The same voice, and—reasoning a step further—the same person.
Such a ghost story did indeed exist.
The doppelgänger: a most famous paranormal phenomenon. A person identical in every way to the original appears out of thin air, and when the original lays eyes on their own doppelgänger, they soon die.
It is said that Lincoln, Catherine the Great, Maupassant, and others all claimed to have encountered their doppelgänger while still alive, and these accounts were regarded as omens of death.
Beyond that, the doppelgänger can be explained scientifically—in psychology it is called autoscopy, a rare neuropsychological disorder in which the patient sees a mirror image or duplicate of themselves. The symptom is often connected to damage or functional disturbance in the brain's parietal and temporal lobes.
In Junji Ito's series of manga, a doppelgänger had appeared as well.
But—no, that wasn't it!
What Fujino Terumi had encountered could not be a doppelgänger; a doppelgänger's manner of killing differed from what Fujino Terumi was going through.
And if it wasn't a doppelgänger…
Amamiya Rin's expression slowly darkened.
He lifted his head to look at Fujino Terumi, and his intent, focused gaze gave her a start.
"Wh-what is it, Rin-kun? Have you thought of something dreadful?"
Fujino Terumi asked timidly.
"I've thought of the worst possibility."
Amamiya Rin scrutinized Fujino Terumi carefully.
This other self had no physical ability to force its way indoors, nor any spirit-type ability to pass through walls; it could only beguile through sound, yet even the sound possessed no special charming power—values low to such a degree usually meant the underlying mechanism was abnormally powerful.
Add to that the trait of floating in the air, and a victim who was a major celebrity.
If the paranormal phenomenon hounding Fujino Terumi originated from Junji Ito's universe.
Then Amamiya Rin could not help but connect it to that worst possibility.
A world-ending-class ghost story—The Hanging Balloons!
Amamiya Rin sincerely hoped he was overthinking it.
But there were far too many points that lined up!
"Terumi, do you have a boyfriend? And at school, do you have a very close girlfriend who has a younger brother?"
Amamiya Rin pressed Fujino Terumi for answers.
"A boyfriend?"
Fujino Terumi blinked, then wore a troubled expression.
"No, I don't. Well, there's a childhood friend everyone just takes for granted will become my boyfriend someday, but he and I clash a little in our ideals. As for a close girlfriend… have you met Kazuko? She's the one who's been running her mouth to you, isn't she?"
As she spoke, Fujino Terumi grew indignant.
Knowing that Kazuko had a younger brother—that surely couldn't be mere hearsay. Kazuko must have met Rin-kun and gone and blabbed about Shiraishi too.
"…Heh, heh heh heh heh…"
Amamiya Rin clapped a hand to his forehead and couldn't help laughing.
People really do laugh when they're left speechless.
Everything lined up!
The idol he himself had saved from the Vampire's attack turned out to be the very close girlfriend of the heroine—the one who dies right at the opening of 'The Hanging Balloons.'
The plot of 'The Hanging Balloons' opens with an idol star found hanged by a steel cable outside her own apartment, after which a wave of collective suicides among her fans breaks out.
Amamiya Rin had once read a piece of popular trivia: this story seemed to have a real-life prototype as well.
In the 1980s, a certain idol star whose name he couldn't recall leapt to her death from the rooftop of her company building, and over a hundred teenagers across all of Japan imitated her by jumping to their deaths, forming some kind of syndrome phenomenon.
It is said that many of these suicides chose to jump from the very same place where the idol star had taken her own life, and in their suicide notes explicitly stated their wish to follow the dead star into death.
It was precisely with this social phenomenon as his prototype that Junji Ito created 'The Hanging Balloons.'
As for the contents of the manga… the dead idol star is an important character who draws out the plot. Of course, she is not the protagonist; the protagonist is her close girlfriend.
After the idol star's death, the protagonist learns from a male friend of the idol that a giant balloon shaped like the idol star's own head often drifts about at night.
When the protagonist goes to investigate, she discovers that the male friend's own head-balloon has also appeared beside the idol star's head-balloon, and that it had hanged that male friend.
After that, similar head-balloons begin to appear openly even in broad daylight.
These head-balloons hunt down the living person each one corresponds to; the rope is a hard steel cable that loops around the human's neck and hoists them up to strangle them.
Actually, that's not even the worst of it. The worst part is that you cannot attack the balloon—once the balloon is destroyed, the corresponding living person dies as well.
Even more hopeless is that, even if you aren't hanged by your head-balloon, and even if the head-balloon isn't destroyed, the living person's head will still gradually turn into the same nylon material as the balloon.
To sum up, the head-balloon possesses three mechanisms.
First, the steel-cable noose that loops around the neck to hang the target. Once a steel cable forms a loop, it ought not be able to contract, making escape simple—but the head-balloon's steel cable is animate.
Second, the art of substituting one for another—linking its own life to the target's, so that if it is destroyed, the target dies as well.
Third, the art of like-kind conversion—imperceptibly transforming the target's head into its own material.
Both the first and second mechanisms have solutions; the third mechanism, by all normal reckoning, is absolutely without solution.
(The first two mechanisms are useless against us. As for the third mechanism… which is stronger, that conversion ability or the Apology Demon's praise ability?)
The Tomies were also stirred by Amamiya Rin's thoughts, and at once one Tomie posed a question.
(A mechanism is just a mechanism; there's no question of stronger or weaker.)
Amamiya Rin pointed out that he didn't even know what lay at the end of the universe, so how could he possibly know this?
Junji Ito was a horror manga artist, not a fantasy manga artist—he wasn't going to design power tiers for the ghost stories he penned.
(Idiot. As a Kawakami Tomie, what is there to be afraid of? Once the balloon is destroyed, burn it clean and let it go assimilate in hell.)
Yet another Tomie scoffed: a mechanism is a mechanism, but it's nothing more than the very last of the three. Before that mechanism completes its synchronization, just find the balloon corresponding to yourself and destroy it—that's all there is to it.
(Ugh, but there's no telling whether the head-balloon corresponding to Kawakami Tomie is the only one, or whether the impostors have them too.)
The instant a certain Tomie's thought surfaced, the atmosphere of the [Tomie Network]immediately turned grim.
If there were only one head-balloon corresponding to Kawakami Tomie, wouldn't that mean that whoever the head-balloon found was the true Kawakami Tomie, and all the rest were impostors?
"Stop laughing, Rin-kun. The way you're laughing scares me a little."
As the Tomies argued fiercely, Fujino Terumi—seeing that strange curve hooking up at the corner of Amamiya Rin's mouth—couldn't help panicking either.
"Did Kazuko tell you some gossip about me? It must be her running her mouth, right?"
The more Fujino Terumi thought about it, the more convinced she became that this was the case, and a surge of mortified vexation welled up in her.
"Don't go listening to other people's nonsense. If you want to know something about me, you can just ask me directly—I won't hide anything! So don't make that kind of face, as if you've learned some great secret that even I myself don't know about."
____
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