Murder At The Rainy Mansion ~The Never Ending 100 Tales~

Chapter 46: More wicked than shichinin misaki

After talking to Takato, Ayano went inside the mansion. She noticed Shun was still standing in front of the storeroom. Is he still curious about this place? She asked, “Why don’t you open it?”

Shun didn’t turn to look at Ayano and just kept staring fixedly at the storeroom. “Didn’t we open it before when we were kids? There was nothing inside.”

True, there was nothing inside the storeroom. The only thing that was inside it was Hisami’s dead body in the recent incident.

However, even if there was nothing inside the room, the screeching sound never stopped. Ayano felt that the sound came from beneath the floor. She remembered she heard it right below Hisami’s body.

“If only it is similar to the sound of cicadas or ocean waves, then we can mentally ignore the noise once we got used to it. This screeching sound – it feels like it is scratching our soul directly,” Ayano said when she suddenly opened the door without giving Shun a heads up.

It was dark inside and there was nothing in the room. All that they could see was only the old wooden planks on the floor.

“Anyway, it is kind of scary that this storeroom is left empty,” Ayano said while listening to the screeching sound from beneath the floor. “Maybe we should remove the floor plank?”

Shun: “I have a feeling that something nasty like those things at the bottom of shichinin bishaku will come out.”

Ayano: “I wonder why the pond is called shichinin bishaku.”

Shun: “I don’t know. It has been called that way for generations. The mysterious factor makes it sound scarier.”

Ayano: “By the way, don’t you think shichinin bishaku sound similar to shichinin misaki[1]?”

Shun: “Maybe they come up with the name based on the folklore. Shichinin misaki is the one that says the person who encounter the seven spirits will die, right?”

Shichinin misaki were a folklore about a group of seven spirits. Anyone who encountered them would die. The victim would then join the shichinin misaki, while one of the original spirits would leave the world.

Shun was skeptical about the tale considering how they managed to pass the story when the person who met the spirits ended up dying.

Shun: “One person died, and one spirit left. That reminds me, the ghost at the altar room left after Yamamura died, right?”

Ayano: “But two more people died after that but none of the ghosts left.”

“Hmm. This mansion is more wicked than shichinin misaki,” Shun said with a frown.

That is right, Ayano thought and turned her head around. Even if the ghost couldn’t be seen, it was still there.

Why did I look back just now?

Perhaps she had turned her head because she knew something was there.

[1] Shichinin misaki: literally means 7-person misaki, where misaki means ‘to leave first’. It is a folklore about 7 spirits that usually appeared around bodies of water.