I desperately held back a scream.
Something was looming in front of my face and peering into it. It was the skeleton I had encountered before falling asleep.
“Waaaaaaaaaaah?!” Finally, my scream escaped me. I bawled. I wailed, kicked, and struggled. But perhaps because of my body’s current state, I quickly became tired and hungry. The energy I needed to violently resist withered away.
“■■■■…?” The old ghost peered at my face, and made indistinct noises to the mummy. She produced from an unknown location a bowl containing some kind of white gruel. Scooping some of it up with a spoon, she brought it to my mouth. Which I kept firmly closed, without so much as a second thought.
I mean, it’s not like I could think of any good reasons to open it.
No one dreams of hearing “Open wide!” before they get a heaping helping of who-knows-what from a bone-dry old mummy.
What I was face-to-face with right now resembled nothing so much as the pictures of those mummified monks you’d always end up seeing in history books, who’d starved themselves to reach enlightenment. She was the ruined final state of the human form, dry as a dead tree.
Who wants to experience “say ah” with one of those? I couldn’t imagine even a single person who would. And if such a person actually did exist, I, for one, wouldn’t want to be friends with them.
Now, all that said, I was feeling desperately hungry. And there was no other obvious way of obtaining food in my present situation. My hunger for both food and sleep was irresistibly strong, probably as a result of my younger body. So I thought to myself, The hell with it! I then snapped up the whole spoonful.
It actually tasted pretty good. My memory informed me that baby food was bland, but I guess my tongue was as underdeveloped as the rest of me.
The skeleton stroked my head, as if to say, “There’s a good boy.”
“Wah…?”
At that time, I came to a surprising realization. It took something being put in my mouth before I noticed it. There were no teeth in there. No wonder my attempts to speak kept coming out kind of funny.
I see. So infants didn’t have any teeth. Well, that was news to me. If I’d had any experience with raising children, I might have been able to use that to figure out what stage of development I’d reached. Aha! No teeth, but not breast-feeding, that makes me a few months old! Something like that. But that sort of warm familial experience was nowhere to be found in my memories. I didn’t know the kind of things you’d otherwise expect of any reasonably mature adult.
There’s not much to me, I found myself thinking.
I had died having accumulated nothing more than superficial knowledge and calendar years. “Ah—”
—Of course.
I had died.
I had definitely died back then.
Despite all my muddy, hazy memories, the agony of death was still deeply imprinted upon me.
Was this confusing place, where I was surrounded by the living dead, the afterlife?
If God existed, was this His punishment?
About half a year passed.
I said “about” because constantly falling asleep and waking up again makes the passage of days a little hazy. It turns out that babies really do spend a lot of time sleeping, then waking up because they got hungry. It felt like I was in a long, strange dream or vision, and so my mind was able to survive the boredom of being constantly horizontal.
About the only information I was able to gain in the meantime was that my situation was neither dream nor vision. It felt far too vivid and far too realistic. And I couldn’t imagine what would have to go wrong for a person to start having visions of having their diaper changed by a reanimated corpse.
I was forced to accept that I was an infant incapable of anything more advanced than a crawl, spending my days in the care of three undead creatures.
After some time, I began to understand their speech.
It was some linguist’s theory—their name escaped me—that a baby’s brain was not a completely blank slate, but instead possessed from birth the ability to steadily construct and learn a language from surrounding sounds. Though my memories were still vague, it seemed like I could still recall a certain amount of my old knowledge.
“Ba… Ba…” I attempted to use my tongue and throat to produce a word, but I had yet to master these organs, so it wasn’t going very well.
I couldn’t shake the way I had controlled my old body before I died. The two were clashing inside my head. The power of speech, something I had taken for granted before, was now something I struggled with. Likewise, I still couldn’t walk properly.
What if I was going to be like this forever, unable to walk or talk to my satisfaction? That fear haunted me.
“There, there. Want a hug?” Possibly sensing my anxiety, the mummy smiled, as if to reassure me.
She wore an old, threadbare robe similar to those worn by ancient priests, and the two around her called her Mary.
While I was a little hesitant to judge the beauty of a woman, not to mention a mummy, I felt that she had probably been a beautiful lady in life. She had a slender body and graceful bearing, with her eyes always averted downward. Her skin was like the bark of a dead tree, but it was unscarred. From it, I felt I could infer the flawless facial features she must have possessed as a living woman. Her wavy blonde hair had, admittedly, grown dull with the passage of time, but it was thick and gorgeous.
“Why don’t we take a little walk outside today?”
You’ll take me outside?!
“Heheh, that put a smile on your face.” She could tell. I had been curious about what existed outside of this… temple?
Yet, with this body, I could hardly just go and take a look. I had been waiting for an opportunity to be taken outside.
“Up we go!” She picked me up. I detected some kind of light, floaty fragrance. It wasn’t an unpleasant odor. Kind of woody? It reminded me of the incense-like scent you might expect from a kind old lady.
Slightly soothed, I allowed myself to enjoy the smell.
Mary carried me in her arms as she stepped slowly through the dimly lit temple.
Its floor was a checkerboard of square stones. Soft light streamed in from the ocular skylight at the top of the temple’s vast, awfully high, domed ceiling. There were alcoves in the walls, which gave the impression of a Japanese shrine, and within them were sculptures of what were presumably this temple’s gods.
One by one, they flowed past my eyes as we walked.
One depicted an imposing man with an air of gravitas, in the prime of life, bearing a sword shaped like a lightning bolt in his right hand and a set of scales in the other.
Another was a portly woman, her smile affectionate, with a baby and a bundle of ears of rice held securely in her arms.
There was a moustachioed man of short, beefy stature, with roaring flames at his back, hands gripping a hammer and tongs.
An androgynous youth smiled amiably, holding a glass of wine and a number of gold coins, and surrounded by what seemed to be pictographs representing the blowing wind.
A fine young woman clad in thin cloth was submerged up to her waist in a clear stream, holding a bow in one hand, and reaching out with her other to what might have been a fairy.
A one-eyed old man who radiated intelligence stood in front of some kind of inscription, holding a cane and an open book in his hands.
Probably the representatives of a polytheistic religious pantheon, I thought. I somehow felt that I could tell what kind of beliefs lay behind each of these gods just by looking at their statues.