by Nisioisin
His face was hardly expressionless, but I couldn’t read anything from it─and even if I could, I would no doubt be mistaken. His was the real poker face.
This, too, was something that Hanekawa told me.
The term has come to mean a completely expressionless face, as in one that betrays no emotion, but apparently its original sense was different. The ability to evoke a completely unrelated emotion on your face than the one that you were actually feeling─that was the true poker face.
It only made sense since a game had given rise to the word. Just wearing a blank look wasn’t enough to deceive your opponents.
You couldn’t deceive them, or fake yourself.
Not hiding expressions, but making them. Or to take it a step further…
Not hiding emotions, but making them.
That was how you did it.
In that light, Hitagi Senjogahara, whose face had been like cast iron until recently, would have made a second-rate con artist.
Maybe she could hide expressions.
But she couldn’t fake emotions.
If she could, I’d never have seen through her act…
She was pretty clumsy that way.
“Those two are experts. Ghostbusters, like me,” Kaiki stated as if he were telling me nothing more special than an acquaintance’s culinary preferences. “However,” he added, “whereas I am a fake─they’re the real deal. If I am a conman, they’re onmyoji.”
“……”
Onmyoji.
At that word, I turned toward Shinobu, but she was completely absorbed in her donuts like nothing he had to say could possibly interest her. Talk about antisocial.
“I said ‘they’ out of habit,” Kaiki proceeded to correct myself, “but strictly speaking Kagenui would be the onmyoji, whereas Ononoki seems to be a shikigami─seriously. Yokai, ghosts, those two are a pain in the neck with their passion for the occult.”
Why don’t they just tell fortunes by blood type instead, he griped.
The pair hadn’t struck me as all that unpleasant─but maybe it went beyond appearances.
I asked Kaiki, “So you know them?”
“What makes you think so?”
“Well, the way you were talking… I don’t know. Something about your choice of words.”
“I only know their names. Kagenui is fairly well-known in the business… The aberration roller, they call her. You’d have to be a quack not to know of her, but I haven’t actually met her. A real deal like her pays no attention to fakes like me… In any case, I am in fact a quack of sorts.”
He had answered me in the negative.
Hmph.
It seemed somehow significant to me that he’d referred to Kagenui and Ononoki as “those two,” which sounded personal…but it was no more than a matter of word choice.
Word choice could be like wordplay, but they weren’t the same thing. There were plain slips of the tongue, too. Just like brothers and sisters had their sibling-speak, maybe experts formed a community via language.
“While we’re at it, Araragi, there is something that I would like to ask as well─though obviously I will not be paying for the honor.”
“……”
Sure.
Ask away.
“How do you know of that pair? As long as you’re on the straight and narrow, you’re even less likely to get involved with them than with me.”
“I don’t know about involved… They asked me for directions, that’s all.”
“So you didn’t just come across their names but met them face to face? That is even less believable─are you trying to pull a fast one on me?”
“You’re the last person who ought to be doubting someone’s sincerity.”
“Are you sure you’re not mistaken? Perhaps they gave false names…”
“Does standing on top of a mailbox or saying ‘with a dashing look’ with a blank look ring a bell?”
“Hmph. That’s them.”
Kaiki nodded.
So that was enough to verify their identities…
“Come to think of it, today’s been weird,” I observed. “I can’t believe I’ve run into three ‘authorities’ in one day─ugh, coincidence is a scary thing.”
Maybe because it was Obon?
Though that would be occult thinking.
The scariest part was that the day was barely half over─at this rate, I might run into yet another expert in the afternoon.
Was Mèmè Oshino’s return being foreshadowed here?
Was it a lead-up to Mr. Aloha’s reentry?
In which case…uh, well, I don’t know, man!
“Coincidence, huh,” Kaiki picked up on my word. “Araragi, I used the word myself just a moment ago to say that meeting like this must be fate, but ‘coincidences’ as they’re generally understood are a tricky affair─and, by and large, a product of malice.”
“Malice?”
“Yes, malice. Nothing like fate.”
Malice─as opposed to justice.
Although Shinobu was supposed to be just some blond Lolita, not a vampire or anything as far as he knew, Kaiki glanced at her meaningfully as he repeated the word.
“Yozuru Kagenui and Yotsugi Ononoki,” he went on. “Implacable latter-day onmyoji─but Araragi. Even as experts go, they have a very narrow area of expertise. That two-man cell specializes in aberrations of the immortal kind.”
009
Not that that means anything since there are no immortal creatures in this world, the tardigrade perhaps, he ended on a deflating note, and that was the full extent of the info I gained from Deishu Kaiki, the con artist.
It was hard to say if it was of any use─at least, I had my doubts that I’d gotten my money’s worth.
Specializing in immortal aberrations.
Guillotine Cutter from spring break was an authority specializing in vampires─was it like that? Was it also like Deishu Kaiki being an expert on fake aberrations?
I couldn’t say.
Hmm. In that sense, despite his clowning, the expert we knew best, Mèmè Oshino, actually had an almost ridiculously broad scope.
Just who had we been dealing with?
In any case, now that we were done, I had no reason to remain sitting with Kaiki. It’s not like we were best buds ready to chat away, and even if we were, trading gossip, let alone barbs, with a guy who played dirty and was so settled in his ways wouldn’t be very fun.
A comic-relief segment with him was out of the question.
Getting up, tray and all, and returning to my original table, I noticed just in time, precariously enough.
“Oh, right,” I called out to Kaiki, “you can keep my wallet and money, but there’s one thing that I want back.”
“…? That you want back? Would it be a credit card?”
“Why would I have one? I’m just a high school student. A photo… There’s a photo in there.”
“Ah.”
Kaiki reached into his breast pocket and pulled out my (scratch that, no longer my) wallet, opened it, and removed a photo─when he saw who it was of, he furrowed his brow a little.
Whether or not that was his poker face, I couldn’t tell you.
“Senjogahara… So she cut her hair.”
“Mm… Yeah, well.”
The picture in my wallet was of Hitagi Senjogahara.
The photograph had been taken recently─with the digital camera I’d unearthed in Kanbaru’s room at the end of last month.
This was a printout.
Maybe I had talent, and it was such a great pic that I’d stuck it in my wallet like a lucky charm for exam-takers─doing so might have been somewhat old-fashioned for a high-school boy in this day and age, but I still sure as hell didn’t want to let Kaiki have it.
I simply didn’t want to part with it in the first place. No amount of information could make up for it.
“Hah…what a broad, insipid grin,” lamented Kaiki. “When people lose their spark, they truly do lose it─I knew her ba
ck when she shone, and to me this looks like a completely different person. There is no shadow nor a trace of who she once was.”
I thought he might demand my last two thousand yen in exchange─but unexpectedly, he handed back the photo without ado.
Without trying to bargain, seeming genuinely uninterested, like he couldn’t begin to find any value in it─he returned it to my hands.
“As far as I’m concerned, this is a very regrettable development,” he opined. “I don’t know what to say other than I am disappointed. A cheerful Hitagi Senjogahara is worthless. To be cursed not to know your own worth, or to be cursed not to know your own worthlessness. Which to choose, if we must, is a question we bear all-life long─but children ought to grow and mature, so a man as old and finished as I am might keep such comments to himself.”
Old and finished─that was Deishu Kaiki’s own appraisal of himself.
True, to someone his age, Senjogahara and I probably seemed like kids who’d just started out.
And further─I gathered that Deishu Kaiki and Hitagi Senjogahara’s relationship was a little more complicated than that of conman and victim. If not, there was no way that her reunion and confrontation with him could offer such definite closure.
It wouldn’t have served as such a detox.
But regardless of what I did or did not gather, I shouldn’t pry into my girlfriend’s past─I didn’t need to be told by the likes of Kaiki that kids should have their faces turned toward tomorrow rather than yesterday.
Not finished, but starting out.
Now then.
As for the immediate future─I obviously needed to be thinking about Kagenui and Ononoki.
Yozuru Kagenui and Yotsugi Ononoki.
I’d learned that the two indeed formed a pair…a two-man cell.
And I’d also learned─that they were indeed experts.
So they hadn’t called me a fiendish monster for my awful behavior toward Karen and Hachikuji, after all. They were referring to the modicum of vampirism remaining in me.
In a sense, I was being permitted to keep treating Karen and Hachikuji in the same way.
That was encouraging.
Obtaining the info I’d been seeking, however, didn’t mean that anything was actually settled─in fact, it seemed to have enlarged the problem.
The plot thickened.
Ghostbusters specializing in immortal aberrations.
Immortal, immortal…
Vampire.
Kaiki insisted that such things didn’t exist. Broadly speaking, his denial made perfect sense, but strictly speaking, there were creatures in this town right now to whom the term did apply─two of them.
Shinobu Oshino and Koyomi Araragi, needless to say.
“Wherever there be immortals, so too one finds their quellers─in myth and legend, immortal beasts, even gods, appear in legion. Immortal though they may be, these aberrations are frequently slayed. If immortals exist, then so do─their killers. That is what those two are,” Shinobu said as we returned home from Mister Donut.
We were riding two to a bike, which I’d avoided doing with Karen.
I would rather Shinobu hide in my shadow while we traveled, but now that her stomach was full, I might as well feast my eyes on the daytime world, she decided all on her own, and I lacked the means to check her wayward desire.
Well, I had the means but wasn’t going to.
Shinobu looked to be about eight. If we claimed she was only six, people would believe us─even though she was actually five hundred years old.
So riding two to a bike with her wasn’t (at least appearance-wise) illegal, but that was only if she sat nicely on the rear rack. Instead…
“Mm. It would be much easier to converse from here.”
Shinobu had fit herself snugly into the front basket.
She was facing me as I pedaled, her butt wedged into the basket and her legs propped on either handlebar. It seemed she didn’t quite understand bicycles.
Ignorance was a powerful thing─mere novices like the rest of us would never dream of such an outlandish riding style.
I name it the reverse ET.
That said… She’d simply been alive, not sealed up, for five hundred years, so even if her grasp of Japanese culture was weak, you’d think she’d have learned about bicycles somewhere along the line.
Maybe it had nothing to do with being a vampire, and she was just generally aloof.
It was a little difficult to steer (I had to lean forward to make sure my shadow stayed over the basket), but I could still pedal so that’s how we rode.
It wasn’t beyond the pale.
“An onmyoji who specializes in immortal aberrations, huh?” I said. “Yikes, their target must be you and me in that case.”
Not that Shinobu and I could currently be called immortal─but our bodies certainly encompassed an immortal factor, or fragments of immortality. Even if the vestiges only meant healing quickly or taking longer to get hungry, if they persisted, that probably was an immortal quality.
Come to think of it, according to the conman Deishu Kaiki, he’d chosen this town as the backdrop for his large-scale scam because a legendary vampire (Shinobu, in her previous form) had descended upon the area, making it conducive to occult-oriented work (Kaiki’s fraudulent activities).
Even if we weren’t his targets, you could say in a broad sense that our existence had lured him here. At the very least, it wasn’t for a wistful or sentimental reason like revisiting the town where his former mark Senjogahara lived.
“Hah, thee and me, their targets? There may be other possibilities, my master…”
Shinobu leaned back arrogantly in my front basket and folded her arms behind her head.
It was the wrong place to be acting like a big shot if her goal was career advancement.
She really was petite, though.
I bet she could slip right into my pocket.
“I’ve devoured nearly enough immortal aberrations in my time to make myself sick. I am a proper slayer of them, myself… Yet if we are to speak of it thus, aberrations do not live,” Shinobu blew up the whole premise.
“Ah. Right, if it’s not even alive, then how is it immortal? Or maybe, all aberrations are immortal in a way… Oshino said something to that effect, too. But semantics aside, Shinobu, when you say there are other possibilities, are you saying there might be another vampire in this town besides us?”
“Not necessarily a vampire─it would not be so odd, either. Or rather, it would be odd.”
Hmm. If we put aside the immortal part of it, then even in my immediate circle, there were actually a few people who were host to these aberrations.
For instance Suruga Kanbaru, who had a monkey residing in her left arm.
For instance Tsubasa Hanekawa, who had a cat residing in her psyche.
“I see. If someone I didn’t know were living with an aberration, that wouldn’t be so unnatural─well no, actually, it would be. Just how many aberrations could there be in one town?”
“Are there not eight million gods in this country? Around 170,000 per prefecture. Ten in one town would seem toward enough.”
“You can’t mix up gods and aberrations─”
…Or maybe you can.
An aberration pretty much equaled divinity in Japan, according to Oshino. Incomprehensible happenings were the gods’ doing, incomprehensible things were their form.
Right, he’d said so.
“Kaiki doesn’t even believe in vampires, but apparently it was a visit from a gold-class aberration like yourself that stirred up other ones in the area. I even hiked up to a shrine that was becoming their hangout─that’s how I met Sengoku again.”
Still.
Realistically speaking, it was probably best if we assumed that we were Kagenui and Ononoki’s target.
Coming after another hypothetical immortal and just happening to ask me for directions, by coincidence, seemed untenable.
It sounded like wishful thinking.
A hopeful outlook is a necessary and wise stance for humanity’s survival, but in this case, it didn’t seem like optimism would be in our best interests.
