Brave Story - Miyuki Miyabe [43]
All that? Wait…I remember everything!
The old man had promised to turn back time, to erase his memories of the encounter, but he remembered it all, down to the last detail. Dizzy, Wataru held one hand up to his forehead. I must have a fever. Or I was dreaming. Maybe I should pinch my cheek. Here I go. Ouch! Yep, that hurt.
Wataru lifted the edge of the tarp and went back outside. He looked at his watch in the glow of the streetlights. It must be late. His mother would be furious. What would he tell…
His breath stopped. He looked at the digital display on his watch again and blinked.
08:19:32
No way. Even if it had been a dream, some kind of strange momentary hallucination, just going under that tarp and coming back out would have taken at least thirty seconds, if not a minute.
No time had passed.
I’ll just roll back time for you, the man had said. It was like magic. Wataru tried his best to recall the spell. Something about Chronos, the great god of time? And his emissary…what was it? Something about wind and stuff. Rainbows, maybe. And something like “ramu” and “ekono” at the end…I should have paid more attention!
It hadn’t been a dream, or a hallucination. He hadn’t seen an old man who likes dressing up in funny costumes. He had seen an honest-to-goodness, genuine wizard.
What the heck is a wizard doing in an abandoned building in a Tokyo suburb?
Wataru jumped up and dove under the sheet once again. His eyes had adjusted to the glare of the streetlights, making the darkness inside the haunted building seem much thicker than before. Nonetheless, it was clear that there was nobody present except Wataru—not on the landing, not behind the steel beams, not under the stairs.
“Well, that sounds kinda interesting, I guess, but it’s a bit of a departure for the series, don’t you think?” Katchan shifted his yellow umbrella from his right shoulder to his left. A light rain was falling.
“Departure?” asked Wataru.
“From the first two games. Setting it in modern Japan seems kinda lame, if you ask me. And if it’s going to start out like that, we probably won’t get to ride in that flying boat on the posters until, like, the third disc.”
Wataru sighed. “You think I’m talking about Saga III.”
Katchan’s eyes widened. “You weren’t?”
The two were in the courtyard behind school after classes let out, at the top of the concrete stairs just outside the library exit. It had been drizzling since morning, and didn’t show any signs of letting up. A large low-pressure front was coming, said the weather report. Chance of heavy rains in western Japan.
And wizards.
Wataru had told Katchan everything: the girl’s voice in his room that came from nowhere and the wizard in the haunted building who cast a spell on him. He had been bursting to tell someone, and now it came out in a flood of meticulous, vivid detail. And Katchan thought that he was talking about a game.
What could he expect? Would he have believed Katchan if it were him telling the story? Invisible girls? Old wizards? All the stuff of fairy tales and video games. He could insist it was all real as much as he liked, and he would still have no way to prove it.
Wataru felt exhausted, and his thoughts were muddled. He had hardly slept the night before, and he worried he might have caught a cold running around in the haunted building. He sat vacantly watching the rain come down.
“Hey!” Katchan’s urgent whisper snapped Wataru out of his sleepy reverie. “Look! Over there!”
Katchan was tugging on Wataru’s elbow and pointing toward the library. Through the large glass window they could see part of a single shelf. Somebody was standing in front of it. The figure moved. The window was higher up than they were, so even standing on tiptoe and craning their necks they could see the figure only from the shoulders up. Still, Wataru knew in an instant who it was.
“Mitsuru!”
He was wearing a white, short-sleeved polo shirt—unusual for a guy who always stalked the hallways at school dressed in black.
“It’s not just Mitsuru,” Katchan said, ducking down behind his umbrella so he wouldn