Dead Hours — The Front, Page 1

About this chapter

3 A.M., rain on the dead-hours store. A customer asks Kaito what the machine outside sells, and he cannot answer — the two vending machines stand on the footpath with their backs to the shop's south glazing, and in two years Kaito has only ever seen their backs. Unable to bear not knowing what stands an arm's length outside his own door, he declares quiet war on a single trivial fact — what the machines actually sell — and spends the entire dead shift trying to find out by every indirect method he can invent rather than simply walking out to look. The dramatic question, set by page two: what is on the front of a thing you have stood behind for two years? All night the running beat repeats identically: Kaito steps toward the sliding doors to go around and see the fronts, and each time is pulled back — a customer, a task, the rain, his own hesitation — and he settles at the counter, dead-eyed, muttering the same '...later,' the two blank machine backs streaked with rain through the glass. He tries to read the fronts in the reflection of the far store's glazing; he phones head office to ask what machines are even registered to the address and is put on hold; he presses his face to the glass and can see only backs. A ladder of night regulars deliver flatly contradictory, unverifiable verdicts on what the machines sell: the tracksuit regular says they have been out of order for years and sell nothing; a drunk salaryman swears one dispenses hot cans of impossible things; a cheerful jogger insists she buys perfectly ordinary drinks from them every single morning and cannot believe he does not know. None of it can be verified from inside. Rin films the whole vigil, unbothered, and has one flicker of near-sincerity late on, phone down — that he faces inward all night, that the whole street is out front and he never once turns around to look at it — before raising the phone again. Near dawn, hollow and out of methods, Kaito finally stops inventing ways to avoid it and simply walks out through the sliding doors into the last of the rain, around to the fronts — the running beat inverting at last. And there, kneeling at the open front of one machine, is Hori: the vending route man who refills these two machines every night at exactly this hour, and has for years, his red hand-truck of blank cans beside him — the one night-worker who has shared Kaito's corner the entire time, unseen because he only ever worked the side Kaito never turned to. The fronts, when Kaito finally sees them, are just ordinary drink machines; nothing mysterious at all. The answer was never what they sold. There is no viral reveal and no trick: Hori, mild and matter-of-fact, says he has filled this corner for years and always liked that the shop kept its light on through the dead hours; he has watched Kaito behind the counter the whole time from the one side Kaito never saw. Kaito, now keeper of the strip's round-book, brings Hori in from the rain for a coffee — and Hori, without ceremony, rests a hand on the worn logbook and says his marks are already in it, years back, and that it is the shop's turn to keep it now: another night handed on. Rin films that one real thing and, for once, does not post it. Kaito, who gets nothing every night, gets the small human answer — a face for the corner he has faced for two years — and gets to keep it. The final page mirrors page one's exact interior angle looking south through the glazing, the one thing changed: at dawn the sliding doors stand open and Kaito is out on the footpath at the fronts of the machines with Hori, on the side of the glass he never crossed — the corner that looked empty all night had a whole other person in it, and Kaito simply never turned around. A standalone deadpan Dead Hours comedy that advances the newly opened round-book fellowship arc and plants a fresh recurring night-worker, Hori the vending route man, for a coming arc to gather.