Chapter 44 Second Contact

Whether it was the aftermath of what he'd just survived or something objectively wrong, the silence felt different now. Ma En stood in the corridor, studying the doors — all shut, all dark, every room asleep — and couldn't shake the sense that even the quiet itself carried something strange beneath it. The corridor was bright. Normally he wouldn't have noticed. Now the brightness felt suspect, as though some unusual force were the reason those lights hadn't gone out. Even the ordinary interplay of light and shadow along the walls looked isolated and off.

He was almost certain that last night, walking back from his outing with Hirota Masami, the corridor had been lit the same way — and nowhere near this bright.

But feelings were just feelings. He couldn't point to a single physical thing that proved them right.

He spent a little over a minute pacing the hallway — from the far end to the elevator and back to Room 6. By the time he finished, the numbness had left his body entirely, and the nerve-deep cold had vanished with it. In that short span he'd listened, searched, smelled, felt the air against his skin — hunting for anything that might prove it wasn't over.

He found nothing.

The bizarre things, it seemed, had truly gone.

Room 6 was equally silent. Through the open door, the apartment was pitch-black — the corridor's brightness only made the darkness inside look deeper. Earlier, standing in the room itself, he'd been able to pick out shapes from the blur. Now, looking in from the hallway, everything had melted into a single murky mass.

Hirota-san didn't seem to have woken. Ma En could understand that. The fight, for all its intensity, hadn't been loud. The smoke face and the vine had moved with a cat's silence; his own footsteps had probably been the noisiest part. That, or she was simply sleeping deeply.

The thought gave him pause. Had all of it been directed at him? Did those things have no interest in Hirota-san at all?

If it was his presence that had drawn them here — if she'd only been caught up in it because of him — then would they never have appeared in Room 6 had he turned down her invitation?

If the answers were all yes, then the fact that Hirota Masami hadn't been hurt was luck amidst catastrophe. And any future decision about how close to let someone get would have to take her case as the benchmark.

Even with the entire thirteenth floor calm again, guilt and worry for Hirota-san lingered.

He hesitated over whether to spend the rest of the night in her apartment.

Ma En carried the black umbrella back into Room 6 and checked the door lock. When the vine had forced the door open, he'd heard nothing at all. Now, by the corridor light, he could see why: a thin twig was jammed into the keyhole.

He tugged it gently. The texture was entirely that of a plant — clear nodes, rough surface — but he couldn't identify the species. Given what had happened, it was safe to assume this was a remnant of the vine, and that this was how it had worked the lock open. Yet this fragment lacked the vine's uncanny quality entirely. Under his fingers it felt like an ordinary piece of wood.

He couldn't pull it free in one try. The resistance from inside the lock was greater than he'd expected — stubborn and tenacious, as though the twig had wound itself through the cylinder's mechanism. He pulled harder. The twig snapped at the keyhole. The bolt didn't spring back.

The lock was ruined. That settled it — he would stay in Room 6 until morning. He had a responsibility to watch over Hirota-san, in case something else came calling while the door couldn't be secured. Whether those things had been targeting him specifically, whether they'd return — he couldn't know and couldn't prevent. He could only do what was within his power.

If he'd stayed in the homeland, the neighbors in his old building might have been the ones dragged into it — and the damage could have spread even wider.

Even here in Japan, where he knew few people, the logic was clear: get close to someone, let the relationship deepen, and whatever had found him tonight would almost certainly find them too.

Should he pull back from Hirota-san?

The thought surfaced and was dismissed within a heartbeat. Tonight's events had happened in Room 6 regardless. Until he'd confirmed that his proximity was actually the cause, cutting ties on impulse would be premature.

He was still weighing the decision as he pocketed the broken twig. Just as he was about to pull the door shut, he spotted the lighter lying on the entryway floor. Something clicked.

He picked it up, pushed the door open again, stepped back into the corridor, and fished the twig from his pocket.

He wanted to see if it would burn.

Logically, this was part of the vine. But it felt like ordinary plant matter. If it had lost its strangeness after separating from the main body, fire might tell him what remained.

He wasn't entirely sure what result he was hoping for. If it wouldn't burn, that proved its material was abnormal. But if it could burn, that might mean the thing wasn't wholly beyond the laws of physics — and from there, he could start devising countermeasures.

Better if it burns. That was what he settled on. He had to keep pursuing the Room 4 Ghost Story, and that meant he'd likely have to face something like this head-on.

The lighter clicked and a flame leapt up. It danced in Ma En's pupils as he adjusted it to maximum, his expression calm, and held the twig into the fire.

For roughly ten seconds, nothing happened. Then the surface began to discolor, and within three seconds of the change starting, the affected area had turned a charred black. But it never ignited. Only the section directly exposed to the flame showed any change at all.

He stopped and touched the blackened part.

It wasn't hot. It was colder than the section the fire hadn't reached.

Ma En's hand paused. He bent the twig at the charred spot, hard. It snapped — but the break occurred at the boundary between charred and uncharred wood. The burned section, it seemed, had become harder.

Or had the unburned part become more brittle?

The thought came instinctively, but when he'd pulled the twig from the lock earlier, it hadn't felt like he'd used much force either. The brittleness might be nothing more than imagination.

He filed the unprovable idea somewhere deep and moved on. The results weren't what he'd expected, but they weren't without value either.

In the end, he didn't discard the twig. He pocketed it again.

He was about to head back into Room 6 when a faint sound came from the other end of the corridor. Faint — but in this silence, unmistakable.

It didn't startle him. He looked toward it on instinct, and in that instant recognized what it was: a door lock disengaging.

Just like the night before, Room 3's door had cracked open. Only the occupant's eye was visible, hovering behind the gap.

Ma En had no direct proof, but he'd felt it multiple times now — this was the eye that had been watching him.

As before, he found himself comparing it to the uncanny eye he'd seen through the peephole. Even on a second viewing, the memory of that eye was vivid. But set against the one peering at him now, the difference was enormous — absolute, even.

The eye behind Room 3's door was unmistakably human.

"Good evening." Ma En gave the occupant a polite nod.

The man's strangeness was tangled up with Room 4 and with Hirota Masami both, but Ma En could hardly charge over and strong-arm the man. Perhaps that day would come, but things hadn't reached that point.

He suspected the man's silence had a reason, and that the reason probably involved other people. He was willing to respect whatever the man was hiding. But he hoped, if possible, they could sit down and talk like reasonable people.

"May I come over?" Ma En asked, his smile mild.

The man behind the door said nothing. But Ma En could hear sounds — something like breathing, or like a low, wet laugh, punctuated now and then by a dripping. Drip. Drip. Drip. What was happening in that room? The sounds alone told him nothing.

He took a few steps toward Room 3. The gap in the door immediately narrowed.

Sensitive.

Ma En stopped. As a gesture of goodwill, he stepped back two paces instead. The man behind that door had clearly become deeply unhinged. There was a real possibility he was dealing with someone genuinely ill.

"Mmnh..." A muffled groan from the other side — part pain, part pleasure. "Ma... Ma En?"

"Yes. I'm Ma En." He softened his voice.

"...You've been marked. I saw it... They've already seen you." The man's voice was thick, turbid — Ma En could barely make out the words.

"Who? Who's watching me?"

"It... them... so many... so many... here, the streets, the residents, everywhere..."

"What are they?" Ma En caught himself and rephrased.

"You... you've been chosen by them... there's no escaping anymore." The words dissolved into a gurgling mumble. "I told you before... told you before... be careful of Hirota Masami... but you didn't listen. Everyone who didn't listen died. All of them, dead, hee hee hee... Only I can't be seen. Terrifying... it's terrifying..."

"I can't understand what you mean," Ma En answered calmly. The man's words were clearly meant to frighten him, but he couldn't muster a shred of fear. Piecing together the fragments, the situation might genuinely be dire. But so what? This was the price of pursuing the bizarre.

"Of course, of course... no one can understand... I know that, I know that." The voice behind the crack turned bitter and raw. "Why should I believe in you? What could I possibly expect from you? You're a fool — hopeless trash. You've got your eye on Hirota Masami, don't you? You want to fuck her, right? Stupid, stupid!"

Ma En couldn't tell if the man was berating him or talking to himself. His tone, his rhythm, the sounds he produced — it was as though his mouth were full of something.

And beneath the words, the dripping persisted. Drip. Drop. Drip. It continued even while he spoke.

Ma En's gaze drifted downward. A damp patch had formed at the base of the door crack. The sheen wasn't quite right — not like ordinary water. Thicker. Oilier.

The air carried a faint smell he'd never encountered before. It might have been coming from the stain.

"Then what do you think I should do?" Ma En didn't press the point. He asked instead.

Silence from behind the door. It stretched on. Ma En showed no impatience.

Then he heard the man speak the clearest sentence he'd uttered all night:

"Kill Matsuzaemon."

Kill Matsuzaemon? Ma En hadn't expected to hear that name again — here, of all places. A senior police official. Every thread seemed to be converging toward something that would erupt into a political crisis.

But what connection did the occupant of Room 3 have to a man at the top of the police hierarchy?

And Matsuzaemon's position was what it was. If Ma En actually killed him, it would almost certainly be classified as political assassination — the one thing the political establishment feared most. He'd be used and discarded, his fate self-evident. Avoiding arrest would be lucky enough, let alone keeping his status as a Party member.

As of right now, this was the one thing Ma En was certain he must not do.

"...Hee hee... I say that, but you can't kill him anyway... As long as they're still here, he won't die..." The voice behind the door giggled — nervy, unhinged — then drifted into a confused mutter. "But... but... why do I think you — you fool — could actually do it?... Hee hee hee hee... Terrifying. Truly terrifying."

The crack in the door closed shut.