Chapter 11 : July I

The rest of June passed uneventfully and rolled into July.

A fresh disaster that befell the class as soon as the new month began was, thankfully, not a result of the changing month. So Mei and I continued our strange life at school basically unchanged, as the two students who were "not there." For my part, it went by in the midst of peace and tranquillity, not as uncomfortable as it had felt at the beginning but still holding the threat that we would never know when the peace would shatter.

Mr. Chibiki, true to his word, was briefly gone from school the very next day, and I never laid eyes on him for the remainder of June. The secondary library in Building Zero stayed closed the whole time, I guess because they didn't have the staff to replace him.

I had a chance to learn what sort of "mundane business" Mr. Chibiki had left town for later on. Apparently he had a wife and kids who had lived away from him for a long time, staying in Sapporo, where his wife had been born. She had called him, so he'd gone to Hokkaido.

I never found out more details than that, but I could imagine. It could be that the reason his family lived somewhere else was because of this "phenomenon" that Mr. Chibiki had entrenched himself at North Yomi to "observe." Maybe it wasn't because the couple didn't get along, but instead because he'd sent his wife and kids to live far away "out of range" so that, remote as the chance might be, they wouldn't be caught up in the "disasters." Or something like that.

And then there was a separate issue.

Recently, one fact at least had become unexpectedly clear. I found out about it in the form of an announcement from Mei.

"Yesterday, one of my senpai came to the gallery. A girl named Tachibana that I know from the art club. She graduated two years ago. And she used to be in third-year Class 3. She likes dolls, so she's come by the gallery occasionally for a while now. But I hadn't seen her in a long time."

This was the first I'd ever heard of her having a senpai like that. Ignoring my slight surprise, Mei went on: "I guess she heard some rumors about what's going on this year, so…"

"You mean she came to see you because she was worried?"

Mei inclined her head ambiguously at my question. "More like she didn't want to get involved, but it kept bothering her, so she ended up coming by…I guess."

She gave me her detached read on it.

"I think Mochizuki might be the source of the rumors. She acted like she knew I was the one who's 'not there' this year. But she didn't really give me any advice or anything. And talking about stuff, she looked really jumpy…So I made the first move and brought up a couple questions I had."

The first had been a question about the "extra person" ("the casualty") who'd infiltrated third-year Class 3 two years ago.

Mei asked Tachibana about her, mentioning the name "Mami Asakura" that she'd gotten from Mr. Chibiki's binder. "Do you remember someone with that name being in your class?"

The result was, basically, exactly as Mr. Chibiki had told us: "No, I don't," she'd answered. Then she'd added uncertainly, "But after everything was over, I heard stories that there was a girl with that name…"  Meaning that the loss of memories involving the identity of "the casualty" had in fact happened to her, the former member of third-year Class 3.

The other question was about the student who'd been made "not there" in third-year Class 3 two years ago.

"What was he like?" Mei had asked, cutting straight to the point. "The 'disasters' started because he violated the class's 'decision' partway through the year, right? What happened to him after that?"

"She said it was a boy named Sakuma two years ago. Apparently he was always a quiet, unobtrusive kid."

As detached as always, Mei related the facts that she'd extracted from the girl Tachibana.

"It was a little after the start of second semester when Sakuma abandoned his role as 'not there.' Then the 'disasters' started at the beginning of October, apparently. People died in November and December, and then…after New Year's, Sakuma killed himself."

"Oh. Suicide, huh?"

"I didn't get a chance to ask what happened after that, but he might have been the 'death for January' in '96."

It was afternoon, during a break in the perpetual rain. We'd gone down to the bank of the Yomiyama River and were watching the cool water flow by as we talked. We had cut afternoon classes, and without either of us making the suggestion outright, we'd left the school grounds.

We returned to school through the back gate around the time sixth period would be ending. When we came back in, someone shouted at us, "Hey! What do you think you're doing?"

Must be the gym teacher, Mr. Miyamoto, I guessed immediately. I suppose he'd spotted us from far away and mistaken us for regular students who'd cut out of school. He came running up to us.

"Hold it right there! Where were you two off to at this time of…"

That was as far as he got before he came to a halt and took another look at us, the words Wait a second— clear on his face. Then he swallowed the rest of his lecture.

I gave a slight, silent dip of my head and Mr. Miyamoto kind of awkwardly turned his eyes in some other direction. With a sigh he said, "This must be tough on you two. Still, I can't really condone you leaving school. You need to cut back on that."

2

With all this going on, I made up my mind to ask Reiko about it again. After much tortured thought with no results, I just couldn't stay quiet any longer.

That was—yes—the night of the last Saturday in June.

"Um, I heard something from Mr. Chibiki, the librarian, the other day."

I spoke up, unprompted, to stop Reiko as she was getting ready to withdraw in silence to the side house after dinner. Right then, I couldn't worry about my grandparents' eyes being on us.

"Uh, I heard that…in your last year of middle school, when you were in third-year Class 3, that was actually an 'on year.'"

"…An 'on year'?"

Reiko's face had until then worn a dreamy, zoned-out look, but now wariness flashed across it…Or so it seemed.

"A year when an unidentified 'extra person' joins the class and 'disasters' befall people. Meaning that every month, people linked to the class lose their lives in one way or another. That's what they call 'the curse of Class 3.' Of course you know that, right, Reiko?"

"Oh…Yeah, you're right," Reiko replied, her voice husky. Then she curled her right hand into a fist and thumped herself on the head. "Right. That's what that means."

It had been a long time since I'd talked to Reiko like this…Naturally, I was incredibly nervous, and she definitely felt the same.

"I'm sorry, Koichi. Really sorry." Reiko swung her head slowly back and forth. "I'm useless…"

I couldn't help seeing my mother's face from the yearbook overlay itself on Reiko's ashen features. Struggling to quiet the fevered ache in the sinews of my heart, I said, "I want to ask you something about fifteen years ago. When my mom had me and then died in this town…Was that one of the 'disasters' for that year?"

Without confirming or denying it, Reiko only repeated herself: "I'm sorry, Koichi."

I'd tried to talk to Reiko about what happened fifteen years ago once before. That was when I'd learned that she, like my mother, had been in Class 3 her third year.

Did they say "the curse of Class 3" about your class or anything like that back then?

Reiko had shrugged off my question by saying, "That was fifteen years ago. I forget."

Had she been playing dumb? Or had her memories of something that happened fifteen years ago truly become hazy? Normally, I would say it was the former, but the latter was hardly impossible. As Mr. Chibiki had explained to us, people's retention of memories concerning this "phenomenon" for the most part could definitely not be called good. Plus it seemed to vary between people.

"Well, Reiko?"

Still, I had to ask.

"What do you think it was?"

"…I don't know."

"Now hold on, Koichi. Why are you bringing this up all of a sudden?"

My grandmother had been listening to our conversation as she cleared the table, but now she paused and her eyes widened.

Grandma probably doesn't know, I thought to myself then. Even on the outside chance that she had been told something of the situation in the past, her memories of it would certainly have gotten hazy by now…

"It's so sad…"

Suddenly, my grandfather broke his long silence. His emaciated shoulders trembled and his voice caught in his throat, as if he were choking on tears.

"Poor, poor Ritsuko. It's so sad, Ritsuko and Reiko both…"

"That's enough, now, Grandpa."

My grandmother hurried to his side. She rubbed his back and placated him as if he were a child throwing a tantrum.

"You mustn't start thinking like that. There, there. Go over there and have a rest now, Grandpa."

I felt as though I could hear the shrill voice of the myna bird Ray overlapping with my grandmother's voice. "Cheer…Cheer up!"

My grandmother took my grandfather's hand and helped him stand up. They eventually made their way out of the room, at which point—

"…About that year," Reiko said at last. "I honestly don't know about what happened to Ritsuko. But…I dunno, I feel like it stopped partway through that year."

"It stopped?" Surprised, I repeated what she'd said. "You mean, the 'disasters' for that year?"

"Yeah…"

She nodded feebly and then thumped herself on the head again.

There were almost no cases where the "disasters" had stopped once they had begun. This was the question I'd had when Mr. Chibiki had said that. If "almost none" meant the same thing as "we can't say it's never happened," then that would mean there had to be "a case where they stopped partway through," meaning—

Had that rare case been the year that Reiko was in third year, fifteen years ago?

"Why is that?" Unable to contain my excitement, my words came out forcefully. "What made the 'disasters' stop that year, Reiko?"

But her reply was evasive: "…It's no use. It's all fuzzy. I can't really remember."

She thumped herself on the head a few more times, and languidly shook her head.

"Oh…But you know what? Something definitely happened that summer…"

In the end, that was all I got out of Reiko that night.

3

During what remained of June, I'd had two other opportunities to make my way to the town of Misaki, to "Blue Eyes Empty to All, in the Twilight of Yomi."

Once, I swung by first thing after going to the municipal hospital for a prognosis on my collapsed lung.

 I paid the fee, looked at the dolls, and went down, alone, into the basement display room, but I didn't encounter Mei that day. I hadn't told her I was coming, so I don't even know if she was at home. I didn't venture to ask the old woman—"Grandma Amane"—to have Mei come down. I contented myself with viewing several new creations by Kirika, then left a little less than an hour later.

It feels weird coming here and not running into Mei…The thought went through my mind that day.

The other time was the last day of June—the evening of Tuesday, the 30th. I'd wound up going because Mei invited me over on the way home from school.

I didn't go up to their home on the third floor that day. And I didn't see Kirika, either. We passed the time on the sofas on the first floor of the gallery, still empty of customers.

That was the first time I accepted the tea that Grandma Amane made for us. It was far, far tastier than canned iced tea at least, that's for sure.

"July starts tomorrow." Mei was the one who spoke first. I think it's fair to say those words implied something like "At last, after tomorrow, we'll get the moment of truth."

I was all too aware of that myself, but right then I deliberately dodged the issue. "The end-of-semester exams are starting next week already…Will you be okay?"

Mei pursed her lips a little petulantly. "That's not really something someone who's 'not there' needs to worry about, is it?"

"I guess that's true, but…"

"I wish I could see your house sometime, Sakakibara."

I faltered for a snappy response to the next of her out-of-the-blue observations.

"Uh, you mean—wait—my house in Tokyo?"

"No, here in Yomiyama." Mei shook her head slightly and narrowed her right eye coolly. "The house where your mom grew up, in Furuchi."

"Huh…Why?"

"…Just because."

A short while later, Mei led me down to the basement. A gloomy string melody was playing in the gallery. I thought it might even be the same music that had been playing the first time I'd come here in May.

The space was crypt-like and sunken in chill, as always. The dolls were set out here, there, and everywhere, with all their various parts. I didn't feel quite as captive to the sensation that I needed to breathe for all of them that day. Maybe I really was getting used to it.

Straight ahead, all the way at the back of the room, with a deep red curtain at its back, stood a black hexagonal coffin. We headed over to it; then Mei turned silently back to look at me. She stood in such a way that her body hid from my view the doll shut up in the coffin, the doll that looked exactly like her—

She touched her fingers to the eye patch over her left eye.

"I took this off for you once before down here, didn't I?"

"Uh…yeah."

The left eye beneath her eye patch, that I'd seen that day…Of course I remembered it vividly.

A blue eye, empty to all.

She had revealed a blue eye with an artificial spark, exactly like the eyes sunken in the eye sockets of the dolls…

…Why?

And now again, out of nowhere, why…?

Undeterred by my bewilderment, Mei took her eye patch off and then placed her right palm over the right half of her face, covering her right eye for once. The exposed blue eye on her left was all that looked, unswervingly, at me.

"I was four when I lost my left eye." Mei's lips trembled, a pale ghost of her voice filling the room. "I barely remember it. A malignant tumor formed in the eyeball and I had to get it surgically removed…When I woke up one day, my left eye was gone."

Unable to say anything, all I could do was stand there and watch her face closely.

"At first, they tried a bunch of regular artificial eyes to fill the hole. But my mother said none of them were cute enough…So she made a special eye for me. My special 'doll's eye.'"

…A blue eye, empty to all.

"You don't have to hide it, you know."

Without my meaning to say them, the words came just then and escaped my mouth.

"Even without the eye patch, I think your eye is pretty."

I startled myself and got flustered saying it, and my heart started to pound almost immediately. I couldn't really read Mei's expression as she stood there looking at me, probably because her right hand was covering her right eye.

My left eye is a doll's eye.

The words Mei had spoken the first time I'd run into her here echoed again in my ears.

It can see things better not seen, so I usually keep it hidden.

All at once, a mysterious foreboding took hold of me.

What does that even mean? At the time, I'd been thrown for a total loop. But what about now? Things were a little different. That thought occurred to me, too.

She could see things better not seen.

Things better not seen…

I wanted to ask exactly what it was that she saw, but I set those feelings aside for the moment. I had a vague premonition all the while that a day would probably come when I would have to ask her that question.

"I found out later on that when I had the surgery on my eye, I nearly died." Mei's palm still covered her right eye. "The truth is, what happened back then left a mark on me. Do you believe me?"

"Uh, you mean like memories of a near-death experience?"

"Just nightmares of a four-year-old kid sick in bed. It's good enough if you think of them like that."

Despite what she said, I noticed how serious Mei's tone had become.

"I don't think death is very gentle. People talk about 'easy deaths' all the time, but it's not like that. It's dark—darker and lonelier than anything else in the world."

"Dark and lonely…"

"Yeah. But living is exactly the same, right? Don't you think?"

"…Maybe so."

"Ultimately, I'm all I have. Doesn't matter how things were when I was born…I'm talking about the life I'm living and dying every day. You know what I mean?"

What could I say?

"No matter how closely linked people appear to be, we are in fact all alone. Me, my mother…And you, too, Sakakibara."

Then Mei concluded with one last comment: "And her, too—Misaki was the same."

Misaki? Did she mean Misaki Fujioka?

That was the name of Mei's cousin, who'd died at the municipal hospital at the end of April.

The image of my first encounter with Mei in the elevator of the inpatient ward flowed through my mind with a strange immediacy. As if it had happened only yesterday.

4

Thus June ended and July came upon us.

Thankfully, the result was not a fresh calamity befalling the class as soon as the new month began. But I thought the level of tension permeating the air in the classroom had ramped way up—which was only natural, I suppose.

Two people linked to the class—namely Ms. Mizuno and Takabayashi—had already lost their lives in June. Would there be new deaths now that a new month had begun? That would be the crucial test to divine whether this unprecedented "strategy" of increasing the number of students "not there" to two would be effective.

And yet—

The strange life I shared with Mei at school went on just the same, showing no change on the surface, at least.

In peace and tranquillity that carried with them the threat of never knowing when it might all come crumbling down. But even so, it was all we could have wished for. The solitude, and also the freedom, rested on the cold palm of that peace, reserved for the two of us alone—

In the second week of July, they set the schedule for the end-of-semester exams.

All nine subjects over three days, from the 6th to the 8th. It was a regularly scheduled ritual for ranking the achievements (or lack thereof) of the students in a simple way. Boring, and also depressing.

But finding it—deep down—"depressing" was a first for me, I suspected. And this despite the fact that as one of the students who was "not there," I should have been openly rebelling in this situation, or I could have been all set to go into it totally relaxed. And yet I wasn't.

I knew the reason for it.

I was remembering what had happened during the midterms in May, more than I wanted to. That tragic accident that had befallen Yukari Sakuragi on the last day of exams. The terrible scene I had been unlucky enough to witness that day.

The horrible memories were probably dragging Mei down, too, to some degree or another. This time around, she pretty much never pulled her move of handing in her answer sheet early and leaving the room. I didn't, either.

Is the new "strategy" working or not?

With that thought in our minds, we couldn't help acting a little more serious than before at school. We were as careful as we could be and worked hard to erase our presence from the class, and everyone else in class continued to collectively ignore us as though we were "not there," even more thoroughly than before.

During July, the enormity of our uneasiness became utterly incomparable with what it had been in June. And the greater our uneasiness became, the harder we prayed for the month to pass us by in peace. I'm convinced that these were thoughts everyone in the class shared.

However, when repeated long enough, a "prayer" also tends to shift and change into a baseless "ritual of the faithful"…

I felt uneasiness, urgency, and also frustration, swelling bigger and bigger as day after day rolled by. And even in the midst of it—no, maybe because I was in the midst of it—every so often I would feel inexplicably lighthearted.

This peace and tranquillity.

The solitude and freedom that only the two of us shared.

That if I only wished for this to continue, things would keep on going exactly the same. Of course they would. Exactly the same…Yeah. For nine more months, right up until it's time for graduation in March next year, just like this, never changing.

…However.

The reality of the "world" we'd all been sucked into was not so indulgent as to grant that idle fantasy so easily.

 The end-of-semester exams concluded without incident and we plowed through the calendar until there was only about a week left before summer break, that day in the third week of July—

The day the peace in the class, which had been so narrowly preserved for a little over a month, ever since Takabayashi's death on June 6, shattered like glass.

5

July 13. Monday.

Ever since I'd become "not there," I'd been absent at about nine out of ten of the short homeroom periods in the morning. Usually I would slip in right before the start of first period, and Mei did the same.

But that morning, even though we hadn't arranged to, the two of us somehow happened to both be in the classroom early. Though of course without talking to anyone or meeting anyone's eyes.

For the first time in a while, I'd felt up to starting one of my paperbacks, which was open in my lap. It was a collection of Stephen King short stories that I'd never read (for the record, the story I was reading right then was "The Mangler"). More than a month had passed since my up-close experience with a graphic death, and I'd gotten back a tiny bit of my capacity to separate that kind of novel from reality and enjoy it. That made me feel like a real tough guy, let me tell you…

The end of the rainy season for the region had just been announced the day before.

The weather was beautiful, with not a wisp of cloud in the sky even early in the morning. Fierce sunlight seemed to plead for the true advent of summer. The breeze that blew in through the open windows of the classroom was crisper than the week before and felt much nicer.

Whenever I glanced over to check on Mei, sitting in that same seat all the way at the back next to the windows that faced the schoolyard, she looked like an "apparition" whose outline was smudged by all the light shining in from outside. Just like when I'd first come to this classroom in May…But no: she wasn't an apparition. She was actually, physically there. Had that really been two months ago already?

Slightly after the bell to begin class, the door at the front of the classroom opened and the head teacher, Mr. Kubodera, came in.

He was dressed in the same boring white dress shirt as always. His posture made him seem, like always, somehow ineffectual. Just like always…I thought, watching him lazily, when a strange feeling came over me.

A couple of things weren't like always.

Mr. Kubodera always wore a neatly knotted necktie, but not today. For the short homeroom period, he always brought a single attendance list in with him, but today he had come in protectively clutching a black overnight bag in his arms. Plus, his hair was always neatly parted on one side and gelled, but today it was wild and disheveled…

When I looked at Mr. Kubodera—standing on the teacher's platform and facing us—with these suspicions in mind, something did indeed seem strange. His expression was vacant, somehow. As if he weren't seeing anything, even the things right in front of him. On top of that—

Even from my seat I could see a delicate, intermittent movement on one half of his face.

Twitch…twitch…twitching. As if the muscles were spasming. Did he have a tic? Just from looking, the movement seemed to be of a psychotic, twisted nature.

I don't know how many people besides me had noticed the state their head teacher was in or whether it made them suspicious. We were all sitting at our desks, but a whisper of the previous commotion still lingered in the classroom.

"Everyone—"

Placing both hands on the lectern, Mr. Kubodera began to speak. "Good morning."

His greeting, too, felt odd as soon as I heard it. His voice was strangely tense, just like his face.

Ms. Mikami wasn't with him. I didn't think she was out today, but she didn't show up for every single short homeroom either, so…

"Everyone," Mr. Kubodera said again. "Today, I need to apologize to all of you. This morning, here where I stand, I owe you all…"

At that, the buzzing in the room faded to silence.

"I've asked you all to work hard to make it to graduation in good health next March. I, too, have tried to give my best effort. Unhappy events began occurring in May, but even so I told myself that somehow we would begin again."

Even as he recited this speech, Mr. Kubodera's gaze never engaged with his students. His vacant eyes seemed to simply hover in empty space.

He had set the overnight bag he'd brought with him on his desk. As he went on speaking, Mr. Kubodera opened the bag and reached his right hand inside.

"Whatever the future brings is your problem."

The same tone as if he were reading an example sentence from a textbook. In itself, that wasn't very different from usual. And yet…

"Is it impossible to stop once it's begun, no matter what lengths we go to? Or is there a way to put an end to it? I don't know. I don't. How am I supposed to know? And actually, what do I care? Ah, I mean, as the head teacher of this class, I am after all obligated to work with you all to overcome these trials without ever bending, to reach graduation next March unharmed. Even at this late date, still I…I still…I…"

A tone not so different from usual.

At that point it began to get more unsettling and his voice became hard to make out. But the very moment I had the thought, an abrupt change went through him. All of a sudden, the words coming out of Mr. Kubodera's mouth broke down. They shattered. That's the only way to express it.

"Angh" and "Ggheh" and "Nkhee" and I don't know what…When I try to transcribe it, it comes out looking like a comic book. But all of a sudden he started making these strange sounds that didn't seem as though they could have come from a healthy human being. All while everyone watched, stupefied, not even trying to decode whatever meaning was in the sounds.

Mr. Kubodera slowly withdrew his right hand from the bag that rested atop his desk.

He was gripping an object that was pretty alien to a middle school classroom.

Something…with a sharp silver blade. A hunting knife or a kitchen knife. Something like that. Even from my seat, I could see it clearly.

Still, we were all struggling to understand what was happening. What was he doing, making those weird noises and pulling out a knife like that?

But a mere two or three seconds later, everyone in the class found out the answer to that, like it or not.

Mr. Kubodera thrust his right hand out in front of himself. His fingers curled tightly around the handle of the knife, he bent his elbow inward. Turning the bladed end on himself. The strange noises that never formed into "words" still rushed from his mouth. And then…

As a tumult began to rise, in front of everyone, Mr. Kubodera produced an incredibly violent, unearthly sound and shoved the knife into his own neck.

The weird noise fluctuated into a bellow.

The commotion transformed into a flock of screams.

A deep, perfectly straight line had been sliced open across the front of his throat and fresh red blood was spraying out. For an instant, the horrendous fountain of blood almost seemed like a bad joke. The students in the seats closest to the platform wound up covered in the spray. Some knocked their chairs over and ran for it, while others seemed frozen, unable to move.

Mr. Kubodera must have sliced open his windpipe along with his artery, because his yell quickly lost the form of a "voice" and mutated into a thick whistling "noise." The hand that had gripped the knife, his shirt, his face—they were all stained bright red with his own blood.

Even in that state, Mr. Kubodera stayed on his feet, his left hand on the desk to prop himself up. In the bloody mask of his face, his wide, vacant eyes…

A certain spark came into them suddenly and I felt them glare in my direction. A kind of…Yes, it was like hatred.

But it lasted only a moment.

Mr. Kubodera raised his right hand once more and placed the blood-spattered knife against his neck, cutting even deeper.

Bright red blood sprayed without end.

The flesh in the jugular area of his neck was pretty much severed and his head flopped backward. The gaping wound in his neck looked like the wide-open mouth of some inexplicable creature. Still, the knife in Mr. Kubodera's right hand never fell, even as his body shuddered. But then…finally.

He fell.

He started to roll off the teacher's platform.

And then he stopped moving.

The room had fallen pristinely silent at this grotesque spectacle. One second later and the balance had tipped. A muddle of voices began to fill the room in a cresting flood. At that moment, I rose from my seat abstractedly and walked forward to a spot where I could get a good look at Mr. Kubodera's collapsed body.

Tomohiko Kazami was at a desk in the very front row, shaking so badly I could practically hear his seat rattling. There was a spray of blood across the lenses of his glasses, but he neither moved to wipe it away nor to leave his desk. Beside him, a girl had at least managed to move from her seat, but she had sunk immediately to the floor. There was another girl curled over her desk, clutching her head in her hands, who was making a loud, unending shriek. And a boy on all fours making strangled gagging noises…

…Just then.

The door on my right at the front of the classroom banged opened and someone ran in.

Why is he here? I couldn't restrain my surprise. Dressed all in black and his hair as straw-like as ever…It was the librarian, Mr. Chibiki.

"All of you, out of the room!"

Mr. Chibiki must have decided it was too late to mount a rescue as soon as he saw Mr. Kubodera's bloody, crumpled form. He never moved toward the fallen man.

"Just get out of here! Quickly, now!" he ordered the students in a loud voice. Then, turning back to the door he'd come through, he called out, "Ms. Mikami!"

I saw her standing out in the hallway, peering in with a terrified expression.

"Ms. Mikami! I need you to call the police and an ambulance immediately! Please!"

"R-right."

"Is anyone hurt?"

Mr. Chibiki turned to address the students fleeing the room.

"It seems not. I want anyone who feels ill or who's starting to feel worse to speak up. Don't try to hide it. We'll get you to the nurse's office right away."

Next his gaze locked onto me.

"Ah, Sakakibara. Are you…?"

"I'm…fine." I clenched my stomach tightly and nodded at him. "Really, I'm fine."

"Let's get out of here, Sakakibara."

A voice came out of nowhere from behind my back. Mei, I realized immediately.

I turned around and saw that her face was paler than usual. Of course such a random event would upset her. Of course it would, but still…

The body of Mr. Kubodera lay collapsed on the floor, no longer even twitching. As she looked down at him, something about her gaze was reminiscent of the way she looked at the legion of dolls at "Twilight of Yomi"…

"…I guess it didn't work." Mei spoke in a whisper. "Even when they upped the number of people 'not there,' it didn't help after all."

"…I dunno."

"You two need to leave, too. Go on."

Mr. Chibiki shepherded us gently out of the classroom, where our eyes met those of several students who'd gone out into the hall ahead of us. Izumi Akazawa, the girl who'd become class representative after Yukari Sakuragi's death, was there with her entourage around her.

Their faces were whiter than white, and yet as one they glared harshly at me and at Mei. They never said anything. But…

This is your fault.

I felt as if they might hurl the accusation at us any minute.

6

They said Mr. Kubodera's behavior had been suspicious all that morning.

He'd been close-lipped the entire time he was in the teachers' office and hadn't offered the slightest reaction to anyone's greetings. They said he'd looked deeply distracted by something, that he looked like a zombie…

Apparently Mr. Chibiki had run into Mr. Kubodera on the street on their way into school. The two had engaged in the briefest of conversations, and Mr. Chibiki said Mr. Kubodera's behavior at the time was very strange—dangerous, even.

He had offered a refrain of "I'm so tired" and "I'm worn out" in a genuinely pained voice, and had feebly appealed to Mr. Chibiki that "I don't know what to do"…

He had also apparently told Mr. Chibiki, "You understand, at least." Mr. Kubodera had known that Mr. Chibiki was once a social studies teacher at North Yomi, and was also once in charge of third-year Class 3. And then when they parted ways, Mr. Kubodera had said something to Mr. Chibiki in a voice that was barely audible. "I'll need your help when this is over."

Of course, that had nagged at Mr. Chibiki. How could it not? That was how Mr. Chibiki described it later.

That's why he'd come to the third floor of Building C during the short homeroom: to see how things were going. And when he'd gotten there, he'd heard the screams and weeping of the students in Class 3…

By the time the police and the ambulance crew arrived, Mr. Kubodera had long since passed. They discovered that the knife he'd used was a carving knife he'd brought from home.

"Apparently when the police went to search his home, they found something terrible."

This, too, was information that Mr. Chibiki shared with us later on. He said he'd gotten lots of information out of the police officer who'd come to question him.

"Mr. Kubodera was single and had been living with his mother. She was quite elderly and some years ago she'd suffered a stroke. She'd been largely bedridden since then. Mr. Kubodera wasn't the sort of person who discussed private details of his life, so very few of his colleagues knew his family situation…

"But his mother. When the police went to his home, they said she had passed away in the bed where she spent her days. Not only that—"

Suffocated by a pillow pressed over her face. An obvious murder. That's what they'd found.

She had died late at night on Sunday the 12th or before dawn on Monday the 13th. They were saying that the odds were stacked toward Mr. Kubodera being the person who'd held the pillow over her face and killed her…

"It must have been caretaker's exhaustion, as they say. He was driven into a mental state that was beyond his capacity to escape, and he wound up murdering his elderly mother. But there were so many options he could have chosen to pursue after that. He could have turned himself in, or he could have tried to hide what he'd done. Or he might have thrown his life away and fled. But in the end, he chose to wait for morning to come, then went to school and deliberately killed himself in front of you all.

"What do you think of his choice? Can you simply write it off as the act of a madman?"

"So you're saying this is another incident that's part of the 'phenomenon'?" When the words came out of me just then, they sounded completely natural. "That Mr. Kubodera was, I dunno—that normally he would have done it without stirring things up so much. So he was dragged into dying like that?"

"I think that interpretation is the correct one in this case. Though of course I have no way to prove it," Mr. Chibiki said with frustration, scratching fiercely at his long, disheveled hair. "Still, considering all the circumstances at play, it's quite lucky that none of the students in the classroom were hurt during the episode."

We were in the secondary library. It was after school on Tuesday, the day after the incident. Mei was with me, but right now she was basically a stone and said pretty much nothing.

"Either way, this means it didn't work." I lowered my voice to spit out the words that had come too late. "Mr. Kubodera and his mother, since she was a family member in range. The two of them wound up being the 'deaths of July,' didn't they?"

"…Yes."

"So in the end, this new 'strategy' of having two people be 'not there' was a bust. It didn't change anything. So the 'disaster' that's started really won't stop—we really can't stop it?"

"Unfortunately, it seems not…"

With a dismal feeling, my gaze fled from the dim room to the world outside the windows. I caught glimpses of blue sky entering in the wake of the rainy season, the color almost disgustingly free of gloom.

The "disasters" for this year hadn't stopped.

The torrent of blood spewing from Mr. Kubodera's neck. The color of it, even now, painted the sky a rich red color. The ghoulish image bubbled up out of nowhere and I closed my eyes tightly, reflexively.

The "disasters" hadn't stopped.

People were going to keep dying.