Heat 8: White
Ogata sighs with relief when his opponent finally concedes. His fingers itch for a cigarette; the other man had drawn out the game to its bitter end long after it was obvious who'd won. A sore loser, Ogata supposes, who couldn't admit the loss and save everyone grief. For a man who claimed he was no amateur, it was an immensely irritating attitude.
He's shaken from his thoughts by the clacking of go stones against wood, the sounds reminding him that a game wasn't truly over until the territory was counted. When he looks up though, he barely manages to choke out a strangled "What--," because there is no resigned opponent shifting pieces but unseen forces moving them instead. Tak tak tak, they echo through the room, chill him to the bones with a sudden sense of foreboding.
He understands why when across from him, the man begins screaming, and screaming, and he can't turn away as he watches the man's body twist and suck into the board with a meaty slurp.
Afterwards, he runs to the toilet and throws up.
------
He tries burning it at first. When the fire neither makes a mark nor even catches, he tries to bury the board instead, in a park three blocks from his apartment. The whole process is done furtively, uneasy glances over his shoulder as he digs, as though he is burying a corpse - though when he thinks about it, (though he tries to avoid doing so), one could say he was. The next morning it sits on his kitchen table, clean as a whistle and unaccountably smug. By the end of the week he has taken to ignoring it, because every attempt at ridding him of the object has failed. Shindou finds him quietly going mad when the boy - a young man now, really - drops by for their appointed game.
"Man, you don't look so great," Shindou says, as soon as he walks through Ogata's door. "Are you sick or something? We can postpone if you want.
On the edge of frantic, Ogata shakes his head. "No! No, let's begin." He pulls out the board, throws a quick glance to where the cursed thing rests, and gestures at Shindou to nigiri.
They're evenly matched, allowing him to shove his problems away for the duration of the game. When Shindou concedes with a groan and a wry grin, Ogata is so wholly involved there's barely even a twinge of worry.
Until he hears tak tak tak and Shindou across the board gaping, both of the younger man's hands in plain sight and neither touching the board.
"How did," and he interrupts himself to look at where he'd placed the board. It's still there. But it's also apparently right in front of him. It wants to be used, he thinks, right before Shindou gives a bitten-off yelp and is gone, too.
------
Akira comes to see him at home when he refuses to play any more. The other man takes in his rumpled appearance, his twitching hands and his almost compulsive chain-smoking, but doesn't say anything. "Do you believe in the supernatural?" he asks Akira, almost casually, and is surprised when Akira replies with an affirmative. He wouldn't have expected it of the boy. "Then you'll take it on my word that I can't play any more."
Akira merely cocks his head, listening - towards the go board, he realizes - and says, "Shindou-kun? Ah. Hello Shindou-kun. I see." The younger man sits down at the board and beckons him to do so as well. "Ogata-sensei, let's play."
When he loses, he gets a last glimpse of his student sitting in his empty house, calloused fingers brushing the board's surface, and he wonders what Akira, with so few people who could beat him, will do.
Then he too disappears.