Chapter 172
A small frame, and a face with a cowed expression seared onto it. A girl carrying a staff made from the skull and spine of someone who had once been alive.
Of everything in this place, her being here was the strangest of all.
When she died, she had been little more than skin drawn tight over hide, and still living, she had fallen all the way to where I was. Then she twisted, and vanished without leaving a single trace, as if she had never existed to begin with.
She was not, at the very least, someone drawn out of my memories.
If this were my mental world, Hyungkesuni's presence would make no sense. Yuanshi Tianzun had called me the master, so I had wondered whether the place I stood in now was a mental world of the sort that turns up so often in stories — and yet Hyungkesuni was here. Daegon, for his part, had called me a guest.
Was one of them lying?
A certain devil came to mind.
What kind of place was this? If I wanted to know for certain, facing it directly was the simplest way, and the surest. I walked up to Hyungkesuni.
"This is the third time we've met."
"Second, I'd say."
Hyungkesuni said something strange. The second?
Now that I thought about it, the dream's atmosphere had changed all at once. For a while it had been full of shapes like a cruel fairy tale, meat and corpses and garbage churned together, and then, from some point onward, I had started meeting people from the past.
When had that been?
After I met Hyungkesuni. From then on, the ones who appeared were people I knew — not nameless corpses, or the carcasses of animals.
In that case, I ought to try this question.
"What do you think of someone who smiles when they're afraid?"
At that, Hyungkesuni's face crumpled hard, and she looked at me with open revulsion.
"You trying to make fun of me?"
Yes. This was certainly closer to the real one I knew. And the Hyungkesuni I had met the first time was not the Hyungkesuni standing in front of me.
Even so, there was still no light in her, and no warmth. In the end, she had to be a fake.
"Yes. That's right. I am making fun of you. You're a witch, aren't you? Answer the question."
If this was something like a mental world, I could afford to speak freely. Hyungkesuni's face twisted with disgust, and then, when I pressed her, she flinched, ducked her head with a frightened look, and peered up at me.
"I think it's pathetic."
She thought she herself was pathetic. It wouldn't be anything the real Hyungkesuni would say, so it amounted to nothing more than a worthless mutter to herself.
"I'm going into the castle I can see up ahead."
Hyungkesuni looked at me, then shifted her gaze a little past me, toward whatever was behind. There was probably something back there.
I didn't turn around on purpose.
A witch, most likely. A witch whose name I couldn't learn.
Something had begun to change around the time I questioned Hyungkesuni. So what, exactly, had gone wrong there?
If she was following me, I ought to show her all the way to the end. I could already guess what lay beyond this pitch-black castle wall, a wall with no sense of depth to it at all.
"You know this is the far side of the door that leads out, and you're still saying that?"
I nodded at Hyungkesuni's words. Yes. I knew. At first it had felt like watching a fairy tale, and I had been wondering whether going to the castle might mean meeting the Queen of Hearts herself.
But partway through, I forgot. It stopped looking anything like a fairy tale, and suddenly only people from the past began to appear. So I had kept moving on inertia. And somewhere in the middle, a reason to go all the way to the end had come up.
"Yes. I know."
Hyungkesuni hemmed and hawed, dragging the moment out, so I stared at her outright. Under my gaze she looked genuinely revolted, and in the end she walked to the wall, set her staff against it, and struck it with a tap.
Rumble!
With a great noise the wall split and opened. The stones that had formed it shifted into place, one after another, and shaped themselves into a castle gate. There was no door. Beyond it, a deep darkness stretched on without end.
And past that darkness, a pure white castle came into view.
I didn't hesitate. I stepped into the dark and sank into a blackness so thick it looked sticky.
The darkness touched my body.
I felt nothing. It was the cold I had always felt — the cold I was feeling even now. A cold that kept growing stronger, a cold it was impossible to grow used to. The cold was driving me mad. Or was I cold because I had already gone mad? I took another step. I had to walk to my destination without losing my way.
"Kyaaaaaaah!"
A scream burst from overhead.
A jet-black lizard leapt down from above my head. Since when had something like that been up there?
Shrieking, it bolted for the far side of the darkness, back the way I had come, running as if its life depended on it. Wings flickered faintly through the black. Not a lizard, then — a dragon?
But it crawled as if it had forgotten it had wings at all, the way a person crawls when they are trying desperately to flee something terrifying. A lizard, after all.
And in the middle of that lizard's body — the only light in this place. Of everyone I had seen so far, the only one with any warmth.
I guessed it was the witch who had dragged me here.
But had she forgotten? If she had been clinging above my head all this time, she ought to have remembered everything I had done.
The lizard ran, and at the mouth of the way out it rebounded as if it had struck an invisible wall. Pitiful thing — it could go no farther. One more step and it would have been free of the dark, and it could not take it. The light reached to the tip of its nose. Its body could not leave the darkness.
"Heh heh."
Hyungkesuni stepped in front of the lizard, laughing at someone unfortunate.
"You can't get out this way."
"Open it! I said open it!"
The lizard screamed. A grotesque voice, a man's and a woman's laid one over the other. I watched them for a moment, then started forward again.
The witch.
Curious, yes. But just now I wanted to see what was inside more than I wanted to see her. Besides, there was still an unused key in my pocket, and I was curious what might be waiting inside whatever that key could open.
I kept walking, on toward the castle that now looked close, step by step.
"This is Maleficent's command! Open the gate! Open it! Open it, I say! Why? Why! Why won't the magic come! Let me out! Let me out of here! Please! I'm begging you! It's too cold here!"
"Kehehe. Half-wit. You should have run back when your head burst from losing to memories in a dream — you didn't even have your own mind left. It's already far too late."
The faint sound of the two of them circled my ear and faded. It had been a while since I'd heard Hyungkesuni sound like herself. And I had heard the witch's name.
New information. I would be able to put it to good use.
Thinking that, I walked on.
Straight ahead.
The voices behind me thinned until I couldn't hear them anymore. The distance was wrong. The castle had clearly been right in front of me, and yet no matter how far I walked, it never arrived.
I could faintly feel what this world was.
If my guess was right, I would have to push through this darkness and walk for a truly long while.
Step. Step.
I walked a long way on short steps, through a dark space that was nothing but cold, until I had forgotten how much time had passed at all.
And then a city appeared before my eyes.
A drab city without color or sound, like a black-and-white silent film. The city where the man from a faded memory had lived. A city that ought to have been missed.
In a sense, I had only just managed to come home. Not to the real one.
I looked up. Unlike the city, a deep blue sky spread overhead, and rising into it was a tower of extraordinary height — a building standing quite far from the place I used to live. People said it resembled a tower from some movie, and from a distance it might well have passed for a castle. But here, in black and white, it shone an especially pure white. A black-and-white space, seen from the outside, is either white or black. One of the two.
Still, didn't one usually enter a place like this only when there was some catalyst for an awakening?
I truly hadn't expected to end up somewhere like this out of nowhere. I started walking. I knew the way through the neighborhood where the man from the faded memory had lived, the way to the house that had been his. It was the road I had wished for in the dark.
I walked it.
And after a span of time that was short if you called it short, and long if you called it long, I arrived in front of the door. Where a door lock ought to have been, there was an enormous keyhole.
I took the key with the worn-away letters from my pocket and tried to fit it in.
Clack!
The key wouldn't go in.
Huh?
Don't tell me I had been supposed to find a key somewhere, and missed the thing I was meant to pick up. Or should I have brought the witch along? If I had to go back now, I could, but it would be miserable labor.
So I went along the corridor and pressed the elevator button. It still didn't move, so I headed for the stairs. I tried the emergency-exit door, meaning to go down the stairs I had climbed earlier.
It wouldn't open.
What was this? A bug?
I looked around and around, and there was no way back. In the end I returned to the door. Wondering whether I could get down by jumping, I tried to climb over the corridor wall, only to find the empty air stopped by something hard as stone.
The door lock had become a keyhole, and the key would not go in.
Just in case, I pressed the doorbell.
No sound at all.
This time I knocked.
I waited, and no one came.
Leaving my companion behind and ignoring her, it seemed, had not been the right choice. Now what?
I was standing there in the corridor when, all at once, I sensed someone. The elevator opened, and a man stepped out.
It was me.
From the eyes upward he was invisible, as if black paint had been daubed over that half of him, but I knew the face was mine. He walked up to me, took a key from his pocket, and unlocked the door. On the end of the key I glimpsed, a word was written.
The door opened onto a small, modest apartment. He went in, and I followed.
He behaved as if he didn't register me at all.
The sum total of every memory I possessed. If that was what this was, what was I supposed to do here?
I was looking around the place with that thought when he changed his clothes, settled into an easy posture, went into the room, and turned on the TV. Then, abruptly, he spoke to me.
"That's the way out."
He pointed at the screen, hissing with static.
"Is the theme park over?"
"Did you do any soul-searching?"
"Impossible."
There was no way I could manage a thing like that. I shook my head, and the man, as if he had expected exactly that, smiled with the only part of him that showed — his lower face.
"Right. As if people like us would have any business doing that. If you're done looking around, go back."
"All right."
Then, on a whim, I took out the key in my pocket.
"Do you know what this is?"
"You don't know, and you think I would?"
"Useless."
"Memories of the past are all like that."
I must have walked past the room I was supposed to enter somewhere, and never found it. I traded a few pointless remarks with the lower-face man and stepped into the TV. I wasn't especially worried.
That's me. When I play a game, once I've cleared the scenario at around sixty percent, I just abandon the rest.
For a moment I felt myself drop from somewhere high, and then I opened my eyes on my bed.
The ceiling of a luxurious lodging in front of the Royal Academy.
I was back in the original world.
I had no idea what any of it had been, but I had the witch's name, so I would call the whole thing a success. As a bonus, there was the heavy press of metal digging in around my hip.
So the witch's name I had gained was Maleficent?
An extremely classic name.