He didn’t notice the old man next door had stopped coughing. He didn’t notice the lights in the hallway flickering. He was inside the rhythm now.
Kaito’s first mistake was believing the silence in his apartment was peaceful.
The phone screen changed. It was no longer a static interface. It was a live feed—a camera view of his own apartment, but wrong . The shadows were too long. The window now showed a moonless sky over a black sea. And standing in the corner of the room, visible only on the phone’s screen, were six figures. Their faces were smooth, white ceramic masks with painted-on smiles. Each held a taiko drum of its own, but their arms were fused to the mallets, bone and wood as one.
He never opened it. He didn’t need to. Every night, when he put his head to the floor, he could hear the six figures drumming in the walls, waiting for him to lose his rhythm again.