Monogatari Series - Volume 26 - Chapter 1.15

015

I’d been calling it a lump of cloth—in other words, looking down on the fact that it was supposed to be a doll—and it was as if I was receiving retribution for it. Even though it didn’t even need a change in thinking to see that the Iie-chan doll, which had been formed like a balloon animal, had untied itself and hid itself in the crib.

I promised to write a letter of reflection, about the length of this book, for my lack of consideration and inadequacy at a later date, but right now, considering the situation he was currently experiencing, what Araragi Koyomi should be writing was a letter of warning.

I wasn’t saying this out of spite towards being strangled by a blanket… But if it had the ability to arbitrarily return from the shape of a three-year-old to the shape of a flat blanket, then why even bother bending the cage to escape from it?

It could just slip through the gap between the bars.

By untying itself and thinning out.

It was plausible to assume that it didn’t do so because it couldn’t do so at the time… It was only after escaping that it acquired the ability to “blanket-ify”, if you will.

Should I say that it learned—or should I say that it grew up, like a three-year-old would?

Its growth rate, its growth potential.

As an oddity, its danger level was way too high—even though I was “former” in more ways than one, the fact that it could entrap the thrall of the King of Oddities in such a skillful way was all the more impressive.

It was probably reading too much into it to say that the doll was waiting all this time for a guy to arrive, who could teach it how to open the door—I thought I’d been plenty nervous, but it seemed I didn’t have enough of a sense of urgency.

So it would not have been a surprise if I’d broken my neck here, and that would have been extremely appropriate as retribution—but it was only by sheer luck that I was here now, speaking the words of a disgraced loser.

And, if you could believe it, I was now chewing on that good fortune inside a cage—yes, the very cage that the Iie-chan doll had been confined in.

At present, I was being confined.

I’d been grabbed by the neck by an old-looking magic blanket and thrown into the cage—and, whether or not that was also something it had learned, it freed me just before I was about to faint, wrapped itself around the pried-open part of the cage, and pulled it back into its original shape.

Perhaps by coincidence or perhaps on purpose, it also twisted the bar of the bolt lock so that it was all warped and twisted—thus, I was rendered unable to escape from the cage.

I’d been locked up.

The blanket, having successfully neutralized its prey, fluttered out of the nursery without giving me so much as another glance.

After that, judging from the sounds coming from down the hallway, the blanket seemed to have opened the front door and left… The situation I had feared had easily become a reality.

If it could become a flying blanket, then the problem of its height was easily resolved, and the barrier turned out to be one that could simply be unlocked… If it had been locked in the room because it couldn’t figure out how to turn the thumbturn, then I had broken that seal when I arrived to destroy evidence.

Oops.

When I came in, I really should have locked the door properly, and even set the chain lock…

At any rate… The escape of an abused doll, huh.

It was like I could kind of understand how it felt. Of course you’d want to run away after being locked in a cage this small, right?

The sheer number of things I’d have to think about after this made me feel fed up, but first things first, I had to figure out a way out of this cage… The bolt lock had been twisted and tied to be immobile, and pulling off a stunt like warping the iron bars was impossible for (the current) me… Which meant that, good grief, I would have to come up with my own locked room trick.

How thrilling.

It had been a year since I was last confined.

Last summer, I had once been trapped in an abandoned building by Senjougahara Hitagi, who I had just started dating—at that time, she had prepared food and drinks for me, but I couldn’t exactly expect anything like that now.

The blanket had escaped, and the homeowner was missing.

I could carelessly act as if I’d managed to survive, but at this rate, I was going to die of hunger in three days.

It was easy to say that people who have never been abused would never know what it felt like to be abused, but I never thought I would experience the same thing as the Iie-chan doll…

Was that also on purpose? Was it revenge?

If so, then all I could say was that it was taking revenge on the wrong person. But that didn’t mean I could allow it to take revenge on the right person, either.

I had to become an escape artist.

Fortunately, I had two rough plans in mind.

Plan number one… Wake Shinobu up. The day was still long, but Shinobu wasn’t exactly a vampire but the remnants of a vampire, so daytime activities were still possible with some negotiation.

Plan number two… Call Kanbaru or Ougi-kun over LINE. Fortunately, the modern convenience that was my cell phone had been neither stolen nor destroyed—Ougi-kun already knew about this apartment, and if I asked for help from those two that were familiar with oddity phenomena (especially since they appeared to be working together on some suspicious activity), they could not only help me break out of this cage, but also with the subsequent search for the Iie-chan doll.

Neither plan was that bad, but the common disadvantage that both plan one and plan two had was that they were both “super uncool”… If any of them saw me locked up in an animal cage like this, I would never be respected again, as a master or as an upperclassman.

I’d be looked down upon for the rest of my life.

Or even just abandoned.

You’d probably say something like, “I couldn’t care less about your trivial sense of pride,” but without that trivial sense of pride, my sense of duty towards capturing the Iie-chan doll that I’d let escape would also vanish.

If I had to resort to calling someone out from their precious daytime nap or from a big senior-junior social, I had to at least escape from the cage by myself.

Seriously, I wanted to cry.

I’d experienced hell and I’d experienced nightmares, I’d traveled through time, I’d destroyed and saved a parallel world, and now I was struggling to figure out how to get out of an animal cage… But, well, in the end, it was just a cage for wildlife. Powerless before the wisdom of humanity—well, I wasn’t exactly wildlife, but one of those wise humans that had ended up being confined by a blanket, but there was no need to be vain about it in this unwinnable scenario. In fact, Shinobu had seen many more shameful things in my life…

Sure enough, thanks to some sort of divine providence, there was currently a toolbox full of do-it-yourself tools in this nursery. Some idiot must have brought it in order to repair the door in order to hide evidence.

But what that idiot was about to do now was the exact opposite—using the tools to break down a door. You could compare this situation to the reality that technology developed to enrich people’s lives could be used as weapons of war in the future, but putting that aside.

I reached for the toolbox through the gap in the iron bars, but alas, it was too far—and my legs fit only up to my knees. Well, thighs are called thighs because they are thick. So I decided to use my head a bit and take off my trousers.15

Not because I thought it would make my thighs slimmer, but because I was going to use my trousers as a lasso—first, I would take my pants out of the cage, hold the left and right cuffs with my hands through the gaps in the iron bars, and flap the trousers in the direction of the toolbox.

It was on the third try that the toolbox was successfully caught in the crotch area—all I had to do was pull it in.

If I stopped to think about what I was doing in someone else’s house with my pants down, it would be a defeat for me… But it was still too early to think that I was done.

This was where the real work began.

Now, in the toolbox, which was on sale for 2,980 yen, there was… Yes, a coping saw! Just what I needed! That was what I cheered to myself, but unfortunately, it was not exactly what I needed—I only realized after I started, but it would probably take me around five years to cut the iron fence with a coping saw.

And it wasn’t like I could just cut a single bar and escape. That would be the way of a true escape artist.

Then, could I use a screwdriver to dismantle the cage…? That didn’t sound so easy without the assembly instructions, either… And then, it hit me.

At the bottom of the toolbox was a hammer.

DIY.

Destroy It Yourself.

Five minutes later, I succeeded in performing my trick to escape from the locked room—a quicker escape than waking Shinobu up during the day or calling Kanbaru or Ougi-kun on the phone, as it turned out.

According to my calculations, I hadn’t even been trapped here for half an hour, but still, there was a real sense of liberation.

I almost wanted to express my joy through song.

With that, I wondered what the Iie-chan doll was feeling now… Right, I couldn’t waste time basking in my sense of liberation.

I had to go after the blanket that had escaped.

It couldn’t have gone very far yet—clinging to those thoughts, I ran out the front door, but I couldn’t find the blanket or the doll anywhere.

Then, could it have figured out how to use the elevator? Or perhaps, the fire escape—no, it was a flying blanket, so I suppose I could skip those formalities. The corridor in front of the entrance faced the sky, so once it was out, the Iie-chan doll was free to go.

I tried to lean over the railing to get a better look, but I didn’t see any blanket dancing in the wind… It didn’t seem there was any chance of bringing out the punny phrase, “The futon flew away!”16, that I had prepared for when I found it.

Still, I had to keep going without losing to my despair—urged on by my frustration, I ran down the stairs. It was not for the sake of being cautious towards the security cameras, like I had done on my way up, but the result of impatience that prevented me from waiting for the elevator. I could at least say that I was rational enough not to dive from the third floor into the parking lot.

And then, with no particular destination in mind, I jumped into my New Beetle and drove off—or so I planned, but…

“Whoa!”

I yelled.

Despite the despair I was facing, what leaked out was not an expression of grief, but an exclamation of astonishment—the four tires of my beloved car had all gone flat.

Or I should say, they had been forced to go flat… It looked like the thick rubber had been torn apart with brute force, leaving the wheel’s rim almost bare.

I’d been trying to go anywhere while chasing after the flying blanket, but this meant I could go nowhere—how clever of you, Iie-chan doll.

Fifteen minutes ago, it had carelessly confined me without taking away my cell phone, but now, it had obtained the judgment to precisely take away my means of transportation—I had no idea how it was able to determine that the New Beetle was my car, but that three-year-old sure was growing up fast.

I was excited for this one’s future prospects.