Chapter 53 The Haunting Thing 2

Ma En's earlier impatience had vanished entirely. Given the state of mind the man behind the door appeared to be in, Ma En wouldn't have walked away even if the neighbor knew nothing about the Room 4 Ghost Story. And behind all that bleak, nihilistic posturing, Ma En sensed something else — other emotions, half-hidden, pressing up against the surface.

This neighbor who almost never left his room had chosen to speak to him. That fact alone, combined with the man's evident fixation on Room 4, gave Ma En plenty of reason to stay.

Even if most of what followed turned out to be delusion, it was worth hearing. The man's behavior suggested he'd been watching Ma En's side of the hallway for some time.

Ma En didn't mind being observed. If the neighbor truly had been doing that, the question of why was far more interesting than the surveillance itself. And the timing of this conversation — the fact that it was happening now, today — struck him as significant. A bystander's perspective was sometimes the clearest. He wanted to understand what this man, who had lived on the thirteenth floor for years, actually thought about Ma En, about Room 4, about all of it.

When Ma En pushed forward, the voice behind the crack hesitated — then said something that made his heart skip:

"Because, Ma En-san. August is getting closer. You're going to die."

"Because in the Room 4 Ghost Story, the victims all die in August?" Ma En wasn't shaken. The ghost story did include that detail — every tenant affected by the curse had died on the same day in August. The man's warning wasn't telling him anything new.

He thought for a moment, then decided to take the lead himself.

Whatever the neighbor was trying to say, whatever had kept him silent before and was pushing him to speak now, there had to be a reason for the hesitation. And in Ma En's impression — a vague, uncertain impression, more like a first-glance feeling than a confirmed memory; he briefly wondered whether this was really their first meeting — this neighbor hadn't always been this lucid, this articulate.

The man speaking to him now was markedly different from that impression. There might be reasons he couldn't bring himself to explain.

He was burdened, his thinking bent toward the dark, and by all accounts — by Ma En's own observation just now — his body and mind were likely in severe decline. Ma En didn't expect someone in that condition to show resolve or fortitude, and certainly not to lay all his cards on the table until he'd been pushed to the absolute edge.

People watching movies and TV shows always grew frustrated with characters who hesitated, who couldn't just say it. "Just tell them!" was the universal response. But in reality, knowing something was critical and still being unable to say it was far from rare — and criticizing that failure after the fact accomplished nothing.

So Ma En, facing this neighbor, showed neither impatience nor judgment.

He simply lowered his voice and asked, steadily: "How much do you know about the Room 4 Ghost Story?"

He adjusted his tone and pacing — releasing, through trained habit, the kind of vocal cues that psychologically signal safety. The same way a speaker might study how to steer the energy of an audience, professionals had thoroughly researched, practiced, and codified the art of adapting speech to the situation. These weren't techniques Ma En had invented himself. He'd simply learned them from established methods during his working years and practiced them until they were second nature.

Silence from behind the crack.

Ma En didn't think it was because his question had hit a nerve.

He'd started this conversation feeling vaguely annoyed by the neighbor's bleak philosophizing, but as the waves of déjà vu kept arriving, he'd begun to suspect the man had real reasons for avoiding the topic of the ghost story directly. If this man was an insider — someone with genuine knowledge — then he might well be the only person who had spent years observing the ghost story from close range, over an extended period.

And witnesses who watched for that long were usually in danger themselves.

Was it the sustained pressure of that danger that had reduced him to this state?

Ma En felt something like a gradual clearing. Not that he'd been confused before, but compared to earlier, his mind seemed sharper now. More awake.

A mode of thinking that felt like instinct was stirring back to life somewhere inside him.

He stared at the crack in the door. He still couldn't make out the person behind it. But he found himself wondering: why had he never, until now, paid attention to the suspicious elements surrounding this man? Why had he treated him as irrelevant, just another neighbor?

"Ma En-san, do you really think the current version of you is normal? Why not question your own logic a little more? You can't escape. They're everywhere — right here among us." The voice resumed after a pause of two or three seconds.

Ma En felt as though he'd heard something very similar before, in a very similar setting. The déjà vu was overpowering, and with it came another surge of formless pressure. It was as if, in that instant, he'd slipped through another fragment of a blurred nightmare — a feeling of something that needed to come out but couldn't find its way.

He was starting to feel genuinely unwell. He kept it off his face.

"Who are they?" he pressed.

"They are impostors. They've replicated every part of the human body down to the last detail. They've successfully faked personality. Faked humanity."

"That's impossible!" The words burst out of him before he could stop them.

And then, on the other side of that reaction, he was stunned — stunned at himself, at why he'd cried out like that. It was as though something else entirely had seized control of his body for that instant.

"What part is impossible? The physical construction of a human? Or the mental construction? Do you truly believe personality and humanity are unique? Or do you just think they're too complex, too fluid, to be replicated perfectly?" The voice behind the crack fired back.

This time it was Ma En who fell silent. What the man was describing sounded like the plot of a science fiction novel — and his own situation was suspicious enough as it was. But then again, hadn't his past self been intensely interested in exactly this kind of thing? One month later, he'd thought the interest was dead, thought he'd moved past it — had just told Hirota-san this very morning that he wanted a normal life.

And here it was again, not even minutes later. The pull was back.

As if it were simply who he was. Unchangeable.

Or as if these strange, impossible things — even after he'd given up on them — were still chasing him.

Ma En felt his throat tighten. He tugged at the deep-red tie. Now, every time he looked at this tie, the image from the mirror rose up, and with it, a prickling discomfort.

"Humans think of themselves as miraculous, as elevated, as full of potential — and they do this only because they understand so little about themselves. It is the fear of the self that gives birth to the worship of the self, and from there to the worship of the human species as a whole. No different from the ancients worshiping the sun. Most of the time, people fear themselves more than they fear the sun, because the sun is a distant unknown and the self is an unknown standing right beside you. And look — even the sun god wears a human face, doesn't it?" The voice behind the crack had drifted back toward its dark philosophizing.

"Then — are you afraid of yourself?" Ma En asked. He didn't consider these words particularly important, or directly related to the Room 4 Ghost Story. But precisely because of them, he found himself thinking, involuntarily, about what kind of person he actually was.

"Be careful of your thoughts, Ma En-san." The strange neighbor spoke with a weight that felt deliberate — and Ma En had the disorienting sense that whatever he'd just been thinking had been seen through completely.

He's saying to me what I said to him. Wasn't I the one giving that warning earlier?

Ma En adjusted his glasses by reflex.

"Those glasses don't suit you. You're not actually nearsighted, are you?" said the voice behind the crack.

"I just... felt like wearing them one day."

"No thought is ever sudden." The voice sharpened. "You know that. No thought is ever sudden."

"Yes. Yes, that's true." Ma En felt his momentum buckling under the man's.

"Then why haven't you asked yourself why you have the thoughts you have? You should think about it. Be on guard against your own thoughts, your own logic, Ma En-san." The voice grew urgent, words pouring out like rounds from a machine gun:

"You need to understand where this life you want actually came from. When you think you've integrated into human society — how do you know whether what you've integrated into is human society or... or theirs?"

Theirs. The word clearly referred to the "impostors" the man kept invoking. But — their society? Was the ghost story's central threat an organized, structured group? Ma En found himself paying closer attention to this particular phrasing.

"Or perhaps what people think of as humanity already includes them — perhaps they're simply one branch of human society's makeup... But regardless of whether they are or aren't — for you, as an individual — they will be lethal."

The neighbor's voice, over the final sentences, had begun to thicken and blur. It sounded as though his tongue had swollen, as though something in his mouth had gone raw and infected, making clean speech a physical struggle.

But this, perversely, matched Ma En's earlier impression more closely. He sensed the man's emotions tipping back toward the neurotic.

"Are you all right?" he asked.

Heavy breathing from behind the crack. And beneath it — drip, drip, drip — the wet, rhythmic sound of liquid striking the floor.

Ma En had been staring into the crack the whole time, trying to adjust to the darkness inside. But the darkness, if anything, seemed to be growing denser.

He considered it, then stayed where he was.

He assembled what the man had told him.

"So what you're saying is this: the Room 4 Ghost Story is actually a case of a group persecuting an individual. Many against one. There are people in Bunkyo District who've formed some kind of antisocial organization, and they periodically hunt targets. The targets, being isolated and outnumbered, always end up dead. And this organization is large enough to suppress all official investigation. Is that correct?"

"...Not people. Creatures disguised as people." The voice seemed troubled by Ma En's framing. It was several seconds before the man spoke again. "This point matters. Those things are not human. They only look human. They've become part of the structure of human society."

He seemed to be fighting to keep his speech intelligible.

"Whether or not they're human, they'd still constitute a group operating within local society, wouldn't they?" Ma En offered a more practical framing. "You want to know what I think? Your description reminds me of a cult — a particularly vicious one. The things they're doing have historical precedent. Medieval Europe had its witch hunts. What appeared to be the hunting of witches was actually a political phenomenon, dressed up in supernatural language. I wouldn't have expected something like that to happen in a developed country like Japan."

He'd finally connected the dots — the police inaction he'd noticed during his own analysis of the Room 4 Ghost Story, and the neighbor's claims. The more he thought about it, the less supernatural it seemed. Everything could be explained as human behavior — human malice, human structures — disguised as a ghost story to avoid accountability.

The only alarming part was the scale: the number of participants and their likely distribution across social strata might be far larger than anyone imagined.

A group concentrated in Bunkyo District, embedded across every level of society, using their sheer numbers to interfere with government and civil functions? Have these people turned Bunkyo District into their own territory?

How? What are they after? Local separatism? Regime change? Activity on that scale can't be hidden forever — and if intelligence about it did exist, the political establishment would never sit idle.

Or is their only purpose — manufacturing the Room 4 Ghost Story? That's absurd. Room 4 can't be the endgame.

Ma En's expression hardened. Whether the cause was purely human or whether something else was mixed in, the labels alone — massive numbers, organized structure, distributed across social classes, acting with targeted malice — described something that could not be taken lightly.

In the worst case, armed insurrection was within the range of possibility.

Which meant: whether from the state's perspective or from his own, rash action was out of the question? He looked toward the darkness behind the crack with sudden understanding. In this neighbor's eyes, was every person around him a potential suspect?

"...Think what you like, but your situation won't change, Ma En-san." The voice had grown weak — as though, in this short span of time, the man had fallen gravely ill. "If you treat them as ordinary cultists, you're already dead."

"Then how many are there, in your estimate?"

"...At least 100,000."

According to official statistics, the entire fixed resident population of Bunkyo District was around 200,000.

Ma En's mouth went dry.