Otherside Picnic: Volume 5, page 16
I felt like she put a lot of extra emotion into that last sentence.
“I’m glad we were holding hands,” she continued. “Because it meant you didn’t get sent to a scary place alone. If you’d vanished, leaving me behind, I don’t think I’d have been able to forgive you.”
“Phew.”
“You understand? If you do, then never apologize again. I’ll get mad.”
Toriko kept stretching my cheeks as she spoke. Her words were strong, but her fingers were playful.
I tried to tear my face free, but my resistance may have looked weaker than usual to her. Toriko stared down at me coldly.
“If you feel that bad about it...”
Toriko’s face suddenly got a lot closer.
“Mmph?!” With no time for me to close my eyes, our lips touched...then parted again.
Freed from her hands, I stumbled backwards. As I covered my mouth and stared at her, Toriko said, “Let’s call it even with that.”
Throwing me a smug look as I quivered, Toriko spun around and began surveying the area.
“Now then... Where are we?” she asked.
“How should I know?!”
“Don’t get mad.”
“Wh-What gives you the right to...” The lingering sensation on my lips was maddening.
She did that so easily... Like it was nothing... Damn it...!
I could glare at her all I wanted, but Toriko wasn’t looking at me. It took me some time before I was able to change gears and start looking around the area again too.
The old-fashioned street stretching out to either side of us hit me with a heavy dose of nostalgia. The tiled and corrugated metal roofs, the wooden telephone poles, the simple, metal-framed sliding glass doors and lacquered walls, and the wooden fences with their paint peeling in places... It all felt very “Showa,” you might say. But that was before my time, so I wouldn’t really know. I couldn’t read any of the rusty enamel signs bearing the names of the stores.
I looked down the road and gulped. There was a bright red sun visible above the rooftops. It looked massive. I know the sun always looks bigger when it’s closer to the horizon, but this went well beyond that. It was too big to fit it in my field of vision, filling nearly the entire sky.
“Wow...” Toriko mumbled. The sight was impressive enough to make us forget our earlier exchange, and I nodded in agreement.
“So this is where Hasshaku-sama’s gate led...” I said.
We stood there awhile, basking in the evening sun. It was a sunset like none I’d seen before, and yet, at the same time, I felt like I had seen it, sometime, someplace.
I remembered running through the field together at dusk, laughing, after we’d gone hunting for Kunekunes. Our laughter back then had carried in it a fear of the unknown. We had been laughing in spite of our fear of the impending darkness of night. But in this brilliant evening scene, even that fear seemed to melt away. The sunset was so marvelous that I just wanted to keep walking into it forever. I’ll bet anyone would have felt the same.
This place must have been deep in the Otherside, like the Beach of the End, or the bottom of the Kotoribako. I knew that intellectually, but I felt no fear whatsoever. There was a painful loneliness in my heart that tried to convince me this was a place we were meant to come to.
“Let’s hold hands,” I suggested, and Toriko took my left hand with a nod. The peaceful expression I saw on the profile of her face told me she felt the same as I did.
“Whenever we hold hands, you always use your right hand, huh, Toriko?” I pointed out.
“Oh, yeah?”
“You’ve been trying not to touch me with your left.”
“Have I?”
“You thought I hadn’t noticed?”
“Because you’re dense, Sorawo.”
“No, I’m...okay, yeah, maybe I am.”
She must have thought it was funny that I was owning up to it, because Toriko let out a child-like laugh. Whenever Toriko touched me, it was pretty much always with her right hand. If she used her left, it was always gloved.
That was largely because we still didn’t understand the nature of her left hand. Considering that she had driven out the Yamanoke by slapping me on the back, and used it to damage one of Runa Urumi’s Fourth Kind followers, there was no questioning that it had some effect on Otherside beings.
Though she acted like the changes to her body didn’t bother her, I had noticed a long time ago that she was being careful that her left hand didn’t hurt me.
Although she totally used both hands when she was squeezing my face just now...
“You don’t need to worry so much. I mean, I’m always looking at you like normal.”
“I know. You’re looking at my face all the time, Sorawo.”
When she said that so nonchalantly, I had no response.
Oh. So the feelings that I thought I was keeping hidden were actually super obvious...
Toriko cast a sideward glance at me as I remained silent. “If I haven’t gotten messed up after all that staring, it’s probably fine, right?” she asked.
“Or you could already be messed up...” I replied, struggling to find an out.
“Maybe,” Toriko replied with a gentle smile.
How can anyone be so pretty?
I stared absently at Toriko’s face, dyed crimson. If nothing had happened, we might have stayed standing there like that for all eternity. Or perhaps we would have walked into the sunset forever, hand-in-hand.
How badly did I want that? But, suddenly, there was a bang as something collapsed, and we both snapped back to our senses.
“Did you hear that...just now?” I asked.
“Yeah. Something’s here.”
I returned my Makarov to its holster and pulled the rifle off my shoulder. Toriko was doing the same. We tried waiting a while, but there was no sign of anything showing itself. Holding our rifles ready, we carefully headed in the direction of the noise.
We moved three doors in the direction of the sunset before spotting a fallen metal sign in front of the building on our right. Behind the sign was a dark alleyway. We kept our distance, trying to peer down it from the opposite side of the street, but there was nobody there. The ground near the entrance had been disturbed. Like someone who had been hiding behind the sign accidentally knocked it over, then decided to high-tail it out of there...
“I’ll go look,” Toriko said, approaching the alley.
“Be careful...” I said as I watched her go. Toriko crouched down at the entrance to the alleyway, then turned back to look at me.
“You said there was no child, right? That it was all just Hasshaku-sama’s trap.”
“Uh, yeah.”
“Looks like you were wrong.”
Look—she pointed, and I approached from behind her to peer down the alley. Little footprints had been left in the slightly moist dirt. One foot wearing a shoe, the other bare. The footprints were small, not even twenty centimeters long.
They were kid-sized.
“Huh...?” I said in confusion.
“See? There was a child after all.”
The footprints continued deeper into the alley. The toe portions of the steps printed in the road with scattered puddles were dug in deep, and skewed a bit to the left or right.
“You think we can leave her?” Toriko asked, and I reluctantly shook my head.
“Well...it’s not like we’re going anywhere else. Let’s take a look, at the very least,” I responded. Toriko nodded as if she’d expected I would say that and started walking. I hurried after her.
“Hold on. I’ll take point,” I said.
“Okay. Please do.”
The alley was too narrow for us to stand side-by-side. It was impossible to tell if something was amiss without my eye, so I had to be the one in front. I always felt uneasy in this situation, but it wasn’t so bad knowing Toriko was there behind me. If things got dicey, I could count on her to push me aside and save me if she had to.
We cautiously advanced down the roughly one-meter-wide gap between houses. Weeds grew near the walls, and rotten boards and rusty metal pipes lay on the ground. The footprints got messy again near a puddle on the other end of the alleyway, perhaps indicating the person who made them had nearly tripped. I saw a handprint in the mud.
We came out onto the corner of another street where there was a red post box. It was the old cylindrical type, one I hadn’t ever seen in the surface world. Its paint was peeling, and there was a muddy handprint on it in a low position.
“How do you think the picture postcards got sent?” Toriko asked, looking at the post box.
“What do you mean?”
“Even if we assume that they were a trap to lure us in, they had to enter the postal system somewhere in order to get to Michiko Abarato’s place, right? Like, if someone prepared the postcards, and then put them in the post box here...it’s kind of weird imagining how they would end up at a post office in the surface world. If there’s a monster from the Otherside delivering them, that’s like something out of a fable, and if they just teleport to the post office, that’s way too convenient.”
“You’ve got a point. When you start analyzing scary stories, it’s pretty common for them to just stop making sense,” I said as I searched for more footprints. “There’s that one common story where you find a black hair in your room, and you have no idea how it got there, right?”
“There is?”
“There is. The point of the story is to make you go, ‘Ew, hair from people you don’t know is gross. I’m scaaared,’ but I always wondered what’d happen if you took a good look at those hairs. Like, if you examine them under the microscope, do they have cuticles like they’re supposed to? And if you extract the DNA, would you be able find out who they came from?”
“Hee hee. Sounds like forensics.”
“But I’m right, aren’t I? Having physical evidence like that means you should be able to investigate it in detail.”
“Aren’t there any stories where people investigated?”
“Yeah, but most of the time they don’t find out anything. The samples suddenly disappear from storage in some cases, oh, and there’s a lot of times where the people investigating go crazy, vanish, or commit suicide.”
“Maybe that sort of deeper investigation is dangerous?”
“But in true ghost stories, it’s surprisingly common for the person telling the story to be left with physical evidence. I started reading all these scary stories because I was hoping there might be another unknown world out there, somewhere. That’s why it was always frustrating when people didn’t investigate the physical evidence they had. I was like, ‘Tell me more!’”
“Hee hee, y’know, that’s kind of cute.”
That wasn’t the reaction I expected, and I didn’t know how to respond. “No, it’s not cute. I’m deadly serious. I was constantly raging at my monitor.”
“I wish I could’ve met you back then.”
“I’m glad you didn’t. I was a nasty piece of work.”
“That’s fine. When we first met, you still kind of were.”
“Harsh much...?” I turned to look back at her despite myself, and Toriko smiled.
“I’m happy for you. You finally found some physical evidence of your own, Sorawo.”
“What do you mean?”
“The Otherside. It’s exactly the kind of physical evidence you’ve been talking about, isn’t it? Or am I wrong?”
Toriko was right.
I had encountered precisely the “other place” that I had been dreaming of as I read true ghost stories. This world was such a super massive piece of physical evidence that, even if I investigated as hard as I could, I would never be able to examine it all.
And on top of that, Toriko and I became physical evidence ourselves.
Her left hand, and my right eye. The reason we had been able to continue our exploration instead of ending up like the other victims had to be that we’d been integrated into the Otherside.
“What’s up?” Toriko called out to me and I realized I’d been standing there, staring at her left hand.
I shook my head. “You know, if we were to send a letter from here using that hand of yours, it might just arrive.”
Toriko chuckled and touched the post box.
“You want to give it a go? It’ll be like sending a postcard while we’re away on a trip.”
“To Kozakura? She’d definitely think we’re harassing her.”
We both had a good laugh and then started walking again.
The child’s footprints continued intermittently through the sunset town, leading us further and further along. From street to street, through alleyways and houses, jumping over drainage ditches... There were times we nearly lost the trail, but it wasn’t too difficult to find it again with a little searching. The kid didn’t seem to be trying to shake off pursuers, just running around willy-nilly.
The further we went, the stranger the streets became. At first the buildings were one or two stories tall, but before I knew it there were five-story buildings towering over us. The upper levels of the houses seemed to be bending towards us from both sides of the street, and they were connected by skyways.
Toriko looked up to the sky through the gaps in the buildings. “That sun’s sure not setting, huh?”
“Sure isn’t,” I agreed.
The massive evening sun showed no sign of moving. It just hung there, shining so very red. It lent the scenery around us the impression of also being stopped in time, never having changed from the past.
“That could be the kind of place this is...a world of perpetual sunset,” I suggested.
“Are there any ghost stories like that?”
“Occasionally. There’s this one story about going to the Otherside in an elevator. When they arrive on the top floor, the sky is bright red even though it should still be afternoon.”
“How about this sort of old-timey town?”
“Feels like I’ve read stories about wandering into an antiquated town here and there. Walking through town, and wandering down a street that shouldn’t have been there. Sometimes the story involves being tricked by a fox or tanuki.”
When I told her that, Toriko made an amused expression as she looked down at the footprints. “You think this kid is a fox?” she asked.
“She could be a tanuki, you know?”
“When we find her, how about we take her to Kozakura’s place? She seems to like tanuki.”
“If the kid’s a fox, you’d better not touch her. You’ll die of Echinococcosis.”
“What’s that?”
“An infection caused by some nasty parasites.”
The rows of buildings suddenly came to an end, and our field of view opened up. A wooden bridge crossed a stream outside town, and a field of red spider lilies were blooming on the other side. The trash scattered all over the place meant it didn’t make for a particularly picturesque scene, though. With no obstructions, the sunset shone down over all of it.
“There,” Toriko said.
I looked where Toriko was pointing and saw a figure tiny enough to almost disappear in the tall grass running towards an especially large mountain of trash. Even at a distance, I could tell she was the girl I’d seen on the thin film inside the jungle gym. There was something familiar about her running style—desperate, as if she was about to fall over.
“Doesn’t look like a fox...” I said.
“Or a tanuki,” Toriko agreed. “What do we do?”
For a moment, I didn’t know how to answer. I mean, up until this point I had been questioning the very existence of the person leaving behind the footprints. But now that the kid was right here in front of me, that same sensation welled up inside me. I can’t leave her like this. I’ve got to save her, it said.
Toriko took one look at my face and then nodded without a word. Our legs picked up speed on their own as we followed the kid. We had to watch out for glitches as we went, though, so we couldn’t run with all our might the way she could.
“Toriko, there may be something wrong with me.”
“Like what?”
“When I see that kid, I reflexively think I need to save her. That’s gotta be weird. I feel like something’s happened to me.”
Toriko stared at me, dumbfounded, then blinked. “Sorawo... Uh, I don’t think there’s anything weird about that at all,” she hesitantly informed me.
“Huh?”
“If someone’s wandered in here, it’s only natural to want to help them, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, you would say that, Toriko, but...”
I know I’m not that good of a person.
Considering this was the other side of Hasshaku-sama’s gate, this had to be her influencing our minds too. Toriko was already the type to help people, so she wouldn’t notice any difference, but I did. Even if we managed to catch up to that kid, I was sure she’d just turn out to be some sort of disgusting monster. I knew how these Otherside types operated. Well, that was fine by me. I’d blow her away, the same as we always did.
Toriko probably wasn’t going to be able to react immediately. Turning her gun on something that looked like a kid wasn’t something a gentle soul like Toriko could handle. I’d have to be the one to take the shot. I didn’t like it either, and Toriko was probably gonna be really weirded out by me doing it, but...if something tries to kill you, you need to kill it first.
We were getting closer to the mound of trash that floated like an island in a sea of red spider lilies. Between a junked three-wheel automobile, a CRT television with a wooden body, and a steel-reinforced paulownia dresser, even the garbage here was retro. The child crawled through a gap in the randomly piled trash.
Running out of breath at the foot of the mountain, we peered through the gap in the garbage. A pitch-black tunnel underneath a wooden table led deep inside.
We turned on our lights and shone them into the hole; the tunnel was less than a meter tall. The garbage piled on top of it looked stable, but I wasn’t about to start shaking any of it to find out for sure.
“Hey!” Toriko shouted down the tunnel. “Are you okay? It’s dangerous to go in there!”
