Monogatari Series - Volume 17 - Chapter 1.05

005

I went to visit Ogi after school like I’d said, and from there we briskly walked over to the building where the AV room was located. Ogi took the lead. This made me feel like I was the transfer student and she was showing me around school. She talked to me about all kinds of things on our way there─so I wouldn’t get bored, I assumed. Things like “the law in serialized manga where editors write really long copy for titles they’re not confident about (on the other hand, copy for popular manga is short)” or “the law where the more expensive something gets, the slower it goes (the speed at which food is served at a restaurant, paying the bill, the delivery of goods, wrapping a present),” stuff she came up with herself. It seemed that she was a fan of laws. Seeing her talk on and on made me think there was indeed something about her that took after Mèmè Oshino. There was also something about it that made her feel like a fresh high school girl. I savored both the nostalgia and the freshness of it as we arrived at our destination. And at our destination, the third floor of the school building in question, next to the AV room, sure enough.

There it was.

A classroom.

“See, Ogi? Take a look at that. There’s a regular classroom right here. You overlooked it, that’s all. In other words, you added the space taken up by this classroom to your drawing of the AV room. Now it’s clear that you made a mistake. So I think it’s time for you to strip down and use your wide-open arms in place of a ruler to remeasure the entire school. Maybe I’ll have you measure my body while you’re at it. I feel like I’ve grown lately,” I didn’t actually say.

After all, it was far stranger for there to be a classroom here than not─in a building full of special classrooms, why was there a regular one, like it had sprouted up out of nowhere? It was so out of place that it left an impression, and I absolutely would’ve remembered it. Even if I didn’t remember it looking at a floor plan, I definitely would after seeing it in person.

“Hmm? What could this classroom be? It wasn’t here when I visited the area to draw my layout. What a big, old mystery,” Ogi said, flatly for some reason─grinning as always. It almost looked like she was enjoying this.

“Anyway…let’s go inside.”

It was the wrong decision. It seems obvious that I should have stepped back, come up with a plan, and returned. I should have drawn on Hanekawa’s wisdom and consulted Shinobu, who was sleeping in my shadow─but I wanted to show my underclassman that I was reliable, so I recklessly opened the door and walked inside.

Like a fool.

From the outside, it seemed like no one was there, but the door was unlocked, making it easy to enter─no one, indeed.

Just rows of desks and chairs, as well as a teacher’s desk and a locker for cleaning supplies.

An empty classroom─nothing odd about that. The fact is, the unticking clock and the gym being visible from the windows already stood out, but I had yet to notice. It certainly wasn’t stuffed full of treasure, and as far as I could see, it was a plain classroom. Assuming I’d just remembered wrong and that it’d always been right here, I felt relieved, not noticing─not noticing a single thing I should have.

Ogi entered the classroom as well.

Then closed the door.

“And that brings us to now…”

I looked at the clock above the blackboard, then compared it to my wristwatch─noting the disparity between the time my watch displayed and the (stopped) time on the hanging clock.

My watch was operating like nothing had happened, so it was possible that the clock on the wall was out of batteries, but Ogi hadn’t dismissed that possibility out of hand. If time was stopped inside the classroom, to some degree that explained why the doors wouldn’t budge and the windows wouldn’t break. A class where time had stopped─or no, maybe I ought to call it a class where time didn’t pass?

“I guess the question is how fixed in time it really is,” Ogi said, facing the blackboard again. It wasn’t a ballpoint pen in her hands now, but a regular implement for writing on a blackboard, which is to say chalk. “That’s right, blackboard chalk. But I’m old-fashioned, so I prefer to call it slate.”

With that, she drew a line across the blackboard.

While the ballpoint pen had failed to leave a mark on it, this time she managed to draw a clear white line on the board.

“Wh… Whoa,” I exclaimed, not so much at the experiment result showing that you could draw on the blackboard with chalk, but at the level of activity with which Ogi performed test after test. Weren’t people normally more cautious in a sealed environment like ours?

“Hahaha. Looks like chalk works. I wonder what the logic is here. What about this?” Ogi then held the chalk sideways to draw a thick line. It was a forbidden way of using chalk that consumed a piece in the blink of an eye. Still, she could draw that way. Her thick line bent back and forth as she drew a love umbrella.

From there, she held the chalk vertically again and wrote “Koyomi” and “Ogi” under each side of the umbrella.

“Hahaha! Just messing around!”

“This really isn’t the time for that, Ogi…”

Oops. If anything, this wasn’t the time for me to be getting ticked off by an underclassman’s silly joke─I should’ve been coming up with my own experiments, my own trials and errors to figure out how to escape from the locked room.

“Will the lights turn on?” We hadn’t tried the switches yet since there was more than enough light coming through the window─but I tried flicking them all on. All of them at the same time, in our situation, showed how slovenly I am, but the fluorescent tubes on the ceiling lit up anyway. “So there’s electricity… I guess this place functions as a classroom, at least?”

I wasn’t sure… Still, if it was getting electricity, then as a last-ditch escape method we could use an outlet to light a spark and cause a fire. Tsukihi had done something similar in the past to help Karen (quite literally the Fire Sisters), but while it was probably safer than an explosion, we ran the risk of suffocating if we started a fire in an enclosed space, making it an honest-to-goodness last-ditch method.

“Is there a danger,” I muttered, “of us suffocating even if we didn’t? I wonder how fast a human being consumes oxygen. We’d run out eventually if this goes on for too long…”

“I don’t know about that one. This is a classroom, after all─it might be a locked room, but I doubt we’re sealed off from even the atmosphere. Maybe if someone used tape to trap us in here, but enough air should be seeping through the window frames and all to keep two humans alive.”

“Oh… That’s a relief.”

Though I said I was relieved, I noticed that Ogi had used the words locked room. She probably just happened to choose them, of course, but maybe she was right.

Locked room might be a more fitting term for our situation than enclosed space if we weren’t in an airtight environment.

Sheesh.

Guided by a blueprint to a hidden room like something out of a mystery novel─we now found ourselves in a locked room. Not a bad setup, but it had a lamentable lack of a detective.

“What do you think, Araragi-senpai?”

“What do I think? Well…what am I supposed to?”

I had to admit─that a floor plan that didn’t seem quite right and my inability to recall the classroom could be put down to some misunderstanding, but there was no logical explanation for ending up in a locked room. My only choice was to explain it illogically, as an absurdity.

“But Ogi. If an aberration is doing this─what kind of aberration is it? Is there some aberration that locks people in a classroom?”

“Hard to say. Unlike my uncle, I’m not versed in that old-timey lore. I only know major aberrations, the kinds that show up in manga and movies,” she either played dumb or acted modest─with such unfathomable snickering that it made me think she actually did know. It was the same when I talked to Oshino─I couldn’t help but distrust him. Seeing my suspicious eyes on her, Ogi continued.

“But I’m sure there has to be some kind of aberration that keeps you from leaving a locked room. The type you hear about most doesn’t let you leave until the next visitor shows up and you trick them into walking in so that you can leave. That sort of thing.”

Yes, I’d heard that kind of ghost story─so were we stuck in this classroom until someone else showed up? No, that couldn’t be right, it wasn’t as if anyone trapped inside had left when we walked in. Even if this was an aberration, it was a different type of phenomenon.

“Ah, I was so afraid a fool like you might go along with that hypothesis.” Ogi smiled gently─she was cutest whenever she called me a fool, but what was it? I kept missing my chance to scold her. “I can say this much, though. For every aberration, there is a reason─you see.”

“…”

Wasn’t that another one of Oshino’s lines? In which case, the inference was that figuring this reason out would help us escape…

“Still, why’d we be unable to leave a classroom? And why should a clock stop the way─”

“Maybe the time its hands stopped on is the key? I mean─doesn’t the ridiculous time they’ve stopped on feel odd?”

The clock hanging on the wall read a little before six─5:58, to be exact. As for my wristwatch, it said 4:45. Ogi and I must have started our investigation at around 3:30─so an hour and fifteen minutes had already passed since the onset of our abnormal situation.

“Even if that clock stopping a little before six is the key, is that supposed to be a.m. or p.m.? You can’t tell with an analog clock.”

“I think it’s p.m.─judging from the view outside.”

“Hm? Wait, really? If anything…”

Referencing the scene beyond the windows hadn’t occurred to me. While I was quietly impressed by Ogi, I didn’t want to betray my lack of insight to an underclassman, forcing me to find faults in her argument. I keenly hated how small of a person I was.

“Wouldn’t it be darker out if it was six in the evening? At this time of the year─you might not know this because you’re a transfer student, Ogi, but the sun around here sets pretty early once it’s October.”

“It does? Huh, I learn so much from talking to you. I still think it’s 6 p.m., though─look at the direction of the shadow cast by the gym. The sun would have to be in the west for it to look that way.”

“Mmm…okay. But we’re facing─wait, no. We shouldn’t base our direction off of this building’s position since we’re seeing the wrong thing from the window. We ought to use the gym’s position instead. And it faces east-west,” I muttered, recalling Ogi’s gym page─fine. In that case, yes, the clock was showing 5:58 p.m.

“Six in the evening is when school closes for the day, right? Heh, so we’ll be able to leave in time─oh, or maybe it’s still 3:30 outside if the clock is stopped?”

“That would mean my wristwatch is malfunctioning here. This is getting annoying…”

“What’re you talking about, time travel is a walk in the park for you,” Ogi said─hm?

Hold on, she shouldn’t know anything about the time travel stuff, it happened after Oshino left town─

“Details aside, we sure are in a bind, aren’t we? If time isn’t moving forward, that means night is never going to come. In other words, you won’t be able to rely on that nightwalker…er, Miss Shinobu.”

“Mm. Oh, I guess not.”

Shinobu Oshino, the vampire who lives in my shadow, formerly known as the Aberration Slayer, is like a natural predator to any and all aberrational phenomena─an aberration who eats other aberrations. If she could make an appearance, she’d surely consume whatever we were facing, maybe even the whole classroom. But it was quite a lot of work luring out someone nocturnal like her at the awkward hour of “just before six in the evening.” It wasn’t impossible…but there was no telling how many donuts she’d demand in return.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Even if time isn’t flowing in this classroom, it’s moving for me─so maybe it is inside my shadow for Shinobu, too?”

“We don’t know for sure if time is flowing for you. It could be that only your will is active, while time has stopped for your body. I mean, I hope that our physiologies aren’t moving through time.”

“Why not?”

“What’re we going to do if we want to pee?”

“…”

A serious problem, indeed. I was doing my best not to think about it, but more than hunger or thirst, that was the most pressing issue─if anything, though, Ogi kept calm as she said this.

“I’ve heard all about your heroics, but even if you’re known as our era’s Junichiro Tanizaki, you couldn’t possibly be into watching a girl pee and vice versa.”

“Who are you calling our era’s Tanizaki?”

“If time really has stopped in this classroom right before six─why would that be?” asked Ogi, putting us back on track.

“What do you mean, why…”

“Let me rephrase that. Six in the evening, time to leave school. What meaning does this phenomenon hold, where two students are trapped in a classroom at the exact time when they ought to be leaving?”

“Not going home, even when it’s time to…”

She was right. It did seem odd─in fact, as far as school-related aberrations go, the type meant to teach some sort of lesson was the most common─like attacking students who loiter on the premises.

“Is this what you’d call detention?” said Ogi.

“Detention…”

Hm. Why was I getting hung up on that word? The reason wasn’t coming to me, but I got the vague sense that it meant something.

It felt like it stirred my memories─detention?

“Have you ever had to stay after school for some remedial session, Araragi-senpai? Hahaha. I can’t say I have. You might be surprised to know, but I’m on the smarter side.”

“Can’t say I have, either…”

“Oh, wow.”

Though Ogi acted impressed, it wasn’t smarts that kept me from doing detention or remedial work; I’d just skip any. Not that I could now, since I was hoping to take college entrance exams…but yes, last year or the year before that…especially when I was a first-year─a first-year?

“What’s the matter? Your fate doesn’t look well─I mean, your face.”

“Hm? Really? Sorry, I was just…feeling dizzy.”

“No need to apologize. No need at all. Being burdened with a helpless underclassman must be taxing. Would you like to sit down on one of those chairs? I’m sure you’re not a germophobe like me─but if you insist, I can lend you my lap.”

“Where exactly on your lent lap would I sit? If I borrowed it when you’re not sitting, that would be a gymnastic formation. Seriously…”

I was starting to get used to Ogi’s teasing. As her senior, I should’ve been putting her in her place (right, before it was too late as with Kanbaru), but I honestly did feel dizzy with a slight headache. I took Ogi’s suggestion and decided to sit down for a moment─not on her lap, of course, but in one of the classroom’s many chairs. I could see this going for a long time, so there was no point in overexerting myself now. I moved, pulled out a chair, and sat in it.

“Why did you sit there?” she asked as soon as I did, or maybe even a little before I did.

Huh, what? Why? She was the one who’d suggested it.

“No, that’s not what I mean─this classroom is full of chairs, so I wanted to know why you picked that one.”

“…”

Why’d there be a reason? I just felt like it─I thought of saying, but now that she’d asked, I couldn’t figure out the answer. If I was sitting down because I was tired, it made the most sense to pick the closest chair─so why get moving, wind my way through the desks, pass up a number of other chairs, and finally sit in the fourth seat from the front, third from the right?

I just felt like it was of course the only answer I could give…

“Felt like it,” Ogi said. “You just felt like─that was the easiest chair to sit in? It looked the most comfortable?”

“I don’t think there’s much difference in how comfortable any of these chairs are… It’s just─”

“Just what?”

“Like I felt used to sitting here.”

I myself thought that was an odd thing to say. Stumped as I was for an answer, used to─in a room I was visiting for the first time? Sure, if I need to rest in our classroom, even though all of the chairs are basically the same─I might unconsciously pick the most familiar seat, my own, to sit in…but this wasn’t even close to being our classroom.

“Is that really true?”

“Huh? What? What’d you just say, Ogi?”

“Oh, I’m just throwing every possibility at the wall─and I just realized that maybe this isn’t the first time you’ve come here. When you needed to take a seat, could you have gone straight to a specific chair because you’ve sat in it before?”

“…Sorry, that one’s too out there for me,” I replied with a half-smile─yeah, that didn’t seem like a hypothesis worth serious consideration. Ogi was playing around and teasing me again. “I didn’t even know there was a classroom here until now─”

“It wasn’t here when I did my first survey, either. But it appeared when I came with you─so it strikes me as completely natural that it has something to do with you.”

“Hm… Is that what it means.”

To be honest, I wondered if Ogi wasn’t the cause since she had discovered the aberrational phenomenon─but from her perspective, I was the suspicious one.

“You even said it yourself, Araragi-senpai. The view out of the window seemed familiar to you.”

“Huh? Did I?”

“You did. Right when we entered, before we noticed we were trapped.”

I didn’t remember this─but I must have if she was so certain. I must’ve forgotten once I realized I was in a locked room.

Still seated, I took another look out the window─where I could see the gym. At our angle, from this floor of this building, we shouldn’t have been able to─and the view from my seat was a little different from the one by the window. I couldn’t see the roof anymore, and instead mountains loomed off in the distance, and it did seem…

My memories.

They were being stirred.

“Hm… I remember seeing this. But…”

“But?” echoed Ogi, more cross-examining than following up─she’d gotten close to my seat without my noticing. She hadn’t made a sound, and she was so close that I found myself a little flustered. I started to talk, as if to gloss over the situation.

“Well… I wouldn’t say I feel particularly nostalgic. Actually, it’s kind of unpleasant…”

“Unpleasant? Really? I think it’s a nice view─this location, this situation. We were saying that despite being on the third floor, it felt more like the fourth or fifth floor, but it’s definitely the fifth at this height.”

“Fifth floor…”

Fifth floor─in which case.

Right… I needed to rethink this. The view was an impossibility from this floor of this building. What if this was the fifth floor, and I was in a classroom in a building that faced the gym─what if I was where I could see this?

I was familiar─with such a classroom.

Fukado.

“…!”

“Uh oh. What’s the matter─it’s not like something came to you? Sorry if I was insensitive,” Ogi said like she was apologizing. No, she wasn’t apologizing, she was savoring this. She’d changed positions again at some point and now stood directly behind me. “Did you just recall─something you didn’t want to recall?”

“No, that’s…not it. I haven’t recalled anything.”

Indeed, I hadn’t. Because I’d never forgotten it to begin with─how could I ever forget what happened? I bit my lips, went silent, and stuck my hand inside the desk─to search inside the seat I chose, claiming it was comfortable. The owner had to be pretty averse to studying at home; it was crammed with textbooks. I pulled one out and examined its back cover. There it said: Year 1, Class 3─Araragi.

“Guh…”

I covered my mouth and instantly moved to hide the name─but was too late. Ogi spotted it from over my shoulder.

“Wait a sec. Did that textbook just now say ‘Araragi’ on it? That’s funny, that’s strange, why could that be─why would your textbook be here in this classroom? Did you slip it in while I wasn’t looking? Please, don’t you know outside items aren’t allowed in this classroom?”

Just kidding, it’s not like this is a test, there’s no such rule, Ogi added slimily─somehow without ditching her easy tone. A test. That’s right, a test. Each word she uttered stirred my memories and stung them─not like a rose’s thorns, but like a porcupine’s quills.

Now desperate, I asked her: “Ogi… What do you know?”

“Nothing. You’re the one who knows. For example─”

Ogi reached for the seat next to mine. From the desk, she extracted a random textbook─then flipped it over and read the name on it. Year 1, Class 3. Toishima.

“You must know this Toishima person, too?”

“Yeah… I…”

I did.

Suisen Toishima. Everyone called her Sui for short─was she in the flower arrangement club? She was always laughing and smiling, no matter what you asked her or said to her. Didn’t her friends always caution her that laughing with her mouth wide open wasn’t ladylike? If anything, though, the boys liked her for her hearty laughter. The teachers did too. Hadn’t she been like a savior, in fact, for teachers who liked to joke during class? Right, and she was so serious about seat reassignments…and seemed pretty unhappy in this one, fourth from the front, second from the right, a half-assed position. Sitting right next to someone who looked so dissatisfied was bewildering at first, but then I came to realize it was a special front-row seat for hearing her laughter.

“She wore her hair in French braids… I knew just how long it took to do that because my little sister is like a walking hair catalog, and I always thought about the amount of work it must take her every morning. I never brought it up, though…”

“You sure do know a lot about this Miss Toishima.”

“No… Any classmate would know that much. I─”

I hadn’t known anything─after all.

This was back when I hadn’t─there were a lot of things I hadn’t known.

“Then what about Fukado? What kind of person sat at the desk I flipped over?”

It seemed that Ogi, too, had seen the name on that textbook. So she had, but not brought it up until now─well, that wasn’t odd. It’s not as if the name had anything to do with her.

“Shimono Fukado. Now her, I was scared of… Not because she did anything in particular. I think she was harmless. I guess she was just ridiculously good at putting forth a personality? To be blunt, she acted cute. She came to school wearing the kinds of fancy hair accessories you only ever see in anime, she’d get told not to all the time, and she’d get this look on her face like, ‘I don’t understand why you’re so mad at me.’ It was obvious that she knew… Maybe because she thought that being smart or a good student wasn’t cute, she’d do badly on tests on purpose─I won’t say she played dumb, but it was kind of like that. I think her goal for the future was ‘becoming a mom’─even an oaf like me could easily tell that ‘becoming a bride’ was the more girlish answer, so maybe she meant it. But when she smiled, her eyes never did, as far as I know.”

Damn. I was talking too much. I couldn’t stop once I’d started, though. It was like the floodgates had opened and the words were spilling forth─hadn’t I decided not to think about it anymore, even if I couldn’t forget it?

I’d thought I’d decided.

Why? Why was Year 1, Class 3─my classroom from two years earlier, here now? Just before six. 5:58 p.m. Right before it was time to go home. We needed to go home─but couldn’t.

This classroom─that no one could leave.

“Ogi? Is there anything around that might tell us the date?”

“The date?”

“Yeah. Like what today─or no, what month and day it is in this classroom. I need to know.”

“Well, it’s right there on the blackboard. Just take a look.”

Ogi was directly behind me now for the third time. Drawing her face close to mine, she put her arm around my shoulder and pointed at the blackboard. At its right-hand corner. Why hadn’t I noticed until now? “Today’s” date in this classroom was right there─along with the names of those who were on day duty.

July 15. Thursday. Koma / Marizumi.

“…!”

“Oh, so today’s July fifteenth─now it makes sense for it to be so bright outside. Hmm, so then, did something happen in this classroom─Year 1, Class 3, I suppose─at around six on Thursday, July fifteenth? Something regretful, I’m sure. And that regret must’ve borne fruit as this aberration,” remarked Ogi, broadly, as if none of it really mattered─I almost found myself protesting and saying it was more serious than that, but I couldn’t. The biggest reason being that I didn’t want to yell at a girl who was my underclassman─but also, she was completely on the mark when I thought about it.

What happened in this classroom on that day─really didn’t matter, which is exactly why it was so unbearable. Who knew what the space was being used for now. An afterschool class council meeting held on July fifteenth in the Year 1, Class 3 room, located in the center of the fifth floor of that building facing the gym. A gathering of the class council that might be termed a trial. There we condemned one another over a certain incident─asserting our own innocence and imputing guilt to others. There were objections, and there was the right to remain silent. There were testimonies, and there was perjury. And I─Koyomi Araragi of Year 1, Class 3, sat at the center of this tumultuous trial.

Right.

Wasn’t that when it started?

When I first started to say it?

“I don’t make friends─making friends would lower my intensity as a human,” Ogi preempted me. Preempted, as if to block my escape route. To chase me down a dead end.

Her face, still to the side of mine, drew even closer. Our cheeks almost touched now. She wasn’t just close, her dainty chin was resting on top of my shoulder.

“That was your favorite line─though it seems you’ve stopped saying it ever since Tsubasa Hanekawa came into your life. Ah, we really do change through meeting people, don’t we─so let me ask this, out of curiosity. How did you change when you were in this class? How did Fukado, how did Toishima, how did Koma, how did Marizumi─change you?”

“Change…m─”

“I’ve heard your personality changed quite a bit between middle school and high school. Could the reason for that possibly be found in this classroom?”

Who told her that? Well, some people did know, of course─but this was the past, and the only ones who’d bother digging it up now were the Fire Sisters.

“What happened, Araragi-senpai? Here in this classroom. That day. That time,” Ogi whispered the words like she was cornering me.

One of her arms was around my neck, and I felt like I was being throttled─and understood what people meant when they spoke of being hanged with a silk noose.

“Let’s talk about it─Koyomi Araragi,” she muttered, murmured. “You’ll feel better once you do. No matter how awful a memory might be, talk about it and it’ll turn into nothing more than a tale.”

“A tale…”

“Don’t worry, I’ll listen. I might not look it, but I’m someone you can really talk to.”

“…”

I did everything to maintain my composure, even then─even under those circumstances, I didn’t want to embarrass myself in front of my junior. How vain am I?

“We can’t leave,” I said.

“Excuse me?”

“We can’t leave─we aren’t allowed to exit this classroom until we figure out the culprit. That’s what we did─that’s what we forced upon ourselves in that class council. And as unbelievable as this sounds…I was the chairman.”