by Nisioisin
“Phew… Jeez.”
I’d put myself in a dangerous position once again. Were I a pedophile, my heart would’ve been won over. Ah, how fortunate that I wasn’t one…
“In any case,” I said, “the streets around here are really complicated. How do they even work? I can’t believe you tried to come here on your own.”
“Well, it isn’t my first time.”
“Oh? Then why did you get lost?”
“…It’s been a while,” Hachikuji replied in an embarrassed voice.
Hmph…I could see that happening. She thought she could do it, but she couldn’t when she tried. You can think something, but that doesn’t mean it’s true. And that went for elementary schoolers, high schoolers, and anyone else for that matter.
“Speaking of which, Mister Arararagi─”
“That’s one too many ra’s!”
“I’m sorry. A slip of the tongue.”
“Well, don’t do it again…”
“I’m not sure what you expect. Everyone misspeaks from time to time. Or do you mean to say that you’ve never had a slip of the tongue in your entire life, Mister Araragi?”
“I wouldn’t say never, but I don’t slip up when I’m saying someone’s name.”
“Okay, then. Say ‘She sells sea-shells on the sea-shore’ three times in a row.”
“That isn’t a name.”
“Yes, it is. I have three friends named that, in fact. So I would say it’s a fairly common name.”
She sounded so confident.
It’s so easy to see through kids’ lies.
Shockingly easy.
“She sells sea-shells on the sea-shore, she sells sea-shells on the sea-shore, she sells sea-shells on the sea-shore.”
I did it.
“What are you when your dreams don’t come true?” Hachikuji said, not missing a beat.
I was apparently being riddled now. “…Sore?”
“Bzzzt. Wrong!” Hachikuji said with a knowing look. “The answer is…” She wore an intrepid grin. “…Human.”
“You think you’re so clever!”
I’d screamed in an unnecessarily loud voice because, despite myself, I did find it clever.
But anyway.
We were in what you’d call a sleepy residential area.
We walked but came across no one else. It seemed like the kind of place where anyone with somewhere to go left in the morning─while everyone else stayed inside all day. Of course, that wasn’t so different from the area where I lived, but what was different was all the incredibly large homes around us. Everyone who lived in the neighborhood must be rich. And now that I thought about it, I’d been told Senjogahara’s father was some big shot at a foreign-owned company. That was probably normal for the people who lived there.
A foreign-owned company, huh?
Not exactly what you’d associate with a town in the middle of nowhere like ours.
“Hey, Araragi,” Senjogahara said, speaking for the first time in a while. “Could you give me that address again?”
“Huh? Sure. Is it around here?”
“You might say so, or not,” Senjogahara answered vaguely.
Unsure of what that meant, I read the note aloud once more.
Senjogahara nodded in understanding.
“It seems like we’ve gone too far.”
“What? Really?”
“That’s what it looks like,” Senjogahara said in a calm voice. “If you’d like to criticize me, then go ahead, criticize me to your heart’s content.”
“…Uh, I wouldn’t over something this minor.”
What a weird way to act defiant…
She was being gracious and not really accepting.
“Okay.”
Senjogahara turned back the way we came, her face showing no signs of agitation whatsoever─and Hachikuji moved in perfect contrast to her, avoiding Senjogahara by rotating around me.
“…Why are you that freaked out by Senjogahara? It’s not like she’s done anything to you. In fact, I know it might not look like it at first glance, but it’s her showing you the way, not me.”
I was just tagging along.
I wasn’t in a position to act all high and mighty.
Even if Hachikuji’s childlike intuition was making her eschew Senjogahara, this was going too far. You could say a lot of things about Senjogahara, but she wasn’t made of steel. How could she not be hurt by someone avoiding her so blatantly? Aside from whatever concern I had for Senjogahara, Hachikuji wasn’t treating her right on a moral level.
“There’s nothing I could say to that…” Hachikuji admitted, surprising me with her modest, timid response.
She continued in a whisper, “Don’t you feel it, though, Mister Araragi?”
“Feel what?”
“The brutal malice emanating from that woman…”
“………”
She seemed to be going on something more than intuition.
The worst part was that I couldn’t disagree with her.
“She doesn’t seem to like me… I can feel a strong will coming from her, and it’s saying, ‘You’re in the way, get lost’…”
“I don’t know if I’d go that far, but… Hmm.”
Fine.
I’d ask, even though I was a bit scared to.
While the answer seemed obvious to me, it seemed like I needed to get her on the record.
“Hey, Senjogahara.”
“What is it?”
Once again, she replied without turning around.
Maybe “You’re in the way, get lost” was what she was thinking about me.
It was strange. We considered each other friends, but we had such a hard time getting along.
“Do you not like kids?”
“No, I don’t. I hate them. I wish they’d die, every last one of them.”
Ruthless.
Hachikuji shrank back with an “Eep!”
“I don’t have any idea how I’m supposed to deal with them. I think it happened in middle school. I was shopping in a department store when I bumped into a child about seven years old.”
“Oh, and you made the kid cry?”
“No, that wasn’t the problem. I found myself telling him, ‘My goodness, sir, are you all right? Are you injured? I’m sincerely sorry. Please forgive me.’”
“………”
“I was thrown off-balance because I didn’t know how to talk to little kids. Still, having acted so politely and modestly to one was such a shock to me…that I’ve decided to show nothing but hatred to anything you’d call a child, human or otherwise.”
She was practically taking it out on them.
I understood the logic, but not the sensibility.
“By the way, Araragi.”
“What’s up?”
“It seems we’ve gone too far in the wrong direction again.”
“Hunh?”
We’d gone too far─past the address?
Really? That made two times in a row.
You could expect someone coming to a new place to have trouble matching locations on a map to where they actually were, but Senjogahara lived here until recently.
“If you’d like to criticize me, then go ahead, try and criticize me to your heart’s content.”
“No, I wouldn’t over something… Hold on a sec. Did you say it slightly differently from the last time?”
“You think? I didn’t notice.”
“Come on. Oh yeah, weren’t you talking about town planning or something earlier? Even your home had become a road, so I guess it’d make sense for this place to look pretty different from how you remember it.”
“No. That’s not the problem.” She looked around the area once more, then continued, “Yes, there are more roads, some houses are gone, and others have been built, but it’s not as if all the old streets are gone… There’s no structural reason for me to get lost.”
“Uh huh…”
Since she really was lost, that did seem to
be the case. How could I conclude otherwise? Maybe Senjogahara didn’t want to own up to making a careless mistake. She could be pretty obstinate in her own way… But as these thoughts ran through my mind, I heard a “What?” come from her.
“I can tell by your face that you’re itching to complain. If there’s something you want to say, then why not say it like a man? I’ll strip naked and get down on all fours to apologize to you, if that’ll make you happy.”
“Are you trying to make me out to be the most disgusting man on Earth?”
As if I’d let her do that in the middle of a residential area.
Plus, I wasn’t interested in having her grovel in the first place.
“Getting down on all fours naked,” she said, “is a small price to pay to make Koyomi Araragi known the world over as the most disgusting man alive.”
“Your pride is the only thing here that’s cheap.”
I could no longer figure out whether she was supposed to be a haughty character or a shameless one.
“But I’d be keeping just my socks on,” she added.
“You say that like a punch line to wrap this up, but I’m not into weird stuff.”
“And by socks, I mean fishnet tights.”
“Getting more extreme doesn’t change a thing…”
Though on second thought.
Even if I wasn’t into that, a part of me did want to see Senjogahara, specifically, in fishnet tights─she wouldn’t even have to be naked. I mean, if she looked like this in regular black stockings…
“That’s the face of someone thinking unseemly thoughts, Araragi.”
“Who, me? Do you really see me in such a vulgar light, a guy whose motto is ‘the straight and narrow’? I can’t believe you’d say that about me, Senjogahara.”
“Oh? I believe I’ve always been saying these things about you, whether I have proof or not. It’s very suspicious that instead of coming back with some sort of quip, you’re rejecting the claim outright.”
“Ulp…”
“So forcing me down on all fours to apologize to you naked isn’t enough, you want to write obscene things across every inch of my body with permanent marker?”
“I wasn’t going that far!”
“Then how far were you going?”
“Um, anyway, Hachikuji,” I brusquely changed the topic. I could do worse than borrow a page from Senjogahara’s book in that regard. “Sorry, but this might take a little longer. But we know it’s in this area, so─”
“No,” Hachikuji said in a surprisingly calm tone─the kind of unfeeling, mechanical tone you used in class to supply the answer to an obvious equation. “It’s probably impossible.”
“What? ‘Probably’?”
“If ‘probably’ isn’t pleasing to you, then ‘absolutely.’”
“……”
It’s not like I wasn’t pleased with “probably.”
I wasn’t pleased with “absolutely,” either.
But─I found myself with no reply.
Not to that tone.
“Because no matter how many times we try, I’ll never get there.”
Hachikuji.
“I’ll never get there.”
Hachikuji repeated herself.
“I’ll never get there─to my mother.”
Just like─a broken record.
Like a record, unbroken.
“Because I’m─a lost snail.”
005
“A Lost Cow,” Mèmè Oshino said in the low growl of a man who had been forced awake from a thousand years of sealed, peaceful slumber, as unbelievably grumpy as he was groggy. He wasn’t anemic, as far as I knew, but he still seemed to have an awful time waking up. The difference between the way he was speaking to us at that moment and his usual banter was striking.
“That’d be a Lost Cow there.”
“A cow? No, I said a snail.”
“You know how ‘snail’ is written in characters. There’s a cow in there, right? Don’t tell me you write it phonetically. You have such a low IQ, Araragi. Take the character for ‘whirlpool’ and substitute the left-hand ‘water’ with ‘insect.’ Then add ‘cow’ as a second character.”
“Oh, I think I get it now.”
“That first character is barely ever used in any word other than ‘snail.’ A snail’s shell forms a spiral, doesn’t it? That must be it. It’s also close to one of the characters used in ‘calamity,’ though…and maybe that one is the more symbolic? There are a countless number of aberrations out there that cause humans to lose their way. In terms of Japanese yokai that block your path, you must have heard of the nurikabe… If it’s one of those and it’s a snail, it has to be the Lost Cow. You see, its name describes its nature, not its form. Whether it’s a cow or a snail, it’s all the same. As for the form, you can even find some paintings of the thing looking like a human… Araragi, the person who comes up with a name for an aberration and the person who comes up with what that aberration looks like are rarely the same. You could even say never─in most cases, the name comes first. More the concept than the name, actually. Think of it as the illustrations in a light novel. The concept exists before it’s visualized─they say that names give shape to nature, but ‘nature’ in this instance doesn’t mean physical, outward appearance. It means essence, so…gaah.”
He seemed very sleepy.
Then again, that sleepiness had rid him of his normal frivolity to the point that I found it easier to talk to him. Talking to Oshino is, if anything, tiring.
A snail.
A shelled pulmonate, classified under Mollusca Gastropoda.
You see slugs more often than snails, but those are really just shell-less snails.
Pour salt on them─and they melt.
After that.
I, Koyomi Araragi, and Hitagi Senjogahara, along with Mayoi Hachikuji, retried and used a total of five continues. We tried shortcuts that skirted the edges of the law, we tried demoralizingly long detours, we tried everything we could think of, but, to cut to the chase, everything ended up being a spectacular waste of time. We knew we had to be near our destination─but we couldn’t reach it, for whatever reason. In the end, we even tried using brute force, checking every home one by one, but that too got us nowhere.
So as a last resort, Senjogahara booted up a special navigation system feature on her phone (don’t ask me about the details) that used GPS or whatever─
But she lost signal moments before the data loaded.
At that point, I finally─or maybe unwillingly─had a perfect grasp on what was up. Senjogahara seemed to have noticed fairly early on, without saying so─and Hachikuji most likely understood the situation better than either of us, but putting that aside.
A demon for me.
A cat for Hanekawa.
A crab for Senjogahara.
It seemed for Hachikuji, it was a snail.
That meant─I was no longer in a position to give up on the matter. With an ordinary lost child, if I couldn’t help her myself, I’d hand her over to a neighborhood police station and smugly consider the case closed. But if it involved that world─
Senjogahara was also against handing Hachikuji off to the police.
Senjogahara─who had been steeped in that world for a few years.
If Senjogahara said so─there was no mistaking it.
Of course, it wasn’t a problem that Senjogahara and I could attend to on our own─it wasn’t as if either of us had any apropos special abilities. It was just a case of us knowing that there was another side, one that wasn’t ours.
You can say knowledge is power.
But you’re powerless if knowledge is all you have.
Which is why─Senjogahara and I went with the safe, easy choice, not our first, but after some discussion, our final choice, of asking Oshino what to do.
Mèmè Oshino.
