Around the time I entered university in a mid-sized city, having moved from the deep countryside by the sea, there was an incredible person in the club I impulsively joined. I’d always had a strong sixth sense and had experienced quite a few supernatural encounters since childhood. Right around college entrance exam season, perhaps due to stress, I had been suffering from frequent sleep paralysis and a series of frightening occurrences. Partly because of that, my interest in the occult had suddenly peaked. Even though the other club members were clearly pulling back and looking uncomfortable, I was eagerly talking about such things when an upperclassman chimed in, "Hey. That's good." That upperclassman was a graduate student majoring in Buddhist art. He rarely showed his face at club activities, but it seemed he had been summoned because it was the freshman welcome period. Inside the clubroom, which was swarming with older students, timid prospective members, and flashy visitors who were clearly just there to gawk, that upperclassman stood alone, coldly observing his surroundings from a step back. His probing gaze gave off an intimidating atmosphere that made him hard to approach, and he had caught my attention from the very beginning. However, to my surprise, he shoved his way through the crowd of people. As I answered his questions by recounting the various strange tales I had experienced, he wore an amused smile at each one, offering reviews like, "That sounds like a disaster." We hit it off completely, and on the very night I went to check out the club, he took me for a drive. The other freshmen were rounded up by upperclassmen and taken to a strip of cheap eateries near the back of the campus catering to students, but the upperclassman and I went our separate ways. Honestly, I hesitated when he invited me for a drive. Acting alone with an upperclassman who was separated from the other members and clearly felt like an outcast within the club made me feel as though this would determine my standing in the club from then on. And that hunch turned out to be correct. "You want to eat something?" When I climbed into his small, secondhand car parked in the campus lot, he asked me that. The sun had already set, and it was dark all around. "I'll eat anything," I replied. "Then a family restaurant it is," he said, fastening his seatbelt with a strangely pleased look. From then on, as he grilled me with questions about what other terrifying experiences I’d had, we arrived at a family restaurant quite far away. It was a Gusto in the suburbs. As I got out of the car, looked up at the sign, and wore a look that asked, "Why this place?", the upperclassman muttered: "This place, it haunts. My favorite." As a country boy who was stepping into a family restaurant for the very first time, I was already nervous enough—and he was saying it haunts? Haunt... is it haunted? With a stride as if he had made a reservation in advance, the upperclassman headed straight for a table without waiting to be seated by a staff member. I hurried after him and sat down across from him. We barely glanced at the menus, and when the food I had ordered at random arrived, the moment I gripped my chopsticks, the upperclassman said: "When I give you the signal, look down. You should at least be able to see their feet." He didn't even turn toward me; he said this in between slurping his spaghetti and chewing. There was no way the food could taste good after being told something like that. What kind of joke was this? Left with a vague, unsettled feeling, as I mechanically chewed the rice on my plate, my ears suddenly started ringing. It felt like a large machine full of gears in some unseen place had suddenly started up. It's coming. Drawing on my own experience, I knew it. It was the moment something out of the ordinary appeared, as if the atmospheric pressure of the space was changing, or the magnetic field was shifting. Cold sweat began to break out, and my hand holding the chopsticks stopped. The upperclassman said: "Hey. Look down." I panicked and dropped my gaze to the table. As I stayed frozen in that posture for a while, at the very edge of my vision, right beside the table, a pair of white feet smoothly glided past. It felt completely devoid of reality. Those feet were not stepping on the floor. My shoulders were suddenly tapped, bringing me back to my senses. "Did you see?" The upperclassman asked this as he wiped his mouth with a paper napkin. When I nodded, he said: "That's where the ghost story about this Gusto comes from—that there's one extra pair of staff feet. Though I can see everything besides the feet too. Well, you're happier not seeing the faces." Saying that, he nonchalantly took a sip of water from his glass. What in the world is this guy? "Eat up. I'm disliked, you know." I had considered myself someone who saw ghosts quite often, but at that moment I knew clearly that this guy was unbelievable. After that, until I finished eating, the white feet shuttled back and forth around our table three times.
After leaving Gusto, I was dragged around to a mountain road where fog is guaranteed to appear if you drive through it while telling ghost stories, and to the upperclassman's favorite mountain temples, until I had no idea where I was anymore. We had probably left the city limits. In a place resembling a farm path flanked by a pond or a marsh, the upperclassman parked the car on the shoulder. There were no lights to speak of, and when he cut the engine and turned off the headlights, complete silence enveloped the surroundings. "Um—" *Shh...* Pressing a finger lightly to his lips, the upperclassman strained his eyes toward the far end of the farm path. Wondering if he could see something, I pressed my face close to the windshield, but beyond the pitch-black field of vision, only the red light of a fire station or something similar flickered faintly. As I held my breath, I had the illusion that my own body was sinking into the night, filling me with an overwhelming sense of unease. Though it was spring, the temperature dropped considerably late at night, and the chill gave me goosebumps. How much time had passed? Suddenly, someone walked right past the side of the car. A person. No, was that really a person? A black shadow moved through the dark. Its features and appearance were entirely unclear. Frightened, I stared right at it through the car window. It wasn't just bizarre that someone was walking around at this hour. It was impossible that a car parked on a farm path at this time of night wouldn't feel unsettling. Yet, without even trying to avoid it, passing right by the side of the car without peering inside, as if it couldn't even be seen, that someone walked slowly and straight away. After it had moved far into the distance and the shadow was completely indistinguishable even to night-adjusted eyes, I let out a deep breath and spoke to the upperclassman beside me. "What was that?" Resting his weight with both hands folded over the steering wheel, the upperclassman answered sleepily. "Who knows." Sensing something unnatural in his tone, I pressed further. Since he had parked the car in a place like this and deliberately waited, there was no way he didn't know what that thing was. No way. However, the upperclassman said something I never could have expected. "It's a spirit path, this is." Huh. A chill ran through me. It was as if the bizarre sensation I had been feeling all along had finally been put into words. "I don't really like the word 'spirit path,' though," he muttered. After a while, I finally managed to react. "Why is that?" "When you say 'path,' it implies traffic—like things going back and forth, doesn't it?" "So what about it?" "I've never seen one," the upperclassman said, staring fixedly past the windshield into the pitch-black end of the farm path. "Come back." I held my breath. Outside, the distant, faint cry of a mountain bird echoed. "Not just here, but in any place they call a spirit path. That's why it doesn't feel like a path to me." "Then... what is it?" Those words brushed against my lips. Without moving his head, the upperclassman turned only his gaze toward me. Then he said, "It's a hole." A hole. A falling, inescapable hole. The moment I heard those words, I fell under the illusion that I was floating just slightly above the place where I was currently standing. It was as if I had been suddenly cast into an unstable space. Right here, overlapping with the world where we live our daily lives, yet different by a hair's breadth, lay another world. The very same thing we recognize as a road opened its mouth like a hole, quietly swallowing something that was not human. Shuddering at that imagination, I sat back down deep into the passenger seat. "Was it just the last one?" The upperclassman asked suddenly. The last one? The moment I heard that, I realized I had been mistaken. Goosebumps broke out all over my body, multiplying. The upperclassman had asked: Was the thing you saw just the last one that passed by? No way. Thinking that, I stared hard at him. However, he gave a dry, snorting laugh and said: "Well, whatever." Could he see them? During the time we had parked the car and held our breath, in the dead silence of the darkness, the countless black shadows passing outside the window. That space, which I had only felt as a cold, lonely farm path—he...
Around the time the morning sun began to pierce over the edge of the mountain, I was finally released from that bizarre drive. "See ya." Looking sleepy, he waved his hand limply from side to side. The window rolled up, and with the beat-up Kei car coughing out white smoke like someone neglecting an oil change, he drove off into the morning glow. Ever since then, I came to look up to that upperclassman as my master. Strange things, terrifying things, unpleasant things, sad things. Every single one of them was just a hair's breadth away from our daily lives. "Well, shall we go?" When he turned back to look at me and said that, the door leading to the space just a hair's breadth away from everyday life would open. Everything in my once-in-a-lifetime university life became colored by such things. And that would continue until his disappearance.
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