It was the autumn of my first year in university. I had gone to the apartment of Kyosuke, an online occult friend, to return a protective talisman I had borrowed. Kyosuke was a woman, a freelancer slightly older than me. She loved black magic and things like that, but she didn't have a gloomy vibe at all. Even though she could be a bit blunt, her clean-cut personality made being around her pleasant. That day, I was teasing her about how she had clumsily scraped her brand-new car against a guardrail, but she brushed me off and told me she was about to take a bath and head to her part-time job, so she practically kicked me out. I hadn't seen her at recent offline meetups, so I felt a bit lonely, but it couldn't be helped. As the door closed in front of me, I felt a slight sense of unease about the room—a place I had visited several times before. I'm sure it wasn't just my imagination. I had this vague anxiety, as if I had forgotten something. For the next week, nothing out of the ordinary happened. Living a lazy life that had completely stripped away my sense of what day of the week it was, I decided—for once—to attend a morning university lecture and left my house. The first hint that something was wrong came when the bike racks in front of the lecture hall, which should have been packed tight, only had a few bicycles scattered around. Then I ran into a friend named Sunami in front of the bulletin board, and she made fun of me, saying, "Today is a national holiday, you idiot." When I shot back, "Then why did you come?", she laughed, but then leaned in close to my ear and whispered, "Who was that walking around yesterday? Nice one." I had no idea what she was talking about, so I asked, "Where?", to which she elbowed me, saying, "Oh, wow, look at this guy," and walked away, leaving me completely clueless. I left the lecture hall, scratching my head.
I was pretty sure I had walked through the underground shopping mall by the station yesterday. Sunami probably worked at a shop around there, which must be where she saw me. However, yesterday I was by myself. There was no way I was walking with anyone. Did someone who happened to be heading in the same direction get mistaken for the person I was with? For some reason, a sudden chill ran down my spine and I turned around, but there was only a deserted campus stretching out behind me. I pedaled my bike furiously, fleeing back to my apartment. As I rode, I had the feeling someone was following close behind me, and I kept glancing over my shoulder while pushing the pedals. For some reason, I didn't pass a single person. Even though my apartment was close to the school, not having a single pedestrian on the way there felt uncomfortably eerie. I parked my bike in the bike shed, climbed the stairs, and unlocked my apartment door. The student-sized room wasn't very large, designed so that you could see straight from the entryway all the way to the back of the living room. At least, it was supposed to be. But. I was standing in the kitchen. With a blank expression, without even looking my way, "I" opened the bathroom door and slipped right inside. The door clicked shut. It felt completely unreal. I stood frozen in the entryway, not even taking off my shoes. Then I replayed what I had just seen in my mind. It wasn't a mirror, obviously. A living, moving version of me had opened the bathroom door and gone inside. That was all. If only it weren't for the abnormal fact that I was watching myself do it.
It's terrifying. I wonder if anyone can understand this kind of terror. I instinctively checked the clock. It was still morning. The sunlight streaming in through the window curtains was almost blindingly bright. Perhaps that's precisely why this inescapable sense of oppression weighed so heavily on me. The terror of the night can be overcome by turning on the lights. Or perhaps by waiting for dawn. But if a morning room is terrifying, where on earth is there any salvation? There wasn't a single sound in the room. I couldn't sense any presence coming from the bathroom, either. I probably stood there in the exact same pose, unable to move, for about ten minutes. And over and over again, like a spell, I kept repeating in my head: *What was that? What was that?* How badly did I want to just pretend I hadn't seen it and head to a convenience store? But for some reason, I decided it was better not to run away. Probably because it was a hallucination. Or rather, I was in deep trouble if it *weren't* a hallucination. Crying out a loud "Hey!", I strode heavily into the room and threw open the bathroom door without hesitation. Even as I pulled it open, I let out another nonsensical battle cry. There was no one inside. Rather than feeling relieved, I thought, *Yes!* Just as I was about to step inside the bathroom to double-check, I caught something moving in the corner of my vision. The front door, which I was sure I had closed, was open, and through the gap, my own face was peering in. Once again, I hopped on my bike and hurried down the holiday streets. Today I should have been attending a morning lecture and feeling refreshed, so why on earth was I going through this?
Until just a moment ago, I had barricaded myself inside the bathroom of my own apartment. I had locked it from the inside and gripped the doorknob tightly. What would I have done if "I" had walked in through the front door? If I had heard that "Hey!" shout from outside, I might have actually passed out. I have no idea how long I stayed in there, but eventually, trembling all over, I crept out of the bathroom and made a call. I called the occult master, who is usually ridiculously reliable in times like this. But nobody answered. I couldn't get through to his cell phone either. Panicking, I called Kyosuke next. Hearing her voice say "Hello" made me feel profoundly relieved. Then I sped down the exact same road I had crossed just a week ago, going several times faster. Kyosuke told me she was at a coffee shop near her apartment building. When I spotted her figure through the glass window at a seat by the window, I felt like a newborn, helpless animal. At the sound of the cafe door's bell, Kyosuke turned around, raised a hand with a "Yo," and I ran over to her table, blabbing about everything that had happened to me today. "Sounds like a doppelganger," Kyosuke said flatly. "It's a phenomenon where you see a human who looks exactly like you. Well, most of the time it's probably just a misunderstanding, but they say if you meet the real one, your time is up." A doppelganger. Of course, I had heard of it. Ah. When you put it that way, it really was a doppelganger. It's a strange thing—even with something whose true nature is completely unknown, just knowing its name brings a bizarre sense of relief. Isn't that perhaps the very reason why humans give names to supernatural anomalies?
"I wonder about yours, though. Didn't you just have a daydream?" I certainly hoped so. Having something like that sneaking around was terrible for my heart. "What bothers me, though, is that female friend of yours seeing *you*," Kyosuke said. "It doesn't sound like she saw both you and the doppelganger at the same time. Judging by the way she talked, the one walking with you was a woman. Are you really sure you have no idea who it was?" I shook my head. "Then did the doppelganger go walking with some woman? Somewhere you don't know about?" "I'll ask her next time. Where Sunami saw me," I said, sipping the orange juice I had ordered. As I said that, I couldn't help but wonder why Kyosuke was acting differently than usual. She lacked that usual nonchalant vibe of hers. There was an urgency to her, or maybe tension—there was even a hint of her voice pitching upward. Even her initial words, *'Sounds like a doppelganger,'* had been like that. "What's wrong?" I finally blurted it out. Kyosuke said, "Hm?" and lowered her gaze slightly. Then she sighed and started talking, muttering, "This isn't like me."
Kyosuke first noticed her other self when she was in elementary school. At first, she said, she caught a human face in the corner of her vision by chance and thought it was a ghost. The absolute edge of her field of vision. Even if she tried to intentionally look right at it, she couldn't. The feeling that something was there might have started even further back in time. However, right after she realized that the whitish thing in the corner of her eye was a human face and thought it was a ghost, she realized, *Oh, that's my own face.* It was expressionless. It lacked any sense of depth. It had no real presence, as if it were actually there. When she turned her head toward it, her gaze naturally shifted along with it, as if running away. It wasn't always there. But she saw it often when she was tired or harboring some kind of anxiety. It wasn't scary. When she was in junior high, she learned the word *doppelganger*. The book said that people who see their doppelganger die. She thought that was a total lie. By that time, it wasn't just a face anymore. She could see the upper half of the body, like a torso. However, she didn't think the clothes it wore matched the ones she had on that day. She thought it was strange that she could see such a thing, but she never thought about telling anyone. A secret between herself and... just herself. In high school, she learned about a condition called auto-oscopy. It sounded like a mental illness. She didn't think it was a lie anymore. Whether it was a doppelganger or auto-oscopy, in the end, it was the same thing if only she could see it. Even if it was that kind of illness, it was still the same.
By that time, she could see the whole body. A version of herself standing quietly in the corner of her vision. It had no expression and stood frozen without moving. And when someone else walked through the spot where it stood, it would become transparent like a hologram, without even a ripple, and just keep standing right there. Once she could see the whole body, there didn't seem to be any particular changes after that. As always, she saw it frequently when she was tired or facing a mental crisis. That didn't make her feel any particular way about it. She just thought, *Well, that's how it is.* That was until recently. Lately, changes had started to appear. Starting from a certain day, the "feeling of it actually being there" grew stronger. What had often looked almost monochrome suddenly took on vivid colors. And its sense of physical depth increased. Whenever someone walked past it, it was enough to make her think for a split second, *Oh. We're going to crash.* Even so, other people still couldn't touch it or see it. However, one day, as she was putting on her jeans in her room, it moved. It wasn't the motion of putting on jeans, but some meaningless movement; yet, its hands had definitely moved. After that, it started showing actions frequently. It never made the exact same movements as herself, but it felt like... she could sense a sort of will, as if it were trying to become complete as another "self," and that creeped her out. She said it became truly terrifying for the first time: expressionless, recognizable only to her, looking slightly younger than her, yet undeniably herself.
After listening to Kyosuke's monologue, I felt an indescribable, cornered sensation. Like reaching the dead end of a path I had fled down. That kind of feeling. "Starting from a certain day—when was that?" I meant to ask it casually. "That day." "When is 'that day'?" Kyosuke punched me in the head with her fist and said, "Do you really make me say that again, you idiot?" At that, I understood everything. After saying "I'm sorry," I began to shake violently. "No matter how you think about it, it's not unrelated." Including yours, too. Kyosuke popped the last piece of toast into her mouth and washed it down with coffee. By that time, I had already figured out the true nature of the odd feeling I'd had when I went to Kyosuke's apartment to return the talisman. "What happened to the ornaments in the four corners of the room?" Those four iron objects she had called a protective barrier that day. They were nowhere to be found in her room a week ago. "They broke." With those two words, my chicken heart felt like it was about to give out. "Does that mean—" Kyosuke forcefully shut my mouth with her hand just as I was about to blurt it out with a sob. "Don't say that name in a place like this." I nodded, trembling. "Doppelgangers can be roughly divided into two types: those only you can see, and those others can see too. The former are mostly caused by mental disorders. Or perhaps transient visual hallucinations. And the latter are just people who happen to look alike, or supernatural phenomena like living ghosts. Either way, for abnormal phenomena, there are rational escape routes. I'm the former and you're the latter, but for them to appear to two people who encountered the same event— Well, it's a bit too neat to be a coincidence."
"In other words, you mean *that* person, right?" I successfully scattered my thoughts, making sure not to even conjure up that name in my head. "It's not like I was underestimating it, but this is bad." Kyosuke furrowed her brow and tapped her fingers rhythmically on the table. Feeling like I had one foot in the grave, I finally muttered in a low voice. "If I'd known it would come to this, I shouldn't have returned the talisman." At that moment, Kyosuke grabbed me by the collar of my shirt. "What did you just say?" "I-I said returning that magic protection talisman thing was a mistake! Could you lend it to me again?" For some reason, Kyosuke looked at me with an unusually fierce expression and said forcefully, "What are you talking about? You haven't returned the talisman." Not understanding what she meant, I answered flusteredly, "I came to return it last week, remember? The day you told me to go home because you were going to take a bath." "Didn't I tell you to keep holding onto it?! What did you do with it?" "I'm telling you, I returned it. So I don't have it anymore." Kyosuke felt around my chest area to check. "Where did you lose it?" "I returned it, I'm telling you. You accepted it, didn't you?" "What are you talking about? You didn't return it." Our conversation wasn't connecting at all. I insisted I returned it, and Kyosuke insisted I hadn't. I wasn't lying. In my memory, I had definitely given the talisman back to Kyosuke. And at the very least, it was certain that I currently wasn't carrying any kind of protective charm.
Kyosuke suddenly plunged her hand into the chest of her shirt and pulled out a pendant featuring an intertwined triangular design. "Take this and hold onto it." Wasn't that the exact thing she had said would lose its power if anyone other than Kyosuke touched it? "Look closely. That was a hexagram, and this is a pentagram." Now that she mentioned it, it was. "For now, this should keep the other you from doing anything to you. But you never know what might happen. Act cautiously for a while. If anything happens, contact me or..." Here, Kyosuke cut off her sentence and continued with a serious expression. "Contact that pervert." "That pervert" referred to my occult master. Kyosuke and the master were always at odds with each other. At least, they were supposed to be. "Honestly," Kyosuke muttered, sinking deep into the cafe chair. Then she continued, "The idea that doppelgangers appear before people whose time is running out... I used to think that was total bullshit. I'd been seeing it for a long time, but I'd stayed alive this whole time. But maybe it's different now. Maybe a mere illusion is trying to become an actual doppelganger right now." I don't want to die. I don't even have a girlfriend yet. Dying as a virgin feels like total disqualification as a living creature. "Um... is that other Kyosuke still there?" Asking that while looking downward, Kyosuke nodded and pointed a long finger smoothly toward a single spot off to the side. I couldn't see anything there. Even though Kyosuke's fingertip was clearly pointing at a specific seat in the cafe, no one was sitting there. Even though the cafe was starting to get crowded with the lunch rush and almost all the seats were filled, no one was sitting in that chair.
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