Even though I hadn't agreed at first, I eventually decided to go along with the old man's suggestion. There was no risk to me, and I would have been an awful person to refuse at that point.
That said, I was a traveler. I didn't want to spend a whole day in a dull village with no inn in sight. If possible, I wanted to get on my broom and hurry to the country that was said to have the cure-all medicine.
That was why I presented my conditions up front. "I'll cooperate. But only once. After I meet Abel, I'm resuming my travels immediately."
The two of them said that would be fine. Once that was decided, we hurried to prepare. I was taken from the big house to another house, where several girls and women from the village awaited me. They varied widely in age, from young girls to old women.
Among them, one particularly elderly woman seemed to be the person in charge. Small wrinkles lined her face as she spoke. "All right then, let's get ready. Men, get out!"
In an impressive display of violence, the women in the house began using sticks to beat back all of the village men who had come to see the spectacle, including the old man and Mina's father, and took complete control.
The old woman closed the door and barred it so that no one could enter, then signaled the rest of them with her eyes. When she did, everyone but me started closing every curtain in the house and the back door.
Once the house was dark, the old woman approached me. "Take 'em off." She was suddenly holding a robe.
"I'm sorry?"
"Hurry up and take those strange clothes off! If you go looking like that, Abel will know you aren't her!"
Oh, so that's what you mean. I wasn't expecting that.
I took care to remove the precious brooch that proved I was a witch from my robe. With it still in my hand, I stripped down to my underwear.
A very young girl politely took the clothes I removed off to the side to fold them.
"Okay, have her put this on."
Another girl took a package from the old woman and hurried over to me, then took the clothes out. "All right, everyone. I'm going to put this on the traveler, so help me out."
Huh? I can dress myself.
But before I could respond, a crowd of women was already bearing down on me from all sides. There was nothing I could do but shut my mouth.
Thus, I became a dress-up doll.
"Okay, lift her leg."
"Would you put her arm through the sleeve of this blouse? Uh-oh, it's the wrong size."
"She really is the spitting image of Mina."
"She's even prettier than Mina."
"Yeah."
"What color is good for the ribbon? Oh, red, of course."
Everyone seemed a little too enthusiastic to me. I could have sworn they were just doing this for fun.
After the dressing was more or less finished, I looked down and found I had been dressed in a white blouse and an olive-brown flared skirt. I could have put something like this on myself, though…
"All right, time for the finishing touches. Miss Traveler, this might hurt a bit, but hang in there, okay?" As she spoke in a cheerful tone of voice, the woman behind me wrapped something black around me.
"...?"
And what do you think it was? A corset. Before I knew it, the thing was around my torso.
"Huh, um, hold on a—"
Ignoring my bewilderment over the sudden turn of events, the girls surrounding me grabbed my body and yanked the strings at my back with all their might. It felt like my rib cage was being crushed.
"Th-that hurts! Ow! If you have to tighten it, at least do it more gently!"
"Oh, come on. Don't struggle."
"Persevere, persevere."
"You'll get used to it soon."
"Do your best, Miss Traveler."
With that, the work of changing my clothes came to an end, and everyone seemed satisfied except for me.
Afterward, the old woman said, "It looks like you don't have enough of a chest, so let's stuff it a bit, shall we?" and held out wads of cotton to me. Apparently, she was serious. I slapped them to the floor.
There was a small house on the edge of the village. It looked completely unattended, and as I walked over, I crushed knee-height grass noisily underfoot. Compared to the other houses clustered together, this small house was old. You could probably punch right through the thin planks of its walls with a single hit. It looked less like a house where someone would live and more like a rarely used storehouse.
They told me Abel was quarantined here.
Abel had suddenly fallen ill one day, and the villagers didn't know whether or not his disease was contagious. That's why they had shut him up in this small house, to reduce the possibility of spreading it.
Apparently, Mina's father had been taking care of him. At first, his girlfriend had been nursing him from morning until night, but she had left the village when his condition took a turn for the worse.
Some villagers wondered whether Mina might have run away, but no one knew whether that was true or not.
After taking a few deep breaths in front of the hut, I opened the door. It made a squeaking sound that hurt my ears.
"..."
I went inside and closed the door with a hand behind my back.
A man was lying on the bed. He was young, and he had black hair. It was easy to see that his face was handsome back when he was healthy—but now he was a shadow of his former self. The man turning his vacant eyes toward me had sunken cheeks and no light
behind his eyes.
"…Mina?" His lips moved slightly, forming the name of his beloved.
"Yes. It's me," I lied. "Have you been well?"
The floorboards squeaked underfoot as I moved to sit in the chair to the side of the bed.
He smiled faintly. "You came back… I thought—I thought I'd never see you again."
"I'm your girlfriend. Of course I was going to come back, no matter what."
"…Of course."
He stared out the window.
There was nothing there. Just overgrown weeds and the primeval forest in the distance. The small hut didn't just appear decrepit; it was truly falling apart, and a draft that blew in from somewhere rustled the man's hair.
"I found the cure-all medicine," I told him, as if I was reading from a prepared script. "I'm going to bring it along with your dinner tonight, so please take one pill after eating plenty of food. It may take some time, but you should definitely get better." This, too, was a lie.
Mina's father had written the speech. He thought it would be suspicious if Mina came back without the cure-all, so he had me act as if I had the medicine in hand, to reassure Abel.
The pill I was bringing with dinner contained sleeping medication.
They would have him talk to his beloved in his last moments, and after that, the villagers would do something with him—they hadn't told me what. There had been no need to ask.
"Say, Mina." He looked into my eyes. "Would you hold my hand?"
With heavy movements, he stuck a hand out from under his quilt. It was not the muscled hand of a young man, but withered and bony.
I mustn't falter.
I immediately grasped it with both hands. It was so cold, it was hard to imagine any blood was flowing through it at all.
"So warm…my blood must already be growing cold…," he said. "Say, Mina," he called the name of his beloved. "Would you give me a kiss?"
"Huh, a kiss?" I asked involuntarily. I immediately felt intense regret.
"…Yes, a kiss. Do you not want to?" I thought I saw a dim flash of suspicion in the depths of his eyes. I thought hard. What should I do? If I'm his girlfriend, then of course, I ought to kiss him, but I'm—Ahhh, if I hesitate, he's going to be suspicious. What to do, what to
do…?
He looked at me as I floundered, and chuckled.
"Sorry, I was just teasing. Please don't mind it." Somehow, he looked like he had recovered just a little bit of his energy.
After that, he smiled and said, "I'm not going to pester someone who isn't my girlfriend for a kiss."
I was upset by the idea that he had spotted the deception due to some imperfection in my performance, and I denied the charge many times over, but he was sure.
"You're not the real Mina. You don't need to force it," he said confidently, despite my efforts to continue my act. "First of all, it's not like Mina's even going to come back to me. I'm such a fool."
I wasn't sure who he was speaking to, but I suspected something else was going on here. I gave up pretending to be Mina and revealed everything about myself—that I was a traveler, that I was a witch, that I had been asked to pretend to be Mina because we looked alike. I hid nothing.
"Hmm," he said, "you really are the spitting image of Mina."
"We look that similar, huh?"