Editing Phenomeno:Case 08 (section)

===3.===





“Ahh, Nagito-kun.”

Yukihito Kurimoto-kun was there alone on the emergency stairs of the special lab building. He smiled cheerfully and raised his hand as he greeted me.

“...Hey.”

“You don’t look well. Are you alright?”

“I guess.”

It was a lie. To tell the truth, my nausea and shivering wouldn’t stop.

I didn't really understand what had just occurred in the school grounds.

“It seems Nee-san still hasn’t arrived.”

Yukihito-kun muttered and stared at the dense area that was behind the special lab building.

I'm still not sure when the conversation ended with the creepy tall girl in the schoolyard who tossed me around like I was in a storm. At any rate, I snapped back to reality when I heard a familiar ringing sound. It was my cell phone, notifying me of an incoming text message from Krishna-san. 

With that, I finally realized there was no one around me. The girl who, up until then, had been whispering incomprehensible things to me was nowhere to be seen.

Krishna-san’s message was brief:

《There’s a few things I want to report. Wait for me at the emergency staircase of the special lab building.》

After reading her message, I staggered my way here. 

I sat down in silence on the emergency stairs, when Yukihito-kun began to speak:

“I didn’t really find any leads in the staff room. I tried asking a teacher I’m on good terms with in a roundabout way but it seems they still have no idea about Miturugi-san’s whereabouts. I got the impression that they weren't taking the search very seriously.”

“Is that so?”


“Also, I realized something while I was looking at the pictures we took in the classroom, she normally doesn't seem to have anything in her bag. In short, she doesn’t have any problems leaving her bags here before going home. That’s why it’s not farfetched to think that Mitsurugi-san went home, but... “

“Yeah, right.”

I replied in a stupor, and picked up a cigarette butt that lay at my feet. 

I see, this place is certainly out of sight. It was completely cut off from the main school building, and would probably be a place where delinquents would often gather. In front of the stairs was the backyard of the special lab building, and the only thing beyond the unkempt looking hedge was an old fence. I flicked the cigarette butt with my finger and let out a sigh.

“Nagito-san, is something the matter?”

“Ah, no.”

Up until now, I hadn't been seriously concerned about Yoishi’s disappearance. It wasn’t my place to lay blame on the teachers. In fact, my pride in having dealt with her on a different level than the teachers ended up making me accept that her disappearance was a normal thing. The idea of Yoishi wandering into a place where people definitely shouldn’t go to -- I was arrogant enough to think that there was no one in the world who would more naturally accept that than me. But now, with the emergence of the girl named ‘Takamura’, a dark cloud slowly enshrouds itself over my head.

--Ayana Takamura.

Krishna-san’s senpai, who disappeared suddenly five years ago.

A crazy girl who could see ghosts and left behind countless taboo words on campus.

Was that Takamura, in fact Ayana Takamura? No, there’s no denying it. So, is that it, then? Have I really become able to see ghosts? Have I really have stepped into the world Yoishi and Sako reside in?

『Does the underground place exist, or not?』

『Did you see it, too?』

『That thing in the clock tower.』


That girl’s words were completely befuddling. And because they were befuddling, they scared me. It felt as if she was completely oblivious to my emotions, my position, and my very existence. There was an overwhelming sense of dread, as if a higher biological being was looking down on an insect.

And the last thing she said—

『She… is no longer alive.』

Did that mean that Yoishi was already dead? Did Yoishi, having seen that thing inside the clock tower, end up disappearing because of that? There were too many things I didn’t know, there was too little information to go on – my head couldn’t process it at all. 

Thereupon, the afternoon bell rang out loudly.

“…Huh?”

--That’s right, I thought I heard a school bell on the way here. And with that, I was finally brought back to my senses.

“Yukihito-kun, will it be alright if you don’t attend your classes?”

“That's right…”

Yukihito-kun smiled as if it didn’t concern him, and simply said:

“It’s more interesting to be present here right now.”

But – I shook my head vigorously, and retorted straight away:

“Just stop.”

“…”

“It would be better if you don’t involve yourself in this incident any more than you already have. And don't get involved with Yoishi anymore.”

Yukihito-kun looked straight at me with a calm and collected expression – Argh, I ruffled my hair. Wasn’t that exactly what Krishna-san had been telling me, over and over again? But I wound up ignoring her anyway. I knew better than anyone that unless you realized the seriousness of involving yourself with the world beyond, such words would not have a shred of persuasive power.

“No, actually, let me start off by saying that Yoishi is not a bad person. But, because of some circumstances, she’s different from us. The place she stands and the things she sees, are completely different. To involve yourself with her is to involve yourself with the things she sees.”

“By that, do you mean to say ghosts?”

Being asked in return, I suddenly lost my tongue. I was hesitant to say anything about ghosts to an innocent high school freshman. Aside from the embarrassment of being thought of as a denpa college student, the existence of ghosts itself was still too vague in my mind. I couldn’t definitively explain their existence in certain terms, so I kept silent, when Yukihito-kun asked me:

“Nagito-san, what’s the relationship between you and Mitsurugi-san?”

“Relationship?”

“I mean, the girl who’s cut off from everyone else in class, I can’t imagine that she would be involved with a university student like you in so many ways, Nagito-san.”

“Well, it’s not that I’m involved, it’s more like I ended up becoming involved…. It's not like we're particularly close. I mean, it’s only recently that I got her contact info.”

Saying that out loud, I suddenly remembered. 

Since I’d learned of Yoishi’s disappearance, I’d been intermittently trying to call her, but I couldn’t get through to her phone.

“Ah, wait a minute.”

I took out my phone and tried calling Yoishi again. 

After it rang for several seconds, I got the intercept message.

The one that says the number you’re trying to reach is out of range, or the phone is turned off. Clicking my tongue, I cut off the call, when I realized I had one voice mail. Huh? Even though there was no incoming call? I pondered as I quickly tried to call the voicemail center.

《…You have one message. The message was sent at 2:37 a.m.》

2 am? Why so late? 

--My thoughts were suddenly interrupted.

《…Hello.》

That nostalgic voice, as if it rang a bell, made me sit up straight.

I unintentionally ended up shouting “Yoishi?!” out loud, causing Yukihito-kun to lean in close as well.

But after that, I couldn't hear her clearly because her voice was muffled and too quiet. I could hear her mumbling something over the phone, but I couldn't make out what she was saying. I desperately pushed my ear against the phone, and covered my other ear with my free hand. I focused my complete and utter attention to Yoishi’s whispering voice.

《I am….ere.. But…. what should… *Zaza* ... I think…”》

Did the lines get crossed up somewhere? The static was crazy.

“Hey, where are you right now? Are you still alive?”

Completely unable to understand her, I stupidly tried asking the voicemail in a panic. 

And the last few words I barely managed to make out were--

《Don’t look for me.》

That was the last thing she said.

I immediately operated my phone and played it again from the beginning. But no matter how many times I listened, I couldn’t pick up anything else from the recording. The only clear line was at the end, ‘Don't look for me.’

“Was it really Mitsurugi-san?”

I saved the message and hung up, and nodded towards the worried looking Yukihito-kun.

I was sure of it now.

There was no room for doubt anymore. She was caught up in something. That creepy girl from earlier was also involved, and despite Yoishi being quite shrewd when it came to ghosts, the situation had become a little too much for her to handle. At any rate, she's trapped somewhere. The question was: where, exactly? And was there anything we could we do about it?

Thereupon, A voice suddenly called out to me: “Sorry to keep you waiting.”


I looked up to see Krishna-san standing there, carrying numerous old notebooks in both hands, looking somber as ever.

“What is that?”

Without answering Yukihito-kun’s inquiry, Krishna-san took a single, deep sigh.

“It’s about Yoishi, you’d better prepare yourself for the worst.”

“…Huh?”

“We might never see her again.”

“Nee-san, calm down.”

At Yukihito-kun's words, Krishna-san shouted back.

“How the hell can I calm down?! Of all the people – Of all the people, I can’t believe I'm going to have to deal with that person again… It's nothing but a nightmare.”

“By that person—do you really mean…?”

When I asked, Krishna-san nodded painfully, then with a thud, slammed down the stack of notebooks on the stairs.

“I don't even know where to begin - no, I have to tell you everything, but before that...”

Saying that, she sits down on the stairs a few steps below me and looks up at me.

“You said you met Yoishi a few times after you got back to Tokyo.”

“…Y…yes.”

“Where did you two meet? Or rather, where did you two go to?”

“…U…uhhhh.”

“I’m not going to get angry. The situation isn’t like that anymore. So be honest and tell me everything from the beginning.”

To that silent, but firm tone of voice, I nodded and told her everything.

About what happened with Yoishi at the ‘clock tower’. About the unknown presence I felt back then. And how, I was entrusted with my friend’s cat (or how I believed it to be my friend). How Yoishi had talked about there having been something inside the cat. How I picked up the strange note. How the guy who wrote it was already dead at the time, and how Sako asked me to look for the book called ‘Rororo’ in the library at night. How I saw countless somethings back then.

And furthermore --- how I’d recently been feeling someone’s gaze around me.

I somehow felt that gaze belonged to that girl I met just now, but for some reason, I couldn’t speak of that. The fact that the girl called herself ‘Takamura’ -- it was something I just couldn’t speak out loud. It was probably the last remaining defense instinct within me. I couldn’t help but feel that If I were to speak it out loud, that girl might appear right beside me once more.

After my long, long confession was finally over, Krishna-san let out a deep sigh and nodded.


“I see, so that’s what happened.”

For a while afterwards, Krishna-san held her breath in as if she were desperately trying to swallow something bitter. She seemed to be gathering a large amount of determination to speak, something I’d never seen her do before. Eventually, with a mutter, she began.

“Is a virgin birth possible?”

“…Huh?”

“…Eh?”

Yukihito-kun and I asked one after the other. Krishna-san proceeded to narrate quietly:

“The woman known as Mary of Nazareth became pregnant with Jesus, the Messiah, while still a virgin. There is little disagreement about this fact among Christians, who now number more than two billion in the world. But the question is, why did Mary have to be a virgin?”

“….Ermmm.”

I didn’t know where she was going with this, but I pulled out an answer from my half-assed knowledge.

“As I recall, Joseph and Mary were engaged, so until they were officially married, uh ...... their relationship, I think, was platonic.”

“That’s not it.” Krishna-san shook her head.

“Who in the modern world can comprehend the circumstances of a couple that lived more than two-thousand years ago? Why did Mary have to be a virgin? It’s because she had to give birth to Jesus Christ. Because she was the mother of the messiah, she had to be a virgin. Because the father of the grand messiah could not be a human. Well, let’s leave it at that. There are many opinions in comparative religions on this matter, but to go too deep into it would take us away from the subject. But you see, the problems that are happening in this school right now all started with Mary's virginity.”

I suddenly remembered.

---The Mary festival. Artificially creating a Mary—

“Could that be….”

“That’s right. In the past, there was a sect of the Marian faith that thought that in order to create a savior in this world again, it would be best to nurture a new Mary. And there are visible traces of that religious group's involvement in the founding of this school.”

Saying that Krishna-san picked up one of the notes at her feet and opened a page. She continued the story as she read aloud.

“To begin with, Mary of Nazareth was canonized as the holy mother in the Niceno- Constantinopolitan Creed of 381 A.D.<ref> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicene_Creed</ref>However, as Christian missionaries spread to various parts of the world, there was a period where the interpretation of Mary began to differ. Mary of Nazareth began to take on a type of divinity of her own as the woman who gave birth to Jesus. It is widely believed that the Virgin Mary was used to absorb the remaining mother-goddess worship in various parts of Europe, and this is where one of the Catholic branches, a sect involved in the founding of this school, was born. They devotedly believed, sometimes fanatically, that the divinity of Jesus was inherited from Mary, and that to incarnate the savior again, his mother had to be created first. Their influence gradually grew far and wide, until their beliefs were eventually labelled as heresy by the Vatican, causing their decline - What happened to them from there onwards is unknown. But the few surviving leaders came to this island country far away from Europe. It must have been a very convenient country for them. Japan was in the midst of the Meiji Restoration at the time, and was taking in a mixture of the good and the bad from the west.”

“Is that what that bastard Sako meant when he said this school was distorted since its foundation?” I groaned, and Yukihito-kun, who had been listening quietly until then, began to speak.

“Nee-san, what traces of their involvement in the founding of this school are you referring to?”

“The biographies of the people recorded as co-founders, the contents of the moral textbooks of the time, the wording of the founding texts that deviated from Vatican doctrine -- there are many things that could be considered traces of Marian worship, but… I suppose the easiest one to understand would be the school building.”

“…The school building?”

“If you were to look at the whole institute from overhead, you would quickly understand – Don’t you think it closely resembles something?”

“…Huh?”

Yukihito-kun and I looked at each other in confusion, which prompted Krishna-san to speak.

“Is it so difficult for boys to understand?”

Krishna-san took a notebook out of her pocket, and drew up a simple map of the school with a ball-point pen.

“See, do you get it now? The school gate is the vulva. The entrance forms the vagina. The main school building is the cervix, and the gym is the womb. If you look at it from a bird's eye view, it resembles a woman's body.”

“….Oh.”

“Indeed, nowhere in the official records of this school is there any mention of creating Mary as being the purpose behind this school’s creation. Now that the school has been remade as a co-educational school, the buildings have been rebuilt and expanded. But don't you notice when you walk around this school? Why is it so hard to get to where you want to go? Even to get to the special lab building which is only a few dozen meters away from the classrooms, you have to leave the school building and take a long detour around the flower beds.”

--That’s right, I just wanted to head to the infirmary from the main school building a while ago, but I ended up in a dead end three times. A distance of less than five meters in a straight line, and yet I was forced to take a detour many times. 

“That's because this entire building is designed to emphasize the spiritual path over the human one.”

“…Spiritual path?”

“Yes. In the first place, a spiritual path is not a path that shows humans the way to do things, but something that is naturally created in places where spirits can easily pass through. The spirits that pass through them vary from the souls of the dead to vengeful spirits, but generally, it’s said that once you pass through, you can never come back. But what would happen if we were to loop it? What if we were to deliberately construct a structure in which ghosts are naturally guided by water, mirrors, and other devices that have a certain effect on their behavior? What if all of the buildings were arranged to gather countless thoughts in one place, and the school was built solely to produce an artificial Mary with overwhelming divinity?”

--A fool.

A fool among fools, is what I thought from the bottom of my heart. No, people's foolishness was and still is, very much the same, and it might be that people have come this far after being disgusted by such stupidity, but this was indeed too much.

“At any rate…”

Krishna-san took off her glasses and started wiping them with a handkerchief while wearing a seemingly sad expression. 

“It's an extremely old story from the past. So I don't know what the truth is. But Takamura-senpai seemed to have realized the truth behind the structure of this institute. No, perhaps the truth behind the rumor never mattered to her. She tried to use the structure of this school building to achieve something that she wanted. As far as I can tell from this note, senpai reconnected the spiritual paths that had been cut off by the structural expansion and renovation, and laid out taboo words around the school that amplified negative thoughts to compensate for the enthusiasm and liveliness of the students.”

“That senpai called Takamura – she sounds a bit dangerous.”

Krishna-san smiled quietly and put her glasses back on in response to Yukihito-kun.

“That’s right. Now when I think on it, that’s exactly it. But back then, it was unthinkable. She was so dignified and beautiful, that you couldn’t even say it out loud if you had noticed something  -- Generally speaking, she had a strong presence, like she was the sun of the school. But that sun was also a pale blue moon at the same time. What she wrote in her letter: ‘Kotodama hide even more amazing potential.’ That line scares me. What was she trying to do? What was she trying to do with the unique structure of this school? In the past, Senpai once told me that she didn’t want to give birth to a flesh and blood child. Then, what exactly is a child that is not made of flesh and blood?”

“Krishna-san.” I interjected.

“How exactly does that relate to Yoishi’s disappearance?”

Krishna-san took out a particularly worn-out college notebook from the many different ones she had in response.

“This is the first draft for the quarterly magazine from the literature club, in other words, a rough draft. In it, there’s a description that follows as such: The clock tower forms the phallus, and the gymnasium forms the womb.”

“Phallus?”

The baby-faced occult site manager blushed in reply.

“D-don’t make me say it. It’s about the male genitals. In short, Senpai seemed to have regarded the structure of this school as a sexual union between a male and a female.”<ref> The word used here is 陰陽和合 [Inyouwagou] which literally refers to the harmony of yin and yang energies, but in this context has another meaning: a sexual union between a male and a female. </ref>

“No—just wait a minute. By clock tower, you mean that thing, right? The gym storage building in the number two sports ground?”

“That’s right, it’s the earthen storehouse you and Yoishi went to.” 

“Ah….”

“Having previously done research on it with the research division of Ikaigabuchi, I already knew that it was originally an earthen storehouse. I’d been asking the school authorities to stop using that building for a long time now, but to no avail. Even though the characteristic of that building more closely resembles an Edo period jail than an earthen storehouse.”

That means the ghost story Karasu-san mentioned surrounding the clock tower really was true after all. And the way Krishna-san was speaking about it, I guess it really was an S-ranked haunted place.

“I don’t know about it being an S-ranked place or anything.” Krishna-san spoke indignantly. “I just deleted it because it was safer not to go there. There's an elderly person in there who doesn't even realize that they’re dead. Supposedly a woman. Anyway, she has strong feelings of resentment against her son and his wife, and on the other hand, she strongly blames herself. She hopes to die quickly, and so, repeatedly tries to kill herself. There is a mechanism in the clock tower that can make a small hole appear on the clock face, where she sticks her face out. The minute hand passes through that hole at regular intervals. And precisely at that time, witnesses accounts state that blood rains down around the clock tower. Some also witness something resembling a head falling down.”

Thereupon, I asked timidly: “I- I felt that when I was there with Yoishi. And Yoishi said that there was one more person in there…”

“…Yes, that’s right. This is nothing more than conjecture: But let’s assume that other person was Senpai – let’s assume that there’s nothing meaningless in her actions. That brings to mind this sentence about the clock tower as a male organ. Senpai had noticed that the high school buildings of the Koumei Institute were made to look like female genitalia. She planned to gather countless thoughts in one place by planting taboo words there. That was foiled by Senpai’s disappearance, but - if there’s still something in this school that used to be Senpai, it wouldn’t be strange to assume that she's trying to continue with her plans. And Yoishi Mitsurugi – is a girl who can who can see all of that, all of those things that we can only imagine.”

“…You mean to tell me that... that Yoishi was trying to stop her, and something happened to her?”

“The only thing I can do is make logical deductions. Senpai was able to see things that people must never see. She saw everything, things that would have been better left unseen. Yoishi Mitsurugi is, no doubt, the same. The amount of information they have on this world is overwhelmingly different than us. Naturally, that means the foundation of their thinking is different. It’s not something a normal person can understand. That’s what leads me to believe that Yoishi must have seen the path Senpai ended up taking. It leads me to believe… that Yoishi might have ended up at the same place Senpai is.”

“Where…is that?”

I asked hoarsely, prompting Krishna-san to feebly shake her head.

“I don't think I'll ever know where that is.”

She proceeded to silently rephrase herself.

“No—I’m sure those living in this world aren’t supposed to know where that is.”

Those words echoed in the emergency staircase, and quietly faded away. 

While classes were in session, we were hidden in the shadows of another high school building. The unusualness of the situation seemed to embody the world that the girl named Ayana Takamura walks. And it seemed to ooze from the shadows created by the sun, depriving us of all words.

“—But you know.”

Eventually, Krishna-san slowly raised her head.

“Senpai once told me: 『Kurimoto-san, I might have been wrong. The real womb of this school might not be the gymnasium after all. 』”

“The real… womb?”

The air around me grew heavier.

“That’s right, Senpai said…『Does the place underground exist, or not?』”