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V13 Story III – Part 05

I retraced my old school route and found myself back at the place.

I was here not too long ago. The dirty school building was cloaked in a wet and gray shadow. As always, its appearance brought to mind an old fish tank. I remembered Asato guiding me through these very halls, though I never quite understood why he brought me here. He had piggybacked on the anomaly caused by a girl, showing me the ugliest sides of humanity once more.

He had tried to settle things with me in the library, but I never found out what kind of emotions drove him to do what he did. I could make a guess, but I doubted I would ever comprehend it. People are like that. Sometimes they take irrational actions, desperate to be understood, or resigned to being misunderstood. In those moments, all you can do is gauge their thoughts and try to read between the lines of their actions.

In that sense, the fox’s actions were always disturbingly human.

I stopped thinking and turned around. Shirayuki was curiously running her hand along a metal rod. I couldn’t recall it ever being used during class. Maybe it had seen use in the past, but by my time, it was forgotten. Shirayuki glanced at me curiously, asking what it was for. I hopped onto the bar, careful not to strain my belly, and swung forward. After I dismounted, Shirayuki gave a determined nod, then jumped up and swung gracefully in her kimono. She landed with a proud smile. I gave her a pat on the head. Smiling happily, she spun around the bar once more before flicking open her fan.

“Seeing where you spent your time makes me happy. I have never been to a school. It’s surprisingly big.”

“When I was here, it felt strangely cramped. I spent my time with Shizuka and Asato. I don’t know why, but even now, those memories bring me joy. I still can’t make sense of what they really were.”

What was the fox thinking? Why couldn’t we just stay friends?

Even now, when he had stopped being a fox and started helping me.

Shirayuki didn’t respond. She just stepped forward and squeezed my hand. I nodded and led her toward the school building. The girl wasn’t here today. The doors and windows were likely locked, and we might run into a guard. We probably wouldn’t be able to get inside, but maybe we could peer into a classroom from the outside. As I was mulling this over, Shirayuki suddenly tugged on my sleeve. I stopped. Something big sliced through the air.

Thud.

It crashed to the ground right in front of us.

A vivid image flashed in my mind—Shizuka’s pale body falling, hitting the ground with a sickening thud. Her body burst open, scattering everything inside. That death had been buried in darkness, erased as if it had never happened. My stomach churned violently. Cold sweat formed on my hand, still clasped with Shirayuki’s. Fighting the nausea, I rushed to the fallen object, trying to calm myself as I approached. In hindsight, it had nothing to do with me. But my mind, accustomed to gruesome events at this point, automatically began to analyze it.

It was a grotesque, oversized white doll. I frowned deeply. It wasn’t human. Not even a living thing.

It was a doll, likely stitched together from sheets. Something dark and red had been stuffed inside the thick white fabric. Simply put, it was like a crude sausage made of cloth instead of intestines. Electrodes dangled from its thick limbs, and its belly was smeared with footprints. Blood and flesh seeped from its rough seams, as if someone had stomped on it repeatedly. I had seen something like this before. I looked up.

No one seemed to be there. But that couldn’t be true. Whoever threw this down must be on the roof.

As I thought back to the apartment building we had just visited, memories of past cases flooded my mind—Shizuka’s suicide, the man who jumped into the sea, the cat that fell from the window, the staff member with a bag over their head, thrown from a height—one after another, they all flashed by. I found myself running. If someone was on the roof, some door had to be open. But before I could check the main entrances, I spotted the door connecting the walkway to the school building wide open. I dashed inside. Shirayuki’s footsteps sounded behind me. She didn’t try to stop me. She, too, must have sensed something was off about the doll. We hurried up the stairs to the rooftop. A strange sense of déjà vu washed over me.

It was always the same. My life was nothing but me going up or down. Chasing something upward. Running from something downward.

I had watched Shizuka jump from the rooftop. Then a demon was planted in my belly, changing my fate forever.

Now, before I descended to a place even deeper than the human world—to the spirit world—I was heading up once again.

I pounced on the heavy metal door and shoved it open. A frigid gust of wind hit me.

A murky night stretched across the rooftop. The black sky loomed low, heavy and oppressive. Clouds raced by, hiding and revealing the pale moon and tiny stars.

Patches of moonlight shone on a red chalk drawing that resembled a magic circle. Even to an untrained eye, it was obvious—though intricate-looking, it was nothing more than a chaotic mess. A metal box sat beside it, likely a power device taken from the chemistry lab. At the edge of the circle stood a familiar figure—a plain-looking girl with thick glasses and a gray long coat, her black hair swaying in the wind. She sighed, then lifted her gaze.

“Huh? It’s been a while. What are you two doing here?” The girl who had summoned the fox for a séance spoke, surprise in her voice.

Her shoes were soaked and red, like she had stepped in something.

“You’re that girl from before.”

“Yes, that girl from before. Is the fox not with you today? Aw.”

She was the one who orchestrated the séance at this high school a few days ago, trying to summon her dead friend’s soul with a grotesque plushie filled with flesh.

Her loafers were stained with blood. My eyes followed the bloody trail that led from the magic circle, ending just past the gap beneath the rooftop fence. The fence itself was tangled with strings and chunks of flesh. She must have forced the doll through that narrow space. Despite the bizarre scene on the rooftop, the school remained eerily quiet.

I clenched my teeth. I had once experienced something similar, yet different. The seemingly gentle yet explosive interactions between the fox and Shizuka resurfaced in my mind.

My stomach churned. I could say this for certain: this girl was a sudden anomaly born from the mundane.

I saw others in her. I thought of the girls who had tried to escape their suffocating dorm, their tangled emotions of love and hate culminating in disaster. Maybe it was because I’d been reflecting on the past just moments before, but various faces seemed to merge with the girl’s calm visage—perpetrators and victims in the cases that Mayuzumi handled, broken individuals, people who wished to become animals.

She clasped her hands, looking at us with a hint of unease. She seemed troubled by us blocking her way to the door.

I opened my mouth to ask a question whose answer I already knew.

“What are you doing? No, why did you make that thing?”

“Well, that hurts. I put a lot of effort into stuffing it. You can’t just show up and mock my work.”

“What’s inside it? There’s more meat than the stuffed rabbit from before. Is it human?”

“How rude. It’s too soon for that. There are steps to these things. For now, I tried using dog meat. Stray dogs are hard to come by these days, so sourcing was tough. My bathroom ended up a mess, and knives are expensive. Anything else? I was just about to leave.”

“It had electrodes attached. What were you doing? Never mind—I can guess.”

The conversation hit a pause. I let out a deep sigh, and the girl gave a mocking shrug. I could feel Shirayuki’s confusion beside me. It was only natural. She hadn’t met this girl before, and our exchange was full of unspoken understandings. The girl was currently doing something far from ordinary. She didn’t see it as wrong, but I did. And she knew that. But she wasn’t in the mood for a lecture. So I stood blocking the door, engaging in this absurd conversation under the mutual understanding that we would never see eye to eye.