mission report for beltenebra (part 2 of 3)
Back to Part 1
The projector that isn't a projector gets delivered just after 6 PM, and the delivery man - another employee of the antiques store, Ueda assumes - seems relieved to be rid of it.
Tegoshi just stares at it sitting in the middle of his living room.
"What the hell am I supposed to do with this?" he asks, petulant. "It's taking up most of my spare space!"
Ueda just finds a plug and gets it set up, not really knowing what he's doing. He's half-aware that his life right now would sound like a bad movie to anyone he tried explaining it to, and he's not sure why this doesn't bother him as much as it probably should. If he's going crazy, then Tegoshi is there with him, and he suspects Tegoshi thinks too much of himself to allow himself to be sucked into some crazed delusions.
As he's finishing up getting everything up and running - or as well as he can with no movie reel, if Junno is to be believed and the thing really is a movie projector, Tegoshi appears next to him looking vaguely confused and holding the camera in his hands.
"The ghost dude keeps gesturing wildly at this thing," Tegoshi explains, and hands Ueda the camera without much else by way of explanation. Ueda looks through the viewfinder, but he can't understand the wild gesticulations without any audio to go with them, so he gives up and continues working on the projector itself.
It's finished a minute later, but Ueda doesn't know what to do with it.
"Maybe try turning it on," Tegoshi snarks, and flips the switch near the base. There's a slow grind, like a machine that's been in hibernation for too long, and then the projector begins whirring; at least the sound seems stable enough to indicate that there wasn't any major mechanical failure inside while it was sitting unused. But nothing happens other than the sound and the dull vibrations, and Ueda isn't sure what to do next.
"What now?" he asks.
Tegoshi frowns at the machine, holds the camera up to his face, and abruptly stops. He stares at the camera after lowering it once more with an expression that Ueda can't read, and then puts the camera on the top of the projector with more force than Ueda thinks the old thing can take.
Something clicks immediately: the picture, which was nothing, just a square of light cast against the white wall of Tegoshi's apartment, rounds at the edges, and then the picture comes into focus. It's just the bookshelves, but Ueda now understands.
"Turn it," Tegoshi demands, and it takes the two of them to gather enough force to get the rusty top of the projector to spin around and point the camera in the opposite direction, near the couch that is covered with strange pillows and a few old throws.
The ghost is there. His picture shows up in the projector screen on the wall, and it's odd seeing it there, life-size, even as a 2D image against slightly ridged drywall. The ghost sighs in a distinctly relieved way, shoulders rising and falling, and it takes Ueda a long moment to realize that he heard the sound of it.
"Thank god," the ghost says, and his voice sounds - normal, deceptively so, considering that he's dead and they are listening to him through some strange antique projector that Ueda is pretty sure isn't a movie projector at all. "We don't have much time."
"First things first, corpse boy," Tegoshi snaps. "Why are you haunting my camera?"
The ghost blinks. "It's my camera. Or at least it was, before I died."
"So how did you know about this movie thing?" Ueda asks. "Or where to find it?"
"I'd tracked down the location before everything happened," the ghost explains. "I never got around to getting it, because I... misjudged... what I was dealing with. Things are worse than I thought. And now, it's been too long, so we really don't have time for this."
Tegoshi snorts. "We've got plenty of time, you've been dead for years."
"I wish you'd stop saying that," the ghost says, and rolls his eyes, like it's the most natural thing in the world, and Ueda wants to pinch his own arm to make sure this isn't all some very bizarre, vivid dream. "It's only been six months since my death."
"Where the hell did you shop?" Tegoshi asks, unkindly.
Hoping to derail the current conversation, Ueda quickly asks, "Not enough time for what, exactly? And what are you hoping to do?"
"I had to get Tegoshi to take my camera in to your shop," the ghost explains. "I can't do this alone - I need your help."
"Listen, I'm only part-time," Ueda says. "You're going to have to wait for Taichi-san to get back."
"Taichi can't help me," the ghost tells him.
"And how do you know that?" Tegoshi asks, with eyebrows raised high.
The ghost sighs again, and says, "Because he's dead, too."
+++
Ueda spends a lot of time that night staring out Tegoshi's windows to the city below, lit up by street lights and the curving trails of cars moving along the expressway. In the past two days, his life has been thrown upside-down, and he'd be lying if he says that the bulk of the situation has caught up with him. His brain is still trying to process the strange turn of events, especially now that he's sitting in the small living room of a man he just met who hadn't even bothered to give him extra pants to sleep in before barricading himself in his bedroom and claiming they all needed to get some rest, "dead people included".
Ueda had left the projector on, just because, and he isn't sure why. Maybe the hum of it comforts him in the unfamiliar living quarters.
"I'm sorry I had to break it to you so bluntly," the ghost says, from the wall where the image is still flickering with the hum of the machine itself. "Did you know him well?"
"I'm mostly just concerned about how I'm going to get paid for my last month of work now," Ueda admits.
The ghost blinks, surprised, and then says, "Oh. Well." He appears not to have anything else to offer after that.
Ueda spins around on his butt, arms looped around his knees. "Is it rude to ask a ghost how they died?"
"I don't know," the ghost responds. "I haven't been one for very long."
"So, do you have unfinished business or something?"
There's another shrug. "I suspect this is it."
"Something big is going down, huh," Ueda says, and it's not really a question.
"I'm not the only one who knows about this camera," the ghost tells him, suddenly serious, and Ueda wishes that Tegoshi were out in the living room too so he doesn't have to be the only one hearing dire warnings foretelling their doom. "There are things that are drawn to it, because of what it can do. But that's the least of your worries right now."
"I really wish you wouldn't say things like that."
He gets a tight-lipped expression of sympathy for that; it's strange, seeing someone against the wall that he can't see in the actual space in front of him. "I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news."
"Did you die trying to stop it?" Ueda asks.
"Yes."
There's a long pause, and Ueda takes in a deep breath, enjoying the way he can feel his lungs filling up with air, reminding him that, of the two of them in the room, he's the one still breathing.
"Sucks," he says, finally. "What's your name?"
The ghost looks surprised by this. Then he smiles, the kind of smile that spreads slowly and wide, splitting his face and making him look distinctly, eerily alive. "Kazuya."
+++
Kazuya tells them about Taichi-san's death the next morning, over coffee, because Tegoshi says he "can't possibly hear about people dying without a strong cup". Ueda privately agrees, and doesn't voice this, because he's a little afraid of how well he and Tegoshi are getting along; he should never share so many opinions with a man who takes photos of himself in the bathroom mirror with his iPhone.
"He was close," Kazuya admits, looking troubled as an image against the wall, "but I don't know what it was that he managed to find."
"So he's not kickin' it with you as a spirit, then?" Tegoshi asks, stirring thoughtfully. He's wearing a shirt with an impressive amount of rhinestones attached in a skull pattern, and Ueda wonders if it's done to be deliberately tacky to someone whose skull probably doesn't have all the skin attached anymore.
Kazuya shakes his head. "He's not a ghost. Whatever it was, he couldn't hang onto it enough to stay."
"That's how it works?" Ueda asks. "You stay a spirit through sheer willpower?"
"You'd be amazed what the human spirit is capable of," Kazuya says, and the way he says it makes it sound more ominous than complimentary. Ueda doesn't ask for clarification - he's fairly sure he'll eventually find out, and the more time he puts between his probable death and this morning, the better.
Tegoshi sits, chin on his knuckles. "What do you want us to do, then?"
"Finish what I started," Kazuya says immediately.
"I guessed it was going to be something along those lines," Tegoshi admits to Ueda, who drains the rest of his coffee in hopes that getting phenomenally bad news with more caffeine in his system will help him process it all.
"I think Taichi had found the source of the disturbances," Kazuya continues. "I believe it's an extremely powerful spirit who has found a way to materialize into the world again."
"You mean, like a poltergeist?" Ueda asks.
"No, I mean really get back into the living world," Kazuya tells him. "As a physical creature."
There's a long period of silence where Ueda wishes he were in his own bed, sleeping and blissfully unaware of the awful future apparently awaiting them all.
"Cheery," Tegoshi quips. "Any other wonderful news you feel like sharing this morning?"
"I might know where the last clue was," Kazuya says.
Ueda dumps his coffee mug in the sink. "Might as well tell us where it is, then."
"Remember how I told you that I'm not the only spirit who knows about the camera?" Kazuya says, face very serious. Ueda wants to make a joke about being serious as the grave, but it feels inappropriate, since he's not sure that the ghost talking to them ever received a proper funeral or burial. In fact, he's not sure where the man's body even is. "There are others - a lot of them. And most of them aren't very friendly."
"Bummer," Tegoshi says. "There goes my idea to start an idol ghost group to take over the charts."
"Don't be an ass," Ueda tells him.
"Seems hard for him to avoid," Kazuya sighs from the projector.
+++
The building Kazuya gives them directions to is a thirty minute ride from the city, where there are more trees than roads and a river that winds around the hills like a snake. It's falling down and the roof is half caving in, and Ueda checks through the camera's viewfinder to make sure that it's the right place; Kazuya is with them, and nodding, and it's the best they can get without the projector around to pick up his voice.
"This place is super sketch," Tegoshi announces. "I'd just like objection to this on record."
"Note how little I care," Ueda replies, and opens the door gingerly, expecting something to fall on his head from the low-dipping beams as he does so. There are a lot of creaks and groans, but nothing rushes at him, so he takes a careful, deliberate step inside. It smells musty and wet - there have to be some animals living within, and the recent rain hasn't helped much with the state of things.
It's cold, though, and that is strange. The weather outside isn't cool enough to have kept a place without functioning windows in below average temperatures.
"There's definitely something off here," Ueda whispers.
"I can see my breath," Tegoshi adds. He follows behind Ueda, and there's a thud, like he jumped out of the way of something. "Oh, that's not okay, spiders should never be that big."
The camera in Ueda's hands is shaking a bit. Even knowing that Kazuya is with them isn't helping; he's afraid to look through the viewfinder, for fear of what he'll find. It's daylight outside, but the inside of the building is dark and damp, and the floor is groaning with each step he takes.
"Why can't ghosts haunt mansion apartments or something?" Tegoshi asks, and he, too, sounds a bit rattled. He's close to Ueda, close enough that his shoulder is brushing against Ueda's back as they move.
"We just have to find a clue to what happened to Taichi-san," Ueda tells him. "Kazuya says this was the last place he was before he died."
"I don't know when I became the voice of reason," Tegoshi says, pinched and uncomfortable, "but what if he's still here?"
Ueda walks slowly through a doorway with cracked beams and peeling paint. "Like his body?"
"No, you dipshit, I mean as a spirit from the great beyond."
There's definitely something here, because Ueda can feel it all the way to his bones. The air is chilled and crisp, stinging a bit on his neck. The hairs on his arms have been standing up since they walked through the front door, and even Tegoshi, who normally doesn't stray too far from 'annoying' in the best of moods, is snippier than usual.
It's now or never, and Ueda sucks in a deep breath as he raises the camera to his face. If there's something in the house that knows about Taichi, then they have to try. He can't see anything at first, but the amount of dust hanging in the air is making it difficult to discern edges through the already-foggy lens. He slowly turns around the room, which is small and cramped and has bits of broken furniture littering the floor. He's almost all the way around, confused because he can't find Kazuya, either, when the ghost in question is rushing towards him shouting something that Ueda can't hear, mouth forming syllables and hands gesturing wildly.
"What-" Ueda says, and Kazuya is pointing at something, something behind them, and Ueda has a split second to try and react before a rush of air so cold it steals all the air from his lungs smacks into his chest. He falls back and lowers the camera trying to steady himself, back pressed against the wall, and then he looks through the viewfinder again to try and find Kazuya.
He doesn't see Kazuya.
There's a girl in front of him, bent over backwards, spine in a hideous "u" arch that can't be possible, and her eyes are nothing but jagged, black holes carved into the white flesh that match the grotesque circle shape her screaming mouth is frozen in.
"Holy fuck!" Ueda exclaims, and drops the camera as his heart plummets to his stomach. "Jesus!"
"Ueda!" Tegoshi screeches across the room, and Ueda ducks as the remnants of a chair hurtle towards his head. The wood explodes against the wall, showering him with a rain of wood chips, and one of them embeds itself deep in his palm in his mad scramble to get away, to find somewhere to hide, to be anywhere other than where he currently is.
There's another crash, and Ueda can only assume that Tegoshi was the intended victim of the second chair. He notes wildly that there isn't that much furniture in the room, so at least the ghost will run out quickly of things to project at them, and then he's pressed against the wall again with the freezing, invisible pressure of a spirit hand choking him.
"Ueda, the camera!" Tegoshi yells. Ueda tries kicking, but his boot goes straight through the air; he can't see her, but he knows she's there, in front of him. He'll never be able to burn the horrifying image of her body, cracked and crooked like a pretzel, out of his mind.
His vision is starting to go black at the edges from the pressure being forced against his windpipe. He grapples at nothing, trying in vain to claw at the hands holding him captive, and there's another crash just before the ghost's hand falls away and he finds himself on the dust-covered floor, sucking in greedy lungfuls of oxygen as his chest heaves.
"Ueda!" Tegoshi hollers again.
Without really thinking, Ueda throws himself across the floor and his fingers find the dropped camera. He pulls it up and starts shooting, hitting the button as fast as the shutter will let him. He's moving so fast he can barely get a clear look at what's happening through the viewfinder, but when he sees a flash of ghostly movement, he angles the camera in the new direction.
Across the room, the desk is suddenly nothing but splinters, smashed without Ueda seeing a single thing happen to it, and then, there's nothing. Nothing but the frantic, jackhammer rhythm of Ueda's heart slamming against his ribcage. He brings the camera to his face and looks through it, but there's nothing. Both ghosts are gone.
"Jesus," Tegoshi breathes. He's standing in an offensive stance, a sharp-looking piece of the broken chair held so tightly in his hands that his knuckles are white. "What the hell just happened?"
Ueda picks up one of the photos that had fallen onto the floor in his mad flurry of picture taking. He sincerely hopes that Tegoshi has more film at home.
The image shows the terrifying dead girl - and really, Ueda has never seen anything more frightening than her sickeningly curved body and gaping eye sockets - latched around Kazuya's waist, the two grappling in the middle of the room.
"Kazuya," Ueda says, and for an awful second, is afraid that they are both gone for good. "Kazuya!"
Belatedly, he realizes that he won't know if Kazuya is there without the camera. He pulls it to his face and counts several long seconds of nothingness, his throat constricting. Then Kazuya appears, looking disheveled and exhausted in levels Ueda never would have thought possible for ghosts. He shakes his head and forms an "x" with his arms.
"Nothing," Ueda says, for Tegoshi's benefit. "He says there's nothing here."
"Yeah, nothing but crazy dead people," Tegoshi says. He's found one of the other photos that had skitted across the floor near his rhinestone-covered boot and is holding it up, eyes wide and angry. "We are getting out of here right the fuck now."
"Agreed," Ueda says. Through the viewfinder, Kazuya mouths "shop", which Ueda can only assume means Taichi's shop and his supposed day-job. "Go to the store, maybe there's a clue there."
In the camera, Kazuya pantomimes writing something on his hand.
"Like a journal?" Ueda guesses, and he gets a tired nod in return.
"Look, I don't care where we go," Tegoshi tells him, "but if we are not out of this hell-hole in five seconds, I am going to kill you and then you'll be stuck here with these things forever."
It doesn't take them five seconds to get out of the house, only three.
+++
Three hours later finds Ueda in Taichi-san's desk drawers, digging through notebooks and crumpled sheets of scratch paper in hopes of finding the answer to all their problems. The only thing he's found so far is the fact that Taichi hasn't thrown anything away since 2007, and that he regularly still uses the physical post despite the digital age of computers. At least his heart rate has gone back to normal, which he thinks is pretty good all things considered, but he still feels jumpy whenever he's absorbed in reading and Tegoshi makes a sound across the room.
"I hate to break it to you," Tegoshi says, far too cheerful to really mean it, "but I think I just found the income and tax records for this shop."
"I'm confused about why that's a bad thing," Ueda says.
"Even if I were alive, I don't think you'd be getting paid this month anyway," the other man tells him, and then frowns at the figures on the paper in his hand. "Unless numbers are supposed to be printed in this festive shade of crimson."
Ueda had actually figured that out himself thirty minutes ago after discovering a collection of post-it notes that had included one reading late on taxes again!! sell grandma's kimono?
"I don't think there's anything here," Tegoshi continues, with disgust, like he's annoyed at having to sit around pulling files out of cabinets. "If there was something that important, wouldn't he just keep it at his house?"
Glancing at the couch - that is, albeit, covered with stacks of paper that he's already glanced over, Ueda says, "The thing is, I think maybe this was his house."
Tegoshi snorts. "Sold his house to pay for his ghost-hunting side business?"
"Main business," Ueda corrects, and holds up a receipt of sale. "A main business about to be repossessed."
"We probably don't have a lot of time, then," Tegoshi says, in a rare moment of seriousness. "If he's been missing for weeks, then he's got to be behind on bills, and that means they could come in here any day to clear the place out."
"So take anything that looks important," Ueda tells him.
"I fail to see why we have to continue using my apartment as a base of operations here."
Ueda just rolls his eyes. "Because sleeping in your own bed is so difficult for you. You aren't the one who has been crashing on the couch and waking up with a kink in your spine."
"You could go home," Tegoshi offers, strongly.
"I need to be able to talk to Kazuya," Ueda says, and sighs. "He's our best source of information-"
"He's dead."
"Again, he's our best source of information about other dead people," Ueda finishes.
Tegoshi immediately pushes a heap of magazines off the desk. "Fine. I'll get some trash bags, and we can dump everything in there and go through it at my place. This office creeps me out anyway."
"Well, it is haunted," Ueda reminds him.
"Ugh," Tegoshi comments, grabbing for a drawer and reaching for all the papers stuck inside. "Just like my life."
+++
"I want to thank you for today," Ueda says, after Tegoshi has gone to bed and he's sitting in the living room with the remains of the trash bag to look through, papers strewn around his feet and Kazuya's image projected on the wall. When the man looks surprised, eyebrows rising to his hair, Ueda adds, "for basically saving our lives with that ghost."
"Oh," Kazuya replies. There's a moment of silence, and then, "You're welcome."
"What happened to her, anyway?"
Kazuya shrugs. "She won't be coming back."
He doesn't elaborate, and Ueda finds that he really, really doesn't want to know. He focuses on the papers, because for some reason, they feel safer than looking at the flickering image of the ghost on the wall - they moved the projector when they hauled the trash bags in, and as such, part of Kazuya's arm is shimmering on the edge of Tegoshi's bookshelf. It just makes it all the more obvious that he's well and dead, and Ueda doesn't know why it bothers him as much as it does.
"What exactly am I looking for here?" Ueda asks, eager to find more comfortable ground.
"I don't know," Kazuya admits, forehead crinkling. "I thought there would be something at the house, because I know that's where he was when he died, but there was nothing."
"Did you think he'd have left something behind?"
Kazuya shrugs. "I don't know. I guess I thought - well, maybe."
There's another period of silence, with only the crinkle of the pages as Ueda turns them. "There's nothing here but old notes to himself," he says. "And none of them are useful."
"There has to be something," Kazuya insists, but even he is looking doubtful.
"This big thing that's going down," Ueda says, carefully, because he's still not sure how much he wants to know, "who exactly is behind it?"
"I'm not sure, exactly," Kazuya admits. "It might be more than one someone."
Even with the lights on, Ueda feels chilled again - remembering the bone-cold feeling inside the abandoned house.
"How did you die?" he asks.
"I was trying to find out what was going on," Kazuya replies. "They... they found me first."
"Ghosts can kill people?"
Kazuya looks troubled, wavering against the white paint. "Ghosts can do a lot, when they put their minds to it. There's a lot of rules they can bend. And some of them are so angry, they have so much rage - well, it gives them a lot to work with."
"I'm sorry that you're dead," Ueda says. It sounds even dumber out loud than it had inside his head.
This seems to catch Kazuya off-guard. Then his face softens, all at once, and if Ueda didn't know better, he would think Kazuya ducks his head to hide the shimmer in his eyes.
"I didn't really think many people would care," he says, like he's admitting something private - and maybe he is. "I didn't really have a lot of friends. I was kind of a loner, I guess."
"You hunted ghosts," Ueda points out. "I suspect it comes with the territory."
There's something in Kazuya's gaze that Ueda can't read. "Yeah," the other man repeats, slowly and a little hesitant. "I guess it does."
Another period of silence, as Ueda opens up a tattered notebook with half the pages ripped and falling out from the binding.
"You know, it wouldn't have been so bad if-" Kazuya starts, and then Ueda cuts him off because the words spiritual experimentation sprang up from the page.
"I think I found something," he says, and straightens up. He skims the handwritten information quickly, biting his lip. "Yeah, yeah... this has to be it. It's talking about a lot of stuff I don't understand, traveling between gateways or something, and experimenting with rituals that would grant re-animated activity to spirits lingering between worlds."
"That sounds right," Kazuya says. He doesn't sound quite as excited as Ueda had thought he would be; a glance up at the projected image on the wall shows his expression blank.
"Were you expecting something else?"
Kazuya shakes his head. "No. I... no. Does it give a location or anything?"
"A town," Ueda says. "But that's it. Nothing more specific."
"It's better than nothing. We can check it out and see what's there; if there's nothing online, then the locals would have to give us some advice."
"What did ghost hunters do before Google?" Ueda muses aloud.
He gets a crooked smile for that, one side quirking higher than the other. "Comb for clues the long way, I guess. Makes you glad we're living in this day and age, doesn't it?"
Kazuya seems to realize what he's just said a few seconds later, just as Ueda does - his face falls, crumpling a little bit, and then he just looks sad. The first time, really, that Ueda has seem him appear to feel regret over what's happened.
"Well, you know what I meant," Kazuya says.
"I'm sorry," Ueda says again, and means it, which is odd. It hurts a little bit, in his gut, the space he usually ignores and represses as much as possible when dealing with the rest of the population.
There's not a response to that. Ueda doesn't want to shut the projector off. He feels like he's alone when it's off, and like Kazuya is alone, too, even though he knows that the other man - or, ghost - is usually around wherever the camera is.
"Do ghosts need sleep?" Ueda asks.
"No. Not really, anyway, in the traditional sense."
Ueda glances at the couch he's been sleeping on. "You can stay, if you'd like. I know you don't need my permission, but there it is."
Kazuya gives him a sad sort of smile. "Thanks."
He doesn't say whether he'll stay or not. Ueda falls asleep to the hum of the projector, and pretends that the ghost is still around anyway.
On to Part 3
The projector that isn't a projector gets delivered just after 6 PM, and the delivery man - another employee of the antiques store, Ueda assumes - seems relieved to be rid of it.
Tegoshi just stares at it sitting in the middle of his living room.
"What the hell am I supposed to do with this?" he asks, petulant. "It's taking up most of my spare space!"
Ueda just finds a plug and gets it set up, not really knowing what he's doing. He's half-aware that his life right now would sound like a bad movie to anyone he tried explaining it to, and he's not sure why this doesn't bother him as much as it probably should. If he's going crazy, then Tegoshi is there with him, and he suspects Tegoshi thinks too much of himself to allow himself to be sucked into some crazed delusions.
As he's finishing up getting everything up and running - or as well as he can with no movie reel, if Junno is to be believed and the thing really is a movie projector, Tegoshi appears next to him looking vaguely confused and holding the camera in his hands.
"The ghost dude keeps gesturing wildly at this thing," Tegoshi explains, and hands Ueda the camera without much else by way of explanation. Ueda looks through the viewfinder, but he can't understand the wild gesticulations without any audio to go with them, so he gives up and continues working on the projector itself.
It's finished a minute later, but Ueda doesn't know what to do with it.
"Maybe try turning it on," Tegoshi snarks, and flips the switch near the base. There's a slow grind, like a machine that's been in hibernation for too long, and then the projector begins whirring; at least the sound seems stable enough to indicate that there wasn't any major mechanical failure inside while it was sitting unused. But nothing happens other than the sound and the dull vibrations, and Ueda isn't sure what to do next.
"What now?" he asks.
Tegoshi frowns at the machine, holds the camera up to his face, and abruptly stops. He stares at the camera after lowering it once more with an expression that Ueda can't read, and then puts the camera on the top of the projector with more force than Ueda thinks the old thing can take.
Something clicks immediately: the picture, which was nothing, just a square of light cast against the white wall of Tegoshi's apartment, rounds at the edges, and then the picture comes into focus. It's just the bookshelves, but Ueda now understands.
"Turn it," Tegoshi demands, and it takes the two of them to gather enough force to get the rusty top of the projector to spin around and point the camera in the opposite direction, near the couch that is covered with strange pillows and a few old throws.
The ghost is there. His picture shows up in the projector screen on the wall, and it's odd seeing it there, life-size, even as a 2D image against slightly ridged drywall. The ghost sighs in a distinctly relieved way, shoulders rising and falling, and it takes Ueda a long moment to realize that he heard the sound of it.
"Thank god," the ghost says, and his voice sounds - normal, deceptively so, considering that he's dead and they are listening to him through some strange antique projector that Ueda is pretty sure isn't a movie projector at all. "We don't have much time."
"First things first, corpse boy," Tegoshi snaps. "Why are you haunting my camera?"
The ghost blinks. "It's my camera. Or at least it was, before I died."
"So how did you know about this movie thing?" Ueda asks. "Or where to find it?"
"I'd tracked down the location before everything happened," the ghost explains. "I never got around to getting it, because I... misjudged... what I was dealing with. Things are worse than I thought. And now, it's been too long, so we really don't have time for this."
Tegoshi snorts. "We've got plenty of time, you've been dead for years."
"I wish you'd stop saying that," the ghost says, and rolls his eyes, like it's the most natural thing in the world, and Ueda wants to pinch his own arm to make sure this isn't all some very bizarre, vivid dream. "It's only been six months since my death."
"Where the hell did you shop?" Tegoshi asks, unkindly.
Hoping to derail the current conversation, Ueda quickly asks, "Not enough time for what, exactly? And what are you hoping to do?"
"I had to get Tegoshi to take my camera in to your shop," the ghost explains. "I can't do this alone - I need your help."
"Listen, I'm only part-time," Ueda says. "You're going to have to wait for Taichi-san to get back."
"Taichi can't help me," the ghost tells him.
"And how do you know that?" Tegoshi asks, with eyebrows raised high.
The ghost sighs again, and says, "Because he's dead, too."
+++
Ueda spends a lot of time that night staring out Tegoshi's windows to the city below, lit up by street lights and the curving trails of cars moving along the expressway. In the past two days, his life has been thrown upside-down, and he'd be lying if he says that the bulk of the situation has caught up with him. His brain is still trying to process the strange turn of events, especially now that he's sitting in the small living room of a man he just met who hadn't even bothered to give him extra pants to sleep in before barricading himself in his bedroom and claiming they all needed to get some rest, "dead people included".
Ueda had left the projector on, just because, and he isn't sure why. Maybe the hum of it comforts him in the unfamiliar living quarters.
"I'm sorry I had to break it to you so bluntly," the ghost says, from the wall where the image is still flickering with the hum of the machine itself. "Did you know him well?"
"I'm mostly just concerned about how I'm going to get paid for my last month of work now," Ueda admits.
The ghost blinks, surprised, and then says, "Oh. Well." He appears not to have anything else to offer after that.
Ueda spins around on his butt, arms looped around his knees. "Is it rude to ask a ghost how they died?"
"I don't know," the ghost responds. "I haven't been one for very long."
"So, do you have unfinished business or something?"
There's another shrug. "I suspect this is it."
"Something big is going down, huh," Ueda says, and it's not really a question.
"I'm not the only one who knows about this camera," the ghost tells him, suddenly serious, and Ueda wishes that Tegoshi were out in the living room too so he doesn't have to be the only one hearing dire warnings foretelling their doom. "There are things that are drawn to it, because of what it can do. But that's the least of your worries right now."
"I really wish you wouldn't say things like that."
He gets a tight-lipped expression of sympathy for that; it's strange, seeing someone against the wall that he can't see in the actual space in front of him. "I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news."
"Did you die trying to stop it?" Ueda asks.
"Yes."
There's a long pause, and Ueda takes in a deep breath, enjoying the way he can feel his lungs filling up with air, reminding him that, of the two of them in the room, he's the one still breathing.
"Sucks," he says, finally. "What's your name?"
The ghost looks surprised by this. Then he smiles, the kind of smile that spreads slowly and wide, splitting his face and making him look distinctly, eerily alive. "Kazuya."
+++
Kazuya tells them about Taichi-san's death the next morning, over coffee, because Tegoshi says he "can't possibly hear about people dying without a strong cup". Ueda privately agrees, and doesn't voice this, because he's a little afraid of how well he and Tegoshi are getting along; he should never share so many opinions with a man who takes photos of himself in the bathroom mirror with his iPhone.
"He was close," Kazuya admits, looking troubled as an image against the wall, "but I don't know what it was that he managed to find."
"So he's not kickin' it with you as a spirit, then?" Tegoshi asks, stirring thoughtfully. He's wearing a shirt with an impressive amount of rhinestones attached in a skull pattern, and Ueda wonders if it's done to be deliberately tacky to someone whose skull probably doesn't have all the skin attached anymore.
Kazuya shakes his head. "He's not a ghost. Whatever it was, he couldn't hang onto it enough to stay."
"That's how it works?" Ueda asks. "You stay a spirit through sheer willpower?"
"You'd be amazed what the human spirit is capable of," Kazuya says, and the way he says it makes it sound more ominous than complimentary. Ueda doesn't ask for clarification - he's fairly sure he'll eventually find out, and the more time he puts between his probable death and this morning, the better.
Tegoshi sits, chin on his knuckles. "What do you want us to do, then?"
"Finish what I started," Kazuya says immediately.
"I guessed it was going to be something along those lines," Tegoshi admits to Ueda, who drains the rest of his coffee in hopes that getting phenomenally bad news with more caffeine in his system will help him process it all.
"I think Taichi had found the source of the disturbances," Kazuya continues. "I believe it's an extremely powerful spirit who has found a way to materialize into the world again."
"You mean, like a poltergeist?" Ueda asks.
"No, I mean really get back into the living world," Kazuya tells him. "As a physical creature."
There's a long period of silence where Ueda wishes he were in his own bed, sleeping and blissfully unaware of the awful future apparently awaiting them all.
"Cheery," Tegoshi quips. "Any other wonderful news you feel like sharing this morning?"
"I might know where the last clue was," Kazuya says.
Ueda dumps his coffee mug in the sink. "Might as well tell us where it is, then."
"Remember how I told you that I'm not the only spirit who knows about the camera?" Kazuya says, face very serious. Ueda wants to make a joke about being serious as the grave, but it feels inappropriate, since he's not sure that the ghost talking to them ever received a proper funeral or burial. In fact, he's not sure where the man's body even is. "There are others - a lot of them. And most of them aren't very friendly."
"Bummer," Tegoshi says. "There goes my idea to start an idol ghost group to take over the charts."
"Don't be an ass," Ueda tells him.
"Seems hard for him to avoid," Kazuya sighs from the projector.
+++
The building Kazuya gives them directions to is a thirty minute ride from the city, where there are more trees than roads and a river that winds around the hills like a snake. It's falling down and the roof is half caving in, and Ueda checks through the camera's viewfinder to make sure that it's the right place; Kazuya is with them, and nodding, and it's the best they can get without the projector around to pick up his voice.
"This place is super sketch," Tegoshi announces. "I'd just like objection to this on record."
"Note how little I care," Ueda replies, and opens the door gingerly, expecting something to fall on his head from the low-dipping beams as he does so. There are a lot of creaks and groans, but nothing rushes at him, so he takes a careful, deliberate step inside. It smells musty and wet - there have to be some animals living within, and the recent rain hasn't helped much with the state of things.
It's cold, though, and that is strange. The weather outside isn't cool enough to have kept a place without functioning windows in below average temperatures.
"There's definitely something off here," Ueda whispers.
"I can see my breath," Tegoshi adds. He follows behind Ueda, and there's a thud, like he jumped out of the way of something. "Oh, that's not okay, spiders should never be that big."
The camera in Ueda's hands is shaking a bit. Even knowing that Kazuya is with them isn't helping; he's afraid to look through the viewfinder, for fear of what he'll find. It's daylight outside, but the inside of the building is dark and damp, and the floor is groaning with each step he takes.
"Why can't ghosts haunt mansion apartments or something?" Tegoshi asks, and he, too, sounds a bit rattled. He's close to Ueda, close enough that his shoulder is brushing against Ueda's back as they move.
"We just have to find a clue to what happened to Taichi-san," Ueda tells him. "Kazuya says this was the last place he was before he died."
"I don't know when I became the voice of reason," Tegoshi says, pinched and uncomfortable, "but what if he's still here?"
Ueda walks slowly through a doorway with cracked beams and peeling paint. "Like his body?"
"No, you dipshit, I mean as a spirit from the great beyond."
There's definitely something here, because Ueda can feel it all the way to his bones. The air is chilled and crisp, stinging a bit on his neck. The hairs on his arms have been standing up since they walked through the front door, and even Tegoshi, who normally doesn't stray too far from 'annoying' in the best of moods, is snippier than usual.
It's now or never, and Ueda sucks in a deep breath as he raises the camera to his face. If there's something in the house that knows about Taichi, then they have to try. He can't see anything at first, but the amount of dust hanging in the air is making it difficult to discern edges through the already-foggy lens. He slowly turns around the room, which is small and cramped and has bits of broken furniture littering the floor. He's almost all the way around, confused because he can't find Kazuya, either, when the ghost in question is rushing towards him shouting something that Ueda can't hear, mouth forming syllables and hands gesturing wildly.
"What-" Ueda says, and Kazuya is pointing at something, something behind them, and Ueda has a split second to try and react before a rush of air so cold it steals all the air from his lungs smacks into his chest. He falls back and lowers the camera trying to steady himself, back pressed against the wall, and then he looks through the viewfinder again to try and find Kazuya.
He doesn't see Kazuya.
There's a girl in front of him, bent over backwards, spine in a hideous "u" arch that can't be possible, and her eyes are nothing but jagged, black holes carved into the white flesh that match the grotesque circle shape her screaming mouth is frozen in.
"Holy fuck!" Ueda exclaims, and drops the camera as his heart plummets to his stomach. "Jesus!"
"Ueda!" Tegoshi screeches across the room, and Ueda ducks as the remnants of a chair hurtle towards his head. The wood explodes against the wall, showering him with a rain of wood chips, and one of them embeds itself deep in his palm in his mad scramble to get away, to find somewhere to hide, to be anywhere other than where he currently is.
There's another crash, and Ueda can only assume that Tegoshi was the intended victim of the second chair. He notes wildly that there isn't that much furniture in the room, so at least the ghost will run out quickly of things to project at them, and then he's pressed against the wall again with the freezing, invisible pressure of a spirit hand choking him.
"Ueda, the camera!" Tegoshi yells. Ueda tries kicking, but his boot goes straight through the air; he can't see her, but he knows she's there, in front of him. He'll never be able to burn the horrifying image of her body, cracked and crooked like a pretzel, out of his mind.
His vision is starting to go black at the edges from the pressure being forced against his windpipe. He grapples at nothing, trying in vain to claw at the hands holding him captive, and there's another crash just before the ghost's hand falls away and he finds himself on the dust-covered floor, sucking in greedy lungfuls of oxygen as his chest heaves.
"Ueda!" Tegoshi hollers again.
Without really thinking, Ueda throws himself across the floor and his fingers find the dropped camera. He pulls it up and starts shooting, hitting the button as fast as the shutter will let him. He's moving so fast he can barely get a clear look at what's happening through the viewfinder, but when he sees a flash of ghostly movement, he angles the camera in the new direction.
Across the room, the desk is suddenly nothing but splinters, smashed without Ueda seeing a single thing happen to it, and then, there's nothing. Nothing but the frantic, jackhammer rhythm of Ueda's heart slamming against his ribcage. He brings the camera to his face and looks through it, but there's nothing. Both ghosts are gone.
"Jesus," Tegoshi breathes. He's standing in an offensive stance, a sharp-looking piece of the broken chair held so tightly in his hands that his knuckles are white. "What the hell just happened?"
Ueda picks up one of the photos that had fallen onto the floor in his mad flurry of picture taking. He sincerely hopes that Tegoshi has more film at home.
The image shows the terrifying dead girl - and really, Ueda has never seen anything more frightening than her sickeningly curved body and gaping eye sockets - latched around Kazuya's waist, the two grappling in the middle of the room.
"Kazuya," Ueda says, and for an awful second, is afraid that they are both gone for good. "Kazuya!"
Belatedly, he realizes that he won't know if Kazuya is there without the camera. He pulls it to his face and counts several long seconds of nothingness, his throat constricting. Then Kazuya appears, looking disheveled and exhausted in levels Ueda never would have thought possible for ghosts. He shakes his head and forms an "x" with his arms.
"Nothing," Ueda says, for Tegoshi's benefit. "He says there's nothing here."
"Yeah, nothing but crazy dead people," Tegoshi says. He's found one of the other photos that had skitted across the floor near his rhinestone-covered boot and is holding it up, eyes wide and angry. "We are getting out of here right the fuck now."
"Agreed," Ueda says. Through the viewfinder, Kazuya mouths "shop", which Ueda can only assume means Taichi's shop and his supposed day-job. "Go to the store, maybe there's a clue there."
In the camera, Kazuya pantomimes writing something on his hand.
"Like a journal?" Ueda guesses, and he gets a tired nod in return.
"Look, I don't care where we go," Tegoshi tells him, "but if we are not out of this hell-hole in five seconds, I am going to kill you and then you'll be stuck here with these things forever."
It doesn't take them five seconds to get out of the house, only three.
+++
Three hours later finds Ueda in Taichi-san's desk drawers, digging through notebooks and crumpled sheets of scratch paper in hopes of finding the answer to all their problems. The only thing he's found so far is the fact that Taichi hasn't thrown anything away since 2007, and that he regularly still uses the physical post despite the digital age of computers. At least his heart rate has gone back to normal, which he thinks is pretty good all things considered, but he still feels jumpy whenever he's absorbed in reading and Tegoshi makes a sound across the room.
"I hate to break it to you," Tegoshi says, far too cheerful to really mean it, "but I think I just found the income and tax records for this shop."
"I'm confused about why that's a bad thing," Ueda says.
"Even if I were alive, I don't think you'd be getting paid this month anyway," the other man tells him, and then frowns at the figures on the paper in his hand. "Unless numbers are supposed to be printed in this festive shade of crimson."
Ueda had actually figured that out himself thirty minutes ago after discovering a collection of post-it notes that had included one reading late on taxes again!! sell grandma's kimono?
"I don't think there's anything here," Tegoshi continues, with disgust, like he's annoyed at having to sit around pulling files out of cabinets. "If there was something that important, wouldn't he just keep it at his house?"
Glancing at the couch - that is, albeit, covered with stacks of paper that he's already glanced over, Ueda says, "The thing is, I think maybe this was his house."
Tegoshi snorts. "Sold his house to pay for his ghost-hunting side business?"
"Main business," Ueda corrects, and holds up a receipt of sale. "A main business about to be repossessed."
"We probably don't have a lot of time, then," Tegoshi says, in a rare moment of seriousness. "If he's been missing for weeks, then he's got to be behind on bills, and that means they could come in here any day to clear the place out."
"So take anything that looks important," Ueda tells him.
"I fail to see why we have to continue using my apartment as a base of operations here."
Ueda just rolls his eyes. "Because sleeping in your own bed is so difficult for you. You aren't the one who has been crashing on the couch and waking up with a kink in your spine."
"You could go home," Tegoshi offers, strongly.
"I need to be able to talk to Kazuya," Ueda says, and sighs. "He's our best source of information-"
"He's dead."
"Again, he's our best source of information about other dead people," Ueda finishes.
Tegoshi immediately pushes a heap of magazines off the desk. "Fine. I'll get some trash bags, and we can dump everything in there and go through it at my place. This office creeps me out anyway."
"Well, it is haunted," Ueda reminds him.
"Ugh," Tegoshi comments, grabbing for a drawer and reaching for all the papers stuck inside. "Just like my life."
+++
"I want to thank you for today," Ueda says, after Tegoshi has gone to bed and he's sitting in the living room with the remains of the trash bag to look through, papers strewn around his feet and Kazuya's image projected on the wall. When the man looks surprised, eyebrows rising to his hair, Ueda adds, "for basically saving our lives with that ghost."
"Oh," Kazuya replies. There's a moment of silence, and then, "You're welcome."
"What happened to her, anyway?"
Kazuya shrugs. "She won't be coming back."
He doesn't elaborate, and Ueda finds that he really, really doesn't want to know. He focuses on the papers, because for some reason, they feel safer than looking at the flickering image of the ghost on the wall - they moved the projector when they hauled the trash bags in, and as such, part of Kazuya's arm is shimmering on the edge of Tegoshi's bookshelf. It just makes it all the more obvious that he's well and dead, and Ueda doesn't know why it bothers him as much as it does.
"What exactly am I looking for here?" Ueda asks, eager to find more comfortable ground.
"I don't know," Kazuya admits, forehead crinkling. "I thought there would be something at the house, because I know that's where he was when he died, but there was nothing."
"Did you think he'd have left something behind?"
Kazuya shrugs. "I don't know. I guess I thought - well, maybe."
There's another period of silence, with only the crinkle of the pages as Ueda turns them. "There's nothing here but old notes to himself," he says. "And none of them are useful."
"There has to be something," Kazuya insists, but even he is looking doubtful.
"This big thing that's going down," Ueda says, carefully, because he's still not sure how much he wants to know, "who exactly is behind it?"
"I'm not sure, exactly," Kazuya admits. "It might be more than one someone."
Even with the lights on, Ueda feels chilled again - remembering the bone-cold feeling inside the abandoned house.
"How did you die?" he asks.
"I was trying to find out what was going on," Kazuya replies. "They... they found me first."
"Ghosts can kill people?"
Kazuya looks troubled, wavering against the white paint. "Ghosts can do a lot, when they put their minds to it. There's a lot of rules they can bend. And some of them are so angry, they have so much rage - well, it gives them a lot to work with."
"I'm sorry that you're dead," Ueda says. It sounds even dumber out loud than it had inside his head.
This seems to catch Kazuya off-guard. Then his face softens, all at once, and if Ueda didn't know better, he would think Kazuya ducks his head to hide the shimmer in his eyes.
"I didn't really think many people would care," he says, like he's admitting something private - and maybe he is. "I didn't really have a lot of friends. I was kind of a loner, I guess."
"You hunted ghosts," Ueda points out. "I suspect it comes with the territory."
There's something in Kazuya's gaze that Ueda can't read. "Yeah," the other man repeats, slowly and a little hesitant. "I guess it does."
Another period of silence, as Ueda opens up a tattered notebook with half the pages ripped and falling out from the binding.
"You know, it wouldn't have been so bad if-" Kazuya starts, and then Ueda cuts him off because the words spiritual experimentation sprang up from the page.
"I think I found something," he says, and straightens up. He skims the handwritten information quickly, biting his lip. "Yeah, yeah... this has to be it. It's talking about a lot of stuff I don't understand, traveling between gateways or something, and experimenting with rituals that would grant re-animated activity to spirits lingering between worlds."
"That sounds right," Kazuya says. He doesn't sound quite as excited as Ueda had thought he would be; a glance up at the projected image on the wall shows his expression blank.
"Were you expecting something else?"
Kazuya shakes his head. "No. I... no. Does it give a location or anything?"
"A town," Ueda says. "But that's it. Nothing more specific."
"It's better than nothing. We can check it out and see what's there; if there's nothing online, then the locals would have to give us some advice."
"What did ghost hunters do before Google?" Ueda muses aloud.
He gets a crooked smile for that, one side quirking higher than the other. "Comb for clues the long way, I guess. Makes you glad we're living in this day and age, doesn't it?"
Kazuya seems to realize what he's just said a few seconds later, just as Ueda does - his face falls, crumpling a little bit, and then he just looks sad. The first time, really, that Ueda has seem him appear to feel regret over what's happened.
"Well, you know what I meant," Kazuya says.
"I'm sorry," Ueda says again, and means it, which is odd. It hurts a little bit, in his gut, the space he usually ignores and represses as much as possible when dealing with the rest of the population.
There's not a response to that. Ueda doesn't want to shut the projector off. He feels like he's alone when it's off, and like Kazuya is alone, too, even though he knows that the other man - or, ghost - is usually around wherever the camera is.
"Do ghosts need sleep?" Ueda asks.
"No. Not really, anyway, in the traditional sense."
Ueda glances at the couch he's been sleeping on. "You can stay, if you'd like. I know you don't need my permission, but there it is."
Kazuya gives him a sad sort of smile. "Thanks."
He doesn't say whether he'll stay or not. Ueda falls asleep to the hum of the projector, and pretends that the ghost is still around anyway.
On to Part 3