It was the winter of my first year in university.
Around that time, I frequented a local occult forum called "Dawn of Ash." It had a secret sub-site that only regular members could access.
Although the site's official purpose was to discuss black magic, no one followed that rule anymore; it had essentially turned into a general occult community. High school and university students who were temporarily into scary things would flood in as newbies and quickly disappear. Naturally, a secret sub-site exclusively for people who could talk on the same level was bound to be created.
I was still a bit too young to be considered a regular, but because my master in the occult path had drilled various things into me, everyone treated me kindly, even if I was a bit of a coward.
One of the regulars, a user named Itami, posted something interesting on that secret sub-site.
"Itami: A buddy of mine at university is the president of a club called the 'Psychic Research Club,' and it seems he's having some trouble lately. Would you guys mind hearing him out?"
The Psychic Research Club?
In front of my PC, I felt a little excited. It sounded sketchy, but I kind of wanted to check it out.
"Mikacchi: Psy-chic- lol"
"Itami: No, it's—well, saying it's proper is a stretch, but they take it pretty seriously."
"Mikacchi: Psy-chic- rofl rofl"
"Itami: Shut up for a second, will you."
"Kyosuke: Sure, I'm in."
That was the final word from the boss. If Kyosuke-san was participating, I would too. And definitely Mikacchi-san. And koko-san as well.
"koko: You shouldn't go."
Huh? Why?
Koko-san opposed it. A chill ran down my spine. Had she foreseen something?
However, after Itami-san's relentless coaxing, a few of us ultimately raised our hands to help with this consultation.
Just what kind of consultation did the president of the Psychic Research Club want to bring to the regulars of an occult forum? With anxiety and excitement all mixed up, I had a hard time falling asleep that night.
A few days later, on a Saturday, four of us rang the doorbell of a house with a nameplate reading "Nagai."
It was past one in the afternoon. Located in a quiet residential area, it was quite an impressive Western-style house.
Itami, the one who should have been here, hadn't come. He had said something about an urgent matter, but was that true? Did he run away? Koko-san's warning flashed through my mind.
"Hello. Nice to meet you."
A small man poked his head out from the entrance.
"I'm Nagai, and I'm the president of the 'Psychic Research Club' at Commerce University. I've heard a lot about you all from Itami."
He spoke with a refined tone. Behind his glasses were long, coolly shaped eyes. He was quite a handsome young man.
Without sizing us up, he cheerfully invited us inside with a "Please come in."
"No one else is home today, so please make yourselves at home."
We walked down a long hallway and were guided to his room. It was a spacious Western-style parlor. As soon as we sat down at the table in the center, Nagai brought us some black tea.
During self-introductions, everyone used their handle names.
"Kyosuke."
"I'm Mikacchi!"
"Uni."
"Ah, I'm Yamashita. Nice to meet you."
Yamashita-san, a working adult, said this while adjusting his glasses with his right hand. He was wearing a suit and tie today as well. It seemed he had been working through the morning.
"So, what kind of things do you do at the Psychic Research Club?"
I asked that first.
"Um, are you familiar with these?"
Nagai lined up five cards on the table, each with a different mark: a circle, a square, a star, and so on. They were the ones you often saw on TV.
"They're called Zener cards, and they're used in ESP experiments."
Nagai turned the cards face down, smoothly shuffled them with his left hand, and wrote "Zener cards" on a piece of paper with his right hand. Quite dexterous.
Then, he arranged the five face-down cards in a horizontal line.
"Try to guess where the star is."
An experiment in clairvoyance. I stared intently, but nothing could be seen through the solid gray backs of the cards.
I pointed to the far right, followed by Kyosuke-san, Mikacchi-san, and Yamashita-san in that order, leaving just one card on the far left.
"Now, let's see how your ESP abilities are."
Nagai flipped the cards over one by one, starting from the one I had chosen on the far right.
Wave, circle, cross, square. Everyone missed. I felt a slight sense of frustration at Nagai's smiling face.
"You all missed. But it can't be helped. The star was… because he…"
Saying this, Nagai flipped over the last card on the far left.
"Ate it."
Oh, I thought.
The last card wasn't the star I saw earlier. It was a joker. The joker from a deck of cards had changed into an illustration of itself scooping up a star with a spoon and eating it.
"Is—is this a magic trick?"
Yamashita-san was startled. No, everyone was surprised.
"So cool!" Mikacchi-san exclaimed excitedly.
"Hahaha, just joking. We actually do serious research most of the time."
Nagai pressed the joker card flat against the table with his left hand, slid his right hand underneath it, and pulled something out.
A spoon. A spoon came out. Which meant, as for the card…
Just as expected, when he opened his hand to show us, the spoon the joker was holding had vanished.
Nagai tapped the table with that real spoon—*clink, clink*—to prove it was hard.
"Watch closely."
He grabbed the handle of the spoon with his left hand and made a gesture like channeling power with his right hand. Just as his movements grew more intense, he gently touched the tip of the spoon with his right hand, and the spoon bent as if its spine had snapped. The moment everyone gasped in surprise, he held both ends of the spoon with both hands and blew a breath onto the handle.
Right before our eyes, the spoon straightened right back out.
Amazing. Amazing, but this…
It looked exactly like the movements magicians performed on TV over and over again.
"It's magic."
Nagai flashed a devilish smile.
"So the Psychic Research Club is just a magic circle?"
Kyosuke-san said unhappily. I felt that scam-like occult stuff was problematic, but having it brushed off so easily didn't feel good either.
"No. Magic is the means; the goal is strictly the manifestation of psychokinetic phenomena."
Straightening his posture as if to say the real topic was about to begin…
Right then, completely ignoring the mood, Mikacchi-san spoke up.
"I can do it tooooo."
Nagai folded the paper where he had written the spelling of Zener cards in half and stood it up on the table.
"Watch."
Then, she struck her left cheek twice with the palm of her right hand, immediately struck her right cheek twice in the same way, and brought her right fingertips close to the paper like a knife-hand, keeping her palm open. The paper didn't budge.
"Now, from the right."
Just as she said, she struck her right cheek twice with that same right hand, then her left cheek, and brought her right knife-hand close to the paper.
The paper fluttered softly and fell backward.
"If you slap your right cheek first, psychokinetic energy comes out."
I was a bit impressed with Mikacchi-san for saying that. But Nagai just laughed, "Hahahaha," and said, "That's just wind. When you end on the left cheek, you sweep away the air as you extend your right hand."
I see. So that was the principle. Upon having the trick explained, Mikacchi-san pouted in annoyance.
"We call this kind of magic an 'artifact.'"
"An artifact? What's that?"
"In Bachelor theory, it refers to something that induces PK phenomena."
Nagai smiled.
"Parapsychologist Kenneth Batchelder proposed a session that makes paranormal phenomena more likely to occur. In a darkened room, people who have gathered to experience paranormal phenomena relax and chat. In that setting, 'staging' such as moving a table or making strange noises with magic tricks—in other words, artifacts—is permitted under a tacit understanding. In that environment, the expectation that 'anything might happen now' makes it harder for psychological inhibitions like 'such a phenomenon is impossible in common sense' to take effect. Only in a space where the locks holding down the power generated by the human mind have been cleverly removed can genuine PK phenomena be born."
Speaking in a flat tone, Nagai lined up five spoons on the table.
"It is precisely in Batchelder's room…"
Nagai's eyes shone darkly as he stared at the spoons.
"PK…"
Kyosuke-san muttered quietly.
Yamashita-san, who had been gazing fixedly at Nagai's face, spoke up.
"Y-You… weren't you on TV? When you were a child."
Nagai looked up, startled. Wearing a forced smile, he opened his mouth.
"You remember very well."
"W-Well, I liked those kinds of shows, you see."
"What kind of TV was it?" I asked, and Yamashita-san gestured toward Nagai, saying, "He was the spoon-bending boy."
"I just appeared on a local evening show a few times."
Nagai held a spoon in his right hand and raised his left hand. With a tense effort, as if channeling some invisible force, his left hand trembled.
Everyone watched with bated breath, but the spoon didn't bend, and Nagai let out a deep sigh.
"When I was in elementary school, for some reason, I could bend spoons. At first, I showed my friends and amazed them, but then adults started making a big fuss. I started appearing on TV like that… And then, I gradually started getting scared. Scared of failing."
Nagai repeatedly clenched and unclenched his left hand.
"That's when adults in suits appeared."
"Ooh, Men in Black!"
Mikacchi-san squealed in delight.
"Are you familiar with Sony's ESP Laboratory?" Nagai asked, and Yamashita-san said, "Ah."
"It's the psychic research institute created at the urging of Masaru Ibuka, one of Sony's founders, right?"
Yamashita-san replied, pushing his glasses up his nose with a click.
"That's right. Not just Sony, but various major corporations were seriously researching psychic phenomena. It seems they abruptly shut it down after the Aum Shinrikyo incident led to a strong backlash against the occult. The people who appeared before me were from such a corporation."
◆
A boy is sitting in a chair. It was a white room.
"You don't need to be so nervous, kid. Want some candy?"
The boy, with a stiff face, rolls a piece of candy around in his mouth.
"Now, won't you bend this spoon?"
The boy holds the spoon he was handed in his right hand and raises his left.
Sweat drips down the boy's cheek. An adult in a suit checks his wristwatch.
The boy squeezes his eyes shut. *Clatter.* The spoon falls onto the table. Its neck is bent ninety degrees backward.
The adults bring a small, black box-like machine close to the spoon. Then they shake their heads.
"This kid is no good."
The world warps with a low drone. This kid is no good. This kid is. No. No. No.
◆
"D-Did they find out metal bending was a trick?"
Yamashita-san asked, and Nagai nodded.
"My condition was bad that day, and it wouldn't bend no matter what, so I finally resorted to a trick. By that time, I was completely broken from the stress of not being allowed to fail. I thought I'd done it smoothly. Normally, I wouldn't have been caught. But they saw right through it."
Nagai tossed a straight spoon onto the table with a *clatter*.
"They told me that spoons genuinely bent by real psychokinesis have a certain characteristic."
"A characteristic?"
"They are always magnetized. What they were investigating was magnetic force."
"Spoons are magnetized?"
I was a bit surprised. I'd never heard of such a thing.
"From that day on, I couldn't bend a spoon even once. Everyone turned on me and started calling me a liar. But…"
Nagai brought his fist down quietly onto the desk.
"Someday, I want to reclaim that power from back then. My power."
His voice was strained. The fresh, handsome young man was now revealing a dark, obsessive passion.
"So, you created a club and kept repeating psychic sessions?"
Kyosuke-san asked in a cold, dismissive tone.
"And why do you need to consult us about this?"
Right. That part still didn't make sense.
"Lately… strange things have started happening during the Batchelder theory sessions."
"Strange things?"
Kyosuke-san narrowed his eyes.
"I have no idea why such things happen. But everyone gets scared and leaves. That's the situation."
"What happens?"
To Kyosuke-san's question, Nagai didn't answer, instead starting to close the windows of the room.
"Please take your seats. Since it's everyone's first time, let's first experience a Batchelder theory session."
Doing as we were told, we sat at the table. In the center, the spoons remained lined up.
Nagai took his seat as well and said, "Now."
"As I mentioned earlier, in Batchelder theory, to induce genuine PK phenomena, a relaxed space and psychological reassurance—the feeling that even if something strange happens, it might just be someone's prank—are important."
Nagai held something like a remote control in his hand.
"I've set up enough trickery to make the table shake, so you can rest easy on that score. Now then."
The room lights went out. Pitch black.
"What are we supposed to do?"
Mikacchi-san's voice rang out.
"Let's just chat and have fun like normal."
The moment Nagai replied…
Even though it had just begun, it appeared. As if it had been waiting for them.
White hands were hovering right above everyone's heads. They were draped in a faint bluish-white light. They were long. Twisting and writhing as if they had no joints, there were ten, fifteen, or even more white hands.
"Hk—"
Yamashita-san and Mikacchi-san let out gasps. I, too, felt a sensation of saliva flowing backward into my throat.
The swarms of white hands stretching out from nowhere caressed the walls, the ceiling, and the table.
"Th-This is definitely… o-our territory, isn't it?"
Yamashita-san rasped out. As for me, I couldn't even make a sound. I pulled my neck in and stiffened my body.
If they touch you, it's over. That kind of obsessive dread took hold of me.
"Isn't this a magic trick too?"
Mikacchi-san's scream only fueled the sense of reality. This wasn't some trick. This was something far more terrifying.
"Why?!"
It was Nagai's voice.
"Why does something like this always show up?!"
He was crying out, almost weeping.
The white hands picked up the spoons on the table. As if they had found a toy, they played with them for a moment before beginning to bend them into squiggly shapes. Multiple white hands swarmed over a single spoon. A chilling bluish-white light squirmed in the darkness.
"Ky-Kyosuke-san…"
I squeezed out the name of the person I could rely on most in a situation like this.
Right then, a warm orange light flared up in the darkness. The silhouette of Kyosuke-san's back emerged. Unable to help myself, I stood up from my chair and, crouching down, felt my way toward him.
Kyosuke-san was holding the flame of a lighter underneath a white hand that was closing in right before his eyes.
It was a sight that defied belief.
"Not physical objects, huh."
Just as he muttered that, in response to Nagai's voice shouting, "Wh-What are you doing?", Kyosuke-san answered, "Oh," and turned around.
"Maybe doing something like this."
He showed Nagai how he was bringing the lighter's flame close to the white hand. The very next moment—
"Uwaaaaaah!"
Nagai screamed, and at the same time, the white hands began to writhe and thrash in the air. It wasn't just the hand being scorched by the lighter. All of them. It was a sickening sight.
"Turn on the lights!"
Kyosuke-san shouted. Yamashita-san went, "A-Ah," and the sound of him frantically feeling around the surface of the table echoed. "I found the remote," he said. And the lights flickered on immediately.
*Clatter. Clatter.*
The spoons dropped onto the table.
Every single white hand had vanished into thin air. Everyone was holding their breath and looking around their surroundings.
Kyosuke-san leaned forward, peering at the spoons on the table. An accessory chain spilled from his chest, the silver crucifix at its tip swaying.
"I see. They're all warped to hell and back."
Just as Kyosuke-san said, the spoons were all twisted out of recognition.
"You did this, didn't you?"
Kyosuke-san stared at Nagai with sharp eyes. Nagai was hugging his own shoulders, shaking violently.
"N-No."
"No, it was you. Even though you're right-handed…" As he said this, Kyosuke-san made a motion of writing something with his right hand. Was he referring to when Nagai wrote out the spelling of the Zener cards?
"The power to bend the spoon was trying to come out of your left hand."
He picked up one of the mangled spoons and held his left hand over it.
"Your first magic trick bent the spoon using your right hand, but the next one—the one that failed—used your left hand. The spoon-bending you did as a child… you did it with your left hand, didn't you?"
Nagai slowly shook his head from side to side. It didn't look like he was denying it; it was more the reaction of a scolded child.
"And the white hands from just now were all 'left hands'."
Huh. Mikacchi-san, Yamashita-san, and I were all shocked. In a situation like that, he noticed something like that?
"It wasn't me."
"I tried scorching it with a lighter, but the reaction only happened the moment you saw it. Because it was your hand."
Nagai's hand? No, was that a metaphor? Meaning—
"It's your power. I don't know if it's childhood trauma or whatever, but the power you've kept suppressed is bursting out like that."
Just as Yamashita-san had called it "our territory," I had thought the hands from earlier were a spiritual phenomenon. Yet Kyosuke-san alone saw it from a completely different perspective.
"I've seen it before, long ago. This kind of power."
When Kyosuke-san said that, Yamashita-san nodded, saying, "I-I see. The phenomenon from back then?"
"You're wrong!"
Nagai shouted. Mikacchi-san jumped with a start.
"I'm not using any psychic powers! Not since I was a kid, never! It was a magic trick from the very beginning! I just wanted to surprise people, I wanted them to say it was amazing! That was all! Psychic powers don't exist, do they?!"
Nagai slammed his hand against the table.
"Then… what the hell is that?"
Tears streamed from Nagai's eyes as he looked up with a terrified expression.
"You…"
Kyosuke-san wore an expression of surprise.
"Just go home."
"Hurry!"
The moment Nagai barked those words in a harsh tone—
With a sharp *click*, the lights went out.
A white hand materialized in the darkness, pressing the light switch in the corner of the room. Startled, I looked over, and the hand vanished smoothly back into the dark.
I felt a blood-draining terror at the return of the darkness.
Faint, whitish things were drifting around us. We were surrounded by them.
"Stop it, Nagai."
Kyosuke-san said in a muffled voice.
"I can't take any more of this!"
Mikacchi-san cried out, half-sobbing.
"It's not me!"
The sound of a chair crashing down echoed. Nagai had collapsed onto the floor. The sound of him scrambling and crawling across the floor.
"Turn—turn it on, this…"
Yamashita-san muttered in a panicked voice, presumably pressing buttons on the remote.
"Ah—"
The lights flashed on abruptly. Holding the remote, Yamashita-san…