Phenomeno:Case 01

Case 01: The Wish-Fulfilling House

Flow

1

Hey mom.

If the beings called ghosts exist in this world, then—

would it ever be possible for someone to prove their existence in a way that no one anywhere could object?

I think it would be impossible, no matter how much humanity evolves. On the flip side, it also means that no one anywhere could prove irrefutably that they do not exist.

From that standpoint, to discuss whether ghosts exist or not is a complete waste of time. That's why people that can emerge victorious from such a discussion must be people who can purely enjoy ghosts as a source of entertainment. Indeed, I fall under that group, and you could call me quite bluntly an occult maniac.

Mom may not know, but I am quite a niche existence in the world — to be of my age and go ghost this, Unidentified Mysterious Animal that; I know that people laugh at someone like me. But you know, there are plenty of things in this world that are inexplicable.

Yes—

For example, the house I'm living in.

This bygone, almost thirty-year-old building rests by the side of the Tamagawa waterworks, and partly because it's located in such an odd place, has incredibly low rent. When I moved to Tokyo this spring, I looked for a cheap apartment but found this place instead.

It takes ten minutes of biking to reach a convenience store. It's surrounded by darkness and covered by a thick copse, and because there are no streetlights in the area, it's completely dark at night. However, I enjoy this old building. It was built like an old mountain cottage, as the first floor is a garage and the second and third floors were a blow-out, so it was more than luxurious for only one person. The kitchen is as cramped as a kitchenette, but it has a living room, a Japanese-style room, a bath, and even an atelier. From what I hear, an architect had designed it as their personal workplace. It was love at first sight. Furthermore, for a place with a bath to be just 30,000 yen in Musashino Tokyo was unthinkably rare, and it even came with an oral story that couldn't be ignored.

"This is 'The Wish-Fulfilling House,'" so said the smiling real estate agent who introduced this place to me. "The architect who built this became famous, an illustrator that had moved in became overwhelmed with work opportunities and moved closer to the city, and the young couple that lived here until last month gave birth to a baby, which led to this becoming open. You are quite lucky."

After hearing that, who wouldn't immediately seal the deal?

So I jumped at the opportunity. There was probably a feeling of superiority too, given that my colleagues at university pay over twice the rent to live in rabbit cages. In any case, I was quite pleased at how lucky a man I was with my first time living alone.

Yet — within a month, I realized how big of a mistake that was.

I can hear sounds somewhere when I sleep at night. The squeaking of something persistently attempting to open some old door. I'd assumed it was just some bad structuring somewhere, but I soon realized that it was odd that it always happened at two o'clock in the morning. I tried going to the living room from my bedroom at the edge of the second floor. And the sounds would stop. I thought, "Maybe it's coming from up above," and went to check the atelier on the third floor. But there was nothing that could be the source of the sounds. I'd planned to eventually organize it to look more stylish, but at the moment it was a bare environment, housing just my desk and a bookshelf. I looked around but all the windows were shut, so there was nothing to make the sounds. After that, I moved to check the toilet and the bath. But I couldn't find anything that could be connected to the sounds there either. So I thought, "Maybe I'm just hearing things," and went back to sleep. But the sounds started up again. They squeaked like the sound of old wood groaning. I could also hear the sound of something scraping. Not like a cat or a mouse, but an eerie kind of sound, like something trying to crawl out of somewhere dark after having been tormented for a long time.

Eventually, those sounds stopped seemingly echoing throughout the house and started to feel like it seeped through the air and around my ears. As a result, I began keeping the lights on throughout the house and using earplugs when sleeping. However, the problem stopped being just sounds.

It was about two weeks ago.

I found something decisive.

I found "6" carved with something sharp into the wall of the landing of the stairs.

I immediately checked the doors and windows around the house. However, there was no sign that someone had entered. I was probably quite terrified. It was a pretty big engraving, but I forced myself to think I had just never noticed it before then. A few days later, though, I found "5" near the bathtub. Something sharp had carved it into the window sill. A week ago from the present time, I found "4" near the toilet, and even a laidback person like myself had to believe it.

Something was in this house.

Moreover, it was doing some sort of countdown.

I immediately left the house. I couldn't live in it anymore. I hadn't made any close friends yet at university, so I lived in karaoke spots and net cafes for several days. I couldn't talk about this to anyone. I didn't know any monks, nor any mediums. Then I realized. Right, the people from "Ikaigabuchi" would be perfect for discussing this with. The colleagues of mine who were also into the occult world may believe me.

And so—

Incidentally, they aren't suspicious people at all.

"No, 'we' are plenty suspicious."

"...Huh?" I recoiled at the sudden voice from above.

When I looked up, I saw "Karasu-san's" white face, waving her hand.

"Sup, Nagi-kun."

"K-Karasu-san. When did you get here?"

I checked the time on my cell phone.

It was ten-thirty at night. There were still thirty minutes remaining until the offline meeting began.

"Right around when you started explaining 'The Wish-Fulfilling House' to your mother."

"...That's basically when I started," I complained, as I grumpily placed my stationery back in my bag.

"Sorry, my bad. But you know, peeping is, like, our thing, right?" said Karasu-san as she displayed a cutesy smile.

This was a family restaurant near Itsukaichi-kaido Avenue.

We were going to have an emergency offline meeting here with the members of an occult site I frequent. Of course, Karasu-san wasn't her real name. It was a handle that she used online. Just as I, Yamada Nagito, go by the name "Nagi" online, she went by "Karasu," meaning "Raven." This was the third time we'd met, but I still didn't know her real name. However, she was a regular visitor on the Ikaigabuchi site, and thus a veteran user in comparison to me, who'd only begun looking at the site this spring.

Her appearance was as usual. A purplish velvet dress that reached her ankles, and under that was just a black camisole, or rather, frankly putting it, her chest was almost completely bare. Her breasts looked like they would jump out at any time, which made looking at her awkward — however, this was her uniform of sorts.

"You're quite early, did you close up shop sooner than expected?" I asked and in response,

"Pretty much. Fortune-tellers don't have much to do when there are no customers," she said as she took off the traditional-looking coat she was wearing and sat down across from me. "But you know, to put it frankly," she looked at me as she twirled the shining skull-shaped accessory around her fingertips on her chest, "Your house probably has nothing to it."

"What?"

"What was it — umm, right, a schema."

"Schema?"

"A word used in cognitive science. If you keep believing you're scared of something, then you start seeing faces in the stains on the ceiling, that sort of thing. Because you were hearing squeaking every day, you began seeing numbers from scratches that were always there in your house."

"...S-seriously?"

"Seriously seriously. I mean, you came to Tokyo by yourself from super rural-ness in Shizuoka, and this is the first time you're living alone, right? Furthermore, you're living in an old wooden house, so it's not too surprising. I used to live in a house that groaned and squeaked a lot, so I know how you feel. It's like the sound of plastic wrap, so it's pretty discomforting," so she said as she raised her hand to call the waitress and order a beer.

Well, wait up then. If this was just me being a wuss, then what was I supposed to say to the occult veterans that were coming to the offline meeting? Would I get banned from that wonderful site in just one night for being such an airhead?

"Ahh, don't worry about it," she casually laughed. "We're a bunch of folks that love meeting up and sharing scary stories."

"But is it going to be that simple? There were about ten people coming to this meeting."

Thereupon, Karasu-san said "Huh?" and stared at me. "You haven't checked?"

"Checked what?"

"This meeting, I think over thirty people are showing up."

...What?

I hurried accessed the Ikaigabuchi offline meeting board through my cell phone.

Thereupon opening the "The Wish-Fulfilling House / Investigation Thread," I was taken aback.

"You're right. Why'd the number suddenly skyrocket? Are that many people interested in 'The Wish-Fulfilling House?'"

"Unfortunately, not at all. See, even the regulars 'Suu-san' and 'Zippo-san' are coming to the meeting. They wouldn't move for some mere horror tale."

...Some mere horror tale.

She laughed at the expression I was making as she plucked the phone from my hand and played with it. She turned the screen to me. "This. The fourth poster, going by the name 'Yoishi.' I think this many people are showing up because this one announced their participation."

"Who is 'Yoishi'?"

"No idea," said Karasu-san with a grin as she pulled out a cigarette. She lit the cigarette using a worn, slender lighter, and after blowing out a puff of smoke, she quietly whispered, "Those that meet Yoishi die seven days later."

"What?"

"There's more. 'Yoishi isn't a living person,' 'Offline meetings they attend end in disaster,' and what else was there..."

"W-what are you talking about?"

"Something like an urban legend that started being whispered about around Ikaigabuchi. Yet no one's actually met Yoishi. No one knows if Yoishi is some old man, or even their gender. However, everyone who attends a meeting they go to remains silent. The entire thread disappears. The participants stop going to Ikaigabuchi, or—"

"Or?"

"They die."

Her low whisper felt like ice-cold water splashing down the back of my neck. As for her, Karasu-san was happily receiving her shiny cup of beer, exclaiming "Woah, delicious!" in a lackadaisical tone.

"But those...those are just rumors, right?" I asked, and she replied "That's right" while laughing.

"So, basically, even if 'The Wish-Fulfilling House' is a miss, there's hope that 'Yoishi' pops up, so everyone's gathering for the hell of it. Thus you have no reason to fret," she said, but even so, I still felt mixed emotions.

Until now, until today, I trembled with fear alone, unable to go back home. I suggested today's offline meeting in the hopes of getting the opinions from the veterans of Ikaigabuchi. Having the story blown off immediately as my misunderstanding wasn't enough to quell my fears.

"But — if Yoishi has gotten interested, might 'The Wish-Fulfilling House' be the real deal?"

"Who knows...I'm just interested in seeing how Yoishi-kun's appearance changes a horror story that doesn't interest me into something eerier."

...Doesn't interest.

"If it's still bothering you, Ikaigabuchi has a page for investigating haunted areas. You can request an investigation. Although I still think you'll just end up being laughed at," she laughed as she quickly finished her beer.

Indeed, the Ikaigabuchi site did routinely check out haunted areas around the country regardless of fame.

After an investigation, haunted areas were graded on a scale of A to D, with A being called the most dangerous of spots. This rating was quite unique, in that even famed areas such as Taira no Masakado's Grave and Oiwainaritamiya Shrine were given a D-rank by Ikaigabuchi — in other words, they were rated as the lowest level of danger. Supposedly, it was because it had become an area that was "evenly split," as humans and ghosts treated each other with respect.

On the other hand, places given an A-rank were often unknown to the common populace. Places such as crime scenes that involved murders brought forth by thick emotions such as infatuation and jealousy, isolated locales of death by seniors who maintained fanatic delusions, and so on and so forth. They say those places serve as lightning rods for souls that resent the current world, souls that had lost their personalities and simply became clumps of malicious intent, far beyond saving.

As I thought such things, Karasu-san had begun peering intently at my face. "Hey, Nagi-kun."

"What's up?"

"You have the mark of a meeting."

"What?"

"And it's — with a girl."

...Seriously?

My expression loosened at her words.

"Can you tell me a little more?"

"Hmm..." she began playing with the realistic skull-shaped accessory near her chest as she continued. "How should I put it...it's a very dense meeting. Like two souls, previously split, are reuniting... But—" she said, seemingly looking through me and to a different world. "It's hard to say if meeting this girl will actually result in happiness for you."

"What's that?"

"And furthermore... Huh? Wait, isn't she dead?"

......Hey.

Isn't that like being possessed?

You've gotta be kidding me, I thought, but I also remembered that she would tell me such ominous things every time we met. Previously, she'd told me I would have luck with bicycles, and then I got hit by a mama-cycle on the way back home. Another time she told me I would have golden luck and was happy about it, then I stepped on a gold-colored thumbtack at home. In other words, she was very good at presenting unfortunate things in a way that you can't tell is unfortunate, which is an important skill for a fortune-teller, I suppose.

"You know, Karasu-san, if you're a fortune-teller, shouldn't you also tell people how to avoid misfortune?" I asked.

"But it's up to the person whether to think of something as unfortunate," she said, and stuck out her tongue in a cutesy way, then shouted to the employee passing by, "Another beer, please!"

As I sat there watching over her in a vexed manner, the door chime sounded repeatedly, suspicious-looking people filing in one after another. Seeing as they were coming over after noticing Karasu-san, I deduced they were people attending the offline meeting.

"What's up Karasu-san, as beautiful as ever."

"Long time no see to you too, Maru-san."

"I'm so excited."

"We have such karmic dispositions, you and I."

As such conversations continued, my seat in the back of the family restaurant slowly became surrounded by activity. Every now and then I would see a familiar face, but most I had never seen before. I'd actively been participating in offline meetings in Tokyo, and that I continued seeing new faces en masse each time made me realized how deep the world of the occult was.

Just after eleven, the group that had gathered at the back of the family restaurant, with the odd interest, had passed thirty. Well, I'd picked the family restaurant figuring there'd be only ten, so this was a pretty big transgression. The looks from the waitresses passing awkward smiles at me hurt.

"Are there any more coming?" I quietly asked Karasu-san, who was engaging in small talk with the other attendees, and she responded,

"It's way too late to ask that now," a bit blushed. "There are a bunch of people who show up without saying anything, so there'll probably be a few more."

"That's problematic."

"This might scare away 'Yoishi,' too," she commented lightly, but—

This really might be troublesome.

  ◯

"So, which one's Yoishi?"

As expected, not even an hour passed before the conversation blew past "The Wish-Fulfilling House."

The countless occult veterans crammed into the family restaurant, each looked around at each other, frantically searching for the accursed "Yoishi."

"Alright, I propose we each go around and introduce ourselves!" said the middle-aged man going by the handle "Professor" with a blushed face.

Seeing empty beer mugs scattered around his table revealed how drunk he was. And then, in response, the others chanted "Let's do it! Let's do it!" and one by one people stood up and gave greetings. At least half the participants were getting quite drunk, so the atmosphere began to feel less like occult maniacs and more of a full-on drinking party.

"Me first! I'm Professor! My field of occult specialty are stories from people abandoned in history!" "Me second! I'm Usagi. I love folklore about Ryoumen-sukuna-sama!" "Me third! I'm Harley! I get excited by stuff related to OOPArts! I'm currently researching the Voynich manuscript!"

What're they going first, second, and third for? And why are Usagi and Harley both jumping on the wagon?

The occult maniacs, who were more playful than necessary, began self-introducing one by one. Incredibly loudly. I alone seemed to be taking the brunt of the customers' glares from the rest of the restaurant.

"Me seventh, I'm Karasu!"

When she energetically rose from her seat, a particularly extra loud round of applause arose, and when she started reciprocating the affection, I completely gave up on discussing the house. Come to think of it, it could be said that every offline meeting for Ikaigabuchi turns out this way, so it's like a feature of the site.

"Go on, Nagi-kun. It's your turn next," urged by Karasu-san, I begrudgingly stood up. "Umm... Eighth. I'm Nagi. I'm a university student."

"What type of occult do you like?"

"Uhh, I like anything related to mysterious stories...but right now I'm interested in things related to ghosts."

When I responded lightly to a question that had been flung at me, people began shouting "Too stiff too stiff!" "You haven't drunk enough!" and someone voluntarily ordered a beer for me. Man, I'm still 18. I'm underage. I can't drink.

"It's fine, it's fine. I'll drink it. Just act like you're drinking and they'll be happy," laughed Karasu-san as she smacked my butt with her palm after noting my expression.

Well, in any case, the thirty or so people introduced themselves in this fashion—

And in conclusion.

There was no one here who went by the handle of Yoishi.

"Huh, so they didn't show up." "I showed up just to see Yoishi." "Is anyone faking their handle?" said people one by one, but given that most had never seen each other and that offline meetings weren't particularly rare, it was hard to figure if anyone was lying.

"Well, since we've all gathered, can we discuss what 'The Wish-Fulfilling House' is—" I began, but "Suu-san" spoke over me,

"I think," he was an old veteran of Ikaigabuchi who managed a liquor store and liked collecting things like the arms of tengu and the shell of kappa, if I remember correctly, "Yoishi might be a different handle of Krishna-san."

I was listening with a sigh, but I reacted to that famous name.

"Hmm, that would make sense," someone responded.

"If we summarize the rumors involving Yoishi — umm, 'if you get involved with Yoishi you'll have terrible consequences,' 'Yoishi isn't a living person,' 'Those that meet Yoishi die seven days later.' Something like that? But we've never heard any specifics of someone dying, and maybe certain threads were disappearing because Krishna-san was secretly joining the horror area investigations? Is what I think, anyway."

I see, even nodded Karasu-san.

"These days Krishna-chan hasn't been showing up as well, so that'd make sense."

"W-wait please," I chimed in. "Krishna-san, as in the administrator of Ikaigabuchi, Krishna-san? Everyone's met them?"

"Met them, or rather, they've always shown up to meetings before."

"But they're not here today?"

"You want to meet them?"

"Of course."

In the first place, the reason I became interested in the Ikaigabuchi site was that the person named Krishna was so fascinating to me. Of course, part of it was that I was interested in the occult from the start, but there was a different sort of attraction with Ikaigabuchi.

That was apparent, for instance, by looking at the odd words at the top of the page, "Things that bother people also bother ghosts." By nature, Ikaigabuchi was a site intended to soothe matters between people and ghosts. Most people can't see ghosts. That's why, regardless of our lack of ill intent, we probably bother ghosts more than they do us was a perspective that was both fresh and unique. And as I read articles about renowned horror areas on Ikaigabuchi, my conviction deepened. Each article was filled with care toward ghosts, taking care to show respect toward both the living and the dead.

"I've always wondered. Why are people always afraid of ghosts? Perhaps some ghosts play tricks on people, while other ghosts say come on, stop it, and step in to intervene, yet no one ever thinks of the latter possibility. Maybe that sort of order is maintained by ghosts, and is why the vast majority of people live without ever being bothered by the supernatural."

That paragraph in particular struck a chord with me.

Those words moved me when I had just arrived in Tokyo and hadn't met anyone I could call a friend. I realized more than ever that people were connected to others through candor. It gave me the courage necessary to think that I could make do in Tokyo, where it's said that people's relationships with others are often weak and diluted; where people try to avoid needless interaction with others as much as possible. That was actually why I began participating on the site.

I became attracted to the person named Krishna by their daily updates of the mysterious. Their deep, yet wide-ranging knowledge of the occult. Their in-depth and cool writing style. The truth that could be felt from each and every word. They were packed with things that my soul needed right then and the things that I lacked. I'd gotten to the point where I felt like Krishna-san had become like my older brother or my father in Tokyo.

And if I could—

I wanted Krishna-san to investigate "The Wish-Fulfilling House" themself.

"H-h-how old is Krishna-san? What kind of person are they?"

"Nagi-kun, you're stuttering." "Calm down." "Here, have a drink."

Undeterred by the interruptions of Suu-san and the others, I rephrased my question. "Please, tell me. How could I meet them?"

However, the response to my question was awkward silence by the thirty.

"I think they won't show up at an offline meeting again."

"Why?"

"Some things happened..."

"Some things?"

"Well, we'll see. Maybe you'll get the chance to find out about it one day. Leave it be for now."

I only received vague responses like that.

What broke the silence at the family restaurant was Zippo-san, who I think worked as a programmer.

"Um...I oppose that opinion."

"That opinion?" asked Karasu-san, and Zippo-san pushed his thick glasses up and slowly answered,

"That Yoishi and Krishna-san are the same person. That theory."

"What do you mean?"

"As a matter of fact, I know of an acquaintance who's met Yoishi at an offline meeting."

"Really?" the gathering immediately rose in unison.

"What are they like!?" "How old?" "Guy? Girl?" "Which offline?" they all asked, and Zippo-san quietly answered,

"The offline meeting was for the investigation of an abandoned hospital in the Tama prefecture, about half a year ago."

"So, what was Yoishi like?"

"Umm, well...I don't know."

"You don't know?" Karasu-san asked, and Zippo-san swallowed once before answering,

"Because he's hospitalized."

"Hospitalized?"

"Psychiatric Ward," and with those words, the once-bustling crowd once again fell to a deathly silence.

It was as if something heavy and grim hung overhead the seats that caused us to say no more words.

"Hospitalized in a psychiatric ward you say. Is that Yoishi's fault?" asked Suu-san, and Zippo-san slowly shook his head.

"I don't know. But even after regaining consciousness, all he mumbled was 'Yoishi.' That's why I came to this meeting because if Yoishi did too, I wanted to ask them, what happened at that offline meeting?"

Everyone fell silent once Zippo-san stopped speaking.

The family restaurant once again filled with stories of Yoishi. "Come to think of it," was the type of statement preceding conversations as one after another, tales of Yoishi leaked out from people.

If I were to summarize such topics—

It seemed "Yoishi" infrequently appeared on the Ikaigabuchi forum. Their appearance was not common, but whenever they showed up, they would post in almost every thread, providing opinions on everything, regardless of how maniacal the topic. Given the time of appearance, Yoishi could be imagined as an occult maniac that sat in front of a computer almost twenty-four hours a day. They had knowledge of the supernatural to rival Krishna-san, but their posts showed no signs of sharing the love for ghosts that defined Krishna-san. If anything, they could be described as more creepy — as if a dead person had eerily joined the internet.

"Maybe the rumors that Yoishi isn't a living person might be true after all," mumbled Jersey-san, who said he was a writer for a magazine. "Remember that thread that popped up some time ago, 'I'm a ghost, anyway, do you have any questions?'"

"Ahh, the one where IP traces, PC, and host searches all came up empty, so people wondered whether it was actually real?"

"I'm of the opinion that ethereal forms have good synergy with computers and digital equipment. Because, you know, brainwaves are weak electrical signals as well."

"You do hear a lot of tales of ghosts writing online."

"Then, that Yoishi—" mumbled Suu-san, in a summarizing way. "We can't see them, but — maybe they are already here?"

Those words sent a shiver down my spine.

I looked around the brightly-lit store.

It wasn't just me, it seemed like everyone had felt something cold.

After that, the gathering seemed to collectively decide to avoid talking about ghosts. Gradually, seats became arranged by topic as people broke off into their areas of interest.

As the host of the offline meeting, I wanted to bring it back to the original topic, but I was certain no one remembered anything about my house. Furthermore, Suu-san was telling fascinating, scary stories, and that was too interesting to pass up. A box bought from an antique store that could not be opened, paper money found behind a painting on a hotel wall, a smiling little girl who often spoke to a doll — each provided entertainment that could leave you sleepless when alone at night.

Everyone forgot about the time as they enjoyed the endless flow of occult discussions—

And at around one o'clock in the morning, the offline meeting dispersed.

2

"Please, wait up!" As the Ikaigabuchi members scattered into the night streets in small groups, I chased Karasu-san as she flagged down a taxi on the main street. "What about my house, you know, 'The Wish-Fulfilling House.'"

Thereupon the once again useless fortune-teller waved her hand back and forth with a flushed expression. "It's fine, it's fine. It's that, uh, umm, schema. And what else... I think I was going to tell you something else but — ahaha, I forgot~"

"What do you mean 'forgot'..."

"Don't worry! You have the mark of a meeting! See ya!" She slapped me on the back and then happily jumped into the stopped taxi.

As I watched the taxi drive off, I stood there, forever dumbfounded.

"...Huh."

I wonder if it's alright to go home now.

To that house — "The Wish-Fulfilling House"

I began walking down the main street toward the train station, dragging along the mama-cycle I'd bought cheaply online for commuting to school.

Tokyo was filled with people even this late at night. In particular, the area around the train station near my house was close to many universities, so there seemed to be no difference in the number of people milling about from day to night. Right around when the station came into view, I almost bumped into a couple of girls then subsequently apologized for it. One of them shot me a "Who the hell are you?" look, but the other cracked a smile and said, "No, I'm sorry." I apologized once again. That was all there was to it, but it filled my heart with hope. Indeed — a fateful meeting was lying in wait for me. With a girl, no less. This might be it. The bizarre events tormenting me at that house must surely be a catalyst for the happy times to come. In the future, I will look back at this string of events and laugh it off as nothing more than just another funny story.

I felt less burdened when I thought of it like that.

In addition, that way I wouldn't have to move out. Moving costs would be painful for me, given that I was receiving no aid from home.

"The offline meeting was, in its own way, fun as well. There's at least something good to take away from it," I mumbled to myself, as I finally straddled the bike.

I changed course completely and decided to go back home for the first time in a few days.

"No one that came to the offline meeting today said anything about 'The Wish-Fulfilling House.' If you look at it from a different angle, that means it can't possibly be a ghost incident. It's a bit shameful as the original poster, but all's well that ends well, right?"

What would have happened if I'd dragged people over to my house, and it turned out that there were no ghosts? I'd just be a laughingstock.

Having finished arming myself with logic, I caught a soft, comforting night breeze and powered the pedals harder. I'd recovered to the point where I even started humming.

However—

I noticed something when I was about to re-enter the main street from the shopping arcade in front of the train station.

For a while now, there's been a strange, uncomfortable feeling on the sole of my left foot. It was like I was constantly stepping on gum, so I stopped my bike and took off my sneaker right then.

After I lifted my left foot a bit and looked at the rubber sole of the sneaker, I froze.

I felt my blood freeze over and the once elated feelings I had completely departed all at once.

Engraved on the bottom of my sneaker—

was the number "3."

  ◯

"Damn it, schema my ass."

The countdown is continuing, isn't it?

I push the mama-cycle along with mostly a half-step as every passing person threw me a strange look owing to my frantic one, but I paid them no heed.

I threw away the sneaker with "3" engraved on the spot. I couldn't continue wearing such sinisterness. The cold of the concrete and the scattered pebbles pierced my feet through my socks, but I didn't care.

Why and when was "3" carved into the back of my sneaker?

What was going to happen when the countdown ended? How would I be able to escape from this terror?

I had no idea, but in any case, I kept on running.

People in fancy clothing stared and laughed, but I didn't care. I just wanted to be somewhere warm.

Where.

Where could that be—

Eventually, after flying past the arcade I found and entered a late-night discount shop. A stupidly cheerful theme song played in the background. I hummed along to the simple, repetitive melody as I checked out the wide selection of products that were, generally speaking, cheap. As I stood leaning against a cosmetics shelf mumbling to myself, a couple of flamboyantly-dressed girls avoided me as they passed by. An employee called out to me and asked, "Are you unwell?" and I finally realized that my left foot, only covered by socks, was throbbing with pain. I looked to its sole. Maybe I had stepped on a shard of glass, as I saw the socks had been cut and bloodied. I bought some bandages, a pair of socks, the cheapest sneakers they had, and went to tend to the wound in the bathroom. I washed the back of my foot, placed the bandage, and wore the new socks. The cheap sneaker had a shoddy design and wasn't very comfortable, but it was far better than being barefoot. It was for sure an unnecessary expense, but I felt comforted by it. I was afraid of staying in the bathroom alone any longer so I returned to the inside of the store, and took deep breaths as I wandered around it as if I was window-shopping.

—What should I do now?

That was all I could think about, but I could not come up with an answer.

At some point, I'd just begun standing in front of a show window absentmindedly, and the employee from before asked if anything was wrong again, so I left the store. I had no choice but to begin heading toward the usual net cafe, but when I got there it was already full. I peeked into the nearby karaoke box, but there was even a line spilling out onto the street. I tried wandering around several karaoke boxes but they were all under the same circumstance. Come to think of it, it was Saturday night. There would be no vacant places until the first train.

However, I couldn't think of anywhere else to go.

As I wandered around the station dragging my bike around, the police shoot me suspicious looks. I almost felt like it would be more comforting to be arrested, but some level of common sense remained in me, so I turned back to the main street.

The headlights of cars on Itsukaichi-kaido Avenue illuminated me as they passed by. Normally the cars looked like fuel-consuming devices to me, but today I felt consoled by them. It was invigorating to eye upon things that could be scientifically explained.

However—

I may have been at my limit.

This is the same as being completely homeless, isn't it?

I had no one I was intimate with enough in Tokyo, where the lights never dim. I had no place to go. On top of that, I was running low on funds. I spontaneously looked up at the night sky, but just as it was as cloudless as it was starless. Just an obsidian dimension that stretched onwards as if painted.

Maybe I could call my sister in the morning and borrow some money. Then go straight back to Shizuoka. Tokyo was too much for me, which was something humiliating to say, but all this was just too unexpected. I'd imagine most people would have trouble with such a case as well. Mom, I'm sorry. You supported me so much in my coming here.

Then at that very moment—

At the end of the night street, I spotted an intense light.

When I lifted my head, I realized I'd come straight back to the family restaurant.

"I see...this is also open twenty-four hours."

That was enough to make me feel like I'd found a million allies. My knees almost buckled.

The drink bar here alone was cheaper than the net cafe, and there were plenty of people about, being Saturday night. I should have just stayed here from the beginning.

"Hahaha," I laughed to myself dryly. I probably looked pretty unapproachable.

Anyway, I left my mama-cycle at the bicycle lot of the family restaurant and recoiled as I was about to enter.

There was something even more bizarre that made me not want to get any closer.

Outside the big, glass window to the store.

Inside the fern thicket that seemed to have been planted to cover it—

Was a girl dressed in full black.

She wore a black long-coat even though it was spring. Her long hair that stretched down her back, her skirt and even her boots were also pure black. Yet her skin was abnormally white. And because she was crouched in the darkness, it looked as if just her face was floating.

...Wh-what is she...doing?

She was standing in the middle of the thicket almost pressing her face against the glass as she stared into the store.

It was so creepy I almost backed off for a second.

But then she slowly turned to face me. Her cheeks were shockingly white, and every part of her face was dreamily constructed. She was so perfect that I felt like saying she must have been constructed, like a giant Bisque Doll that had accidentally been left there — that's the impression she gave.

A girl whose color was the night itself.

Unexpectedly, those words popped into my head.

Those were the colors of the girl's eyes. Maybe it was because of the lighting, but it felt like an inordinately large proportion of her eyes were taken by her irises, and that under those long eyelashes a seeming jet black glimmer. Below her straight-cut bangs, they shone a dark color as they gazed upon me.

"...By any chance, are you," my mouth naturally spoke, "—Yoishi?"

The girl silently nodded.

  ◯

Yoishi isn't a living person.

Those that meet Yoishi die seven days later.

Offline meetings that Yoishi attends end in terror.

What I'd heard earlier floated around my head as I stared at the girl in front of me.

Seven glasses were laid out on the table in front of Yoishi, ranging from iced coffee to cola to orange juice to Japanese tea, effectively creating her own drink bar.

"Um. Aren't you supposed to just take one at a time?" I said to her in an exasperated tone, but she replied,

"As long as I drink everything there should be no problem," as she kept her eyes on the glasses, trying one after another.

She drank the orange juice, then the iced coffee, then the warm Japanese tea, then the cola. She faithfully repeated the order a number of times, sometimes adding Rooibos tea, black tea, or melon soda as a bonus. I didn't know if there was any meaning to the order, but I found it odd that when she drank them, it looked like some kind of traditional religious ritual.

I again took a look at the girl who went by Yoishi.

She was probably still in high school. I realized when looking at her under brighter conditions that she had immense beauty. But her eyes were a problem. The glass bead-looking eyes that seemed to be looking somewhere and nowhere. The air she gave off felt as if we did not share the same world, putting up a peculiar atmospheric barrier around her. Hers was not like that of nobility from a princess, rather, if anything, like that of a witch's apprentice.

"Anyway," I asked the girl dressed in black as she busily rifled through the drinks, "why didn't you come to the offline meeting?"

"I was there."

"No, but, when everyone was around, you didn't come."

"I was there. Right there, the whole time." She pointed toward the other side of the window, where I'd first found Yoishi—in other words, in the bushes outside the store.

...There? Pressed up against the glass?

"So, what does that mean? From eleven until now, you've been there the whole time?"

Yes, she nodded. As I stared at her pale face, I began thinking.

This girl—

Is she what you'd call psychotic?

It was already past two o'clock in the morning. To stick to the glass for three hours since eleven at night must have creeped out the employees. When I quietly turned back around, a different group of waitresses than before were staring at Yoishi and saying something to each other. Their expressions were contorted in an extremely mean manner, much more contemptuously than they'd shown me. I stood up, having felt like I'd seen something detestable. I immediately walked toward them and declared "I want a drink bar as well," then headed straight for the counter to grab a drink. I don't know why I felt so irritated. Maybe it was because I'd felt like I'd been laughed at, as a fellow occult-lover.

I filled my glass to the brim with ice, then pressed the button for coffee.

—Now then, what to do from here out.

As I watched the hot coffee melt through the ice, I thought.

I can't go back home, the countdown still continues. Furthermore, I've ran into the heresy-class occult girl from Ikaigabuchi. And now, for some reason, I'm alone with her at a family restaurant late at night. In a way, it's comforting that I'm not alone, but given that it's an occult girl with strange urban legends attached to her, it's a bit of a tricky.

"You like bad coffee?" said Yoishi when I returned to my seat.

"What?"

"I asked if you like bad coffee. The coffee here is unsatisfactory." I looked at her seven glasses again and noticed that only the iced coffee had hardly been sipped. "Information that you can gather beforehand should be processed before you act."

Yoishi's neat logic-filled words annoyed me, so I replied with some nastiness. "Then allow me to gather information. Why did you come to today's offline meeting?"

"Because I was interested."

"In 'The Wish-Fulfilling House'? Why are you interested in that house? The sounds are probably just structural groans, and the engravings might just be my mistake, right?" I said exactly what Karasu-san had told me, in a self-deprecating manner.

Yoishi replied, "Of course," without any hint of retorting.

"Then, why—"

"When I read about that house on the forum — I felt a bit of an oddity from it." Her low, whispering tone gave me goosebumps. "There are countless stories of oddities overflowing on the internet, but most of them are fake. Real ones, however, have a scent that cannot be hidden."

Something hot bubbled forth from the bottom of my stomach at those words.

Having a psycho believe you isn't really something to be pleased about, but I was, to be frank, happy that there was someone who would finally listen to the source of my fears. Indeed. That place is real. I was already in shambles as the bottom of my shoe had been carved into.

"Hey, what is it? Is it a ghost? Are you the type that can see them? What do you mean by having a scent that cannot be hidden?" I couldn't stop myself from blurting out questions. Yoishi stared at her glass of orange juice and she flatly answered, "Firstly, first reply. It may not be a ghost."

"Huh?"

"Second reply. It's not that I can see everything. Final reply. A feeling. Real abnormalities always have a strange sense of not-fitting-together." Yoishi switched out of her previously dazed posture and began talking once again. "Strange phenomena happen. People related to it become afraid. When you investigate, you find out that someone committed suicide there — I won't say that such neatly-placed-together stories are all fake. However, the real, fun ghost stories surpass such things. There's a feeling as if something important has been skipped over. Being able to fill in the gap is the single theory of the other side."

"S-so basically, what's happening to me? What are those frightening sounds in my house? Why are numbers being written, and why are they always counting down? When the numbers run out, what's going to happen to—" I'd subconsciously stood up as I shouted. "—What's going to happen to me!?"

The store went silent, everyone staring at me.

A bit embarrassed, I sat back down. I didn't even know what was going on anymore. I didn't know what to do anymore. As I was scratching my head shakily in shame, feeling sorry for myself, Yoishi quietly muttered,

"So you are the one that posted that."

I looked up, and Yoishi's cold, dark irises were mysteriously glimmering.

I nodded and explained what had just happened.

That "3" had already arrived, that it had been carved onto the bottom of the sneakers I had been wearing myself. I explained that all while trembling.

"How does someone even carve that? Did something possess me all the way from home?" I asked, almost in tears — then I recoiled.

Yoishi's eyes, which were once like glass beads, had seemed to harbor life.

She suddenly placed a finger to my nose, and said, "Hey, close your eyes."

"Huh?"

She turned her beautiful white features to right in front of my face, peering into my eyes. Her eyes and nose were so pronouncedly stretched out in my field of view that, to be honest, my heart started racing.

"Why do I have to close my eyes?"

"Just do it."

My heart thumping, I did as she said. I closed my eyes tightly. I felt like some inappropriate fantasy had drifted into my mind, so I frantically tried to dispel it.

"Imagine." Her lips seemed to move at the back of my eyes, commanding. "You are now standing at the entrance of your house." Her frosty, yet somewhat kind voice forced me to stand before it. "In as much detail as possible, please imagine a situation in which you are standing at the entrance of your house."

As if controlled by those words, I imagined myself standing at its entrance in the darkness.

Black — the sharp image of that mountain cottage.

The reddish-brown roof, the mountain cottage, and the atelier that the architect had built for himself. The walls faded nicely and were covered by vines to the second floor, and the white paint was slightly peeling of the wooden window sills. The first floor was a garage, the second and third floors built as living quarters. The house that I rented for 30,000 yen which didn't even have a kitchen. The house that at night, you could hear strange sounds, and the next morning a number would be carved somewhere within—

My legs began to shiver, but I held on, clutching my knees down tightly with my hands.

"Alright. Once you've called it to mind, place your hand on the doorknob."

"...Ok."

"Now, please open the door."

I opened it. My shoes were sprawled out on the foyer. They were the leather shoes I had kicked off when I rushed out in a hurry. But from there, my feet refused to walk further. I felt someone inside the house, even though no one should be in it. The thick, sticky air seemed to make me feel that way. No way. I don't want to step forward, even if this is just my imagination.

Seemingly noticing my emotions, Yoishi whispered, "You'll be fine. Slowly move inside. Take off your shoes as usual and step inside. Once you do, and I don't care in what order; open all the windows in the house. Neatly, one by one, without leaving one out."

...Windows? Why open the windows?

I thought but obeyed anyway. I went by the window in the living room, unlocked it and opened it. From there, the Japanese-style room I was using as a bedroom. Unlocked and opened that window as well. Then from the Japanese-style room to the bathroom. Opened. Next, the bath. Opened. I progressed to the third floor. There were two windows; by the veranda and next to my desk. I precisely unlocked and threw both open.

"...I'm finished."

"Then, this time, please close the windows in reverse order."

"...Huh?"

"Close them in order from the last one you opened to the first."

Having no other choice, I did as she said.

The window on the third floor by the desk. Veranda. Then down to the second floor, and uh, the bath, toilet, Japanese-style room, living room.

I closed them all.

"Ok, you're done. Now open your eyes," said Yoishi's voice, and I opened my eyes. The light from the bright, fluorescent lamps flooded into them. Until now, I hadn't paid attention to the bright pop music filling the restaurant, but suddenly I was was. Right, this was a family restaurant after all. As I rubbed my eyes to adjust, Yoishi asked me,

"How was it?"

"What do you mean how was it, what was the point of that?"

"Was there anyone in the rooms?"

At those words, my hair stood on their ends.

...There was.

On the landing on the stairs between the second and third floors. A middle-aged man wearing ashen-colored clothing seemed to have been there. Immobile, with a vacant expression. He watched over my every move with his fixed gaze. I couldn't catch him in front of my vision, but he was always appearing out of the corner of my eyes—

"... There was, right?" Yoishi's black eyes dazzled with some kind of delight. "Was it someone you know?"

"...I don't think so. Never seen him before."

No... How could that be? To imagine someone you've never met before. That house still thick within my mind, Yoishi's joyful voice echoed.

"Scared?" I looked, and Yoishi had come close enough to me that I could feel her breath. "Hey, are you feeling scared right now?"

...Scared.

Or rather, I'm scared of those eyes that look like they are going to eat every part of me.

"Tell me more details. What did they look like?"

Taking a deep breath, I explained, all while trying to stop myself from trembling.

A gray, worn suit. I didn't remember a necktie. The suit seemed a bit big, but that may have been because the man was thin. His hair had streaks of grey. I couldn't remember his face. His hair was carelessly grown long. Wore black shoes.

Yoishi went "Hmm..." as she rubbed her chin.

After some silence and letting her eyes wander for a while, she turned them toward me once more.

"Hey, how about we go?"

"—Go where?"

"To your house. Right now."

3

—Ahh, why am I here?

It was a night with a beautiful moon. I was dangerously pedaling the mama-cycle.

I passed through the residential area to the north of the train station near the family restaurant, then continued west along the grooved river. The grooved river was called Shimokawa, one of the rivers that flowed into the Tamagawa waterworks. This river gradually curved northeast, heading toward the area I lived. Every time my bike bounced off the bumpy road, Yoishi's body pressed against my back. I could feel the slight inflation of her breasts through my jersey, and ever so often I had misplaced thoughts of how we looked like a nice couple.

However, what was hanging onto my back was a psychotic girl dressed entirely in black. The arms she wrapped around my waist were oddly cold. Aren't girls supposed to have higher body temperature? Like, soft, warm, and nice smelling. I could hardly feel any heat from Yoishi, currently at the rear seat of my bicycle. If it were to turn out that only I could see her, I wouldn't even be surprised. That's how far away from a date this night-time bicycle rendezvous was.

The residential area became increasingly distant, in its stead came fields. There were fewer street lights here. It felt like the number of stars increased and the smell of grass became stronger. We were much closer to home.

"Quite rural."

"Shut it," I replied to Yoishi's line after a considerable period of silence.

"I didn't mean that in a bad way. I just didn't realize Musashino still had places like this."

"That's why I figured the rent was so low," I vented a small amount of my feelings of self-deprecation.

Houses became more scarce, and after passing by a few old shrines, we entered an area lined up with dense groves of trees. By following this narrow path, we would arrive at that house.

"To be honest, I didn't want to come at night," I spoke towards my behind.

"It's a phenomenon that only happens at night, so we should go at night," Yoishi readily replied. Very sound reasoning.

For a short while, we both remained in silence, until eventually, Yoishi asked, "What was your wish?"

"Huh?"

"Well you're specifically living in 'The Wish-Fulfilling House,' aren't you?"

She says "specifically," but really I just had no money for anywhere else.

"Nothing special. I wished that my family's business would go well, that's all," I answered.

"A family man, how surprising," Yoishi commented, devoid of emotion.

Surprising is pretty harsh, I began replying, but then that house beyond the black forest came into view.

"That's it."

"Yeah."

Looking at it again, I'm amazed that I had rented such a place. This looks like a haunted house no matter who looks at it.

As I slid the mama-cycle into the first-floor garage, Yoishi jumped off the rear seat. When she pressed the switch on the steel column, the garage's ceiling light turned on. That was all it took to reduce my fear. Yoishi began walking about on her own, looking at the building from several angles.

"A magnificent building," she said, and then she began walking ahead of me. She climbed the stairs to the entrance on the second floor. Not having any other choice, I placed one foot on the stairs but could go no further. As for Yoishi, she quickly climbed the stairs, casually opened the door, and took a glance inside. Ah, right. Now that I think about it, I rushed out without locking the door. That means I'd left it unlocked for several days, which was very careless of me.

All I could do was look from the bottom of the stairs. It's pretty shameful, but I'm the one that experienced the fear. I'd say it's animal instinct to not want to get any closer unless safety is ensured.

"How is it?"

"Dark."

Well of course it is.

And with that, Yoishi quickly went inside. I was afraid of being left behind at the bottom of the stairs, so I rushed after her. When I opened the entrance door, the inside was already lit by electricity. Yoishi stood right next to the lamp switch, glancing around from the ceilings to the walls. The lights felt great. I was calmed just by it being bright, so lit to the point of not knowing whether those creepy happenings were really real or not.

When I was about to take off my shoes at the foyer, I saw that Yoishi's knee-high boots had already been neatly taken off. She may surprisingly be well-raised, I thought, but then it struck me.

That in retrospect, we hadn't even properly introduced ourselves.

"Hey, I know it's belated, but-" I turned toward her and said, "I go by 'Nagi' online, but my real name is Yamada Nagito. I'm in my first year of university starting this spring."

She didn't turn around; she nodded and then said, "I'm Yoishi."

"Isn't that a handle?"

"No. My surname is Mitsurugi. Not that it matters."

—Mitsurugi Yoishi.

She continued being odd. She used her real name online, and in addition, didn't care for her surname. However-

"'4' was on the wall of the toilet?" she asked that as if to say that that conversation was a waste of time, and so I pointed to the far end of the second floor. Yoishi silently moved in that direction. Without hesitation, she opened the door, turned on the lights, and peered in.

I quietly followed.

"Right? It looks like the number '4,' doesn't it? It's not a schema or whatever, right?" I said to Yoishi's back.

"You know of words such as schema?" she replied as if being condescending.

"Well, I mean, I am an occult maniac."

That was a lie. It was a piece of information I had just received.

"In a state where you've received a specific set of information when you see a meaningless figure, your brain follows the information to create a suitable schematic — that is a schema in cognitive science, but this is without a doubt a '4.' Even I see it that way," Yoishi said, not caring for my words, as she traced her fingers over the engraving.

Well, it wasn't like determining that it was not a schema solved anything. If anything, it made things worse. If this was truly a deliberately-written '4,' then someone wrote that in this house — or rather, someone, "something" in this house.

"'5' was near the bath?"

Having finished observing the '4,' Yoishi went across the hall to the bathroom with the toilet, turned on the lights, and opened the door. She placed her face right next to the symbol engraved into the window sill. As I watched the scene from behind her, I caught the smell of something odd.

Truth be told, it'd been bothering me since I met her — but now that I was in an enclosed space with her, it'd become clear.

"...Are you wearing some sort of perfume?"

Yoishi wordlessly shook her head.

"Wait, but this smell on you..."

Then I realized what that smell was.

I'd smelled it in the changing rooms during middle school.

A sour, nose-curdling smell, as if something was rotting.

"...Um, I totally understand this is a rude thing to ask a girl," I asked, pinching my nose, "When did you last take a bath?"

Yoishi turned around and looked at me quizzically. Then she looked up at the ceiling. I had a bad feeling about that gesture as if she was searching through distant memories.

"Wha... You have to think about it?"

"I don't quite remember, maybe last month?"

"Wh-what the hell! Get in the bath! The bath!"

"But I'm already here."

"That's not what I meant! Do you not take showers? Wash your hair?"

"What does that have to do with the numbers decreasing?" Yoishi seemed completely bewildered as she asked me, but come on, I'd heard about the term "dirty girl," and I know French royalty were famous for never taking baths, but this is contemporary Japan. Do high school girls that don't take baths for months exist?

"What you say lacks reason," she said flatly, and then peered closely at the window sill again. "It is without a mistake, a '5.'"

She quickly turned around and asked, "How about '6'?" She really had no interest in anything other than the paranormal. Sighing, I reluctantly guided her.

It was on the landing heading to the third floor.

That was where the middle-aged man I didn't know was standing during the pseudo-word-association game Yoishi had me play earlier. As expected, I didn't feel like following her there, so I just gestured towards it. Yoishi wordlessly climbed the stairs and leaned at the wall.

"Hmm."

"That looks like '6' too, right?"

However, Yoishi didn't immediately answer. Instead, she took out a mini-flashlight from her pocket, shined it at the number "6," and looked all around it.

"Is there something strange about it?"

"This is certainly a '6' but it's — odd."

What's odd, I was about to ask, but at the moment I was going to-

Yoishi suddenly vomited. She didn't do anything cute like place a hand to her mouth in an effort to hold it back, but rather standing upright in a daunting pose, she boldly hurled, and as expected, I took a step back. Used to vomiting. That's how what that posture gave off and I completely saw it through.

Dripping vomit.

Sparkling intestinal fluid, and the remnants of the orange juice she'd been drinking.

—What was up with her?

She doesn't take baths, boldly vomits out in the open;

And to make things worse, she's an occult-loving wears-coats-during-spring psychotic girl.

However, I finally noticed that the psychotic girl did seem to be struggling a bit.

"Hey, are you alright?" I ran up to her and began rubbing her back. She gave a feeble nod and then wiped her mouth.

There was vomit on the landing, but she resumed conversing as if nothing had ever happened.

"Ever since I saw your post, I've thought it was strange. Why did the countdown begin from '6'?"

"Huh?"

"Normally countdowns should start from 5 or 10."

"How should I know?"

I mean, ghosts are scary because you don't know what they're thinking. How would a human like me know why something like that began counting down from "6"?

"Wrong. The paranormal has no rules, but the other side has intentions as befitting of the other side," said Yoishi as she climbed the stairs. I had no choice but to follow.

As if to say there must be a "9" and a "10" somewhere, Yoishi turned on the lights to the third floor and began peering at the walls. Her posture, as she crawled about on all fours, scampering along the walls, was both creepy and comical. Afterwards, Yoishi began mumbling to herself and didn't respond to me, so I gave up and went back to the second floor. I poured water from the sink next to the toilet into a bucket, and threw a rag in. After all, this is my house, and while I couldn't forget the hollow face of the middle-aged man I saw at the family restaurant, I tried not to think about it, and cleaned up the vomit.

Ugh, why does vomit smell so acidic? Somehow it always entices you to vomit, too. Moreover, it was irritating that the one who vomited seemed to not care at all. As if it was obvious that it would be my job to clean after her.

"Hey, do you not eat? There's only liquid in this," I said with a bit of a nasty tone, but Yoishi, who'd come back down from the third floor, simply mumbled that there was no "9" or "10" anywhere. I snapped at her totally depressed reaction. "Didn't I already tell you there was none?"

She ignored my comment and began looking at the walls on the second floor. Half-exasperated, I watched over her as I went down to the second floor with the rag and bucket. Then, I looked at the clock and "Say," I called to her, "are you alright being out at this hour?"

Of course, that was pretty belated, given that it was almost three o'clock in the morning.

If I were her parents, I'd be beside myself with anger.

"I hope you called home before coming out at this hour. I mean, I know it's my fault this is happening, but parents always worry. Back home, I always thought my parents were a pain in the ass, but once you leave, you feel gracious for that stuff."

However, she wasn't listening to my passionate sermon.

Instead, I noticed she was completely immobile, staring at a single spot.

"What is it?" I asked, but Yoishi didn't move. She stood still, frozen like a mannequin. I also stood behind Yoishi and looked where she was.

That was where Yoishi had vomited—and exactly where the middle-aged man was standing in my imagination that only I knew about.

"Wa...Wait a second. Who're you having a staring match with?"

When I placed a hand on her shoulder, she twitched, as if a curse had been lifted.

Then she whispered, ever so softly, "I see."

When she turned around, her face was filled with joy. I could tell by the slight blush creeping into her pale face that she was excited.

"Hey, did you notice?"

"What?" But Yoishi didn't respond, instead turning her heel and heading toward the foyer.

"H...Hey, wait up!"

"Let's get out of here."

She quickly put on her deep black boots, then walked straight out of the entrance. I hurriedly put on my sneakers and chased after her. Trying not to look inside, I shut off the lights, closed the door, and remembered to lock it this time. I stuck close by Yoishi as she staggered down the stairs.

When we walked near where the mama-cycle was parked inside the garage, Yoishi looked up at the building once more, and said "This building is very interesting."

"What're you talking about?"

"Under the stairs to the third floor. There's a meaningless space."

That moment, I felt a chill travel down my spine.

I see—

The eeriness that I'd felt all along about this house, I finally understood it. Indeed, it had always felt like something was odd about this house. And that was the area under the stairs which I could never reach. You couldn't enter the space under the stairs from either the outside or inside of the house. You hear about places that don't open sometimes, this was similar in that we didn't know what was inside.

"And, look at this."

Yoishi pointed at the mailbox by the stairs in front of the first floor.

My full name was written on a piece of paper the size of a business card, a curved zigzag over it as if to overwrite it.

It was—unmistakable.

"2."

The countdown continued.

Yoishi placed her face almost right onto the engravings and mumbled happily, "this place is the real deal," but I said, with a hollow voice, "I'm at my limit."

Fall

4

The new apartment was fantastic.

The pretty, cleaned flooring. The new wallpaper. The sterilized unit bath.

It wasn't right comparing it to that house, where the previous inhabitant's remnants drifted everywhere, but I definitely learned that it wasn't right to skimp on housing expenses. This was even further from the university, but at least there was housing nearby. I could walk to a convenience store and there were plenty of streetlights. This apartment, which was brightly lit even at night, was introduced to me by Karasu-san.

From what I heard, one of Karasu-san's acquaintances was the landlord, and Karasu-san was also renting a room here. It annoyed me a bit that the room was simply a warehouse (a place to put paranormal cursing equipment apparently) for her, but I couldn't complain. Rent rocketed to 50000 yen, but it was six tatami 1K with a loft and a unit bath, so it was extremely cheap for the area.

It had been one week since I looked at that paranormal house with Yoishi.

Right afternoon on a Sunday, on a rare day with no part-time work and no lectures—

I opened the window and took in the comfortable breeze as I sprawled out in the empty room.

Anyhow, the previous week had passed by quickly.

First, I cried to my big sister for some borrowed money, then immediately moved here. I didn't want to enter that house ever again, and while it was expensive having to hire movers, it was worth it. Furthermore, this apartment's walls were so thin that you would almost instinctively want to pick up your neighbors' ringing phones, which made it feel like you were among living people. You could greet people in the hallways, and if you opened the window, you could hear the lackadaisical voice of the bamboo pole merchants. Basically, this place was overflowing with life. For me, that was extremely important. As I'd been drained of mental energy to the extremes, I required the comfort of living amidst people.

I never met Yoishi again.

That night, I gave her a lift to the family restaurant and parted ways. Everything about her was a mystery other than the fact that she was a high school student and that her real name was Mitsurugi Yoishi. I spoke with her a bit as we rode back to the train station, but I never found out what was going on with that house. She didn't try to explain, and I wasn't in any hurry to ask.

However, I had a strange conviction that something bad was there. Every night, I heard something eerie, and I even bit the bullet on the countdown, but I mostly believed it because of Yoishi's one phrase: "This place is real." That this was not a place I could deal with. I immediately thought that. If you think about it that way, she was why I was able to make the decision to place myself in such a peaceful place, but—

It was true what they say, that when the blade is no longer to your throat, you regain your curiosity.

Now that it was all in the past, I was truthfully somewhat curious.

What did she notice?

What was the countdown?

What is Yoishi anyway? It was hard to explain, but she seemed different from just an occult maniac. It wasn't like she was getting a thrill out of coming close to danger, but rather, she seemed to have no instinct telling her to avoid dangerous areas—in other words, it was hard to explain herself as anything but someone wanting to die. Whenever she said something, I felt like the world I believed and lived in was about to crumble apart.

Sometimes I would take a peek at Ikaigabuchi, but Yoishi never appeared in a thread.

And of course, no one reacted to the thread I'd started, and it'd been buried deep to the point where I didn't want to revive it. Krishna descended upon various threads, but he never touched on my or Yoishi's case. It was real, I wanted to write, but I had no means of proving myself, and I myself felt fuzzy about it, so I kept myself to a normal, daily life.

Indeed—ordinarity continued.

An increased living expense and an abundance of light and heat. My scholarship was insufficient, so I began working part-time at an Italian restaurant near the train station. I wanted to pay back the moving funds that I'd borrowed from my big sis too, so I started working whenever I had no lectures. My survival in the city began as I worked myself to exhaustion and flung a tired smile everywhere.

The week had flown by, and it was that kind of day today.

My first university lecture in a while had just ended, I was stuffing my textbooks into my bag when I realized a girl I recognized was staring at me.

She was short, yet her breasts were big enough to notice them standing out from her clothes. Her hair was bobbed and cut straight like a Zashiki-Warashi's, and her face resembled that of a young middle-schooler, matching her red-framed glasses.

"Who're you?" I stared right back at her. She cleared her throat once then came closer.

She started taking something out of her pocket, then put it back. I saw that it was some sort of paper. She walked over to me, standing erect and still, and in the end, never took out that piece of paper. She had a bit of a vexed expression as she glared at me (although her baby-ish face made it lose its bite), then clicked her tongue and turned away.

"H-Hey, wait." I couldn't stop myself from calling out to her. "What do you need, speak up."

The straight-haired girl turned back around and said, "Moron."

"Mo-Moron?" Despite being mild-mannered, I wasn't one to stand being insulted by a girl I'd never met before. "Why are you being so rude? What's your name? What grade are you?" I asked, but she simply snapped back, "Shut up."

"It's your fault in the first place." Then she pointed her small index finger at me. "It's because of people like you that things like this will keep happening until the end of time. Learn your place, fool."

"Fool? You..."

After that, she rapidly asked me.

"Do your shoulders ache? Do your ears ring? Are you able to sleep at night?"

Was she some sort of doctor's apprentice? Did this university even have a medical school?

While I was bewildered, the girl finally pulled out the piece of paper from her pocket. She stuck it under my nose. I had no time to take it, as she ran off like a rabbit, and by the time I picked it up, she had already left the classroom.

"...The hell was that?"

No one was left in the classroom by then, so I looked at the piece of paper I was holding.

It was like a handmade business card.

It just read—

"Beatnik Research Club President - Kurimoto Shina"

—alongside the location of the Beatnik Research Club, situated on the west wing.

  ◯

That night, I saw a dream.

In my dream, I was still living in that house.

The old three-story mountain cottage by the river bank.

There, I was looking at myself. It was like I'd spiritually departed from my body and was floating in space, gazing upon the "me" living my life. The "me" down there showed no signs of noticing me and continued living normally. It seemed I was looking into a bit of the past. "I" was living carefree, as I hadn't learned of the fear of the noises at night. Hey, give up on this house, I wanted to tell him, but as a person just drifting in a dream, there was nothing I could do. All I could do was observe.

Eventually, I noticed that Yoishi was sitting next to "me." The two of us were sitting together on the old sofa I'd picked up after moving. The two of us didn't speak to each other, instead just moving on with our lives individually. "I" was yawning as I watched TV, while she was just quietly reading an old book.

It was just a dream so it was free to make up any situation it wanted, but I still thought this was odd. However, I also accepted that if I were to live together with her, neither of us would really interfere with the other.

Eventually, the "me" down there got bored of the TV and proceeded to stretch, wash his face, and brushed his teeth. "I" thought about studying a bit, but instead "I" just immediately went to sleep. As I observed myself as an outsider, I realized that I was a pretty boring person. I boasted that I would rebuild my family's downtrodden lumber business, departed Shizuoka in opposition to my father and big sister, failed to get into the seminar I wanted, and then just wandered occult sites. Plus I hadn't even written a single letter to my mother, who I'd promised to send letters to after coming to Tokyo. Finally, I'd moved into a haunted house because of the low rent and ran into a psychotic girl. I wanted to slap myself.

As I sighed and glared, "I" quickly curled up in my bedroom. Even though Yoishi was there, it seemed that I could not see her, and I turned off the lights. Yoishi seemed to notice the lights had gone off, as she closed her book and stared off into space.

I'd floated down to Yoishi, thinking I'd turn the light on for her.

"It's about time."

I had a bad feeling from Yoishi's words.

And then—in the darkness, only illuminated by moonlight, I heard that sound.

From somewhere, the sound of something being scraped.

An ominous melody ringing across the border connecting this world and the other.

As if something was trying to crawl out of a sealed dimension. As I heard that sound, my body slowly froze over. It was like watching those supernatural shows on TV, where they set up a camera in rooms that ghosts are rumored to appear.

This is a bad dream, isn't it?

I need to wake up as soon as possible.

Because, if I stay here like this—

I would see the "something" that was engraving numbers into this house.

I frantically tried to wake up. I waved my limbs around trying to touch something, but I could not wake myself from the dream. It was like my body had been caught by some black hand seeping out of a different world. Feeling the despair of having been locked into a room with no exit, within the dream, where only my panting echoed—I suddenly found myself next to Yoishi.

On the old, leather sofa, Yoishi and I were embracing each other.

As if I were trying to stain both of my palms with Yoishi's body temperature, I played with her body. That was my wish, and yet, it wasn't. I mean, of course, I had some interest in girls as a regular eighteen-year-old boy, but my lust wasn't this twisted. I wasn't the type to release my sexual desires by turning myself into an unseen existence. I was pretty sure I had that much reason left in me, anyway.

However—Yoishi showed no signs of fear.

If anything, she was in a state of ecstasy. Her expression was dangerous. I felt my rational mind flap its wings and fly away. I licked Yoishi's skin. I groped her breasts through her clothes. I lusted over her soft body with the tips of my fingers. I pulled up her long skirt, showing her pale thighs. Yoishi's eyes were barely open. Her lips were slightly parted, and I could see her white teeth. Stop. Stop. Stop, I screamed from within my body, but I couldn't restrain my abnormal, extreme lusting.

However, the moment I placed a hand on her pale wrists—

I almost screamed. My arms were not ones I'd become accustomed to seeing but, conversely, were long and thin, like that of an aged man if anything. Those sleeves were gray and worn. I was wearing an old suit. I felt like I faintly smelled some cologne. I stretched out my trembling arms and felt my face, my nose, my lips. And what I felt was, hideously, not mine. It was definitely that of someone else—and I knew whose it was.

Him.

That man which existed out of the corner of my eyes. And finally, my face tilted against my will. My face pointed toward the window ahead, toward the moonlight—and my eyes locked with the man hanging over Yoishi.

At that moment—

I lost consciousness.

  ◯

I awaken with a violent shudder.

I was in my new apartment, abnormally bright-lit from the lamp.

To my side was a coffee table, on it an empty convenience store meal box I'd just eaten and an unfinished bottle of oolong tea. Near my pillow was a bag full of university textbooks and notebooks. There was a cheap curtain between me and the sash to the small veranda. It swayed a bit from the night breeze coming through a gap in the sash.

I let out a deep breath.

My heart was still pounding.

I came home from work, ate a bit, and then fell asleep some time ago.

Stop fucking freaking me out. Cursing no one in particular, I grabbed the bottle. I gulped down the third or so oolong tea left. I felt so incredibly thirsty that even lukewarm oolong tea tasted delicious. After finishing it, I felt a bit calmer. I scratched my hair as I exhaled sharply.

"...Calm down. It's just a dream. It was only two weeks ago. It's not surprising that I still have some fear in my heart. That's why I saw that dream, that's all it is," I mumbled in an effort to convince myself, but my heart still didn't stop pounding. I could still feel Yoishi's soft body in my hands.

It was then that I realized something had been ringing in my head the whole time.

It was like a phone from the neighbor, like a cell phone in my pocket, continuously ringing. A quiet, but definite warning sound. What...what's bothering me? I began looking around. Fresh white wallpaper surrounded me, inside a spacious, vacant room I hadn't been able to fill with furniture. Nothing had changed between before and after I'd slept. However, the bell inside my head kept on ringing.

"What the hell is that?"

I stood up and looked around the room again. There was nothing out of the ordinary. The aftereffects of the scary dream were just bothering me, that's all. I was trying to make myself believe that when I noticed it. Next to the wall was a ladder leading to a small loft. The lighting for the loft was different, so it was slightly darker there. Just then, I felt something cold travel down my spine.

Why did I pick a place with a loft again?

That dark area, where it felt like someone might jump out from, gave me bad thoughts. However, it felt like the warning inside me was directed straight at the loft. I mustered the courage to look up, and the warning sound grew louder. I swallowed once and turned on the light next to the ladder to the loft. I placed a foot on the ladder, climbing it one step at a time. Then, I willed myself to look into the loft.

Of course, there was no one in the loft. The only thing there was a cheap sleeping bag I'd bought instead of a blanket, and a number of books scattered about.

"Haaah," I breathed with relief, and just as I was about to climb back down, I saw something. On the other side of the sleeping bag, at the furthest wall, I saw something. Wounds. Two lines had been violently etched, one perpendicular to the other.

I let out a silent scream then fell off the ladder. My knees and shoulders made a horrible noise when they struck the ground, but I didn't care. Somehow I managed to grab my wallet and cell phone before running out of the apartment.

Not lines. Definitely not lines—that was...

"1." The number "1."

I even moved places—but the countdown still continued nonetheless.

I jumped into the night city and ran to a convenience store in search of light. As I ran, I tapped at my cell phone, accessing Ikaigabuchi. I looked at the forum from end to end. I didn't care if it was Karasu-san or Suu-san or Yoishi or anyone else. I desperately looked for someone I knew. Then I saw it. In a thread titled [Mysterious Dimension ☆ Ise Grand Shrine], a mere thirty minutes ago "Yoishi" had posted. Ignoring the serious discussion of how to see the Yata no Kagami at the inner section of the shrine, I posted: "Hey, Yoishi. Please help me!"

The occult maniacs who were having their debate interrupted laughed at my spontaneous post, but I ignored them. "Yoishi! Are you reading this? Talk to me. He's still following me."

But of course, Yoishi never answered. All it did was anger the Ise Grand Shrine maniacs. Even after reaching the convenience store, I continued to look at Ikaigabuchi in the parking lot. I tried writing in places that Yoishi might find interesting. Telling her to contact me immediately. But maybe I'd posted too often because the entire forum rose up in arms, calling me a troll. If I got banned, I'd have trouble contacting her, so I started responding, "No, I'm not trolling! I'm seriously in trouble!" but people just coolly responded "Yep, he's trolling." Eventually, someone began calling me a DQN and I exploded, shouting "YOU OCCULT MANIAC SCUM!" and I set the thread ablaze. It was like a 100 vs 1 flame war. Right as I was starting to feel like the world was against me and close to spiking my phone against the ground, someone wrote: "Are you Nagi?"

When I looked at their name, it said "Krishna."

That miraculous name was like a gift from heaven, one that almost made me crumble to the ground. I tried to type back a response, but my fingers were trembling too much.

In the meantime, Krishna-san posted again.

And—

It said.

"Come to the place written on the card I gave you this afternoon."

5

It was past two in the morning.

I'd left my bicycle behind, so I plodded my wait to the university on foot.

Of course, the front gate closed, the security guard eyed me suspiciously. In an effort to escape from that gaze, I took a wide arc and then went along the fencing toward the line of Zelkova trees on the left. After you here for a bit, you reach the western wing, which housed the Beatnik Research Club room.

"Kurimoto Shina—Krishna."

I was so careless.

I had realized nothing.

The administrator of Ikaigabuchi, Krishna, was a person who attended the same university as me—

and for that baby-faced girl to be Krishna, was unimaginable.

I went straight to the clubroom building on the far end and as I entered, I was met with surprise. There were still some students inside chatting with each other. Is this some kind of nightless city, I thought in exasperation, but in the same light, upon hearing such characteristic small talk, I felt a bit embarrassed still being afraid of ghosts at this age. I walked with my feat heavy to the Beatnik Research Club on the third floor. Upon arriving, I saw light come through the smoked glass. I knocked on the door and heard a familiar voice, so I introduced myself. "It's 'Nagi.' Yamada Nagito."

"It's open."

"Excuse me."

Opening the door, I found myself facing an empty, concrete-walled room of about ten tatami mats.

There was a single steel cabinet placed against a wall.

In the middle was a relatively large worktable.

And around it were four chairs, only three being sat in, comprising of both sexes.

On the center of its far side—

was the baby-faced girl who'd given me a business card in the classroom a few days ago.

The red-framed glasses were as usual odd, but she also seemed to be wearing a black dyed shrine maiden outfit paired with tall wooden clogs, sitting perched on a chair. This suited her too well. I had no interest in such types, but I frighteningly almost coming to understand how people who liked lolis and cosplay felt.

"Uh, hey, I mean, hello, are you Krishna-san?" I asked, the girl nodding while showing a disdainful expression.

"I warned you to leave that house immediately."

"Huh?"

"You didn't hear anything from Karasu-san?"

"Nothing at all."

Krishna cutely clicked her tongue and said "Anyhow, come in."

I looked around the room again and—to the sides of the small occult site admin was a woman who seemed to be in their late twenties and not like a student, boasting a simple white dress, and a bald, middle-aged man wearing monk attire who no matter what looked nothing at all like a student.

"Eh...huh...um."

I didn't know how to greet them, so I just stood bewildered at the entrance. Krishna-san then made a motion with her small chin to take a seat over there. I sat down on the chair that had been prepared for me, and when I did so, the middle-aged monk came up behind me and grabbed my shoulders with his thick arms.

"Um... Wait, what's going on?"

Thereupon Krishna-san asked me while pushing up her glasses. "Why are you willingly trying to peek at the other side?" And from there, her fuming raging lecture had begun. "Are you listening? As long as we don't look in, they can't look out. You can have an interest in the occult, it's natural and unavoidable that people would have an interest in things little understood. Still, the other side's business is the other side's. To them, not being able to see them does not count as an excuse. Even not being able to, humans have enough power to be able to feel them. This is eerie on its own, so you should immediately understand that there's something you can't see, and pay it due respect."

In the face of her stern gaze, even I, the fool, could understand.

"So, basically, I've been possessed?" I said in a tearful tone.

"At this rate, you're pretty screwed."

Her expression became ever sterner, and I froze.

"Krishna-san," spoke the woman in the white dress. She had no make-up on and held a strangely-shaped rosary.

"It's already gotten a bit inside."

...What? What has gotten inside?

"Could you possibly remove it here?"

"I can try."

The two finished their strange conversation.

"Wait, Krishna-san. Who are these two?" I asked while trying to escape the rather strong monk.

"Ikaigabuchi investigators," she bluntly replied.

"Investigators?"

"I'll explain later. Just shut it and obey."

"It's pointless. The host isn't here," I heard from a feminine voice, seemingly far away.

"It seems we still have to go to that house anyway."

"That does seem to be the case, doesn't it."

The middle-aged man and Krishna-san's voice also echoed a bit, like a record that was losing speed.

I'd started to go limp. The monk was strong, but that wasn't the only reason. It was as if I had never noticed I was on the verge of toppling over under an extreme weight—and as soon as I did, every single one of my body's sensory organs frantically tried to show me my level of fatigue. I felt that kind of exhaustion, one that tried to sink me into a bottomless mud pit.

"You can't move? You'll be ok, just don't move," Krishna said in a mysteriously kind voice, and then I lost consciousness.

To be honest, I don't remember much after that. I think I was loaded into a car. I think there was a lot of shaking. My consciousness came back because I felt a familiar sense of coldness on my skin, one that seemed to want to wring me dry. My body was still heavy and my consciousness still felt like mud, but my survival instincts seemed to scream that wherever this was, it was bad news.

When I came to, I was in front of that house.

The middle-aged man was carrying me on his back, climbing the stairs to the second floor.

—No way, hell no, I don't want to come back here again! I wanted to shout, but in reality, I couldn't even move my fingertips anymore. Not caring for my will, I was carried forth by the middle-aged man, now stood in front of the entrance to that house alongside Krishna-san and the white-clothed woman. Krishna-san easily opened the door. I thought I'd locked it, but it had opened without a key. Inside glowed an ethereal light.

"Who's there?" sharply stated Krishna-san.

I forced my resistant eyelids shut.

—No! I don't want to see them!

I don't care about who it is, I don't want to deal with this anymore. I give up. I decided right then and there. If I was able to wake up to the sunrise tomorrow, I would go straight back home to Shizuoka. It was impossible for me to try and make it alone in the demonic city of Tokyo after all. I wanted to rebuild my family's business and came to Tokyo to study for it, but I'm too much of a wuss to live alone. I'm better off living in the countryside surrounded by family and friends. My opposing father and sister were correct after all. Ahh, my mother supported me but now I just feel apologetic toward her. But I tried. I tried my best. But these happenings, I couldn't expect them, and I could do nothing about it—

"Close the door on your way in," someone said, from inside the house.

I recognized that voice. Cold, clear, but somehow decisive.

"If you want to know what's to happen, then please abide."

Right—this voice.

"Yoishi," my whisper echoed through the silence.

"Yoishi?"

Yoishi's lackadaisical voice saying "Good evening." overlapped with Krishna-san's incredulous reply.

"There was a spare key near the sewer entrance below, so I used that to come in."

"Let's go in."

At the sound of Krishna-san's voice, the middle-aged man entered the foyer, still carrying me. He took off his shoes and continued on to the living quarters. Krishna-san and the woman-in-dress followed behind. When I looked past the middle-aged man's shoulder, I saw Yoishi, already sat in the middle of the empty living room, lit by a candle inside an empty can. The dim light came from that.

"Who are you and what are you doing here?" Krishna sounded as if she were scolding her, but Yoishi still answered lackadaisically.

"Be very quiet. If you brought that person here, then you already understand what's going on in this house as well."

"Yoishi...I see," groaned Krishna.

"You're 'Yoishi.' The child that occasionally posting on Ikaigabuchi." Yoishi continued her silence, but Krishna clicked her tongue and continued. "I have no problem with you having an interest in the occult. But having an interest in it and actually walking along the edge of the abyss are two different things. You should be aware that you're messing around in a blurred boundary line."

"Nothing to worry about," flatly responded Yoishi to Krishna-san's harsh tone. "I have confidence only in being aware of that."

...Wow. She's undeterred by this angry-looking version Krishna-san.

This is why girls are scary. My big sis was scary, too, and when my mom snapped she was scarier than my dad.

However, Krishna-san responded, but not in kind, and instead in a slightly lonely tone. "I understand you—I get it. I've seen kids like you before. That's why I say this. People who harbor expectations from the abyss of darkness, they always drag others into it, too, even without meaning too. That's a very—very dangerous thing."

The middle-aged man slowly let me down from his shoulder and sat me down leaning against the wall, and I could do nothing but hear without "listening" to their conversation. My powerless body felt like it was being dragged about, being fully aware of my endless sense of helplessness. What happened here, what was happening here, and what's about to happen here, anything and everything differed from the rules my life had been following thus far. I was able to do nill. All I could do was hear their uncanny conversation and be a bystander to their uncanny drama play. However, stronger than my desire to learn the truth of this nonsense was my desire to run away from this nonsense. Leave as quickly as possible to a brighter place.

"Krishna-san." Just then, the monk stepped in between the two. "It's begun."

Along with his words began that sound.

From somewhere in the building, that sound echoed.

...scratch. scratch, scratch, scratch. sssscraaaaaaaaaaaatccccchhhhhh.

As if overpowering everything, only that sound echoed. Scratch scratch crunch crunch, something ground. Something carved. The sound was the loudest thing I'd ever heard. It was almost as if something was trying to crush this place from outside. I frantically looked around. I was completely in tears, only the creepy sound filled the world.

—Please, stop this already. Forgive me.

As I was about to begin tearfully screaming, "How lovely," Yoishi said. Her happy voice entering my ears, I became enraged.

—Lovely? Are you fucking insane? It's beyond sanity to sneak into a house with a ghost milling about using only a single candle as light and just sitting there patiently. Ahh, I get it, you're that kind of person. You're like a friend of ghosts. Then great. Can you tell your friend to stop scaring me? I'm sorry for barging in on your house. But I didn't know. I cleaned up after myself and already left so stop bothering me and go away. I mean, tell your friend to stop following me to my new place and give me mysterious countdowns. I don't know what sort of grudge they have against the world but I'm completely unrelated to it so stop, tell them that.

Of course, my body wouldn't move and neither would my mouth, but I begged Yoishi with my all.

However, Yoishi didn't understand my feelings at all.

"Scared?"

I heard an inexplicably hopeful voice at my ear. It seemed Yoishi had come right next to me, but I resolutely did not open my eyes. So I screamed at her with my soul.

—Of course I'm fucking scared. I'm super fucking scared. My body won't move and I don't get it and some sound is echoing through my head and only psychos and ghosts are around me. Right, this house only has psychos in it now. A psychotic administrator that gathers and edits creepy articles, a psychotic woman holding some bizarre weapon despite being of age, some psychotic baldy who seems to only have bodybuilding as a hobby. And then there's you. A black-covered straight-frontal-hair psychotic girl. And there's some douche ghost that never shows itself but does annoying pranks like carve numbers. Seriously, cut it out. Are you all just enjoying your emergency offline meeting right now? You're all just waiting for me to pee my pants, aren't you? Come on. Knock it off. I've apologized. I was wrong. I don't want to be here anymore. I don't want to see those numbers anymore. Next is "0," and then what? What's next? I don't want to know. I mean if you're gonna kill me, just do it. Stop chasing and dragging me around—

—However.

At some point, the sound had stopped.

The dark world, formed by my tightly shut eyes, had become filled with silence.

What? How? What happened—

I became worried that everyone had left, but I was also afraid that if I were to open my eyes something else would be there.

Still, I couldn't just stay like this. I was tired. I'd begun to feel reckless. If you're gonna kill me, just do it. I don't want to get cornered and hunted like this. Just give me a bad end already.

I opened my tearful eyes. But, all I saw was just a house, unchanged from before. And everyone was still there.

Krishna-san stood in front of the door to the bedroom.

The woman-in-dress stood in the middle of the living room with her eyes closed.

The monk lingered by my side, with only Yoishi looking at me emotionlessly.

Everyone was standing at the same spot they were before I had closed my eyes. I tearfully met my gaze with Yoishi's eyes, herself nodding in return. Then she looked down.

I followed her sight.

To my feet.

As if cutting across space between them, four, thick wounds had been carved into the floor.

"A, AHHHHHHHHH," I screamed, pulling my sluggish body away from it. But my hips wouldn't respond. All I could do was flail in place. But I tried to scramble away anyway.

You already know what's coming.

It was—"0."

"It's '0.' It's all over. I'm tired of this, I'm going home. I'm going back to Shizuoka."

"Calm down, Nagi-kun," said Krishna-san. Before I realized it she'd started calling me Nagi-kun, but I couldn't care less at the moment, I just continued to try and crawl away. I was too busy trying to flee from that number.

"I won't! What's the point of me staying here!? What's going to happen next!? What's going to happen to me!?"

"Pull yourself together, Nagi-kun," Krishna-san's voice sounded out once more—Ouch, goddamnit, must have been the monk. My back was struck with a tremendous shock. After that, the woman-in-dress said something I couldn't understand. It was filled with strange rhymes I'd never heard before, countless words whose power were making my head go insane—

As I frantically flailed about trying to escape, suddenly a long, black skirt blocked my path.

It was Yoishi, dressed in obsidian, as always.

"Move," I said in a tremble, but this time they weren't glass beads, no glimmer to be seen, rather, this time, Yoishi had a look of fascination as she reached out to me with her hand.

"Give me that thing."

......That thing?

"What you're holding, that thing," she said, and I looked at what I was holding in my hands.

There was the key to my apartment. It was the key I'd left in my pocket. I was holding it backward, and at the end of it was chips of wood. For a while, I didn't know what that meant. Only until the chips of wood fell off, onto the "0" that had been cut ominously at my feet.

"Wha..."

—No way.

—That's impossible there's no way.

"Yes," said Yoishi in a whisper. "The one that was carving numbers into this house was always you."

With those words—

My consciousness went completely cloudy.

6

"In other words, it was just a schema."

It was a regular evening, roughly five days later.

Krishna-san was talking to me in the Beatnik club room at the university.

"Or rather, a reverse schema. That house makes people uneasy."

Krishna-san and I were facing each other in the room, under the light from the beautiful evening sun.

"The house...makes people uneasy?" I repeated like a fool, and Krishna nodded in confirmation.

"In the past, Ikaigabuchi investigated similar places too—the structure of the building causes changes in the human psyche to lean toward anxiety; there are actually a number of them around the world. Some of them turn into murder scenes, and others turn the people living within them into criminals. There's no actual scientific proof for the correlations, but I'm of the opinion that they exist. People's minds, after all, are indecisive things that you can easily manipulate into leaning one way or another."

"W-Wait a second. What exactly do you mean?"

"Basically, that building wasn't built for people."

I felt something like a cold hand gripping my heart.

"I'll avoid saying their name here. But the architect of that building had actually received architecture awards during his time in university. People had high expectations of him," as she spoke in remembrance, Krishna-san was illuminated by the golden sunlight, her straight, black hair glittering. "He was supposedly a very serious person. Maybe too serious. He was the type of person that wondered what buildings are—and he would lose sleep pondering that. Above all he loved seeing his clients happy, so he used his ingenuity and worked and worked. However, he realized the futility that arose when one person asked him for a different design, and he watched the house he'd put his blood and soul into being demolished in the name of 'renovation.' Families change. Preferences change. It's an inevitability in life, but he couldn't take it."

—If you took care of it properly, it would last over a hundred years. —Sometimes, people should suit themselves to the house.

"Leaving behind with those words, he vanished from his atelier someday. His family put out a search request, but no one could ever find him, and some years later he was effectively declared dead. That was over thirty years ago. That atelier was his final work, and had at some point been dubbed 'The Wish-Fulfilling House.'" Krishna-san pointed out the third-floor window, toward the residential district. "This country tossed aside countless traditions with the Westernization of the Meiji era. I'm of the opinion that one of those traditions was that house. Tiled roofs became scarcer over the years, and buildings that housed several generations became rarer. Mass production, mass consumption—that was the era we'd entered. We weren't inheriting treasures anymore, believing instead that you could reset life every few decades. After all, that sufficed for supply and demand. But I think things that were previously important to the people of this country increasingly faded away."

After hearing her words, I thought.

My father says the same.

It takes thirty years to grow a single, sturdy tree. And yet, the Japanese lumber industry found itself in danger of going out of business in the face of cheap imported lumber. It wasn't that he was worried about his job. He was afraid that the idea—that you could get an unlimited amount of cheap wood—would become ingrained in the minds of the people of this country. In the past, people would pray to the gods of forests, cut trees while offering gratitude towards them, then carefully built houses with it. Whenever they rebuilt, they carefully tried to reuse wood wherever possible. Even on this earthquake-riddled island, one of the formerly powerful Seven Great Temples, the Houryuuji, had remained standing for a thousand years. The skill of the carpenters who understood the finest details and characteristics of its wood was, of course, amazing, but they also say that the graciousness toward nature's important offerings was just as important in the process.

I always agonized over having been born into a family whose business dealt with lumber.

Did I take care of the buildings I lived in as I grew up? Did I ever think about the feelings of those who built them? I was filled with emotions as I wondered if a day would ever arrive that "his" wish would come true, within this grand city where the every day included seeing the sites of reforms or reconstructions.

According to Krishna-san, everything originated from the design of that house, containing the intent of the architect. When an architectural friend of Krishna-san took a look at the house, they noted that while it looked simple, it used extremely high-level techniques. They said that the groaning of the house was to give it durability against hurricanes and earthquakes, along with a bit of playfulness to deliberately make it groan.

"The meaningful space under the stairs is the center-point of a sturdily built house. The kitchen, which gets abused the most, was deliberately omitted. The living quarters were deliberately designed to interfere with a daily routine. It was certainly a house constructed for durability," Krishna-san mumbled as she pushed her red-framed glasses up. "Normally, houses should revolve around the inhabitants, but not in this case. People naturally begin to feel like the house was built for something other than themselves, and that's enough to psychologically rattle people. So what do you think would happen when a boy who'd just recently arrived in Tokyo, with no friends, decides to live there?"

"So, in other words, it had nothing to do with ghosts?"

"Indeed, you're probably much more mentally fatigued than you realize, having moved to a city alone and all. You may have felt fear at first, but you likely tolerated it. Eventually, though, you reached a limit, and then what do you think a person would do?" Krishna-san gazed at me with her big eyes. "They create a reason for escaping from the fear."

"Create...a reason?"

"Yes. They create a reason for the sounds. In other words, you were subconsciously carving numbers into the walls of the house at night."

"But—"

I was speechless. Krishna-san leaned in closer.

"Think about it, Nagi-kun. Where does fear come from? It comes from the unknown. So people study and learn. They research inexplicable things to escape from the fear of the unknown. Man's knowledge was born from an effort devoted to escape from fear. Cooking developed out of the fear of starvation, clothing developed out of fear of external temperature, and buildings and weapons developed out of fear of enemies. Everything began with human fears. You thought there was an inexplicable sound at night. However, no matter how much you searched the house, you couldn't find a reason for it. Of course not. You'd have to know that the house was deliberately designed to make sounds, but you had no way of knowing that. So then what did you do? Cornered, you created a reason for the sounds. In other words, a reverse schema."

Is that even possible?

No—it had to be. Otherwise, how would the number "3" have been carved into the back of a shoe I'd been wearing all along? I was the one wearing it, so it had to have been me.

My lower body was trembling. It terrified me, the other-self that acted irrespective of my will. Or rather, that I didn't understand myself.

"Well—" Krishna-san sat back down and sighed. "It was partly my fault for leaving a building like that alone, even though I knew it existed right near me. Sorry," she said, as she bowed her head, which flustered me.

"No no no, stop that. It all started with me being greedy because I wanted to skimp on living expenses and didn't immediately move out. Please raise your head," I frantically said.

"Mmhmm, it was your fault," she nodded. "There are no shortcuts for granting wishes."

I could give no retort, and just groaned.

However, I realized there was one question that hadn't been answered.

"Hm, wait a second. Why were the numbers counting down?"

Krishna-san shook her head, saying she "didn't know."

"Huh? You don't know?" I asked, and for some reason, her big eyes glimmered with amusement.

"I don't know. I don't know, but I think you probably carved a '5' on the wall."

"A '5'? Not '6'?"

"Right, the number '5.' It's possible that it might not have been meant to be a number, to begin with. It probably didn't matter to you. Your fear was alleviated by carving anything into the wall, to act as the source of the sounds. However, this is why this incident came forth, a little bit of coincidence. On the place you carved, there was from the start, out of pure coincidence, a scratch. Subconsciously, you'd remembered where you carved '5.' Yet when you woke up, it combined with the scratch that was originally there to create '6.' And that was what gave birth to something else inside you—a 'ghost.'"

...Ahh.

So that's why I felt an incredible amount of anxiety when I first saw that number. The feeling of having encountered something far beyond my threshold, that I could not reason out.

"After that, you continued carving numbers into the wall in accordance with the sound you heard after sleeping. The countdown was probably because of your subconscious desire. If the numbers went up, it would continue forever. You were probably hoping that it would eventually stop." After that, Krishna-san had a bit of a mischievous look. "But you're quite simple. If the countdown had truly finished, you may have ended your life. I'm glad we made it on time."

And with that, she showed me a soft smile for the first time.

"Alright? I hope you've learned your lesson to not enter the world of ghosts out of pure curiosity. And as with living people, pay respect to their existence. That's the main motto of Ikaigabuchi, after all."

And the Krishna-san who said those words with complete seriousness had finally matched the image I'd created of her as a person.

Although—

She had a more moe-like character look than one of a father or big brother.

  ◯

And with that, the complex, tangled threads had been unraveled.

According to Krishna-san, she'd realized that the building caused anxiety in the psyche of its inhabitants the moment I made my first post. In an effort to keep it under wraps, she had left it in Karasu-san's hands to tell me—but Karasu-san was pretty careless to begin with and then became drunk on top of that, so the important message never got across to me, which is why things had escalated to this point.

In any case, everything had been solved, so that was good.

"I'll give you a warning, though." As I was leaving the house, Krishna-san had told me. "You don't seem to have much tolerance for this area. Maybe I shouldn't be saying it as an administrator for an occult site, but you shouldn't delve into the occult genre too much. Find friends in Tokyo with whom you can bond, get a girlfriend, and construct a proper, solid identity while you dabble in the occult as a hobby. That's the right way to go about it. And especially—avoid that girl named Yoishi."

...Which sounded about right.

As Krishna-san had said, Yoishi was abnormal. She was, to put it frankly, as if her feet were planted firmly on the other side. That was probably why those urban legends popped up over her odd level of focus on the paranormal.

Stepping out of the west wing, I was met with an extraordinarily beautiful sunset.

The clear orange color shone straight to the depths of my soul.

Damn.

I'd become easily moved by this incident and almost came to tears just out of graciousness toward peace. I hung on, willing myself against crying. There were a lot of students about, and a feeder high school was just on the other side of the gate to the west wing. There were a number of high school girls going home, too. I didn't want to embarrass myself as a university student.

Just then—

I realized one of them was staring at me.

She had pale skin, pretty black hair, and was slender. Her uniformed figure was blinding, and just by standing, she looked like she was from a different world...

"Wait...what?" I eventually realized that I recognized the beautiful girl and couldn't restrain myself from running over to her. "Are you, by any chance, Yoishi?"

Then the girl turned her glass bead-like eyes towards me.

"Oh, it's you."

Judging from that half-awake reply, she didn't seem to be gazing at me.

Yoishi was wearing a school uniform, and perhaps as a fault of her looks, stood out because of it. Even in such an appearance, she seemed distant from the concept of daily life.

"Yo, how unexpected. You attend our feeder school? What year are you in?" I spoke to her with a full smile.

"That has nothing to do with you."

Yoishi's response was quite cold.

Her bedazzled, vitality-filled looks that she had when looking upon the paranormal were now completely absent.

"I hadn't come to school in a while—looks like I shouldn't have come at all," she said with annoyance. I noticed she didn't have the sharp odeur from before. It seemed she'd taken a bath. Glossy hair, an ironed white blouse, a black tie. I narrowed my eyes as I gazed at the contrasting look from before, and said, "Pretty good."

"What is?"

"Your looks. You look cleaner and that uniform suits you better."

However, Yoishi turned her back to me, saying "Pathetic."

I intended to praise her, but it apparently just annoyed her.

"If you have nothing to say then I'm going."

She turned on her heel, and I hurriedly stopped her.

"You were staring over there, did you want something from Krishna-san?"

"—Krishna." She reacted to that name, as life looked to return to her glass beads. "I see—then Ikaigabuchi is here."

As always her ability to point out occult-related topics was spot on.

As I continued to drive the conversation in that direction, I felt myself going mad.

"I owe you a lot too. I was told all about that house. Didn't know something like delirium over a building even existed. You know, when I learned the truth, I completely freaked out."

I was probably on a high from having been freed from my bottled-up anxiety. I kept on talking. I talked on and on and on. Everything I'd heard from Krishna, about the truth about the incident, the architecture of the house, the will of the architect, and even about the problems of contemporary Japan.

However, Yoishi's reaction was worse than I'd expected.

Without even glancing at me, she said "That's good to hear," without any trace of emotion, continuing her stride.

I chased after her, weirdly bothered about that somewhat lonely, slender back that looked as if it would fly away if someone blew on it.

"You're looking kinda down, what's up? Something on your mind?"

The moment I said that I recalled.

Come to think of it, that day, she said something to me at the house.

"Have you noticed?" I think.

...Right. What had she noticed back then?

When I asked her that, she halted in her tracks.

She slowly turned around and answered with another question.

"Do you really want to know?"

Those cold black eyes are going to swallow me—

I heard something inside me urging me to not go forwards.

That I shouldn't learn anymore, it warned.

"You can still turn back," said Yoishi. "You know what they say—if you peer in from this side, they'll be able to see you, too."

I got goosebumps at those words, the same ones that Krishna-san had spoken to me.

But—

I truly wonder why.

That instant a bizarre sense of excitement assailed me. I wanted to view the world as she did. I wanted to stand where she did. I wanted to know why her words always seemed to shake my own world.

"I'll listen. So tell me," I said, and the moment I did, either my mind was playing tricks on me or did Yoishi seem to have a slightly forlorn expression on her face?

However—

I would only later realize this was a turning point for me.

A bizarre, grotesque, irredeemable story about wandering around the darkness of man began right here.

The boundary between that world and this one—the journey around the "Ikaigabuchi" began at this very moment.

After a bit, Yoishi nodded and then spoke once again.

"I always wondered. Why is it called 'The Wish-Fulfilling House'?"

"Why? Because-"

"The title lacks a subject. Whose wish?"

Those words gave me chills-

I immediately began regretting my decision.

"That house isn't a house of hope. I feel an incredible source of malice from it," Yoishi whispered-with the expression of a queen who'd been locked away in a dark castle for a millennium. "The architect that had disappeared while loving strange buildings. The countdown that began with '6.' The mysterious space under the stairs. The Wish-Fulfilling House for who knows. There's a single answer that ties everything together."

My goosebumps wouldn't disappear.

What was she trying to say? What was about to show up?

The night-colored girl's darkened pupils glimmering as she spoke.

"The architect is still inside those stairs."

"W-wait a sec-"

"Of course, he isn't alive. But then it all comes together. Why there's a meaningless space under the stairs. Why it became named 'The Wish-Fulfilling House.' And why the numbers began with '6'"

"Wait, that doesn't explain anything. It didn't start from '6' because it was originally '5' and I had just coincidentally written the number over an already existing scratch—"

"Wrong." Her words twisted my world. "You originally wrote '5.' You're right to that point. But there was never a scratch originally. Someone added a scratch that changed it to '6.'"

"How...how can you say that happened?"

"I saw it."

"Saw what?"

"That on top of your '5,' someone had added a scratch to make it '6.'"

"Then...then when Krishna-san said that there was no ghost in that house—"

Yoishi turned her eyes to the west wing, a sad look on her face.

"Ignorance is bliss, after all."

...Ha.

"That is that person's kindness, and what I lack."

...Hahaha.

Hahahahahahahahahahaha.

I had to laugh at this or else I would have gone insane.

"You're completely lying aren't you? You're making this all up, aren't you? Oh, I got it! It's an occult story you read somewhere!" I continued laughing, hoping that that was the case.

Yoishi looked at me sympathetically with a mourning gaze.

"It's all true. Because—" When I could no longer respond, Yoishi quietly landed the final blow. "When you were being carried out, some man I'd never met before was clicking his tongue on the stairs."

With the world going dark—

Only Yoishi's sweet cold voice rang out.

"Welcome...to the other side."

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