This is a story I heard from my Master.
My Master was a woman of many hobbies. Since she was my master in the occult, occultism was naturally her number one pursuit, but she was obsessed with all sorts of other things as well. She especially loved sports, indiscriminately dabbling in baseball, professional wrestling, swimming, mountain climbing, beach volleyball, and sprinting.
And she didn't just watch; she played them all herself. Her vitality and athletic reflexes were astonishing. Her running speed, in particular, was top-tier, and she mainly utilized it for making quick getaways.
Wanting to know more about this woman of mysterious charm, I decided to interview everyone I could find who knew her. Here is what they had to say:
She's really fast. She can see ghosts. She owes me money. Sometimes her bedhead is explosive. She's a pretty good guy, all things considered. Way too fast at running away. I have no idea what's going on in her head. I saw her outrun a stray cat. Sometimes she says creepy things. She's terrifying when she loses her temper. She's the female Gian [from Doraemon]. She never gives up. She has no shame. You couldn't kill her if you tried. I feel like she owed me money. She is insanely fast. I wish she'd stop bumming food off people. She's smart. She put a Northern Light Suplex on some pervert in a split second. She loves ghost stories. I saw her being chased by a cop. Her superiority complex is awful. She pretends to know things she doesn't. She's fast. She's flirting with the professor. …………
And so on. The one characteristic most people brought up was her speed. The fact that, even as a college student and not a member of the track team, she had so many opportunities to show off how fast she could run seemed to vividly illustrate just how abnormal she was.
Beyond sports, her range of activities was remarkably broad. She worked part-time as a sort of detective for a private investigation agency and belonged to the local volunteer fire brigade.
However, her true nature was fickle. Piled up behind her long-lasting hobbies was a mountain of things she had tried but couldn't keep up for even three days.
Take khoomei, for example. It’s a traditional Mongolian singing or vocalization method where a groaning low voice is accompanied by a high-pitched, flute-like sound.
She must have seen it on TV because she immediately tried it out. When she actually managed to produce the sound, she seemed so happy that she practiced even more, eventually mastering mouth khoomei, throat khoomei, and even belly khoomei, using them in various ways. That ultrasonic, vibrating sound—somehow reminiscent of something metallic—used to give me a headache just listening to it.
Once, when I went over to hang out at the Master’s apartment, a bunch of cats were loitering right outside the door of her rundown room. There must have been four or five of them. They all looked like strays, and every single one of them seemed intensely interested in what was happening inside. They tried to peek through the gap under the door, or used a stack of cardboard boxes by the wall as a stepping stool to spy through the window.
Wondering what on earth was going on, I joined in and peeked through the window, catching a glimpse through the curtains of the Master sitting in the exact middle of the room in a yoga-like pose.
That was when I noticed the window glass vibrating in tiny increments. And then I heard it: a faint, low growl, overlaid with a metallic sound.
She must have been practicing khoomei. Before I knew it, her hobby had escalated to the point where it was attracting neighborhood cats.
Or rather, why cats?
She was only obsessed with khoomei for two or three weeks. Apparently, because so many cats gathered around, the neighbors complained, thinking she was feeding them.
There were times when she got into magic tricks, and periods when she dabbled in haiku. Once, she even recorded her own sleep-talking. The Master apparently talked in her sleep a lot to begin with, and on a whim, she decided to find out what kind of things she was saying and record them. At first, she tried using a cassette recorder, but the tape kept running out, so she decided to use manual labor instead.
In other words, me.
"Listen," she had declared. "You are going to stay awake the whole time and write down every single word of my sleep-talking without missing a syllable."
After that declaration, the Master pulled the futon over her head and went to sleep. The surreal scene consisted of me sitting at her pillow with a notebook and a pencil. The clock pointed to midnight.
True to form, the Master started talking in her sleep.
I had assumed it would just be muddled mumbling that was impossible to transcribe, but on rare occasions, the content was clear enough to understand.
Just as I thought she was muttering something about a grass lizard or Cecco d'Ascoli, she would murmur things like "I shall grant you a name," "Could you move aside for a moment," or "I'm hungry."
As I sat there silently jotting these down, the scene eventually shifted to what sounded like a conversation with someone.
She seemed to be talking to someone named "Ralph, Ralph," and her tone sounded quite angry.
After straining my ears and concentrating for about ten minutes, I finally figured out what she was saying. In her dream, she was explaining how to use chopsticks to Ralph Bryant of the Kintetsu Buffaloes. Bryant apparently sucked so badly at using chopsticks that no matter how much the Master taught him, he just couldn't get the hang of it. Her tone gradually grew harsher, calling him an "idiot" or "you're doing it wrong, moron," until she finally spat out a parting shot: "I don't care anymore. Just go eat some bread."
I diligently took notes on all of this.
Just as I looked down at the notebook, a piercing scream echoed through the room.
Startled enough to nearly stop my heart, I fell backward and banged my head on the table.
The Master bolted upright, holding her mouth. Her eyes were wide open.
"Wh-what? What's wrong?" I stammered.
She seemed unable to answer, breathing heavily from her shoulders.
"Did something happen to Ralph?" I asked.
She looked at me with a bewildered expression and asked back, "Who the hell is Ralph?"
"You were saying it in your sleep. You were dreaming, weren't you?"
When I explained, the Master snatched the notebook from my hand to check the sleep talk she had uttered. I had been noting down what the sleeping Master said along with the timestamps: she had slept soundly for the first hour and a half, started muttering indistinct sleep talk a little before 2:00 a.m., and then, right now at 3:30, suddenly screamed and jumped awake.
Outside the Master's room, it was still pitch black. The faint light of a streetlamp mounted on a utility pole filtered through the curtains.
"Hey. This bit—'Just go eat some bread'—was that the last thing?" "Yes." "When was it?" "When? Just a moment ago." "How many minutes ago?" "Minutes? Right before you suddenly started screaming and woke up." "Right before...?"
The Master wore a serious expression, her eyes wide, pressing her forehead with her hand as if trying to recall something.
"My dream changed." "Huh?" "It wasn't a fun dream with Bryant in it anymore."
Told that with a straight face, a chill ran down my spine while I stood there completely clueless.
"What kind of dream... were you having?" I asked apprehensively.
The Master slowly thrust her right hand forward, making a motion as if probing for something invisible in the air.
"It was like... in a deserted night street, there were traces of something crawling on the road, and when I followed them..."
She trailed off there.
She seemed like she wanted to continue, but only her hand wandered through the empty air, and no words came out.
The moment the Master gave a single shiver, she dove back under the futon. Stunned, I stared at the lump of the futon for a while, but since nothing changed no matter how long I waited, I gave it a shake and said, "Hey."
"What?" "Not 'what.'" You'd be curious, wouldn't you?
When I urged her, a whispering voice came from inside the futon:
"Something's out there." In this town...
With that, the futon shook in small tremors. Was she laughing? Was she terrified? There was no way of knowing.
***
Some time after that incident, the Master got hooked on lip-reading.
I was immediately summoned to her room and forced to be her practice partner.
"It's a... fine day today?" *Mouth moving silently.* "Carl... Lewis." *Mouth moving silently.* "Gator... ade." *Mouth moving silently.* "Tom... and... Sherry."
I was supposed to sit there, moving only my lips without making a sound, while she guessed what I was saying by watching my lip movements. If she was right, I was supposed to nod silently. If she was wrong, I’d shake my head left and right. In the Master's hand was a how-to book on lip-reading, though heaven knows where she’d gotten it.
"B-boobs?" Correct.
The Master called a time-out at that, crossing both hands above her head. "Hey, have you been trying to make me say perverted words here and there for a while now?" I shook my head vigorously. Glowering at me with a suspicious look, the Master returned to a kneeling posture knee-to-knee with me. "Even if you tell me to pretend to talk about anything, it actually makes me not know what to talk about," I protested. The Master thought about it for a moment, then said, "Alright, let's restrict it to professional baseball players' names."
I slowly moved my lips, feeling the pressure of the Master staring intently at me with a serious expression. *Mouth moving silently.* "Kuwata... Masumi." *Mouth moving silently.* "Aikoh... Takeshi?" *Mouth moving silently.* "O... na..."
Just as I got that far, the Master suddenly slapped me across the left cheek. "O-ouch!" Startled, I spoke out loud. "Cut it out, you moron." She yelled at me. "I just said O'Malley! O'Malley, from the Hanshin Tigers." "No way. Absolute lie." "It's not a lie."
Actually, it was a lie.
We argued for a bit, but perhaps losing interest, the Master threw the how-to book aside and stood up.
She went to the washroom to change into a tracksuit, and announced, "I'm going for a run." In her hand, for some reason, she was gripping a lamp. It was an antique-looking oil lamp of the handheld type. There was no flame inside the glass cylinder hanging from the frame.
This, too, was a strange running routine the Master had taken up lately. After the sun went down, she would run all over town holding this unlit lamp.
The Master smoothly lifted the handle to eye level, staring into the hollow space inside the rounded, bulging glass. Her mouth twisted into a smile through the glass. Seeing that sent a shudder through me. "See you, I'm going." With that, I watched her back as she walked out the door.
From here on, the Master would run through the night streets, holding aloft an unlit lamp. She would illuminate a night filled with artificial light and covered in a hazy white heat shimmer—with that lamp.
An empty, unlit lamp. Illuminating a counterfeit sort of night with the bottomless darkness that welling up precisely because it was empty. And as she ran, she would repeat like a spell: "Are there any ghosts?" "Are there any ghosts?"
…………
It was an extreme provocation. In ancient Greece, Diogenes the "Sage in a Barrel" once lit a lamp in broad daylight and paraded through the crowded streets of Athens. When asked what on earth he was doing, he replied: "I am looking for a human." He was a philosopher, but he wasn't mad. It was a biting, characteristic sarcasm questioning whether anyone truly worthy of being called a "human" existed in that city.
The Master's worst hobby, based on that anecdote, was this. What she was mocking, insulting, and provoking were all the wandering dead of this city.
Naturally, when I first found out about this malicious run, my face fell, but since she repeated it with such persistence, I began to think there must be some hidden meaning behind it. Indeed, the expression on the Master's face during these runs always carried a hint of tension.
Are there any ghosts?
Muttering that in the empty room, I felt a sense of loneliness wash over me, accompanied instantly by something cold slowly crawling up my spine.
Doing nothing while I waited, about an hour later I heard the sound of someone grabbing the doorknob.
"I'm back."
The Master entered the room, wrapped in steam-like sweat. At the same time, right above the outside of the door where the Master had just ducked through, there was a face hanging upside down, peering in at us. It looked as though someone were dangling upside down from a second-story window. But this apartment, little more than a modern tenement house, had no second floor. Just the pale, expressionless neck and head of a thin man in his thirties or forties stared straight at us. Curiously, his hair wasn't hanging down against gravity. Along with an indescribable sense of revulsion, for a single second, I suffered the illusion that such a painting was simply pasted there.
Noticing my gaze, the Master looked back. She glanced up at the upside-down man's face, grabbed a nearby broom, and brushed at the bridge of its nose while saying, "Shoo, shoo."
The face pulled back, still expressionless, and the Master immediately slammed the door shut. "Ah, I'm tired," she said, tossing the lamp aside and collapsing flat on her back in the middle of the room. The man's face that had been there just moments before wouldn't leave my head, and I nervously kept staring at the top of the door.
Had it followed us from somewhere in response to the Master's tasteless provocation?
***
"What's wrong?" "That neck just now..." "Small fry. Forget about it." She said it as if it were nothing.
But the very next moment, I heard the doorknob being twisted from the outside. It was unmistakably the presence of something terrifying, clearly different from the surreal, painting-like existence from before. The door rattled in rapid succession, then groaned with a "creak" as it began to push open.
A creepy, unsettling sensation raced up my spine. Bad. I knew it instantly on instinct.
The Master sprang to her feet. "Get back!"
Shoving me out of the way, with unbelievable momentum, she executed a dropkick straight at the door.
With a tremendous thud, the door burst outward. Which meant the door really *had* been opening. Landing on the floor of the entryway, the Master paid no mind to me—frozen in place and unable to move—instantly stood back up, grabbed the same broom as before, and made a sweeping motion toward the outside of the room while yelling, "Shoo, shoo!"
However, outside the open door, nothing was visible. Still holding the broom, the Master tilted her head with a "Hmm?" and leaned forward to peer out. I, too, peered out past her into the hallway.
It was there. Illuminated by the meager light of the streetlamp, something was there.
A shadow attempting to leave the apartment grounds. It wasn't human. I understood that immediately.
Its head was clearly not a normal size. It wasn't big. On the contrary, it was small. Far too small. Everything from the upper jaw upward was missing, as if it had been cleanly sliced off. From behind, there was literally an empty space just above the nape of its neck. There was no way anything could live in a state like that. Yet, that human-like shadow walked away with a staggering, unsteady gait.
Staring at the sight, the Master let out a single "Oh," lingering in thought for a moment before suddenly turning back to look at me. "That one just now is pretty nasty." "Is it different from the head-only one we saw earlier?" "Different. You're going to get yourself killed if you can't tell the difference between small fry and nasty ones just by looking at them."
Get myself killed? But wasn't the Master the one deliberately inviting them? Inviting them...?
"Could that whole Diogenes routine..." "Yep." The Master nodded. "I'm making a spirit highway."
Don't go making things like that! I wanted to snap at her, but a chilling cold swept down my spine. At the same time, I felt something akin to elation mixed into it.
She was desecrating and provoking the spirits of the dead all over town, making them chase her. Recognizing the intent, entities that reacted to it followed the same path and came here. Even those who hadn't happened across her Diogenes routine were drawn in by the path taken by other spirits, wandering here unknowingly. To this very room.
"Why would you do something like that?" "Why? You wanna see 'em, don't you?" "See what?" "Something amazing."
She answered flatly, with a look that said it saved her the trouble of searching and going out to look for them. I was so flabbergasted that a dry laugh escaped my lips.
"Is this really safe?" Did she plan to repel something like that every single time with a broom? When I asked, the Master grinned and replied: "The thing I want to meet probably isn't the kind you can just 'repel' like that, though. Still, it hasn't shown up at all."
Her tone suggested she had some specific entity in mind.
"What kind of thing is it?" I asked, instinctively swallowing hard.
The Master closed the door and stepped back into the room. Turning to face me, she sat cross-legged on the tatami mats and placed her hands on her knees.
"Lately, you know how there are weird ghosts wandering around town?" "Weird? What kind?" "Like ones without hands, or ones severed around the waist."
I tried to picture it, but had I ever seen anything like that? "Like the one from earlier, there are some without heads too," the Master said, laughing happily.
After laughing for a good while, she leaned forward and said: "They're being eaten."
E... eaten. I was struck speechless.
"Just the other day, I saw an amazing one in front of the post office near the station. A ghost that was just ankles. It only had the shins down to the feet. And it just stayed right there. It hardly had any sense of will left; since it couldn't maintain its individuality like that, it'll probably fade away soon."
She held her hand flat over the floor, indicating the size of the foot-only ghost.
The Master was saying that the ghosts in this town were being eaten by something.
My heart was beating with an unpleasant rhythm. I couldn't help imagining it. Even at this very moment, some unfathomable entity might casually rip off the roof of this room, pluck us out from inside, and toss us into a massive mouth. Or perhaps tiny, ant-like things would appear from nowhere, swarm over my face, and strip it down to bare bone in a fraction of a second. Such absurd images flashed through my mind one after another.
"Something's out there," she murmured to herself, dropping her gaze to the floor, falling silent with a thoughtful expression.
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