The Tolling Bell
An early November morning. The chill of early winter was beginning to creep in, a gradual, cutting cold.
On the grim Monday commute that always followed the weekend, people waiting for the bus flinched at a sudden knife of wind and pulled their collars tighter.
“Jesus Christ, it’s freezing. Just last week it was still autumn. How the hell does it turn like this overnight?”
“Oppa, can’t we just grab a taxi instead of waiting any longer?”
“Huh? Ah… that’s a bit much. Who knows how much the fare’s gonna bleed us.”
“Aww, I’m so cold. I wore this instead of my thick coat because of you, you know.”
The woman gave the ivory coat she was fiddling with a little tug, deliberately emphasizing the volume of her chest. The man’s eyes rolled with transparent lust.
“Ahem. Well… guess we’ve got no choice. Let’s catch a cab.”
The couple stuck together like magnets, rubbing against each other as they flagged down a taxi and vanished. Only then could I, who had been watching the whole display from behind, finally rest my eyes comfortably on the road ahead.
Looking at the department jackets, same school, same major. Campus couple?
No matter how hard I spun the memory banks in my head, the faces were complete strangers. Clearly juniors who’d enrolled while I was legally getting worked to death in the military.
The thought that I might have to watch that same performance every time I ran into them on campus made me briefly regret not saying something, but in the end I decided to keep ignoring it.
Even after two years of near-total starvation for female company, calling out a little public affection like that still felt beneath me. My standards were a touch too high for that kind of ugly jealousy.
The mask hid everything but her eyes, so I couldn’t be certain, but that particular strained eye makeup was classic magician-girl bait.
Pretty sure one of my classmates used to do the same thing.
Or not.
Still, the chest was pretty solid. I’ll give her that much.
I boarded the bus that pulled up to the stop, tapped my card, and nodded to myself—then suddenly hit a wall of self-disgust.
…Fuck. I don’t think I was this bad before the army.
It felt filthy, like a single oversized keyword—“woman”—had been driven deep into my frontal lobe and refused to come out.
I let out a small sigh, sat down somewhere in the middle of the bus, and reached for my phone to change the song I was listening to.
—Zzzt.
The sudden noise made me think my AirPods had finally died.
—Zzzt. Zzzzt.
But even after I pulled them out, the static kept filling my ears. I looked up from the window and immediately found the source.
—Zzzzzzzzzzt.
It was the usual route-display monitor every bus has. The machine that normally played mindless videos before chirping the next stop in an annoyingly cheerful voice was now blasting nothing but a screen of pure, eye-watering noise.
“Ah, shit, that’s loud as hell. Mister! Can’t you just turn that off?”
“Hey, the driver’s driving. Wait till we stop and then—”
A guy whose face looked like it could win a mid-tier national brawl barked the first line; his friend tried to rein him in with the same irritated tone. That was when every conversation on the bus died at once.
The reason: the noise screen vanished, and a man took its place.
“…Who the fuck is that?”
The face filling the oversized monitor was ugly enough that even without the speaker’s equally rough speech habits, the first impression still deserved a curse.
—Ah. Ahem. Is this coming through? Never get used to this nonsense no matter how many times I do it. This is why I hate modern-type worlds.
It looked like something that should have shown up at the end of October for Halloween and had simply missed its cue—a man wrapped head to toe in bandages, wearing a suit, a mummy cosplay no one had ever seen before.
In a low, strangely beautiful voice completely at odds with the getup, he muttered something incomprehensible, then flicked a finger. Without touching anything, the camera focus magically pulled back.
The mummy now fully revealed was seamless. Bandages wound so tight not a single scrap of skin was allowed to show, classic all-black suit, fedora. And above all—
There’s being serious about cosplay, and then there’s this. Can he even see?
Even the bare minimum openings needed for vision were completely covered. If I’d seen that at a Halloween festival I would’ve whistled in pure admiration.
—Still, not too late. Far better than the last planet, all mixed up with magic engineering and whatever else.
He kept muttering nonsense to himself, occasionally glancing at the watch on his wrist, never once looking our way—until finally he raised his head.
Dong—
A sudden, unidentifiable bell tone poured from the screen.
It filled the bus with a heavy, weighty resonance, grand enough to call Big Ben to mind.
Donggg—
And for some reason, it raised goosebumps.
…What the hell is this atmosphere?
I tried to ignore the small prickle of gooseflesh on my arms and glanced around. The people who had been snickering at the man’s ridiculous outfit only moments earlier now wore the same stiff faces as me, reading the room.
“…Hey. Look at that.”
“Hup—”
Someone who happened to look out the bus window dropped his jaw and called his friend. The friend followed the pointing finger and felt the air lock in his throat.
It wasn’t just this bus.
The navigation screen of the car right beside us. Every household-appliance store monitor lining the street. Even the giant electronic billboard in the middle of the department store.
Every single screen in the area was showing the same man, staring straight ahead.
Dong—
I put my hand on the bus window latch and pushed.
The bell tone that came through the creaking, sliding glass—
Dongggg—
—was blanketing the entire city.
How long it lasted, I couldn’t say. When the tolling finally stopped, the people on the sidewalks and the cars on the road still couldn’t move, crushed under the unprecedented atmosphere that remained.
In that frozen moment, a man’s voice replaced the bell and rolled across the whole city.
The bandages hid even the direction of his eyes; you had to guess from the tilt of his head. That grotesque appearance stood in absolute contrast to the endlessly courteous speech and the refined gestures of a gentleman—more than enough to win favor from any number of women. Yet every woman I could see on the bus simply stared at the screen with faces locked tight.
With those meaningful words he casually adjusted the angle of his hat and smiled.
?!
Everyone flinched.
The mouth drawn unnaturally long was one thing; the interior revealed by the smile was so black it looked like a transmission error. No tongue, no teeth—just a hollow void punched open.
It didn’t look like cheap CG. The sheer, real-world grotesqueness of it made the children on the bus freeze in terror and start to cry.
…What?
The man—no, the mummy—nodded as if he fully understood our “shortcomings.”
His tone remained perfectly polite and courteous, yet somehow an equal measure of contempt seemed to ride beneath it. And alongside that, pity. And alongside that, superiority.
At that moment a voice roared from the street beyond the window.
“Don’t fuck with us! Who the hell are you to say that?!”
“You think you’re God?! Huh?! Answer me! You think you’re God?!”
If the situation had been normal—if this indescribable heavy atmosphere hadn’t existed—most people in the city would have snorted and gone on their way.
Karma? Retribution? When the hell did that trend even die?
Better get to work and slam a cup of instant coffee already.
But no one could do that now.
Even the middle-aged man screaming himself hoarse couldn’t do it.
Because the air that had once let humanity live in this city had turned hostile and was whispering to every person:
Everything that mummy is saying is not a lie. It is real.
Yet the mummy himself—whether he could hear the shouting or was simply ignoring it—kept staring straight ahead at us, at humanity, and spoke again.
What?
The middle-aged man who had been bellowing, the dull old man who had been watching the racket with a “what kind of bullshit is this” expression, and every single person on the bus including me all doubted our ears for a second.
I hadn’t even been discharged two full months yet.
What? Extinction?
The mummy on the screen finished speaking in a voice laced with laughter and rose from his seat. The camera focus widened naturally with him, and only then did the background behind him come into view.
Countless shining stars and an endless black wilderness of space.
With those final words the mummy vanished from the screen.
I stared blankly at the black display for a few seconds, then blinked and looked around.
Come on. Who in their right mind would take something like that at face value?
Extinction, my ass. There’s a limit to how far you can take a joke…
The instant that thought formed in my head—
Clunk— Clunk—
KRAAAAAAASH!
The end of the peaceful, boring road humanity had been walking began when a truck suddenly leapt from the shoulder and slammed into the side of the bus.