The other day, as I tried to enter a certain shop, I found that the automatic door wouldn't open. It was a door I had just come out of a moment earlier, yet when I tried to go back in, it showed no response. I gave a wry smile and walked around to enter through another door. In times like these, there are invariably no other witnesses. I laughed it off self-deprecatingly, chalking it up to a purely personal experience.
At that moment, I suddenly found myself thinking back to my university days. Back when I was a student, automatic doors failing to open was an everyday occurrence. It goes without saying that a college student living alone visits a convenience store at least three times a day. Since I lived in a student-heavy neighborhood near the campus, the surrounding area was packed with convenience stores. For some reason, from morning till night, I would hang out in them whenever I had a chance, just to kill time.
It must have been around the summer of my freshman year when automatic doors started failing to open for me quite frequently. I’d try to walk into the exact same convenience store, wearing the exact same clothes as the day before, yet for some reason, the door wouldn't open. I'd instinctively look up at what seemed to be the sensor above the door and move my face around. It wouldn't open. I'd shift my body forward, backward, left, and right. It wouldn't open. I'd step away once, then try walking up again as if I were a completely different person passing by. Finally, it would open. Things like this happened quite often.
True to the nature of a university student, when you feel like an utterly insignificant human being in society, struggling with your own sense of existence, and feeling depressed, having something like this happen makes it feel like a symbolic event, bringing you down even further. Seeing a gal walk right past me—as I stood helplessly frozen in front of the door—and slip effortlessly inside while babbling stupidly on her PHS phone, I would feel an indescribable sense of defeat.
*“You rank 5 in human rights, so you have no right to use an automatic door.”*
It felt as though someone was telling me that. The self-deprecating line, "The door wouldn't open again," became something like my habitual greeting for a while back then.
I suppose those days weren't unrelated to the feverish, occult-obsessed lifestyle I was living at the time. Back then, I was tagging along like a lost puppy behind my "Master"—an upperclassman from my university club who hammered the basics of the occult into me.
Once, when the two of us stood side-by-side in front of the automatic door trying to enter a FamilyMart, it showed no sign of opening, acting as if it were just a plain sheet of glass. We stood there blankly for a while until the Master finally said, "Try moving around a bit," so I shifted my body in various directions to find the responsive spot. It wouldn't open. After the two of us repeated these agonizingly awkward movements of shifting, stepping away, and stepping back, the door suddenly slid open without any warning. An unhealthy-looking man carrying a pack of 100-yen iced barley tea stuffed into a plastic bag walked out and told us, "Get out of the way." Stuff like this happened repeatedly at convenience stores in my daily sphere of life.
One day, the Master said: "You know how there are ghost stories about convenience store doors opening in the middle of the night when there's supposedly no one there? This is the exact opposite."
Come to think of it, I had experienced that myself. It happened on a stiflingly hot night when I stopped by a neighborhood convenience store to cool off and read some magazines while standing. At the clerk's voice calling out, "Welcome," I casually raised my eyes from the book, and the automatic door slid open, but no one came in. Thinking someone had just walked past the entrance, I dropped my gaze back to the book.
After a while, I heard the clerk's voice again: "Thank you very much." When I looked toward the entrance, only the door slid open once more, and no shadow of anyone was to be seen. Looking around the store, there were only two reading-standing customers, including myself. The young store clerk was silently writing something at the counter. He didn't even raise his head, seemingly just reacting to the sound of the door opening.
For some reason, an eerie sensation crept up my spine. I looked around the store again. The sluggish atmosphere typical of the deep night hung in the air. The clerk surely couldn't retreat to the back because we were there, and must have been wishing we would hurry up and leave.
It was dark outside. Since it was a student town, despite the darkness, there was a fair amount of pedestrian traffic even late at night. The sight of nameless silhouettes coming and going through the dark alleys looked eerie when viewed from inside the brightly lit store through the glass.
I heard the sound of the clerk yawning. His head remained lowered. I knew well that this store operated with only a single staff member on duty late at night. What if someone shoplifted and he didn't even notice? The moment I thought that, a chill ran through me as I realized something.
When the door opened the first time, the clerk said "Welcome" without even looking. When the door opened the next time, he said "Thank you very much." Why wasn't it "Welcome" the second time around, too? The clerk wasn't even looking in that direction. And since no one actually entered or left, I couldn't understand the reason for switching his greetings. It was as if someone invisible had slipped in, and then slipped out.
The compulsive feeling that I didn't want to stay here grew stronger, and I returned the magazine to the shelf and hurried out of the shop. As the door opened and then closed, the clerk's mindless voice echoed at my back: "Wel-thank you very much."
Now, among the days when the doors wouldn't open, there is one particularly intense memory.
During my freshman year, in the dead of a midsummer afternoon, I reached a convenience store feeling as though I was melting. It was said to be the hottest day of that summer, and I even had the illusion that the asphalt was sticking to the soles of my shoes. Standing in front of the automatic door, I couldn't even wait for it to open fully before slipping inside. I immediately headed toward the dessert section, even though I had no particular intention of buying anything, and bathed my face in the chilling air drifting from the case.
*Come to think of it, the automatic door opened smoothly for once,* I thought as I raised my head, only for a bizarre sight to unfold before my eyes.
The layout of the products inside the store was the same as always. The posters for a concert happening half a year from now were the same as always. The high-lumen lighting was the same as always. Yet, there wasn't a single human figure to be seen.
In broad daylight like this, it was practically unheard of for there to be zero customers. This was a shop that would usually be packed solid with university students during lunch hour. Most abnormally of all, there was no sign of a clerk either. The two cash registers were unmanned, and no work like stocking shelves or inventory checking was being done.
Feeling somewhat creeped out, and using the notice that read "Please call out if you need assistance" as an excuse, I called out toward the back of the registers, "Excuse me, could I use the restroom?"
I waited ten seconds, but there was no response. I looked around the store again. There wasn't a soul in the magazine section, where people were always standing and reading, and every single book was lined up neatly on the racks without a single one out of place. That only served to emphasize the bizarre nature of the situation.
Abandoning any pretense of composure, I blatantly looked around in every direction and shouted, "Hey! Is anyone here?" When that voice was swallowed up by the cold, heavy air of the dead-silent store, I instinctively found myself heading toward the exit.
And then I stood in front of the automatic door.
It wouldn't open.
"Oh, you've got to be kidding me," I muttered, slapping the glass, but the door didn't twitch in response. I looked back inside the store, but nothing had changed from a moment ago. I couldn't sense the slightest presence of another person. Yet precisely because of that, a quiet pressure began to fill the space, making the hairs on the back of my neck prickle.
*I've wandered into somewhere I shouldn't have.*
That phrase popped into my mind, and I was seized by the obsessive thought that this was a mistake and I had to get out of here quickly.
I changed my standing position in front of the door, changed the timing of putting my weight into it, adjusted my height using the suspension of my knees, altered the speed at which I walked under the supposed sensor—struggling in every conceivable way to get the automatic door to open. *I don't mind standing here for thirty minutes tomorrow, just open on the first try this time!* That was the kind of prayerful feeling I had.
Outside the door, amid the heat where shimmering heat waves seemed ready to rise, many people were walking past. Not a single person paid any attention to me. I turned back repeatedly, but there was no presence inside the store whatsoever; it just felt as though something incomprehensible was quietly malfunctioning. Feeling an abnormal pressure in the lifeless scene, I broke out in a cold sweat and fumbled frantically in front of the door.
Suddenly, a faint reflection of the reversed interior of the store caught my eye in the window glass. Though I couldn't make out their faces clearly, several customers were definitely visible moving around inside. Even though there shouldn't have been anyone there.
Just as I was on the verge of a panic state, the door suddenly opened without any warning, and I burst outside. I was enveloped in a stifling, intensely heated air, but it actually felt comforting, and I fled from the spot without even being able to look back.
As I left, the edge of my vision seemed to catch the usual convenience store interior with people inside, but I just wanted to run away.
Later on, when I told the Master this story, he laughed and said, "Weren't you just having an out-of-body experience because it was too hot?"
"Because isn't that experience like looking at a convenience store ghost story in reverse?"
Since he seemed to be making light of the fact that the door wouldn't open, I counterattacked: "Even if only my consciousness slipped inside the convenience store, how do you explain the fact that there was no one inside the shop?"
The Master simply replied: "Just as humans can't see spirits, there are times when spirits can't see humans, you know."
With that, he crossed his two index fingers, muttered "Intersecting worlds," and whistled for reasons unknown.
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