It was the summer of my second year in university. A friend of mine had given me something that looked like a spirit photograph, and I decided to take it to an expert to have a look. By "expert," I mean an eccentric senior from my club who acts as my mentor in all things occult. When I visited his apartment, I immediately pulled out the photograph. The moment he took it in his hands, he gave a dry laugh and handed it back with a single word: "Double exposure." In the photo, my friend's grandfather was posing with his beloved dog, and right behind them, a vague, human-like shadow was floating. Yet, the Shisho dismissed it effortlessly as a mere shooting mistake. Unconvinced, I retorted, "Didn't you show me a photo a while ago that looked pretty similar?" The Shisho owned piles of spirit photographs, which he claimed to have bought from dealers in that line of work. However, he shook his head and said, "I don't have them here right now." I glanced around the cramped apartment room. That was when I suddenly realized that none of the eerie occult items he had shown me before were anywhere to be seen. Perhaps some of them were stored away in the closet. Even so, I recalled that things I had seen once were never just lying around the room again. "Where are you hiding them?" The Shisho gave an uncanny smile and tilted his head. "Want to know?" When I honestly answered yes, he said, "Then let's wait until night," and suddenly rolled out a futon and went to sleep. Stunned, I initially thought about going home, but it felt like too much trouble, so I just flopped down on the floor and eventually fell asleep.
When I came to, the dark room was crowded with strangely shaped Buddhist statues emitting a faint, hazy glow, and the futon the Shisho was wrapped in was floating in the middle of the room. Having suffered through such an absurd nightmare, I opened my eyes. Perhaps due to the heat and the restless sleep, I was lightly sweating. Naturally, there were no Buddhist statues or the Shisho's occult collections in the room; the master of the house was sleeping on the futon on the floor. When I shook him awake and said, "It's already night," he stared blankly out the window, muttered, "Oh, good timing," and crawled out of the futon. After stretching and making popping sounds with his mouth, the Shisho didn't even bother to change his clothes before dragging me out of the apartment. It was the middle of the night. We weren't carrying anything that looked like luggage. His battered old Kei car sputtered to life. When I asked from the passenger seat, "Where are we going?" he stepped on the gas and replied, "My hideout." "Eh?" I had imagined that such a place existed, but it seemed I had finally gained enough of his trust to be invited there. This was a man who would leave his dilapidated 9,000-yen-a-month apartment unlocked when he went out, claiming there was nothing worth stealing. Yet, he would frequently and gleefully brag about creepy antique tools with ominous backstories, claiming he bought them from dealers in Kansai. So, as it turned out, he had a separate place where he kept those things hidden. The car headed further and further north, winding along a mountain road with almost no passing headlights, and I was overcome by a certain sensation. A chilling coldness that crept steadily over my skin. I knew the cause. I was simply scared. A mass of condensed human grudges and malice lay at our destination. And I wasn't mentally prepared for it.
At the periphery of my vision, I had the illusion of white, hazy, swaying human-like shadows passing by and flickering out of existence, so I closed my eyes. The Shisho said nothing. Only the sound of the tires scraping against the asphalt and the sensation of my body being pulled side to side continued. Before long, with the words "We're here," the car stopped, and I was prompted to get out. A dark shadow resembling a mountain farmhouse stood before me. The light of another house was visible a little down the slope. However, there was no sign of human presence, at least within a radius of twenty meters. The phrase "abandoned house" suddenly popped into my head, making the eerie atmosphere feel even stronger. Standing in front of the entrance while saying, "The rent is 11,000 yen," the Shisho knocked on a lion-faced door knocker as if it were the most natural thing in the world. A dull metallic sound echoed. There was no response from inside. After waiting for the lingering echo of that sound to fade, he said, "Just kidding," turned the key, and pushed open the Western-style door. Even if it was a single-story house and quite old, it was a proper house. I was extremely curious about what connections he had used to rent a place for 11,000 yen, but I kept quiet, sensing he wouldn't answer. There were no streetlights near the house, and it had been almost pitch black outside. Once inside, I naturally expected the lights to come on. Instead, after hearing the Shisho rustling and moving something around as he disappeared further into the entranceway, a faint lamp light flickered like a will-o'-the-wisp. "The electricity isn't working." A silhouette of the Shisho holding a lamp guided me down a dusty hallway. Wearing slippers and half-blindly following the creaking wooden floors while trying to muffle my footsteps, I was seized by a wild suspicion: *Is this guy really renting this? Isn't this trespassing?* "Here's the living room," came his voice, and the lamp was placed on something resembling a table in the center of the room. Lacking the energy to explore the dark interior, I obediently sat down on a sofa near the lamp. It might have been of good quality originally, but now it felt dry and deflated, offering no comfort whatsoever.
The Shisho sat down on the opposite sofa, facing me across the lamp's faint glow. Even though it had been stiflingly hot earlier, the air here was cold. When I timidly looked around, black masks reminiscent of Micronesian or Polynesian aborigines hung on all four walls. Other items, such as hanging scrolls that looked like ghost paintings and fans covered entirely in mysterious writings, were scattered haphazardly across the walls. "Is this the hideout?" The Shisho nodded silently. "Why did you bother waiting until night?" With a deep sigh, the Shisho stared at a single point on the wall and opened his mouth. "I like this time." Ahead of his gaze, a large grandfather clock cast a dark shadow. The dial was barely legible, as if emerging from the lamp's faint light. The long hand pointed somewhere around 2:30. A pendulum was visible through the glass-covered lower half. However, it wasn't moving, indicating that this clock no longer functioned. I checked my wristwatch; it was just about that time. With the pendulum stopped, could the clockwork itself actually still be intact? Just as I was thinking that, the Shisho continued. "Is that watch of yours running fast? Or slow?" Prompted, I glanced down at my wristwatch again. How *was* it running, anyway? I felt like it was maybe a minute or two fast. "No matter how precise a clock is, it can never point to the exact, correct time continuously. Even if it seems to have zero error down to units like one ten-billionth of a second, what about one ten-billionth of *that*? And one ten-billionth of *that*? What about one over ten billion to the power of ten billion?" Under the illusion that the lamplight was wavering in a faint draft, I rubbed my eyes while looking at the Shisho's face.
"From the moment a clock is created, it moves away from that single, singular point called correct time," the Shisho said, shifting his posture slightly. "Unless some external correction device exists, like a tasteless radio-controlled clock, that is a fate equally given to all clocks." However, he continued, "Because this broken grandfather clock *is* broken, it can reach the moment of truth that ordinary clocks can never attain." I involuntarily looked up at the clock face. The long and short hands were frozen at an angle slightly wider than 90 degrees, unmoving. "Only once a day does it point to the perfectly correct time. Even if that moment is a metaphysical fleeting instant, it *always* points to it, just once." The Shisho stared at the clock with an entranced expression. So *that* was why he had waited until night and deliberately came at this hour? I went to pick a petty argument. "Twice, actually. Twice a day: 2:30 in the morning and 2:30 in the afternoon." Yet, shaking off that uninvited criticism as worthless, the Shisho said, weighing each and every word, "Only once. What this clock is pointing to is this very time, right now." I racked my brain for a moment, but there was no rational interpretation for those words. Yet the Shisho stated it with absolute, unquestioning certainty. A snapping sound echoed. A house creak. I stiffened my body. Timidly looking up toward the ceiling, I saw only the dark, spacious area and beams characteristic of a single-story house. *Creak... creak...* The sound of wood groaning reached my ears. When I lived at my parents' house, I heard this often, but after moving to my current apartment, I had rarely heard the sound—perhaps due to a difference in building materials. As if waiting for the grandfather clock to intersect with its true time, the house creaking continued.
I instinctively cringed at a loud snapping sound. Presumably, it was a phenomenon where moisture-absorbing materials started to contract in the cold, dry air of the night, causing slight misalignments among structural elements like floors, walls, and pillars, making an eerie sound. This wasn't just any ordinary house. In this creepy house, where I had no idea what kind of grotesque things might be hidden, and illuminated only by the unreliable yellow light of a lamp, I couldn't bring myself to dismiss the sound casually as a mere house creak. Looking at the Shisho sitting opposite me, I saw he had his eyes closed, the corners of his mouth curved in an amused expression, as if listening to music. I, too, remained frozen to the sofa as if my roots had grown into it, simply listening to the sounds echoing intermittently through this old house. After an unknown amount of time passed, the Shisho suddenly said, "Wait here a second," and vanished toward the hallway with our only light. A veil of darkness swooped down over the living room, and the creaking sounds of *thud... snap...* became strangely multidimensional, echoing throughout the space. Just as I was starting to feel deeply helpless, the Shisho finally returned, carrying something tucked under his arm. He placed it in the center of the table and held the lamp over it. It was a painting. Even at a glance, without any apparent reason, it was a creepy painting that directly triggered my instincts and gave me goosebumps. I didn't know why such a painting was scary. Against a pitch-black canvas, slightly off-center, a single yellowish stain-like color was placed all by itself. That was the kind of painting it was. "The original owner of this house was a Western-style painter," the Shisho murmured. Furthermore, he was a painter who went mad in his later years. "He was the kind of person who would look at his own paintings and cower, saying, 'Someone was inside.' Even after painting this himself, he reportedly asked, 'What kind of painting is this?' and then spent weeks and months pondering over it." *Snap,* the wall wept.
It felt as though the house creaks had grown louder. "One day, having grown gaunt and emaciated from hardly eating any food, continuing to glare at this painting, he suddenly raised his head and said to his family with a blank look on his face, 'I understand. This is...'" *Thud... creak... creak...* The groaning sounds continued, as if trying to interrupt the Shisho's words. "Four days later, he vanished from before his family, leaving behind a written note that read: 'I am in the basement.' The family searched the entire house. But he couldn't be found. Then, after waiting for the usual seven-year period for mysterious disappearances to pass, he was declared legally missing, and regarded as dead. This land and house were sold off by the remaining family. The eccentric buyer apparently liked the legend passed down in this house. He said it was practically like paying money for the phrase, 'I am in the basement.' I got to know that eccentric and rented this house. Well, I use it kind of like a shared storage room." "However," the Shisho continued. In that fleeting instant, a sound like someone knocking on the ceiling intervened. "However, this painting is certainly one of them, but for example, the things surrounding this room are all collections of that Western-style painter. He was a painter, and also a mad occultist. His collection was never understood by his family and ended up being sold for pennies along with the house. That grandfather clock is one of them, too. Apparently, there's a bizarre wartime legend attached to it, though I don't know the details." Chasing after the Shisho's voice, the house creaks seemed to grow gradually louder. "My own collection is kept in a locked basement. The basement where he left the written note saying, 'I am in the basement.' I like those words, too. Doesn't it give you a sort of caressing creepiness? What if the omitted subject in 'I am in the basement' isn't 'I'?" *Snap...* A sound came from somewhere near the floor. No, perhaps it only seemed that way because I had concentrated my consciousness on it.
"I feel like he's still here," the Shisho smiled, his eyes darting around. "Him, or something else that isn't him. In the basement of this house. At least inside this house..." His voice faded away as if being swallowed into the dry darkness, and a metallic creaking echoing from nowhere intertwined with it, sending a chill running down my spine like crawling bugs. My gaze was snatched away once more by that dark painting. And I couldn't help but ask, "Did *you* figure it out?" Amidst terrifying sounds from nowhere, like bones being snapped—*crack, crack*—the Shisho calmly settled his expression into that of a Noh mask. "I don't know." He took his time, and said only that.
We left that house before dawn. In the end, I never got to pay respects to the Shisho's prized collection. I simply didn't have the courage. To me saying, "Forget it," and waving both hands, the Shisho just smiled. After the Shisho's whereabouts later became unknown, I managed to track down the owner of that house. The person who had rented out the house for 11,000 yen.
He showed no interest in the fact that his tenant had disappeared. "Nothing was missing, and nothing was left behind, so..." the man said. Hearing that, I simply assumed the Shisho had disposed of his own collection before vanishing. Yet, the man said this: "Why did I buy that house? More than anything, it was because of that intriguing written note: 'I am in the basement.' Because, you see, that house doesn't even have a basement."
To cut a long story short, I never visited that house again. When I stopped by years later on some occasion, it had been turned into a vacant lot, so visiting it again is impossible forever anyway. This baffling story has a few rational interpretations. The lie that there was a basement when there wasn't. The lie that there wasn't a basement when there was. And the lie written as "I am in the basement." I don't know which one is the proper answer. Only that, whenever I am alone late at night and hear the sound of wood creaking from somewhere in the room, I recall those strange hours spent talking with the Shisho in the faint lamplight of a room surrounded by antique, old-fashioned art.
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