Chapter 5: The Inescapable Gaze
"That pretentious bastard!"
Back home, the first thing Sawamura Eriri did was to fiercely crumple the note with the phone number into a ball and throw it into the trash.
She had to admit, she had been scared for a moment.
But after calming down, her pride and rationality as a proper young lady regained the upper hand.
"It must be a prank! That's right!" she declared loudly to the empty room, as if to convince herself. "That gloomy guy must have investigated me somewhere in secret and then deliberately said those vague things to scare me! How vile!"
She even began to imagine scenarios where Natsume Yu was hiding in a corner, spying on her life with binoculars, then secretly gathering information about her... The more she thought about it, the more plausible it seemed, and the angrier she became.
However, despite her words, that night, Eriri uncharacteristically did not stay up late drawing. She got into bed early and left the lights on all night.
She tried to use her busy schedule of studying and drawing to forget Natsume Yu's ominous warning, treating the encounter that evening as a bizarre and absurd interlude.
The first day passed peacefully.
Other than being occasionally flustered by the memory of Natsume Yu's all-seeing cerulean eyes, nothing happened.
"See? It was a lie after all," she scoffed internally, her tense nerves relaxing a little.
However, starting from the second day, the situation took a sharp turn for the worse.
That afternoon, she went out sketching with her art club classmates. As she sat on a park bench, engrossed in drawing the scenery, she inadvertently caught a glimpse of something out of the corner of her eye by the park wall.
Beyond the two-meter-high wall, the top of a white, wide-brimmed hat flashed past.
"..."
Eriri's hand, holding the paintbrush, froze.
An illusion... it must be an illusion, she told herself, but her heart skipped a beat.
She didn't dare to look in that direction again, forcing her attention back to her drawing board. But no matter how hard she tried, that fleeting glimpse of the white hat was like a thorn stuck in her mind.
On the train home, she leaned against the window, watching the scenery fly by. As the train passed a dense cluster of residential buildings, her pupils suddenly contracted.
On the fourth floor of an apartment building, in a room where the curtains weren't drawn, a tall figure in a white dress stood silently by the window, seemingly... gazing at the speeding train.
Gazing at her.
"Po, po, po, po..."
That bizarre sound exploded by her ear without warning, so clear it was as if someone was whispering right next to her.
"Ah!" Eriri let out a small cry of shock and shot up from her seat, causing the surrounding passengers to cast surprised glances at her.
"What's wrong, Sawamura-san?" a fellow art club member asked strangely.
"N-nothing..." Eriri sat back down, her face pale, her heart pounding wildly. When she looked out the window again, the apartment building had long been left behind, and the figure was gone, as if it had never been there.
From that moment on, the seeds of fear began to sprout wildly in her heart.
She became paranoid, wary of everything around her. When walking on the street, she would subconsciously look into the gaps between people; at home, the first thing she would do was draw all the curtains.
But it was all in vain.
That white figure began to appear in her field of vision more and more frequently.
Sometimes it was across the street, standing out conspicuously in the crowd waiting for the red light due to its superior height; sometimes it was outside the school building window, standing quietly under the shade of a tree across the field; sometimes it even flashed through her family's garden.
She tried to mention it to her parents, but her mother, Sayuri, just smiled and said she was probably hallucinating from drawing too much lately, and told her to get more rest.
No one could see it.
Other than her, no one could see that curse-like figure.
That constant gaze made her feel like prey in a glass cage, while the hunter watched with great interest, enjoying the entire process of her breakdown.
"Po, po, po, po, po-po-po-po..."
The sound also became louder and more frequent, as if it were urging her on, or perhaps it was the prelude to the upcoming feast.
Her spirit was rapidly worn down under this relentless, day-and-night torture. She couldn't sleep, couldn't eat, and certainly couldn't pick up a paintbrush. In just two days, she had become haggard.
Then, the third day arrived.
The "final" day, as Natsume Yu had called it.
At dusk, the setting sun was the color of blood.
Eriri locked herself in her second-floor bedroom, pulling the blanket tightly over her head, her body trembling uncontrollably. She didn't dare look out the window, because she knew it was definitely out there.
"Po... po-po... po-po-po-po..."
The sound grew closer, clearer.
This time, it was no longer coming from a distance. It was...
Right outside her window!
It was as if an invisible demon was pressed against her windowpane, repeating that deathly, bizarre laugh over and over again.
Her fear reached its peak.
Eriri finally broke down. She screamed, threw off the covers, and scrambled off the bed, shrinking into the farthest corner of the room. She clamped her hands tightly over her ears, but the sound seemed to ring directly inside her brain, impossible to block out.
Her gaze, against her will, flickered to the window.
A blurry, distorted, faceless face was pressed against the glass. The white, wide-brimmed hat took up almost the entire window.
It was here.
It was really here to take her life!
In the endless darkness and despair, a crumpled piece of paper slipped out of her school uniform pocket.
The phone number...
That's right, there was still him!
Like a drowning person clutching the only piece of driftwood, Eriri lunged for the piece of paper. Her fingers trembled so violently from extreme fear that she fumbled several times, unable to unlock her phone.
With all her might, she looked at the string of numbers and pressed them, one by one, into the keypad.
Time had never felt so long.
Listening to the "beep... beep..." of the ringing tone, she felt as if her heart was about to leap out of her throat.
Please... please pick up the phone!
Just as she was about to give up, the call...
Connected.
"Hello?"
A calm, cool voice, yet one that sounded like a gift from the heavens at this very moment, came from the receiver.