Phenomeno:Case 06

Case 06: Rororo

『Am I the one reading the book? Or am I the one being read by the book?』

It was on a Monday afternoon in October when I picked up a piece of paper with these words written on it. It was lying in front of the student bulletin board; I had gone there to get information about class cancellations and noticed a piece of paper lying on the ground.

“The hell is this?”

If you look at the text alone, it seems somewhat philosophical, like a poem of an excessively self-conscious student. I didn't pay any attention to it at the time, and I quickly tucked it into my pocket as an acquaintance approached me. I wasn’t particularly interested in it or anything, thinking I’d just throw it away in a trash bag later. However, a few days after that, I was in the main auditorium during a lecture on Introduction to Political Science, when I noticed that something was stuck on the edge of the compartment of my desk. It was a page of a notebook that seemed to have been torn out, and when I picked it up and unfolded it, I found the following:

『I see, The book was the origin.』

I remembered the meticulous handwriting. Coincidentally, I was wearing the same jeans that day, so I felt around in my pockets and found the piece of paper that I had picked up in front of the bulletin board. I compared the two, and it was exactly as I thought. It felt like a continuation of the note I had found earlier.

But is that really possible?

The possibility that the same person will pick up two scraps of paper that some student randomly threw away, Am I too much of a romantic to believe that it was more than mere coincidence and instead, a fateful event? The thought briefly flashed across my mind, but I still didn’t pay it too much heed at the time.

The moment I started paying it heed, was when I was headed to the western club building, and bumped into Yoishi Mitsurugi , who was heading home from school -- somehow or another we ended up going to a coffee shop where we talked about it.

“This person is no longer alive.”

“Huh?”

“Yes, I believe they’re dead.”

Startled, I stared at Yoishi’s pale face, she was taking a sip of milk tea as if she had said something trivial. I then asked:

“H-hold on a second. You’re saying a dead person wrote this?”

“That’s not it, I’m just saying there’s a chance they died after they wrote it.”

“Even if that’s the case, that’s damn creepy.”

I said so, but Yoishi looked more vacant than ever.

A black blazer and a black skirt. A black tie on a white blouse. Navy blue socks and black leather shoes. In the beginning of October, the Koumei affiliated high school changed to winter clothes, and I didn’t know whether to call her winter uniform stylish or funeral attire; Her dark eyes shined as she gave a vacant look. Her black hair, which was originally beautiful, was somewhat unkempt, and her eyes were bloodshot, as if she hadn't slept at all.

That’s right, the reason why I invited her to this coffee shop was because I saw her wandering around like a ghost as usual. I had a lot of questions I wanted to ask her, about the clock tower and about Miiko, but they were all thrown away to the wayside the moment I saw the way she walked out of the main high school gate, it was as if she were drifting in the sky. So, I called out to her, "Hey, I'll buy you a cup of coffee," grabbed her by the arm and dragged her here. Anyway, I was worried because it felt like she didn’t care if she disappeared from this world.

“You still haven't solved your problem, have you?”

“I don’t think it can ever be solved.” Yoishi muttered as she rested her chin on hands to cover her mouth.

I shrugged my shoulders, and for some reason, looked around the coffee shop.

The coffee shop was in front of the station on the second floor, and although it was my first time coming here, it was a quiet store with a relaxing atmosphere. A modern bossa nova was playing in the background, and all the interior decorations, such as lights, tables, and clown figurines, were all antiques.

Maybe I’ll come back here to read a book next time, I thought to myself.

“But, it’s strange.”

Suddenly hearing that voice, I turned to face Yoishi who was looking down at the two scraps of paper I had handed her.

“If this note is a memo to oneself, then there's no need to cut it off, and if it's a message to someone else, it's too all-encompassing.”

“Well, that’s true.” I nodded.

“Look, isn’t it by some kind of poet? Lately, I've been hanging out a lot in the western club building, and there are countless guys composing their own poetry. Especially in the A wing of the Humanities Club, there are a lot of aspiring creators who have a creative fever that can’t be stopped.”

“Did any of them die recently?”

“You’re gonna stay obsessed about the dead guys to the very end, huh?”

I asked humorously, yet Yoishi nodded with a blank expression.

“After all, Kotodama are words packed with feeling.”

I felt a hint of something cold in her words.

“…Kotodama, you say?”

“That’s right --- The words we normally use without concern also have the characteristics of a curse. Have you ever heard of taboo words? Like Kameari was originally called Kamenashi, or how parking numbers and room numbers in hospitals avoid using the numbers four and nine – Originally, the people of this country were prudent in the words they used, and the sounds they produced. They feared that anything spoken out loud would one day come to pass. Compared to that, contemporary people are rather callous in the words they use.”

“Well, let’s leave aside the problem of contemporary people.”

After rebuking Yoishi, who had suddenly started to get fired up, I asked her once again.

“How do you connect that with this note? And the guy writing it being dead?”

“After all, these words are trembling with power.”

Those words gave me goosebumps, completely filling me with horror.

“Trembling --- what?”

“They’re trembling. The letters themselves are shaking. They are shaking as if wandering around for a way out, as if searching for a destination. The more a person's soul is put into a text, the more it trembles with power as a kotodama.”

“No -- but this could have just been written by a living person with a tremendous amount of emotions put into it, right?”

“No…”

Thereupon, Yoishi suddenly looked behind me.

“Over there.”

“—Huh?”

“A man around your age. I don’t think he’s a vengeful ghost.”

“W-what are you saying?”

Flustered, I turned around.

But there was no one there. Just two old ladies sitting in a seat behind me, chatting happily. ‘Hey, don’t scare me like that’, I was about to say, when Yoishi quietly continued.

“A striped T-shirt and jeans. A grave look on his face. Short hair. He appeared there ever since you started talking about the string of words on that piece of paper. He’s been staring at the paper for a long time.”

Yoishi’s eyes shone with amusement as she looked over my shoulder.

--Hey, are you serious?

Immediately, I began to feel the raw presence of someone behind my back, and I sat up. You gotta be kidding me. I don't want to get possessed just because I happened to pick up a piece of paper.

“Yoishi, I’m leaving.”

I picked up the receipt and said that, but Yoishi was still calm as ever sitting back in her chair as she spoke:

“There might be something he wants to tell us.”

“Don’t drag me into it. You’re the one who can see him, so you go ahead and ask.”

“I’ve rarely been able to talk to ghosts. Mostly, they’re just there.”

Yoishi continued to stare behind me while she spoke. She’s probably trying to read the ghosts’ facial expressions and gestures, but it’s downright creepy because I’m right in her line of sight. I couldn’t stand to keep sitting in that seat anymore, so I moved next to Yoishi. In short, we were both facing that striped shirt guy. I slowly traced my eyes to where Yoishi was looking at. I thought I might be able to see something vaguely, but I couldn't see anything. The only thing that happened was that the two old ladies turned to look at us, startled by the suspicious pairs of eyes gazing at them. This is bad. They’re gonna complain if we don’t stop.

“H-hey Yoishi, let’s just go.”

“Wait, he’s saying something.” Yoishi abruptly stopped me.

“…Eh?”

“He keeps muttering something…repeating the same words with his mouth.”

However, Yoishi's gaze was now completely focused on the two ladies who had been sitting behind me earlier, and they were giving us a very dangerous look. A fearsome gaze, as if to say, ‘You wanna fight? Bring it on.’

“S-sorry. We’ll leave right away.”

Right away, I preemptively apologized to the two ladies. When –

“---Ro, ro , ro.”

Yoishi uttered the bizarre words with a look of delight.

“He's repeating, ‘Rororo.’”

---

In the end, what did the note mean?

What the hell is that ghost with the striped shirt?

And what did he mean when he muttered the word ‘Rororo’?

All of this remained a mystery, and several days passed.

I haven’t met Yoishi since then. As always, she left me with nothing but cryptic and creepy information. And of course, she didn’t even say a word of thanks for the treat. No, that would have been fine, but what about this unconvinced, hazy feeling I'm left with? To keep that note with the strange words written on it, or to throw it away, either choice is terrifying.

However, that afternoon – this time, I ended up finding a notebook.

The place I discovered it was in a large common room on the second floor of the university's student hall. It was placed on a round table by the window, sitting there all by itself. I was helping with posting updates on "Ikaigabuchi" at the Beatnik lab during my lunch break, and missed lunch as a result. I had free time right around third period when class got cancelled, and was washing down some Anpan with milk – when that notebook strangely allured me.

I looked around in all directions. The common room was exceptionally large. It was so large that many of the clubs that didn’t have their own club rooms used it as a gathering spot. But at that time, perhaps because it was the middle of third period, there were only a few groups of students huddled together in sparse numbers. No one was near that table by the window side.

After thinking about it, I stood up and moved my chair next to the table. And I took the notebook in hand. It was an elegantly looking, dark-red colored notebook. It was sold for around 300 yen at the campus store. But when I opened it and saw the first page, I was horrified. It was written in the same meticulous handwriting.

“…Damn it, stop messing with me!”

Getting flustered, I threw away the notebook, and looked behind me.

Of course, there was no one there, that guy wearing the striped shirt Yoishi spoke of might have been there, but I couldn’t sense his presence. And yet, even if he keeps placing creepy things everywhere I go, there’s nothing I can do for him.

“Hey, if you have something to say, go to Yoishi. I can't hear or see what you're saying.”

I must have looked like some kind of lunatic to the other students, muttering such things by myself. But I couldn’t help it -- what scares you, scares you. I was about to get up and leave – when I caught a glimpse of it.

On the last page of the notebook I threw away, there was a name – ‘Kouhei Niijima’.

Yoishi was right.

After that I proceeded to the student affairs office, informed them about the notebook I had picked up and tried inquiring about the guy called ‘Kouhei Niijima’. The staff member who dealt with me was a man over forty, who gave me a strange look at first, then changed to a somber one, and informed me. That student is no longer with us, he spoke in a hushed tone of voice. “Because he passed away last month.”

Judging from his manner of speaking, Kouhei Niijima apparently committed suicide. Of course, he didn't give me any details as to why or where. I had no way to ask any more questions. I said a word of thanks and left the student affairs office at a loss.

That note really had been written by a person who had died.

There were signs that a few pages inside the notebook had been ripped out, and that matched with the first note I had found. The question was, why did it manifest in front of me in its entirety? And the words Yoishi had mentioned: ‘Rororo’, what did they mean?

In the early afternoon, I sat down on the bench in the courtyard. There, I opened the weathered, dark-red notebook. Rather than using it as a schedule notebook, Kouhei Niijima seemed to be have been using it more to write casual notes. Passing my eyes over the descriptions on the first page, I found out that he was a freshman like me, belonging to the Japanese Literature Department. His hometown was Hirosaki in Aomori, and on the first few pages, he laments endlessly about being homesick and how he couldn’t make any friends.

Before I realized, I had become absorbed in reading the notebook.

Kouhei Niijima was working part-time at a convenience store. He couldn’t hide his peculiar Aomori accent, which often made the customers laugh, but troubled him. He seemed to be somewhat introverted, and didn’t hang out with any of his colleagues from work. Even in the university’s linguistic class, he didn’t have any people he was close to, and was always hanging out at the library. The books he had read and his brief impressions on them were jotted down. I knew about Osamu Dazai and Shuji Terayama, but when it came to Yojiro Ishizaka, Ujaku Akita, and Zenzo Kasai, well, I wasn’t particularly a literary enthusiast so I didn’t know those names. According to the description, apparently all the authors were from Aomori. As if he were nostalgic for his hometown, Kouhei Niijima seemed to have collected and read their writings.

His day was almost entirely made up of waking up at the boarding house, going to university, and either going to his part-time job, or spending time in the library. There was no account of him going anywhere for fun, or talking with anyone. Just the things he ate, and the books he read, that was all. With the impressions I got from his meticulous handwriting, the loneliness of his life was vividly depicted in my mind. I myself felt anxious the first few weeks after I moved out of Shizuoka. There were so many people in the city, and I didn't know any of them. I was always threatened that Tokyo would be a scary place to live, and in fact, looking at the unending crowds in front of the station even at night, I felt that time passed differently than back home. However, I had ‘Ikaigabuchi’. A group of like-minded people who spent twenty-four hours gleefully discussing some paranormal thing or another. Even if I didn’t get along well with anyone in my class, and even if I didn’t belong to any club, as long as I could read the bizarre stories there, my loneliness would be alleviated. But Kouhei Niijima didn’t seem to use the internet, and although he had a cell phone, he hardly ever seemed to use it. I guess books were his only friend -- I sighed. Well, I guess there is meaningfulness in spending the first period of your life with nothing but solitude and literature as your friend, but I don’t think I could do it. If you kill yourself after all, that meaningfulness will never flourish.

As I continued flipping through the pages, feeling somewhat depressed, in the middle of the notebook, I found a page with a single line written.

『I met her today.』

There was just one line on that page.

In the dull accounts of the notebook, that line out stood out.

Hey, hey, hey, is it suddenly turning into a love story?

Even if that’s the case, these notes are from someone who committed suicide. I thought it would continue to get darker and increasingly depressing, but that line captivated my interest. However, mentions of the ‘girl’ didn’t increase from there on. There were only occasional mentions of greeting her, or making eye contact. I found myself rooting for Kouhei Niijima the more and more I read. Like, ‘Hey, hurry up and talk to her already!’ Even in his somewhat detached writings, I felt that Kouhei Niijima was taken in by that ‘girl’. Finally, after a few pages, I saw an account that said that the girl had an interesting way of thinking. Then it concludes by saying that she is indeed an extremely interesting girl. I was already skimming vigorously ahead, chasing mentions of the ‘girl’. At any rate, she seemed to be a slender, beautiful girl, and she seems to be intelligent -- but the whole picture is a bit vague. It was hard to infer whether Kouhei Niijima was indifferent or whether the girl had no distinctive features. Then, without any particular event happening with her, the accounts continued in a matter-of-fact manner, until I finally landed on a blank page. When I turned the page, I found that one had been torn out.

“…What the hell is this?”

I uttered, and then remembered: ‘Oh, right’, I took out the two scraps of paper from the notebook I had picked up earlier.

I matched the torn parts to the notebook, and it looked like that the latter scrap I picked up with 『I see, The book was the origin.』had been written first. But when I compared the contents of that scrap of paper to the contents of the previous page, it was quite incomprehensible. I mean, the notebook is like a bunch of random memos jotted down, so it’s filled with parts which don’t make much sense, but I felt that the appearance of that ‘book’, was too sudden. Continuing a few pages after that, the book didn’t make an appearance again, it just alternated between the girl, his part-time job, and the food he ate. And then, another ripped page appeared. I matched the remaining note, 『Am I the one reading the book?』It matched perfectly. However, that too was incomprehensible. Neither the book’s title nor his impressions were written down. And that was Kouhei Niijima’s last entry. Only about a third of the notebook remained, the rest of which was blank.

“The book is the origin… the origin of what?”

I closed the notebook, and looked up.

Before I had realized, the palm of my hand had gotten sweaty, I wiped it on my jeans.

I was so immersed in the world of the notebook to the point where I had forgotten where I was for a moment.

Nearby, on the lawn of the campus courtyard, a group of students were laughing loudly. They had a lot of tennis bags next to them, so I surmised that they belonged to a tennis group. The bitterness etched in the notebook, and the cheerful laughter of the group members was in complete contrast to each other.

And -- that just made Kouhei Niijima's loneliness all the more apparent.

What lay in the palm of my hand, was the life of a man who was already dead. It was the fragment of a man who, until a month ago, was living, worrying, eating, and reading.

Kotodama – why did Yoishi say those things? But she was right. There was still a hint of him in here. If you’d open the notebook, his presence would linger in the air. But Kouhei Niijima, there might be something you want to say, but, It’s impossible for me. I’m a special kind of coward. I've had this happen to me before, and I suffered greatly for getting too emotionally involved.

“…I’m sorry.”

Apologizing, I softly put down the notebook on the bench.

Immediately, I stood up and walked away without looking back. I shoved my hands in my pockets, and took a few steps as I were running away, and then – a voice called out to me.

“Hey, you there.”

It was an overly-familiar voice, one I‘d heard somewhere before.

“You forgot your notebook.”

…Damn it. I was found out.

With those sorts of regrets, I turned around--

And there was a somewhat familiar figure of a tall and lanky man. He was dressed in a cool, indigo-dyed kinagashi, and with a smile on his white, smooth face, he was looking at me.

“Ah, you’re—”

“Yo, it’s been a while.”

The man approached me with a grin, picked up the dark-red notebook I'd intentionally left behind on the bench, and held it out to me.

“What a coincidence to see you again.”

His white face was set like a kabuki stage actors’, and he was stroking his thin, shallow beard. And his seemingly friendly smile reminded me of something akin to physiological disgust. I felt a chill, as if I had seen a fox in human form during broad daylight.

That’s right, it was the man who had once guided Yoishi and me to the world of dreams. He seemed to be Krishna-san’s teacher, a dweller of the world beyond.

“W-what are you doing in my university?”

The man in Japanese clothing replied with a grin as he kept his hands in his pockets.

“What? I'm just here looking for something.”

“Something?”

“A book.”

My heart thudded painfully at those words.

“I’m searching for a mysterious book in this school. It’s called ‘Rororo’ -- and it seems, if you read it, you’ll die.”

His words -- caused my vision to go blurry.

---

“Long story short, this school is distorted.”

The man wearing a kinagashi peered at me with fox-like eyes and declared.

“It’s hopelessly distorted. I don’t know if everyone is aware of it, but it was probably that way since its foundation. Well, I guess it’s not fair to blame such old distortions on you students here in the present...”

The man, who had been yammering on and on to that point, suddenly stopped speaking.

“But hey, this sure is some good coffee jelly!”

We were in the university coffee shop on the second floor of the students’ hall.

I couldn't say no to the man's pushy invitation, so the both of us came here.

“I mean, for a coffee shop in a university, this is first-class. Not only are the fresh cream and ice cream perfectly proportioned, but what’s more, you can really taste the flavor of the coffee in the jelly. I mean, as long as there’s ‘coffee’ in the name, it's the least you can do, but how many coffee shops just ignore that?”

It was already his third coffee jelly. He complimented her so many times, that the old lady from the coffee shop wearing the white, triangle bandana kept blushing like a schoolgirl.

“You're a nice man, but you're also a smooth talker.”

“No, no, not at all, this really is delicious.”

The man smiled at the old lady amiably and continued by adding:

“To do what is obvious and to do it well. It may not stand out, and it’s not something that’s instantly appreciated, but I think that’s where the foundation of human beauty lies. To think that there are women in this university who do such a great job. It's truly a wonderful thing.”

“Would you like one more? It’s on the house.”

“Oh, thank you, so very much.”

“Hey!”

That's right when I butted in.

“Enough with the coffee jelly already. Tell me, why is our school distorted? What the hell is up with that book called ‘Rororo’?”

“Now, now, please just calm down.”

He then took a last sip of the coffee jelly somewhat regretfully, and took out something from his pocket.

“I still haven’t introduced myself properly, yet.”

He presented me with a pure white business card. In black letters, what lay printed there was:

【Sako Takita, Chief Priest of Okitachi Inari Shrine】

I flipped it over to see that there was no address, nor phone number. It was all very suspicious.

“Okifuto…Katana? Sakyo?”

“Sako Takita, Okitachi Inari Shrine.”

Saying that, the man ---- Sako Takita, took out another business card and handed it over to me.

【The owner of the antique store: Kouroudou, Sako Takito】

This one had the store’s phone number and address written on it.

“This one is another title. I guess it works better in Tokyo.”

“Hold on a second. You’re a chief priest, but you’re also a businessman?”

“Well, there’s no reason why a chief priest can’t run a business. It’s tough running a religious group these days. Especially shrines with no parishioners, they’re barely scraping by. Some of them have even opened up fancy sweet cafes on temple grounds.”

With a look of contentment, Sako then took out a cigarette from his pocket and lit it. He let out a carefree puff of smoke and I panicked.

“Hey! Smoking isn’t allowed here.”

“Ah, is that so? Then is there a place where it is allowed?”

The old lady in the coffee shop, who seemed to have taken a liking to Sako, said the veranda would be fine, and pointed to a seat at the back of the room.

Sako stood up, took the ashtray the old lady handed out to him, and quickly moved to a seat in the veranda. It couldn’t be helped, I sighed, as I followed suit.

“Hmm, this is a pretty good university.”

While gazing at the rear garden, bristled with tall trees, Sako leisurely smoked his cigarette.

“As expected of a historical school building in Musashino. The greenery of the zelkova trees dazzles in your eyes, and the serene construction of the school buildings all give me a sense of gravity and history. And aren’t all the female students so lovely? I’m quite jealous.”

A few female students were sitting at the edge of the balcony, all staring at Sako’s kinagashi dress in amazement. Moreover, being praised face to face by a cunning fox-like smile was doubly effective. The female students exchanged glances with each other, whispering in glee.

“Look, just get to the point.” I sat in the chair in front of him and grumbled.

“You’re a hasty one, aren’t you?”

Sako gave an exaggerated sigh.

“As I said before, It’s a distortion. This school has been messed up since its foundation. It was incorporated through conglomerate funds, and a Christian religious organization was also involved in its founding, so it may be difficult for many issues to come to the surface, but – don’t you see? It's unstable, isn't it? It’s a building built up with the wrong foundation which was then continually expanded. That's why the atmosphere here is so grim and why there are so many suicides.”

My heart raced at those words. The word ‘suicide’ was bitter to swallow, as I was immersed in reading about the fragments of Kouhei Niijima's life just a little while ago.

“For example… Can you see that?”

Sako suddenly leaned over the railing and pointed somewhere. It was a bushy area at the back of the library. A dimly lit place of evergreen trees about the height of a man’s waist.

“What’s wrong with that place?”

“Look carefully, can’t you see anything in the hedge?”

I squinted my eyes, and sure enough, there was something in the bushes: whitish, and stone like – what is that?

“Not many students or even faculty members here know about it, but that’s a memorial tower.”

“M-memorial tower?”

“I believe it’s from around sixty years ago, just after the end of the Pacific War. It was built to memorialize a boy who died at this school. But look at it now. It’s wrapped in such thick bushes that I can’t even get close to it. Anyway, I don’t like this kind of thing. If you build a memorial, you should honor it, and if you don't want to honor it, you shouldn't build it in the first place. Surrounding the cenotaph with a hedge, it’s like you’re sealing up the past.”

…That’s right. I mean, I didn’t even know there was a memorial tower there, and if I hadn’t been told, I wouldn’t have noticed it even if I were here till graduation.

“Anyway, I don't want to speak ill of this school in front of the current students, but this school does not properly treat the dead. Instead of directly confronting what happened, they just pretend it never happened, and repeatedly try to cover it up. Even if you put a lid on it, the truth doesn’t disappear.”

With a gulp -- I asked:

“So then, what exactly is that dangerous book called ‘Rororo’?”

“Hmm...”

Thereupon, Sako leaned back deeply in his chair. He took a puff from his cigarette, then smothered it out in the ashtray, then intently fixed his eyes on me.

“Have you heard about taboo words?”

“…Eh?”

“Judging from your expression, I can tell you have. That’s right, there are words in this world that drive a deep wedge into people's thoughts and unconsciously control their actions. If words that empower people are the yang, then taboo words are the yin.”

“No… It was about that, wasn’t it? Like Kameari being called Kamenashi, or the numbers nine or four not being used by hospitals, because they were bad luck or something, right?”

When I conveyed Yoishi’s words to him, Sako gave a faint smile.

“That’s right. There are simple ones like that, and then there are more sophisticated ones. The ones that you can recognize just by looking at them or hearing them aren’t as threatening as taboo words. The ones that pose a problem are those that you don't even perceive as taboo words when you see or hear them.”

“Don't even perceive...?”

“It unwittingly traps us in a maze of thoughts and amplifies the negative thoughts within us. It is a word that is best not to know. And I believe that ‘Rororo’ is probably a book that particularly consists of dangerous taboo words. Words that are better left unknown.”

“W-what the hell is such a book doing in this university?”

I asked in a voice that was beginning to tremble, and Sako just shook his head, ‘Who knows’.

“Someone must have put it here. At first glance, it’s indistinguishable from other books, but it was secretly mixed in among the ordinary books in this university’s library. However, if you were to read it once, you’d be bound by the taboo words. You wouldn’t be able to take your eyes off the writing, and end up being dragged inside the world of the story. In the end, you’d lose sight of the border between reality and fantasy, and be taken to the world beyond.”

Sako’s low voice seemed to drift in the air, and I grabbed my knees firmly. I felt If I didn’t keep a tight grasp on my spirit, I would be taken somewhere bizarre.

“That book has a certain peculiarity. The person who reads it would continue to repeat a single thing until their demise: ‘Rororo’. That's why the book was conveniently named ‘Rororo’. It’s strange, isn’t it? What does ‘Rororo’ indicate, exactly? Why do you end up muttering ‘Rororo’? You have to read it to find out, but if you do, you'll die.”

He then chuckled, took out another cigarette and lit it with a match.

The scent of the ignited cigarette, together with a strong, sweet aroma drifted on the wind.

“…So?”

“Hmm?”

“So why are you telling me all this?”

“I’d like you to help me. That book is in this school’s library. I know where it is, and I just need you to bring it to me.”

“…What the hell are you saying?”

“The school administrators knew about the existence of that book. Well, they might have been skeptical, but they were trying to pretend it didn't happen every time. However, there have been so many suspicious deaths at this school that they finally decided to do something about it. In other words, I was called here by someone at the top; my task being to retrieve the book.”

“W-why does it have to be me? I mean, does Krishna-san know about this?”

“If it's about 'Rororo,' then she doesn't know. The fact that there are so many suicides - well, I don't know what she knows because I'm not her, but she's smart. I'm sure she's sensed it.”

Thereupon, Sako brought his face towards me and spoke in hushed tone:

“But you know, I don't want her to be involved this time. Because she's been on the verge of breaking down over something like this once...”

“Huh?”

“Five years ago, you see. She got too involved, and it nearly destroyed her. That was the first time I met her.”

--Nearly destroyed?

--A person like Krishna-san?

“T-time out. Having me do something dangerous like that is impossible!”

“What? It’s no problem. You just have to avoid reading it.”

Sako spat out such irresponsible bullshit.

“For better or worse, I'm deeply involved in the Shinto priesthood, and everything I wear, the words I say, and the way I behave is heavily tinged with the influence of the divine. There’s a high possibility that just getting close to it will purify the spirituality of the book. This time, I merely wish to retrieve it. The book as it is. Who placed such troubling taboo words in the book, and why? Everything needs to rectified from the source.”

“No, I refuse. There’s no way I can do it. In the first place, My –”

In a trembling voice, I shouted without care for my surroundings.

“My mind is still in the rehab phase!”

No, it was a little too late to say that. Up to this point, I'd been involved with the Clock Tower and the Miiko Incident, two incidents that were related to the world beyond. Before I realized, I’d been associating with Yoishi as if it were completely normal. And If I were to go and get this book that ‘If you read, you’ll die’, I’m sure I’ll exceed some kind of limit.

And in response –

“Did Kurimoto-kun tell you that?”

Sako gave a pleasant smile.

“Rehabilitation of the mind, huh? Yeah, that sounds like something she would say. Kurimoto-kun seems to be very protective of you.”

I don't know if she’s protective of me or not, but at any rate, I was the completely wrong person for the job, so I firmly shook my head and refused.

“You’re going to refuse no matter what?”

“Yes, there’s no way I’m gonna do it.”

I nodded vigorously, and then Sako eventually spoke, as if he recalled something.

“Well, it can’t be helped, I guess I’ll just have to ask that girl.”

“That girl?”

“Hmm, what was her name again? That pale young lady with the dark hair, who looks like a medieval bisque doll?”

“Hey…wait a minute. Are you talking about Yoishi?”

“That’s right, Mitsurugi Yoishi-kun. How nostalgic. I wonder if you still have the pleasure of meeting her.”

I silently glared at Sako, who quickly corrected himself.

“Or in your case, should I say…displeasure…?”

“The hell did you say?”

“She’s interesting. Truly interesting. I don’t hold that much interest in people, but she's the most interesting person I've met in the past six months. I guess you could compare it to the mystique of holding an old and used… religious magic item ---Ah, that was rude. I don't know how to say it, but due to my profession, I have a bad habit of looking at things in terms of whether they can be used as a catalyst or not.”

With eyes resembling a thousand-year-old fox, Sako gazed at me and then spoke:

“Say, could you ask her to do a favor for me?”

---

“Screw that bastard!”

In the coffee shop on the second floor in front of the station, I fumed to myself as I poured in a large amount of milk and sugar into my coffee.

After what happened, I had stood up and stormed out of there and headed straight for the station. I still had some time before my part-time job started, so I decided to head to that coffee shop again. It was only after I had entered inside was when I remembered that this was the place where that ghost in the striped shirt -- Kouhei Niijima had been, but it was too late to go back out now. However, I was relieved to see that the atmosphere in the store was as calm as ever and there were quite a few customers. For the time being, I took a seat by the window, far away from the seat I had taken the other day, and was fuming by myself after I recalled Sako’s words.

To begin with, it’s just wrong to ask Yoishi to collect that book. If she knew there was a book that would kill her if she read it, her eyes would light up, and she’d declare something like: ‘Oh, how wonderful’, and end up insatiably reading it to the last line in no time. In the end, what if she ends up dead like Kouhei Niijima? Will that bastard Sako take responsibility? Already, Yoishi is standing out even less than usual. She’s always brooding by herself, and it felt like if I were to take my eyes of her, she could disappear from this world.

“But you know…”

I looked down on the palm of my hand holding piece of paper, and sighed.

It was handed to me by Sako. In it were written instructions on how to ascertain which book is ‘Rororo’ in the library and such. According to him, the book is on a unique spiritual level and can thus be recognized.

“It's surely not a good thing to have a book like that in the library forever.”

I muttered to myself and held my head in my hands.

Kouhei Niijima, a student from the country-side like me, committed suicide on a certain day.

Kouhei Niijima, who had few friends, who was fond of spending time in the library, died after leaving a description about a certain book. In short, Kouhei Niijima, who committed suicide, found the book that Sako’s looking for: ‘Rororo,’ the book that kills anyone who reads it. Thus, he got bound by some sort of taboo words and ended up killing himself, is how it all happened, right?

Words that bind people --- I'm not sure if that's possible, but I don't have enough arguments to deny it at this point. The ghost Yoishi saw was muttering ‘Rororo’ with its mouth. Supposing the two of them didn’t conspire to scare me beforehand, there was no way it was a coincidence.

Unable to think straight, I sighed and gazed out of the window.

The weather had become worse while I was on the way here, and it was raining already.

On the arcade street in front of the station, a lot of shoppers were drenched from the sudden downpour. In the eaves of a commercial building, a few people were taking shelter from the rain, looking up at the sky. And among them, I suddenly caught sight of a girl, wearing the uniform of our affiliated high school. She was a tall and slender, a beautiful girl with a somewhat dignified look. I checked my watch. It was still 2 pm. Aren’t high school classes still on? I wondered, but oh well, I looked away. In the first place, my institute is distorted. I'm going through a lot, and everyone is going through a lot. If I intervene in other people's affairs every single time, it’ll be too much for me to bear.

But speaking of distortions, Sako also mentioned that there were many suicides. I’d heard a couple of rumors about that, too. The first one happened while I was back in Fujieda for my summer vacation. A girl from our university killed herself in a boy’s bathroom somewhere. Another incident that supposedly happened a few years ago, was when a housewife from a neighboring town came all the way to our university grounds and burned herself to death. But I didn’t witness either of those incidents, and neither did any acquaintance of mine. It's just one of the rumors floating around within the school. But if what Sako said is true, and the school culture is one where everything is swept under the rug, then few students would have heard about it.

"This school is distorted."

Sako's words seemed to express what I had vaguely felt about this university. Everything ended before it even began. I can't help but feel that same sense of isolation. Then there's some person who deliberately created a book that would kill you if you read it, and placed it in the school's library. For me, that's the kind of crazy behavior that’s enough to make my heart turn cold.

"It seems... I ended up entering an unpleasant university."

Before I realized it, those bitter emotions had once again surged up inside me. Thanks to Krishna-san, I had begun to believe that this university was a place where people were responsible for themselves, and I could enjoy myself any way I wanted as long as I kept myself together -- all that had transformed into bitterness, as if I had just discovered that someone had kicked over a new bike I had just bought.

I recalled the emotion that Yoishi detested enough to make her vomit: the 'malice' that humans carry.

That dark feeling, which once killed the heart of Yoishi Mitsurugi.

"Because she's been on the verge of breaking down over something like this once...”

And I recalled Sako's words at the same time.

Does that mean that like Yoishi, something terrible happened to Krishna-san in the past? Does it mean that there was an incident that would have caused her heart to collapse? Sako had mentioned that it happened five years ago. And that that was the time when he and Krishna-san first met.

Let's see, Krishna-san is twenty years old right now -- so it would have been around her third year of junior high school or first year of high school. About the same age as Yoishi is now. What the hell could have happened back then? I hate to imagine that Krishna-san, who's so wise and strong, could be so easily broken. To me, she's like a Bodhisattva, a Mary, a guardian angel. Just knowing something once existed that was enough to drive her to the verge of collapse, it makes my stomach feel as heavy as if I'd swallowed concrete.

I shook my head, and then…

I felt someone’s gaze upon me, and when I looked up, I noticed a high school girl sitting directly across from me in the seat where Yoishi and I had sat on the other day. Even though she was sitting down, she looked as slender as a model. Her shoulder-length, short haircut looked very appealing.

“…Huh?”

I looked outside the window once more.

Wasn’t she the girl who was just outside taking shelter from the rain? I wonder if she came inside this coffee shop because the rain didn't look like it was gonna stop. I stole a glance at her once more; she looked out the window as if to turn her eyes away from me. There’s no doubt about it. It’s the same girl with the Koumei school uniform. Her white blouse and black tie were slightly wet, and her bangs were still sticking to her forehead.

The young girl ordered something from the store employees, and then silently took out a book. After that she quietly kept looking down at the book. I also took out my textbook on Introduction to Economics, which I hadn't even read, from my bag and opened it. I felt like if I didn't open a book in response, I wouldn't know what to do with my time.

In fact, for some reason, I kept stealing glances at her.

How can I explain it? --- I thought she was really beautiful. It was partially that, but also because I felt that this slow passage of time was beautiful. Outside, the filth of the city was gently being washed away by the rain, and inside the store, the sound of mellow piano music drifted in the air. The image of a young girl looking down at a book with an intelligent gaze was very picturesque.

Whether she was skipping school or not, I concluded that it was the proper thing to do. It’s fine if it’s only once a week, and maybe I need to have this kind of time too. And then, all of a sudden, the thought came crashing down on me.

The reason why Kouhei Niijima couldn’t speak to the ‘girl’ in the library.

Perhaps he was in the same state of mind as I am now.

Kouhei Niijima must have seen a certain girl in the library. That girl was also always in the library, and she might have been somewhat lonely. And a library is a place that carries a unique atmosphere. The scent given off by countless books. Books that had been carefully read for a long period of time, and the quiet fervor given off by the people who concentrate on the words within. In this world, vivid romantic fantasies are just a hindrance. However, they do notice each other. They notice each other, but they don’t want to destroy that beautiful, harmonious world. That border that lies between the two, how should I say it? I feel like it’s a sparkling jewel in the crown of life.

In fact, if you were to ask me if I could talk to the beautiful girl who was so focused on her book in front of me, I would say that it was quite impossible. It was like a fear at the idea of mixing a foreign substance like myself into something that was already perfect.

--So that’s how it was.

I finally realized.

Kouhei Niijima wasn’t cowardly, or introverted -- he was undoubtedly, more sensitive than most people. The moment I realized that, the tip of my nose twitched. I felt the clumsy and sincere nature of the deceased Kohei Niijima, I felt we could have been friends, and although it was too late now, I regretted his death.

“You left too soon…”

I muttered in a tone that was a mixture of sorrow and affection. When –

Some kind of words, reached my ear.

When I checked, it was the young girl, muttering something with her lips. It could be that she was so engrossed in the book that she was unconsciously mouthing the lines of the characters in the story. Or, it could be that she found a phrase in the book that struck a chord in her heart.

I just gazed at her with a pleasant feeling.

I admired the movement of her lips, her long eyelashes that were cast down.

Eventually, she looked up. Her eyes met mine head-on. It was so natural, though, that I didn't feel the need to look away. I ended up staring back at her as if I was entangled in her eyes. Her eyes… were exceedingly black, and in the depths of those black eyes, I felt there was another, deeper color. How many shades did black have? I wondered, when I suddenly noticed.

Her lips moved. She kept murmuring something slowly. And then, the words reached me.

What were those words? I couldn't remember anymore.

And I would later find out that around this time –

A large number of tadpoles had rained down on Kichijouji station.

---

"What are you smiling about, Nagi-kun?"

The next day, during lunch break, Krishna-san looked at me and asked.

"Eh? Is that so...?"

Stroking my own face, I realized I was in a pleasant mood. Why was it, though? I wondered, and it came down to the beautiful girl in the coffee shop yesterday. 'Oh, it's nothing', I muttered in embarrassment. Krishna-san didn't care for the subject anymore and was already taking out a lot of materials from the cabinet. For some reason, there was a tremendous amount of clutter in the usually neat and tidy club room.

"Did something happen?"

I asked, and Krishna-san replied with a disgruntled look.

"Well, a lot of things. But the main problem is the incident in Kichijouji yesterday."

"...Incident?"

"You didn't hear? It happened again, this time in the north entrance of Kichijouji station, a large number of tadpoles were seen hopping on the street."

"R-really? Is it the strange rain again?"

"We won't know if it's the real thing until we investigate. At any rate, be it a harbinger of a natural disaster, or an omen signaling the end of the earth, this kind of situation has brought out the trolls en masse on the message boards. The server is overloaded with all these mixtures of fact and fiction being posted. I can't even finish updating the damn site with the article you translated for me."

Continually grumbling about such things, 'Ah, where was it?' Krisna-san now began to rummage through the shelves.

"What are you looking for? I'll help."

"No, it's fine. This is a personal thing."

While saying that, 'But it's been so hot recently', Krishna-san wiped the sweat off her face with the towel around her neck. Her faintly flushed face was still childish, healthy, and cute as ever. The light blue checkered short-sleeved dress also looked really good on her. I guess I was relieved to see Krishna-san looking the same as always. I decided to casually broach the subject that was weighing on my mind.

"Um, is it ok if you ask you something?"

"...Hm?"

"It's about your master, the guy who came to my house before -- the one who lives in Aomori, is always wearing a Kinagashi, and is always acting smug with a smooth face."

"Oh, you mean Sako. What about him?"

"Is he someone you can trust?"

Krishna-san pushed up her slipping red glasses with her middle finger, and chuckled.

"Well, he's quite an odd one, but he's trustworthy."

"Which part, exactly?"

"Hmmm..."

The petite occult site manager folded her arms and pondered.

"When I think about it, yeah... There were many times when he offered me a treat but I ended up paying up instead, there were many books I lent him that he never returned, and there have been times when I was peeked at while in the bath."

"Wai--Peeked at? What do you mean?"

"Ah, it's not like that. See, I sometimes stay at Takita-san's shrine for spine correction. They have an open-air style bath over there."

In a panic, Krishna-san tried explain things, but jealousy flared up inside me in the face of her petite, yet voluptuous body.

"I-Isn't that completely untrustworthy?! Krishna-san, are you sure you're not being deceived? Aren't you being targeted as a woman?"

“No, you can trust that person when it comes to ghost related matters. The Okitachi Inari Shrine, where Takita-san is the chief priest, has been famous since ancient times for its ability to ward off evil spirits, but he himself is not from the original family of priests. In addition, he not only studies Shintoism, but all kinds of exorcism methods from all kinds of sects. In other words, um ...... The reason why he's so odd is probably due to his strict training."

"So, he's just a twisted man, after all."

"Well, I guess you could say that... but why are you asking about Takita-san, anyway?"

"E....Eh, That's--"

Being asked in reverse, I hesitated. And I remembered that bastard Sako not wanting to involve Krishna-san in this matter. I suppose it would be better to keep the fact that we met on campus yesterday a secret.

"Well... You see, now that I've become a member of 'Ikaigabuchi', I ought to know what kind of person the website's boss calls master."

"Ah, I see."

Krishna-san nodded, and then cast her eyes downwards.

Her face seen from the side, staring silently off into the distance, was seemingly sad, gentle, and wore a somewhat strange feeling of transparency. I wondered if I had asked something wrong, but at the same time, behind those eyes, I felt I caught a glimpse of Krishna-san that I didn't know, and I almost moved my hand to reach for her shoulder. I was about to shake her slender shoulders and blurt out something inappropriate like, 'Please don't keep secrets from me.'

However--

"A long time ago, another personality almost took over my body."

Eventually, Krishna-san muttered in a slightly trembling tone.

".....Huh?"

"That personality was extremely overpowering, to the point where I almost lost my true self. That person helped me back then -- well, at any rate, if he wasn't there for me back then, I'm sure I wouldn't be here talking to you like this. And then, I regularly have the airways in my spine adjusted. It's said that that's where the ghosts come in through.”

"What..."

What --- kind of incident was that?

I was about to ask, but those words failed to leave my mouth. That's just how dark and somber Krishna-san's face looked right now. For some reason, it reminded me of the remains of a fruit that had completely dried up into a crumbly heap. What was once a juicy, ripe fruit will always rot away once it leaves its roots and becomes abandoned. Right now, Krishna-san was perfectly healthy, but even this person was a living being, and her health was maintained by a precipitous balance -- such strange, tearful thoughts welled up inside me.

"Hey, what's the matter?"

She must have noticed the worried look on my face, as she smiled.

"I'm fine now. The only problems I have now are eating too much in my three meals a day, and when I feel ghosts close by, my heart is strong knowing that the living are much stronger. I'm no longer so weak as to be deceived by them anymore."

Then she patted me on the shoulder.

"You're the one I'm worried about."

"...Huh? Me?"

"Yeah. You seem to have adjusted to the university quite well, but keep in mind that you're still in the process of rehabilitation. You need to look at the world more broadly, not just the occult. Make friends, find a girlfriend, indulge in food, scenery, movies, books and music. Anything is fine. Move your heart with emotion."

"Move... my heart?"

"That's exactly right."

Krishna-san gave a broad grin.

"Everything that adds flair to your life will definitely strengthen your heart and make it stronger,"

Her soft smile filled my heart as if it were spreading throughout.

---

When I left the club room, I was filled with courage.

After receiving Krishna-san's words – coupled together with a feeling similar to enlightenment I received at the coffee shop yesterday finally took shape in my heart. I felt as if I had peeked into a part of Kouhei Niijima’s heart, and with resolve, I had finally decided to help Sako out. Help him in retrieving the book that would kill you if you read it – ‘Rororo’. But that definitely wasn’t for Sako’s sake. It was more of a feeling of wanting revenge.

Kouhei Niijima.

A first-year university student like me, who came alone from Aomori, lived his life earnestly without the support of any friends, with the books in the library his only friends, and in his last days, ended up encountering some kind of cursed book. If things had been slightly different, I might have ended up just like him. But, despite both of us having come from the countryside, I had the occult by my side. I had ‘Ikaigabuchi’, And even when I found myself in the depths of the other world, I met Krishna-san, who was always strong. It was something I couldn’t help but love, and I met a good person along the way. That’s why, I was able to crawl up from the bottom of the deep darkness that time.

I don’t know what Kouhei Niijima wants to tell me, but being linked by fate, I ended up picking up his note. Shouldn't I at least accept that? Shouldn’t I at least lend a helping hand in finishing off that book once and for all? As for ‘Rororo,’ Sako said it wouldn’t be a problem as long as you didn’t read it. I don’t quite trust him, but he knows how to remove the book from the library, and right now, I’m the only one in this university who can do it. If I just let it be, that book might kill someone else again. With those kind of fired up emotions serving as my motivation, I had finally arrived here, but –

“Man… I’m just an idiot.”

I muttered to myself as I wriggled in the pitch-dark space where it was impossible to even twist my body.

It was almost 10 pm.

In this dark and narrow space, my determination quickly began to waver. I was at the Koumei institute library, inside a locker in reading room number four, and I was desperately holding in my urge to pee.

What the hell was I doing in such a place?

Okay, let me answer that.

I arrived at the library feeling a strong sense of duty, and that's when I took my first proper look at the paper Sako had given me. And therein, I found a sentence, telling me to perform the ritual at night. Apparently, for a novice like me, it would be half as effective if I did it in the daytime. I should have looked through it earlier, but I originally had no intention of going through with it so please let's not get into that.

However, sneaking into the library late at night was not such a trifling matter. The security guards would be roaming about, and on top of that, at the entrance of the library, there's a machine which checks you in with your student ID. It was made so that anyone affiliated with the institute, whether they were university students or high school students, could enter the library, but in my case, it was very troublesome. Even if you go inside and hide somewhere to wait for the library to close, you'll be found out since there's a record of your entry.

Well then, what should I do? After racking my brain, I carried out the plan. Just before closing time, I used my student ID to enter and break into the number four reading room where the guard had just finished checking the door. There, I unlocked the window, left and held up my student ID to the machine at the entrance, and left the building. That's how I cleared my entry record. That made it as if I wasn't inside. After that I waited for the library to close, and clambered up the window to sneak back into the number four reading room.

Well, so far, so good. But even though I had taken the day off from my part-time job and snuck in after nine o'clock, there were still people in the library. The super-serious librarians were working overtime for some reason. So, I had no choice but to kill time by hiding in a locker in the number four reading room– but, I made the bitter mistake of not using the toilet beforehand.

“Arghhh…”

It was past ten o’clock, my urge to pee was already at its limit.

I slowly opened the door of the locker. I held my breath and peeked at my surroundings; all I could hear was a pin drop silence. It seemed the librarians had already gone home. I proceeded to open the door of the number four reading room as well, after confirming once again that there was no sign of anyone inside the library, I rushed across the corridor towards the toilet at the back of the entrance.

“…Ahhh.”

My mind felt at peace for a while as I listened to the raw sound of my urine trickling down.

I finally felt comfortable and was in a daze, but then I finally realized the reality of the situation I was in.

I was without a doubt, in a toilet, late at night.

What’s alarming was the fact that I was most creeped out by ghost stories set in a toilet late at night.

Ghosts are said to gather around watering places. Also known as a bathrooms. The famous ghost stories like Hanako-san, Aka Manto and Kashima san are all set in the toilet. I don't know if that's the reason why, but toilets at the dead of night are exceptionally terrifying. The sound of water always dripping down from somewhere, and the light blue wall tiles along with the mirror next to the washstand scare me for no reason. But what scared me most of all --- were the three toilet stalls in the back. Their doors were all open, but I absolutely did not want to look inside.

As my thoughts drifted on such things, I started to worry about what was behind me. Delusions ran through my mind about a blue face staring at me from the toilet stall.

With tears in my eyes, I vehemently did my best to shake off the thought,

Emptying my mind, I desperately tried to think happy thoughts -- however, I still ended up recalling it. I recalled the story of a female student killing herself in a men's restroom during the summer vacation.

--Hey, that surely didn't happen here, right?

To begin with, the mysteriousness of a female student dying in the men's bathroom is eerie. It strangely stimulates my imagination about the darkness of the dead person's mind. Yoishi once said it as well. That the real ghost stories have a subtle lack of cohesion. There is a sense of discomfort in them, as if the important parts have been skipped, and the only thing that makes up for it is a theory based on the other side.

...You've gotta be kidding me.

Doesn't that mean it has all the ingredients for being the real deal?

I felt impatient at how long it was taking me to pee, and then proceeded to run out of the bathroom without even washing my hands. I ran straight down the corridor to reading room number one without looking back, relying on the light from my cell phone to guide me.

"Let's just hurry up and get this over with."

However, in front of reading room number one, when I thrust my hand in my pockets to take out the piece of paper Sako had given me, I realized. It was gone. The paper was gone.

"Dude, are you serious?"

Without that paper, what did I struggle all this way for?

Even when I turned both my pockets inside out, I found nothing. I checked every part my wallet. Nothing. Neither was it stuck anywhere in Kouhei Niijima's notebook. The only thing I could think of was that I dropped it somewhere. In the locker, or in the toilet. And I really didn't wanna go back to the toilet.

I was alone and teary-eyed as I thought about it, when --

"I never get tired of watching you."

Hearing a sudden voice from behind me, I jumped.

"At that rate, you'll never have a boring life."

As I fell down, I looked behind me and saw -- Sako Takita.

His indigo blue kinagashi melded into the darkness, and his white face alone remained eerily visible. I don't know where he came from, but there he was, his smooth face had a smile of satisfaction as he held small penlight.

"W...why, are you...?"

"Why? I came because you refused, after all. Ahh, that window from reading room number four really helped, by the way. So that was thanks to you."

He spoke in in a relaxed manner, and held his hand out to me. I stood up to brush his hand away and yelled at him in a low-key manner, taking into consideration the fact that it was late at night, and we were trespassing.

"...W, what the hell?! If you could have done it yourself then why didn't you do it from the start?!"

"It's no joke, it would be best if you were the one to do it. Didn't I say it? I carry a heavy trace of the divine. There’s a high possibility I might end up purifying that important book."

"Oh, and about that. I wanted to ask you about that. Why is it a problem if the book is purified? Wouldn't it be better if that kind of dangerous book were to be purged from the earth?"

In reply, Sako looked at me with a look of disbelief.

"Wouldn't that be a complete waste?"

"Huh?"

"A book that kills you just by reading it, that's not a book that's created with ease. You need to have extensive knowledge and overflowing love for the curse of taboo words to be able to create it. It's in the highest order of magical artifacts, and it's a precious thing that the creator himself risked being affected by. Well, in fact, it might well mean that the creator is no longer alive.”

…No longer… alive?

“Someone who used to be in this school. Someone of very intelligence, whose sense of right and wrong was distinctly different from that of normal humans. There’s a psychiatric condition known as antisocial personality disorder, and the author of the book ‘Rororo’ is definitely someone who fits that description. Sometimes called predators, they appear in the world as lust killers, but you can never identify them by their appearance. In fact, they appear more normal than your average joe, and they blend in with their surroundings. As a general rule, they are very intelligent. They can be people of high social status who have attained respect in the world.”

After all that rambling, Sako spoke in a hushed tone of voice:

“They have excessive self-esteem, and are self-centered. No remorse, no feelings of guilt, apathetic, no empathy. They are talkative and friendly at first glance, but they cannot take responsibility for their actions.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“A certain scholar proposed that these are all common statistical characteristics of people who have antisocial personality disorder. But well, after all, that's just their narrow definition.”

Or rather, doesn’t that description fit you to a T?

I thought I’d say that out loud, but thought better of it. But you know... if you were to remove the friendly part, I feel that Yoishi also fits that description. She was definitely not normal, but I didn't feel comfortable in calling her abnormal.

In any case, Sako put one hand in his pocket and started walking away.

“This school is distorted. Did that person create the book because it was distorted? Or did it become distorted with the appearance of that person? In all probability, I think it’s the former, but whatever the case may be, that book is dangerous. It's not something that should be kept in a library used by countless students for any length of time."

Saying that, he quickly disappeared inside reading room number one.

The university library was one of Koumei institutes’ oldest buildings, a massive stone structure with one basement and three floors above ground. Reading room number one was the largest reading room in the library, and according to Sako, the book made up of taboo words known as ‘Rororo’ was hidden in with the other books here somewhere.

I opened the wooden sliding door and entered inside to find the vast room dimly lit.

The eastern side was lined with windows, the curtains were all drawn, as was expected now that the building was closed. The center of the room was lined with long wooden tables, and the west and north sides were covered with high bookshelves that extended all the way to the ceiling. Fluorescent lamps hung from the tall ceilings, but if I had to guess, it was probably a dimly lit place even during the day. However, the reading tables had a warm light for each seat, which made it easier to concentrate on reading books.

"It seems like a pretty good place, doesn't it?"

Sako spoke in a carefree tone as he stroked his thin beard.

"Hey, let’s hurry up and get this over with!" I called out to Sako from behind, 'Please just wait', he replied. The somewhat unreliable priest and antiques dealer was excitedly shining his light on the bookshelves here and there.

"Oooh, they have 'The Hundred Headless Woman' by Ernst. There's also ' A compendium of bizzare ghost literature from the Edo era' by the national publication society. They even have 'The 120 Days of Sodom' by Sade. I wonder if there's anyone who understands the value of having such a collection in a private university. Say, would it be a bad idea if I quietly took a few of them after we've finished?"

"Don't ask me." I retorted, as I once again looked around at the giant stacks of bookshelves.

I took a deep breath. To tell the truth, I didn't dislike the atmosphere of the library. I don't read as many books as a bookworm might, but even so, I find my heart strangely calm when I'm surrounded by the scent of countless books. I was filled with emotion, a feeling of respect I had for the ocean of knowledge that stood neatly lined before me. Of course, there were many, many more books that existed in the world. And it was an amount that no human could ever read through in a lifetime. It was similar to the feeling I got when I thought about the universe. A feeling that reminded me of how utterly finite the nature of my existence was. And 'Rororo' was somewhere in this universe of books. A dangerous book, with dangerous taboo words planted all over its text, that would kill you if you read them. Some kind of psycho purposely mixed in that cursed book with the other books in the library.

"---Well then."

I turned around hearing that to find Sako had shifted the table at the center of the room to make a space a few meters square. He was squatting there, taking out what looked like a small water bottle from his pocket and proceeded to gently sprinkle the place with water.

"What are you doing?"

"Making a barrier, for now."

He spoke as he switched to a seiza posture, and moved his fingers in a practiced manner. As I watched his flowing gestures, I finally got the sense that he was indeed a priest. I couldn't help but feel the 'divinity' the guy spoke of.

Before long, his resonant words began to echo quietly in the reading room.

They were ritual incantations. As I listened to them, even my spine straightened, and the atmosphere around me turned somewhat solemn.

"Please take it."

After he finished his ritual incantations, Sako handed me another piece of paper. I took out my cellphone, switched on the flashlight and focused it on the paper to see: "Agyousansagyougo", words I couldn't make heads or tails out of.

"This sutra is one of the mantras of the Shingi Shingon sect and is said to make it possible to see the strange and mysterious."

"You're a Shinto priest and yet, you're using sutras of the Shingon sect?"

Sako smirked at my sarcastic comment.

"Being bound to one religion is foolishness. If you were to ask me, religion is a form of science, the fruit of mankind's wisdom. I humbly bow down to what is effective, and I am not afraid to adopt it without restraint."

Ah, now I understand.

This guys' insincere nature seems to be borne from that.

"Now, come over here. Spread your legs as wide as your shoulders, relax, and please recite the words three times with your eyes slightly open. Eventually, you should be able to discern the wondrous 'Rororo' in your vision. In this dim forest of countless books, only that book should stand out as a white one."

Sako then took out a small black bag out from his pocket.

"Once you find the book, please place it inside this bag."

"Say...Does it really have to be me...?

"Of course. Didn't you hear me before?" Sako clicked his tongue, narrowed his eyes slightly and added: "Do you get it? When you find the book, you must absolutely not open it. You must not read even a single letter. If you do, it's because you're extremely weak-minded, and the taboo words will instantly take hold over you."

"Hey, don't scare me!"

"Well, even if anything happens, I'm right here. I'll deal with it right away, so please don't worry about it."

Sako smiled broadly as he spoke -- but I mean, this guy was completely untrustworthy.

That's what I thought, but I had originally sneaked into the library late at night to do it alone. I had no choice, so I strengthened my resolve and stood at the place Sako was pointing at. I stretched out my legs as I was told, took a deep breath and relaxed my body.

"It was three times, right?"

"Three times. Do it slowly… draw the letters in your mind one by one."

I took a deep breath once again, and spoke out those words three times. "Agyousansagyougo, Agyousansagyougo, Agyousansagyougo." After that I took a gulp, and examined my surroundings.

The deathly silence inside the room was deafening. Somewhere in the dimly lit room, I thought I heard a cracking sound, but it might have just been my imagination. I could feel my heart beating faster and faster. However, no matter how long I waited, and no matter how many bookshelves I looked around at, I couldn't see any white book standing out.

"Please recite it once more."

Being urged on by Sako, I recited it three times once more, 'Agyousansagyougo'.

But as before, I saw no change in my surroundings. The area remained as dark as if ink was dissolved in water, with only the occasional sound of a car passing by echoing from somewhere in the distance.

Still, -- This unpleasant feeling, what is it...? It's as if I've somehow gotten lost on a different road. Like I've stepped into someone else's shoes without knowing -- and it was as if someone, somewhere was laughing at my actions. Thereupon, a giggling voice behind me literally did reach my ears.

I turned around to see it was Sako. His white face was becoming eerily distorted by the light of the penlight he had left on the desk.

"...Hey, what the hell are you laughing about?"

However, Sako's skinny body merely continued to shake slightly. The muffled laughter that echoed through the dimly lit reading room was both eerie and upsetting.

"Hey! Stop fucking kidding me!"

Sako spoke at long last.

"Why, you really are a nice person after all."

"The hell are you talking about?"

“Fujieda’s clean nature has produced an infinitely simple soul like yourself – Ah, please take it as a compliment. In the near future, I'll have to put together a study on the influence of climate and nature on the mind --- Ohh, we’re getting a good crowd.”

…Getting a good crowd – of what?

“For some reason, they gather here late at night.”

His voice had turned cold.

I could feel the muddy, stagnant air hanging over the area.

"To tell you the truth, I had another job here besides retrieving 'Rororo'."

Smiling like a puppet who had abandoned his emotions somewhere, Sako spoke:

"The job in question being... to exorcise them."

...To exorcise--Hey, it can't be!

There was something there at the place Sako was pointing at.

"...The students that killed themselves in this school."

At the same time he uttered those words --

I noticed the presence of countless people in the surrounding air.

The two of us should have been the only ones in the reading room, but now the presence of countless people could be felt.

The number of people were ten, twelve -- no, it was much more. About as many as there would be packed here during daytime. I couldn't see anyone, but what felt like countless sounds of breathing hung in the air.

"Well, would you look at that? I wonder if that hideously burnt woman committed self-immolation. That one drooling over there must have hanged himself. The girl with the wide cut in her neck there, she must have slit her neck with a knife -- hmmm, were you the one who died in the men's bathroom? Getting caught up in a love affair, you threw away your life; what a complete waste. Even though you had such a lovely face. Even though you had your whole life ahead of you."

As if he were addressing each of the dead individually, Sako's words unavoidably made them manifest inside my mind. All of them were wandering around me in a dense atmosphere, as if they were sorrowful, empty, and in general, painfully appealing for something.

"H-hey....What the hell did you do to me...?" My voice shook as I asked.

"In the first place, you shouldn't go around chanting words you don't know the meaning of."

Sako sneers with a smile. I glared back at him as if to say that he was the one who told me to do it -- when I saw that Sako's eyes were now shining bewitchingly. It was different from the faintly glowing eyes of Yoishi. It wasn't a ghost or something vague, but something clearly ominous -- That's right, it was like a fox spirit that lived on a different plane of this world.

"Regrettably, the number of ghosts here is just too great. That's why it would be quicker just to gather and exorcise them all in one go. Say, don't your shoulders feel better now? The feeling of something heavy being lifted off your neck? Doesn't your body feel slightly lighter now?"

I put my hand on my shoulder as he continued to ask me this.

At the same time, a deep regret took hold of me. Why the hell did I come to such a place this late at night? In spite of Krishna-san warning me that my mind was still in a period of rehabilitation, I was here with this guy who I trusted much lesser than Yoishi.

“To tell you the truth, the phrase is one of the mantras of the Mikkyo lineage, it’s a sutra that unties the bond between a person and their guardian spirit. Look at the old man standing behind you right now. He’s your guardian spirit, the one that's been protecting you for so long.”

In a panic, I looked at the place Sako’s gaze landed at. However, I couldn’t see anything. I desperately strained my eyes, but all I could see was a stack of inconspicuous books appear in the dim darkness.

“You can’t see him? Well then, let me explain. He’s probably your ancestor from several generations ago. A man with very genteel wrinkles reflecting a life lived on the straight and narrow. But now, his wrinkles are contorted in sadness. He laments, ‘Why did you chant such a sutra?’ Regardless however, his figure is slowly fading away.”

“…H-hey!"

"Most ghosts aren't actually aware that they're dead, but they're aware of the fact that they've lost something very important. This feeling of loss creates a void inside them. And thus, they try to fill that void with something. That is, in short: a physical body, and that's why they possess people who are on the same wavelength. However, the living have reliable guardian spirits by their side to protect them, so they can't possess anyone they wish. That's why, I apologize -- but I had to prepare a mere vessel with no guardian."

My breathing was becoming ragged. I couldn't clench my teeth.

So that's it. The vessel he's talking about -- is me.

"You end up sympathizing with everyone, that's why you fulfill the requirements of a high-quality vessel."

I tightly closed my tear-filled eyes.

Losing my guardian spirit, I had no one to blame but myself, as I gritted my teeth in desperation.

More so than the fact that I had been deceived by him, I hated myself for trusting him. With all my heart, I felt sorry towards my ancestor who had protected me for so long. It was the same terrible thing I did to Miiko. Without realizing I was receiving someone's kindness, I ended up repaying their kindness with ingratitude. I didn't change. I never learned from my mistakes. Yoishi said it in the coffee shop. The people of this country were originally prudent in their use of words. That the people in the present day used words too callously. And yet, I had ended up chanting words I didn't know the meaning of, just doing what I'd been told, an irredeemable goddamn idiot.

And yet still, Sako's cheerful voice reached me.

"Oh, so many have gathered already. I understand, you all want a body. You think you'll be able to escape the suffering if you only had a living body. Well, please don't be so hasty. Normally, one body per person would be preferable, but fortunately, the vessel present here is a truly outstanding one that once managed to call down wandering ghosts that filled the sky."

Dredging up my past wounds, Sako turned to face me once more, his lips contorted in a sneer.

"That's right, be it once or twice...It's all the same, isn't it?"

As that terrifyingly gentle voice was about to snap something inside me --

"So noisy."

In the dark world, that somewhat irritated voice echoed.

"The library is supposed to be a quiet place for reading."

That voice is...

The voice that sounds like a wind chime on a windless summer night...

--Yoishi.

I recalled her pale face in a strangely nostalgic way, but I just couldn't open my eyes right away. My knees were shaking with fear, and I was doing my best just to breathe. I couldn't even muster up the courage to move a single fingertip or eyelid. To begin with, what if I opened my eyes, and instead of Yoishi, I end up seeing something I shouldn't? Something creepy? It would definitely be all over for me then. That's when my mind, which had been muddy and in rehabilitation to begin with, would collapse.

"I've been listening to the conversation about mid-way through, and I'm wondering if you're really that stupid."

"....What?"

"It's troublesome, so I'll only say it once."

But in my dark world, where I had shut my eyes tightly--

That voice sounded somewhat kind.

"You being you, means your guardian spirit won't abandon you so easily."

"No...but... I'd already chanted that thing that was like an incantation."

"That, was a lie."

"...A lie?"

"Everything's in reverse. That kind of sutra does not exist. 'Agyousansagyougo' is just a series of phonetic characters – without doubt, they were used as taboo words to destabilize your mind.”

Hearing those words spoken in indifference, I slowly managed to open my tear-stained eyes.

Beyond the hazy darkness, her figure emerged.

Yoishi Mitsurugi… was there. With her long black hair, and doll-like beauty. Dressed in the dark uniform of the attached high school, she sat on the edge of a table, her pale face gazing quietly at me.

“Y…Yoishii…”

My voice was already a snotty, teary mess.

“B-by lie, do you mean…? Is my guardian spirit still there? I didn’t commit a dishonor?”

Yoishi silently nodded in response.

“What do you mean by phonetic characters? What was it all about?”

Yoishi looked at me somewhat annoyed, and said:

“You still don’t get it? 'Agyousan-sagyougo' simply means the third syllable of agyou and the fifth syllable of sagyou.”

…Huh?

The third syllable of ‘agyou’, and the fifth syllable of ‘sagyou’…Huh?

“…Lies(uso)?”

I turned my gaze back towards Sako as I held my trembling knees, he was merely concerned with stifling his laughter.

“It’s what they call a nocebo effect.”

Yoishi stood up, and walked up to me.

“For example, being made to believe that a non-existent fire is burning your hand, resulting in a burn scar, or if you're blindfolded and given a light pain at the tip of your feet while being made to hear the sound of dripping water, you'll be made to think you're bleeding and you'll really die. It's a psychological phenomenon where the body manifests what the mind believes -- an elaborately constructed 'taboo word'."

"Just as I expected."

Sako's voice was mixed in with laughter as he spoke:

"I was so close."

I was completely befuddled. I mean, how much of it all was a lie? I understood that the story about the incantation making my guardian spirit leaving me was a lie, but was the ominous presence that hung over the reading room just my imagination? No, more so than that, what about the book that kills you if you read it: 'Rororo'? And what about the guy who killed himself, Kouhei Niijima? Was it all, just a part of Sako's lie?

I asked in a trembling voice to Yoishi, who was staring at her surroundings -- and then her eyes began to shine, as if she had just noticed it for the first time.

"There's a lot of them. So many."

That somewhat happy look on her face -- it made me shudder in horror.

"...H-hey, Yoishi. I don't get it. Explain it to me properly."

I took out the notebook I had stuffed in my back pocket and held it out. I opened the notebook Kouhei Niijima had left behind in front of Yoishi.

"It was just like you said. The guy who wrote that memo -- Kouhei Niijima, he was dead. He was just...interested in this girl here in the library. He was just in love. Why did he end up killing himself? Isn't the cause this 'Rororo' book this asshole's been talking about? Isn't that why there are so many suicides in this school?"

Taking in the torrent of questions with her dark eyes, Yoishi opened the pages of Kouhei Niijima's notebook that I held out to her, starting from the beginning. Tucked inside were the two notes that I had first found torn up. While Yoishi read them with the light from her phone, I scowled at Sako's white face as much as humanly possible. It’s scary that there are ghosts here, but it's even scarier that this guy was trying to bring them all down on me. I mean, is this guy a sociopath? Or a living demon? I glared at his white face with such thoughts, but Sako merely wore a thin smile on his white face and waited patiently for Yoishi to finish reading the note.

"...Hmmm."

Eventually, Yoishi muttered out loud, so I quickly asked her:

"Look, I need an explanation that makes sense. Did you get it? Why did Kouhei Niijima die? And what the hell was he trying to tell me? That 'Rororo' thing he muttered about, that's the 'Rororo' book, right?"

Yoishi stared at Sako. Sako shrugged his shoulders slightly, and after that, she stared at me. Finally, she spoke in a voice that sounded like she was making fun of me.

"You really are so naive."

"...What the hell are you saying?"

"That's why you were conveniently used as a catalyst."

"T-this bastard!"

--Yeah, I know already. I know it so well it makes me sick to my stomach. And I'm sorry for my stupidity. Even a fool like me finally understood that this bastard Sako was trying to bring out the countless things here by using me as bait. However, the problem was the original reason for the sticky air in the reading room, which was making it hard to breath even for someone like me, who couldn't see ghosts. Why does this school have such a closed-off air about it? How did a guy like Kouhei Niijima end up committing suicide? Was it all because of the book called 'Rororo'? And like Sako said, was there really some sort of crazy psychopath who wrote that book?

When I asked, Yoishi silently shook her head.

"That's not it."

"...What?"

"What you don't seem to realize is that this person was, after all, the second one to use you."

--Huh?

"Well, that's true." Sako gave a complacent smile once again.

"I said it, didn't I? Being possessed once or twice, It's all the same."

...Huh? Hey! What the hell are these two maniacs talking about? Once or twice is the same? I don't get any of it. Or should I say... I'd always assumed Yoishi was my ally, but was that really the case? Isn't she herself, like Sako, a walker in the depths of darkness? Wasn't she the type of person who never read the situation and would expose everything, no matter how cruel the truth might be? In the midst of this darkness being surrounded by the presence of countless creepy presences, isn't it just that the number of demons that I thought was only one has now grown to two? Ah -- that's what it looks like. The glow in Yoishi's dark eyes is growing. From now on, she's going to spout some decisive words. And those words will undoubtedly crush the foundation of the reality I believe in. They'll turn everything upside down.

"Y-Yoishi, wai--"

Wait, wait a second.

I was about to say -- but...

Yoishi's large eyes widened, and with an expression of ecstasy, and one without mercy, she declared it out loud:

"You've already been possessed for a long time."

"...Ugh."

I groaned out loud. Yoishi's words caused an intense surge of vomit to rise from the pit of my stomach. Now I became aware of a heaviness in my body that I hadn't noticed for a long time.

"It's... It's really him then? Kouhei Niijima?"

"No."

With a bewitching light in her eyes, Yoishi shook her head.

"A far, far more wicked ghost than him."

The reading room, which was already dimly lit, seemed to grow even darker.

The ground shook violently. My footing suddenly became unsteady. I desperately put strength into my lower body to cling to the world of the living. I grit my teeth, trying not to get caught up in the rapidly intensifying atmosphere of the world beyond.

"Just now, you said that the deceased Kouhei Niijima was in love."

"....W-what about that?"

"What kind of person was she?"

"What kind -- It's written right there, isn't it? She was tall, intellectual, shoulder-length hair, a bookworm --"

"Where does it say that?"

"..."

"This notebook has no description of any woman."

I felt a rush of goosebumps at her words. I recalled the uncontrollable presence inside me that had once thrust me down into the depths of terror.

"What...are you saying...?"

"The depiction of the girl that took shape inside your mind unnoticed -- that is the real form of 'Rororo'."

All of a sudden--

口口口口口口口口口口口口......

I definitely heard those voices. A series of countless, muffled human voices. And, I already knew what they were saying. It was – ‘Rororo’. Each and every one of them were muttering in unison with their mouths: ‘Rorororororororororororo’, like a prayer to Buddha.

Someone – somewhere, was laughing.

It was the thing clinging to the old woman in the clock tower, the one that took the name of Miiko and lived with me, the one that stared at me through the frosted glass in the club building, and the one who jumped off the school building and disappeared -- Those countless fuzzy fragments of memory melted at that moment, and were reconstructed into the coffee shop on that rainy day, with the tall girl quietly reading a book.

Now, in this microcosm of the library, it was just me and the slender girl. In a space surrounded by bookshelves, the girl was sitting a little further away, simply staring at me. Her shoulder-length hair swayed slightly. Her white face, devoid of any expression. And her eyes, which had seemed so intelligent, looked like mere holes. She continued to stare at me with those eyes that were like dark, bottomless wells.

Those eyes were nothing but darkness.

An entrance to a world that, once peeked into, could never be left again. And the second I felt as if I saw something beyond the darkness ---

“Hey, are you feeling scared right now?"

Yoishi asked me.

“Is this scary?”

Yoishi asked with her pale, shapely face drawn so close to mine that our noses were almost touching.

The expression on her face - her eyes – she was in pure ecstasy. I'm sure this is how excited Schliemann must have felt when he finally found the ruins of Troy, which had never left the realm of legend.

With that monstrous look on her face, as if she was about to eat me --- I finally became convinced.

I can't do it. I can't stay with her. To be near the girl named Yoishi Mitsurugi, is to stand face to face against the world beyond.

However, Yoishi looked around and shouted with glee.

“It’s all going crazy! Everything in this school is going perfectly, completely, 100% crazy!”

With eyes wide open and an ecstatic look on her face, she declared to no one in particular.

“J-just stop it already!”

I shouted and tried to push her away, when –

Something began to fall down.

The universe collapses, the bookshelves collapse, and a terrific amounts of books collapse. Works of Stendhal, Shakespeare, Ozaki Kōyō and Maeterlinck, dance in the air – Les Miserables, The Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, Iliad and The Gold-Bug, all dance. The mushy dogma in countless other books I'd never read was raining down incessantly like a stream of internal organs. The ceiling collapsed, giving way to an open gray sky, but even that sky ruptured. Countless books, a rain of words, poured down in a torrent aimed right at me. However, the polished, well-crafted words of those countless authors were somehow distorted. As soon as I noticed that the polished words had lost their original luster, had turned reddish-black and reeked of decay, I felt a surge of gastric juices well up inside my stomach. In this world where I couldn’t tell night from day, nor which planet I was on, I perceived the truth of the things that kept falling to and rebounding from the ground in succession. They weren’t books. They weren’t words. They were countless fish. They were frogs, nails, and pieces of meat. They were old coins, and birds with whitish feathers. All of them were squashed by the impact of the fall, staining the ground in red. Corpses. Corpses. Corpses. Corpses. Corpses. Corpses – Only corpses that had finished their lives rained down to fill the entire horizon. Decomposing into blood, flesh, and bodily fluids, all signs of life had disappeared. One after another, they continued to explode at my feet, as if to declare that living things are nothing but sacks of blood. That graphic and thunderous sound continued to ring out.

In that nightmarish world on the verge of collapse – someone’s mere laughter continued to echo.

Did that laughter belong to the person who had set up ‘Rororo’ in this room? Was it Yoishi? I didn’t know anymore. In this warped world, countless voices kept reverberating. I heard someone’s scream from somewhere, and the moment I realized it was my voice –

"Shall we leave?”

A sharp voice rang out, and my arm was grabbed by Sako’s cold hand.

At the same time, I started running like crazy. I had no idea where I was running to. At any rate, I must have gone back the way I came, running out of reading room number one onto the floor and down the corridor. But I'd like to think that the thing I saw when I ran out of the reading room number one was a hallucination caused by my clouded consciousness. In Yoishi’s hands, running right behind me, was an old black book. And, as if trying to snatch back that book, a long white arm stretched out from the darkness.

---

The next thing I knew, I was in the courtyard of the university, beneath the radiant moonlight.

I was standing there, pumping oxygen into my lungs as hard as I could. My knees hurt like hell, probably because I hit them hard on the corner of the table when I left. While rubbing my knee, I continued to repeat the process of filling my lungs with fresh oxygen and expelling it. I felt as if I had just completed an underwater dive, probably because I had been unconsciously holding my breath the whole time. I think that was because I felt like I was letting something nasty into my body just by breathing while in the library.

“…”

I thought I heard a muffled voice close to me, and when I slowly turned around, there was something there. At first, I thought it was a black garbage bag, but it was a human being. Sitting on the bare ground, looking miserable with their head dropped down.

“Y—Yoishi…?”

The figure looked up slightly at my voice.

Her long hair moved smoothly, and her pale face stood out under the moonlight. Yoishi Mitsurugi looked absentminded, as she turned her beautiful, cold face like that of a western doll towards me. And then, moving her lips slightly, she said:

“It got taken.”

“…Huh?”

“That book. Even though I was the one who found it.”

Those words finally brought me back to my senses, and I looked around in a panic.

In the pitch-dark university courtyard, there was only silence; Not a single person in sight. Besides the sound of insects chirping from somewhere, it was intensely quiet.

“What happened to that kinagashi wearing bastard?”

Yoishi looked at me as if she were clicking her tongue.

“He vanished.”

“Vanished?”

“Like I told you, he stole the black book from me and left somewhere.”

…T-T-that foxy bastard.

He's the type of guy who scares people to death, and when he gets what he wants, he says goodbye with no explanation. Isn’t he an adult? Isn’t he supposed to be a fully-fledged member of society? Is he really worthy enough to be Krishna-san’s mentor? I was shaking my dizzy head and moaning bitterly out loud at the same time, “That’s right”, Yoishi said, agreeing with me.

“It's so deplorable to rob a girl of a book she hasn't read. He should have at least asked if he could borrow it after I’d finished reading it. It's really irritating when he said, ‘Adieu’, and left."

“No, about that...”

I interjected, being as fed up as I was.

“You’d die if you read it, okay? Even If you've already got one foot in the world beyond, you'd get dragged there in the blink of an eye.”

Yoishi silently turned her dark eyes to me. As expected, her expression seemed to be saying, ‘What's the problem with that?’ I sighed and asked her once again:

“Well anyway, you helped me out back there – but, why were you there in the first place?”

“Why, you ask? I was reading, of course.”

“No, it was dark. I mean, the library was already closed.”

Yoishi stood up unsteadily. She lightly brushed the dust off her skirt and walked feebly through the dimly lit courtyard toward the main gate.

“I was in there since lunchtime, trying to read a book.... When I finally opened the book, I couldn't concentrate. The thoughts that were stuck in my head were interfering with my thinking, and each letter in the book looked like nothing more than a pattern. I had no choice but to continue reading, and before I knew it - I fell asleep.”

“Y-you fell asleep?”

“It was quite a deep sleep, actually.”

“No…just wait a minute. You were asleep all that time? From noon till now -- in there?”

Yoishi nodded in silence.

…No, ughh. What’s up with the security in this library? You mean to tell me they just locked up the facility even when there was a person asleep on the reading chair? What about the entry record? What was the point of me going to all the trouble of sneaking in without leaving a trace? And having to endure the urge to urinate for so long in the locker?

“I woke up a few times, but I hadn't been sleeping well lately, so I figured it was fine. But then, just as I was getting the deepest sleep I'd had in a long time, you guys started making a racket.”

Yoishi muttered somewhat resentfully, but there was still something persistent that was bothering this girl. So that’s why she didn't notice anything when I was having such a scary time? Oh, that’s right. After all, ghosts being everywhere is normal for this girl’s world, and I don't know what it is, but her problems are probably all that matter to her in that world. Other problems are just trivial to her. I guess she just happened to wake up and saw me there, teary-eyed and upset.

I thought that as I glared at the back of Yoishi, who was walking ahead of me in a daze.

It’s a characteristic of the antisocial personality disorder Sako spoke of. I think it was about having excessive self-esteem, being self-centered and a lack of empathy, or something like that. It's a trait that fits perfectly with the psycho that went to the trouble of putting a book in the library that was made up of those taboo words, and it's a trait that’s terribly true of Sako himself -- But still, in some respects it reminds me of this black-haired girl walking right in front of me.

“That’s the definition espoused by Robert D. Hare, isn’t it?”

Yoishi suddenly stopped in her tracks and looked back.

Damn it. It seems I unconsciously muttered it out loud. Slightly embarrassed, I asked: “You know about it?”

Yoishi nodded, and added:

“Indeed, every single aspect of that definition applies to me.”

I was at a loss for words when she easily admitted it to me.

“I’ve always felt constantly inconvenienced by the insular atmosphere of this school.”

“No…you see...”

I cleared my throat and tried to change the subject.

“I don't know if it was a sociopath or what, but is it true that there was such a dangerous person in this school after all? And did they put a strange book in our library? Why did they do that? What was their objective?”

Yoishi looked at me closely and then… asked me:

“Do you really want to know?”

Her pale face stood out under the pouring moonlight, and it terrified me—

Behind Yoishi, I watched the night sea spread out endlessly.

The boundary between the sky and the horizon is unclear, an infinite world spreads out in darkness.

And somewhere in that limitless expanse, an unfathomable presence lay hidden.

The incomprehensible - people sometimes call it the occult. I've always been thrilled by the transcendental atmosphere of ghosts, UMAs, and out of place artifacts, but this time, for the first time, I had terrible goosebumps at the very thought of human beings. It was fear of an act more twisted than what the word "prank" could even begin to cover: Mixing in a book that would kill you if you read it amongst ordinary books.

For example, digging a small pit on a snowy day to lure your friends in. I used to do that when I was a kid. It was fun, and I used to roar with laughter when my friends fell in. But that didn’t have an iota of murderous intent. It's because I wanted to see my fallen friend jump out with a smile on his face. I couldn’t possibly imagine it my heart pounding in excitement at the possibility of someone dying.

That's what I was thinking, when –

“Predator, serial killer, antisocial personality disorder. Those words are just labels.” Yoishi muttered in a whisper.

“It's easy to dismiss them as abnormal but, statistically speaking, in every age, there's always been at least one person in every class who has a desire to destroy the status quo. The fact that the probability of their appearance does not decrease in any era has even led to a belief among some who think it is a manifestation of population control genes. People who hold thoughts beyond comprehension are simply classified and tagged as such by those around them."

"No, I don't know about tags and labels, but that's still not normal. Laughing at other people's misery, doing all that just for the fun of it, that's--"

Suddenly, it hit me.

No...no. Isn't that the true nature of human beings?

Haven't humans always been irredeemable, self-righteous creatures filled with malice? I recalled the arrogance of the human species in removing the reproductive functions from their pets for their own convenience, something I had thought about during the Miiko incident. At the same time, my conscience began to denounce me for my own past mistake. The mistake of abandoning the proposal I had made after being broken hearten, 'Look who's talking', it mocked.

"That's right."

Yoishi nodded slightly.

"People are selfish, but they also have a hypocritical mental circuit known as a conscience, which subconsciously creates a sense of atonement for the things they have trampled upon. It can be said that this creates ghosts in the minds of people in every generation. And perhaps the taboo words embedded in the book 'Rororo' have the function of raising that negative circuit to the extreme. Those who read it would be caught unaware and endlessly be made to believe that their lives have no worth, and finally, their own conscience would kill them."

Yoishi kept muttering such things in a detached manner, but --

I realized, after all this time...

"Huh--Wait a second! What, what about me? Is that thing gone? You said I'd been possessed for a long time, right? It's gone already, right?"

Yoishi just stared at me with her emotionless eyes--

And abruptly turned away and started walking again.

"...Hey. Just wait a second. You're not going to deny it?"

As I stared at Yoishi's distant figure, I realized something even more important.

Come to think of it, I had, without warning, ended up seeing that girl in that coffee shop, and without being dragged into something by Yoishi. Even now, if I close my eyes, I can clearly imagine the entire shape of her face behind my eyelids. If she was a ghost, then that means... it can't be--

"It can't be…"

My feet stopped moving then and there. I desperately clapped my knees, which were about to collapse, but I couldn't take one more step. The dark sea of night behind Yoishi immersed my feet. The rough sound of the waves enveloped me from somewhere.

"It can't be, does that mean... that I've been able to see ghosts for some time now...?"

If you hang out with a psychic, your ability to sense the supernatural will strengthen. Krishna-san once said that the ill-natured feeling of 'knowing' makes people connect with the world beyond. So, does that mean that since I arrived to Tokyo and went to places with Yoishi Mitsurugi, that I've become tinged with her strong magnetism relating to ghosts, is that what it means?

"There's one thing I forgot to mention."

From the darkness beyond, came Yoishi's voice.

Looking up wearily, in the dim darkness up ahead, the unearthly shadow spoke in a voice that sounded like a wind chime.

"There's something I misunderstood."

"...Huh?"

"Their world always surpasses my imagination, and the more I peek into it, the more I realize the depth of its darkness. Their words are muffled and incoherent, and I couldn't understand them no matter how many times I heard them."

--So, what does that mean?

"Now that I know, it doesn't make things any better, but - the word that dead young man was muttering was not 'Rororo'."

--Stop it! Don't listen to her anymore! Cover your ears and get away from this girl right now! Before I could even react to the warning coming from the back of my mind, her voice filled with ecstasy reached my ears.

"It wasn't 'Rororo', it was --- 'Run away'."

With those words spoken with joy—

Yoishi walked off into the darkness. My feet were stuck as if sewn to the ground, and I stared at her disappearing figure for what seemed like forever. For an instant, I caught a glimpse of what I thought was the emaciated dead clinging to Yoishi’s back with their thin hands -- I quickly rubbed my eyes.

Alone, I stood there, petrified, even as the darkened university building came back into view.

Suddenly, I felt a sense of relief as the strength drained from my body. I knew the truth behind this numbing feeling of pleasure, it was as if I had finally overcome a deadly threat to my life.

“How absurd…”

I whispered, my voice quivering.

The idea that she and I were war comrades was downright absurd.

Right now, from the bottom of my heart, I was... truly relieved that Yoishi had disappeared from my sight.

But the ground I was standing on was a gentle slope. And I knew was that if I made any mistakes from here on, the slope would become irreversibly steep.

“I can’t… do this anymore.”

I tell myself, wiping the tears from my eyes with both hands.

She and I were confronting completely different things. I selfishly believed I had finally understood her, but I had completely failed to grasp her true nature. After all is said and done, Yoishi and I were two beings who lived in worlds that could never intersect. I still had my feet firmly planted in this world, and even if I plant one foot in the other side, she already stands with both feet there.

It’s not… too late.

If I continue walking with her, the path ahead will surely lead to the world beyond. I'm not prepared for that yet. I still want to live in the warmth of this world.

I turned to face the direction opposite from where Yoishi had disappeared, and kept on running without looking back.

Epilogue

“…………..Huh?”

I opened the door to the club room and saw—

Krishna-san and Sako were locked in an embrace. The two of them were huddled together in the middle of the club room, with the tall Sako completely wrapped around the smaller Krishna.

For a moment I was at a loss of words, moreover, I felt so agitated that I even lost myself.

“…S, s, sorry for intruding!”

Flustered, I closed the door and leaned against the concrete wall of the hallway, repeatedly pumping oxygen into my lungs. Shaking my burning head, I tried to shake off the sight I had just witnessed, but it wasn't going to happen.

--Why is Krishna-san and that guy…?

The reason I came here was to once again declare my intention to part ways with Yoishi to Krishna-san. I was there to say that I finally understood that it was like playing an impossibly hard video game for me to get involved with her. And I would also take the opportunity to report Sako’s actions: how that bastard tricked me into going to the library late at night, and at the end, how he tried to turn me into some kind of vessel for countless somethings.

However, all such feelings ended up vanishing in an instant.

That's how confused I was by what I just saw. Two people hugging in a club room in broad daylight…that means, it’s that sort of thing? Did they cross the line between teacher and student? Oh my god, I’m such an ignorant dullard. When I think about it, it's pretty remarkable that Krishna-san, who’s extremely weak at dirty talk, would go to Aomori for an overnight stay. She even told me that she had been peeked on in the bath, that means it was that sort of relationship all along. In fact, Krishna-san is an unmarried, fully-fledged woman who will turn twenty-one this year. It's not surprising that she might have a boyfriend or two. But – despite all that, be it the benefactor who saved her life -- of all people, it had to be that guy?

I slumped down in the hallway, dumbfounded, unable to think of anything else.

What is this feeling of emptiness?

Where was the wind that blew through my chest coming from? And where was it headed?

No, the problem was not the wind. It was the hole the wind was blowing through. What was it, I wondered, that had gouged out my chest? In my mind, Yoishi had gone over to the darkness. She had a certain cuteness about her despite that, but still, I couldn't follow her to the other side. I didn’t have that resolve. I managed to fill that void by thinking of Krishna-san's smile.

I could immediately imagine her as a child, with that immature, lovely and innocent face. Her big eyes and the sparkling light of innocence within. Whenever she got angry or upset, her smooth hair would bob up and down and a nice scent would always tickle my nose. Ah… she was always an angel. She was my guardian angel. That she should fall into the hands of that demonic, monstrous fox-like guy-- is this the bitterness of life? Is this what you would call absurdity? At that moment, I thought I heard a voice saying, ‘Hey, you there,’ but I must have been imagining it.

“…I guess I’ll quit.”

I mutter to myself, and finally make up my mind.

"That's right, I was only let into the Beatnik research society when I forcefully tried to get in, I wasn't admitted as a staff member of Ikaigabuchi. That was, after all, because Krishna-san didn't wholeheartedly agree with me joining. My fervent speech back then inadvertently influenced that kind person, and that's how things ended up this way. I'm a heavy burden to her, and hardly any help. Even though she told me to stay away from Yoishi, I totally ended up getting involved with her anyway, three incidents in a row, starting from the 'The Clock Tower', 'The Cat Monster', and 'Rororo'. And on top of that, I've been targeted by some kind of troublesome ghost that I don't understand. I... really am an irredeemable..."

"Hey, you there."

I thought I heard that voice again, but I failed to recognize anything with my ears as well as my eyes. I was so devastated by the enormity of what I had lost, and furthermore, I even lost sight of the path that should have been right in front of me, but regardless, the voice continued.

"Hey, I'm speaking to you, the one wearing the misspelled English T-shirt slumped in the hallway. I don't know what happened, but please cheer up. I've been there, too. At your age, you've probably got more problems than you can handle, but they're usually not a big deal when you look at them with a calm head. Why don't you try and act a little more dignified?"

"............."

I vacantly raise my face to see that the door to the Beatnik research room was open, and there, holding a drooping Krishna-san in his left hand looking down on me with a grin was Sako Takita.

"Y-you..."

"Save the greetings for later, Yamada Nagito-kun. Say, could you rearrange those chairs over there for a minute? Kurimoto-kun needs to be laid down."

"L-laid down? What are you going to do after laying her down? What kind of nerve do you have to make me help you with something like that right now?"

Sako gave me a cold gaze, and then breathed a deep sigh.

"You really are a fool. Can't you tell just by looking? Or are you someone so heartless without even a shred of compassion to help out someone who's done so much for you? Kurimoto-kun is unconscious. Can't you see that I'm asking for your help?"

At those words--

I stood up in a panic. And finally understood the situation.

"K-Kishna-san!? You lost consciousness? Wai--What happened? Please, stay with us!"

"Oh, she'll be fine. She just got a little shocked and will probably wake up soon. More importantly, you'd better set up some chairs over there, so she can have a place to lie down."

I did as I was told and ran into the club room, setting up a simple bed-like space by lining up a pipe chair and some other chairs. Sako easily carried Krishna-san in his arms and gently laid her down there.

"Sako, What the hell happened?"

"Well, it's a long story -- but I guess it's because she saw something unbelievable."

"Something...unbelievable?"

With those words--

In the humid club room where the cicadas were still chirping noisily, something chilly rose up.

"It's this."

In Sako's hands, there was an old, worn out photograph.

Was it possibly some kind of creepy ghost photograph? I braced myself -- but, what Sako was holding out was a perfectly normal photograph. A scene cut out from somewhere on campus. A picture of two high school girls huddled close together in front of a large tree. A petite girl and a long, slender girl are smiling as they stand shoulder to shoulder. I don't have to strain my eyes to see it. The petite girl was Krishna-san. A shy smile peeked out from behind her red glasses, dressed in the Koumei high school uniform, she was looking this way.

But, the other girl.

The moment I saw her, my blood froze.

--It's her.

The girl I had seen in the coffee shop -- tall, intelligent, with the beautiful face. Her hair around shoulder-length, her eyes had a strong light in them, and her lips were shaped in a mature smile.

"Hey, hey, hey, Sako! It's her. She's the one I saw!"

I excitedly pointed at the picture.

"You and Yoishi both scared me into thinking that this girl was a ghost that only existed in my mind -- but look! She really does exist. Hahahaha. I knew it. The girl I met at the coffee shop didn't look like a ghost at all. She has legs, and a shadow....Just like in this picture, she was wearing the Koumei school uniform, and quietly reading a book in the coffee shop, and--"

"N-no way!"

At that moment, a nostalgic angry voice sounded directly below me.

“T…There’s no way you could have met her! There’s no way… you could have met that person—"

Startled, I looked down to see the petite occult website manager feebly glaring at me.

“Krishna-san! You regained consciousness?”

“---I’m fine. More importantly, did you really see that person?”

Looking pale as she dragged half of her body up to the chair, Krishna-san asked me as I reached out to her.

“….U..Uhhh. I’m sure of it.”

“--What about Yoishi? Was she nearby?”

“U…ummmm…”

Letting out a deep breath at the sight of me, Krishna-san laid back down again with a heave and folded her hands over her face.

“Even after I told you not to get involved with Yoishi Mitsurugi, yet you…”

“Actually, I came here today to tell you that. From now on, I’m never gonna meet Yoishi—"

“It's already too late.”

She spoke plainly and dismissively, then proceeded to ask Sako while peeking through her fingers.

“Takita-san, what should be done now?”

“Well then…”

Saying that, Sako turned to me with a faint smile on his face.

“First of all, Let's start with a very fundamental contradiction that it seems you haven't noticed. Listen here, Yamada Nagito-kun. Take a good look at this picture once again, and see if you notice anything.”

“…Huh?”

“In this photo, the two high school girls look to be on good terms. And as you can see, on the left is Kurimoto-kun. She is now a university student, and she is wearing a high school uniform in this photo. Unless your shrewd understanding leads you to believe that Kurimoto-kun has a hobby of cosplaying, you would know that this photo is from the past, right? Yes, to be precise, this photo was taken five years ago, right here within the Koumei educational institution.”

“…Five years ago?”

That number brought back an unpleasant memory.

As I recall, five years ago—

Didn't this bastard once say that Krishna almost broke down once?

“That’s right.”

Sako smiled, his long, slitted eyes narrowing like a thread.

“And this tall girl smiling next to Kurimoto-kun… immediately after this picture was taken, she ended up mysteriously disappearing from this school.”

“…Huh?”

“She disappeared without a trace. Without even leaving a body behind, her bag was left in the classroom, and she never even went home. School officials, friends, neighbors, police, and the mass media all tried desperately to find her at the time, but there was still no sign of whether she was alive or dead. That’s right, she literally vanished from the face of the earth, as if she had been spirited away by the gods. Even now, after five years, she still falls in the category of ‘being actively searched for’ -- but if we think about it realistically, it would be more natural to assume that she is already dead.”

Those words made me feel a nebulous chill, like something cold was creeping at my feet.

“But, I mean, uh, look – there’s all sorts of high school students, right?”

I spoke, trying to chase away the creeping feeling.

“Maybe there was some guy she was going out with and she ran away with him or something, or maybe some bad guy tricked her or--”

“Of course, such a possibility was taken into account at the beginning of the search. But she didn't have any boyfriends at the time, and her purse, pencil case and other stationery were not missing. Even the shoes she used to go to school with still remained in the shoe rack at the entrance.”

“Then she must still be somewhere in this school, right? Maybe she's locked up somewhere that's hard to find, and is still waiting for hel—”

I was about to say that much, when I finally realized. Five years. Five years have already passed. If this girl was looking for help somewhere – then it was unlikely that she would be still be alive.

“It seems you finally understand. Every inch of this school has already been searched, and even the police dogs failed to find anything. To sum it all up, realistically and scientifically speaking, her physical body doesn’t exist here anymore.”

Sako’s words–

And that seemingly happy, warped, white face of his - reminded me of something. Words that distort my stance, the darkness that spreads behind those eyes and shakes the foundations of what I believe.

Yes – it reminded me of Yoishi Mitsurugi.

It was the same feeling of something shaking and slipping away, just like when that black-haired girl talked about ghosts.

“A girl that shouldn’t be here anymore, and you…where did you meet, I wonder? Even If the girl who disappeared five years ago is still alive somewhere, what are the chances that she's still wearing the uniform she wore back then? How likely is it that a girl of this generation, growing mature every day, would still look exactly the same as she did back then?”

Aah, it’s getting darker.

The world, now, is becoming ever darker. Sako’s words, and his empty eyes, gripped my heart coldly, and his thin, smiling face appeared like a monster fox on a moonless night.

--Antisocial Personality Disorder.

Suddenly, the word comes up in my mind again.

I don’t know if that word is correct or not. But right now, the person called Sako Takita, was an inexplicable existence to me. He was well versed in all kinds of mantras, an advanced user of taboo words, a half-hearted guy, a liar, and yet, he was also a calculating man who worked everything to his advantage. And despite all of this, I never felt any sense of responsibility from the man himself. He was an incomprehensible monster that I sincerely hoped to never see again.

“I don't really want to push you too hard right now, but...”

Sako waved the photo in his hand and spoke:

“For the record, this photo was supposed to have been burnt up five years ago.”

“……”

“I was sure Kurimoto-kun had properly extinguished it from the world. But for some reason, it was once again discovered in the club room. I believe that Kurimoto-kun's mind, which is stronger and more graceful than most people's, couldn't stand to do it, because this slender girl and Kurimoto-kun had a rather special relationship.”

He spoke happily, and then:

“Say, Yamada-kun… Yamada Nagito-kun.”

Sako handed me the photo.

“What happened to this girl five years ago -- and where is she right now?”

In a world where I slowly bleed away.

The mature girl in the photo smiles quietly.

In the clock tower. In the eyes of the cat. In the club room at dawn. And, in the coffee shop –

That hazy figure, standing lurched over, was right now… in front of me.

The girl sneers. She turns her deep hollow eyes towards me and moves her red mouth.

Enshrouded in the scent of the world beyond—

She declares:

--A t l a s t, w e m e e t…

---

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