Chapter 3

"All right," said Maki as they headed back to Kainan. "So the jury's still out on whether there really is a strange woman wandering the corridors of Kainan. What do we know so far?"

"That we're all going to die," said Kogure dreamily. He turned to Mitsui, and said with the air of someone imparting great knowledge, "And that's a fact."

Mitsui turned away in disgust. If he'd known that Kogure would prove such a basket case, he would have had second thoughts about rejoining the basketball team after his sojourn on the outskirts of the law.

"Could it be that that ghost of the woman isn't a malevolent spirit?" asked Jin. "I mean, if the woman really were connected in any way to the deaths of all those students, then shouldn't Maki-san be dead by now? That is, if he did truly see her back then."

Maki shuddered at the suggestion that he had narrowly escaped death two years ago.

"Maybe," he said weakly.

"Actually," Kogure interposed eagerly. "I don't think that follows logically—"

He was interrupted by Maki, who went on as if Kogure had never spoken.

"I just can't bear the thought of Kainan being shut down on account of some stupid haunting." He was deeply distressed.

Uozumi placed a sympathetic hand on his shoulder.

"There's no such thing as ghosts," he said reassuringly. "Mark my words, this woman everyone keeps seeing will turn out to be just some vagabond—much like our friend Mitsui here used to be." Mitsui scowled and began examining his fingernails. "We'll find her and call the police, and then everything will be back to normal. Isn't that right, Mitsui?"

Mitsui wasn't paying attention. He had moved on from his fingernails, and was studying Sendoh keenly. He had never been big on styling his hair, and regarded guys who paid too much attention to their looks with the utmost suspicion. Sendoh had always struck him as someone who would have no qualms about stretching the truth to any length, if it suited his own purposes, and was certainly not above weaving tall tales for attention.

"I think Sendoh's lying about the whole thing," Mitsui pronounced. He tended not to mince words—particularly negative ones. "I think he sneaked out in the middle of the night and stayed out long enough for the rest of us to get worried to death, and then returned when…"

He was unable to finish his sentence. Sendoh had turned and fixed him with a penetrating stare, and Mitsui's next words had been stifled. A feeble croak was all that issued from his throat.

"Senpai, what's wrong?" said Ayako.

Mitsui looked as if he was suffocating. Beads of sweat formed on his forehead, and a strange pallor came over him as he struggled to breathe.

Then Sendoh tore his eyes away just as abruptly as he had brought them to bear on Mitsui.

Mitsui doubled over and gasped for air, hands on his knees for support, as if he'd just run a marathon or was struggling to go on during a particularly exhausting basketball game.

"Senpai, are you okay?" Ayako placed a solicitous hand on Mitsui's shoulder.

"He's fine, Aya-chan." Miyagi pulled Ayako's arm away possessively. "A fly must have flown into his throat."

Mitsui was too dazed to register anything that was going on around him. He was still panting when he rose to his full height and stared at Sendoh with disbelief.

Sendoh was looking up at the clear blue sky with his usual insouciance, as if nothing had passed between him and Mitsui mere moments earlier.

Then Mitsui caught Rukawa's eye, and realized that he wasn't the only one present who had detected something strange in Sendoh's aspect that morning. He decided to wait until they returned to Kainan before confronting Rukawa with his suspicions.

Maki led the group to a large koi pond in the middle of a luxuriant lawn, as if to mourn the—to his mind—imminent shutting down of his great school. The golden fish swimming around in the clear water brought peace to Maki's mind, and helped him come to terms with the facts in these difficult times.

"Rukawa," said Mitsui in sepulchral tones, pulling Rukawa aside. "Notice anything strange about Sendoh lately? Ever since his 'disappearance', I mean?"

Rukawa nodded at length.

"And what do you make of that woman he keeps talking about?"

"I didn't see any woman."

"Do you think he's lying?"

Rukawa shrugged.

Then an outrageous idea occurred to Mitsui. It was so outrageous that he cringed when he thought about it, but he decided to float it anyway.

"Do you think he's possessed?"

Rukawa opened his mouth to answer, but was interrupted by a sharp interjection from his immediate rear.

"Bingo!"

Mitsui and Rukawa both started and turned to behold Kogure standing at their elbows. Neither of them knew how long he had been there, listening in to their conversation with the wide-eyed mania that he became possessed by whenever any talk of the numinous was in the air.

"You're this close to the right answer," said Kogure, indicating the distance between his thumb and his forefinger. He shook his head and smiled like a patient teacher who was doing his best to bring out the most in his dull students. "There's definitely something wrong with Sendoh. There's a dissonant quality to his entire being, as if he were struggling to act normal but falling miserably short. It falls into what experts like to call the 'uncanny valley'—meaning there's something just sufficiently off about him for the result to be creepy as hell. You may have also noticed something about his eyes."

This struck a chord with Rukawa, who had indeed noticed something strange about Sendoh's eyes.

"They were…" He couldn't get himself to say the next words: They were too embarrassing.

"Demon eyes," Kogure finished for him with a look of triumph. "Typically when your physical body is taken over by a higher entity—usually a demon or an exceptionally powerful spirit—its possession of your body is reflected in your eyes, which are, after all, the window to your soul. Except they're now the window to someone else's soul." He laughed a full-bellied laugh at the irony of the metaphor.

Mitsui was tempted to ask if Kogure had had run-ins with demons in the recent past, and if that explained his own eyes, which had the unmistakable glint of crazy in them.

"What do you propose we do?" he said aloud instead. "Stand around in a circle, holding hands, and chant some spell in Latin?"

His sarcasm was lost on Kogure.

"That comes later." Kogure was growing the more animated by the minute, glasses dangerously askew. "The simple test for possession is one of the classic tests for witchcraft. People in the olden days would lower someone suspected of being a witch into a lake. If they floated, that meant they were a witch. Of course, witches today are far too clever to fall for something that basic, but it's still a pretty effective test in the early stages of demonic possession."

Mitsui and Rukawa exchanged looks of the deepest disbelief. This man before them was Kiminobu Kogure? The vice-captain of the Shohoku basketball team? Someone they turned to in moments of crisis because he could always be relied on to be the single voice of reason in any situation?

"I see you don't believe me." Kogure smiled sadly. "Watch."

He crept up behind Sendoh in two silent strides. Sendoh had bent down to examine a particularly large koi that Maki had pointed out to him. Before anyone realized what was going on, Kogure had planted his palms on Sendoh's back with the adroitness of a martial artist, launching the spiky-haired ace over the edge of the pond in a long arc.

"Aaaah!"

The koi scattered as Sendoh landed headfirst among them. He was gone for a moment. Then he emerged, sputtering and gasping for breath.

"Sendoh!"

Maki and Uozumi wasted no time in grabbing Sendoh by the arms and pulling him out of the water.

"What the fuck?" Sendoh demanded. His hair hung about his face in wet clumps. Water flowed freely out of it and dripped from his clothes.

Kogure smiled like a scientist whose theories had met with experimental vindication.

"Kogure." Akagi gritted his teeth. He had to exercise a prodigious amount of self-control to keep from going ape-shit. ("Gori-shit," Sakuragi would insist.) He was aware of Kogure's tendency to nuttiness when it came to the supernatural, but this was unprecedented. "What the hell was that?"

"What the fuck, Kogure?"

"Kogure-senpai!"

Kogure returned with a look of accomplishment to where Mitsui and Rukawa stood with open mouths.

"Gentlemen," he said, straightening his glasses and grinning widely. "It gives me great pleasure to report that Akira Sendoh is, without a shadow of a doubt, possessed by an evil spirit."

Sendoh was led away to the gym by Jin and Maki, where he was given towels to dry off. Maki thought about pinching some Xanax from the nurse's office, but a consideration of his standing with the Student Council stopped him from going down the path of debauchery.

The others returned to the gym not long after. Rukawa studied Sendoh long and hard, searching in spite of himself for a sign—some mark of possession. He found none. The water had washed away whatever he had seen in Sendoh's aspect earlier, and the not-so-spiky-haired ace shivering pathetically in the purple-and-yellow towel on the bench looked just like the old Sendoh that Rukawa had come to know and be continually annoyed by.

"Did we imagine it?" Mitsui asked, echoing Rukawa's own thoughts.

Rukawa gave the matter serious thought.

"Kogure's obviously not all up there," Mitsui went on, carrying on both sides of the conversation without missing a beat; "but what if he's right?"

Rukawa turned and fixed his senpai with a blank stare. The stare concealed his own misgivings and uncertainties.

"I mean, it sounds looney as fuck, obviously." Mitsui scoffed. "But when you think about it, what do we know, really?"

Not much at all, Rukawa conceded within himself. His report card could attest to that.

Sendoh turned and looked at Rukawa, and for a moment Rukawa thought he had caught a flash of something evil in the other's face. His blood froze. The lively chatter of conversation faded away to be replaced by a faint buzz, punctuated at intervals of growing length by the dull thumps of his own heartbeat.

Sendoh smiled.

Rukawa turned pale.

The face under the towel, partially obscured by the clumps of wet hair, was not Sendoh's. Grinning hideously at Rukawa from Sendoh's body was a pair of black eyes in sunken sockets. Translucent skin stretched tightly over a set of high cheekbones. Black lines ran down the cheeks from the eyes, like mascara smeared with tears.

"This is the woman," said Rukawa. But his voice didn't emerge from his mouth: It echoed around uselessly within the emptiness of his own head.

He gasped as realization him.

No, this was not the woman. The woman was to Rukawa's left. He could see her faintly out of the corner of his eye, like an image refracted through a prism, but she always moved out of sight when he tried getting a better look at her. One thing was for certain: he was not afraid of the woman. There was something warm and comforting about her presence. Something vaguely sad, too.

Which meant that the being that was impersonating Sendoh was not the woman at all, nor had ever been. It was something else entirely. There was a decided aura of evil about this other being.

The woman began sobbing. Overlapping murmuring pervaded the air. Rukawa couldn't make out any words. Was the woman telling him how she died? Did she want him to avenge her death? The death of a loved one? Or was she trying to warn Rukawa about the ghoul in Sendoh's body?

Even as Rukawa watched, Sendoh's— the ghoul's skin began to melt off; yet the being did not diminish in size. Instead it grew steadily the bigger.

Eventually Rukawa's vision went black, and he passed out.

Nothingness.

"Rukawa!"

"Rukawa, are you okay?"

"Rukawa!"

He stirred and opened his eyes slowly.

"He's awake!"

Rukawa opened his eyes fully. The gym light directly above him was on and glaring down at him. He shut his eyes again. Eventually his pupils adapted to consciousness, and he opened his eyes fully again and sat up.

"Are you okay, Rukawa?" said Ayako, helping Rukawa into a sitting position. "Do you need to see a doctor? Should I call an ambulance?"

"I'm fine." Shut up! "I…"

Rukawa came close to relating what he had seen to the group, but he realized that the only person who was apt to take him seriously was Kogure, which was no consolation at all.

He looked past the group at the bench that Sendoh had been sitting on. Sendoh wasn't there anymore. The towel lay draped across the bench, swinging pendulously, as if it had just been put down.

"Where's Sendoh?" said Rukawa.

"Huh?"

"Wasn't he here just a second ago?"

"Did anyone see him leave?"

"I didn't."

Rukawa rose shakily to his feet.

"Let me take you back to your room," said Ayako, throwing Rukawa's arm around her shoulder.

"I'm fine," said Rukawa, pulling his arm away impatiently. "He's gone again. Sendoh."

Maki sighed deeply.

"What did I ever do to deserve this?" he said. He seemed not very far from a nervous breakdown.

"He'll be back," said Rukawa. It was a statement of fact more than an attempt to comfort Maki.

That night Rukawa lay in bed alone in his dorm room. He was wide awake. The last chatter of conversation died down in the corridors outside. Doors clicked shut in succession as everyone retired to their room for the night. Soon the residence hall was plunged into silence. The only sounds were the faint chirping of crickets and the occasional creak of the building's frame.

A minute passed.

Five minutes passed.

Time began slipping out of Rukawa's grasp like loose sand as his eyelids became heavy with sleep.

Then suddenly he was alert and sitting up.

The doorknob rattled. Then the door swung open softly on its creaky hinges.

tbc.

A/N: I must admit, I'm not especially pleased with how I ended the chapter, though I'm sure you will find a lot more to object to than just the ending.