In an elementary school second-grade classroom during an arts and crafts class, the assignment was: "Draw your family." Everyone chatted while using colored pencils to fill their drawing paper with pictures. A picture of a father, a mother, and a little girl smiling side by side in a field. A picture of two children playing on something like a slide, watched by their father and mother. A picture not just of a father and mother, but with grandfathers and grandmothers lined up alongside them. Many children also drew their pet cats and dogs. Children of that age probably have a strong perception that pets are also members of the family. When the class ended and the teacher looked at each completed piece one by one, she suddenly tilted her head at a drawing made by one particular child. It was drawn by a quiet, unobtrusive boy in the class. Visually, he had generously used many colors of pencils, making it a lively and cheerful picture. However, there was a strange sense of dissonance about it. The drawing paper showed a picture of a family sitting around what looked like a table. Perhaps it was a scene of a family gathering at mealtime. Everyone was facing this way, but the composition was somehow off. From the left, an adult who looked like a father wearing glasses, an adult who looked like a mother with a perm, and a single boy. Furthermore, on the far right, there was another adult. Everyone was smiling, and the insides of their mouths were boldly painted red, but only the adult on the far right sat with a closed mouth and expressionless face. The eyes were as narrow as threads. You could tell it was an adult by the size of the body. All the children in the class clearly distinguished between themselves as children and adults based on size.
That expressionless adult on the far right—their age was hard to tell, but there were no lines indicating wrinkles, so they didn't seem to be an elderly person at all. Three adults and one child. ...It was a picture that made people feel uneasy somewhere. The teacher recalled the boy's family structure. It was a family living in a single room of a housing complex apartment, a family of three consisting of the father, the mother, and their only son. Then just who on earth was this third adult? Had some relative been visiting recently? Thinking this, the teacher shook off the clinging, unpleasant feeling. Pulling herself together, she turned to the next drawing. Yet in a corner of her mind, she couldn't help wondering why that third adult was the only one drawn expressionless among the smiling family.
Two weeks passed. That day was Open Class Day, and the children were distracted by the well-dressed adults lined up closely at the back of the classroom. Even the children who usually worked hard to cause trouble were stiff with tension at that moment and had quieted down. At the end of the class, the teacher said, "During arts and crafts the other day, everyone drew pictures of their families, didn't they?" A chorus of "Yay!" came from the children. Then the teacher pointed with her hand behind the parents attending the class and said, "The pictures pasted on the back wall are those." The parents turned around all at once, starting to search for their own child's work using the names pasted beneath the drawings as a guide.
And the mothers said things like "Oh my," acting exaggeratedly embarrassed. The fathers quietly gave bitter smiles. The children started making noise in all directions, making a huge fuss. Watching such a scene with a smile, the teacher stepped down from the podium to speak to the parents. At that moment, a piercing scream went up. The scream echoed throughout the classroom, and both adults and children gasped and stopped moving. The owner of that voice was the perm-haired woman who had been looking at the picture in the corner of the wall. As the teacher rushed over, the woman kept screaming, her eyes wide, her fingers hooked and held against her mouth. At the end of her gaze was the expressionless face of the third adult sitting at the edge of the table in the drawing.
"That's how the ghost story goes," my mentor said. It was the spring when I had just entered university. He was a senior in a university club, but completely unrelated to club activities, he was a severe occult maniac, and I was someone who toddled along behind him like a disciple or a child. "Where are we?" I asked just in case, but I already had a faint idea of the answer. We had sneaked into a room in an unpopular housing complex apartment that had been abandoned and reduced to ruins. On the tatami mats where we squatted, there were shoe prints, empty cans, and burn marks from something. At the very least, it looked like more than five years had passed since anyone had lived there.
The mentor said, "This is the room where the child who drew that third adult lived with his family." "Is it a true story?" When I asked this, he nodded and said, "It's not something originally spreading as a street ghost story; it's a tale I collected through personal connections," and turned off the flashlight that had been illuminating the room. Just past 1:00 AM. Darkness covered the surroundings. Thinking why he would turn off the light, a creeping fear began to rear its head. "You understand the meaning of the ghost story, right?" a voice that sounded like my mentor's reached me from the darkness. I somehow understood. The reason the mother screamed at the end was because that third adult was someone who originally should not have been depicted there. It wasn't someone completely unfamiliar. If it were, she would have tilted her head in confusion wondering "Who could this be?" and wouldn't have had such an excessive reaction. Someone she knew, but not a family member, and furthermore, someone who should not have been surrounding the table. Faint moonlight seeped into the dark room, dimly casting the silhouettes of the pillars, the walls, and my mentor who should have been sitting right in front of me. I sat tensely in the six-mat living room where a table once must have stood. Assailed by an unbearable chill, feeling as though a pale, expressionless face was about to emerge in the darkness.
My mentor whispered as if to shake the tense atmosphere. "Actually, you might not have noticed, but this influence naturally extends even to the humans who listen to this story." The sound of exhaling a breath—*hoo*. I also drew in a breath and let it out. "Just by hearing the story, for some reason, you are already imagining that face." My heart pounded, and an urge to cover my ears washed over me. "Just by hearing the word 'adult,' for some reason you are imagining that face—not as a woman's, but as the face of an expressionless man with his mouth closed." I covered my ears. And I closed my eyes. My head was automatically imagining a face floating in the void. A voice could be heard from nowhere. That is the face of the third person who must not be here.
Comments (-)