Monogatari Series - Volume 17 - Chapter 2.07

007

Ogi and I followed the map contained inside envelope c to arrive at what might be called a flag lot in a new housing development not far from Public Middle School #701. Standing there, surrounded on all four sides by homes, was a dilapidated house. So perhaps it would be more accurate to say it was crumbling there, not standing there─in botanical terms, it seemed withered. Yet this derelict building was the exact place frequented by first-year middle schooler Koyomi Araragi.

“Hm. Could this be like the abandoned former cram school that I hear my uncle used as his bedroom while he stayed in this town?”

“Ah…yeah, I guess so.”

True, this secluded, rundown home did bring to mind that no-longer-standing building. You could even say the two places were just about as deeply memorable to me.

But. That said. I went to that abandoned building so many times to visit Oshino, to give blood to Shinobu─so why hadn’t I ever thought about this place? It seemed completely reasonable to make the association at least once.

I couldn’t help but be puzzled.

Now Oikura’s words made sense.

She hated water that thinks it made itself boil.

She hated people who don’t know why they’re happy.

Ungrateful people who lived their happy little lives─now I understood.

She was exactly right─neither more nor less. It wasn’t any exaggeration to say that by completely forgetting about this dilapidated place, I’d forgotten why I was me.

It was like carrying on with my life having forgotten the name of my parents.

How embarrassing─no.

How shameful.

Was this what Ogi meant moments ago by “suggestive”? Aberrations existing before aberrational phenomena─but as far as she was concerned…

“It’s so rundown it’s dangerous. It’s at the mercy of the elements and not even being maintained. I’m a germophobe, unlike my uncle, so I could never live in a place like this. You’ve got to be kidding me.”

She didn’t hesitate to slander wholesale a place that held a treasured spot in my memories─I’d be lying to say it didn’t offend me, but how convincing would a scolding be from someone who’d forgotten about it until just moments ago?

It’d be brazen─transparent and shameless.

Not to mention, unlike her uncle, Ogi was young and innocent. Only natural for her to dislike a place like this.

I spoke.

Recalling the figure of a girl─of that girl.

“I used to meet a girl in this deserted place…”

“Hm. Why would you do that?”

While my words brimmed with emotion, Ogi’s were rather sharp. Her tone lacked any trace of sentiment. She seemed to find this crumbling home extremely displeasing─but not enough for that spirit of investigation at her core to shrivel. She took a look at the nameplate at the gate as soon as she detected a break in the conversation.

She took a look, but there wasn’t any plate where one ought to go, only an old piece of rubber tape, rudely stuck there. We didn’t even need to try the intercom next to it to tell that it was broken.

“Since there’s a trace of a nameplate, this place must have been a regular home, right? I mean, there are nothing but homes all around it.”

“Who knows,” I answered. “I’m not that familiar with this area. I never was. I was never aware of any nameplate as a middle schooler.” Ogi really was sharp. Even if we couldn’t press the button on the intercom, she knew which buttons to press when it came to fieldwork. “But it was to do homework, rather than fieldwork, that I frequented this place. A home, huh…”

I looked at the crumbling house again. Despite having slept over in that abandoned cram school like Oshino, I hesitated to walk inside. More because it seemed in danger of collapsing than for any sanitary reasons─but I hadn’t come all this way just to look at it from the outside and turn tail.

There was no getting off this ride─or rather.

What goes up─must come down.

No, maybe I was only digging myself in deeper here…

“You know, I called it a haunted house back then.”

“Heh. A haunted house─that you visited every day for a whole summer? How spooky. Our tale’s suddenly turned into a ghost story.”

“Well, yes… An old-fashioned one.”

I opened the gate and walked inside. Maybe it was trespassing since someone surely owned the land, but unless I stepped in, the story couldn’t unfold. Entering the premises felt a bit like treading into my own mind without taking off my shoes, but that was just another feeling I had to ignore.

I had to if I were to face it.

If I were to face my past─

“Heh,” chuckled Ogi. “People must live facing the future, but every now and then, the past catches up to you─I guess? At least in this case. Humans live their lives having forgotten pretty big things. That goes for me too─but when something suddenly triggers our memories, we act surprised. Let’s hope all that comes out of this ghost story is a jump scare. Heheheh…”

Ogi briskly skipped along the stepping-stones behind me, and we arrived at the entrance. A rusted sign, which hadn’t been visible from the front gate, hung on its handle.

For Sale.

Underneath were the name and contact info for a management agency, but the rust made it illegible─I couldn’t even be sure the company still existed.

“This sign wasn’t here when I was visiting this place. It must be under new management compared to five years ago─”

It might even have changed hands more than once. That’s just how long a period five years is─and while the place looked like the same haunted house to my memory-tinted eyes, I had to admit it was a building, not some sort of immortal vampire. It had to change.

It was only a “haunted house” because that’s what I felt like calling it.

In fact, it was just a derelict house.

“Heh. Yes, you’re right. Still, I wouldn’t want to come by here at night. Let’s go home before it gets dark.”

“Yeah, I know─I’m not going to make you hang around with me for that long.”

I looked at my watch. It was before five in the afternoon.

At this time of the year, evening turned to night before you knew it. If we really were to go home before it got dark, I basically had no time to waste.

I put my hand on the handle. Surprisingly─or maybe naturally, the door was locked. It resisted me.

The place did have a new proprietor, then─no one ever locked the front door back when I used to visit.

The door would just open for me.

Welcomingly.

“Well, we could force it open…but why don’t we try one of the windows? I’m sure we can find one to enter through, they’ve been sitting here for the breaking all this time.”

As I made this lukewarm proposal, Ogi was already getting to it, but she must have only heard the first half. The entrance was weather-beaten, but it still was an entrance, and it was against it that my junior slammed her body.

Seriously?

Dealing with a stubborn door by charging into it (with a shoulder tackle?) was something I’d only ever seen in crime dramas─just how obsessed with mysteries was this girl?

In any case, whether you’ve been locked in a room or are going after a holed-up criminal, trying to force a closed door by slamming into it is inefficient. The area of impact is too large, and the momentum spreads out. It’s more logical to focus on a specific point, kicking down the door at the area around its lock─when the riot police charges into a closed space, they use a ram as if they’re going to sound a temple bell, to smash their way in. We needed none of this reasoning, though. The entrance had exceeded its lifespan, and a solid slam from the slender body of a high school freshman brought it down easily.

“Okay,” Ogi said, “let’s hurry up and go inside. The neighbors might call the police after hearing that noise.”

She hastily entered the building, her already-swift actions accelerating further, and I could barely keep up. This should’ve been a journey through my memories, but all of a sudden it felt like she’d taken the reins─or had she held them from the beginning?

“If the police show up, I’ll say that we got lost, so make sure our stories are straight,” she advised.

“Why do you seem so used to doing this?” I asked with some disbelief, but maybe she actually was. I didn’t imagine she was some sort of abandoned-building aficionado, given her earlier antipathy, but she must regularly perform various kinds of fieldwork just like her uncle. I suppose she gets questioned by the police or reported to the authorities by neighbors? When we were entering Public Middle School #701, she was on high alert, too.

Being concerned about the police made her a very delinquent young woman despite her spick-and-span image, but I wasn’t too different. We were both on the watch for the authorities as we went about our lives, so I couldn’t scold her as her senior. How many faces would I need to do that? Two wouldn’t cut it.

“Don’t worry, I’ll give them the same story. Getting lost is embarrassing as a high schooler, but better than getting my whole life derailed.”

“Getting your life derailed? What’s that supposed to mean?” my partner found fault with my words. “Sure, they might get mad at you, but it’s not like your whole life is going to get derailed just because you were questioned by the police. For the most part, those kinds of people are on the side of us upstanding citizens. Just how much of a coward are you?”

“Well, you know. In my case, both of my parents are police officers, so─”

“Your parents are police officers!” Ogi reacted dramatically.

Hm?

Why did I say that?

Both parents in the Araragi household, both father and mother, being police officers was one of my most private facts, and I told as few people as possible─some of my most highly classified pieces of information, withheld from Hanekawa and even Senjogahara. Why leak it to a transfer student I met for the first time just yesterday?

It was hard to believe. I could only chalk it up to letting my guard down.

Yes, my guard had come down visiting this nostalgic spot, what else could it be─but no amount of regret could take back the words that had come out of my mouth. Both of my parents are police officers was powerful bait to a mystery buff like Ogi, and she was acting like a fish on a line I never meant to cast.

“Why didn’t you tell me? How awful, how could you keep something like that from me, how amazing!”

“Well, it’s not something you’d come out and tell someone you’ve just met─”

“What greater tradition is there in mysteries than having a police officer as a close relative? My goodness, I always knew you were a senior deserving of respect, but I never thought you were royalty!”

“…I guess there are a lot of mysteries like that.”

It did seem more like a TV or film setup to me than a mystery novel motif─but now that she mentioned it, a Japanese detective fiction lion, Mitsuhiko Asami, fit the bill.

“In that case, no need to worry. If someone did report us and the police biked over here, your parents could just bail us out. Can’t you hear the officer interrogating us saying it already? ‘Oh! I never imagined that you were Commissioner Araragi’s son!’”

“Neither of my parents are that high up. And anyway, they aren’t the type to bail out their son if he got himself in a fix,” I retorted in a pained voice.

No, more in pain generally.

As much as I didn’t want to discuss my parents, it was going to be difficult to change the subject and cut this short without any sort of explanation, given how deeply Ogi had her teeth in it.

She really was good at drawing things out of you. I didn’t think I was particularly loose-lipped…

“If anything, they’re the kind of strict parents who’d never forgive their kids for breaking rules. They disciplined me as a kid by taking me to the nearest police box any time I did something bad.”

“A police box? Now that’s scary─I could even see that traumatizing you.”

Well.

It probably did.

Quite the trauma.

But it, too, was part of the past that created the present-day me─I consist of many things. I’m built of many things. The issue is the degree to which I’m aware of it─whether I remember it or not.

I hate people who don’t know what they’re made up of─Oikura had told me. Now that I remembered this dilapidated house, I had to admit, I saw what she was trying to say.

This place.

That girl. That I lived having forgotten them─did mean I didn’t know what I’m made up of.

I hadn’t remembered, after all.

“They haven’t done it to me in a while, but I can’t even imagine what kind of discipline would be awaiting me at home if I got taken into custody. All that time off would only make it worse.”

Maybe I wouldn’t have had to worry about it six months earlier, when my parents had half-abandoned my high-school-washout self, but now I was starting to see signs of reconciliation as far as that part of our relationship. I wouldn’t want to let it go to waste, even if I was still waist-deep in teen rebellion.

“So, Ogi. I’m going to be as scared of the police as I can. If the worst does happen, I’m sorry, but I want you to play the role of a delicate little high school girl.”

“Haha. Well, it’s not like I have to play a role, I really am a delicate little high school girl. Don’t worry, I won’t testify, even by mistake, that you forced me to come into this abandoned home.”

“How would you even make that big of a mistake?”

Forget about custody, they’d arrest me for that.

I’d have committed a huge mistake.

Anyway, we went straight into the derelict house via the broken (by us) front door─I think this goes without saying, but we kept our shoes on. While manners would have us taking them off, it’s not as though an abandoned home had slippers for visitors.

The floor was of course not in a state where Ogi, the germophobe, could walk on it, and stepping on any of the scattered glass or odd scraps of wood and metal could cause injury or worse. Tetanus isn’t as far-removed a disease from our lives as you might think.

“Speaking of tetanus,” Ogi began to ask, walking at a rather leisurely pace down the hall compared to her entry.

Her slower speed was due to the lack of electricity (even if the building did have it, every one of its light bulbs was broken) and the dark interior, as well as our fieldworker inspecting the area around her as she walked. For my part, nostalgia had me looking around, so I didn’t feel that she was going particularly slow.

“Is the back of your hand that Miss Oikura stabbed okay?”

“Hm? What, are you worried about me?”

“Of course I am. How could I, Ogi Oshino, your faithful junior, not be worried about her esteemed senior Araragi? Please be careful, that body doesn’t belong to you alone,” she said, not making any sense.

Yet another form of teasing─Oshino’s jokes were similar, now that I thought about it. I didn’t get their brand of humor. Just how disconnected were they from the rest of the world?

“No worries, as you know, I have a vampire’s constitution. It’s already healed up without a scar. Fortunately, in the ensuing commotion…”

The commotion that was two girls passing out.

“I was able to fudge whether or not I’d really gotten stabbed with a pen. Senjogahara’s arrival was a blessing, if you look at it that way.”

“Or you’re that weak of a presence in class─weak to the point that you can vanish without anyone figuring anything out. I guess you’re not that different from two years ago in that sense?”

Ogi snickered. Maybe she really was making fun of me.

Pondering this, I continued.

“Oikura ended up spending the whole day in the nurse’s room. Too bad─just when she’d finally made it to school.”

As for Senjogahara, she left early. She would have been taken to the nurse’s room as well, but when the teacher wasn’t looking, she made herself scarce─what was she, a master thief or something?

“Haha. I see, I see. I can only imagine how hard that must have been on Miss Hanekawa.”

“You said it─and I went off on this journey through my memories to try to lessen any part of that load, but…well, at least it seems like it won’t be in vain. Not that this will leave me feeling great…”

“I wonder. If there’s one thing I could say─” Ogi turned to face me. “The theory that Miss Oikura holds a grudge against you because of what happened at the class council two years ago─probably doesn’t hold up.”

“Hm?”

“The chances that she mistakenly believes that you brought about her downfall, or are the culprit who leaked the test answers, are strikingly low. Why, you ask?” said Ogi, amused.

Well, I didn’t ask.

While she hadn’t enjoyed the Monty Hall problem all too much, she must have a fundamental love for mysteries and solving them, whether it was this or our earlier time in the classroom. Maybe even her germophobia was the inverse of a personality that loved to take messy situations and give them order. Though you could just call her a mystery nerd… Anyway, her assertion made me want to hear why the chances were low─whether or not I was asking.

“It’s simple. Because she came to school.”

“What do you mean by that?”

It was odd, now that she mentioned it.

A mystery.

Oikura had refused to come to school for two years after the majority vote, so why appear out of nowhere today─with zero warning signs. It was almost as if Ogi and I picking up where that meeting left off and pinning down the culprit, locked in that classroom, had triggered it. But it was a pretty big stretch to claim the two were related. Things happening in a specific order didn’t imply causation─it made even less sense than a butterfly flapping its wings and causing a tornado.

“What I mean by that─well, Miss Hanekawa said it from the start. Tetsujo-sensei went on maternity leave, and Miss Oikura came to school as if to replace her─”

“…”

Hanekawa did say that.

Right.

I’d completely forgotten thanks to the commotion that followed…

“In other words,” explained Ogi, “Miss Oikura could come to school because Tetsujo-sensei is no longer at Naoetsu High.”

“…Which means, she knows who the culprit was.”

She knew─or rather, figured it out.

During the majority vote.

When Tetsujo raised her hand after the class was asked who thought Oikura had done it─or maybe she only realized during the two years she spent “shut in at home,” as she put it. I didn’t know, but essentially, she figured out that her homeroom teacher had framed her.

“…”

Not as if it improved Oikura’s situation─if anything, it must have been the reason why she couldn’t come to school. If it was me, I doubt I could ever return even if Tetsujo was gone.

In that sense, she was tough mentally.

“Tough? I don’t know, it looks to me like she’s bullying herself and enjoying it.”

“Bullying herself…”

“She’s so weak. A heavyweight weakling, even. She tries to put herself in bad situations, intentionally driving herself into corners─and isn’t there only one thing she could want from that? You might even call it a roundabout suicide. No matter how awful things get, maybe they aren’t ruinous enough for her,” Ogi said nastily.

I guess she could be this biting about Oikura because they’d never met, but then again, this was Ogi. She might say the exact same thing to Oikura’s face.

Even in the face of someone so weak, who’d crumble at a touch, she might refuse to ease up.

Saying, Fool.

“In any case, what we do know is that Miss Oikura has never given voice to her grudges or hatred for you in relation to the class council.”

“Never given voice to her hatred…”

What was she doing making it sound so romantic?

But true─even if the class council transformed her personality and temperament, it wasn’t her immediate reason for hating me.

That’s what Ogi meant.

Because as far as that went, Oikura hated me from the day we met in Year 1 Class 3.

She hated me─like you’d hate a homewrecker.

“She hates water that thinks it made itself boil, was it? She says the most interesting things. In other words, Miss Oikura simply couldn’t stand the way you live not knowing, even forgetting your roots. But when you really dig into it, that seems odd too. Plenty of people forget about the past. Like I was saying─I’ve lost most of my elementary-school self to oblivion, to the point that I wonder if I was born just recently and don’t have any past at all.”

“Born just recently… What, like the five-minute hypothesis?”

“So then why does Miss Oikura hate only you like you’re some sort of homewrecker? How strange, how unusual, how suspicious─how frightening.”

“Frightening?”

“Yes─due to the difference,” Ogi said, enjoying every moment of this. She couldn’t actually be frightened, but indeed, people who hate you and attack you for no good reason are the scariest thing in the world.

If you don’t understand their goal, you can’t deal with them─in order to fight, you must first know what your opponent considers just. What Sodachi Oikura thought was right, what she believed was right─this trip was in part to figure that out.

“Hahaha. I see, well said, Araragi-senpai. But be careful. While you can’t fight without understanding what your opponent considers just, you’ll be unable to fight if you start believing that justice is on their side. If you think they’re no less right, or righter than you, it’s too late─how do you fight then?”

“…”

“Speechless? Are you thinking you’d be fine even if that happened? Or have you already understood what Miss Oikura considers just─and lost the will to fight?”

I wouldn’t say that.

I understood something─a mistake that Koyomi Araragi made that might be the flip side of Oikura’s righteousness.

My own mistake.

I couldn’t be certain yet─couldn’t claim to have remembered it all, or to have a perfect understanding of what she was trying to say. I’d have to reach the deepest part of this derelict house to grasp that.

That’s where it was─my truth.

It had to be.

The prologue and epilogue that needed to be told, of my tale.

Certainly not a monologue, but a dialogue─with her.

“We should’ve brought a flashlight,” Ogi griped in response to my silence as she began walking again. “I’d have brought my set of fieldwork tools if I had the time. Since we came straight from school, all I have are my cosmetics.”

“Isn’t it against the rules to have cosmetics with you?”

“Well, I’ve only just transferred. I don’t know the rules yet, you see.”

Ogi’s plan, as she spouted her convenient logic, must have been to keep on searching, but there was no need. Climbing the stairs and looking at a certain room on the second floor would suffice.

When I made my way up the perilous stairs, which threatened to collapse underfoot, and entered the room─

I was already certain.

“Yikes, this one looks just as terrible on the inside. I know you called this building a haunted house, but that’s literally what this place is,” Ogi dispraised, holding a handkerchief to her mouth. Maybe it was too dusty─she seemed truly revolted. “But dilapidated as it is, you can see signs of repair: rubber tape on the broken windows, putty on the cracks in the wall. The management’s earning their keep─or maybe there was a time when they did?”

“Beats me. Even if someone did some work on this place, it was management that existed before I started showing up here─the windows already looked like this by the time I came by.”

“Is that so?”

“Yeah. In that sense, this place is exactly like it was five years ago. Unchanged. As if time─has stopped.”

Like the classroom we’d wandered into the day before.

Actually, no. The dust and stagnant air that Ogi hated so much spoke to the passage of time. It wasn’t as if time had really stopped like with that supernatural phenomenon.

But coming here─instantly transported my heart and mind back by five years.

It felt more like traveling through time than actual time travel did.

“See the low, small table over there? We used it.”

“You used it? How? As a chair?”

“No…”

“I don’t really get this to begin with.”

Even if the low table was a chair, Ogi didn’t want to use any that who-knows-who had sat in. She’d never perch on a table covered in splinters and a thin layer of grime. If she moved stuff around with her feet, she could make a place on the floor to sit like I used to, but even I thought it might be unsanitary with so much dust.

Would it not have bothered me five years ago?

Kids can be fearless that way.

“Why keep coming back to these ruins every day for an entire summer? Your behavior just doesn’t make sense─were you an adventure-loving grade schooler, or what?”

“Says the fieldwork-loving high schooler. Of course it doesn’t make sense, kids never do. I don’t know why. My mindset then was nothing like it is now.”

That might go for everyone. This wasn’t just a difference between children and adults, but between the past and the future.

When I look back on this a dozen years later, eighteen-year-old Koyomi Araragi’s behavior would surely seem mysterious─I’d tilt my head and wonder, why talk about myself in a derelict building to a transfer student I’d only just met?

Okay, I was already wondering.

A real-time mystery.

Seriously, why did my tongue get so loose around her? When she asked, I even answered questions I could cover up with a throwaway lie.

By the time I noticed, I’d given my answer.

Ogi was a good listener, but maybe she was a good interviewer too? Oshino had been an expert talker despite how frivolous he seemed─and I guess his niece took after him. Interviews and hearings must be an important part of fieldwork, after all.

In any case, I began to tell her.

About what happened five years ago.

About who I met─and what we did together.

About the stuff that Koyomi Araragi─was made up of.

I told her.

I told my tale.