🐱 An Ominous Dream
This is Onomichi City, Hiroshima Prefecture, a place made famous by director Obayashi Nobuhiko's trilogy. There lived a small boy named Sawaki Shin-ichi who had just entered his third year of junior high school. The only son of a high school teacher, he probably missed out on inheriting his father's genes, and he wasn't particularly good at academics. He was currently lying in bed in his small but assigned room, with his eyes open, gazing at the faintly lighted curtains hanging in the window. He was the only one in the room, and the alarm clock beside his pillow showed 2:00 AM.
"Was it a dream?"
He was already a very easily scared boy, but now his body was trembling violently. Shin-ichi had slept in the same room as his mother throughout elementary school. He continued to do so for a while after entering junior high school, but he was often told it was bad for people's reputations, so he had only recently agreed to sleep in his own room. However, the look on his face now clearly showed that he regretted it.
He had a childhood friend named Kozuki Haruka whom he had known since elementary school. Since their mothers knew each other, they often hung out together until around fourth grade. They gradually grew apart in fifth and sixth grade, but in their third year of junior high school they were not only in the same class but also in the same clubs, and they began to talk frequently again. She was a bright girl with clear eyes and a short bob.
The dream he had earlier was like this.
After school, after cleaning his assigned room, he and Haruka headed to the clubroom, as usual. The clubroom was the science preparation room on the top floor of the three-story reinforced concrete school building.
"Are the seniors here yet?"
"Maybe not yet. Shin-ichi has the key, right?"
"That's true, but..."
As he climbed the stairs, the number of students he saw decreased. The science preparation room was at the very back of the third floor, and when he arrived there wasn't a single junior high school student around.
The room was locked. Shin-ichi inserted the long key he had brought from the teachers' room into the door. There was a click as the lock released. He pulled the iron sliding door open with all his might, and could see inside.
As always, the dark room made Shin-ichi flinch. The smell of chemicals brushed against his nose, and the human model with its red veins bulging out in the corner of the room was also unpleasant. The rock specimens were fine, but the white small animals preserved in formaldehyde made him want to look away. Even if they weren't as easily scared as Shin-ichi, it was certain that every student who came here would feel a chill down their spine, big or small.
Shin-ichi quickly turned on the light, praying that the bright light would dispel his anxiety. Then he exhaled sharply and said nonchalantly:
"What should we do? Should we wait here until everyone else arrives?"
He turned around and spoke to Haruka. Or rather, he thought he spoke to her. But Haruka, who had come in from behind, was nowhere to be found.
"..."
Where on earth had Haruka gone? Just as he called out to look for her, he heard a loud "Meow!" from behind him.
When he turned around in the room, there was a cat that had somehow entered.
"Eeek!"
He couldn't help but shout out loud. Shin-ichi hated cats.
But in this case, there was more to it. The cat was no ordinary cat. It was the size of a lion, with both sides of its mouth split open, reaching all the way to the base of its ears. Now, the inside of its terrifyingly red mouth was exposed, and it was preparing to pounce on Shin-ichi.
"It's a ghost cat! Help!"
As soon as he screamed, he woke up. The dream seemed eerily real. Even after waking up, he could still picture the brown stripes running all over the cat's body, and its terrifying, bloodshot red eyes. He could even see its absurdly large fangs, and the strong stench of decay emanating from its entire body...
It took him a considerable amount of time to shake off the nightmare and fall asleep again. By the time he finally fell asleep, the sky in the east was already beginning to lighten slightly.
In fact, this wasn't the first time Shin-ichi had had such a nightmare. A few years ago, the night before a huge fire broke out in a seaside shopping district, killing and injuring over a dozen people, he dreamed of himself being severely burned in the kitchen. The next day, his dream came true. The fire began in the evening, when a small earthquake triggered an explosion of propane gas in a restaurant. The strong winds that followed turned it into a major blaze that engulfed over a dozen shops and houses. Fortunately, Shin-ichi's house, which faces the mountain, was undamaged, but the red flames that rose into the night sky across the San-yo Main Line were clearly visible from his house.
But that's not all. Six months later, the day before the family was due to go on a trip, Shin-ichi had a nightmare, as usual. After waking up, he was hit with stomach pains for no apparent reason, so the family trip they had been looking forward to was canceled.
The next day, as he and his mother were watching the news in a depressed mood, they suddenly cried out loud. The news was reporting that a food poisoning incident had occurred at the inn where they were supposed to stay on the first day, and that more than a dozen people had been rushed to the hospital. If they had really gone on the trip, it would have been a terrifying one, far from being fun. By that time, Shin-ichi's stomachache had completely subsided, as if nothing had happened.
He don't know the exact details, but this sort of thing happened to Shin-ichi often. He was a boy who could dream about the future. He wasn't able to know the future freely, but from the strength of the impressions his dreams left, he had grown to the point where he could roughly guess how accurately his dreams represented the future.
Based on his past experiences, he was certain that this dream was also a sign that something was about to happen.
