Black Snow

A girl like a sculpture sat there. Dressed in pure-white lace sleepwear, perched neatly atop a Victorian-style canopy bed. Not figuratively, but literally frozen stiff like a sculpture.

The only thing moving was the girl’s shadow.

“I’ll rip those nauseating, disgusting guts of yours to shreds, carve you up, and kill you……!”

As the objects in the room rose up on their own, the shadow gaped open in the shape of a beast’s jaws and spat out its words.

“You faithless dumbfuck bastards really think you can save this girl? Huh?”
“A-ah, ah, please stop…….”

It was then. The girl, who should have remained frozen like a sculpture, struggled to move her lips and murmured. Her eyes were soaked in fear, shimmering with tears.

“Please…….”
“Ha! What can your god even do? Probably sucking dick somewhere, obviously! That’s probably the only thing your god is actually good at!”

Even so, there was no leisure to calmly listen to the girl’s anguished pleas.

Whooong!
Before they knew it, the objects in the room were moving on their own and flying straight at Solomon and Jean Baudri. This was not the sort of poltergeist one usually imagined, with things merely floating up and drifting about. They came with the speed and force of an Olympic athlete’s throw.

The kind of force that would send them straight to the grave if they were hit.

‘Fuck!’

Just as Solomon was about to throw himself aside to dodge the barrage of flying objects, the troll clergyman Jean Baudri stepped in front of him and said quietly,

“.”

The clergyman’s blessing did not stop with himself, but spread to encompass Solomon as well. The invisible curtain rippling around them deflected the various objects in the room that came pouring at them in the name of poltergeist activity.

Step.

In that state, the troll clergyman Jean Baudri stepped forward. Toward the girl sitting primly atop the canopy bed. At once, the shadow cast by the girl split apart as though to tear a body in two, revealing the menacing form of a beast’s jaws lined with countless teeth. Like some grotesque piece of shadow art.

“This bitch is mine now! She’s mine now, I said! I’m not giving her to anyone!”

The shadow had become the jaws of a beast. And before long, those jaws had turned toward the girl casting them.

Gulp.

And at the same time, a sound rang out. The sound of something being swallowed.

“Ah…….”

The focus vanished from the girl’s eyes. Her gaze turned black and dark. The corners of her mouth twisted upward into a grin. A crooked, creeping smile.

“A perfect day for an exorcism, isn’t it?”

It was the girl’s voice. A refined and elegant voice, one that still retained traces of youth. And yet it was unmistakable. The malice writhing beneath that voice.

“One could say so.”

Jean Baudri had already drawn a cross-shaped holy emblem from his coat and murmured softly,

“Ashes to ashes, Evil to Evil.”

At once, the girl’s body writhed grotesquely, twisting her limbs and neck at impossible angles as she thrashed in agony. Jean Baudri didn’t stop, pressing the cross forward as he closed the distance even further. The girl’s body began giving off steam as though it were burning, writhing in pain. The pitch of the screams rose higher and higher. Not the girl’s voice, but the sharp shrieks of that evil spirit.

“■■■■─!”

In the middle of it all, unable to bear the pain, the girl lunged and slashed with her nails, but unfortunately, her delicate hands could not leave so much as a scratch on the troll’s massive body.

It was then. From the girl’s body, writhing in pain with twisted and bent limbs, the dark silhouette overlapping her began to slip out of alignment.

“Now.”

The assassin who dissolved into the air didn’t miss that opening.

The evil spirit’s silhouette had pulled away from the girl. Whether it was a person, a machine, or an evil spirit, it made no difference. When something was exposing its back so defenselessly, an occupationally diseased assassin could never simply let it pass.

Kwachik!
From behind the evil spirit, the 「Hungry」 Ghost Whale Bone Blade drove down. A sneak attack. Even if it was an incorporeal spirit with no physical body, it changed nothing. Not before a knife-hole that pierced everything with equal fairness.

“■■■■─!”

Once again, a shrill scream sharp enough to tear the ears rang out. Before long, the evil spirit’s shadow, pierced through with a knife-hole, began breaking down into tiny particles as though turning to ash.

“Ah, ahh…….”

Then focus returned to the girl’s eyes. Her shoulders and hands trembled, and cold sweat stood out along her back in beads.

‘Did we get it?’

That was what Solomon thought as he looked at her. It was the one thought in the world he should never have had.

“Father…… did you save me?”
“……”

The girl asked in a trembling voice. A brief silence followed.

“There is a saying that only you can save yourself.”

At the end of the silence, Jean Baudri opened his mouth. His voice was heavier than ever.

“It seems that here…… it is time for us to save ourselves.”
“What?”

Solomon asked back in bewilderment.

“What do you mean? Didn’t we just eliminate the evil spirit?”
“It was quite a cute little thing. So much so that you could tell at a glance it was only a decoy.”
“Fuck, somehow it did feel that way.”

Solomon knew it too. At least enough to know that what had just happened was not the end of it.

“For Director Molesworth to commission me, it must have been a rather burdensome expense even by his standards.”

An expense burdensome even for one of the city’s highest officials. That was the weight carried by a ninth-floor guest of the hotel.

“And yet his investment portfolio…… has come very close to realizing a painfully definite loss.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“It means I never expected to run into a colleague here.”

A colleague. There was no way not to understand what that meant. It was not exactly rare to get tangled up with another contractor from the same hotel while carrying out a commission. Solomon and Jean Baudri themselves were proof of that.

Even so, what the troll clergyman Jean Baudri was showing now was different. Different from the composure and intellectual poise he had shown until now, even from the way he had been when a chandelier was dropping over his head.

“And not just any colleague, but one of the hotel’s prized blue-chip stocks.”
“I’m begging you. Can’t you say things in a way an actual human can fucking understand?”

And so Solomon finally snapped and spat it out.

“The Maiden of June—Blanc of Black Snow.”

Jean Baudri answered.

“A VIP evil spirit guest of the hotel’s thirteenth floor.”
“Ah, great! That’s fucking crystal clear!”

Truly easy to understand. There couldn’t have been a clearer answer. And so Solomon muttered again,

“……!”

In the very moment he murmured it, the vapor from his breath condensed white in the air.

Crack, crack!
Just as when they had first stood before her room, a skin-cutting cold came sweeping in. Frost settled down. Rime bloomed across the windows like flowers. And then he realized.

The frost rapidly freezing over the room was black and dark as pitch.

─ Oh my, the know-it-all troll from the ninth floor……

By then, the girl was sitting on the edge of the canopy bed, crossing her legs alluringly. Behind her, black frost bloomed like flowers in every direction. Her eyes were the same as that darkness dwelling within the ice crystals.

Eyes black and dark like obsidian, completely unfocused.

─ And the hotel’s greatest rookie, the one everyone’s been talking about lately.

That voice said it. It even recognized Solomon’s existence. It might have been flattering to be recognized, but unfortunately, the situation didn’t allow him to simply enjoy the honor.

“To think an aggressive investor with even greater capital than Director Molesworth would appear. A truly painful risk-hedging failure.”

“……”

Even now, the bullshit coming from the intellectual troll clergyman Jean Baudri showed no sign of stopping. Solomon stayed silent in disbelief.

‘A VIP of Hotel Snark.’

「They’re the sort of beings even an organization like ours can’t casually lay a hand on…… the hotel’s strongest monsters in the truest sense.」

Without meaning to, Solomon recalled the words of Vlad Țepeș, Curator of the Black Museum. What stood before him now was exactly that kind of monster. And its true nature was not even a living being like a human or a troll.

“A VIP evil spirit of the thirteenth floor would hardly possess some random girl for no reason.”

Solomon said flatly. The evil spirit dwelling in the girl, or rather in Marie Molesworth’s body, smiled and answered.

─ Then do I look like some idle spirit that pops out of a Ouija board with nothing better to do?

Business. Just like that troll, this one too seemed far removed from the usual stereotypes of evil spirits. It didn’t rant in hatred with its hair flying wildly, nor did it blaspheme against God.

─ It’s business, isn’t it? Let’s not act like amateurs, rookie.

“So we’ve got the evil spirit of capitalism now.”
─ It happens when you’ve lived a long time. The tragedy of a professional.

She merely maintained her poise with perfect composure while controlling the girl’s body, with the terrifying black frost drifting behind it.

─ Though I do envy, from time to time, the passion of those little amateurs who pop out of mirrors at midnight or Ouija boards for no pay at all. The little rookies who torment people for no reason but passion pay and sheer enthusiasm.

“So that’s not your style.”
─ That’s why they say not to turn your hobby into your profession.

The Maiden of June, Blanc of Black Snow, shrugged. She truly was a professional evil spirit.

‘An evil spirit without passion. I don’t even know whether that counts as evil-spirit-like.’

Solomon thought that in disbelief. And his thoughts did not stop there. An evil spirit taking up residence in a daughter’s body, and hiring the hotel to exorcise it, was nothing especially unusual in itself.

But to deliberately hire an expensive evil spirit, one some idle thing from a Ouija board, but a thirteenth-floor VIP of the hotel, and make it inhabit the girl’s body……

The reason for this was clearly far from ordinary. And she was not the sort of monster just anyone could hire.

[Insight Roll in Progress……]

And amid all this, a sound echoed from far away. The sound of dice rolling.

[Insight Failed!]

Of course, no matter how high Solomon’s Insight was, it could not simply guess every hidden detail of such a bizarre situation on sight.

What remained, in the end, was that one of the hotel’s strongest monsters, a being even the Curator of the Black Museum regarded with respect, stood before them. Blocking the path of Solomon and his partner, the intellectual troll clergyman.

“Hmm, I suppose in this situation……”

That very troll clergyman, Jean Baudri, continued,

“It would be best to exercise the utility-maximizing reason of a rational economic agent.”
“Cut the bullshit. You’re thinking the same thing I am right now, aren’t you?”
“Oh, of course. I have not the slightest doubt in Mr. Solomon’s rationality.”

At the end of that brief exchange, the man and the troll moved. They turned their backs without the slightest delay, as though they had planned it in advance—

And fled the room without even looking back. Or rather, they tried to.

─ Oh my, where are you two hurrying off to like that?

But they couldn’t escape.

“Fuck me.”

Jean Baudri, the intellectual and refined clergyman troll, muttered under his breath. It was the most troll-like sound a troll could make. Solomon agreed completely.

“……We’re screwed.”

Because the door they needed to escape through was gone.

The door that should have been there just moments ago had vanished. Not that it was locked, but as though such a door had never existed in the first place.

Like the victim cliché in a horror movie about evil spirits.