The Intrigues of Haruhi Suzumiya (15 page)

“Asahina, does Haruhi by any chance make us dig beneath this rock?”

“Yes, that’s right. Although the only ones digging were you and Koizumi.”

And she’d said we didn’t find anything. Was that true? I asked.

“It’s true,” she said, her eyes downcast. “We didn’t find any treasure…”

I heaved a sigh and dusted the filthy palms of my hands off against each other.

So what was I even doing? But this wasn’t the time to ask. Not even Asahina had understood the purpose of our prank last night, or the man we’d played it on. The only one who knew for certain was Asahina the Elder. I’d have to ask her. I wasn’t gonna allow this kind of unilateral communication again.

I gazed at the rock I’d just erected and realized another unnatural thing. Since it had been partially buried for so long, one side of it was dirty and covered with soil. Anyone could tell at a glance it had recently been moved from somewhere else.

“And the ground there too.”

The spot where the stone had lain was now exposed, the crater of black soil obvious.

“What did it look like when you got here?” I asked.

Asahina made a face of concentration as she thought back. “Hmmm, nobody said anything, so I didn’t really notice. I guess all Suzumiya cared about was digging holes…”

In which case, we could’ve just left it be, but I figured we might as well make a bit of an effort.

Asahina and I gathered up dried grass and ivy twigs and scattered them over the crater left behind by the now-moved rock, tamping them down with our feet. We also brushed off the soil that clung to the once-buried side of the rock. It wasn’t perfect—the difference between the two sides of the stone, one of which had weathered years’ worth of changing seasons while the other was buried in the earth—was too great.

We did our best, but the sky was getting dark, so it was all we could do to finish up at a convenient stopping point. I wasn’t sure how hard the work actually was, but it was hard enough.

“Let’s go home, Asahina.”

I led the way going down. It was a good thing I’d brought a flashlight. The ancients feared and revered the forest’s darkness—plus they say the descent takes more of a toll on your body than the ascent does.

Asahina stumbled several times, clinging to my back for support, and by the time we reached the foot of the mountain, it was nighttime proper. Just then—

“Oh!” said Asahina, looking skyward. “Rain!”

Within five minutes, the occasional drops had turned to a gentle rain.

With Asahina on the back, I rode my bike as fast as I could to Tsuruya’s house. It was mostly downhill, which made pedaling easier. It took us less than half the time it took to get to the mountain and only a third the effort.

As we arrived through the drizzle, there was someone waiting for us.

“Hey there! Welcome back!” Tsuruya was wearing the same traditional clothing as yesterday, carrying an umbrella in one hand as she smiled cheerfully and opened the gate for us. “Where’d you guys get off to? Nah, never mind! I’m sure you had your reasons! Tsuru-nyan hears no evil and speaks no evil! She does see you, though. Wait—Miku—I mean, Michiru! You’re super dirty! Let’s get you into the bath, hmm?” Tsuruya said in her usual rapid-fire way. “You must be freezing! C’mon, into the bath with you! We’ll take one together! You too, Kyon! I’ll wash your back for you. We’ve even got a traditional cypress bath!”

I would’ve cried tears of gratitude at the proposal, but I could tell from her face that Tsuruya was only joking. Haruhi would say things she really meant while sounding like she was kidding, but Tsuruya would crack jokes with a straight face.

“I’ll just head home. You take care of Asahina—Michiru, I mean.”

I turned to leave, but Tsuruya stopped me. “Hang on just a sec.”

She held the umbrella over me, then produced from the breast pocket of her traditional jacket a piece of paper that had been rolled up and tied with twine.

“Haru-nyan asked for this. Would you give it to her, Kyon?”

She looked completely serious. The thick, aging parchment was partially bug-eaten in places, looking every inch like the kind of paper that would have a map leading to buried treasure on it.

“What’s this?”

“A treasure map!” Tsuruya answered quickly, grinning. “I found it a while ago poking around in the old storehouse. I figured why not give it to Haru-nyan, but then I forgot all about it.”

Was it okay to just give it to Haruhi? I asked. I mean, it was a
treasure
map.

“Sure, why not? It’ll be a pain to go all the way out there and dig it up. If you find anything, just kick me back ten percent. One of our ancestors was the one who buried it, see, and according to family records, he was a crazy old geezer who loved pranks. I bet he thought he’d get his descendants good! There’s either nothing there or something totally pointless.”

Surely it would be the former.

I took the rolled-up parchment as respectfully as I could manage, but Tsuruya just flippantly handed it over, so there was only so much graciousness I could show.

“Make sure you give it to Haru-nyan, ’kay?” Tsuruya gave a gleeful smile, one eye closed, while a stiff Asahina looked back and forth between the supposed treasure map and me, hastily looking down when she noticed my gaze. What was going on? I wondered. Was there really classified information regarding the treasure hunt? I knew she was sad about being sent back in time with no idea why, but she seemed to have some hang-up about the treasure hunt as well.

“Here, Kyon, I’ll let you borrow the umbrella. Take care on your way home! Bye!”

Tsuruya waved good-bye, and I saw Asahina give a small wave herself before the two disappeared behind the closing gate.

I stood there in the rain, umbrella in one hand, ancient scroll in the other.

A terrible loneliness struck me hard enough that I wanted to break in and help myself to a bath. Was Tsuruya having this effect on me? When you were with someone that cheerful, then left her side, it was like a festival had ended. She was like a one-woman carnival.

“Damn, it’s cold out here.”

I rested the umbrella over my shoulder and started walking my bike.

Haruhi, Asahina, even Nagato—they could all make me crazy.

“Crap, I’m really hungry.”

I didn’t see Koizumi on my way back, even though for once I wouldn’t have minded talking to him.

The next morning, four days after the other Asahina had appeared in the broom closet, the previous day’s rainclouds were quickly moving east, and the clear sky facilitated some serious radiative cooling.

The uphill hike to school helped warm me a bit, but I knew that half an hour in my unheated classroom would make the sweat I’d worked up only chill me further.

I crossed the front grounds and got to the school entryway, then took a deep breath before opening my shoe locker. I knew that the messages from the future wouldn’t stop with the last one, and thus I expected there to be another one this morning, and who knew what I’d be ordered to do this time. But my hesitation was pointless, since after all, I had to get my school slippers.

And indeed, there was a letter.

In fact, there were three.

“C’mon, Asahina, you’ve gotta be kidding me…”

They were even numbered. Each envelope had a number carefully handwritten on it: #3, #4, and #6. Three, four, and… six?

“So were the two earlier ones number one and number two? Guess that makes the first one number zero.”

But why did they jump from four to six? What happened to five? Had she written the wrong number?

I shoved them in my pocket and headed directly for the bathroom, which had by this time become routine.

I opened the envelopes in ascending order.

There wasn’t much time before the bell would ring, so I scanned them quickly, then headed out of the restroom. On the way out, I caught a glimpse of my own face in the mirror and saw that I looked as confused as I felt.

What was Asahina the Elder trying to get us all to do? And while I’m on the subject, I wouldn’t even ask what the point was of sending a completely random man to the hospital, then moving a rock from one place to another. I really wanted to know, though.

I headed to my classroom, filled with half-formed misgivings, where a strangely agitated individual was waiting for me.

“Kyon!”

It was Haruhi who called out my strange nickname and came running over—a girl who, until yesterday, had been strangely melancholy.

“I heard all about it; hurry up and show it to me!”

Just as I was momentarily wondering what the insanely grinning Haruhi was talking about, she interrupted.

“Don’t tell me you forgot it. I’m talking about the thing you got from Tsuruya! You know, the super-awesome one.”

I knew she was mercurial, but surely even Haruhi’s mood swings had a limit. What had happened to the gloomy, almost sick-seeming girl of yesterday? Don’t tell me she’d been replaced by an impostor, I told her.

“Don’t be stupid. I’m always me, and there’s only one me in the whole world!” replied Haruhi with a triumphant smile. “Anyway! C’mon, show it to me! If you forgot it, I’m gonna make you sprint home to get it.”

I just bet she would. Our idle classmates were starting to stare at us. I told her that I tried to live as unobtrusively as I could.

“A goal that boring should be written down on a paper airplane and launched off the roof. Living unobtrusively or conspicuously—none of that is relevant. If you want to talk about your life, do it three seconds before you die!”

I didn’t want to live a life that could be explained in three seconds, but in any case, I helplessly—well, not quite
helplessly
—got the ancient scroll Tsuruya had given me out of my bag, whereupon it was immediately snatched out of my hand. The owner of the hand that had done the snatching undid the string that held it closed, and then spoke to me in a lowered voice.

“Hey, did you look at this?”

“No, not yet.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, I didn’t particularly want to.”

“Even though it’s a treasure map? That doesn’t excite you a little bit?”

I already knew there wasn’t even one scrap of treasure, so the only phrase that came to mind here was “pointless waste of effort,” so tell me, please, how I was supposed to get excited about that? Thus, I’d tossed Tsuruya’s terrible souvenir into my bag and hadn’t given it a second glance. I’d had other things to worry about, and I still did. To be perfectly honest, I was thinking about trying to talk Haruhi out of this whole treasure-hunting business, but she was already unrolling the scroll.

“Honestly, I don’t know what Tsuruya was thinking either—giving this thing to you, when she should’ve just given it straight to me! I guess it’s nice to get it first thing in the morning, but I was gonna make it a surprise after school…”

She seemed pleased despite her muttering, whirling around and returning to her seat. Using her pencil case and textbooks as paperweights, she spread the parchment out on her desk and absorbed herself in studying it.

I gave up and sat back down in my own seat, whereupon a new question occurred to me.

“Hey, Haruhi.”

“What?” came her quick reply.

“When did you find out Tsuruya had given me that thing?”

“Last night. I got a phone call from her,” Haruhi said without
looking up. “You took Shamisen for a walk, right? Tsuruya spotted you going past her house, and that’s when she gave it to you, she said. I guess Shamisen’s feeling better. Good for him.”

I could only purse my lips at Tsuruya’s tale. I’d like to see the person who’d take a
cat
for a walk on a freezing, rainy night like that. There was something wrong with Haruhi if she really believed that.

She didn’t seem to notice the silence that indicated my exasperation, her eyes shining like they had at Setsubun. “Take a look at this, Kyon! This is
definitely
a treasure map. It says so right here!”

I looked down at Haruhi’s desk.

There on the sheet of parchment (which really belonged in a museum) was a picture and a few lines of text, along with the name of the writer. The picture was clear enough. It was done in simple brushstrokes but had skillfully captured the shape of the mountain. The writing was done in squiggly phonetic characters—and since my own classical literature textbook frequently seemed like alien writing to me, I didn’t have a prayer of reading this.

Haruhi translated for me.

“ ‘Upon this mountain is buried something rare. Those of my descendants who would seek it, dig ye here.’ ”

After that came the writer’s name.

“ ‘Fusauemon Tsuruya, 1702, Fifteenth Year of the Genroku Era.’ ”

I didn’t know how many generations back
this
Tsuruya was, but he’d sure left quite a thing behind. I mean, why’d he need to bury it? I wondered if it was just as Tsuruya had said, a prank reaching across time. If not, somebody would’ve dug it up in the centuries between the Genroku period and the modern era.

“So where on the mountain is it buried?” I asked, disinterested.

Haruhi traced her finger over the ink drawing. “It doesn’t say. There’s no landmark or marker. All it says is that it’s somewhere on this mountain. But that’s okay.” Her energetic gaze assaulted
me. “We’ll just start digging, and eventually we’ll come to it or run out of spots to dig! It’ll be Operation Steamroller!”

So who was this “we” she was talking about? Was she just going to get the townsfolk to volunteer? I asked.

“Of course not, stupid.” Haruhi rolled the map back up and retied the twine, placing it in her desk. “We’ll just do it ourselves, obviously. You don’t want your share of the treasure to be any smaller, right?”

If my “share” were actually going to be smaller, I wouldn’t have wanted that, but a smaller share of nothing was still nothing. The bell interrupted my internal muttering, and our homeroom teacher, Mr. Okabe, entered the classroom.

“We’re meeting after school in the clubroom, got it?” said Ha-ruhi, poking me in the back with her mechanical pencil. “And keep this a secret. I want to surprise everybody. And you better act surprised too. Like you just heard about this for the first time. Seriously, I can’t believe Tsuruya spilled the beans like that…”