Another, Vol. 2 (7 page)

Even in that state, Mr. Kubodera stayed on his feet, his left hand on the desk to prop himself up. In the bloody mask of his face, his wide, vacant eyes…

A certain spark came into them suddenly and I felt them glare in my direction. A kind of…Yes, it was like hatred.

But it lasted only a moment.

Mr. Kubodera raised his right hand once more and placed the blood-spattered knife against his neck, cutting even deeper.

Bright red blood sprayed without end.

The flesh in the jugular area of his neck was pretty much severed and his head flopped backward. The gaping wound in his neck looked like the wide-open mouth of some inexplicable creature. Still, the knife in Mr. Kubodera’s right hand never fell, even as his body shuddered. But then…finally.

He fell.

He started to roll off the teacher’s platform.

And then he stopped moving.

The room had fallen pristinely silent at this grotesque spectacle. One second later and the balance had tipped. A muddle of voices began to fill the room in a cresting flood. At that moment, I rose from my seat abstractedly and walked forward to a spot where I could get a good look at Mr. Kubodera’s collapsed body.

Tomohiko Kazami was at a desk in the very front row, shaking so badly I could practically hear his seat rattling. There was a spray of blood across the lenses of his glasses, but he neither moved to wipe it away nor to leave his desk. Beside him, a girl had at least managed to move from her seat, but she had sunk immediately to the floor. There was another girl curled over her desk, clutching her head in her hands, who was making a loud, unending shriek. And a boy on all fours making strangled gagging noises…

…Just then.

The door on my right at the front of the classroom banged opened and someone ran in.

Why is he here?
I couldn’t restrain my surprise. Dressed all in black and his hair as straw-like as ever…It was the librarian, Mr. Chibiki.

“All of you, out of the room!”

Mr. Chibiki must have decided it was too late to mount a rescue as soon as he saw Mr. Kubodera’s bloody, crumpled form. He never moved toward the fallen man.

“Just get out of here! Quickly, now!” he ordered the students in a loud voice. Then, turning back to the door he’d come through, he called out, “Ms. Mikami!”

I saw her standing out in the hallway, peering in with a terrified expression.

“Ms. Mikami! I need you to call the police and an ambulance immediately! Please!”

“R-right.”

“Is anyone hurt?”

Mr. Chibiki turned to address the students fleeing the room.

“It seems not. I want anyone who feels ill or who’s starting to feel worse to speak up. Don’t try to hide it. We’ll get you to the nurse’s office right away.”

Next his gaze locked onto me.

“Ah, Sakakibara. Are you…?”

“I’m…fine.” I clenched my stomach tightly and nodded at him. “Really, I’m fine.”

“Let’s get out of here, Sakakibara.”

A voice came out of nowhere from behind my back.
Mei
, I realized immediately.

I turned around and saw that her face was paler than usual. Of course such a random event would upset her. Of course it would, but still…

The body of Mr. Kubodera lay collapsed on the floor, no longer even twitching. As she looked down at him, something about her gaze was reminiscent of the way she looked at the legion of dolls at “Twilight of Yomi”…

“…I guess it didn’t work.” Mei spoke in a whisper. “Even when they upped the number of people ‘not there,’ it didn’t help after all.”

“…I dunno.”

“You two need to leave, too. Go on.”

Mr. Chibiki shepherded us gently out of the classroom, where our eyes met those of several students who’d gone out into the hall ahead of us. Izumi Akazawa, the girl who’d become class representative after Yukari Sakuragi’s death, was there with her entourage around her.

Their faces were whiter than white, and yet as one they glared harshly at me and at Mei. They never said anything. But…

This is your fault.

I felt as if they might hurl the accusation at us any minute.

They said Mr. Kubodera’s behavior had been suspicious all that morning.

He’d been close-lipped the entire time he was in the teachers’ office and hadn’t offered the slightest reaction to anyone’s greetings. They said he’d looked deeply distracted by something, that he looked like a zombie…

Apparently Mr. Chibiki had run into Mr. Kubodera on the street on their way into school. The two had engaged in the briefest of conversations, and Mr. Chibiki said Mr. Kubodera’s behavior at the time was very strange—dangerous, even.

He had offered a refrain of “I’m so tired” and “I’m worn out” in a genuinely pained voice, and had feebly appealed to Mr. Chibiki that “I don’t know what to do”…

He had also apparently told Mr. Chibiki, “You understand, at least.” Mr. Kubodera had known that Mr. Chibiki was once a social studies teacher at North Yomi, and was also once in charge of third-year Class 3. And then when they parted ways, Mr. Kubodera had said something to Mr. Chibiki in a voice that was barely audible. “I’ll need your help when this is over.”

Of course, that had nagged at Mr. Chibiki. How could it not? That was how Mr. Chibiki described it later.

That’s why he’d come to the third floor of Building C during the short homeroom: to see how things were going. And when he’d gotten there, he’d heard the screams and weeping of the students in Class 3…

By the time the police and the ambulance crew arrived, Mr. Kubodera had long since passed. They discovered that the knife he’d used was a carving knife he’d brought from home.

“Apparently when the police went to search his home, they found something terrible.”

This, too, was information that Mr. Chibiki shared with us later on. He said he’d gotten lots of information out of the police officer who’d come to question him.

“Mr. Kubodera was single and had been living with his mother. She was quite elderly and some years ago she’d suffered a stroke. She’d been largely bedridden since then. Mr. Kubodera wasn’t the sort of person who discussed private details of his life, so very few of his colleagues knew his family situation…

“But his mother. When the police went to his home, they said she had passed away in the bed where she spent her days. Not only that—”

Suffocated by a pillow pressed over her face. An obvious murder. That’s what they’d found.

She had died late at night on Sunday the 12th or before dawn on Monday the 13th. They were saying that the odds were stacked toward Mr. Kubodera being the person who’d held the pillow over her face and killed her…

“It must have been caretaker’s exhaustion, as they say. He was driven into a mental state that was beyond his capacity to escape, and he wound up murdering his elderly mother. But there were so many options he could have chosen to pursue after that. He could have turned himself in, or he could have tried to hide what he’d done. Or he might have thrown his life away and fled. But in the end, he chose to wait for morning to come, then went to school and deliberately killed himself in front of you all.

“What do you think of his choice? Can you simply write it off as the act of a madman?”

“So you’re saying this is another incident that’s part of the ‘phenomenon’?” When the words came out of me just then, they sounded completely natural. “That Mr. Kubodera was, I dunno—that normally he would have done it without stirring things up so much. So he was dragged into dying like that?”

“I think that interpretation is the correct one in this case. Though of course I have no way to prove it,” Mr. Chibiki said with frustration, scratching fiercely at his long, disheveled hair. “Still, considering all the circumstances at play, it’s quite lucky that none of the students in the classroom were hurt during the episode.”

We were in the secondary library. It was after school on Tuesday, the day after the incident. Mei was with me, but right now she was basically a stone and said pretty much nothing.

“Either way, this means it didn’t work.” I lowered my voice to spit out the words that had come too late. “Mr. Kubodera and his mother, since she was a family member
in range
. The two of them wound up being the ‘deaths of July,’ didn’t they?”

“…Yes.”

“So in the end, this new ‘strategy’ of having two people be ‘not there’ was a bust. It didn’t change anything. So the ‘disaster’ that’s started really won’t stop—we really
can’t
stop it?”

“Unfortunately, it seems not…”

With a dismal feeling, my gaze fled from the dim room to the world outside the windows. I caught glimpses of blue sky entering in the wake of the rainy season, the color almost disgustingly free of gloom.

The “disasters” for this year hadn’t stopped.

The torrent of blood spewing from Mr. Kubodera’s neck. The color of it, even now, painted the sky a rich red color. The ghoulish image bubbled up out of nowhere and I closed my eyes tightly, reflexively.

The “disasters” hadn’t stopped.

People were going to keep dying.

I started to have a lot of bad dreams.

I don’t remember the details very clearly, so I don’t know if it was exactly the same dream every time. But they all had a lot of the same people in them, either Mr. Kubodera, who had just died, or Yukari Sakuragi, who’d died in May after falling down the stairs, or Ms. Mizuno, who’d died in an elevator accident at the hospital in June. A couple of my classmates who were still alive would show up, too, like Izumi Akazawa or Tomohiko Kazami…

Mr. Kubodera would glare at me, his face spattered with blood and both eyes flashing with an intense hatred. Then he would start to speak.

He would proclaim,
It’s your fault.

Sakuragi would rise unsteadily to her feet and yank out the umbrella stabbed so deeply into her throat. Then she would turn to me and declare,
This is your fault.

Ms. Mizuno did the same thing. The doors to the elevator in the inpatient ward slid open, allowing her to drag herself out.

You did this, you know.

It’s your fault. Both of you.
This was the merciless condemnation launched from Akazawa’s lips. Following close on its heels, the same words came from the mouths of Kazami, Teshigawara, and Mochizuki.

Stop.

Please, stop
—I tried to shout, but no sound came out of me. I couldn’t speak.

You’re wrong. This isn’t my fault
—I wanted to deny it, but I…

…I just…

They’re right
—Somewhere inside myself, I agreed with them.
That’s why. That must be why I can’t say anything.

Because of me.

Because I came to this school.

Because I had interacted with Mei, the girl who was “not there.” I had violated the “decision” that was meant as a
talisman
to prevent the “disasters.” It didn’t matter how inevitable my actions had been.

That’s why…
Because of me, “the ‘disasters’ for this year” had acted on them. Because of me, they had met such senseless ends…

I would groan in my sleep until it got so hard to breathe that I woke up in the middle of the night. It happened several times a night.

I would kick off the blankets that had grown sticky with sweat, then take several deep breaths, alone in the pitch blackness…

If my lung collapsed again, this time there would be no going back, for sure. The thought struck deep.

“Well, whatcha gonna do? Nothing you could have done about it. Don’t get so down, Sakaki. You can blame yourself and drag yourself down in the dumps all you want, but it’s not gonna change anything.”

After Mr. Kubodera’s suicide, the first person to start talking to me was—who else?—Teshigawara. He’d gone gung ho back to being the “bleached airhead,” in line with the image I’d had of him since the very beginning when I transferred in. He was casually striking up conversations with me about everything under the sun. Despite how completely he’d been ignoring me until just a few days ago…

When I expressed some understandable sarcasm on that point, he replied, “That hurt me, too, dude. All of a sudden we had to start snubbing you, and I couldn’t tell you what was going on. How terrible is that?”

Teshigawara gave a bubbling laugh, but his face turned instantly serious.

“You know the situation now, right?” he checked, just to be sure, apparently. “You said that Chibiki guy in the secondary library told you most of the details, right? Then you get it, don’t you, Sakaki?”

“Yeah, I totally get it.” I turned my eyes from his face and repeated in a low voice, “I get it,” then said, “I don’t think you had a choice…I mean, what else could you guys have done? I get it.”

Since the attempt at increasing the number of kids “not there” to two hadn’t had any effect, there was no need for everyone to keep it going. There was nothing to be gained by continuing to ignore Mei and me. So…

It wasn’t just me: there was a transformation in the way everyone in class behaved toward Mei, too, demarcated by Mr. Kubodera’s death. Not as if they had discussed the issue and decided to do it. I thought it was probably a more gradual, invisible change.

For example, when this happened—when I was talking to Teshigawara during lunch on Thursday—Mei was at my side. And Teshigawara acted
as if she really existed
, and even addressed one or two comments to her himself.

Teshigawara wasn’t the only one. In a reversal of the way everyone had acted up until last week, they had stopped treating Mei as if she were “not there.”

However, Mei’s personality was not exactly what you would call social, so it was nothing more than a subtle change, one you wouldn’t even notice unless you were deliberately looking for it. But still, the news would get around soon and teachers would probably start calling her name in class and calling on her for answers.

Mei Misaki, being treated by all those around her as someone “there.”

Of course this was the way things should have been all along. But I actually found it oddly unsettling to see people acting that way…

The third-year Class 3 classroom on the third floor of Building C had been put off-limits immediately as the scene of a violent death. The class wound up being hastily moved to an empty room in Building B (the ancient desk and chair Mei had been using were left in Building C). And as a solution for the absence of the head teacher, the assistant teacher, Ms. Mikami, would obviously take the position of “substitute head teacher” for the time being, except…

In the room we’d switched to in Building B, the empty seats were strikingly obvious. Maybe that was to be expected. More than half of the class had gone home early the day of the incident—totally understandable. The day after, and the day after that, the number of students who used Mr. Kubodera’s death as a reason to stay home from school had risen quite high.

“I mean, sure, I guess.”

That was Teshigawara’s comment on the situation.

“No one’s gonna see something horrible like that and not be affected. I guess anyone with normal nerves probably wouldn’t want to come back for a while. If we were still in that room, I’d be gone too, no question.”

“Kazami’s been out this whole time.”

“That guy’s been wimpier than anyone else I know, ever since he was a kid. Plus he was in the very front seat. I’m shocked he didn’t pass out, actually.”

Teshigawara spoke bluntly, but at root it really was affection for his “childhood friend” that he’d be “better off without.” With the next breath, he added, “I tried calling him last night, and he actually sounded happy. I couldn’t believe it. He said he’ll be here tomorrow.”

“I wonder if some people just aren’t going to come back until after summer break. It’s only a couple more days, after all.”

Without a second of hesitation, Teshigawara replied, “No way they’re coming back.”

Mei had been listening to our conversation in silence, but at that, she murmured, “Some people might have even left town by now.”

“Left town?”

Teshigawara’s face looked kind of shocked, and Mei gave a slight nod. “Yup. I hear there are plenty of people who do it every year. They get out of Yomiyama for summer break.”

“Because the danger doesn’t reach outside Yomiyama, you mean? I wonder if that’s true.”

“According to Mr. Chibiki, there’s a pretty good possibility that it is, anyway.”

“Hm-m-m. So then, what? The kids who booked it told their families what’s going on?”

“Maybe so. But there’s that taboo against talking about this stuff, even with your family, so…It’s a tough problem.”

“Hm-m-m.”

The bridge of Teshigawara’s nose filled with wrinkles, then he spat, “I don’t even know.” Then he turned to look at Mei again and said, “Anyway, you really are a weird one, Misaki. You’re wrapped up in this, too, but you act all cool about it, like it’s someone else’s problem.”

“Do I?”

“It almost makes me think you’re…” Teshigawara trailed off for a few beats there, but in the end he went on in a tone of indifference that sounded pretty deliberate. “Maybe underneath it all, you’re the ‘extra person’ for this year.”

“Me?” A shadow of a smile went through her right eye, the one unobscured by her eye patch. “I don’t think I am, anyway.”

“…Figured.”

“Yeah…But you know, they say the ‘extra person’ hiding in the class doesn’t even know that they’re ‘the casualty.’ So maybe…”

Mei was joking about it now, but when the same topic had come up at her house before, I remembered her flatly telling me something different.

I know that I’m not “the casualty.”

Why was that? How had she been able to say that with such assurance?

The question bugged me.

“But it could in fact be you, Teshigawara,” Mei said with another faint smile. “What do you think?”

“M-me?” Teshigawara reeled, his eyes wide, and he pointed at the tip of his nose. “No way…C’mon, quit joking around.”

“Are you sure there’s ‘no way’?”

“Hey, I’m alive! I’ve got an incredibly healthy appetite for food and for worldly possessions, and I don’t have a clue what I could have ever died from. I’m not trying to brag, but I’ve got super-vivid memories of my whole life, ever since I was a kid.”

Watching Teshigawara’s frantic response, I couldn’t help letting a laugh burst out of me. And yet…

That didn’t mean I was denying the possibility that he could in fact be the “extra person” for this year. Inside, I was working hard to think it over calmly.

Who is “the casualty”…?

Conscious all the time that the question written on Mei’s desk was even more crucial now.

Of course, Mr. Kubodera’s sudden death became a topic of conversation at my grandparents’ house in Koike.

Ever since May, my grandmother seemed to always respond to the continuing deaths of people linked to third-year Class 3 by uttering “How frightening” in an effusive loop. When I gave her a quick background on Mr. Kubodera’s suicide, she’d switched to a loop of “How terribly sad.” As usual, I didn’t know how much of the discussion my grandfather had really understood. Only that whenever he heard the words “death” or “died,” he reacted acutely every time. Then he would say, like he had before, “I don’t want to go to any more funerals.” Or he would suddenly tear up or start weeping quietly…That was how it went.

As for Reiko, she was considerate enough to say, “It must have been such a shock for all of you,” but she was consistently tight-lipped about the incident. I suppose that was to be expected, really. I had gotten the message on that, but…

“You can’t remember anything from fifteen years ago?”

I couldn’t keep myself from asking the question yet again, after all.

“That year you were a third-year in middle school, you said that the ‘disasters’ had started, and then they stopped partway through the year. Why? What stopped them? Don’t you remember?”

No matter how often I asked, however, Reiko would only hang her head morosely.

“You said something happened during summer break. So what was it?”

“…That’s a good question.” Reiko propped a hand under one cheek and sank into thought. Then, finally, her expression touched by insecurity, she murmured, as if to herself, “That summer…Ritsuko died. But that means staying shut up in the house would have been worse…Right, so I went to the camp on Yomiyama…”

“A camp?”

This was the first I’d heard of it. Unconsciously, I leaned forward.

“You guys had that? Camping over summer break? Like a school trip to the mountains?”

“It wasn’t as full-blown as that. It was just our class, I think.”

“What’s ‘the camp on Yomiyama’?”

“I…”

Reiko struggled for an answer. My grandmother had been off to one side, listening to our conversation, but just then she spoke up. “She means
Mount Yomi
, I’m sure.”

“…What?”

“Yomiyama was originally the name of a mountain. The mountain came first, and then the town, so the town took its name from the mountain.”

Ah…That reminded me—there was a mountain to the north of the town actually called Yomiyama. I remembered hearing about that from Reiko herself. Right—that time she’d come to visit me while I was hospitalized, back in April.

“Do the people here call it that? ‘Mount Yomi’?”

“That’s right.” My grandmother nodded triumphantly. “When we were young, your grandpa and I would hike the mountain all the time. You can see the entire town from the summit, which is quite a lovely view.”

“Wow.” I turned my eyes back to Reiko. “So you had your camp during summer break at the mountain Yomiyama. A class trip just for third-year Class 3?”

“…Yeah.” Her face hadn’t lost its unease. Haltingly, she replied, “At the foot of the mountain, there’s this tiny building. The original owner used to go to North Yomi, but he donated it to the school a long time ago. So they used to use it sometimes for camping trips or whatever. When we went, the head teacher recruited people to go and…”

“What happened then?” I asked, piling on. “Did
something
happen
at the camp?”

“…I think so, maybe.” Reiko dropped her hand from her cheek and gave a slow shake of her head. “I just can’t remember. I’m pretty sure that something happened, but then to actually tell you what that was…”

“Oh.”

“What a cop-out, right? I’m sorry.”

Reiko let out a tortured sigh.

“No, it’s okay,” I murmured, unable to say aloud the words
Please don’t apologize.

I had all kinds of complex feelings about it, but when I saw Reiko suffering, my heart started to hurt. Plus…

After all, it had been fifteen long years ago, not to mention being an event linked to the “disasters.” Since she was directly affected by it, maybe it was inevitable that her memory had gotten so incredibly blurry.

It seemed pointless to keep questioning her right now. Although, slight as it was, I felt as though I’d gotten my hands on a clue.

I would just try asking Mr. Chibiki about it. And maybe get his opinion on it.