I don't know if I should be talking about this, but the statute of limitations has basically passed, so here goes.
More than ten years ago, when I was a high school freshman, my friends and I used to sneak into an abandoned building in the suburbs to sniff paint thinner. The place had been passed down to us by our upperclassmen, and since it used to be a love hotel, some of the rooms still had beds in them. Of course, we always went there in the middle of the night, bringing flashlights and mainly just hanging out in what used to be the lobby. There was a sofa, even though the springs creaked terribly. There were usually about four or five of us who went. It was a prime spot for delinquents, but because the upperclassmen who had it before us were notoriously unhinged, nobody else ever came near it—it was the ultimate hangout.
That day, five of us, including me, were hanging out in the lobby. Just as the sound of light rain started tapping outside, Shirou, being the idiot he was, announced, "I gotta use the toilet."
Usually, we just took a leak in the grass outside, but since it started raining, he didn't want to go out. "Wasn't there one past that door?" one of my friends asked, shining a flashlight toward a door at the back of the lobby. "Yeah, but the water doesn't work," I told him, but Shirou said, "Whatever, it's fine," took a flashlight, and disappeared. We faintly heard him say, "Found it, found it," in a dopey voice.
However, ten minutes passed, then twenty, and he still didn't come back. Getting genuinely concerned, one of us called out, "Hey, taking a huge dump or what?" and opened the back door to go in after him. After a short while, he came back out looking pale.
"Hey, Shirou's not in there." Not in there? "I mean, he's just gone. You guys gotta see this for yourselves." So all of us went and opened the door.
It turned out to be an office-like space. It consisted of two connected rooms, but it was immediately obvious that there was no toilet. More importantly, there were no other doors or exits anywhere.
Shirou had taken one flashlight with him, which meant we only had two left, but it was completely clear that there was nowhere a person could fit. We thoroughly checked behind lockers and desks, but in the end, Shirou wasn't found anywhere. Terrified by how abnormal the situation was, we all agreed to keep quiet about it to everyone.
I hate to say it, but maybe because Shirou didn't come from a normal family, even though their son never came home, they didn't seem to file a missing person's report. In the end, he was simply treated as missing and vanished completely from the face of the earth. We stopped going to that love hotel altogether. Even after graduating high school, that incident always bothered me. More than the fact that he had vanished, it was the question of why Shirou had said, "Found it, found it." For some reason, that terrified me beyond measure.
Years later, I happened to run into one of those old friends in town. While chatting at a cafe, the conversation naturally drifted to that incident. My friend told me that after everything happened, he had asked the upperclassmen why that love hotel had been abandoned in the first place.
I got the chills. It was because several customers had gone missing there. I didn't know how they had vanished, but that alone was enough.
After telling me that, my friend looked down for some reason and just kept stirring the melting ice in his lemon tea with a straw. Cold sweat was beading on his forehead, so I shook his shoulder and asked, "Hey, what's wrong?"
That's when my friend started talking about the fine details of what happened right after Shirou said, "I gotta use the toilet."
"Do you remember how I was sitting closest to the door Shirou went into?" Now that he mentioned it, I thought I was. "Well, right after the door closed, I heard a small voice." "You mean when he said, 'Found it, found it'?" My friend nodded with a pale face and continued. "That wasn't Shirou's voice."
I felt like years' worth of goosebumps erupted all over my body at once.
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