東方プロジェクト二次小説・オリジナル小説サイト
Chapter 1: The Embodiment of Scarlet Devil

One

𝘛𝘦𝘯 𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘵𝘭𝘦 𝘴𝘰𝘭𝘥𝘪𝘦𝘳 𝘣𝘰𝘺𝘴 𝘸𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘵𝘰 𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘦;
𝘖𝘯𝘦 𝘤𝘩𝘰𝘬𝘦𝘥 𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘵𝘭𝘦 𝘴𝘦𝘭𝘧
𝘈𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘸𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘦.

—1—

—It all started with a story about her great aunt.

"Sumireko?"

"Yes, Usami Sumireko. She was my great aunt, my grandfather's younger sister."

The Hiroshige Super-Express No. 36 had just departed from Kyoto station on its 53-minute journey to Tokyo. Today's Kaleidoscreen movie playing across the walls seemed to have been made for local trains, and displayed imagery appropriate to a much slower and older locomotive moving lackadaisically through a tranquil rural landscape. It was no less fake than ever.

Inside the train, I, Maéreverie Hearn, was face to face with my partner, Usami Renko. We were having a snack, and my partner was spending the ride staring at my face rather than the fake natural scenery scrolling along the screens.

"I had never even heard of her until recently but—" my partner paused as she moved her face closer to mine, as if to whisper in my ear, then continued in a hushed tone "it seems she had a mysterious power."

"Like the ability to look at the night sky and mutter the time?"

"Nothing so amazing. She was, apparently, a psychic."

I've been hanging around with Renko long enough that nothing she says surprises me anymore, but to claim that a distant relative is a psychic is just a little too 𝘤𝘩𝘶𝘶𝘯𝘪 for my liking. Being as she was a great aunt who Renko hadn't even known existed, she was also, presumably, conveniently already dead, rendering the question of proving such a claim moot. Noticing my blatant skepticism, Renko puffed out her cheeks slightly.

"You don't believe me, do you, Merry?"

Like the slow-moving scenery on the Kaleidoscreen, it was all too cliché to be credible. "It might have been believable around the time Yasuhiko Nishizawa and Miyabe Miyuki were writing psychic mysteries", I said. "But don't you think psychics and ESP are a little played out now?"

"Well, these stories about her psychic powers were just something I read in my grandfather's notes. I didn't ever see it with my own eyes, and I can't dismiss the possibility that it was just his imagination or a misunderstanding. I did really have a great aunt named Sumireko though; I checked the family register and confirmed it."

"And so your aim in going to Tokyo now is to investigate this mysterious power she may have had and try to confirm if it existed?"

"That's it, more or less."

I sighed a little. Hifuu Club activities were always sketchy like this. Relying solely on hearsay and legends was enough to propel Renko into spending the first hour of her summer vacation sitting on a train watching fake scenery scroll unconvincingly by. Of course she thought nothing of dragging me along with her. I rested my chin on my hand and let my eyes fall onto my partner's smiling face in front of me. Despite all of my complaints I don't really mind that much. If I really didn't want to be dragged around by her, I wouldn't go out of my way to accompany her to Tokyo. I wouldn't tell her that though.



The Hifuu Club. That's the name of the occult club to which my partner and I belong. The members of this club are just us two. The club is not officially recognized by our university of course, and it doesn't operate much like an occult club at all. We rarely, if ever, engage in any serious spiritual practices. Instead, my partner and I spend our time pursuing the forbidden act of chasing and investigating or debunking reports of strange phenomena.

Immediately after coming to Kyoto university, I had become acquainted with Renko by chance and from there we had learned of the strange abilities of each other's eyes. I won't talk about our early adventures here because it would be too long, but my partner showed great interest in my ability to see the rifts in the boundary between this world and others. With her by my side I was living a care-free college life, pursuing the mysterious worlds that existed on the opposite side of that divide. This trip to Tokyo was, supposedly, one such officially sanctioned club activity.

This had all started two weeks ago, when Renko had left for home after receiving word that her grandfather was critically ill. Renko is from Tokyo and her parents and extended family all still live there. Renko had raced home on the first train from Kyoto and had managed to make it in time to say goodbye and help with the funeral and organization of her grandfather's belongings.

When she came back, the first thing she had said to me was "Merry! We're going back to Tokyo as soon as summer vacation starts!" Thus, without being informed of the reason or having time to complain, as soon as we finished our exams and handed in our reports, we were almost immediately running to make the connection for the Hiroshige Super-Express and headed for Tokyo.

This will be the second time visiting Tokyo, after I had accompanied Renko there to meet her family when she had returned for holidays last year. Being as I had been rushed out the door without a chance to plan for anything, I wasn't overly excited about the prospect of visiting the old town this time.



Sensing my lack of enthusiasm, Renko struck a pose, lowering her shoulders in exaggerated exasperation.

"Merry, do you really think I would drag you all the way to Tokyo with so little information?"

I politely ignored the fact that Renko had already dragged me to all sorts of places with less information than this in the past.

"This time is different," she continued, "the case is directly connected to us, after all."

I frowned. Just what sort of connection could she claim I had with someone like her great aunt, who would probably be almost 80 by now if she was even still alive. I had only been to Tokyo once before and I had certainly never met this woman.

Leaning in conspiratorially, Renko pulled her phone and another small object from the bag beside her. The small object was something I recognized as a long outdated recording medium, but it was the first time I had actually seen one in person.

"A USB memory stick? Do you even have anything that can read that?"

"I have an adapter."

Renko produced a dongle from her bag and connected the stick to her phone. Looking at its screen, I could see several primitive document files displayed.

"Is this your grandfather's stuff?"

"That's right. The diaries and other things my grandfather may have written on the web when he was young are all long lost, of course, but these private notes were never posted, just saved to USB and gathering dust in the back of his desk at my parents' house."

Renko tapped the phone's interface and the documents opened.

"If I read you everything, it would take our whole summer break, so I'll summarize. It seems that my grandfather was the only one who knew that my great aunt Sumireko possessed a strange power. She had apparently been cleverly concealing her abilities since she was young, so of course there is no definitive proof, but according to grandfather's writings, she could move things without touching them, appear places suddenly without warning, and predict guessing games with perfect accuracy."

"ESP, telekinesis and teleportation? That's a little hard to swallow."

"Well, whether or not we believe it, my grandfather certainly seemed to. He wrote about his sister as a person with special powers and he was concerned about her. Sumireko was apparently so fascinated by her own talents that she became a self-centered and introverted person. He was worried that her strange abilities would prevent her from ever being able to have a decent social life."

That last bit hurt a little to hear. "I can imagine."

"Yeah, sounds familiar to me too. Anyway, grandfather wrote that Sumireko left home when she was still in high school and started living alone, so no one really knew how she spent her time." Renko was scrolling through the text, her eyes following the words as they rolled down the screen. She stopped suddenly and turned the phone to face me. "One day, Sumireko's school called my grandfather's family, saying she had been absent from school for three days without notice. They all rushed to her apartment and found her sleeping soundly. It seems she had just been asleep for three whole days until they came by to wake her up. Even before that, the school reported that she had frequently been arriving late and falling asleep in class."

I narrowed my eyes involuntarily. This was beginning to sound unpleasantly familiar.

"When Sumireko woke up, she uttered something completely incoherent and quickly fell asleep again. She was malnourished from sleeping so much, and they brought her straight to the hospital, where she spent most of the day sleeping on a bed with an IV drip. She would wake up for only a few hours a day, talking about nonsense the entire time before falling back asleep. The doctors maintained that there was nothing physically wrong with her throughout."

"So what happened to her?"

"Probably exactly what you'd imagine. My great aunt eventually stopped waking up altogether. It was as if she had decided to live in her dreams instead of reality and given up on returning to our world. She was in a coma for several years."

When Renko said that, it felt to me as if the temperature inside the stifling train car had suddenly dropped. I covered my eyes and groaned slightly. Could such a thing really happen to those who wandered in dreams?

These eyes of mine. These strange eyes that see the boundaries of this world that others cannot. Perhaps because I have these eyes, I often wander into strange worlds when I dream. In the perspective of Relativistic Noology, the subjective reality I experience in those wandering dreams is no less real than the life I experience while I'm awake, sitting in the car of the Hiroshige Super-Express as it hurtles through its underground tunnel, watching a placid fake countryside slowly roll past on the Kaleidoscreen. Even now as I sit here, there is no way for me to definitively mark the boundary between dreams and reality from my subjective point of view. It could be possible that I am dreaming even now. And were I to die in the next few moments, the only way I could ever learn if that was really the ending of my life or not would be to wake up afterwards.

Usami Sumireko would have been born more than 80 years ago. At that time research into spirituality and its connection to the mind were still in their infancy and Relativistic Noology would not yet have been established as an academic discipline. I wonder if, had Sumireko possessed a modern understanding of her relative mental state, things would have ended differently for her. Could she have understood that her dreams and reality had become switched?




"Is Sumireko still alive?"

Renko shook her head in response to my question.

"She went on sleeping for twenty years without waking up, then passed away quietly."

I was at a loss for a response, so I said nothing. Certainly, for someone like me who has had such strange dreams, this was not something I could ignore. I've been attacked and injured by creatures in my dreams and I've wandered into strange places and brought back strange objects from the other side of that border. I've had such experiences many times, but was luck all that separated me from becoming like Sumireko? If I made a mistake, could my waking life disappear as hers had? "So she passed away about 50 years ago?" I eventually asked.

"That's right. And now here's where the Hifuu Club comes in. My grandfather passed away the other day, and I was helping to sort through his belongings. The house he lived in was old, having been remodeled and updated many times. It's been standing for almost 80 years. My grandfather's parents were fairly wealthy people, with the means to keep a house with more rooms than they needed."

"You don't mean...."

"Yes. Her family had been ready for her to wake up at any moment after she fell into a coma, but she never did. Having kept it waiting twenty years, they never wanted to clean up Sumireko's room, so they just sealed it up. It's been abandoned for half a century. I remember that even as a child, there was always a sealed-off room in grandfather's house that no one talked about."

"That's amazing."

If the room of a person who died 50 years ago, long before we were even born is preserved exactly as it was then, then it would almost be like time had ceased flowing in that room. Crossing into a place like that would almost certainly be like stepping into a world on the other side of a boundary.

Renko smiled, with the sort of sly grin that always preceded trouble. "The purpose of this Hifuu Club activity is to examine my great aunt Sumireko's belongings. Why did she refuse to wake up and choose to live in her dreams? Was the psychic power she was said to have real? What happened to her? Don't you think that's a worthy club activity? To uncover secrets that have been sealed away for more than half a century?"

I nodded vaguely. I had to admit she was right. Finding out about someone who died a half century ago was exactly the sort of thing we had investigated before, and with the details we had heard, we definitely couldn't ignore a case with so many connections and parallels to our own lives. What really happened to Sumireko Usami all those years ago? Could she have stepped over a boundary between her dreams and reality? Despite Renko's excitement, the thought of the investigation filled me with a sense of dread, hanging like a leaden weight on my shoulders. This really did feel too close to home. I couldn't shake the bad feeling about it, like I was watching Renko reach her hand out to open Pandora's box.

"You've got your family's permission to unseal the room at least, right?"

"Of course! It's all taken care of. I even told them you were coming with me. We can go straight to my grandparents' house from the train station."

This is how it always went, my curiosity pushing against my better judgment from behind and my partner in front, pulling my hand toward mystery. At this time I felt a vague anxiety that I couldn't put into words, something I had never felt before, but I couldn't tell Renko that.

My intuition would turn out to be spot on, but at this point, I had no way of knowing.


―2―


In a built-up but slowly decaying urban neighborhood in Tokyo, Japan's old spiritual capital, the Usami family home stood quietly. After visiting with Renko's grandmother, we climbed up the creaking wooden stairs to the end of the second-floor hallway, only to find a dingy, dimly-lit and somber wooden door clad in peeling paint. Looking at it, I got a vaguely creepy impression, as if that doorway led to somewhere lonely and far away rather than a room that was mere steps from my current position.

Almost immediately, my vision began to sway and shake like a heat mirage. A slight headache. Unquestionably, there was a boundary here.

"How about it, Merry. Can you see anything?"

"I can clearly sense that the boundaries here are becoming unstable, though I don't know why. It's almost like a magnetic distortion on the surface of reality."

Perhaps it was due to the interference between multiple boundaries. There are boundaries and gaps between them occurring naturally all over the place in this world, but there are also artificially created wards and seals. The shimenawa of a shrine is one such example and the concepts of national borders or private property are boundaries of another kind. Even houses and rooms function as boundaries to keep certain things in and others out.

By nature, such artificial boundaries are usually very weak and easy to cross, however the boundaries of spiritually powerful places like shrines or mountain forests are stronger and can interfere with other naturally occurring boundaries, distorting them. It was Renko who pointed out to me that my eyes most easily see the gaps between boundaries at shrines or temples and this is because the boundaries of those places have the most friction with boundaries of the natural world.

This room, on the other hand, was a human made boundary that had been sealed and undisturbed for half a century. It was not in a forgotten vault or remote shrine where it could be ignored, but right within an inhabited house. A barrier that had not only been left intact, but seen, acknowledged and reinforced within the minds of everyone who dwelled here for fifty years. There is no way such a ward wouldn't cause distortion in the natural boundaries surrounding it.

For my part, I got the distinct impression that whatever mysteries the room beyond that door might contain they would be better left undisturbed. My instincts nagged me persistently with a sense of danger and the impression the distortions left on me were that the room contained nothing good. Any way you looked at it, the boundaries here were fragile, and a gap could open at a moment's notice. I was struck with the unpleasant impression that once opened, that door could lead to anywhere else.

For Renko, however, my anxiety was nothing more than a spice to double her curiosity.

"That sounds promising. Let's see if it's oni or snakes behind the door, Merry."

"Seriously?"

"Of course! We're the ones who reveal the world's hidden truths, after all. We're the Hifuu Club!"

With these words, my partner put her hand on the door and slid it open.

There was no other world waiting for us on the other side of the door. The room beyond the door frame was dimly lit and packed like a storehouse. A cloud of dust hung in the air, scattering the sunlight that filtered in through dreary curtains. Renko stepped in, covering her mouth with a handkerchief. I dallied for a moment at the threshold, but Renko moved forward without hesitation, half-dragging me in with her free hand as she did.

"They say you can tell who someone is by looking at their bookshelves," she muttered, looking around at the packed shelves lining every wall. "This is quite the collection."

I looked around as well, scanning the titles printed on the neatly arranged spines and exhaling a sigh that was neither a mark of admiration nor one of dismay, but somewhere in between. Books on mysticism, black magic, ESP, urban legends and anything that could be lumped together under the umbrella of occultism stared back from the shelves beneath a gauzy mask of dust. The books were a mixture of those generally accepted in spiritual research and volumes that had no worth other than for their shock value, giving the impression of a chaotic jumble selected for their shared aesthetic rather than the library of a dedicated scholar.

"Renko, your aunt fell into a coma when she was still in high school, right?"

"That's right. This number of books in a high school student's collection is pretty strange, isn't it?"

Renko almost seemed a little impressed. Both she and I are bookworms, but to find that someone younger than either of us who lived so long ago could have amassed this many books at such a young age was a bit surprising. Perhaps if Sumireko had been a professional psychic, then this sizeable collection might have been practical for her, rather than just interior decoration. For a high school girl though, this many books must have taken every bit of money she had to purchase. Could she have perhaps inherited these books from someone else?

Looking around at the state of the room I tilted my head a bit in consideration. It certainly didn't look like anyone had been in here recently, but could this place really have been sealed for a half century?

"This room is rather interesting, isn't it? When I first saw it, I was quite surprised."

Renko and I both whirled around at the sound of an unexpected voice to find that Renko's grandmother had come up the stairs to stand in the doorway.

"Grandma, have you been in this room before?" Renko asked.

The old woman nodded. "Of course, this is my house after all. We came up here every few years to clean and put things away."

Renko's grandmother looked around the room nostalgically, "I think this room has been waiting for you, Renko."

"What do you mean by that, grandma?" Renko asked.

"I never knew Sumireko before she fell into a coma, but keeping this room untouched was something like her final request—she had asked your grandfather to always keep it just as it was." Renko looked at her grandmother with a puzzled expression. Apparently this information was as surprising to her as it was to me.

"There was a note she had left in this room when she moved out that your grandfather found..." Renko's grandmother continued. "'If anything should ever happen to me, please leave my room back home just as it is for as long as possible. Your grandfather kept this room just as it was until his death for her."

Someday those who uncover secrets will discover the truths that I have found too' is what it said, I think.
Renko and I stared at each other, speechless. It was as if Sumireko was foretelling our visit 50 years in the future from beyond the grave. I felt a shiver run down my spine as if the shadow of someone who disappeared half a century ago had suddenly appeared before us. Sumireko's presence could be felt in the room almost as if she were still alive.

"I'll be downstairs, so please call me if you need me." Renko's grandmother said as she turned and shuffled slowly down the stairs, leaving us alone in the dusty room. We looked around the room in silence for a moment, somewhat stunned by that revelation, but after only a brief hesitation my partner stepped forward with determination and threw open the door to the closet.

"What the heck? Is this playground equipment stolen from a park?"

For some reason the lower section of the closet was filled with a fiberglass panda that looked like it belonged in a children's play park. Next to it was a traffic sign on a steel pole. Why was this stuff in a closet?

On the closet's top shelf, a small box contained a deck of Zener cards. Having these of course did not prove Sumireko was a psychic, but who would keep such disconnected items together?

With a slight headache, probably from the dust, I turned back to one of the bookshelves lining the walls. I felt more at ease dealing with the books than trying to imagine what might have possessed someone to store such an odd collection of objects together in a closet. Glancing along the orderly rows, I noticed one spine that looked out of place. Between the glossy hardcovers, a single thin, staple-bound notebook peeked out.

Out of curiosity, I took out the thin book—and as soon as I read the fading, hand-written words on the cover, I dropped it in shock. Dust rose from the floor in a small cloud.

"What's wrong, Merry?"

Renko, who had been probing the closet, turned around and walked over to me. I picked up the book from the floor, dusted it off, and checked the words on the cover again. They remained the same no matter how many times I looked at them. Why? Why would that name be written on such an old notebook?

"Renko, I'd like to ask you something."

"What is it?"

"Wasn't the name 'Hifuu Club' something that you came up with?"

"Of course."

On the cover of the worn and brittle notebook in my hand, there was a simple handwritten label that read 𝘏𝘪𝘧𝘶𝘶 𝘊𝘭𝘶𝘣 𝘈𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘷𝘪𝘵𝘺 𝘙𝘦𝘤𝘰𝘳𝘥.

Renko snatched the book out of my hands and stared at the words. Putting her fingers to her temples, she grimaced. "No way, the 'Hifuu Club' was supposed to be the name I thought of..."

"Could you have heard about your great aunt having used the name somewhere and have forgotten or something?"

"Maybe, but still..."

It's the only possibility. If this notebook belongs to Sumireko, she must have been involved in something called the "Hifuu Club" more than 70 years ago, and Renko had heard about it from her grandfather when she was a child. It would be natural to assume that Renko had merely picked that name out of her subconscious when she formed an occult club with me without realizing it.

For Renko, however, this was quite a shock. With a stunned look on her face, she was about to open the notebook when something small and hard tumbled from between its pages and rolled onto the floor.
Without thinking, I picked it up. It was a chunk of amber, with some kind of insect sealed inside.

The next moment, the world distorted.

I tried to cover my eyes with my hands, but through the space between my fingers, a phantasmagoria of shifting images and sensations overflowed, filling my vision. A gap had opened. A crack in the boundary. A doorway between worlds.

The tear in reality surged quickly, spreading out of control. I lunged to push Renko out of the way, away from the burgeoning gap.

"Renko!"

I only got as far as grabbing her hand before the world appeared to distort around me, first growing hazy like a mirage, then crumbling away to a swirling, chaotic void.

"Merry—!"

Her voice sounded terribly distant even though she was not more than a few steps away from me.

The gap in the boundary swallowed us both, headfirst.

Holding each other's hands tightly, we tumbled into the churning nothingness, crossing from one side of the boundary to the other, clutching with us the tiny, insect-infested jewel in which time had been sealed, though we couldn't have known its import.

—And then, everything went dark.