Published at 4th of December 2019 10:33 am

Volume 2, Part V: Spiral Paradox - IV

This chapter is updated by NovelFree.ml

That night, after finishing up the last of the research I had to do for Miss Tōko, I headed on over to Shiki’s house to hang out. It is just past 8pm on the night of November 9, and I find her absent from her home, which by itself, isn’t a really out of place event.

Except on the next day, I find she still has not come back.

Unwittingly, before either my mind or my body could actually notice, my feet have already brought me to Ryōgi’s house. As I step in, I notice that it has not changed its dreariness ever since the last time I set foot in here, the day when I admitted to Ryōgi that I killed my parents. Just before I close the door, I see the sky already darkened, though still somewhat lighted by the faraway setting sun. The hour hand on Ryōgi’s bedside clock points to six, and as always, in this quiet space, the incessant ticking of the second hand eventually grows to become an annoyance, and only serves to exacerbate my growing headache.

It’s already been nine days since I last saw Ryōgi. In that span, I’ve spent my time roaming the streets among the hobos and corner boys, all greeting the turn of the months to November with a silent vigil as they go about their duties. I barely ate, only pausing to look at the occasional newspaper or TV display for any news on the discoveries of my parents’ bodies. Perhaps because of the depths to which my life has suddenly sunk, I’ve had a headache that hasn’t stopped, and in fact continues to reach a new high every day. On top of that, my body has been steadily weakening, and all the joints in my body have become heavier every time I wake up from a supposedly restive night’s sleep.

“What in the hell am I doing to myself?” I whisper to no one as I hug my knees close to me. I was never supposed to come back here. But now, Ryōgi’s voice is the one thing I want to hear. I’m scared, and I need someone, anyone’s help, and so I unconsciously brought myself here. As I wait in what seems like hours in the darkness of the unlit room, my teeth start chattering lightly, adding to the droning repetition of the ticking clock. It makes me not notice there is anyone in the room until suddenly the entirety of my sight is bathed in light. It’s Ryōgi, who had opened the door without my noticing.

“Enjō? What were you…never mind. I don’t think I really want to know what you like to do alone in the middle of the dark,” says the voice of the girl clad in a red jacket over a white kimono. She doesn’t even sound like she’s surprised at my being here. Nothing about her has changed: from the hair with its tip at her shoulders, to her deep, dark eyes, to the tone of her voice. It’s still the Ryōgi that I know. “Still, you couldn’t have come at a better time.”

She approaches her bed and places the long bag she’s holding on top of it. Then she opens the door to the room she never used or opened while I was here, and from it produces a wooden box of about the same length as the bag on her bed.

“Sorry, but whatever you gotta say, it’s gonna have to wait until I finish. I just can’t wait to put this bad boy together.” She unties the knot on the satchel, revealing a naked sword blade inside. In a manner that tells me she’s done this many times before, she opens the wooden box and retrieves a sword scabbard and grip from it, as well as on oval shaped object that must be the guard. “Oh man, the scabbard sleeve ain’t fitting. And this is the only one I have, too,” she says with dissatisfaction as she slowly transforms the blade from its nakedness to a fine example of a katana by assembling it, affixing different things to the blade tang. After she’s done and has looked upon it with some pride, she puts it on top of the bed and turns to face me again. “Alright. You wanted to talk, right?”

In contrast to how delighted her voice is, her expression is still nothing more than the plain indifference she has given me all this time. I try to speak at first, but nothing comes out. I just want someone to help me. And I realize that nothing has changed. Everything is as it was when Ryōgi first saved me in that alley, but now I can’t remember what I wanted to be saved from.

“I don’t fucking know. I’ve done things, things are happening, and I don’t know,” I say. Ryōgi says nothing, only listening as she continues to look at me. I don’t think I have any other choice except to continue. “When I was wandering in the city today, I saw my mom. At first, I thought it was just someone who looked like her. But then I followed her, until she went inside the same apartment building I used to live in. It doesn’t make any fucking sense anymore!” I declare, my shivering becoming worse with every word. Ryōgi stands up.

“So long story short, you think she’s alive. You’ve seen nothing in the news, so hey, it might be possible.”

“No! I killed her, and my dad too. I’m sure of it. It’s the ones that are alive that are fake!” I say with as much vigor as I can muster, as if shouting it will make it real somehow. I don’t know if I truly believe what I’m saying. What did I see, then? I remember leaving the house a picturesque image of a blood-drenched nightmare, and yet who did I see go back into it?

“Must be my mistake. How about an idea so we can solve it? Why don’t we go there to make sure?”

“Wh—”

“We go there, we knock on the door, see if anyone’s inside, ask. That way we’ll know for sure if they’re alive or not. I’m serious!” As soon as she says that, Ryōgi wastes no time. She immediately stands up and retrieves a sheathed knife from her table, putting it into her jacket’s inside pocket, and then sheathes a second one in a leather scabbard, tucking it into her kimono’s sash. The viciousness of the blades belies the atmosphere of Ryōgi’s casual attitude, which almost feels like she’s just going out to buy some smokes. It seems she’s determined to go with or without me. I was planning on objecting, but seeing her determined state of mind makes me resolve to at least not let her go alone. And so I follow her out of the room.

“Feel like driving a motorcycle, Enjō?” “Somehow, I feel like I don’t have a choice.”

“Good. I left one in the parking lot, so we’ll use that.” We walk hurriedly towards the underground parking lot of the building. While I’m surprised that a building this small has such a facility, I’m more startled by the motorcycle that Ryōgi shows me: A large, heavy-looking Harley with an attached sidecar, which Ryōgi proceeds to get on. Driven on by her lack of hesitation, I position myself on the motorcycle, start the engine, and start us on the way to the apartment where I used to live over a month ago.

We arrive at the high rise a little later than I expected, in some part due to the fact that I’m not really used to driving motorcycles as big as the one Ryōgi provided. The November nighttime air is so cold it’s almost unbearable, and driving in an open vehicle didn’t serve to alleviate it one bit. But through all that, we finally arrive at the circular apartment, tall enough that it seems like it could reach the moon. Its strange construction—circular, and actually being two buildings connected—helped it stand out from its much more plain, four-corner neighbors. My former house is located on the fourth floor of the east building. From what I know, the west building never had any residents. There aren’t a lot of people living there to begin with, so I guess they just never got around to using it. I did hear a lot of people wanted to buy, but the owner was a picky one, and not at all social, so he only filled more or less half of the units in the thing. Apparently my dad knew him, so my family got in fairly easily as a favor, I suppose.

“Well, this is it,” I say to Ryōgi riding in the sidecar. She casts her eyes upward at the building, looking suspiciously like she’s seen some ghostly apparition on one of the windows.

“What is up with this place,” is the only thing she says. I leave the bike parked in the street in front of the apartment, and I lead Ryōgi inside the grounds. A concrete wall surrounds the entirety of the premises like one of those bad community elemenatries. The circular shape of the building makes it so that it doesn’t take up a lot of space, but the grounds with its surrounding flora takes up much of the lot. Bisecting it is the paved walkway leading from the street to the building itself. Wordlessly, Ryōgi follows my lead as we enter. Inside, we can immediately spot the large central column that dominates the structure like an ancient monument. Within it is the elevator, and around the elevator shaft is the spiral stairs that hardly anyone uses. I push the “up” button beside the elevator door to call it.

Somewhere, a clock’s second hand ticks. Something doesn’t feel right. My heart is beating at a rate much higher than it does normally, and my breathing is labored. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. I mean, I’m about to pay a visit to the family I killed. That’s hardly a recipe for relaxation.

The elevator arrives.

The door opens.

I go inside.

Shiki follows.

I push the button for the fourth floor.

A deep, mechanical sound can be heard as the elevator begins its ascent, a sound that I’d gotten used to hearing a long time ago.

“It’s twisting,” says Ryōgi to no one in particular. The elevator stops on the fourth floor. I get out and immediately head for the hallway directly in front of us, leading to the east building. Ryōgi continues to follow me in silence as I take a hard left, following the corridor’s direction. Now I face the hallway outside the rooms of the east building, with the left hand side all having doors to their respective units, and the right hand side an open view of the outside world. A chest height wall is situated on the right side to prevent any nasty accidents. All of them are lit by the glow of the orange fluorescent lights on one half, and the other half the soft blue of the moonlight from outside.

“We just go straight ahead to the end of this hallway to get to my house.” I start walking again. The whole place is quiet, save for the little noises that you can hear from inside the units, but it’s all background noise that your brain tends to filter out, and besides that, you never meet anyone in the hallways anyway. At last we arrive at the last room as the hallway terminates, and I stop my feet right in front of the door.

Are we really doing this? My hand doesn’t move to reach anything, and my vision seems to blur for a moment when I look at the doorknob. Oh wait. That’s right. I have to ring the doorbell first. It’s an absolute rule, even with the key I have. If I don’t do it, mom’ll be scared shitless again. It’s all because of that one time when some debt collectors forcibly entered. Now, we have to ring the doorbell to allay mom’s fears. As I remember this, my hand hovers over the button.

Ryōgi stops me.

“How about we not ring the doorbell and just go inside, Enjō?” “What the hell? Do you plan on just barging in?”

“This is your house, isn’t it? Besides, we ring the doorbell, I wouldn’t be able to see the trick, and that would be too bad. Now give me the key.” Ryōgi abruptly grabs the key that I produce from my pocket and inserts it into the doorknob, giving it one turn.

The door opens, and inside I can hear the low hum of the television. Someone is inside.

The sounds of a conversation. The buzz of words. My dad blaming the problems of life on my mom and the world. My mom hearing all of it in one ear and out the other one, nodding along to everything he says. The daily life of someone called Tomoe Enjō.

Ryōgi makes her way inside silently, and I shadow her steps. We exit the hallway, and open the door leading to the living room where the noise originates. Inside is a cheap looking table, quite unfit for the how good the room looks. Or how good it would look if it was swept regularly and the trash was taken out. As it stands now, bags of trash fill its corners like necessary furniture.

And in the middle of this entire scene are my parents.

“Jesus, is Tomoe not home yet? It’s eight o’ clock, for crying out loud. He got off the clock an hour ago! Where the fuck is that asshole playing around?”

“Who knows?”

“It’s because you spoil him that he acts like we ain’t his parents. That goddamn punk better start putting some money into the household or he’s gonna get his ass pounded. Whose house does he think he’s living in anyway?”

“Who knows?” What…what the hell is this?

Both my dad who hides behind the image of the fucking big man of the house even though he’s a coward at heart, and my mom who serves as his unflinching yes man are both alive. The two people I killed are continuing on with life as if nothing had happened. But that isn’t even the most suspicious thing about this. They’re not even turning to look at me and Ryōgi standing in the doorway, visible to all.

“What time do you get home?” Ryōgi whispers into my ear. “Around nine,” I answer back, my voice stunned to incredulity. “Man, an hour? Guess we got no choice but to wait.”

“Ryōgi, what the fuck?” I whisper, thinking the two would hear us.

“Explain this bullshit to me.” Her indifference finally makes me angry, but she casts me an annoyed glance in response.

“We didn’t ring the doorbell or knock, so they’re not treating us like guests. We didn’t trigger anything that fires up their predetermined response. So they continue their act thinking no one’s actually come.” Her observation finished, Ryōgi walks to the room behind us, across the hall from the living room.

My room.

After some hesitation, I follow her while trying to avoid meeting my parents’ gaze. There I could do nothing but stand and wait. Ryōgi chooses a spot on the wall to lean on, and waits like that in the room where the lights are off. But waiting for what, exactly? Nothing less than myself, Tomoe Enjō, and his return. And so I wait for me in the place where I committed murder. Not the most normal of times for me. Time passes simultaneously fast and slow for me, an eternity committed to a second, an hour where my sense of reality seems to slip away as the second hand on a clock ticks away somewhere beyond my reach.

And then at last, I hear the door open. Finally, I’ve come home. A sense of relief and dread at the same time, two paradoxical emotions combine as I watch another me enter the house without a word, not venturing to converse with my parents, and enter my room in silence. All of it is the same: The wavy red-dyed hair, the body and face that made everyone call me a girl up until junior high, the sullen look that cursed the world, and the deep breath taken upon entering the seclusion of the room; a meditative act, almost a ritual, that seemed to will all the troubles away.

Tomoe-the-other pays as much attention to Ryōgi and me standing by the wall as he would invisible specters. He lays out the mattress. My mind is blank as I watch Tomoe Enjō fall asleep, even though I’ve seen all of this before. I know what happens next. The sounds of an argument fill the room across the hall. It’s my mom, raising her voice to dad in what must be the first time ever. Then inhuman screaming. Both of them, baying like wild dogs. Then the unpleasant sound of a hard and metallic object making impact with something fleshy. After that, only my mom’s desperate breathing can be heard through the door. Footsteps, repeating over and over. The clock ticking and ticking.

“No,” I whisper, though I know it won’t change anything. After all, I’ve seen this before.

The door slides open, and Tomoe dares to open his eyes for a peek, and he sees the silhouette of his mother holding a broad kitchen knife in one hand.

“Die, Tomoe.” Her voice detached, feeling nothing, but perhaps this isn’t true. After all, Tomoe can’t see her face against the light, but now Tomoe can see. Mom is crying. And yet, she goes on to stab him as if possessed with reckless strength, each stab strangely in time with the sound of the second hand’s progress around the face of the clock. In the stomach, the chest, the neck, both arms and legs, the thighs, each finger, both ears, through the nose, a stab on each eye, and finally, on the forehead. It is then that the knife breaks, and mom puts the broken blade on her own neck, stabs, then twists. Both she and the knife fall to the floor in a dull sound that nevertheless manages an echo in the room.

Then nothing. Only the eternally reverberating sound of the ticking, growing louder and louder in my mind like a mocking tone. This is—

“—a bad dream.” That became real at last. Or whatever level of reality this is. The sight makes me sick to my stomach, but I am delayed from any further thoughts when I hear the sound of a kimono fluttering as it moves. Ryōgi moves to leave the room.

“If your curiosity is sated, then we can go. We have no business left here.”

“No business?! A person just—I just died here!”

“Did you really? Look closely and you’ll see there’s not a drop of blood on them. They’ll just wake up right as rain in the morning. It’s a cycle where they’re born in the morning and die at night. Get a grip on yourself, Enjō. You’re the one alive. That—” she points to the corpse “—is the one with a lot more holes in his body.”

I turn my head to look at the tragedy one more time, and just like Ryōgi said, no blood on any of them even though there should have been gallons of the stuff.

“What, how—”

“Hey, I’m as clueless as you as to how and why someone would do something like this, but at any rate, we’ve got nothing more to do here. C’mon, let’s go to the next one.” Ryōgi walks to the hallway and towards the door leading outside. I call out to her, though she doesn’t turn around to acknowledge me.

“What do you mean ‘next?’ Where the hell are you going, Ryōgi?” “Durr. To the place where you really lived, Enjō.” She says, and continues walking, the briskness of her action dispelling the confusion I feel, at least temporarily.

At first, having followed her all the way back to the central hall, I thought Ryōgi would get on the elevator. Instead, she goes behind it, to the opposite side of the hall, where the corridor leading to the west building lies. Without any attempt at solemnity, she passes through the corridor and goes into the west building hallway, constructed similarly to its counterpart. I suppose I shouldn’t have expected any less. I realize—even though I lived here for over half a year—that I’ve never really seen anyone from the east building go to the west building. It’s like some kind of common courtesy.

We walk through the hallway, the open air to our right letting in drafts of biting, cold air that tells me how late it is. I glance at my watch, displaying the time as around ten o’ clock. As far as I know, no one lives in the west building, which is probably why only the minimum amount of lights are actually turned on in this part, and no light nor any indication of movement seems to be slipping in the cracks under the doors to each unit. Guided mostly by the moonlight, Ryōgi presses on through the barely-lit hall. 406.407. 408. 409. When she reaches the last unit, 410, she suddenly halts, looks at the door, and starts to talk.

“I went here on a hunch, based on a really small observation, really. Even though you said you lived in 405, I remembered that Mikiya said your name last. He’s not the kind of guy to mix the order of names around. So I thought that the Enjō family must be living in the last room of the fourth floor, room 410 in other words.”

“What…”

“You told me some time ago that elevator didn’t work for a while, right? It only worked when all of the residents were here already, like somebody gave it a signal. The entire thing is a trick to displace the exit by turning the elevator, to fool you where north and south is. The fact that it’s circular and it makes a loud sound when it goes up hides the trick. It’s also the reason why the second floor isn’t used. It needs the height of a floor so that it can spin around a half circle for the trick.”

Displacing the exit? That sounds like a load of bullshit, but what if it’s true? After all, I wouldn’t know. The only thing I know is that when I get off the elevator, the corridor in front of me is the one that leads to the east building. I didn’t question it since it seemed so obvious. If what she’s saying is true, then I’ve been mixing things up, and I just didn’t notice due to everything being the same. Whichever corridor you go to, you end up taking a hard left to end up in the building’s hallway, and there aren’t any numbers on the doors, so you wouldn’t know the difference.

“Then, this is my house?”

“Yep. The house you were in for a month before the elevator started working, to be exact. After that, you were living in the funhouse we’ve just been to. Now that I think about it, the stairs must be moving too, or else this whole thing wouldn’t work. They’re spiral stairs, aren’t they?”

I can’t even bother to give her a nod. “But all of that can’t be true. Normally, you’d notice that shit.” I retort, but Ryōgi, as always with the considerable amount of composure she can bring to bear, refutes me.

“Can you still call this place normal after what we just saw in 405? This place is an enclosed space. All of the buildings you see from outside are the same four-angle mid rises with no great difference from anywhere you look. All the walls that partition the place are some kind of strange color with small patterns on them that you don’t notice but your mind processes and remembers. There aren’t any small inconsistencies, so your mind lets the obvious ones slide. It’s not the same as Tōko’s, but there’s one hell of a ward in here.” She puts a hand on the doorknob. “I’m letting it rip, Enjō. It’s the homecoming half a year in the making,” she says, a note of glee intruding in her voice.

She opens the door. There’s no turning back now.

The inside of 410 is consumed by a thick darkness such that both of us can’t really see more than a foot in front of us. In my head, the ticking resumes once again, and my body, and all my joints, reclaim their previous heaviness.

“Where are the goddamn lights? Oh, here they are,” I hear Ryōgi say somewhere in the dark. In a second, a light burns brightly above.

I gulp. But I am no longer surprised. Somehow, I knew it would be here. “Looks to be half a year since they died,” says Ryōgi in a voice that implies no surprise in her as well. Though I know we should be at least somewhat astonished, for the living room we have entered contains two wasted corpses. What few dry skin remains is hanging on their clearly visible bones. Most of the flesh has fallen off, dry decaying on their own in the floor like a pile of garbage. They look like bodies dumped in a landfill and left to rot, with eye sockets as black and empty as a cave, and faces that no one in good confidence can possibly put an identity to. Except me. They are what remain of Takayuki and Kaede Enjō, the parents I killed a month ago for the sake of one bad dream. But as Ryōgi says, it looks like it’s been longer than a month since they died. And then there is the other

Enjō family that still exists on the other side.

It’s all a paradox that I can no longer muster the will to resolve. Like

Ryōgi, I stand here in the room, thinking and doing nothing except stare at the bodies, as if by looking at them, I could divine the exact time and date like a perverse clock. Compared to the dream that I see every night made real earlier, this is more final, more conclusive, so much so that it doesn’t even hold any surprises for me. A meaningless, worthless death for my parents.

Even so, I can’t seem to take my eyes off the sight of the decay. I have the acute feeling of someone wanting to feel emotional without actually being able to. I want to be disgusted, to be startled at the very least, but no dice.

The sound of the front door opening intrudes on my thoughts. “Spoiling for a fight, eh?” says Ryōgi, smiling upon hearing the distinct noise. She draws the knife from inside her jacket, and in one smooth motion unsheathes the blade. At that same moment, someone enters the living room without us hearing his voice or even his footfalls. His face is a middle-aged man that could have been anyone you passed by on the street, but containing a hollow expression that reeked of imminent danger. As soon as I think I sort of recognize him, he rushes forward to attack us.

But that’s Ryōgi’s cue to meet his steps and dispatch him easily with one stab of the knife. A second later, another one—wait, no, three—no, four people pile inside the room, clearly with the same intent, but Ryōgi wastes no time. Moving towards them, she slashes and stabs with a dancer’s grace, reminding me of the spectacle on the night we first met, now made deadlier with the knife in her hand. In a few moments, it is over, and the entrance to the living room is soon covered with four corpses. She grabs my hand and urges me to go.

“Well, the residents have clearly expressed their opinion,” she says in a hurried tone. “Let’s get the hell out of here.” I guess I can still count on her to be cool-headed right until the end. I’m still in a fair daze from seeing my parent’s corpses, but I obviously can’t ignore what’s going on, and it makes me let go of her hand.

“What the hell, Ryōgi?! Why are you—”

“They’re not human. They’re human corpses, that much is obvious. But they’re just puppets with a death wish. It’s fucking sick. In any case, less talk, more run, run, run.” I see her face colored for the first time with a look of utter contempt, but at what exactly, I have neither the time nor the composure to divine. Ryōgi runs ahead, while I struggle to go through the pile of corpses that Ryōgi made, observing that they seem to be a collection of adults and children that, to my eyes at least, look like a family.

I burst through the front door that Ryōgi left open and come out into the hallway to find five more of these so-called “corpses” on the floor. No blood, like the four she left inside, though their injuries are severe. I suppose this proves they’re not really human, like she said.

In the gap of time that we were separated, Ryōgi has already travelled to what looks to be just in front of unit 408, preoccupied with another of these corpses. Watching her from here, I can finally come to grips with how overwhelmingly skilled she is. The movements of her enemies aren’t dulled or delayed, but violent and human-like when they press their assault.

But it isn’t enough to deal with Ryōgi, who dives and spins through the press of people, her movements almost too fast to follow. Each slash, each stab, each swing of the knife that cuts through bone, muscle, and sinew makes her look less like a girl, and more a force of nature, a white-clad reaper mowing down a path back to the central lobby. Despite the mass of rapid movement blocking most of my view, I see the other end of the hallway, with the light of the lobby spilling in from the right. Shadowed by this light, a black figure stands in the hallway.

At first, with the stillness of his posture, I take him for some sort of black sculpture, but I soon realize he is a man, wearing a black coat. He seems different somehow from the corpses Ryōgi is dispatching. A moment after seeing him, I freeze up all the way to my fingertips, unable to move like a puppet that lost its strings, and I am overwhelmed with dread.

I should not have seen him. No, that’s wrong. We shouldn’t have come here at all, so that we could not have met him and the spectral placidity that he casts over the entire place; the stillness that wraps around him like a tailor-made cloak.

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