Dead Hours — Footprints, Page 9
By Suha · Published
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Transcript
Panel 1. The same low view up the middle gangway as before. Kaito crouches beside the last wet print with one hand flat on the tile, dead-eyed, the beige phone handset now trapped between his shoulder and his ear with the cord stretched across the frame. KAITO: ...stops here. Panel 2. Rin holds her phone up at arm's length to film him, a small smirk on her face. RIN: Forty minutes. Same crouch.
Image description
Two panels: Kaito crouches at the last footprint again, the phone handset now trapped on his shoulder. Rin notes he has been in the same crouch for forty minutes.
About this chapter
3 A.M., rain on the dead-hours store. Kaito finishes mopping the sales floor to a flawless dry shine, and ten minutes later a single line of wet shoe prints is walking up the middle gangway, away from the doors, stopping dead halfway with nothing beyond it. No return trail. Nobody in the aisles. Nobody came in. Unable to accept that a person walked into his store and stopped and never left, Kaito declares quiet war on seven footprints and spends the entire dead shift trying to establish who made them, spiralling over how a trail can have a beginning and no end. All night he crouches at the last print with his hand flat on the tile beside it and mutters the same dead-eyed '...stops here.' He searches every gangway, checks the staff door, finds the footpath outside completely unmarked, and waits out head office's hold line, while a ladder of night regulars deliver flatly contradictory verdicts nobody can verify: the tracksuit regular says the tile always does that and prints come up on their own as it dries; a drunk salaryman swears somebody has been living behind the shelves for years and he has seen him; a cheerful jogger insists they are her own prints from yesterday afternoon. Rin livestreams the whole vigil as 'Who Walked To The Door', with one flicker of near-sincerity late on, that it is not a person and that things stop without ever announcing it, before raising her phone again. Near dawn the prints finally dry off the tile and vanish, and Kaito, hollow, takes the same crouch one last time over bare clean floor with a small settled almost-smile: '...gone.' Then the reveal Rin planted in the first minute pays off. She turns the phone around and plays the ten o'clock clip: Kaito hauling the supply crate in from the doorway, straight up the middle gangway, setting it down halfway, and walking back along the dry counter side. Seven in, none out. He spent six hours investigating himself. 'Who Walked To The Door' hits four hundred thousand viewers; Kaito gets the correct answer and it is him, and nothing else. Dawn light fills the spotless store from exactly the angle the night began, the floor dry and bare, and a fresh line of wet prints walks in from the doors and stops halfway, Rin's phone already raised, already live.