No Exit
Minel had a high-intelligence personality disorder. The fact had come out of a childhood psychological evaluation.
The specialists spoke with one voice.
What this child needed more than anything, they said, was a mother.
But his mother had left the world far too soon.
The father who remained raised the boy alone—with a calm, and a competence, that bordered on the astonishing. Instead of teaching emotion, he taught logic. Even in the moments that called for comfort, he offered answers first.
In Minel's world, every feeling had to be translated into the language of logic. Morality he replaced with the will to win.
"Whoa, you lost again."
"How are you always this good?"
"You even ace your classes. Total perfect kid, huh?"
When Minel told his father about the envy of his friends, the man answered in a flat, uninflected voice.
"You think you won? No. You lost."
"Why? Everyone says I won."
"Not getting invited to play anymore—that's the real loss."
His father was right.
From that day on, the other children stopped playing with Minel. Victory and defeat both became meaningless.
At last he asked his father,
"Nobody will play with me. What should I do?"
"Let the other person win sometimes. Hold back just enough."
"Why should I? I don't really want to."
"Because only then can you keep enjoying the fun of winning."
From then on, Minel learned the art of holding back.
A year later, he was the most popular boy among his friends.
One day the school thugs decided to make an example of him. Minel showed them no mercy. He put every one of them on the ground. They were not people he meant to play with anyway. He left them half-dead.
"……"
"Ah…… uuh……"
"C-call an ambulance……"
With razor-edged eloquence Minel talked every teacher around. On the walk home after the school violence committee hearing, his father spoke.
"You lost again this time."
"Why? I didn't get any punishment at all."
"You'll understand what I mean when you go to school tomorrow."
The next day, the moment Minel arrived, he understood. His friends had begun to fear him.
He knew well enough that social isolation never led anywhere good. He thought it over. In the end he went to his father again.
"How do I get close to my friends again?"
"They've already seen your violence. It'll be hard. You'd do better to give up."
"Still—I want to turn their hearts around. Leaving it like this means I lost."
His father looked at him for a long moment, then said flatly,
"Give them the certainty that your violence will never turn on them."
"How?"
"Protect them with that strength of yours. But it will take a long time."
"Why? Them being scared of me was only for a moment."
"It's a one-way street. Easy to go one direction. Hard to reverse. So in ordinary times, you must never show them violence."
From that day forward, the gang of thugs never managed to harass anyone again. Minel stood at the front and stopped them.
On the last day of his final year of high school—the day he became an adult—Minel went home.
"What the hell? You're bailing on a day like this?"
"If El doesn't go, I'm not going either!"
"The whole vibe's dead, Minel."
A sea of disappointed faces turned toward him. In truth, even remembering each of their names was labor. How much longer did he have to keep acting? Was there any meaning in the performance at all?
A peaceful daily life did not suit him in the slightest. He almost wished a war would break out.
Even in a moment when everyone was supposed to be happy, his mind was crowded with questions. How was he supposed to live from here on?
He poured it all out over the phone to his girlfriend, Suye, and still felt no better. His head was a snarl of noise. He threw himself onto the bed without washing, without changing clothes.
Lying still, he felt sleep begin to pull at him. And yet—
The sensation of slipping under was strangely vivid.
Wait. That made no sense. How could falling asleep feel vivid?
Minel's eyes snapped open.
Absurdly, the world had split horizontally. More precisely: his left eye was looking into the bed, and his right eye was looking out of it. The way it might look if you sank into a waterbed. But his mattress was hard. In other words, the floor itself would have had to give way for him to see this.
"Wh-what is this……"
Goosebumps raced over his whole body. Minel tried to sit up at once. The bed, however, swallowed him like sand, drawing him endlessly downward. Thrashing his arms and kicking his legs only made the fall faster.
Urgency cut through him. He shot a hand toward his phone. His fingertips had just brushed it when his body vanished completely into the mattress—
and he fell.
Thud!
Pain slammed through every inch of him. The last possibility—that this was a nightmare—died on the spot. Minel endured the pain in silence, then forced himself to his feet.
The world before his eyes was a sight he could not believe even as he saw it.
"……"
An office long out of use. Fluorescent tubes flickered or hung dead; the few that still lived spilled a thin, sickly light. That light, faintly deformed, stole back the sense of reality the pain had just returned to him.
"Uugh."
"Ah—"
"Kyaa!"
Groans rose from every direction. People. Their clothes were all different; Minel understood at once that they, too, had arrived the same way he had. Dropped into a place they did not know, they eyed one another with faces full of fear and edged slowly together.
"Wh-what on earth is going on? Does anyone know?"
"I don't even have my phone! Shit! I've got nothing!"
"Hmm. From what I can tell, we've all been kidnapped……"
"Fuck! Who is it? Was it you? What the hell is this? Why kidnap us?"
"K-kidnapped? We've been kidnapped?"
Waves of feeling crashed through the group. Minel, by contrast, watched the situation in silence from within it. To him, emotion was only a tool—raw material required for socially acceptable behavior. In a crisis like this, displaying feeling was simply a waste of energy.
"W-well, for now let's introduce ourselves. My name is……"
As the panicked strangers launched into meaningless name exchanges, Minel stopped listening. Instead he turned a sharp eye on the environment around him.
Marble flooring lay under a carpet of old gray. When he set his foot lightly down, the damp, soft give of wet carpet and the hardness of stone rose together through his sole. Desks and chairs were scattered without order. On stacks of paper, telephones, and unidentifiable equipment lay a film of dust so thin it might have been painted on. The whole place looked as if someone had fled in a hurry—and, at the same time, as if no one had set foot here for decades. A double atmosphere.
"Um…… excuse me……"
Minel suddenly felt every gaze fixed on him. All of them wary.
Ah. They had been doing names.
"Minel."
"M-Minel?"
"Min is the family name. El is the given name."
"Is that so? Unusual surname."
Minel tilted his head for a moment. Plenty of people had called his name unusual; no one had ever called the surname strange. Everyone kept staring. His composure—bordering on indifference—was simply too alien here.
"Ah! I remember! Th-this is the B-Backrooms!"
A man in glasses shouted out of nowhere, and every head snapped toward him. His face had gone bloodless.
"You don't know? This is the B-Backrooms! Here! Y-you can't just stay like this! Y-you can never get out! There's no exit! None!"
The man who had been swearing earlier strode straight at him. He was easily twice the size of anyone else; even walking he was overwhelming.
"Hey! What the hell are you talking about? Backrooms? What's that?"
The man in glasses managed to keep speaking in a voice that shook as if he were in full panic.
"I-it's a liminal space on the other side of the world—an enormous place. P-people fall into it sometimes, and all kinds of strange things lurk there. Ah!"
"What? What now?"
The man suddenly clutched at his own body and screamed.
"M-monsters! There are monsters! Monsters that roam this space! W-we have to run! We have to run!"
The glasses man bolted. In an instant he was gone down the corridor and out of sight.
"……"
"……"
Fear began to surface on every remaining face. The big man, however, spoke as if it were nothing.
"All right! Calm down! Don't get jerked around by some crazy bastard. For now we split up and look for an exit. Looks like an abandoned building—we need to get out before the people who grabbed us show up."
His loud voice damped the rising agitation. Groundless or not, a tone full of confidence shoved fear aside for a moment. People began to move one by one, searching for a way out. The big man folded his arms as if it were only natural and simply watched them obey. He had said the words; he had no intention of moving himself. Why risk searching the area when he didn't know what dangers waited? He would move when safety was certain.
Something, though, was getting on his nerves.
"Hey. Minel, right?"
"……"
"Why aren't you moving? You see everybody else going?"
Minel was looking steadily at a desk. He drew a fingertip across its surface, then bent and examined the floor with care. Watching him, a thick vein jumped out on the big man's forehead. He realized Minel had ignored him completely. He had needed a chance to tighten his grip on the group anyway. He would make an example of this one—kill him, if necessary.
He strode forward, hand reaching for the back of Minel's collar.
"You little shit! You hear me? Everybody's looking for an exit and you're just—selfish bastard……"
"It's a waste of effort. There is no exit."
"What?"
Minel turned and looked at him. His eyes were perfectly calm.
"Staying together is the smart move. Splitting up is more dangerous."
The words snapped people awake. They realized they had been following the big man's booming voice without thinking. The man scanned the faces around him quickly. People were drifting back together. When the situation stopped flowing his way, he ground his teeth.
"Yeah. I figured you knew something. Fuck. You're with the ones who grabbed us, aren't you? Huh? How do you know there's no exit?"
The reason was simple. The dust lay thin and even everywhere—proof that this was a sealed space without so much as a breath of wind. In a space this large the humidity should have been uniform, yet the water in the carpet had never evaporated; that meant air circulation had failed so completely that layers of humidity had built up. When he had breathed near the floor, the air had been colder and wetter. If an exit had been nearby, if outside air had entered even once, temperature and humidity could never have stratified this sharply.
And more than anything—the only person who claimed to know what this place was had said so.
"If you really want an exit, go look yourself. Don't order other people around."
At that, the man could no longer hold back. He clenched a fist and swung for Minel's face.
But the fist never reached him.
Before it could—
the man's entire arm disappeared.
Crunch!
"Gyaaaaah!"
From the dark, a massive set of teeth. Between them, the man's arm crumpled like paper.