“What is that?!” Suu whined as she covered her nose and mouth.

Fumi pulled a handkerchief from her pocket to cover her own nose and mouth, and muttered, “It smells like something died in there…”

Though the smell was revolting, Fumi’s words struck a chord with Hideki.  He remembered that when they first spotted Suu inside this ghost world weeks ago, she looked just a touch thinner than usual, and she had only been gone for one day, while Kazuo had been gone for several.  Hideki threw his arm over his face and ran into the room, looking around frantically.

The inside of the apartment was filthy.  There were garbage bags piled in the corners, and the sink was filled with dishes.  The low kitchen table was piled with trash, empty cereal boxes, dirty dishes, and empty beer bottles.  The worn tatami mat floors were smeared with black and gray streaks, and littered with cigarette butts from an overturned ashtray.   Hideki froze when he caught the sight of someone sitting at the table in the darkness.

“KAZUO-KUN!” Hideki shouted as he kneeled down by the young man.

Kazuo wasn’t in his school uniform, but instead in a pair of sweatpants and a tanktop, which hung off of his scrawny body.  He had gone from ‘lean’ to emaciated, his skin faintly sagging and his cheeks sunken, with dark circles under his glassy eyes.   Flies crawled across his skin without him seemingly paying any attention to him.  When Fumi and Suu realized what Hideki had spotted, both of them ran into the room and knelt beside him.

“Takahashi-kun, can you hear us?” Fumi asked, gently shaking his shoulder, stirring the flies to take off and buzz away from him.

“Oh my god, he looks awful,” Suu whispered.

Kazuo stared at the table, seemingly oblivious to their presence.   The gentle rise and fall of his chest was the only sign that he was still alive.

“We don’t have time for this, we need to get him to a hospital,” Hideki said, grabbing Kazuo’s arm and trying to lift it to pull it around his shoulder.   However, he only lifted Kazuo’s arm a couple of feet from the floor, before it stopped suddenly with a metal clang.  Hideki looked down, and saw the dim ambient light of the room glinting off of chains.  His eyes followed the taut chain links, down to a metal plate screwed into the floor, and them up to a heavy metal shackle around Kazuo’s wrist.

“What is this?” Fumi asked, eyeing the chains as she lifted Kazuo’s other arm, “Who could be keeping him here?”

Suu was quiet as she watched Kazuo, before whispering, “Himself.”

“What do you mean?” Hideki asked.

Suu looked at Hideki, then back to Kazuo, hesitant to speak at first.  She took a moment to find her words, before saying, “I said before, that it felt like I couldn’t leave.  The two of you tried to rescue me, but in my heart, I felt completely hopeless.  When Hideki-kun threw my bicycle away, I was devastated, even though it was something I knew was keeping me bound to this place.  I didn’t feel like I deserved to be free, not while I thought I still had to help people here.”

“So what, he’s chained himself here?” Hideki asked, grabbing hold of the chain itself and beginning to pull.  Though the metal made a faint creaking sound, the plate and screws showed no sign of budging, even secured to such a seemingly fragile surface.

“Maybe not intentionally,” said Fumi, “But if he can’t see a way out, then he might as well be being held by chains.”

Suu reached up and gently touched Kazuo’s sunken cheeks, gently tilting his head toward her, treating his frail body as if he were something fragile.   Looking into his eyes, she asked in a soft tone, “Kazuo-kun, do you hear us at all?   It’s Onishi Suu, I’m in your class… The class representative is here too, and Hideki-kun, he sits in front of you…”

Kazuo’s eyes slowly focused on Suu’s, before he whispered, “...Onishi…?”

Suu smiled brightly, nodding.

“Hey, Kazuo-kun,” said Hideki, “Listen, you’re in a really bad place right now, but we need to get you out of here.”

Kazuo began to lazily shake his head.

“This again,” Fumi whispered with a touch of annoyance, before she looked down at Kazuo and said, “You’ve been missing for days.  You’re in bad shape and you need to let us get you out of here so you can go to a hospital.”

“No, noooo,” Kazuo groaned, “I can’t leave her here…”

“Leave who?” Hideki asked.  Kazuo’s head lulled to the side, and Hideki gently shook his shoulder to try to rouse him again, asking once more, “Leave who, Kazuo-kun?  Who can’t you leave here?  Is there someone else in here with you?  Did you call the number with someone?”

As Suu and Hideki tried to talk to a dazed and drifting Kazuo, Fumi turned her head to look toward the nearby kitchen.  Aside from the dripping of the sink, and the skittering of insects through the rot-filled cabinets, she swore she could hear sounds like distant shouting.  As she stood and moved toward the kitchen, from the corner of her eye, she caught a ghost of movement.

“Do you hear that?” Fumi asked softly, too softly to be heard by Hideki and Suu, though she tried not to talk over the sound she was so intently focusing on.  She cupped her hands behind her ears as she leaned in, before the vague distortions in the air began to take shape.

She could vaguely see the images of a man and a woman, as they stormed from one side of the kitchen to the other.  The woman was opening cabinets and slamming them again, and the man was following after every step she took with a bottle in his hand.  Though the voices were too distant to make out their words, Fumi could tell by their movements that they were screaming at each other.  The woman whipped a can from the cupboard at the man, before he struck her, knocking her to the floor.  Fumi winced as she watched the shapes, as the man reached down to grab the woman, striking her several more times before wrestling something out of her pocket. The woman laid on the ground, silently sobbing as the man stormed away and out the front door.

Fumi turned to watch him go, and she saw something that Hideki and Suu clearly had not noticed.  Sitting at the same table as Kazuo were two children, a boy, and a younger girl, quietly eating bowls of rice.  Fumi walked toward them, slowly circling around one side of the table, before she kneeled to get a closer look at the boy's face.

“Takahashi-kun?” she whispered softly, before turning to look at the girl.  Suddenly, the girl opened her mouth and shut her eyes, appearing to be crying out in pain.  The woman had stormed in from the kitchen and grabbed the girl up off of the floor by her small arm, yanking her off of her feet like a rag doll.  Fumi saw the woman lift her other hand, but she couldn't bare to watch what she knew was coming.  She looked away to the boy, and saw his eyes turned down to his meager breakfast.  She watched as he flinched every now and then, as if reacting to a loud sound.  After a few moments, the images faded from view, and Fumi was left sitting across the table from the sickly looking Kazuo.

“The chains won't budge,” Hideki said after another pointless round of pulling.

“Is there even a way we can bring him food or water?” Suu asked.

Fumi slowly stood and walked around the table, before kneeling next to Kazuo, and asked quietly, “Was she your younger sister?”

Kazuo's head slowly turned, and he stared at Fumi, his eyes wide.  Slowly, tears began to brim at the corners of his eyes, before rolling down his cheeks.

“Kazuo-kun?” Suu asked, surprised, before looking at Fumi; “How did you know?”

“I saw it,” said Fumi, “Glimpses of it.”

Kazuo threw his head back and let out a tortured wail as he began to cry, startling Hideki and Suu both, as this was the most movement or sound he’d made this entire time.

“Hey, whoa!” Hideki said, touching his shoulder.

“I didn’t save her!” Kazuo sobbed, “I didn’t do anything for her!”

“He has every reason to cry, and feel pain,” said Fumi, “But he was a child when he lost his sister… There was nothing he could have done.”

“That’s awful,” Suu whispered.

Hideki grimaced, as the reality of what happened began to sink in.  He squeezed Kazuo’s shoulder, before saying, “You can’t keep blaming yourself for that.  Come on… Let’s talk about this more later, but you can’t stay here…”

Suddenly, Kazuo screamed, “I WON’T LEAVE HER!”

The floor cracked next to Suu, and a chain burst up through the tatami mat, shredding the weave.  Suu yelped and covered her head as the chain pierced through the ceiling above her, raining dust down on her head.  Another chain burst from a wall and narrowly missed Hideki’s shoulder as it speared into the opposite wall.

“Damn it!” Hideki shouted, reaching over to grab Suu’s arm, “We can’t stay!”

No sooner were the three of them on their feet, than the walls and floors of the apartment were seemingly coming apart, every surface becoming knitted together by rusty, jagged chains.  They barely made it out the door before the opening was crisscrossed by chains, barring their reentry entirely.

“Wh-What was that?!” Suu stammered, holding onto the railing of the verandah as she stared at the door, “Kazuo-kun!  Is Kazuo-kun okay?!”

Fumi closed her eyes to listen to the sounds beyond the rattling metal, before she nodded, and said, “I can still hear him crying… He’s alive, at least.”

Hideki clenched his fists tightly and muttered, “We have to try to get him out of there.”

“He doesn’t want to come out though,” said Suu, “We can’t just make him go.”

“If anything is like the last time, then Takahashi-kun has a ‘shadow self’ somewhere in this world that must be dealt with,” said Fumi, “There are things he is hiding that he cannot let go of, things that are torturing him.  Until those can be addressed, the chains will continue to bind him.”

“So how do we try to find his shadow?” Hideki asked, looking around.

“It’s going to take some planning,” Fumi replied, “I would suggest we retreat for now.”

“Retreat?” Suu asked, “You mean… We just leave him here?”

“We can’t do that!” said Hideki, “He already looks half dead!”

“What do you suggest we do here, then?” Fumi asked, eyes narrow, “We have absolutely no leads whatsoever outside of a room we’ve clearly been barred from entering for now.  We also don’t understand how time passes here.”

“Time passing?” asked Suu, “What do you mean?”

Fumi looked at her and explained, “In the real world, you were missing for twenty-four hours.  Takahashi-kun has been missing for days.  Meanwhile, when Hideki-kun and I entered and retrieved you, we re-appeared in the real world at 12:01am, less than sixty seconds after he and I called the line, but a day later for you.  At some point during our time here, the clock will roll over and we’ll find ourselves returning to the real world a day later.  None of us can afford to terrify our families and teachers like that, least of all Suu-chan.”

Suu nodded a bit, biting her lip.

“I know, just…” muttered Hideki as he looked at the chain-covered doorway, “I hate this.”

Fumi’s voice softened a bit as she said, “I do too. But we’re going to come back for him.”

Hideki and Suu looked at each other a moment, before nodding in agreement with Fumi.

The three of them undertook the walk back to where they had started, once more utilizing the map application on Hideki’s phone.  They were lucky to find three old fashioned payphones waiting for them in the middle of the street, precisely where they had appeared, and they picked up the receivers from the phones.

Though they were returned to the real world unharmed, at 12:01am on Saturday, a mere minute after they had vanished.  Still, they all three felt uneasy, looking to one another before stepping back from the phones.

“So what now?” Suu asked quietly.

“I guess we go home,” said Hideki.

“We’ll do research tomorrow,” Fumi said, “We’ll look into Takahashi-kun’s family history, see if there is any public record of anything that’s gone on.  If we can find some information about exactly what happened to his sister, it’s possible that we can help him come to terms with it.”

Hideki sighed heavily, and asked, “How does someone ever ‘come to terms’ with something like that?”

Fumi was quiet for a moment, before saying, “I suppose we’re just going to have to figure that out.”

The three of them parted ways, to return home for a short, restless sleep before school.