Spiral

I want you to come here right this minute and tell me what happened to those pages!

She reached out for her coffee, now quite cold. If only she’d read through the manuscript sooner, she wouldn’t have been in this mess. She couldn’t regret that enough. If she couldn’t find the missing pages, she’d have no other option but to try to supply them herself. She shrank in fear from the thought that what she wrote might diverge from Ryuji’s intentions. It would really be quite presumptuous of her. True, she had already been accepted into graduate school, but for a girl barely twenty to doctor the conclusion of the very last work of a logician from whom everybody had expected such great things …

I can’t do it.

Telling herself she’d just have to find the pages, she opened the next box.

Sometime after four, the room, which faced east, began to get dark, so she turned on a light. It was November, and the days were getting noticeably shorter. But it wasn’t cold. Mai got up and drew the curtains. For a while now, she’d been bothered by the feeling that someone was watching her through the window.

She’d already gone through half the cardboard boxes, and she hadn’t yet found the missing pages.

Suddenly, Mai could hear her heart beating. The inside of her chest was pounding. She stopped what she was doing and sat there, one knee up, back bent, waiting for the palpitations to subside. This had never happened to her before. She pressed a hand over the left side of her chest and tried to figure out what was causing it. Was it guilt over having lost her teacher’s work? No, that wasn’t it. Something was hiding in the room with her. A minute ago, she’d thought it was outside the room staring at her, but evidently she’d been wrong. She half expected a cat or something to dash out from behind a box.

She felt something cold on the back of her head and neck. A stabbing gaze. She turned around. She saw her pink cardigan draped over a box where she’d left it when she got to work. The spaces between its fibers glittered like eyes, reflecting the lamplight. Mai picked up the cardigan to reveal a video deck.

The jet-black deck sat on top of a box, its cords wrapped around it. It had to be the one that had been in Ryuji’s apartment. There was no TV set to be seen, however, and the deck hadn’t been hooked up.