Inevitability
Chapter 2:
There was a dead silence after the knock and then the SPR sprang into action. Everyone except for Naru stood up to clear space for the client. Lin answered the door whilst Yasuhara went to make some tea.
The client turned out to be an elderly lady dressed in a flower patterned yukata. Lin led her to sit on the sofa opposite Naru.
The scientist regarded her with emotionless eyes, he was still worrying about Mai, but he had enough focus on the client to come to a conclusion about her. The client's eyes were red rimmed and had black bags underneath, suggesting that she hadn't had a very good night's sleep for several nights running. He decided that she was most likely to be consulting him about a poltergeist, judging from the signs of insomnia.
"What is your name?" he enquired as Yasuhara handed her a cup of tea.
"Hana Kudou," she said and accepted the tea.
"What do you wish to consult the SPR for?" Naru asked as Lin passed him the black notebook which contained information on all the cases that the SPR had ever handled.
"I own a Ryokan and my daughter and grandchild help me. Recently, there seem to be ghosts present. I am losing business rapidly and my daughter has been attacked several times."
"What kind of ghosts?"
"For the first month only my daughter could see the ghost and it would only pull on her leg or arm or frighten her, but after it pulled her down a flight of stairs, the attacks escalated and all the guests began to see ghosts."
As he was listening Naru noted that the client's daughter reminded him of Mai who had always been a terrible magnet for anything that was supernatural.
"In what way did the attacks escalate?"
"Blood started regularly coming out of the shower in my daughter's bathroom and mirrors everywhere keep cracking and one of the guests nearly drowned in the ornamental pond," Hana informed him.
Naru stopped taking notes for a second. Something about the client was bothering him.
"Why did you come here, to SPR? We have only just reopened today."
The client gave him a sharp look. "My daughter was talking in her sleep last night, I shared her room as she has been unstable due to all the attacks. She said "Shibuya Physic Research" and muttered something about a narcissist."
At hearing her words, Naru dropped his pen, Lin stiffened and all the other members of the SPR who were hiding in Naru's office, gasped.
"What is your daughter's name?" Naru asked in a voice that was one pitch higher than his normal tone.
"Maaya Kudou," she said, puzzled at his reaction.
Naru picked him pen up and resumed his notetaking. It wasn't Mai after all, but something told him that there was more to the case than met the eye.
"We will take your case, Kudou-san," he said with one of his plastic smiles.
Having a case to solve would stop him worrying about Mai and there was a chance that the client's daughter might have some connection to Mai, if the words that she had said in her sleep were any indication.
At 10 o'clock in the morning, a plain black van pulled up outside the Ryokan and all the members of the SPR piled out and stretched their arms. The Ryokan was situated on the outskirts of Tokyo and the van had been caught in several traffic jams on the way.
"What are the room allocations?" Masako asked, shooting a derisive look at Ayako, as if to imply that she never wanted to share a room with her ever again.
"Kudou-san said we could decide between ourselves as the Ryokan is almost empty of guests due to the attacks. Apparently there are enough empty rooms for one each and a base..." Lin trailed off as his eyes fell on something outside the Ryokan.
A small child was playing outside with a ball. What had caught Lin's attention was the boy's black hair and pale skin. If the boy didn't have caramel coloured eyes, he would have assumed that it was a young Oliver Davies.
Bou-san peered over his shoulder to see what had attracted Lin's attention.
"Hey, doesn't that boy look like Naru-can?"
"He looks too happy to look like him," Ayako muttered, causing Naru to glare at her before stepping forward to see the child for himself.
His eyes widened as he took in the boy's appearance. The monk had been entirely correct, the boy did look exactly like him when he was younger, before he had been adopted. The only difference was the colour of his eyes.
"Do you think that he is Shibuya-san's illegitimate son?" Yasuhara stage whispered.
The child became aware that he was being stared at by a group of strangers and he ran into the Ryokan. Naru followed in his path and the rest of the SPR trailed after him. Their client was waiting at the reception for them, dressed in another flowered yukata. There was no sign of the child.
"Good morning, Shibuya-san," she greeted with a bow. "Have you decided about the number of rooms?"
Before anyone could make any comments about who they really didn't want to share with, Naru decided for them.
"They will all share rooms for safety and we need one as a base. They can all argue among themselves about who shares with who."
Hana passed Naru five room keys and gave them directions.
Naru paused as everyone walked off to haggle over roommates.
"Kudou-san, who is that boy who was playing outside?"
"That would be Yakumo, he is my daughter's son. But I have to say, only the eyes resemble her," Hana answered thoughtfully.
Naru nodded. "I will need to talk to your daughter at some point, preferably today."
"I will tell her."
Masako looked around her designated room which resembled any room in a traditional Japanese house with a cupboard for futons, paper screen door and tatami mats. She checked out the bathroom and found it was perfectly clean. The only thing spoiling the room was her roommate.
"Why of all people, do I have to share a room with Matsuzaki-san?"
"Because we're the only two females in SPR now that Mai had gone and you are the youngest person here so you have to always be with someone who can exorcise," Ayako explained as he unpacked her suitcase. "It makes sense for us to be paired together. Besides we could have it worse; due to the fact that there is an odd number, the monk, Yasuhara-san and John-san are sharing."
Masako reluctantly agreed. "Did you notice that the child's eyes looked exactly like Mai's?"
"Yes," Ayako said slowly. "I thought it might have just been me.."
"I really do wonder where Mai disappeared to..." Masako sighed. "Looking back now, I think I deserved all those evil glares that she used to give me, for being so close to Naru. And we weren't even close, I was blackmailing him."
"You've learned your lesson now," Ayako decided that it was time to change the subject. "Can you feel anything here?"
Masako closed her eyes and concentrated. After a moment she opened her eyes again. "...There's something faint that I can sense, but only just...however I feel that there is more than one presence here. But I don't currently know what kind of being the presences are."
The priestess frowned. They were going to be working blind in this case as Masako couldn't warn them what they were up against.
The pair walked together the room that had been designated as the base. The base was actually two rooms joined together by parting the paper screens, due to the fact that all the equipment wouldn't fit in one room.
Everyone was already in the base picking up cameras to place at locations that Naru had selected from the floor plan and his notes on where all the attacks had taken place.
"Brown-san, place two cameras at either end of the first floor corridor," he ordered. "Takigawa-san, four cameras in the kitchen area. Yasuhara-san, three by the ornamental pond."
The three men left the room, each with a handful of cameras and Bou-san muttering darkly about how a rock star shouldn't have to carry around everything and be at the beck and call of a 19 year old boy.
Masako relayed her observation about what she could sense and as expected, the scientist wasn't too happy.
"Maybe Masako will sense the presences properly when someone gets attacked," Ayako suggested to placate him."
"That may be right," he admitted. He picked up a clipboard and a thermometer. "Go measure the temperature at all of the locations listed."
Naru returned to reading the case report again, but the mystery of Mai's disappearance and the boy that looked like him were still bothering him and he couldn't concentrate like he normally could. He glanced up at the monitors and spotted the priestess and the teenage physic walking past one of the cameras, carrying the thermometer.
Taking the temperatures used to be Mai's job...
"Naru, would you like me to make you some tea?" Lin asked, concerned about his young charge. "It might help you concentrate better,"
"If you would," the narcissist replied and Lin left to go to the Ryokan's kitchen.
He took Mai's red bow out of his pocket and stared down at it. He did want to continue the psychometry, but he also felt reluctant to as he didn't want to discover that she had died after all, albeit after the car accident.
A cup of tea was placed in front of him and he realised that he had been so deep in thought that he hadn't noticed Lin coming back with the tea. He picked up the cup and took an experimental sip. Lin's tea always paled in comparison to Mai's...
Naru paused as the taste of the tea sank into his taste buds.
It didn't taste like Lin's tea.
It taste exactly like Mai's tea.
He turned round to see a familiar girl with light brown hair and eyes standing behind him holding a tea tray.
It was Mai.