"What kind of cryptic nonsense is this?!"
Back home, the very first thing Eriri did was grab that slip of paper with the phone number on it, crush it into a tight ball, and hurl it straight into the trash can.
She admitted it. In that moment, she really had been scared.
Once she calmed down, her usual pride and composure quickly returned.
"It has to be a prank. Obviously!" She declared loudly to her empty room, as if she were trying to convince herself. "That gloomy guy must have secretly dug up information on me somewhere, then deliberately said something vague just to spook me. That is so low!"
In her mind, she started imagining Natsume hiding in some corner, lurking somewhere and secretly digging up information about her... The more she pictured it, the more plausible it seemed, and the angrier she got.
Even so, that night, Eriri did something she almost never did. She did not stay up late working on her manuscript. Instead, she climbed into bed early... and left the lights on all night.
She tried to bury herself in studying and drawing, to forget Natsume's ominous warning, to treat what happened that evening as nothing more than a bizarre, absurd episode.
The first day passed in complete calm.
Nothing happened. Aside from occasionally recalling Natsume's pale blue eyes that seemed to see through everything, which left her a bit agitated, the day was uneventful.
"See? I knew it. He was lying." She snorted inwardly, letting some of the tension in her chest relax.
However, from the second day onward, everything went downhill.
That afternoon, she went out sketching with her fellow art club members. While she sat on a park bench, fully absorbed in drawing the scenery before her, something flickered at the edge of her vision.
Her gaze brushed, by chance, past the park's outer wall.
Just beyond the two-meter-high wall, the top of a head wearing a white wide-brimmed hat slid past.
"..."
Eriri's grip on her pencil tightened abruptly, her hand freezing in mid-stroke.
An illusion... It had to be an illusion. She tried to reassure herself, but her heart skipped a beat.
She did not dare look in that direction again. She forced herself to focus on her sketchbook, on the lines and shapes in front of her. But no matter how she tried, that fleeting image of the white hat stayed lodged in her mind like a splinter.
On the train ride home, she leaned against the window, watching the scenery race by in reverse. When the train passed rows of tightly packed apartment buildings, her pupils suddenly shrank.
On the fourth floor of one of the buildings, in a room whose curtains had not been drawn, a tall figure in a white dress stood silently by the window... as if it were watching the speeding train go by.
Watching her.
"Pop... pop, pop, pop..."
That eerie sound burst into her ears without warning, as clear as though something were whispering right next to her.
"Ah!"
Eriri gasped and shot to her feet, drawing startled looks from the other passengers.
"What is wrong, Sawamura-san?" one of the art club members asked, puzzled.
"N... nothing." Eriri forced herself back into her seat, her face white, her heart pounding wildly.
She looked out the window again. The apartment building had already vanished behind them, and the figure was nowhere to be seen, as if it had never existed.
From that moment on, her fear began to grow rapidly.
She became jumpy, wary of everything around her. When she walked down the street, she would instinctively scan between people, peering into the gaps in the crowd. When she got home, the first thing she did was yank all the curtains shut.
But it was all useless.
That white figure started appearing in her field of vision more and more frequently.
Sometimes it stood on the other side of the road, mixed into the crowd waiting for the light to change, its abnormally tall build making it stand out sharply. Sometimes it was outside the school building, across the field, standing in the shade of a tree, silent and still. Sometimes it flickered for an instant in the yard of her own house.
She tried mentioning it to her parents, but her mother, Sayuri, just laughed and said she had been overworking herself on her manga, that she was hallucinating from exhaustion, and told her to get more rest.
No one could see it.
No one but her could see that figure that seemed to linger over her life like a shadow.
That constant gaze, always there,made her feel like trapped prey, watched from a distance as she slowly fell apart.
"Pop, pop, pop, pop... pop pop pop pop..."
The sound grew louder, more frequent, as if urging something on, as if it were building toward something terrible.
Under that relentless torment, day and night, her mind was quickly worn down. She could not sleep. She could not eat. She could not even pick up a pencil. In just two days, she had become visibly thinner and hollow-eyed.
Then the third day arrived.
The "last" day, as Natsume had called it.
At dusk, the sky glowed a deep, ominous red.
Eriri locked herself in her bedroom on the second floor, bolted the door, and curled up under her blanket, trembling. She did not dare look toward the window, because she knew... it had to be there.
"Pop... pop pop... pop pop pop pop..."
The sound drew nearer and nearer, clearer and clearer.
This time, it was no longer coming from far away.
It was right outside her window.
It felt as if something unseen was pressed against the window, repeating that deathly rhythm over and over.
Her fear reached its peak.
Eriri finally broke. She screamed, flinging the blanket aside, tumbling out of bed and scrambling into the farthest corner of her room. She clamped her hands over her ears, but the sound was in her skull now, echoing inside her mind where nothing could block it out.
Her gaze, dragged by terror, slid uncontrollably toward the window.
A blurred, twisted, featureless face was mashed up against the glass. The white brim of its hat filled almost the entire window.
It was here.
It had really come to take her life.
In that endless darkness and despair, a crumpled piece of paper slipped from the pocket of her school uniform and fell to the floor.
The phone number...
Right, she still had him.
Eriri lunged for it in desperation. She dove forward, grabbed the scrap of paper, and clutched it in both hands. Her fingers shook so badly from fear that she could barely unlock her phone, failing several times in a row.
She forced her shaking fingers to press the number on the dial pad, matching each one against the trembling numbers on the paper.
Time had never felt this slow.
As the waiting tone rang in her ear, beep... beep... beep..., she thought her heart was going to burst right out of her throat.
Please... please pick up.
Just as she was about to give up, the call...
Connected.
"Hello?"
A cool, calm voice came through the receiver, so ordinary on any other day, yet now it sounded to her like the greatest relief she had ever heard.