by Nisioisin
The girl wasn’t just stupid, she was also crazy.
She was out of her feeble little mind.
024
It wasn’t until well after I descended the mountain, having continued this giggling romp with the stupid, crazy, out of her feeble little mind Nadeko Sengoku until evening came, that I noticed I was being tailed.
The instant I noticed, my legs unconsciously began to carry me away from the station─you could put it down to the fact that I’m a battle-worn veteran, or a sly old fox, or to the muscle memory of evasive action taken in the past.
I often pretend to be the thrill-seeking, self-destructive type, but perhaps my instincts prefer safety. So is Deishu Kaiki just another human being? Does that disappoint you? Well, I’m into that version of myself. I think it’s cute─and while I can’t speak for Nadeko Sengoku, to me “cute” is a compliment.
“…”
Without looking back, I casually, and now consciously, upped my pace. The ground was covered in snow, so I nearly slipped.
Snow country makes it pretty easy to tail someone, when you think about it─the snow creates clear footprints, deadens sound, and even light precipitation will completely mask the form of the person tailing you.
Of course, having noticed that I was being followed, I could exploit corners and blind spots to discover the identity of my tail. If I whirled around and threw down my flat-out adult dash, I might even catch the person─but I also might not, and if I failed, I’d only have succeeded in revealing that I was onto them.
In which case, he or she (or they?) would adopt a new strategy─one that I wouldn’t catch on to so easily. And that would spell trouble.
So I decided to leave it alone. I wouldn’t put an ounce of effort into discovering the identity of the person following me. I’m not trying to sound sage, but not expending effort is actually quite easy. Easier than expending effort, anyway.
I chose a likely spot to hail a cab and asked to be taken to the station rather than to my hotel. Not the station nearest my hotel, but one stop down the line.
Whoever the person tailing me might be, I didn’t think they’d follow me in another taxi at this stage, but I was erring on the side of caution.
It’d be one thing in a big city like Tokyo or Osaka, but a car chase in this nowheresville town might be fun… As I predicted, though, no vehicle followed my taxi.
They seemed to have given up. Too easily. Maybe they’d cut it short for the day─or maybe the little shadow play didn’t mean anything, and they were already staking out my hotel.
At this point, I finally wondered who it might be.
Too many possibilities occurred to me, there were too many people who bore me ill will, and the truth is I had absolutely no clue─a fact that was only compounded by being where I was.
“At the same time…” I muttered.
The most likely possibility was, naturally, some peon of Gaen-senpai’s─though there was no need to call her senpai anymore.
I may have pulled the wool over Ononoki’s eyes, but I had no illusions about doing the same to Gaen-senpai. Once she discovered my betrayal, no, my beautiful decision not to withdraw for the sake of that darling child, she would put me under surveillance─Ononoki, however, had said that she had no means of contacting Gaen-senpai.
In which case Gaen-senpai didn’t know what I was up to─this was her, though, so there was a strong possibility that, anticipating my duplicity, she’d put additional people besides Ononoki in place to watch me.
But after considering the matter for a while, I decided I didn’t have to worry.
I couldn’t rule it out completely, of course, but based on my experience of her in the years since we were at school together, Gaen-senpai herself had already fully withdrawn from the matter at hand.
And withdrawing, for her, meant withdrawing for good─whatever I might do to come in and muck up her beautiful handiwork, she wouldn’t personally set foot in the town again.
So my decision not to worry didn’t stem from the remoteness of the possibility, but purely from the idea that I was good as long as Gaen-senpai herself didn’t show up.
Unless it was Yozuru or Mèmè, I was good─I could even set a trap for Gaen-senpai by manipulating her peons.
Well, whether or not I’d actually go that far, it seemed prudent to find out what the hell she’d been up to in this town a few months back─it might be important for my work going forward.
Then I considered who the most likely candidate would be if the person tailing me wasn’t sent by Gaen-senpai.
One of the middle schoolers who bore me a grudge?
Normally I would have said yes…but if that were the case, why would they go to the trouble of tailing me?
They’d just resort to some violent action, and smash me in the back of the head without warning─though I could also imagine why they might not.
“Are you vacationing here, sir?” the taxi driver asked me.
“Sure, kind of,” I nodded. “More of a business trip, really. Work has provided me with an opportunity to come here.”
“Work, huh? I knew it. You’ve got kind of an urban feel about you, sir, so I thought that might be the case.”
I wasn’t sure if “urban” was a compliment, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t an insult, at least, so I acknowledged it with a “Thanks.”
“So, what do you think of the place?” he asked.
To which I responded, “I’m enjoying myself. It’s a real thrill ride.”
025
I didn’t end up boarding a train at the station where the taxi dropped me off, nor did I go back to my hotel. I did an immediate about-face and returned to the town.
I wasn’t being vigilant, I had completely given up worrying about that. As long as they didn’t bother me directly, they were harmless, so I opted to just forget about it. No harm no foul, that’s the kind of guy I am.
There was something else that concerned me more─the fact that Nadeko Sengoku was so broken.
Ultimately that was her right, whether she was stupid crazy or smart crazy, but something about her was incongruous and just felt off-balance.
Maybe getting stuck doing cat’s cradle with a snake had rattled me more thoroughly than I’d expected─but you should’ve seen the smile on Nadeko Sengoku’s face when she innocently manipulated that snake into the shape of a broom, just like I had taught her─thankfully, I hadn’t been so rattled that I forgot how to make the shapes I had memorized. Either way, if she was mentally unstable, I had to stabilize her.
In aid of which, I visited the Sengoku residence again.
This time, however, I had no intention of calling her parents on the intercom and coming in through the front door─there was nothing more I needed to hear from them, so I had no interest in speaking to them again.
Good, law-abiding citizens.
Well, maybe I wasn’t going to get away with literally never speaking another word to them…
I called the Sengokus’ on my cell phone from right outside their house─it wasn’t so far from Araragi’s, by the way, so I was on constant lookout.
I couldn’t let my vigilance lapse entirely with regard to being tailed, but in that neighborhood, a chance encounter with Araragi or his little sister Karen was of much greater concern.
It was her father who answered the phone: Sengoku speaking.
I unleashed my vaunted gift of gab on him. I had found a clue regarding their missing daughter. Something new had come to light when I compared it with the book I’d taken home from the bedroom they’d been kind enough to let me examine. It wasn’t the kind of thing we could discuss over the phone, and I wanted to hear their thoughts on the matter, so could he and his wife come meet me. That was how I played it: circuitous, which is to say reserved, yet carefully calibrated to make it impossible to refuse.
The time being what it was…around nine o’clock at night…Nadeko Sengoku’s father wasn’t thrilled, but ultimately he acceded to my request. He was ho
nestly worried about his missing daughter, after all.
After hanging up, I watched and waited, and at last a car carrying Mr. and Mrs. Sengoku left the garage and drove away into the night.
Making sure they were gone, I entered the grounds. Cautiously. Yes, I was breaking and entering, but it’s a little late to be bringing that up now.
I ignored the front door and went around to the back. I very much doubted that the front door was unlocked, and even if it were, I wasn’t going to go in that way.
It was the second-floor windows I was interested in.
I located the window of Nadeko Sengoku’s room─more or less right away.
I took a few steps back, just enough to give myself a running start, then took off. The second floor of an average home isn’t high enough to require a ladder or rope.
I ran up the vertical wall with my leather shoes and grabbed the frame, then used a bit of rock-climbing prowess to make it the rest of the way.
Opening the window, I climbed inside.
I had unlocked it the day before under the guise of opening and shutting the curtains, and fortunately it did the trick─I say fortunately, but it wasn’t a question of chance, it was a premeditated crime.
That said, I hadn’t necessarily been sure I’d need to return to her room; unlocking the window was simply a precautionary measure I’d taken─naturally, there were a number of others─but something had bugged me enough that I’d figured it might be worth a return visit.
The closet.
The closet that Sengoku’s parents had absolutely not opened because they’d been told absolutely not to─I had come to open it.
That was why I’d set a rendezvous with her parents and gotten them out of the house. A trick I could only use once, it would irreparably damage Mr. and Mrs. Sengoku’s impression of me…but so be it. What was done was done.
If you let yourself worry about everything, you’ll never accomplish anything.
Now that I had the opportunity, I left the closet for last, and in the gloom, or rather pitch darkness, I made the thorough search I’d been prevented from conducting by her parents’ watchful eyes. Unfortunately, however, this prefatory work yielded nothing.
Even rummaging through her underwear drawer didn’t turn up anything interesting─I’d hoped for a secret diary.
Thinking that they might hold some promise, I flipped through the pages of the notebooks sitting atop her desk. The doodles she made during class might provide some insight into her personality. Apparently, she wasn’t one for taking notes during class (when else would she?), and the pages were almost entirely blank.
Not into studying.
Nadeko Sengoku.
I hadn’t been such a great student myself, but this girl was a little extreme─I guess that was an insight into her personality, revealed by those blank notebooks?
Now then─time for the main event.
I’d set the meeting a bit on the late side, on top of which I’d said something like, “I must apologize in advance, I might be a little late,” so I probably had about another hour to continue my search, but I was still in someone else’s home.
An unfamiliar habitat.
Definitely no need to overstay my welcome.
I reached for the closet door─a slight resistance. It seemed to be locked. Now it all made sense, her parents couldn’t open the closet because it was locked─nope, that explained exactly nothing.
While there was a lock, it was simply the kind where you can insert a ten-yen coin and turn the handle. A lock not worthy of the name. Just a modest assertion that “this is a private space, so no peeking.” Nothing more than a reminder to the forgetful.
They say that locks only protect us from the righteous, and this of all locks definitely appealed to people’s better natures. Naturally, I rejected the appeal, not having anything resembling a better nature. Case dismissed, this court is adjourned.
I felt around in my pocket for some coins.
It held the change from when I had bought Ononoki’s chocolate chunk scone─and fishing out a ten-yen coin, I opened the lock on the closet door.
Inside was the decomposing corpse of a middle-aged man who’d been chainsawed into pieces. Not bloody likely─on first glance a vista of not bloody anything opened before me.
It held clothes, hanging on hangers.
But that wasn’t all.
Or rather, the clothes were just camouflage, and behind them.
“What the hell…”
026
I exited the Sengoku residence and, once I was at some remove, I called Nadeko Sengoku’s father and told him that I had been held up and wasn’t going to be able to make it.
He was an adult so he didn’t let his displeasure show, but it was clear that he’d taken offence. I was prepared for this eventuality, but they weren’t going to be as easy to communicate with as they had been up to that point.
Then again, who knows when they might notice that their daughter’s room’s window had been unlocked. Communicating with them would get more and more dicey as time went on. I would’ve had to search that closet in the next day or two in any case.
In that sense I had made the right call, but in the end, I’d come up empty-handed.
That stuff.
That stuff─didn’t tell me anything.
All it did was put me in a bad mood. But I’m always in a bad mood. It’s by no means an exaggeration to say that I’m in a bad mood pretty much anytime I’m not looking at money.
No big deal.
I’d forget about it more or less right away.
I skipped the taxi ride this time, instead heading to the station on foot, where I got on the train and returned to my hotel─well, strictly speaking, I took a small detour.
Why I did this I can’t rightly say, and in retrospect it seems like an utterly foolish choice, but I went out of my way to walk by the Araragi residence on my way to the station.
The lights were on, and I just waltzed on by, giving the place the side-eye without saying or doing anything more.
I did happen to glance up at the second floor, but I didn’t know which rooms belonged to Araragi or his sisters, so it was pointless. For all I knew their rooms might’ve been on the ground level─kids’ rooms aren’t necessarily on the second floor.
Only, as I glanced at the house, the lights still on inside it, I thought, Seems like he’s doing some exam prep.
This was a total shot in the dark too. A room with a light on late at night by no means meant that it was Araragi’s or that he was studying. Maybe he was up playing an FPS or something.
Well, whether it was good luck or nothing out of the ordinary, I safely walked past the Araragi residence and carried on to the station.
How pissed off Senjogahara would be if she found out. I absolutely had to keep it secret from her, but at the same time I felt like calling her right there and then and confessing.
Basically I wasn’t just in a bad mood, I was annoyed. I was pissed off that I had come up empty-handed. And since I didn’t have anyone to take it out on, I was exposing myself to danger as a means of relieving my stress, I suppose.
Hilarious.
What a delicate flower I am.
Sure, I probably only indulge my self-destructive behavior and urges because I have unshakable confidence in my ability to survive any crisis in which I might find myself, so my hubris is nothing to sneeze at either.
Otherwise I couldn’t flout Gaen-senpai’s command like that.
Quite right.
Pondering these questions, I got back to the hotel and opened the door to my room─only to find a letter lying on the floor inside my locked room, over by the bathroom.
“…”
A letter?
A white envelope, anyway. I locked the door behind me, then slowly, cautiously approached the envelope and picked it up.
It didn’t seem to be a mail bomb. Having confirmed this, no, even before I did, as soon as I picked it up, in fact, I got sick o
f being cautious, and I tore the envelope open.
“Withdraw,” was the entirety of the message on the sheet of paper neatly folded into three. It was written by hand, not typed─but the penmanship gave absolutely no sense of the author, who must have intentionally modified his or her handwriting.
Thus I had no clue who’d written the message─though it had to be someone who wanted me to withdraw.
