The restaurant conversation between Sakakibara Kouichi and Mizuno Sanae in "Put Flesh" plays out differently as Kouichi, enthusiast of mystery novels and all things horror, latches onto a passing reference.
"I'm pretty sure there's no Damien in this town..."
"Why?"
A "For Want of a Nail" idea set in an alternative universe to the anime adaptation of Another.
"June 6, huh?" Mizuno Sanae, registered nurse and certified horror aficionado, mused as she idly stirred her coffee. The gentle rain continued to patter down outside the family restaurant where she had stopped for lunch with her former patient, a sign that the monsoon season would soon be upon them. "I'm pretty sure there's no Damien in this town…"
"Why?"
Sanae blinked with surprise, her train of thought completely derailed by the interruption. Her lunchtime companion seemed equally surprised by his own outburst; Sakakibara Kouichi's eyes widened as he realized his social faux paus and his mouth snapped shut.
Impulsivity and teenagers went together like fish and rice in Sanae's experience, both as a nurse working at the only hospital in the district and as the older sister to a rambunctious teenaged boy. Takeru, her brother, always seemed to be mouthing off to someone or showing up covered in bandages, generally thanks to something that had "seemed like a good idea at the time."
But Kouichi was a refreshing break from the usual model of adolescent impulsivity. Over the five weeks he had spent hospitalized thanks to the collapse of his left lung, "Mister Horror Lover" had proven to be a very calm, friendly boy with an introspective, thoughtful streak a mile wide. In a ward crammed with crotchety old geezers, Sanae had found herself looking forward to their conversations about the horror and mystery novels she regularly brought him to distract from his bed-bound state. The boy's willingness to ask questions and pull at loose plot threads until they yielded their mysteries had proven a wonderful, intellectually stimulating break from the tedium of her rounds.
And so instead of chiding Kouichi for his bad manners, Sanae held her peace, tilting her head inquisitively as Kouichi sucked down the rest of his soda, giving the kid time to organize his thoughts.
"You said there's no Damien in this town…" he began at last, clearly still getting his thoughts in order, "and I get that you were saying that because June 6 was Damien's birthday in The Omen, but… What if there is something behind all this? Or someone?"
"Behind all this?" Sanae frowned, wondering what Kouichi was seeing that she wasn't. "What do you mean, 'behind all this?'"
"Well…" Kouichi fidgetted for a moment. "I don't know… But there's too many coincidences, aren't there? You said earlier that this is turning into a horror story, but what if it's actually a mystery story instead? Or maybe horror/mystery…?" He paused again for a moment, before shaking his head. "Sorry, the genre isn't important, but there's way too many pieces flying around for them to all be unrelated, right?"
"Detective Sakakibara's on the case, eh?" Sanae teased, before nodding. "I see what you mean; there definitely seems to be something going on here…" Sanae grabbed a napkin from the dispenser and began jotting down notes as she spoke. "So… Let's start from the beginning: There's the story about the Class 3-3 of 1972, where a kid named Misaki died but showed up in the group photo at graduation."
"Right," Kouichi nodded. "A story that I heard from Mei that everybody in Class 3-3 refuses to talk about. Whenever I ask them about the story, they look uncomfortable and change the subject. But when I ask about Mei, they look… frightened. Really, really scared."
"Yeah, I saw the way my brother looked when I asked about this Mei girl…" Sanae agreed, frowning as she spun the pen between her fingers. "I've… never seen him look so freaked out before… Especially not over such a simple question. And then he refused to explain why he looked so worried!" She shook her head, the frustration common to older siblings when dealing with their foolish little brothers or sisters rising from her concern for her brother. "This is why we don't talk much!"
"Right, right…" Kouichi replied, the words clearly automatic and meaningless, his eyes still lost in thought. "But… whatever it was that Misaki told me… that isn't the whole story… A few weeks ago, Teshigawara, ah, that's Teshigawara Naoya, let it slip that there's a curse on Class 3-3, but he didn't explain what that meant… but then last week, when I saw Misaki up on the roof, Teshigawara called me and promised to tell me the 'rest of the story' right before he told me not to mess with 'things that don't exist.'"
"The rest of the story…" Sanae muttered as she jotted another note down on her napkin, followed by "and a curse… Do you think the curse is the story? Like, just hearing the spooky story is a curse all by itself? Or that the story carries the curse? Or are they two entirely different things?"
"Might as well add them both to the list," Kouichi shrugged. "At least for now? But curses have to come from somewhere, right? And… I mean, it doesn't necessarily have to be the story, but the rest of Class 3-3 really doesn't want to tell the story…"
"And you heard that story from Misaki, right?" Sanae looked up from her notes to smile knowingly at Kouichi, making the boy fidget in his seat again. "The girl you like who, according to herself and everybody else, doesn't exist?"
"She definitely exists," Kouichi replied emphatically, clearly doing his best to ignore her commentary and, judging by the light blush across his cheeks, failing. "I see her all the time, and so does the rest of Class 3! Otherwise…" the blush faded. "Otherwise, Sakuragi wouldn't have reacted the way she did, right before…"
Right before her accident, Sanae silently finished for him as she wrote down "Misaki Mei" on the list of notes, followed by a question mark.
"It was a really bad day for the Sakuragi family," Sanae said aloud as Kouichi lapsed back into silence. "First a car accident kills Sakuragi Mieko, and then her daughter trips and falls on the school stairs and dies in a freak accident only an hour after her mother…"
"Yeah…" Kouichi agreed, slumping in his booth seat.
"Well," Sanae said with forced charm, clicking her pen shut as she smiled encouragingly at her young friend. "Let's look at what we've got so far. Item one, something weird happened back in '72 with Class 3 and nobody wants to talk about it for some reason. Item two, Class 3 might be cursed, and that curse might have something to do with the first thing. Then there's the matter of Misaki Mei, who you saw heading to the morgue with a doll the night another girl named Misaki died…?"
"Her cousin," confirmed Kouichi, sitting back up. "Fujioka Misaki. And, I forgot to mention it earlier, but a week before her accident, Sakuragi screamed at me to never say the name Misaki Mei, and that saying it was forbidden to any member of Class 3-3."
"...Well, sounds like she definitely exists," Sanae commented, clicking her pen open to cross out the question mark after Misaki Mei's name. "You don't forbid talking about something that doesn't exist. And, Sakuragi Yukari screamed at you for just mentioning her name, you say? So there's something about Misaki that she felt strongly about… So that's item three…"
"...I think that's why she ran down the stairs," Kouichi said, his quiet voice barely audible over the background wash of conversation and rain. "Misaki and I both finished our practice test early and we were standing outside in the hall by the east stairway, just talking. She told me about her cousin… and said that she didn't exist. She asked, 'what if you're the only one who can see me?' Then… The gym teacher ran past us… Went to the classroom to tell Sakuragi the news… She came out into the hall, and… She turned towards us, probably to use the stairs, but then…"
Sanae noticed Kouichi's hands had balled up into tight fists, trembling with suppressed emotion. His eyes were fixed on some point behind her, lost in a memory, reliving those last few moments… She reached across the table and rested her hand atop one of his, lending what support she could.
"Sakuragi definitely saw Mei," rasped Kouichi, eyes swimming with tears. "She turned and saw Mei, and this… this look came over her face… She was terrified. She… she gasped, then ran away down the hall. Down to the west stairway…"
And then you and the gym coach found the body, Sanae remembered, smiling sympathetically at Kouichi, fully aware of how little that helped. Hell of a thing for a kid to see…
After a moment's quiet, Sanae patted Kouichi's hand and withdrew, giving him a moment to rebuild his facade of calm. After a moment, when his hands finally relaxed back into their flat, calm posture, she turned back to her pen and napkin.
"So, the class rules say that you can't mention Misaki's name or respond to her presence, then?" Sanae asked, adding a note of "taboo" under her last note. "That means there's a structure to this, that's what you're getting at here, right?"
"Right," Kouichi nodded, only a hint of a tight, watery pain in his voice as he distanced himself from the memory, losing himself in the hunt for clues and patterns once more. "I know that, logically speaking, there's a pretty easy through-line here. Sakuragi's mom got into an accident, and the news upset Sakuragi. She ran out of the classroom and saw Misaki and I talking. For some reason that nobody wants to explain to me…"
He paused and took a deep breath, and deliberately flattened his hands on the table. "For some reason, showing any recognition to Misaki is a bad thing to do, and seeing it made Sakuragi even more upset. She took off running, slipped on the stairs, and had her accident. That's all simple cause and effect. But… that doesn't match everything else."
"Everything else being the story, the so-called curse, and the way everybody in Class 3 is always walking on eggshells?" The question was more or less rhetorical; it was clear to Sanae what Kouichi meant. "Not to play devil's advocate here, but you know all of that could have just been an accident, right? One perhaps aggravated by… whatever is going on with Mei… But still just a tragic accident."
"Right," Kouichi nodded again, toying idly with the straw in his empty drink, stirring the melting ice as he stared through the table, lost again in his thoughts. "Right… But… Let's just… pretend for a moment that all the curse talk is real, that curses are real…"
"Sure," Sanae readily agreed. "I don't think we've ruled out everything that's possible quite yet, but we can certainly skip ahead and consider the impossible too!"
And even if this is just all an accident, if pretending there's a curse behind it is what it takes to get you to talk about it… In her role as a nurse, Sanae had humored all kinds of nonsense, taking the wildest delusions and justifications in stride. So long as the fantasies didn't contribute to the patient's injury, she saw no reason to strip away whatever comfort they could provide. And in a strange way, it might be more comforting for a kid who loves mysteries and horror to consider that his class might be cursed, especially when the alternative is realizing that accidents can happen at any time…
Kouichi smiled at the reference to the classic Sherlock Holmes line, blatantly relieved that she hadn't laughed at him for giving any credence to the idea of a curse. "Right, so… if there is something… else… happening, we don't really know why it's happening or what exactly it does, but Yomiyama North's Class 3 is clearly at the heart of it. Now… in all of the horror stories I've read that mention curses, there's two broad types: Directed, and non-directed. Or, to put it differently, automatic versus guided."
"Well, Mister Horror Lover, you'd be the one to know!" Sanae teased, eliciting another blush. "So, one kind just kinda… happens, and the other is the result of… actions?"
"Not quite," Kouichi demurred. "All curses come from actions, right? Like, there's always a cause, and that cause came about because of something else. But… Well, it's about whether the curse… knows what it is doing, I guess? Like, a non-directed or automatic curse doesn't have an agenda – it just curses everything it touches."
"Oh, like the 'built on an old burial ground' trope," Sanae added, nodding along. "Or like a cursed ring that makes anybody who touches it see ghosts."
"Right!" Kouichi said, smiling as he held forth on his favorite topic. To Sanae's relief, the darkness of his memories seemed to have already receded entirely. "But then, there's the other type of curse, the directed or guided type. That's when the curse only touches certain people who either fulfill some specific criteria or have some responsibility for the curse's activation. Probably the best example of this would be the Curse of Tutankhamun, which supposedly hunted down those responsible for invading the pharaoh's tomb."
"So… which type could be affecting Class 3?" Sanae rubbed her chin as she turned the problem over. "We've got an old ghost story that specifically mentions the actions of Class 3, we've got rules about how Class 3 needs to conduct itself, which mostly just mean pretending Miss Misaki doesn't exist, and we've got a dead student."
"Right," Kouichi nodded. "It could go either way. I mean, for either type to come into play, Class 3 must have done something really bad or wrong and was cursed as a result. Most likely, if there is a curse, then something happened that attached a curse to Class 3 and everybody in it, and that curse just operates automatically. It's undirected, and following the rules turns it off or whatever. Like the off-button on a machine. But…"
"But…?" Sanae prodded, curious what Kouichi was getting at.
"But…" Kouichi swallowed, his face growing strained as if his lunch was disagreeing with him. "But what if I'm looking at it the wrong way? Instead of a machine with an off-button, what if… Well, the idea that the class has special rules to ward off the curse, either to stop it from triggering or to stop it from finding victims…"
Sanae felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand to attention as Kouichi's eyes panned furtively across the restaurant's dining room before he leaned in, his voice soft as he continued. "...Doesn't that sound like a ritual to you? Almost like praying at the shrine for good health and luck in your studies? But when we pray, we pray to the Gods… and if there's a ritual, doesn't that mean that the class is trying to send a message to something? What's the point of sending a message to something without a brain to respond?"
"...That's a pretty big leap, Kouichi," Sanae leaned back in her seat, frowning as she turned the idea over in her head. "Not saying that you're wrong, but… Well, if there is a curse, maybe the rules are just supposed to be like safety precautions? I mean, it's kind of like avoiding mountainside roads during the rainy season, when the risk of landslides is high, right?"
"You've got a point," Kouichi agreed, straightening back up. "But then, why not tell everybody about the landslides, right? I mean…" he hesitated again, before plowing on. "Look, I know that it's crazy to talk about curses and all that, but if there is such a thing and it is affecting the students of Class 3 and their family members, people need to know. It doesn't make any sense that the information wouldn't be shared with parents and siblings, with the school administration… Not unless someone or something is deliberately suppressing information about the curse. And the only reason why you wouldn't tell somebody about a threat…"
"...Is because you don't want them to know about the risk," Sanae finished, feeling a chill running up her spine. Suddenly, the interior of the blandly friendly family restaurant felt unbearably cold. She'd had a conversation like this with Kouichi before, as he worked his way through a curated selection of American horror. "You're thinking of It, aren't you?"
"I am," Kouichi confirmed, sending a second, stronger chill through the nurse. "In It, Pennywise kept adults from noticing what was going on and adopted disguises that would keep the children off their guard until it was too late. There wasn't any point in informing the adults because they wouldn't believe what was going on."
"But you're telling me," Sanae pointed out, trying not to think about how suddenly desperate she was to poke holes in his logic. Somewhere along the way, she'd stopped simply indulging his fantasy; she'd been drawn into it, she realized, and the only way out was to prove that it was all nonsense. "If the Class 3 curse makes adults not believe in it, I wouldn't be sitting here talking seriously about it with you."
"We might not be working by Derry rules," Kouichi replied seriously, no hint of humor to be found in his intent eyes, on his solemn face. "In fact, we almost certainly aren't; in It, all of the victims were killed by Pennywise directly or through proxies. Here, though… Well, Sakuragi wasn't out of my sight for more than a few seconds before…" he swallowed, his hand going up to massage his neck. "Well, I don't think anybody pushed her. It was just an accident. But…"
He shook his head, frustrated. "It just doesn't make sense why they would keep it all quiet, you know? The class… The school administration… Everybody. Not unless telling people did something bad, like make the curse worse or expand its reach, but that also points to it having some sort of intelligence, as do the ritual rules."
"...I'm not convinced," Sanae decided after a long moment of thought, pushing back against the sense of growing certainty that every word Kouichi said was completely true, "but I'm not not convinced either, you know? But, assuming that any of this is real – and it might not be! Class 3 could just be weirdly paranoid and that paranoia made Sakuragi panic and act rashly! – but assuming any of this is real… What next?"
Another long, uncomfortable silence passed. The waitress came by and unobtrusively slipped their bills onto the table before moving on.
"...I don't know," Kouichi said at last as he fumbled for his change. "But there's definitely something going on, and I'm going to ask more questions. I think Mister Chibiki, the school librarian, knows something, and Misaki definitely knows more than she's saying, I think. If the rest of the class won't tell me anything, I'll just keep asking them until they say something."
"Sounds like a plan," Sanae agreed, standing up and collecting her umbrella and her purse. "How can I help?"
"Well…" Kouichi stood up too, mulling the question over. "I guess… can you research into past years' deaths? I'm not asking you to go prying into records," he hastily clarified, "but… Well, if there is something actually going on that leads to bad things happening to people in Class 3 and those close to them, that should be pretty obvious from the records, right?"
"That might take a bit of digging, but it should be doable," Sanae nodded, tucking her scribbled notes into her pocket. "I mean, all the kids who attend Yomiyama North live in the Yomiya ward, and Yomiyama City isn't that big. A whole bunch of hospital admissions from Yomiya should be pretty obvious. Of course, if you can get the class records from previous years, that would be a big help."
"I'll ask Mister Chibiki about it," Kouichi promised. "But… In the meantime? I think we both need to be really careful. Even if nothing is going on… People are scared."
"And if something is going on that makes bad accidents more likely, whether passively or because something is deliberately making things worse, we really need to be careful," said Sanae emphatically. "Keep your head on a swivel, Kouichi; you're good company, but I'd hate to see you in the hospital again for something worse than a collapsed lung."
And I'd hate to see you in the morgue even more… You, or Takeru…
