Monogatari Series - Volume 26 - Chapter 1.26

026

To make an unsubstantiated claim, as someone who didn’t actually know Associate Professor Iesumi well, I didn’t know if she commuted by car or not, and I didn’t know if she left her car behind when she disappeared… If anything, if you think about it normally, you’d think a person would disappear using their car, if they owned one.

It was a very convenient vehicle, after all.

Thus, my previous statement was quite the careless statement, not backed up by anything.

However, if she wanted to completely erase her presence, instead of just simply disappearing, then driving a vehicle with license plates on the front and back was basically the same as traveling with a name tag.

Just like with her home, it felt like she would have left something like that alone, without getting her affairs in order… Maybe this line of attack had some merit to it?

I didn’t expect things to go smoothly.

As long as we were expecting unpredictability, we were going to need an indiscriminate brute-force attack…

It seemed that, strangely enough, luck favored the kind of guy that liked to take detours without any plan in mind… The number of parking lots near Manase University was not small, including the one I usually used. Going through all of them would not be easy, no matter how mobile Ononoki-chan was—not only did we not know what kind of car Associate Professor Iesumi owned, we also didn’t even know if it existed.

But, even so (because I was afraid that Hachikuji might find out if we kept lingering at Shirohebi Park), I figured we may as well get moving, and headed to the campus of Manase University in its summer break (“Unlimited Rulebook”—I’d taken off my frozen cap and jacket). And when we arrived, I realized something that I hadn’t expected at all, but of course something like that existed.

In other words, the campus had a parking lot for staff use.

It was far from my usual travel route, and even if I had passed by it at one point, it might have left my awareness as an area that had nothing to do with me as a student… It wasn’t that I didn’t know everything—there was nothing but things I didn’t know, this university that I attended.

Not to mention, since it was summer vacation, there weren’t many cars parked in the parking lot, which was just a plain asphalt lot with orange lines painted onto it.

It was sparsely populated.

If it was like this, then we’d be able to conduct a full investigation in a limited amount of time, and, if we were so inclined, we wouldn’t even need to go that far… That was because there was one car that stood out from the rest. A car with a distinctly different disposition.

Or, rather than a different disposition, it just had a different color30… Basically, it was a car that had become covered in dust and dirt. Like an abandoned automobile… Is this what happens to cars that are left uncovered for just a few days?

Just because the owner disappeared and left it alone… It looked like it was originally a pretty expensive car, too—a foreign car with the steering wheel on the left side.

“Feels like the car’s been abused,”

said Ononoki-chan—it was some harsh criticism of the owner, but an excellent statement. Only a tool could express such a thing.

It seemed that the statement that “homes quickly fall into disrepair when people don’t live in them” could be directly applied to automobiles, as well… It also happened to be favorable for the ritual that we were about to perform.

“No security cameras here. Good, good.”

I was basically acting like a criminal by now, but the fact that this car was not parked in a contracted parking lot was really the luckiest thing… It was unknown if the bizarre phenomenon of the blanket puncturing tires in the apartment building’s parking lot was captured on video, but if we were caught on video tinkering with this abandoned car, it would totally be vehicle burglary.

But we couldn’t just dawdle around.

If the owner of the car was not found, the car would eventually be towed away… I wanted to hurry up. In the first place, bringing a tween girl to a university campus could easily attract attention on its own.

“Seems there’s no dash cam installed, either. All right, all that’s left is to hotwire the car.”

“Don’t talk about things you can’t even do. The only thing you can do here, oni onii-chan, is keep watch.”

The tween girl made me into her underling… Well, it was true that I couldn’t possibly attempt to cooperate in the creation of an oddity.

“But how do you plan on getting inside? Ononoki-chan. For the record, I’m not going to let you break a window, okay?”

“What kind of ruffian do you think I am? I wouldn’t do something like break a windowpane.”

And with that, what the god of destruction broke was the lock to the trunk in the back of the car. While I was speechless, she slipped the little bear from my pocket.

“Then, see ya. Keep watch for about half an hour, will you? It’s a job that only you can do, oni onii-chan. I’m counting on you.”

She dexterously folded her body into the not-very-spacious luggage compartment and squeezed in like some girl that had been kidnapped, closing the lid from the inside.

I see, she didn’t have to sit in the driver’s seat or the passenger seat to perform the ritual… With the trunk lid closed like this, no one would be able to see what was going on from outside, so the choice of the trunk area was a pretty nice idea.

Even if there were no security cameras or dash cams, it took a certain amount of bravery to perform a questionable ritual in a car for half an hour—and for Ononoki-chan, the darkness inside the trunk was nothing to be feared.

I couldn’t help but get curious about what sort of forbidden ritual was taking place inside the trunk to breathe life into that little bear (I could hear an odd wriggling sound—wriggling?)—but it was probably better for me not to know.

A careless guy like me…

I’d been told to keep watch so that nobody interfered with Ononoki-chan as she put her heart and soul into that little bear, but considering that a guy who wasn’t even a staff member loitering around the staff parking lot was plenty suspicious, I almost thought it would be better if I joined Ononoki-chan in the trunk. The fact that she didn’t give me the time to do so was probably because she didn’t want me to learn anything unnecessary, on top of how cramped it already was in the trunk.

Despite all she said, she was a rather considerate tween girl… I guess she was leaving me out of the loop so that I didn’t get cursed even more.

Certainly enough, the curses placed on me by my childhood friend were more than enough… Plus, she was the one that started this whole thing.

Oh, that lovely girl.

On the other hand, on the flip side, you could say that Ononoki-chan was just willing to take on that much risk—for a professional, it probably wasn’t that big of a risk, but it still made me a bit anxious.

So that I wasn’t just dragging my feet, I decided to at least act like an admirable student, industriously cleaning my professor’s abandoned and dusty car—I didn’t have any cleaning fluid or brushes, so I couldn’t do much, but I could at least brush away the dirt with my hands. I even thought about using my ski cap as a towel, but decided against it, thinking it would be a bad idea to clean someone else’s car with something that was once covered with drool.

As I did so, I could see the inside of the car through the window, but there was nothing unusual about it—no stickers or decorations on the seats… Also, there were no stuffed dolls from a crane game lined up in the back seat or anything like that, either.

Well, even if I were to break into this car, there wasn’t any sort of fabric that could come and attack… No, wait, was it possible for the floor mats to come flying at me?

“……?”

There, my hands that were wiping the windows paused—partly because my hands were getting so dirty that they were no longer useful for cleaning, but also because I had a strange feeling about the interior of the car.

As mentioned before, there shouldn’t have been any cause for concern inside the car, and yet my attention was drawn to something… Unlike the third bedroom where that father doll lay, it didn’t give off the impression of being a set. It didn’t feel like a car displayed at a car dealership… It had the feeling of being lived-in, the feeling of being used.

Then what part of the car was bothering me?

If only I were the kind of person that could get flashes of inspiration. Then life would be so much easier… Although something like that seemed more tiresome.

If only I had a button to give me a flash of inspiration.

In the first place, there weren’t enough things inside the car to worry about… Maybe this was the kind of thing where I was not worried about something “being” there, but something “not being” there?

But, the steering wheel was there, the accelerator and the brake were there… The back mirror was there, the gear shift was there, the parking brake was there… Maybe something that wasn’t so fundamental?

Was I just concerned about how the steering wheel was on the left side? But, my New Beetle also had its steering wheel on the left side, so I was actually pretty used to that—something my car had that this car didn’t… Not only in the driver’s seat, but also in the passenger seat—

“…Ah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.”

I got it, I got it. When I figured it out, it was almost shameful… Honestly, I didn’t want to describe it. But now that I’d made myself so obvious, I couldn’t just keep my mouth shut about it, even if it might not have anything to do with the main topic.

It was the passenger seat—the child seat.

In my New Beetle, the passenger seat was equipped with a child seat for Shinobu’s use, but this car just didn’t have one—because both cars had steering wheels on the left side, I was able to feel that sense of discomfort.

Good grief, what was I doing, getting all preoccupied in the middle of more pressing issues? In terms of the mise-en-scène of a child seat, there were more cars that didn’t have them than did… After all, if you didn’t have children, it wasn’t an essential element at all—if you didn’t have children?

But Associate Professor Iesumi was a mother with a three-year-old daughter…

Hm? No, “Iie-chan”, the three-year-old daughter, was actually the Iie-chan doll… But if Associate Professor Iesumi thought that the doll was “her own child”, then…

The doll was the target of abuse, so she didn’t provide it with a child seat as part of the abuse? Well, that could be the case.

If it was locked up in a cage, then it wouldn’t have had a chance to go out with her—but it wasn’t locked up all the time, and there must have been a time “before the abuse”…

Besides, it was a legal obligation to install a child seat, right? I liked the way Shinobu squeezed in tightly into that small seat, so I set mine up without regard to the Road Traffic Act, but when I looked it up when I bought the car, it was mandatory to install a child seat when taking a child under the age of six into the car—by the way, Shinobu’s outer appearance was that of an eight-year-old.

There were even those who thought that babies shouldn’t even be put into cars for safety reasons… But not even I thought that we needed to be that much of a stickler. While we’re on the subject of the law, child abuse was an unforgivable crime in the first place… However, when I remembered the “remnants of affection” I felt from the nursery, I wasn’t sure if it made sense to remove and dispose of the child seat because she didn’t think of Iie-chan (the doll?) as cute.

Associate Professor Iesumi’s abuse came in the form of abandonment.

That’s why the fruit knife stabbed in the back was a clear contradiction—then, shall we assume the child seat was removed by someone else? But I was pretty sure that child seats were treated as oversized garbage in most areas… It was obvious that getting rid of one would be troublesome.

I’d been regretting becoming aware of this, but that regret was quickly changing into a different kind of regret… I had a feeling that if I continued to think about this, the end goal would be good for nothing.

Earlier, I’d wanted a button for a flash of inspiration, but now I wanted a button to undo it—such a self-centered wish would normally not get fulfilled, but it seemed luck was on my side here as well.

If I hadn’t used up all my luck yet, I would have preferred it if it took my side in a different scene than this one… Anyway, my thoughts, which I couldn’t stop on my own, were interrupted by an external impetus.

When I noticed, it turned out that much time had passed, as Ononoki-chan said, “Thanks for waiting, oni onii-chan,” and crawled out of the trunk.

“Rejoice, for the ritual has succeeded. Look.”

But even if she told me to look. 

The result was not exactly something I could rejoice over—when looking at the little bear doll standing atop Ononoki-chan’s hand, and when looking at Ononoki-chan’s face half an hour later.

This was the first time a change occurred in Ononoki-chan’s face, which had always been expressionless—I wanted to opt for a description that was as appropriate as possible, but the more I twisted it, the more disturbing it became. So, to say it outright.

Ononoki-chan’s right eye had been gouged out—turned into a hollow cavity. And.

In the face of the little bear doll wriggling atop her hand, her right eye had been implanted.