When Maki turned her flashlight on the figure, it spun around.

A chill stabbed through my heart.

Glittering golden eyes.

Fangs protruding from a sliced mouth.

It was exactly like- "Ah...ah..."

Her eyes still wide open, Uotani shook her head from side to side. She was making a sound at the back of her throat that wouldn't form into words.

Shirayuki's face was covered in a Prajna ghost mask.

With a clank! the flashlight went out. It became pitch-dark again and there was a scream.

People crouching in the hall holding their heads, people fleeing, people raving steadily. Tohko was clinging to me, too.

Uotani stood frozen, trembling.

I thought I heard someone murmur, "Ah...the promise...it's...," and then I saw the white figure move with the speed of a bird across the floor and ceiling.

The glass in the window shattered, the curtains billowed in the wind, and the light of the moon shone in.

"K-Konoha...that was...that was...!"

Tohko's voice quavered at my ear, and she pointed at the window.

Beyond the latticework fitted into the window, thin, bony hands reached toward us.

While one hand rattled the latticework, the other was moving, as if trying to catch hold of something.

Outside the latticework, the Prajna mask peered in. Sunken, gaping, golden eyes- A string of unnatural things were happening, and it was too much-my senses might have been numbed. Without shouting or looking away, I stared at that bizarre spectacle.

Kicking aside the fish in soggy clumps, Maki ran toward the window.

Astoundingly, she grabbed the arm that was reaching through the lattice and tried to yank it in, but Shirayuki's arm slipped through Maki's hand and disappeared into the darkness.

Glaring at the broken window, Maki tsked.

The sound of water had stopped at some point, and the bone-chilling silence filled the room.

Still clinging to me, Tohko lifted her face timidly. Uotani's eyes were still wide with terror and she was stiff. Maki was the one she was looking at.

Illuminated by the eerie moonlight shining through the window, Maki whispered significantly, "Konoha, if you toss me aside and leave like eighty years ago...next time Shirayuki might appear and turn this house into a sea of blood."

I'm sure that Shirayuki exists.

How can I communicate the chill I felt when I laid eyes on her, bound by an old vow, shut away, and twisted?

As if the dark shadows lurking in that cursed mansion gathered together and condensed and transformed into the shape of a frightening girl- In rare cases, such things certainly happen.

Beings that are human but have moments of being inhuman. Bizarre creatures that carry a brutal, primordial soul, somehow enigmatic, which our ordinary awareness cannot fathom.

It is quite simply unrealistic-but undeniably reality-and it left me helplessly astounded, and I could only tremble.

Shirayuki's laughter rang out loudly, filled with joy, that day.

At the time, the reason behind it was an impenetrable mystery to me.

But now that I am long separated from that summer and people and time have all passed on, I am able to exercise my imagination on that laugh.

Yes, that could only have been-

Chapter 5-The Guest Who Was Too Early/The Lover.

Who Disappeared

After all that, the bunch of us cleaned together that night.

Luckily the lights had only gone out because a breaker had tripped, and they were easily turned back on, but even when the room was brighter, it wasn't as if that made the fish scattered all over the carpet disappear.

We all picked the fish up, removed the rugs, and intently scrubbed the exposed floor with a mop and rags.

"Miss, you and your friends should retire now," the butler suggested, deeply grateful, but I was in no mood to sleep and joined Tohko in her work.

Maki was picking up fish and throwing them into a bucket with a blase expression as she'd been doing the whole time.

Tohko had her braids pinned up on top of her head and the lower half of her face covered in a bandanna. With the rubber gloves she wore, she was in full war dress for sanitation. She tried to pick a fish up by its tail, but it looked as if it wasn't working, and after trying several times, she gave up and focused all her efforts on polishing the floor with a rag. Occasionally she would shake her head rapidly from side to side, as if to clear away some bad thought.

The others were working silently, too, looking exhausted and hardly once opening their mouths.

Uotani also wore a tense, brooding look and didn't say a word.

It was nearly midnight by the time the room became somehow tolerable. The smell of fish had seeped into my hands and clothes, and I waited my turn to get into the bath, then slathered my entire body with bubbles and scrubbed my skin until it practically split open.

Thus, after two o'clock, I finally managed to lie down in my bed.

Tohko climbed into my bed again, hugging a pillow. I had no energy to chase her off and reminded her before falling asleep, "Please don't kick me."

It was after noon when I woke up.

I had developed two beautiful lumps on my head.

"Tohkoooo."

"I-I'm sorry!"

Tohko said she was going to wash her face and ran off.

Geez... Frowning, I got dressed and left the room.

As I walked down the hall, I thought about the supernatural events the night before and grew depressed.

Up until now I had been theorizing that Shirayuki was human. One person was fully capable of sending a threatening letter and of pouring water off the roof. But what had happened last night- I recalled the demonic woman with the white hair who had floated before the bookcase and a shudder went down my neck. Was it possible that everyone could see the same hallucination?

And those fish and the puddles in the halls-that was impossible for one person to do. How had they managed to get into the house and do those things without being discovered by anyone?

The more I thought about it, the colder I felt.

Even though she had been exposed to such danger so far, Maki was still unfazed. And she didn't act as if she was trying to catch the ones responsible for it, either. Was she...waiting for something? But what?

When I started to go downstairs, Uotani came up.

"Morning."

I called to her, but she didn't answer.

She wasn't ignoring me; it was as though she couldn't hear me. Her eyes were bloodshot and she looked as though she could barely breathe. Her face had gone beyond ashen to pure white, like a candle. Her steps were unsteady, too.

While I was caught up in my surprise at how haggard she looked, Tohko, who had finished getting dressed, ran up.

"Morning, Sayo. Wha...?"

It seemed Tohko sensed that Uotani's manner was odd, too.

"Sayo, can you come over here?"

She took Uotani's hand and pulled her down to the bottom of the stairs, then pressed their foreheads together.

"I knew it! You've got a fever! And your eyes are all red. You couldn't sleep last night, could you? You should stay in your room and rest today."

Uotani finally seemed to have noticed the presence of others. She looked up at Tohko with a trembling gaze and shook her head from side to side, as if frightened of something.

"I can't...sleep. I can hear...the song."

"Song? What song?"

Uotani's voice grew even hoarser. Her face contorted, and her eyes filled with tears before she whispered with difficulty, "My grandmother...taught me...the rhyme...that comes from...the land...of dragons..."

"'The land of...dragons?'"

Tohko knit her brows and looked thoughtful.

My mind was also moving through what the land of dragons could possibly be.

"You know what, let's go back to your room, Sayo. I'll go talk to the butler for you."

Tohko and I delivered Uotani to her room, her head still bent and trembling.

It was a bare room on the first floor about six feet on a side. I saw that a woven ball the crimson of a spider lily had been set on top of her chest of drawers, and a shiver went through me.

That old woven ball...I'd seen it before...

Could the rhyme be the song Uotani had been singing that day?

Once we'd pulled her bedding out of the closet and spread it out and put her to bed, we left the room.

Just as we closed the door and were about to walk off, there was a whisper of a song behind us.

A snake is in the swamp there.

Rich old spirit's little girl Get you up and set a trap A bead of water 'pon her neck, Golden shoes upon her feet, Call me this and call me that To the mountain or the field, go, go, go...

Tohko and I looked at each other.

When we returned to her room after that with warm milk and honey and some fever medicine, Uotani was sitting up in bed cradling the ball in her arms like a baby and tonelessly singing the same song.

A snake is in the swamp there, in the swamp there.

Her monotonous voice and her vacant eyes, as if she was lost in a dreamworld, made my skin prickle.

The events of last night could have given her such a shock that it threatened her mental balance.

Even if she looked undaunted, she had only just started middle school, so it was only to be expected, but...

Tohko made her drink the milk and the medicine, then told Uotani a story to take her mind off everything, during which Uotani finally fell asleep.

We made sure she was asleep, then quietly left the room.

"That song is in Kyka's The Grass Labyrinth," Tohko said once we'd gone a little way from the room.

"That's the story where Akira Hagoshi is the main character, right? The one where he stays at a haunted mansion to find his mother's lullaby. So then, do you think Uotani's grandmother read it in The Grass Labyrinth and taught the song to Uotani? But what's 'the land of dragons'? Is there a dragon god in that story like there is in Demon Pond?"

"No...although..."

Tohko's eyebrows pulled a little closer together, as if something were bothering her, and she put an index finger to her lips. And just like that, she fell silent.