Monogatari Series - Volume 26 - Chapter 1.07

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And, inside was a nursery… If I had to guess, the third room at the farthest end had to be the bedroom of the estranged husband.

It was a nursery fancifully decorated by loving parents—or, to be precise, the remnants of such, vestiges of a baby’s room.

Because, if it was a three-year-old’s room, there was no need for mobiles hanging from the ceiling anymore, right? Especially not the crib right underneath it… It looked more like a room for a baby that was just barely a year old…Soft toys, pastel-colored wallpaper, remnants of fancy decorations, remnants of affection.

The curtains had been tightly shut.

And the crucial cage?

It was there.

I would have preferred if it wasn’t, but it was right there in front of me.

There was no magnificent plot twist in that respect—right next to the crib, there was a sturdy-looking cage, presumably made to keep a dog in.

It was a large cage that seemed difficult to assemble… Wouldn’t special equipment be needed for something like this? The cage itself was scary, but so was the effort that went into it… “You’d go that far?” was what I felt. I would think that she went to a lot of trouble to set up a cage of this level. The same went for the lock to this room… It felt like some uncomfortably elaborate device for capital punishment.

Well… The most favorite interpretation would be that Associate Professor Iesumi’s mind had been pushed to the point where she’d go this far.

That was something I’d known when I, a mere student, had been approached for something like this—so there was no plot twist that you’d find in a honkaku mystery.

For the cage itself.

The plot twist came with the contents of the cage—according to Associate Professor Iesumi’s explanation, the cage should have contained her three-year-old daughter, Iesumi Iie, who had been locked up for three days.

According to my inferences, that daughter was not Iie-chan herself, not a human but an oddity, the “replacement child”—however.

Within the innermost part of the threefold locked-room, what was tightly locked up was neither of those two options.

“…A doll?”

I whispered. It was just as I saw.

Inside the cage was a doll… Or at least, what appeared to be a doll at first glance, lying on the floor.

“It is a doll,” Ononoki-chan agreed.

Since that was coming from a corpse doll herself, that judgment was surely correct.

The doll called a doll a doll.

However, even if the doll was a doll, it wasn’t the kind of product you could find in a store, but handmade—and yet I couldn’t feel any warmth from it. If I may say so without fear of misunderstanding, it was a creepy doll.

Almost like a cursed doll.

There are those street performances in which they twist balloons into the shape of cats and dogs, right? It was as if the same thing had been done to a thick blanket-like cloth, to create a human form.

The form of a human—more specifically, the form of a baby. And the fact that those twists and turns were so well-done made it all the eerier.

However, it seemed that while the creator of this doll was very skilled at making stuffed toys, they didn’t have any artistic ability… The eyes and nose drawn on the doll’s face with a marker was a “henohenomoheji” face, as if it was some sort of joke. The hair had also been drawn roughly… It was more accurate to say that the head had been painted all over.

Doll-making… Teori Tadatsuru? No, there was no way that man was involved in this case. The act of locking a doll in a cage was completely out-of-character with his “sense of justice”. For him, it was not dolls that he locked in cages.

Calm down. This was no time to freak out.

It was a point where I needed to think things through.

“There’s no need to think about it. This is obviously sensei‘s handiwork, right?”

Said Ononoki-chan.

As if she were bored.

“It’s handmade.”

Surely you weren’t expecting some superpowered battle with the “replacement child” that had invaded a stranger’s home… The “Small But Mighty Tank” had already shifted her interest from the cursed doll in the cage to inspecting the room.

Oh yeah, that was her specialty. Investigation, analysis.

“You might have already realized this, oni onii-chan, but this nursery feels like it was designed for a one-year-old, at best two-year-old child.”

“Yeah—so up to that point, Associate Professor Iesumi was feeling affection for her child, right? But afterwards, she ended up not thinking she was cute or that she was her own child anymore—”

“Didn’t the baby die?”

Said Ononoki-chan, detachedly.

Moving from place to place around the room.

“When she was two years old or so. Because of illness or an accident or an incident or something.”

“Eh? But, even so, to say she died…”

“If you’re a gentle onii-chan who can’t stand the idea of a dead child, then allow me to offer another possibility. That’s right, what if the daughter is currently under the care of the estranged husband? At any rate… Whether she’s alive or dead, as of over a year ago, Iesumi Iie must have left the hands of that sensei.”

She declared.

It seemed that Ononoki-chan had already discovered several pieces of evidence from this room—or from the hallway, or even from Associate Professor Iesumi’s bedroom—that I, as an amateur, could not find.

“Yeah. At the very least, I don’t see any indication that there were at least two people living in this enclosed space. In any form. If you let me take a peek at the contents of the trash cans and the refrigerator, I might be able to tell you a hundred more things… But we don’t have to go that far.”

“……”

“At any rate, it’s quite touching. I like this kind of thing. A sob story about a mother who loses her child and carries around a homemade baby doll as compensation. No matter how common, no matter how mundane it is.”

It was certainly something to cry about. At least, I couldn’t laugh at it.

I belatedly looked around the interior of the nursery, imitating Ononoki-chan—remains of fancy decorations, remnants of affection. And then… the cursed doll.

If that was the case.

It was a hell of a designer baby.

“After losing her own child, she made a child by hand to take her place—but in the end, it wasn’t her own child. So she didn’t find it cute, and naturally, she didn’t think it was hers, either?”

“Because it wasn’t her child at all. It’s just a lump of cloth.”

“How absurd.”

“Exactly. It makes an absurd amount of sense.”

Ononoki-chan spoke in a monotone to the very end.

That aspect of hers wouldn’t change, even though her fashion had changed—to the very end, she was a doll. In that respect, the “henohenomoheji” seemed much more charming.

“It makes sense why she asked oni onii-chan for advice, too. As far as I know, under the laws of this country, it’s not a crime to abuse or imprison a mere doll—if this were to be revealed, it would only make things easier for her.”

“Easier… Do you think Associate Professor Iesumi is aware of this herself? That is, um, how should I put it… Does she believe with all her heart that this stuffed doll is Iie-chan? Or is it that she knows that it’s a fake doll and has the awareness that it’s not her child, but she just can’t stop?”

So did she try to stop, by asking for help from one of her students?—did she ask for my help not because I was a specialist of child abuse, but because I was a convenient third party with no real stake in the matter?

Because I had nothing to do with it?

“Even if you have no real stake in the matter, there’s still a power dynamic. If you’re a teacher and they’re a student, then it’s easier to get them to listen to you… It’s easier to control them.”

“……”

Was she saying that me standing here like this was all according to that university professor’s expectations? Well, I wasn’t so innocent that I would be shocked by something like that. I was pretty used to being used and taken advantage of.

I was a nineteen-year-old with experience being a slave.

However, if that was going to happen, then I would prefer it if someone became happy as a result… I didn’t want to be a part of any scheme to “make it all go to hell and back”.

“To cover for that intellectual sensei whom I’ve never met, I think it’s probably an unconscious scheme. She’s suffering, too. Like a mother who can’t help but abuse her beloved child.”

“Is that what you would call a snide remark, Ononoki-san?”

“That’s what I was aiming for, but did it get through? Well, if I may say so as a specialist of oddities, I would recommend that your professor seek counseling. She may appear to be maintaining her sanity on the surface, but she must be on the precipice. As for the question of whether or not she believes this handmade stuffed doll is her child, I would say that she believes it with all her heart, and that she doubts it with all her heart.”

She believes, and she doubts.

It was a very human skill.

So there was no room for any oddities to appear here… There was no need to call for a former vampire or the tsukumogami of a corpse. If that’s the case, let’s leave it at that. Like Ononoki-chan said, there was no need to go as far as checking the refrigerator or the trash cans. As well as the third room, which was probably the husband’s bedroom.

“……Hm?”

Feeling like I’d been rejected, I’d been about to turn on my heel when I needlessly realized something—I ended up needlessly realizing something.

This was the bad part about me. The worst part about me.

Perhaps out of curiosity to look at something frightening, because I looked at the stuffed doll in the cage one last time—I sensed something unnatural in the way it was balanced.

It seemed that it was just carelessly thrown into the cage, but there was something off in its posture… With its shape being so short and stout, would it really be that stable with such a strange pose?

Was there something to its center of gravity? Like a dumbbell was placed inside the stuffed doll or something… It would make the weight more realistic than just having a lump of cloth… No, if that were the case, the entire plushie would have a slightly more distorted form.

Or was there something supporting it from the back that you couldn’t see from the front?

“What’s the matter? Oni onii-chan. Let’s go. You wanna die?”

“Um. Well…”

I reined in Ononoki-chan, who was planning on killing me again, and approached the cage with trepidation… The cage was placed in the far corner of the room, right up against the wall, so it was quicker to peek in from directly above than to try and look from behind.

It would probably be quickest to open the simple bolt lock and take out the stuffed doll to check it out, but even before saying that I was afraid to touch it, I didn’t think I had the qualification to touch it.

The only person who should be allowed to touch it was Associate Professor Iesumi herself—with that in mind, I looked down at the cage.

“…Hey, Ononoki-chan. Just to be sure, I’d like to check something… About the fact that abusing a baby doll by locking it in a cage is, well, not really a crime.”

“What is it. Stop being so implicative. I really am going to kill you, okay?”

“Right. It’s about that ‘killing’.”

“?”

“In this country, is it a crime to stab a baby doll in the back?”

When I looked.

To keep the handmade stuffed doll from toppling over, its unnatural pose was supported from behind by a deeply pierced fruit knife.