Natsume Keigo's Apartment - 3:41 AM
The bathroom door had transmuted into an immovable boundary—a threshold between worlds that refused his desperate pleas for passage.
Keigo's breath formed ephemeral ghosts in the confined space, each exhalation a prayer without destination. Condensation wept down the mirror's surface like spectral tears, collecting on the porcelain sink below and on his trembling hands—hands that seemed increasingly unfamiliar to him with each passing second.
The lights above performed their unsteady ritual, their illumination waxing and waning in rhythm with what Keigo imagined was the heartbeat of the apartment itself—a mechanical lung straining against the compression of realities never meant to intersect.
"What is a reflection but the universe's first attempt at forgery?" Keigo whispered to himself, his voice strange in his own ears.
Behind him, the woman with the inverted neck remained—a stationary monument to impossibility. Yet as the moments stretched into an eternity of fractured seconds, her reflection undertook a metamorphosis. Her eyes—windows to some void beyond comprehension—blackened like ink diffusing through water. The skin around her mouth began to separate, not tearing but parting, as if something ancient and patient was excavating an exit from within her throat.
"Frame me next."
The utterance that escaped her wasn't meant for human comprehension. It manifested as a chorus of disharmonious voices—a cacophony of timbres folded impossibly into a single source, resonating from somewhere beneath the skin of time itself. The sound vibrated not through air but through the membranes between realities.
"Who are you to wear her face?" Keigo asked, surprising himself with the steadiness of his voice. "What narrative are you forcing me to enter?"
No answer came, only the subtle shift of her presence behind him—like a shadow acquiring weight.
Keigo's fingers scrabbled against the door, nails excavating shallow graves in the wood grain until the handle beneath his desperate grasp underwent its own perverse transformation. The cold metal softened, becoming pliant and warm—disturbingly organic. When his fingers sank into what the handle had become, the "door" released a scream that contained the memory of every pain ever inflicted.
"Is this what Arakawa meant by framing the innocent?" Keigo whispered. "Do we become complicit merely by witnessing?"
The Seduction of Forbidden Pages
Two Hours Earlier
The autobiography rested on Keigo's desk—an anomaly of existence that defied the known laws of literary creation. Its presence was an accusation, a temptation, a dare.
Keigo understood the folly of reopening what had already revealed itself as a gateway rather than a book. Yet understanding and resistance occupied separate territories within the geography of human nature.
"We always return to that which unmakes us," he murmured, fingers hovering above the cover.
The binding felt colder now, as if it had been stored in the drawer of some forgotten morgue—a repository of stories that died before they could be properly told. The embossed title, "How I Committed Murder and Framed the Innocent," had deepened since his last encounter—the letters carved with such violence into the leather that Keigo imagined broken fingernails as the engraving tools, perhaps the detective's own in his final moments of lucidity.
But it was the olfactory presence of the tome that penetrated his defenses most profoundly.
Books carried the aromatic signature of their materials—paper and glue, ink and binding. This one emanated the scent of wet earth recently disturbed, of formaldehyde used to preserve that which should have remained in decay, the unmistakable reek of something exhumed after too many seasons beneath the soil.
"You smell of secrets never meant for exhumation," Keigo told the book, even as his fingers betrayed him by opening its cover.
Still, Keigo read—navigating sentences that felt like corridors in a labyrinth designed by a mind untethered from the constraints of linear thought.
Words That Bleed Through Reality
"The victim was found in the bathtub, water dyed red to the shade of late autumn maple leaves. A single eye floated near the drain, torn loose post-mortem. I framed her lover—but I knew the truth. The real murderer watched from the mirror."
Keigo's consciousness registered the anomaly before his intellect could process it. The text before him had abandoned the sterile permanence of print, manifesting instead as handwritten script in ink that retained the liquid sheen of recent application.
When his finger, drawn by some impulse beyond rational control, brushed against the page, the ink responded—spreading, flowing, reforming into the whorls and ridges of fingerprints. His fingerprints.
"The narrative is absorbing me," he realized with mounting horror. "Or perhaps I am becoming the narrative."
A sound like the turning of pages whispered from within the walls surrounding him—as if the apartment itself was reading along, following his progress through this literary deformation of reality. The ink before him began to flow again, letters dissolving into primordial darkness before reconstructing themselves into a new configuration:
"The victim was found in the bathtub—in Keigo Natsume's bathroom."
The words hung before him like an accusation written in his own hand, a premonition rendered in ink and intention.
"Is this prophecy or predestination?" Keigo asked the empty room, receiving only the subtle rustle of pages turning somewhere beyond perception.
The Baptism of Dread
Keigo's gaze was drawn inexorably to the bathtub—a porcelain vessel now filled with water he had no memory of drawing. The liquid within was opaque, clouded with particulate matter that refused to settle. It moved with deliberate rhythm, as if something beneath its surface was attempting to ascend from depths greater than the physical dimensions of the tub could possibly contain.
"Frame me next."
The twisted woman had relocated, now standing as sentinel beside the tub. The transition had occurred without movement—one moment absent, the next present, like the sudden recall of a memory long suppressed. Her shadow stretched across the tile floor with impossible length, extending far beyond what the bathroom's dimensions should allow.
Keigo observed with detached fascination that her feet never made contact with the floor—she existed in this space without truly inhabiting it, a projection rather than a presence.
Her mouth began to split once more—the fissure extending far beyond human anatomy, stretching from ear to ear in a grotesque approximation of a smile. From the cavernous opening that her throat had become spilled not words but paper—wet, ink-stained pages torn from Arakawa's impossible book.
"You're not the narrative," Keigo whispered in sudden understanding. "You're the medium through which it manifests."
The pages moved with apparent sentience, crawling across the tile floor like insects composed of pulp and possibility. They reached his feet, adhering to his skin, winding around his ankles with the intimate knowledge of a lover's embrace.
"Is this how stories consume their readers?" he asked the room at large. "Or how readers become characters?"
The Fracture in Perception
Reality shifted without warning—the space around Keigo undergoing a transmutation of identity. The bathroom was no longer his own but another entirely—one he recognized from countless hours of research following Arakawa's death. The wallpaper, yellowed from decades of cigarette smoke and neglect, peeled at the edges like skin ready to slough away from dying flesh. This was the detective's private bathroom, adjacent to the study where his body had been discovered.
Above the sink hung a mirror, its surface a web of fractures that somehow formed coherent text:
"The first crime is always your own."
"What does that mean?" Keigo asked his reflection, but his reflection was no longer his to command.
The face that stared back underwent its own transformation—still Keigo, but altered by time and trauma, gaunt from deprivation, clothed in a prison uniform saturated with darkening crimson. The hands that belonged to this potential future self were incomplete, fingers missing as if edited from existence. The smile that stretched across this doppelgänger's face was constructed of broken glass and desperate resignation.
In the reflection, mirror-Keigo's hand held a knife with practiced familiarity. In physical reality, Keigo's hands remained empty, potential without manifestation.
The reflected blade rose to the throat of his mirrored self, and Keigo felt a corresponding sting against his own flesh—a phantom pressure that carried the memory of steel without its physical presence.
"Is this empathy or possession?" Keigo wondered aloud. "Am I witnessing or becoming?"
The Portal Opens
The door released him without warning, swinging inward on silent hinges to reveal not the apartment he remembered but some alternative iteration—a parallel space where the architecture remained constant but the meaning had shifted.
Darkness dominated this variant of his living space, interrupted only by the erratic illumination of a television he had no memory of activating. On screen played footage that Keigo recognized from his research—an interview conducted with Arakawa Hajime a decade prior.
The detective sat in profile, smoke from his ever-present cigarette creating a veil between his features and the camera lens, as if even in public he insisted on maintaining a barrier between perception and truth.
"Detective Arakawa," the interviewer's voice inquired, "how do you always manage to identify the killer?"
Arakawa's lips curved into what might generously be called a smile, though it never reached his eyes. Smoke twisted between his fingers like captured spirits.
"Simple," he replied, his voice carrying the certainty of absolute knowledge. "I make sure I already know who it is."
"How is that possible?" the interviewer pressed, leaning forward with professional curiosity.
Arakawa's posture changed subtly as he shifted to face the camera directly—his gaze piercing through the screen, through time itself, to lock with Keigo's own.
"Because I put them there myself," the detective stated with quiet confidence.
The screen surrendered to darkness without transition, becoming a reflective surface that revealed Keigo's back to himself—and behind him, the twisted woman had returned, her inverted features now wearing Arakawa's knowing smile like a borrowed mask.
"Is history written by the victors," Keigo asked the darkness, "or by those who control the narrative of victory?"
Communion with the Departed
Keigo's phone erupted into electronic life, its screen emitting a light so pure and white it seemed to burn away the shadows rather than merely illuminate them. No caller identification displayed—just emptiness awaiting connection.
His hand moved as if guided by forces beyond volition, answering the call and raising the device to his ear.
"Keigo," the voice on the line manifested, distorted beyond recognition yet carrying an essence of familiarity—as if someone were attempting speech through a throat filled with crushed glass and memory. "You opened the book. Now you're in the next chapter."
"Who claims my name with such certainty?" Keigo managed to ask, his voice barely above a whisper.
A pause stretched between them—a moment of recognition that transcended the limitations of linear time.
"I'm you," the voice finally responded, carrying the weight of revelation.
The connection severed without preamble, but the speaker continued to emit sound—a soft, rhythmic percussion like liquid falling against hard surfaces. Like blood forming constellations on tile.
"The self is the first fiction we create," Keigo spoke into the silence that followed. "Perhaps also the last we abandon."
The Text That Writes Itself
The autobiography called to him, an irresistible gravity drawing his attention back to its metamorphosing contents. Keigo's fingers trembled as he turned to the next chapter, finding a heading that confirmed his deepest fears:
"Chapter 2: The Murder of Natsume Keigo (Framed by Natsume Keigo)"
"Is this predestination or prophecy?" he whispered again, the question taking on new urgency.
As his eyes traced the words that followed, the pages began to bleed—ink rising to the surface like wounds reopening, spilling over the edges and onto his hands with the warm viscosity of fresh blood. The final lines manifested not as printed text but as handwritten instruction, the slanted, precise handwriting unmistakably Arakawa's:
"Kill someone you love, or the book will write your death instead."
Keigo stared at the directive, feeling the weight of choice pressing against him like the crushing pressure of ocean depths.
"Is this how free will dies?" he asked the bleeding book. "Not with philosophical debate but with impossible choices?"
The Call That Completes the Circle
With hands that seemed to belong to someone else, Keigo dialed 110, the emergency number etched into memory through cultural repetition. The line connected with unnatural immediacy, as if the call had been anticipated, perhaps even preordained.
"This is Detective Natsume Keigo," announced a voice identical to his own, yet carrying an authority he had never possessed. "I'm calling to report a murder I'm about to commit."
The connection dissolved, leaving Keigo alone with the implications of what he had just heard—a future already spoken into existence, a narrative loop closing around him like a noose.
From the hallway, the twisted woman's laughter cascaded through the apartment—not sound but the memory of sound, the archetypal shape of amusement drained of all genuine mirth.
"Perhaps," Keigo spoke into the expanding silence, "we are all merely characters written by someone else's hand, reading lines we believe we've chosen."
The book on his desk continued to bleed, its pages turning without touch—writing the next chapter of a story Keigo was no longer merely reading, but becoming.