Monogatari Series - Volume 15 - Chapter 3.05

005

The epilogue, or maybe, the punch line of this story.

After that I returned to the park to confirm the “solution” Hanekawa suggested─and obviously, I mean this goes without saying, but her deduction was right on the money.

“Listen, Araragi. You keep saying that you checked out the sandbox─but it was just the sand you checked out, wasn’t it?” That’s what she said. “A sandbox─also includes the container the sand is in.”

The container?

Even after she said it, it didn’t click right away─and this usually ends up driven to the periphery of our thoughts on the subject, but of course, in order to keep it from mixing with the soil around it, the “sand” in a “sandbox,” unlike the sand on a beach, is surrounded by a container that is, for lack of a better analogy, like a swimming pool that’s been partially buried in the ground.

If you kept digging down into a sandbox, at some point you would reach the “bottom”─but a sandbox is surprisingly deep, so children sometimes believe that it’s bottomless or that it simply melds into the soil around them.

That’s how sandboxes are generally constructed, anyway, and once it’s pointed out─or once you think about it for a second, it all makes sense.

“So Araragi, if you’re investigating a sandbox but didn’t investigate the box itself, it doesn’t really count as investigating the sandbox. And─” Hanekawa’s tone became somewhat severe. “Sand is heavy.”

Even sand with nothing unusual about it.

That’s what she said─which is how I found myself at the sandbox in question, digging a hole with a shovel I’d brought.

Digging hurriedly, but cautiously.

And at last, after an excavation of about two feet, I reached the bottom.

Where─there was an enormous crack.

An enormous.

Crack.

“…”

Now it all made sense.

Because the bottom of the “sandbox” was ruptured, probably from a combination of age and the weight of the sand (as Hanekawa had pointed out), the surface settled into that shape─appeared to be the solution to the mystery.

Just as water conforms to the shape of a vessel, so too does sand─though it takes much longer and the process is less obvious than it is with water.

Which is why the sand didn’t “revert” immediately after children played there, or immediately after I kicked it all over the place in the course of my investigation─but it would “revert” over time.

Almost as if it had a will of its own.

Taking on a shape that reflected the topography of the bottom of its container.

And, as predicted, the demonic form was probably pure happenstance─thanks to the simulacrum phenomenon or what, I don’t know.

But it was just as Hanekawa said─the deterioration of the container, and the weight of the sand, being neither man-made nor aberration-related, were indeed natural phenomena, yet not at all placid ones.

The most placid solution, this was not─far from it.

Natural phenomena, though not wind and rain.

Up to this point, it’s natural phenomena─and it would be natural phenomena from here on out as well.

As of now, those phenomena’s effect was limited to a strange pattern appearing on the surface of the sand, but if the fissure in the container continued to grow, then the sandbox really might become bottomless─sand and earth mingling until they turned into quicksand, or to the point of liquification…not on a scale that would pose a problem for an adult, perhaps, but one that might prove fatal for any children playing in the sandbox.

Who might be swallowed up.

As if by a bottomless swamp.

Even if that was the worst-case scenario, playing in a sandbox whose container was broken was a dangerous thing to do─dangerous enough that at this point, it was a race against time.

Which is why Hanekawa had scolded me.

“So, for now…a call to the management company that oversees the park?”

No, it was probably the town that oversaw the park, not a private company… Well, if I contacted the all-knowing Hanekawa, she could tell me.

Then at last we’d be leaving this case behind.

But seriously… I thought, looking at the hole I had dug. Maybe that whole debate misses the mark. Aberrations are more frightening than human beings, human beings are more frightening than aberrations─that debate entirely missed the mark.

More frightening and less placid than human agency or any aberration…is nature.

As scary as a demon, as scary as people.