"You've got to be kidding me..." I spoke to the cat right in front of me, brushing away the smoke that still filled the air. The cat was sitting in the middle of a magic circle drawn in paint on the hardwood floor, looking completely bewildered. It wasn't that I had lost my mind. The problem was that the world had gone crazy. Why on earth did Kyosuke-san have to turn into a cat? It all started when Kyosuke-san called me to say he had found an interesting magic circle. Apparently, he had stumbled upon what looked like an old copy of a grimoire at a secondhand bookstore. The demon-summoning magic circle in it had a shape he had never seen before, so he said he wanted to try it out. And while he was in the middle of performing this shady ritual in his apartment room, a sudden explosion echoed, purple smoke billowed everywhere, and before I knew it, Kyosuke-san was gone, replaced by an adorable white cat. I wasn't entirely certain that the cat was Kyosuke-san. It was just a simple matter of subtraction and addition—one person vanished, one animal appeared—and above all, the cat was wearing Kyosuke-san's talisman around its neck. "K-Kyosuke-san?" When I asked timidly, the cat answered with a huge yawn, skillfully lifted its hind leg, and began scratching behind its ear. Not a single "meow" or a word. Which is it?
I spread my arms and approached the cat. "Look, if you're just a normal cat, this is super pathetic. Well, if you're just a normal cat, I don't really have to be embarrassed in front of anyone—wait, what am I even saying? Anyway, let's just step out of the magic circle." I reached out to pick the cat up. "Pervert." The cat spoke! Deftly dodging my stunned hands, the cat stepped out of the magic circle and gave a light stretch. Then, as it passed by me, it rubbed its face against the table leg and looked back. "You are Kyosuke-san, right? Wh... what happened? I mean, what, what should we do?" Ignoring my panic, the cat calmly turned its neck and began licking its own back. "Was turning into a cat a success or a failure? I mean, I just can't believe a human turned into a cat." As I appealed to it with frantic gestures, the cat abruptly stopped moving, tilted its head in a gesture that seemed to beg for something, and said, "I wanna go outside-nya." Whoa. So cute. Hit by an unexpected surge of cuteness, a grin spread across my face. It reminded me of how I felt when Miyoko-san transformed into a cat in the old Doraemon movie, *The Record of Nobita's Parallel Visit to the West*. "Outside? Oh, that's right, why don't we go see the Master? He might be able to do something about this." "..." Kyosuke-san (whom I believed to be Kyosuke-san) went back to licking his own body.
"What is it?" To my question, he answered irritably, "Well, wait. Let me groom myself first." He suddenly turned very arrogant. Kyosuke-san then spent a generous amount of time meticulously licking every single hair on his body. Even a strange luster started appearing on his fur. "Alright. Fur coat looks good." With another stretch, Kyosuke-san began walking trot-trot toward the entryway. He stopped in front of the door, lowered his body, and leaped up with an un-cat-like shout of "Hah!" His white body danced lightly through the air, and his front paws entangled with the doorknob. But only a faint click was heard, and the door remained closed. Only Kyosuke-san dropped back down. "Are you okay?" "Hmm. When I was a kid, I saw a cat open a door like this at Mutsugoro's Animal Kingdom." He looked up at the door, clearly mortified. In the end, I opened the door for him, and the two of us headed outside together. We walked down the apartment hallway toward the stairs. Then, Kyosuke-san, who was walking ahead of me, suddenly stopped. "What's wrong?" "Actually, you should go first." "?"
I stopped as well, reluctant to move forward, and Kyosuke-san said to me, looking annoyed. "You can see everything from behind, you know." Ah. So that's it. If he was that embarrassed, he shouldn't keep his tail sticking straight up in the air like that. "I can't help it." I didn't really understand why, but it must have been an unavoidable feline instinct. When I took the lead and started walking, Kyosuke-san followed right behind me. "Is this situation dangerous? Anyway, I brought that grimoire with me just in case." "Who knows. That pervert might find it amusing and do something about it." "Come to think of it, was it okay that I didn't bring a change of clothes?" "My clothes didn't drop when I became a cat, so I guess that means I transformed along with my clothes. It should be fine." We exchanged such conversations as we left the apartment and walked down the street. I wondered if I could put Kyosuke-san in the basket of the bicycle I had ridden over on, but he said, "It's not that far, let's walk," so we decided to go on foot. Passersby looked at us, smiling or turning to look back. Sometimes you see old men forcing cats to take walks on leashes with collars, but seeing a cat follow its owner without a leash must be rare. Feeling somehow in a good mood, with a light step, I occasionally turned around and smiled brightly at Kyosuke-san. "By the way, what happened to that '-nya' ending you mentioned earlier?" I asked. "I'm suppressing that with sheer willpower," came the reply. Apparently, he was consciously stopping himself right before he let a "nya" slip out. Given Kyosuke-san's personality, he probably couldn't bear to say it.
Ah, but even happy times eventually come to an end. I had never felt that arriving at the Master's place was so fast, and so disappointing, as it was today! Standing in front of the rundown apartment, my shoulders dropped in dismay. Right beside me, Kyosuke-san had stopped and sat down in the exact same manner. "What's wrong?" I asked. "Well, wait," he replied, and started grooming himself again. Sitting on his bottom with his legs stuck straight up in the air, he licked along the grain of his fur, then shoved his muzzle right into his coat to untangle knotted fur with his teeth. As I hurried him with a "Let's go already," he moved his tongue at an even more frantic and busy pace, saying, "Wait, wait." When I couldn't wait any longer, Kyosuke-san inspected his gleaming body and announced, "Alright. Let's go." Knocking on the door of the Master's room, I felt a wave of irritation wash over me (*What is even going on with this guy?*). "Master, I'm coming in." Without waiting for a reply, I opened the door. Slipping right past my feet, Kyosuke-san trotted quickly inside. "Master?" Huh? The room, which was far from spacious, was completely empty. Junk—whether it was garbage or furniture, it was hard to tell—was scattered everywhere. That's strange. Just as we were leaving Kyosuke-san's apartment, I had called the Master on my PHS and told him, "I have something to discuss, so I'm coming over now."
At the time, his reply had been, "Perfect timing. I just got my hands on something interesting." Hmm. That bothered me. While I was thinking this, Kyosuke-san, who had been sniffing around the room, let out a grunt: "Oh." Looking over, I saw a small mouse cowering and trembling in the corner of the room. Suddenly, Kyosuke-san's eyes lit up with a fierce gleam. He lowered his body, wagging his rear end, and entered hunting posture. Before the mouse even had a chance to run, he lunged in a fraction of a second, catching it in his fangs with blinding speed. "Squeak!!" The mouse let out a single cry and stopped moving. Eww. He's actually eating it. Pinning his captured prey down with his claws, Kyosuke-san began chewing it to pieces with his teeth. Finding it gross, I looked away for a moment. But before I knew it, Kyosuke-san had finished eating and was licking clean around his mouth. "Still, I wonder where the Master went," I said casually, dropping my gaze to the spot where the mouse had been, when I noticed a wooden statue of a strange shape near the wall. It was a wood-carved figure of a crudely caricatured mouse, chiseled with rough, violent strokes.
Sitting on a pedestal like a contemplative half-lotus figure, it wore an archaic smile. The eerie part was that both of its eyes were hollowed out, as if rubbed away by some tremendous force. Those eye sockets were darkened with grime, looking exactly like marks left by countless human fingers pressing into them repeatedly over a long period of time. (*Could this be the interesting thing the Master said he got his hands on?*) Thinking this, I cautiously reached out to touch it, when Kyosuke-san suddenly let out a fierce hiss: "Hsss!!" Startled, my gaze caught sight of something I hadn't noticed before. Huh? Mixed in with the other trash in front of the mouse statue, a pile of clothes lay on the floor. It was a complete set—socks, jeans, and a T-shirt—dropped on the ground in the exact shape of a human body, as if only the insides of a person who had collapsed had melted and vanished. The door to the Master's room hadn't been locked. He was the kind of person who always wandered out without locking up, but what if the Master hadn't gone "out" at all...? What would happen if you pressed both eyes of the mouse statue? What were the clothes left behind? And what about the small mouse that had been near the statue? In my head, the clacking sound of an old-fashioned mechanical calculator echoed, followed loudly by the cheap *ding-dong* sound of a convenience store cash register. "MAAAASTEEER—!!"
Following my line of sight, Kyosuke-san's fur stood on end. Only the fur and bones of the uneaten mouse remained there. This time, the sound of a bell—*ding!*—rang out in my head. Uttering an incoherent scream, I collapsed on the spot. Kyosuke-san was frozen, trembling all over. H-He ate him. He ate the Master. I don't know if it's the curse of a wooden statue or what, but I wanted to believe that humans couldn't possibly turn into mice. Yet, standing right in front of someone who had literally turned into a cat, what value did that kind of belief have? "I'll apologize with my death." With a single cry, Kyosuke-san leaped onto the kitchen counter, clamped an onion rolling around there in his jaws, and tried to bite straight into it. I rushed over to stop him. Amidst this commotion, a goofy voice drifted in from the doorway. "Ooh~? What're you guys doing?" Standing in the entryway with a convenience store plastic bag in one hand was the Master. "Asdfghjkl..." Right in front of me and Kyosuke-san, both of us utterly dumbfounded, the Master casually took off his shoes and stepped into the room. "Didn't you turn into a mouse?!" "You didn't turn into a mouse?!"
Blindsided by our simultaneous accusations, the Master answered our questions one by one. "Huh? This mouse statue? Oh yeah, recently a mouse showed up in my room and it's been driving me crazy. So I bought this wooden statue from that old guy, supposedly filled with miraculous divine power to keep mice away. Apparently, if you press the eye parts, it activates the miraculous rat-killing wave. Eh? There was already a mouse here? And this cat took it down? I guess that means the rat-killing wave actually works. Come to think of it, this cat's been talking since a while ago... Oh well." "What about those clothes?!" "Ah, these clothes on the floor? Look, after I do my laundry, I fold a whole day's worth of clothes together, you see. Right while I was folding them, you called saying you were coming over, so I ran out to buy some drinks. My bad, my bad. Don't be so mad. I'll clean them up right now. Eh? What's that? What are you idiots talking about, there's no way a human could turn into a mouse. Hahaha!" Kyosuke-san lunged straight at the Master's laughing face. The eerie, flashing gleam of his claws tearing through empty air...
"And that was the terrifying dream I had," the Master said, turning pale. "Right..." was all I could say.
Comments (-)