Monogatari Series - Volume 10 - Chapter 1.30

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Araragi-senpai drove me right up to the gate of my house and was about to drive off without even getting out of his New Beetle, but I hadn’t actually recovered to the point of being able to walk on my own─or at least I pretended that was true─so he helped me into the house.

I was hoping to be carried in those arms one more time, wishfully thinking that Senjogahara-senpai would be totally fine with it, but of course he didn’t go that far and just gave me his shoulder to lean on.

It was its own kind of intimate contact, and that was good enough for me.

But, bad luck for him, we bumped into my grandma who was cleaning the front hall just at that moment─they’d met a number of times before, and she had taken quite a shine to him, so before he knew what hit him, he was invited in for breakfast.

I told her I’d been running all night long and the last thing I wanted to do was eat, so I was going to take the day off from school and sleep all day. I started to head back to my room.

When my grandpa called out to me.

Apparently, a package had come for me early that morning.

“A package?”

Yes, a package, my grandfather nodded.

He said it had been left outside the gate and that he’d put it in my room for me.

“…”

Left outside the gate? What the hell?

That seemed pretty suspicious.

Was it a bomb or something?

Thinking that my grandparents, old-fashioned as they were, tended to be too lax about these things, this time I walked on my own towards my room, or maybe crawled would be a better way to put it.

The thing that had been left in my room was a box wrapped in bright white paper. Because my grandpa said that a package had been delivered, I somehow imagined a cardboard box, but when I touched it, I discovered that what was beneath the wrapping paper was actually wood.

When I tore off the wrapping paper, I saw that it was a paulownia box.

It seemed somehow familiar─or perhaps strange─but no, the paulownia box I knew all too well was smaller than this one.

Attached to the lid was a piece of paper with a note:

This is something Gaen asked me to hold onto, so you don’t need to pay me for it. If you want to use it, use it. If you want to throw it away, throw it away.

The handwriting was infuriatingly good, and it wasn’t signed.

But it was pretty easy to guess who it was from, given the unprompted talk of money, especially since the sender referred to my mother as Gaen.

In which case the paulownia box─had to be his response to the phone call I’d made yesterday.

I held my breath and opened the lid.

Sure enough, the thing crammed into it─was the mummified head of a devil.