the ceiling, Mei gave a short sigh.

“No one would really talk to me about it. Doctors would examine me, but they never found anything abnormal. They told me I was just imagining it. I tried to believe them, too, but…Every so often, I kept seeing the same thing, and it didn’t go away. So—”

Mei slowly returned her gaze to me.

“Over the course of however many years, I’ve come to understand it. When I sense that color, it means ‘death’ is there.”

“You mean ‘death’ is there every time you look at a dead person’s face?”

“It happened once when I was at the scene of a car accident. There was a man trapped in the driver’s seat of a crushed car. His face was covered in blood…He was already dead. I could sense the same color in his face as I’d seen at the funeral.

“And it’s not just when I see something in person. Say, on the news, when they show clips or photos from the scene of accidents or wars. It almost never happens with TV or newspapers, but magazines have pictures of dead bodies in them sometimes. When I look at stuff like that, I see it.”

“That same
color
?”

“I’m not sure. There are lots of degrees.”

“What?”

“Sometimes I sense it clearly, and sometimes it’s hazy. You could call it different shades of the same color. When someone’s actually dead, it’s clear and when someone’s badly hurt and is going to die soon or they’re on their deathbed from a terrible illness, then it’s comparatively faint.”

“So it’s not just on dead people that you sense this
color
.”

“Right. In those cases, I think it’s because the person is close to ‘death.’ They’ve come closer to ‘death’ than normal, closer than necessary…And their essence is being pulled toward the side of ‘death.’ That’s why it’s faint. Less a
color
and more a
shade
…You know?

“I can’t stand big hospitals. Grandma Amane was hospitalized once to have surgery on a tumor, and she was okay because they’d found it early, but when we went to visit her…That was hard. I was scared. Without even trying, I could see all kinds of patients in her ward tinged by ‘shades of death’…

“It’s not prophecy or some kind of power like that. I can see the color on people who are badly hurt or seriously ill, but if I were to meet a person who’s going to die in an accident later on, I wouldn’t see anything. So I think maybe this is like detecting the
‘mortality’ component
a person has in them.”

I couldn’t offer any response.

“To be honest, I wasn’t very excited going to the hospital to visit Misaki, either, because I would sense it sometimes. But I never once sensed it on Misaki. That reassured me; I thought she would be all right, and then…And then all of a sudden she—”

Mei bit down on her lower lip out of grief, or maybe remorse. Her lips were pressed together for a long moment before she went on.

“You must be wondering why this eye can see that sort of thing, how it got that way. I call it the ‘color of death,’ but I only see it on humans. I don’t sense anything for other animals…Isn’t that strange? It’s so weird.

“I wondered, too, and I was scared, and I hated it. I thought about it from every conceivable angle, but I don’t know. I don’t understand it, but I can’t escape it. All I can do is accept it. And so eventually I started to think of it like this:

“Maybe it’s because of the emptiness in dolls.”

The dolls are empty.

Ah…This, too, Mei had told me when I’d run into her in the basement of the gallery.

Dolls are emptiness. Their bodies and hearts are total emptiness…a void. That emptiness is like death.

“Dolls are empty, you know. They contain an emptiness that parallels ‘death’…Maybe that’s why this left eye that I share with them illuminates the ‘color of death’ in human beings. Or maybe it has something to do with my experience during my eye surgery, where I could have died.”

At the time, as I listened to her talk, I remembered feeling as if she had allowed me a glimpse of a secret underpinning the world.

“All I could do was accept that explanation. But there’s no way I could ever talk to anyone about this. I never even fully explained it to Misaki. I couldn’t. And then, at a certain point, I decided I would just keep this eye covered, especially around other people.”

“…I see.”

Even as I gave her a solemn nod, in the rational part of my mind I never stopped thinking it over. How seriously could I take this story Mei was telling me?

However, without revealing that to her, I wore an earnest expression as I asked, “So then, what about ghosts? Have you ever seen any? The spirits of people who’ve died, or anything like that?”

“No…Never,” Mei replied, her face just as serious. “I mean, I have no idea if those things exist the way everybody talks about them, or whether they haunt all these different places people claim they do. Though I think, fundamentally, they probably don’t.”

“What about paranormal photographs?”

Naturally, this was a question with a point.

“Not those, either.”

She didn’t move.

“Those photos they show on TV and in magazines, they all look so fake. But that’s why—”

At that point, Mei’s expression seemed to sharpen.

“That’s why I wanted to get a look at that photo from twenty-six years ago. I wanted to look at the real thing with this eye and make sure.”

“Sure. And when you saw it…”

The day before yesterday, when she’d come to my house and looked at the photos my mother had left behind, she’d taken the eye patch off her left eye. And then she’d asked me—

What about the color?

That question.

You don’t see a weird color?