If i had to guess I would believe that the brother never actually came back to the town and the family which our protagonist was talking to was just puppets controlled by Jean-Pierre. The key factor her appears to be the puppet at the end who somehow must have been in control of all the strings.

Being about a brother that comes back to town and mysteriously his family are controlled by strings like puppets. The Marionette Mansion story also has issues but at least there is more to work with when it comes to that story. At most we can speculate and even with that we have far too little information. Who was the doctor and why was he connected with the stone? Frankly I feel the horror of the story fails because we as the audience just know far too little of the situation to get what is even happening. Yet the victim can still somehow live which makes me wonder just how blood circulation works when the body is full of holes. This hole disease does create holes in the body as shown by the last victim who even had one of his eyeballs falling out of it’s socket due to a hole under his eye. So what was this girl so special that she lived so long with the disease? The disease itself doesn’t make much sense either and while Ito does tend to stretch credibility to make his monsters come to life, here is another example where I feel he pushing things too far. For one they state that the girl next door had been afflicted with this hole disease for all her life and yet when other people are infected they die within days.

The story itself was relatively simple but I can’t help but notice some logical inconsistencies. In the first story we had a tale about a jade stone which cursed people with a disease that causes holes to open up on their body. Today’s stories fell a bit flat for me as one of Ito’s tendencies to not explain his horrors actually somewhat backfired.

Junji ito phantom mansion