Loups-Garous by Natsuhiko Kyôgoku

her face. Even though they wouldn’t look at one another’s faces or anything.
    â€œWe’d be a bigger nuisance if we just left.”
    â€œDo you want to access the terminal at home?”
    â€œNot really.”
    â€œIt looks unused. It should be fine,” Ayumi said as she approached the cable.
    The cable wound up the stairs.
    Her footsteps made thumping sounds. There was an endless buzzing.
    It must have been either an old lamp or an electric fan.
    Or was the cable running something?
    â€œShe said it was the second floor, right?”
    Three along the hall, one around the corner, four doors altogether. Ayumi looked at the floor. The cable extended not just from the bottom of the stairs but out from the top of them too. Two outlets were conjoined at one point, then the cable ran down the middle of the hall and through the doorway around the corner. The wall on one side of the hall was slightly peeling, with a hole dug through where the cable ran.
    â€œIt’s so primitive,” Ayumi said smartly as she went straight to the door at the corner. There was no sign on it or anything. There was no way of knowing which room was Tsuzuki’s. The address they found online indicated only the neighborhood and building number. Hazuki hadn’t even considered that the building might be some old tenement housing complex.
    â€œWait.”
    She couldn’t possibly just know where to go. Ayumi definitely knew a lot of things Hazuki didn’t, but this building had been pretty hard to find. Ayumi pointed a finger.
    â€œWe can’t get in.”
    The doorknobs had been plucked off all three doors in the hallway.
    Ayumi stopped dead in front of the door around the corner. It was a nondescript door. It had a doorknob at least. There was no residential name plaque on it, nor a visitor scan sensor. Ayumi peered into the hole through which the cable ran.
    Probably, this was where the old-fashioned interphone used to be back in the day. You’d see houses like this in old moving pictures. Complicated machines that combined mics, cameras, and speakers so that residents could communicate with people outside.
    â€œCan you see anything?”
    Ayumi answered, “Nothing.”
    They briefly stopped moving.
    Ayumi has probably never visited another person’s home. She’s not used to it.
    The buzzing continued.
    Suddenly, Ayumi grabbed the doorknob.
    The door opened easily. The volume of the noise increased.
    â€œIt opens,” Ayumi said as she opened the door and took one step in. Hazuki stuck her head in.
    Hazuki was at a loss for words. The interior of the room was beyond her imagination.
    Black. That was the impression she got. It was neither a wall nor a ceiling, but thick black cables winding everywhere. There were chips and parts and exposed machine insides, various displays, and other metal objects Hazuki had never seen before scattered all over the room. Black cables twisted around everything and connected each and every object together.
    It’s the insides of a monitor , Hazuki thought matter-of-factly.
    When she was small, seven or eight years ago, an engineer came to repair the main terminal at her home, and she was able to sneak a look at the disassembled machine.
    Happy things, shameful things, proud things, problematic things, and, of course, messages from other people, notifications and warnings, all of it appeared on monitors. She had wanted to look at the insides of that monitor, beyond the window on which information appeared.
    Inside was just black.
    It was a flavorless dry enclosed space built out of a variety of cables, chips, and materials. Be it lines or boards that broadcast onto a contained box, it was the entirety of the world, and suddenly the young Hazuki had realized that must mean the whole world was an illusion.
    Realizing this did not surprise her, nor did it make her feel sadness or joy.
    She thought she might have experienced some tightness in her