Water splashed up against the sunlight. It sparkled for a moment, making me squint against the glare. A single cloud floated in the sky. Beyond an invisible layer of the atmosphere, a pristine blue stretched out, and a lukewarm breeze stroked my cheek along with the piercing sunlight as I lay flat on my back on a poolside bench. "There's nobody here, is there?" "……Did you say something?" The Master stopped his arms, making the sound of the water echo coolly. It was the summer of my first year in university. We had been wasting the morning chatting away in the Master's room, but it was so hot that we decided to head down to the municipal pool together in the early afternoon. However, the pool, which I had expected to be crowded on a day like this, was completely empty. When the middle-aged woman at the reception desk fanned her face with a paper fan and said listlessly, "It's empty today," I had thought she was just joking around. Yet, when I left the locker room, climbed the stairs, and stood by the poolside, I couldn't believe my eyes. Beyond the sun-baked concrete shimmering with heat haze, not a single person was swimming in the vast expanse of sun-drenched water. Despite it being such a perfect day for the pool, there was a strange atmosphere to the grounds—not a single moving shadow besides the two of us. The Master didn't seem to care at all and started swimming with barely any warm-up exercises, while I lay down on a poolside bench to catch a tan. I wasn't very good at swimming, and besides, the Master would always make fun of me for being "too pale." "It's Saturday today, right? Why is it completely empty in the middle of the day like this?" "Maybe nobody wants to go out in this heat." Surely that couldn't be it. A pool should be at its busiest precisely on a hot day. "Was there some kind of huge event going on in town?" "Nah, not really." "Then maybe a concert, or a soccer match, or something?" "Who knows, maybe," the Master said, before sinking beneath the water and doing a turn.
"Even if there was, I doubt it would affect all the tens of thousands of local residents." He was right. Even if there were something competing with the pool for visitors, it would be a zero-sum game with far too large a denominator. Or perhaps, if it were a match for Japan's national soccer team or a local team playing at Koshien, it might glue a fair number of citizens to their televisions. Even so, it wouldn't even amount to half the total population. The remaining half would still exercise their free will and choose how to spend a scorching hot day. Above all, no such program had been listed in this morning's newspaper. With a cloudy head, I wiped the sweat threatening to get into my eyes with a towel. More than thirty minutes had already passed, but no one had appeared at the entrance. It was an uninhabited world belonging solely to the Master and me. "Do you think there might have been rumors of an infectious disease outbreak at this pool or something?" I asked. Swimming along, the Master replied, "No way. If that were true, it would've been shut down ages ago. Forget a rumor about one or two people—if it's spreading all over the town, they'd shut it down immediately regardless of the facts." Fair enough. Besides, I hadn't heard anything of the sort. I racked my brain to see if there were any other factors keeping people away from the pool. Among the factors hindering the purpose of visiting a pool, what could possibly affect the minority numerator of visitors among the vast, unspecified majority of residents in the denominator? I couldn't figure it out at all. Hoping to shift my perspective a bit, I just blurted out whatever came to mind. "Road closures in the surrounding area!" "Did you see any sign of that?" Come to think of it, pedestrian traffic felt no different than usual. "A price hike." "It's been the same for ages." "A brand-new pool opened up in the neighborhood starting today." "That might be possible. But neither of us has laid eyes on any such information up until today. And for no one else to know about it ei—glub, glub, glub, blub, cough, cough…… Cough, cough…… Don't you think that's strange?"
Indeed, both of us subscribed to newspapers and watched local information programs quite regularly. Since I didn't remember seeing any flyers inserted in the paper either, the opening of a brand-new pool didn't seem very realistic. Above all, hadn't the lady at the pool counter tilted her head in confusion? "That's because you talk while you swim," I shouted out. The Master gave a light cough, turned smoothly while doing the crawl, and kept going. Looking up, a bird was swimming far high above in the sky. Beneath that sky, only the sounds of the water disturbed by the Master echoed. An empty pool somehow lacked a sense of reality, and the searing sunlight merely licked the surface of my body, feeling as though it failed to reach the depths of my soul. Just as I was thinking about getting up to swim soon, in the corner of my vision, I caught sight of a human figure climbing out of the water and onto the pool-side with a splash. Oh, looks like there was someone here after all. The moment I thought that, watching an eerily pale back, I realized the impossibility of it. I had been in a spot where I could see the entire grounds, and I should have been watching the whole time to know there was no one there. Unless they had been hiding underwater the entire time since we stepped onto the poolside. A chill rapidly began to spread from deep inside my body. That couldn't be. There was no way a living human being could stay submerged for over thirty minutes. He was wearing standard school-issue swim trunks and a blue cap on his head. Judging solely by his back, he looked like a small boy. Without even looking back, that figure receded toward the entrance, swaying as he went. I remained frozen in the very posture in which I had tried to sit up, only my throat twitching. "……Th-that person."
When I finally managed to speak, the Master, who had been making a flashy splash in the water, came to a dead stop and looked in the direction of my gaze. The swaying back was just disappearing toward the stairs. The Master glided smoothly over toward me. "Finally gave up, did they?" Not understanding what he meant, I asked, "Huh?" "They've been pulling on my feet from underwater this whole time." The Master said that, resting his elbows on the poolside. The boy was no longer in sight. "I swallowed a bit of water, but when I completely ignored them, it seems they finally gave up." He wore a sly, mean-spirited grin. Had this guy been aware of that kid's presence the whole time, while also talking nonsense about how there was nobody else in the pool? I was too dumbfounded to say another word. "Probably the spirit of a kid who died here, or something. And today must be the anniversary of his death. Sounds like a pretty nasty one, too. Nasty enough to implant a psychological aversion in the deep consciousness of the surrounding residents so they wouldn't want to come to the pool today." Was the pool being empty the result of everyone's unconscious self-preservation instinct? If so, what did that make us, who had come here today? In the direction the boy had gone, a trail of dripping water stretched out. From it, a heat haze seemed to be shimmering upward. "You still don't get it?" the Master said with a laugh. At that moment, a premonition—bordering on certainty—surged within my chest, telling me that this summer was not the summer I knew. "We stepped across the line a long time ago." With those words, the Master dove backward into the water. A splash struck my ears, followed by a voice echoing out into the sky: "It's so much fun!"
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