I thank the fact that I have not been called in for extra hours today for giving me the time to finally finish this chapter in between browsing job sites for another weekday job. It took a long time to get this chapter started in the first place, but having the time today definitely helped with finishing it. Hope you all enjoy it!
Rieka
Naturally, the first place we headed to was the small room whose purpose had never been established. Otsuka had the map, so she consulted it and led the way to a small closed door. There was a heavy lock on it, but it was very clearly broken. When she shoved against the door, it opened easily, and we stepped inside.
And it just looked like a room.
There was some junk in the corners-planks of wood, rods, random crap like that. It was also very dusty, which made some of us sneeze, but apart from that it was empty. There weren't even any windows. Nonetheless, I stepped in, and started to look around, as did we all. There had to be something about this room, there had to be. But no matter how I looked, nothing seemed to stand out. I frowned at one of the walls, and wondered, what is this place for? The fact it was just left has to mean something, because every room was filled with something, for some purpose….
Hearing a tapping that interrupted my thoughts, I turned around to see that Akagi was tapping his foot against the flooring. He did this a few times, with Akio and Akemi looking on, slightly confused. I didn't blame them. I opened my mouth to ask what he was doing, but then he suddenly knelt down and knocked at the wood.
"It's thick." He said.
"What do you mean, it's thick?" I demanded.
He looked up in my direction.
"The floor, it's thicker than it should be."
This did not clear up my confusion, but I bent down and trained my camera on the floor and tapped at it. The sound seemed muffled, I supposed, but I couldn't say that it felt particularly thick.
"Well, we did have to step up to get in here, didn't we?" Akemi said. "I wonder if that's something to do with it?"
"But why would someone make the floor thicker?" Akio asked. "Surely if they were hiding something then it would be easier to just….re-carpet it or something?"
"I don't know," I said. "But there's definitely something strange about this, whatever it is."
Akagi sighed.
"Whatever it is, I do not think I can figure it out."
"That's alright, leave it to me! Secret doors and stuff are totally my thing!"
Though I had to admit, as I took a closer look at the flooring, I was completely baffled too. There was nothing that I saw as strange as I walked around, using my camera and zooming in on sections of the floor I was filming to save me from crawling around.
"Alright, let's go!" Otsuka suddenly proclaimed.
I swung my camera around to her, glaring.
"What do you mean?" I demanded. "We haven't figured out what's up with this room!"
"No, but I want to see the rest of this place first."
"Well, I suppose the rest of the building isn't going to go away. Besides, this place is cramped." Mitsuhide remarked.
"What he said." Ritsuka remarked, shrugging.
I glared in their direction, but Ritsuka wasn't even looking at me. Instead, she was frowning down at the floorboards.
"Hey, you think there's something weird about them too, right, Nishimiya-chan?"
Ritsuka looked up at me, and nodded.
"I can't figure it out just yet. I need a little more time to do that, first."
"Hey, I thought you agreed with me!" Mitsuhide whined.
Ritsuka raised an eyebrow at him and just stared, waiting until he squirmed. She did not smirk when he did, but I had to.
"Well," he spluttered eventually. "You could always stay here."
Ritsuka narrowed her eyes, and simply said:
"I'm not stupid."
We all left the little room, and continued to wander around the building. I recorded while we carried out our explorations. There wasn't much to find, considering most of the objects here had been taken into evidence but there were little traces of things. Bloodstains on the floor, that we mapped to deaths according to the tentative timeline Uncle Matsuo had written down. The broken railings on the upper floor, consistent with Teiichi Kazama's death. Places on the walls where cameras had clearly been held, and Ritsuka noticing small nooks and crannies where the cameras surely wouldn't have been able to reach. But no big breakthroughs, nothing that would make or break the case.
What I did notice was just how haunted this place seemed. Obviously, there were no such things as actual ghosts. But I kept hearing footsteps, seeing shadows, only to turn around and not see anything. Sometimes, I felt someone staring, but again I would look over my shoulder and see nothing. There were also the standard weird creaking and shoving and screeching sounds, but those could easily be explained as the various birds we saw flying in and out of some of the gaps from time to time, and the general facts of this being an old, long-abandoned building. I kept telling myself there were logical explanations for it all. I tried my best to hide the haunted feeling as I filmed and narrated every little discovery we made. I wasn't having anyone call me a wimp. But I couldn't deny it to myself.
After some time, we all tired and decided that it was a good time to pause for a break. We decided to go back down to the ground floor, and ended up sitting in one of the classrooms, in a circle on the floor since the few chairs left there were seemingly crumbling to pieces. We ate for a while, and talked about nothing in particular for a little while. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, Akio mused:
"I wonder what this place was like as an actual school. Because it was used as one, right?"
"Not for decades." Otsuka said.
"Yes, I know that, but…I wonder, the people who once went here to school, they would have been alive when Mum and her friends were trapped in here. I wonder how they felt about that."
"I don't think it was ever proven that anyone with connections to the school had anything to do with this." Otsuka said.
"Well, that's true," Akemi said. "That doesn't mean they didn't have feelings about it. It was once their school, after all. They probably sat here and had lunch and chatted together, just as we're doing now. They probably ran down the corridors and got told off by their teachers. They probably helped to maintain the courtyard and loved how it looked. They would have grieved when the school shut down and they had to go to other schools…and then to find out what it had been used for…."
She trailed off, looked down at her lap and the juice carton she was holding in her hands.
"I hope it didn't taint their good memories." She concluded eventually. "But it probably did, didn't it?"
She sighed into her juice carton. Akagi stared at her, and reached a hand out tentatively in her direction. If he had stretched out a little more, he would have been able to pat her arm, which I assumed was his goal. But after a moment he silently put his hand back down, looking downcast. Truth be told, I felt the same way. I hadn't even thought about the original purpose of this place, even when I'd looked at the dance studio and made silly poses in front of it, even when I'd tip-toped into the staff room as if there were crotchety old teachers still sitting at the desks that had never been removed. It hadn't even occurred to me to think about it. It was as if the Class 78-B case had completely overshadowed it.
I wondered if those were the ghosts I had been sensing. The students who'd once used this place as it was meant to be used, rather than the ones who'd been trapped here and died. But that, of course, was a lot of nonsense. Despite that, I found I couldn't say anything in response to Akemi. It would have felt flippant in a way that I didn't like.
"Speaking of the courtyard, the windows out there," Mitsuhide gestured to the open classroom door. "They lead out into it, right? Maybe we should explore there next, once we're done here."
"But those windows and entrances to it were barricaded, right? They never went into the courtyard." Ritsuka pointed out. "Why would we go in there?"
"No, no, I think we should give it a try." Otsuka said. "It's possible that the captors may have used that space to hide things."
"So…."
We all stared at the boarded up windows in the corridor.
"You really want to do this, instead of the room?" I asked. "I'm sure that room is the key to it all."
"It pays to be thorough," Otsuka said. "What'd your uncle say about this?"
I went back to all the folded pages, then looked at some of the ones in between. I frowned at them, and then looked up:
"Doesn't say anything. I mean, he mentions it being boarded up but apart from that, nothing."
I slammed the notebook shut, shoved it haphazardly in my bag. I got why Uncle Matsuo wouldn't have looked. If none of Class 78-B had ever gone out there, it didn't really count as the crime scene. All the same, it was frustrating. I would have looked if I had been one of those detectives.
"I say we should go too," I declared. "Just to tie up loose ends. We can always go back to the room afterwards. Isn't that what we were gonna do anyway? It's not as if we'd found much else anyway."
Otsuka narrowed her eyes, but then grinned at me before clapping her hands together and looking at everyone else:
"So, we agreed then?"
"No." Ritsuka muttered.
"Sure!" Akio said.
Akemi said the same, but she gave Ritsuka a sideways look.
"I don't see the harm, sure." Akagi said.
So we packed up our lunch things and left the room we were in. I turned the camera back on and held it up as we filed out into the corridor.
"Hold up, let me check the map…" Otsuka said.
"No need, these are definitely the windows." Akemi said immediately, at the same time.
I snickered as Otsuka raised an eyebrow at Akemi. Akemi blushed, then turned to study the boards.
"Huh, some of these seem newer than the others," she commented. "But there's still a hole here."
"That's not big enough for us to get through." Ritsuka said immediately.
"Wait, why are these inside windows newly boarded up?" I asked.
I moved closer, making sure to get close-ups of the boards. As I did, I could see how different boards had been layered over each other over a period of time. Why would anyone board up the inside, but not bother with the outside? I wondered. I repeated this question aloud, but rather than an answer I heard the sound of boards being ripped, and turned the camera to see that Akemi and Otsuka had found a small hole and were attempting to widen it.
"We'll offer to fix it afterwards," Akio said, turning to me. "If it comes to that, right?"
"Eh, I reckon this whole place should be torn down, but I guess. I'm sure that our dear audiobook narrator can cough it up if need be, right?"
"Ehhh? What? Why me?" Mitsuhide whined.
Otsuka let out a whoop of triumph as she pulled away a little more of the boards, saving me from having to waste breath on a response. I immediately darted forward.
"Alright, I'll go through first, then I'll film all of you coming out!"
I held out my camera, and Akemi took it obligingly. I stared through the hole, seeing nothing but a riot of green. Through it, I could see what I thought must have once been the water fountain, but it was hard to tell. I batted some of the plants away, stamped on a few others, then turned to retrieve the camera, walking around as the others clambered through.
I filmed them searching through the leaves, finding various bits of junk, as I did similar myself. Most of it seemed to be litter, though for some reason Ritsuka seemed intrigued by some small glass bottle, tucking it away in her pocket for looking at more closely later. But then, Akagi found two backpacks near some bushes the opposite end to where I was, and lifted them up. They were caked in leaves, dirt, and what looked like five or six concerned-seeming snails (one of whom fell of as the bag was lifted).
"Whose are they?"
"There are things inside, but I don't know…" Akagi said.
"Well, I'm not touching them, they look disgusting!" Mitsuhide declared.
I rolled my eyes at that (even though I agreed, they were disgusting), and went over, but as I did my feet got caught in some of the plants and I found myself tripping over. I felt something crunch beneath my hands and feet as I fell to the ground. Sticks, gravel, something like that. There were places where the building had collapsed so there were probably bricks and crap too. I staggered up and dusted them off without really looking, ripping away the bits of plant that had ended up tangling me and pulling me down.
"Are you alright, Amasaki-chan?" Akio asked, rushing over as best as he could.
"Um, yeah, wow, this place is really uneven, huh?"
I still felt a bit shaky, though. I looked at my hands and arms, just to be sure they weren't bleeding and then waved them around a bit. Then, I looked down at my legs. Which meant I also looked down at what was actually underneath all these tangled plants. And it wasn't sticks, or gravel, or even bricks and other building crap.
It was bones. Unmistakeably bones.
I tried not to scream, but I couldn't help it. I felt the noise bubble up in my throat and then burst out as I tried to scramble away.
"Amasaki-chan? What is it?" Akio asked immediately.
"Rieka! What's happened?" Mitsuhide demanded.
"Yes, what's all the fuss about?" Otsuka asked.
"Are you alright?" Akemi also asked, at the same time.
Their questions overlapped, and all I could do was point, trembling. I gasped, trying to get the words out, but I couldn't, because if I did I was sure I would scream again. I watched Akio and Akemi end up slightly ahead of the others and bend down, before immediately leaping up. Both of them looked pale.
"Are those….bones?" Akio stammered. "Human bones?"
Mitsuhide yelped, and Otsuka crouched to take a closer look as Akemi answered.
"I-I believe so. They look quite old, I'd say, b-but…who are they?"
"I have no….fucking idea..!" I finally managed to say. "S-skulls don't exactly look like people!"
"We need to call the police." Akagi said, bags no longer in his hands. "If there's dead people here, we need to call the police."
"What do you mean, if?" Mitsuhide squawked. "There are bones here, man! I know you can't see them but…."
"Ah, no, that's not what I meant…."
Mitsuhide sighed as he looked at Akagi's genuinely baffled face.
"Sorry, I did not mean to snap at you. This is just not what I was expecting to see."
"Safe to say that none of us were….oh shit."
Silence descended at Otsuka's words, and we all turned our attention to her. She was frowning at her phone, poking at the screen, and then after a few moments she looked up:
"No signal."
Nobody said anything, but instead we all took out our phones and looked at them. On my screen, sure enough, there were no little bars at the top to indicate any kind of reception. I held it up in the air, waved it around, but still no luck. Akemi and Ritsuka wandered around a little, which made them braver than me-I sure as heck didn't want to trample any more skeletons. But soon enough, they stopped and shook their heads.
No signal.
"Let's go back in," Akio suggested. "Back the way we came. To the room that we sprayed."
I nodded at this, and the others agreed too. I shuffled to the edges, hopping and jumping to try and avoid more bones, but I couldn't quite manage it. Now I had seen those ones, I was seeing them everywhere. It was a mass grave, this place, except they hadn't even been buried. Not properly. But if we hadn't come here, nobody would have ever known that there were dead people here.
When I reached the hole, I almost fell through in my eagerness to get through, as did most of the others. But we dusted ourselves down and half-ran, half-walked back to the room. We checked our phones every few steps, but each time it was the same. No signal. No signal. No signal.
"Oh hey, it's that room." Mitsuhide remarked absently during one of the times we stopped.
Sure enough, we had ended up back at the small room. The door had been closed, and for some reason that made me shiver.
"Wasn't that door open before?" Akio asked, as if he'd read my thoughts.
"It could have been the wind?" Akemi said.
"It wasn't windy though." I objected.
"Pfft, whatever, closed doors can be opened again." Otsuka declared, before going to do just that-open the door.
"Wait, you're going in there?" Ritsuka asked. "Do we not need to call the police?"
"Well, yes, but the bones aren't going to go anywhere, are they? We may as well take one more look before leaving for good. I want to say that we found something, at least."
"But…but we found the bones." Akagi pointed out.
"Oh, psh, you know what I mean. But alright, let's see if there's signal, then we can make a call before exploring again. Alright?"
Ritsuka rolled her eyes, while Akemi and Akio looked at each other and Akagi uncertainly.
"Well, I suppose…" Akagi stuttered.
We all took out our phones, just to check one more time. It was Akio who pointed out what was true for all of us:
"Um… Still no signal. "
"Maybe we should go outside first, make the call, and then come back in?" Akemi suggested.
"What? No!" Otsuka exclaimed. "I said we were going to explore this room so we will! You can go on off outside by yourself if you want to, but I'm checking out this place before that!"
Akio pursed his lips, but put his phone away. He looked over his shoulder and shivered, and I couldn't blame him. All those bones, just dumped there. I wondered if those people had ever been reported missing, and if so, who were they? What connection did they have to Shirohata? Could they have been involved in Class 78-B's kidnap and captivity? Even if they weren't-why would the bodies have been dumped there, of all places?
Part of me wanted to agree with Akio aloud, protest annoyingly enough to get Otsuka to turn back and leave so that we could call someone. I wanted to ask my uncle what we should do now, because he'd know. Uncle Matsuo always knew what to do, even when I didn't want to hear whatever it was he thought had to be done. Suddenly, I wanted to turn this over to adults, the way all adults expected kids like us to do.
But at the same time, I wanted to see this through, right to the end. And more than that, I wanted to see it through with everyone here. Even Mitsuhide and Otsuka.
"Yes, come on! I saw something weird about the floorboards earlier, I just couldn't pin it down."
"There are only four floorboards, and there's a weirdly large gap between them." Ritsuka said immediately.
We all gawped at her, and she rolled her eyes as she knelt down and pointed. We all followed suit, and sure enough she was right. Immediately, Akio, Akemi, Akagi and Otsuka tried to work their fingers into the gap and lift up a floorboard, but though they managed to shift it slightly, they couldn't lift it.
"We need something to-"
Ritsuka cut herself off abruptly as to my surprise (and hers too, presumably), Mitsuhide got up again, looking thoughtful. He went to the pile of junk in one of the corners and pawed through it before coming back with a slightly curved metal rod. He stuck it into one of the gaps and manoeuvred, and the floorboard started to rise. Quickly, Akio scrambled to help support its weight, and then he and Mitsuhide pushed up the floorboard and leant it against the wall. From there, it was easy enough for all of us to lift up the other three floorboards, revealing a set of floorboards that were decidedly older, dirtier.
And a huge opening, right in the middle of it.
And leading from that opening, a staircase.
It was wooden, and had clearly been patched up multiple times. I could see overlapping boards, nails hammered in, even some sections tied up.
"Shiiiiiit." Akio said immediately, before reddening and clapping a hand to his mouth.
I would have cackled, if not for how strange I felt. I picked up my camera from where I'd had to leave it when helping the others move the floorboards and used it to peer in.
"I think that's the right word for this, yes." I managed to quip after a few moments.
"How come they never discovered this the first time around?" Mitsuhide asked.
"Presumably it wasn't a huge gaping hole the first time around." Ritsuka snarked.
"I'm guessing it must have been hidden quite cleverly. In such a way that it would have looked like the flooring rather than a door. Look, you can see hinges there-they look ripped. We'll have to be careful when we go down."
Akemi pointed at the offending hinges, but I was too taken aback by when we go down. I mean, it was obvious that we'd have to go down, but….
"We…we're going down a hole?" Akagi asked uncertainly.
"There are stairs," Akio explained to him. "They look steady enough, but…I guess we gotta go down, huh?"
It was hard to say who amongst us was the most surprised that it was Akio, of all of us, who was saying that. He blushed at our stares and said.
"This is the thing, isn't it? The big discovery we were hoping to make. So…we've got to find out what it means. For Mum's sake."
"For the sake of all the dead, too." Akemi said softly, almost whispering it. "Including the ones out there."
We all had a moment of silence for that. Then, as if we had planned it, in almost perfect synchrony we made sure our phones (and in my case, my camera) were tucked away in our bags safely, that those bags were securely on our bodies. Then, we arranged ourselves to head down the stairs. Otsuka went first, and I didn't fight it. Akio and Akemi took care to make sure that Akagi was between them as they went down, and then Mitsuhide and Ritsuka followed. That left me to be last, which I didn't much like either. Despite that, I hesitated. Something flickered in the periphery, but when I turned, there was nothing there.
Pull yourself together, idiot!
I went down the stairs as fast as I could, only looking at the backs of the others. I couldn't bring myself to properly look at the stairs themselves, because then I'd have to pay attention to the way it felt like some of them were buckling. Unfortunately that also meant that when I did get down, I bumped into Ritsuka's back.
"Ouch! Heyy, why're you just standing here?"
I got no answer as I righted myself, and I opened my mouth to say something else when I realised they were all standing still. Confused, I pushed past Ritsuka and Akio and looked out into the room.
And then I understood.
Well, I understood why everyone was struck dumb and frozen. What I didn't understand was what I was seeing. What I was smelling. Whatever I had been expecting, it wasn't anything like this.
"Th...this…what is this?"
Akio was the first to break the silence, but barely. None of us could quite make ourselves be the ones to really make the first move. That would mean really and truly comprehending what all of this was and once again, I had the horrible, strange feeling of wanting to turn all of this over to the adults. Slowly, trembling, I took my bag off, went for my phone again-
-and then there was a horrible scraping sound. I yelped, almost dropping everything, and spun around, looking for the source of the noise, which continued as shadows started to fall across us. Akemi clung to Akio, but she didn't seem to realise she was doing it.
"What unholy thing was that?" Mitsuhide yelled as the noises continued.
"Shit, it's so loud!" Otsuka said as she ventured further into the room. "It's not anything in here, is it?"
Akagi, who had also started wandering when the noise started, shook his head:
"No, it's coming from above."
"And it's getting darker." Ritsuka commented.
Otsuka froze at those words, but she did not look at either of them. Instead, she was looking back towards the staircase, which I was still relatively near to. I also turned to it, looking up at where we came from. That was when understanding hit me hard. I reacted immediately:
"HEY!"
I bounded back up the stairs, my previous wariness burnt to ash as I yelled myself hoarse:
"HEY, WE'RE DOWN HERE! STOP! WAIT, WAIT!"
But the final floorboard had already been put down and pushed in place by the time I was halfway up. Still, I forced myself up and kept yelling, hitting at the heavy wood, not even sure what I was saying until abruptly, reality hit me. My shoulders slumped as I tried to get my breath back, and then I turned and looked at the others, who had all clustered at the bottom of the stairs, looking at me. My throat still felt rough, and I was wobbling all over, but I forced myself to say it:
"Somebody's just trapped us in here."