Receiving a Guest
The voice in the forest that Tucker claimed to have heard.
To children always starved for something to do, that story might have been nothing more than a delicious excuse—good enough to gather a little band and slip into the woods behind the adults' backs.
But that was only a child's bravado.
Even the forest, which to them was hardly different from a playground, showed an entirely different face once night fell. Darkness so thick you couldn't see an inch ahead. The feeling of eyes on you no matter where you turned. Cries you couldn't name. Only then did the children understand: the monsters that hunted little ones in the dark, the great wolves that carried off children who wouldn't listen—those weren't fairy tales invented to frighten them. They were advice, rewritten at a child's eye level, meant to keep those children alive.
Clack. Clack!
"Please, please open...!"
The girl shoved and yanked at the handle with everything she had. It didn't budge. No matter how hard she strained, the old door only trembled a little, with no sign of giving way.
"Hello?! Is there really nobody in there?!"
Strange. She was sure she had heard someone's voice from inside. Maybe she had only misheard...
"Eek—!"
Even so, behind her, the wolves' breathing drew closer and closer.
Grrrr...
The girl's face went deathly pale.
No...
She didn't want to die here. Her mother would be waiting for her to come home for dinner. Her father would be searching the village for her, gone missing. The other children would be worried, too—she was sure of it. Only then did the girl begin to regret it. She had never meant to fall behind the others; her eyes had simply been caught by an evening primrose she had never seen before. What was a flower like that even worth? The price of losing her head to a moment of brilliance was brutal.
Grrrr...
One step. Two. The wounded wolves crept nearer. The girl clenched her teeth and shoved the door once more, but it still would not open.
"Help me!"
She screamed until her throat felt ready to tear. Still, no answer came.
"Is anyone there?! Please!"
In the very moment when hope seemed nowhere to be found—
Click.
"...Huh?"
She distinctly heard the latch that hadn't moved at all come undone on its own.
It opened?
Did I open it?
No. She didn't think she had put any strength into it just now...
"Ah!"
In that instant, the girl felt something seize her and fling her bodily inside the mansion.
Thud!
She rolled across the floor several times, and behind her—
Bang!
The great door slammed shut again.
Creak, creak.
Thud! Thud!
"Hhh...!"
The girl stared at the door without even breathing. With only a single door between them, the sound of the wolves scraping with their claws and throwing their bodies against it kept coming through. The mere fact that those huge beasts that had been chasing her a moment ago were separated from her by nothing but one wooden door made her whole body shake.
But before long, the outside went quiet. The sound of the wolves moving away, and mixed faintly with it, a clattering... She couldn't be sure exactly what was happening, but it seemed the wolves had started chasing something else.
"Haa..."
Only then did the strength leave her legs, and she sank to the floor where she was. Her heart was still pounding like mad. Her hands trembled, and her mouth had gone bone-dry. The knowledge that she would have died if she had been even a little later was still hammering at her heart.
The girl barely steadied her shaking breath and looked around. Unlike the abandoned house it had seemed from outside, the interior was unexpectedly tidy. There was hardly any dust on the floor, and though the carpet and the furniture were old, they were arranged as neatly as if someone had been looking after them. But contrary to that cleanliness, all she could see were furnishings so worn and broken it was hard to believe anyone lived here.
Just as the strange fear born of that discordant wrongness began to creep over her—
Rustle.
From somewhere came the sound of something brushing past. The girl flinched and looked toward it, but there was nothing there but darkness.
"...Is someone there?"
She gathered what courage she could and spoke, but her voice came out far smaller than she had expected. That was how thoroughly the fear this alien place stirred had cowed her.
I... I must have misheard again...
Yes. It was surely the wind, or some small animal. There couldn't possibly be anything in a mansion like this.
Rustle.
Rustle.
"Eek...!"
But the sound came again. This time from an entirely different place.
Rustle.
Rustle.
Rustle.
The sounds multiplied. From the ceiling, from the gaps in the furniture, from beneath her feet... The girl was already surrounded by rustling.
Kiiiiii...
At last, from the far side of the darkness, a resonance spread that no ordinary animal could possibly have made. The girl's heart began to hammer. The scream from the forest, the suspiciously tidy mansion, the grotesque cries and the presence—all of it came together in her head and settled on a single conclusion. What if, from the very beginning, something inside this mansion had been luring her in?
The girl's legs froze. Until a moment ago she had been trying to get as far from the door as she could; now she found herself pressed tight against the handle of the door she had come through, ready to flee at any second. But once again, the door would not open. The darkness deeper inside seemed to ripple, as if it meant to swallow her whole...!
"Uuu, aaaaaah!!!"
At that moment—
Bang!!
"Kyaaah!"
The mansion's front door, shut tight, came flying inward, and splinters of broken wood sprayed in every direction.
"Mari. You alive?"
A familiar voice. A woman with a great axe in hand leapt in over the wreck of the door—the finest hunter in the village, the one the girl had admired so much. Evelyn Hedwin.
The girl cried out, nearly in tears.
"E-Evelyn!"
Evelyn didn't answer. Instead she swept her gaze once around the inside of the mansion. A clean lobby. Furniture kept in order. And footprints and traces leading into this mansion that weren't Mari's.
And...
......
Just as she'd thought. Someone was in this mansion.
Rustle.
Evelyn's eyes turned toward the direction the sound had come from. So that was it. Up the stairs. A position from which you could look down on the front door and the whole lobby, and a good place to hide yourself in the dark.
"You there. Why don't you show yourself?"
When Evelyn spoke, her gaze aimed precisely, a suspicious figure in a robe quietly revealed itself from behind the curtain.
"Who are you?"
No answer came.
"Don't feel like talking, is that it..."
Most of those who hid their identity had ill intentions. Lately she had sensed that the wild animals' movements were unusual. As if something were controlling them, they had been showing patterns of behavior clearly different from usual. What if that being was the very one that had been controlling the wild animals and the monsters? And the proof of it was right here, in her arms.
Evelyn drew the frightened Mari back behind her, pulled that piece of evidence from her embrace, and rolled it across the floor for all to see.
Thud. Roll, roll...
What Evelyn had taken from her arms was a skeleton's skull.
"I've already dealt with the minion you were using to command the wolves. So what are you planning now?"
"...!"
At the visual shock of a human skull, Mari swallowed her breath. Really, that person was...
"A necromancer...?"
It was at that moment. The one who saw what had been done to their familiar was so utterly flustered that they started down the stairs, tangled their feet, flailed—and at last began tumbling down the staircase.
Crash, bang, clatter!
"...?"
Ow. Ugh. Ghk. A voice so clumsy it was impossible to believe they had been plotting anything with the intent to harm a person. The suspicious figure who had come down the stairs with their whole body crawled almost on all fours toward the skull, pulled it into an embrace, and curled around it.
"...?"
Wait. Were they... crying right now? Looking closely, their shoulders were shaking. What? Up close, their build was quite small, and they didn't look as if they had prepared any further scheme.
But...
...even so, she couldn't let her guard down. A necromancer was still a necromancer. You did not lower your guard in front of a mage—and one who used black magic, at that. This, too, might be nothing but an act put on to get out of the situation.
So Evelyn steeled herself and approached the necromancer to settle things. The necromancer, as if terrified, flipped over and began scrambling backward in a crawl, trying to flee. Then, behind them, the darkness began to move.
Eeeee—!!
Waaaaah—!!
No. It wasn't darkness. It was simply an enormous number of dust spirits. She had mistaken the spirits hiding behind the dark, pouring out in countless numbers, for the darkness itself.
"What...?"
It was astonishing that a mansion which was no refuse pit held this many dust spirits. Given their nature of living by eating filth, the environment would have to be extremely dirty for more than a certain number to gather. On top of that, the sight of every one of those spirits trying to wrap themselves around the someone who had tumbled down the stairs was absurd enough to leave her speechless.
Wheeeee—!!!
The dust spirits that had swarmed in then began charging at the hunter.
...They were no threat at all. Dust spirits weren't aggressive by nature—beings that lived modestly, absorbing dust and filth no one paid any mind to. So of course they wouldn't know the first thing about fighting.
Evelyn brushed off the dust spirits leaping at her and approached the necromancer again. Surely they weren't commanding a number of dust spirits this large? If so, they seemed to have talent... which was precisely why she had to end it here. For the village's safety.
In the end Evelyn stepped up to the one wrapped in the black robe, raised her dagger, and roughly pulled back the hood.
And—
She froze.
Her hand stopped. She couldn't move the dagger.
"Ira...?"
Impossible. She should already have died back then. And yet that silver-pale hair, and those eyes touched with violet. It was unmistakably the face of Ira Elysia, the youngest daughter this mansion had once had.