Monogatari Series - Volume 13 - Chapter 1.25

025

I didn’t end up boarding a train at the station where the taxi dropped me off, nor did I go back to my hotel. I did an immediate about-face and returned to the town.

I wasn’t being vigilant, I had completely given up worrying about that. As long as they didn’t bother me directly, they were harmless, so I opted to just forget about it. No harm no foul, that’s the kind of guy I am.

There was something else that concerned me more─the fact that Nadeko Sengoku was so broken.

Ultimately that was her right, whether she was stupid crazy or smart crazy, but something about her was incongruous and just felt off-balance.

Maybe getting stuck doing cat’s cradle with a snake had rattled me more thoroughly than I’d expected─but you should’ve seen the smile on Nadeko Sengoku’s face when she innocently manipulated that snake into the shape of a broom, just like I had taught her─thankfully, I hadn’t been so rattled that I forgot how to make the shapes I had memorized. Either way, if she was mentally unstable, I had to stabilize her.

In aid of which, I visited the Sengoku residence again.

This time, however, I had no intention of calling her parents on the intercom and coming in through the front door─there was nothing more I needed to hear from them, so I had no interest in speaking to them again.

Good, law-abiding citizens.

Well, maybe I wasn’t going to get away with literally never speaking another word to them…

I called the Sengokus’ on my cell phone from right outside their house─it wasn’t so far from Araragi’s, by the way, so I was on constant lookout.

I couldn’t let my vigilance lapse entirely with regard to being tailed, but in that neighborhood, a chance encounter with Araragi or his little sister Karen was of much greater concern.

It was her father who answered the phone: Sengoku speaking.

I unleashed my vaunted gift of gab on him. I had found a clue regarding their missing daughter. Something new had come to light when I compared it with the book I’d taken home from the bedroom they’d been kind enough to let me examine. It wasn’t the kind of thing we could discuss over the phone, and I wanted to hear their thoughts on the matter, so could he and his wife come meet me. That was how I played it: circuitous, which is to say reserved, yet carefully calibrated to make it impossible to refuse.

The time being what it was…around nine o’clock at night…Nadeko Sengoku’s father wasn’t thrilled, but ultimately he acceded to my request. He was honestly worried about his missing daughter, after all.

After hanging up, I watched and waited, and at last a car carrying Mr. and Mrs. Sengoku left the garage and drove away into the night.

Making sure they were gone, I entered the grounds. Cautiously. Yes, I was breaking and entering, but it’s a little late to be bringing that up now.

I ignored the front door and went around to the back. I very much doubted that the front door was unlocked, and even if it were, I wasn’t going to go in that way.

It was the second-floor windows I was interested in.

I located the window of Nadeko Sengoku’s room─more or less right away.

I took a few steps back, just enough to give myself a running start, then took off. The second floor of an average home isn’t high enough to require a ladder or rope.

I ran up the vertical wall with my leather shoes and grabbed the frame, then used a bit of rock-climbing prowess to make it the rest of the way.

Opening the window, I climbed inside.

I had unlocked it the day before under the guise of opening and shutting the curtains, and fortunately it did the trick─I say fortunately, but it wasn’t a question of chance, it was a premeditated crime.

That said, I hadn’t necessarily been sure I’d need to return to her room; unlocking the window was simply a precautionary measure I’d taken─naturally, there were a number of others─but something had bugged me enough that I’d figured it might be worth a return visit.

The closet.

The closet that Sengoku’s parents had absolutely not opened because they’d been told absolutely not to─I had come to open it.

That was why I’d set a rendezvous with her parents and gotten them out of the house. A trick I could only use once, it would irreparably damage Mr. and Mrs. Sengoku’s impression of me…but so be it. What was done was done.

If you let yourself worry about everything, you’ll never accomplish anything.

Now that I had the opportunity, I left the closet for last, and in the gloom, or rather pitch darkness, I made the thorough search I’d been prevented from conducting by her parents’ watchful eyes. Unfortunately, however, this prefatory work yielded nothing.

Even rummaging through her underwear drawer didn’t turn up anything interesting─I’d hoped for a secret diary.

Thinking that they might hold some promise, I flipped through the pages of the notebooks sitting atop her desk. The doodles she made during class might provide some insight into her personality. Apparently, she wasn’t one for taking notes during class (when else would she?), and the pages were almost entirely blank.

Not into studying.

Nadeko Sengoku.

I hadn’t been such a great student myself, but this girl was a little extreme─I guess that was an insight into her personality, revealed by those blank notebooks?

Now then─time for the main event.

I’d set the meeting a bit on the late side, on top of which I’d said something like, “I must apologize in advance, I might be a little late,” so I probably had about another hour to continue my search, but I was still in someone else’s home.

An unfamiliar habitat.

Definitely no need to overstay my welcome.

I reached for the closet door─a slight resistance. It seemed to be locked. Now it all made sense, her parents couldn’t open the closet because it was locked─nope, that explained exactly nothing.

While there was a lock, it was simply the kind where you can insert a ten-yen coin and turn the handle. A lock not worthy of the name. Just a modest assertion that “this is a private space, so no peeking.” Nothing more than a reminder to the forgetful.

They say that locks only protect us from the righteous, and this of all locks definitely appealed to people’s better natures. Naturally, I rejected the appeal, not having anything resembling a better nature. Case dismissed, this court is adjourned.

I felt around in my pocket for some coins.

It held the change from when I had bought Ononoki’s chocolate chunk scone─and fishing out a ten-yen coin, I opened the lock on the closet door.

Inside was the decomposing corpse of a middle-aged man who’d been chainsawed into pieces. Not bloody likely─on first glance a vista of not bloody anything opened before me.

It held clothes, hanging on hangers.

But that wasn’t all.

Or rather, the clothes were just camouflage, and behind them.

“What the hell…”