Monogatari Series - Volume 26 - Chapter 1.14

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Surprisingly enough, I hadn’t been able to quickly deduce from the warped frame of the cage the possibility that the Iie-chan doll’s escape had just taken place—I hadn’t imagined that the Iie-chan doll could still be at home, or even that she could still be hiding in this very nursery.

While there was certainly no place to hide in the empty cage, when the playing field consisted of the entire house, there would be plenty of hiding places for a stuffed doll the size of a three-year-old.

I was suddenly very nervous.

It happened at quite the accelerated rate, especially taking into account the fact that the fruit knife was also missing—a doll capable of irreversibly destroying a cage, while also wielding a knife? That was more than enough of a threat.

It was threatening, and it was terrifying.14

To think that it was not Associate Professor Iesumi but the Iie-chan doll that was holed up inside this apartment… Even though it was able to escape from the cage, did it stay in here because it couldn’t figure out how to get past the front door? At the size of a three-year-old, it wouldn’t be able to reach the thumbturn, either… If it had the strength to bend bars of iron, then it would be strong enough to break a window, but the question was whether or not a three-year-old understood what the substance of glass was.

For example, adult dogs were said to have the intelligence of three-year-olds, but supposedly they often ran headfirst into window panes… It was a bit different from the concept of the mirror self-recognition test, but it wouldn’t be a surprise if the Iie-chan doll couldn’t conceive of breaking that transparent glass. In the same way you can’t break air, which is transparent and not visible… Damn, this was making me glance around for no reason.

To think that after just barely registering the fact that a doll had escaped, I would be devising plans for my own escape… However, if I wasn’t being too cowardly and the Iie-chan doll really was still inside this apartment, then you could say that there was a successful lockdown in place.

In specialist terms, a barrier.

If I were to open the front door to escape, it would result in the barrier being lifted… Of course, if I closed the door immediately and locked it tightly, then I could probably get away with it, but that couldn’t be guaranteed… It was even possible that the escapee was waiting to take advantage of when I would make my escape.

So here I was, feeling a sense of responsibility and trying to figure out a way to settle the matter of this barrier… Although, if the doll had already escaped ages ago, this would just be tilting at windmills.

It wouldn’t exactly be a reprehensible double standard if a stuffed doll that could pry open an iron cage with its monstrous strength could also pass through walls.

Even though I knew that very well, I still had to do whatever I could… Because if I let the Iie-chan doll leave the house right now, I had no idea where it would go off to—well, no, I did have an idea.

My idea was that the abused “three-year-old daughter” would go looking for the missing “mother” or perhaps the estranged “father”—with unexpected superpowers, that is.

That’s why I had to stop it.

If it was still in here, I couldn’t let it escape.

If only I had the skill to detect oddities like a radar… If it were Shinobu, she could probably do it… However, as far as I could tell from my glancing around, it seemed it wasn’t still in the nursery. I also astutely made sure to look at the ceiling, but there weren’t any mobiles hanging from it.

It wasn’t as if I looked that carefully at the living room or the associate professor’s bedroom when I arrived, but thinking about it, the most suspicious room had to be that third room, right? It seemed that the time had finally come for me to muster up the courage to enter into the estranged husband’s room—a room I had not yet seen. I took one last glance at the crib to see if the doll would actually turn out to have been sleeping peacefully there, but of course, it was empty, just like the cage.

No, strictly speaking, it wasn’t “just like” the cage.

Without exaggerating, the cage was completely empty, but the crib was a bed, so naturally there was a blanket inside—a blanket?

“!! Urk—!”

By the time I thought of it, it was already too late.

The blanket that flew out from the crib wrapped around my neck—with an intense power that could even bend iron.