Dead Hours — Nobody There, Page 6

About this chapter

3 A.M., rain on the dead-hours store. The sliding doors hiss open for nobody. Kaito, who cannot bear the idea of his store greeting empty air, declares quiet war on a faulty sensor and resolves to prove what is triggering it before his shift ends, spiraling all night over whether a door that opens for nothing is broken or just polite. All night the doors slide open to the identical dead-eyed beat of Kaito's head snapping up at an empty doorway as he mutters '...nobody.' Early on, the tracksuit regular comes in, sets his usual item on the counter, pats his pockets, quietly puts it back and leaves without explaining, and Kaito is too fixated on the doors to notice. A ladder of night-shift regulars then deliver verdicts nobody can verify: a drunk salaryman insists it's a ghost and that doors always know, a cheerful jogger swears sensors are just sensitive and it means nothing, and head office puts him on hold for forty minutes. Kaito crawls the threshold to map the sensor's reach, tapes cardboard over it in triumph, and has to rip the tape off when a real customer is left stranded outside unable to get in. Rin livestreams the whole vigil as 'Six Hours of Nobody,' with one flicker of near-sincerity late on — that the doors are working fine and he just wants someone to be there — before raising her phone again. Near dawn, hollow and defeated, Kaito gives up, sits with his back to the doors and stops turning around. That is exactly when the doors open and Rin says someone IS there, the running beat inverting: past the empty-looking doorway, out in the dark rain on the footpath, stands the tracksuit regular, soaked. He lost his wallet hours ago and has been walking up to the doors and turning back all night, too embarrassed to come in with no money — every 'nobody' was him. Kaito hands him a hot bun on the house, and the man thanks Rin, who had told him an hour ago to just come inside. Kaito gets the correct diagnosis, that the doors were never broken, and nothing else; 'Six Hours of Nobody' hits four hundred thousand viewers. Dawn light fills the store exactly as the night began — and the doors slide open on daylight for nobody at all, Rin's phone already raised, already live.