Phenomeno:Case 03

1

I was in my dreams that day, too.

It was an afternoon right smack in the middle of summer, and I could hear cicadas somewhere. It was such a hot day that I could feel sweat dripping even if I were just sitting still, and I sat on the porch of my house, staring absent-mindedly at the garden.

At some point, the girl this house belonged to had taken a seat by my side.

She wore a white shirt and a drab skirt. I couldn't figure out what era this dream chose as its setting by what she wore. Still, I thought it couldn't be too far from my time. The girl couldn't see me in this dream.

That's why we didn't so much as exchange greetings. The girl stepped down from the porch, poured water into a small tub, and then sat next to me with her feet in the tub. She looked absolutely beautiful as she sat there using a small fan to send herself a breeze. Her black hair was carefully tied behind her, and the way she always had her lips closed expressed her upright personality.

The girl and I simply sat there in silence. The bamboo trees on the other side of the white wall swayed from the wind and made rustling sounds.

This world was peaceful, as it had no other sounds.

Or it should have been--

I had a feeling, which was closer to conviction.

A sad premonition that this dream wouldn't have a happy ending.

This one large Japanese-style building that was covered in a somewhat bluish tint.

At some point, I'd started seeing the dream of this house over and over again.

There were times I'd see a continuation, and other times that it seemed like time had skipped. But being a dream, I'd eventually awaken. That's why I'd slowly begun to enjoy these dreams -- but at the same time, I'd begun to feel sad whenever I awakened. Eventually, I'd come to realize that the emotions I felt were tied to the eventual sad conclusion that this mansion faced. I often saw the blue world stained red, the girl a bloody heap on the ground.

This was clearly a lucid dream. In other words, a dream that I am cognizant is a dream even as I dream.

Normally, dreams have unique attributes that make them stand out. lucid dreams in particular usually cause you to have an omnipotent feeling because you can cause anything to happen. However, this dream always gave me a nagging feeling of lack of control.

Why?

Shouldn't I be finding out?

And then I began investigating the nooks and crannies of this house.

The house in the dream had, roughly speaking, a cast of four. At the center was the girl, who smiled at everyone like a spring breeze, and there was also an old man of around fifty, presumably the lord of this house and probably her father. Furthermore, there there were two other men, who seemed to love the girl, and who also seemed to be her cousins. I also saw servants entering and leaving every so often, but we can probably put them aside. The house had a room roughly fifty tatamis large with a large pillar going right down its center that housed the houselord, and to its side was the girl's room, and then further than that were the rooms of her cousins. There was a kitchen, a parterre, a parlor, and a room for servants. I would answer yes it I were asked if it were large, but there were also plenty of houses around this size in the countryside from which I came. It didn't strike me as particularly uncommon, and so I simply wandered about.

Windows and sliding-screen doors held no meaning to me, given that I was like a ghost in this world. I could enter anywhere I wanted to if I wished. However, the more I roamed the house the more I had this bizarre and out-of-place feeling.

There was something wrong with this house.

I began to think that. And then I felt like I'd sensed this oddity before. And when I thought about it, I realized: it was like that house. The "house that grants wishes" that I'd stayed in when I first came to Tokyo. A house for the house that had been built by a heart-broken architect. It was the same sense of misplacement that I felt then.

That would mean.

That there should be a room that could not be entered via normal means. A space that had been deliberately sealed away.

I felt some misgiving, but I decided to look for that room, anyways.

However, I would always forget about that goal whenever the dream began, and only after gazing at the various events occurring in the house (such as an amusing conversation between the girl and her cousins, the houselord having trouble with the trees in the garden, such as when there's some trouble the servants need to take care of) do I eventually remember that room. And then I would begin searching, but time would run out and I would awaken. It was almost as if once I remembered the existence of that room, the administrator of the dream would kick me out.

Of course, in the end, it's still just a dream.

Not everything needed to make absolute sense. In particular, looking at the girl's spring-like smile makes me feel like such a room doesn't really matter at all. Was it wrong to just wish for the girl's happiness? Isn't it enough to just watch over the girl's beautiful mannerisms? There was always something nagging at me from the corner of my mind, but that's what I'd begun to think.

But, when I was rudely lying down on the porch and gazing at the girl pruning the trees in the garden, I heard a familiar voice from above.

"This house is quite amusing."

I looked, and for some reason, there was Mitsurugi Yoishi.

"Everything here was built to further seal off something that had already been sealed."

She whispered, as the dark eyes on her white face glimmered.

"You-"

I pointed at Yoishi as I spoke.

"You, what are you doing in my dream?"

I opened my eyes and found myself in a car.

I was in the back of a damn small light vehicle and about to be crushed by a number of bags.

I tried to straighten myself out and was shocked to find someone's fragrant, black hair right up at my nose.

I hurriedly pushed out with my hands, and that person lazily slid back over to the other side, like a rotten corpse.

"It- it was your fault!?"

I shouted, but Mitsurugi Yoishi kept sleeping as if she were dead.

"Shut up, Nagi-kun."

"You know, Fujieda should be a short drive off the highway."

"Don't blame me, the GPS told me to go this way."

I sighed. We'd done that exchange several times already in this tiny car.

Well, all of this is because I struggled with the first-semester exams at my university, and then I forgot to buy train tickets to get back home.

That was yesterday. After I finished my exams, I was sleeping like a log to make up for my sleep deprivation. And then my cell phone rang... my sister was on the other end.

"So, we're getting ready for the festival tomorrow. When're you getting here?"

My brain cells froze for a moment, and then pulled out some latent powers without any regard for how overheated they were from my exams, like a divine revelation, it came to me...

Krishna-san had certainly spoken about it, At the end of July, she was going to participate in the Ikaigabuchi offline meeting taking place in Shizuoka. Moments later I called Krishna-san and cried, please let me tag along.

And now, I'm being shaken around in this cramped car.

"That's why I tried to stop you."

Krishna-san said with an annoyed voice from the driver's seat.

"I'm not a good driver, and this car's an almost thirty-year-old can of junk. You're the one that insisted, anyways. I have so much stuff to bring to the offline meeting, so you're the ones making things worse. It's usually just fine when I'm the only one here--"

Sounded the cold voice from the driver's seat.

I looked up, and found Krishna-san glaring at me through her rear-view mirror.

"You made me miss what the GPS was saying."

Those words finally jostled my consciousness back.

The sunlight coming through the windows was bright.

I could see the Pacific Ocean glimmering on the other side of the window.

Yes, we're in Krishna-san's old car.

And I was on my way back to Fujieda.

"This GPS is old, so it takes a really long time to get back on track once I miss something. It's like it's punishing me for not paying attention to it."

Krishna-san, who was extremely poor with any machine other than a computer, desperately tried to adjust the GPS, but the old, LCD display started taking us in an even more inexplicable direction.

"It's because you bought such an old car."

I said with a somewhat disdainful tone, and she quickly fired back.

"I was told this was bargain. I like how it looks, too."

"You get too excited over things, Krishna-san."

"Shut up. If you're good to machines they'll hopefully eventually reward you for it."

And then she looked back at us, at Yoishi, who slept between the luggage like a broken doll.

"It's pretty insane to try to fit both of you in there, you know."

"I agree, but you know, I'm not the one who dragged her in here."

And then, Yoishi whispered, still in a crumpled posture.

"You're the one that told me to come to Eboshi Mountain."

"..... huh?"

That moment, the car took a bounce.

For a moment it felt like my stomach was turning inside-out, but I frantically held that back. And on the side, I looked at Yoishi's face, and her usual pale look had become ashen-blue.

"Hey, you, don't puke here!"

"What?"

Krishna-san shouted back in a frantic voice, but by that time Yoishi had quickly opened the rear-seat window, stuck her head out, and vomited.

"Hey, you."