Paprika
Page 32
Tokita casually brushed the still-arguing security guard to one side. “Well, that’s him out of the way. And in we all go.”
Still wrangling and quarreling, the gathered throng surged through the automatic glass doors into the central lobby. Following Tokita’s lead, they headed for the Meeting Room usually reserved for press conferences.
“Wait! You may not enter!”
The middle-aged Senior Nurse Sugi glared at them as she blocked their path. Atsuko pushed her aside and, breaking free from the human tide, raced up the central staircase to the first floor. She was worried about Noda and Konakawa, having left them there on waking from her dream. Could they still be in Osanai’s lab, where she’d left them in the dream – which, for them, was reality? Could they still be trying to open the lead storage box with the DC Minis inside? Atsuko held herself responsible for them, as if they were her own sons. She felt a harrowing sense of shame and regret that they, as upstanding members of society, had gone to such undignified lengths to help her.
Osanai’s lab was deserted, the chemical storage box gone. They must have taken it away to open it. Atsuko felt relieved, but at the same time gripped by another nagging worry, something she hadn’t considered in her dream. Hashimoto had escaped to the waking world while pursued by the grotesque Lord Amon. She had definitely heard his dying cries. Her fear that he might actually be dead was no longer unrealistic. In fact, it was more or less certain, and for that reason, it had to be confirmed.
The research lab newly assigned to Hashimoto was across the corridor from Osanai’s and a little farther toward the stairs. On its door was a plate bearing Hashimoto’s name. Atsuko had no idea whether he was inside. Judging from the time of his appearance in her dream, he was more likely to be snoozing in this lab than sleeping in his apartment.
Atsuko overcame her fear and resolutely opened the door. Inside, her eyes met a sight that turned her stomach. An indeterminate mass of flesh was heaped there on the sofa, and it was definitely real. Her numbed mind gradually registered a pile of entrails spilling out of a lower abdomen, cascading down to the floor, a gaping red hole in a crotch with the genitals ripped out, a line of white ribs jutting from a bloody chest, an expressionless face so scorched by fire that it resembled a black mask. It was the pile of Hashimoto’s remains after the butchery meted out by Lord Amon. An ashen-gray languor started to swirl loosely inside Atsuko. She closed the door, overwhelmed by her own powerlessness.
Of course, Konakawa should be the first to hear of it. He was probably with Noda, but where were they? Atsuko wanted to keep the door locked until Konakawa had arrived, but lacked the brute courage to go back into the room and search that lurid bag of dripping guts, that glistening heap of barbecued mincemeat for the key, which Hashimoto must have had on his person. Atsuko headed back to the Meeting Room, convincing herself that it was all right. Nobody would enter Hashimoto’s room until the following morning.
By intentionally withholding the discovery of a murder, Atsuko knew she was sinking even deeper into guilt as a co-conspirator in evil. Even winning the Nobel Prize might have been part of that evil. Fortunately, though, she felt no such guilt about winning the Prize itself. She could therefore put on a brave face, drawing on her feminine ability to become impervious to evil as necessity demanded.
Atsuko waltzed into the Meeting Room as if nothing had happened. While expressing dissatisfaction at her absence, the reporters had reluctantly started questioning Tokita and Shima. Now they started to remonstrate and call out loudly to Atsuko, without even waiting for her to settle in her usual seat.
“Doctor Chiba. Doctor Chiba. If I might ask right away, could you explain why we were given that reception at the entrance just now?”
“What’s been going on here?”
“Did the Institute oppose your winning the Prize? Why did they try to block the press conference?”
“No, no, no. First of all, your reaction on winning the Prize.”
Employees in the Vice President’s faction had joined the journalists in the Meeting Room. They now stood in a line beside the podium, glaring at Atsuko and the others with looks of suppressed spite. Secretary-General Katsuragi sat impudently in his usual moderator’s chair, though no one had asked him to moderate anything.
Atsuko stood up. “I find this kind of attention most regrettable. It puts the spotlight only on myself and Doctor Tokita, and that goes entirely against my better wishes,” she started, then turned to face the group that stood beside the podium. “In fact, it goes without saying that our great honor in winning this prize could only have been achieved with the fullest cooperation of all our colleagues here in the Institute and the hospital. Though not all of them are here with us tonight, may I take this opportunity to extend my sincerest thanks to them.”
Atsuko bowed deeply; the group of six or seven shifted uneasily and pulled sour faces. Aware of the cameras trained on them, some grudgingly returned the bow.
“What were you doing when you heard news of the award?”
The question showed that the speaker had no interest in courtesies or niceties, but wanted only to drag a matter of lofty importance down to her own mundane level. It was the bespectacled female reporter in her thirties.
That’s right. It was when I was looking for the DC Minis. Before that I’d been fighting the griffin. So Inui must also have been asleep then. Is he still asleep now? Has he heard about the Prize in his dream? Was he dreaming when he gave the order not to let the journalists in?
“What were you doing when you heard news of the award?” As she repeated the question, the female reporter’s face began to look increasingly blank.
“I think Inui’s sleeping now,” Atsuko said to Tokita and Shima on either side of her, ignoring the gathered journalists.
“I know,” Tokita replied, thrusting out his bottom lip and on the verge of tears. “We’re in terrible danger. He appeared in my dream again, just now. It was a one-legged medieval creature called a sciapod, but its face was definitely Inui’s.”
“I saw something like that in my dream too.” Shima sighed. “A dwarf-like thing the size of a child, with legs growing straight out of its head.”
“Ah, that would be a glyro,” said Tokita. A monster suggested by some to be a demonic manifestation of the child Jesus.
“What were you doing – when you heard news – of the award?” the female reporter repeated once more with an indignant sneer, almost singing the words.
The lighting in the room started to grow red. The photographers tutted, more concerned with the loss of precious light than the advancing redness. The reporters started murmuring and looking around them.
“I SAID NO!” came a coarse, boorish voice that seemed to be screaming over a cheap loudspeaker. The voice came from far beyond the ceiling, way above the heads of those present, yea, even from the lofty heights of heaven. “I SAID, NO PRESS CONFERENCE!”
“It’s the Vice President,” Atsuko breathed as she stood again. Many of the reporters also stood in astonishment at the sheer volume of the voice.
“Who is it?”
“Such a loud voice! How rude can you get?!”
“Where’s it coming from?”
Everyone in the room felt a dull, heavy crash. Those who were standing started to stagger. The wall between the room and the corridor vibrated under a force suddenly and violently exerted from the other side, causing the air and floor inside the room to shake.
There was a second crash, then a third. The reddish light in the room was emanating from this wall, made incandescent with heat. The ferocity of the heat started to melt the wall. The wall cracked, and there, in the center of the white heat on the other side, something like a sunspot appeared. It expanded into a massive bull’s head, causing dizziness in those who saw it and giddiness in those who tried to stand. The long claws of a gigantic beast appeared through cracks in the wall. A hairy black arm smashed through the wall and into the room.
Now two more heads appeared
on the monster. One was the head of a ram, the other the purple head of a man. He had the face of a demon and was boiling with rage.
“GRRRROARRRRRGGGGHHHH!!!” roared the monster in a voice that covered the entire range of frequencies, including falsetto. The bespectacled female reporter gave out a lengthy and very bizarre scream as she rose to her feet, tried to run away, kept changing direction, then fainted, hitting her head heavily on the corner of a table as she fell rigid to the ground.
“It’s Asmodai!” screamed Atsuko.
Asmodai, the demon of wrath and destruction. Master of all malevolent deities and governor of hellish legions, a monster with the three heads of a bull, a ram, and a man, the tail of a serpent, and the webbed feet of a goose. The monster sat astride an infernal dragon and held a lance bearing the war standard of hell. The three heads simultaneously breathed fire from their mouths while they surveyed the room. A television cameraman engulfed in flames ran screaming toward the window.
Tokita grabbed the microphone and shouted loudly above the tumult of confused screams inside the room. “Everyone, listen! This is a creature called Asmodai! Stand firmly where you are and face it! To exorcise this demon, we must call its name loudly and clearly! Don’t be scared! Call its name!”
Tokita and Atsuko faced the monster and started chanting its name.
“Asmodai!”
“Asmodai!”
Shima joined them.
“Asmodai!”
“Asmodai!”
The monster’s human head started to distort as if in torment. The white-hot wall gradually cooled to gray. The monster stopped moving, its further advance into the room halted by the voices chanting its name.
“It’s in torment!”
“It doesn’t know what to do!”
The reporters also started chanting, the tempo of incantation gradually increasing under Tokita’s guidance.
“Asmodai!”
“Asmodai!”
Eventually, enclosed by the hardening wall, Asmodai turned to stone, his front half still protruding into the room. Bull, ram, and human were all transfixed in expressions of spite, mouths wide open with rage but quite bereft of life.
20
At about the same time, specters released from the realm of dreams started to appear all over the capital, wreaking havoc in the waking world. They caused real deaths, not fictional or dream deaths, and drove many more insane.
In various places around Shinanomachi, home to the Institute’s staff apartments and the Inui Clinic, tens, hundreds, or even thousands of Japanese dolls about a meter tall started walking toward every intersection from the darkness of every street corner. They quickly filled roads and pavements in the busy evening hour. The dolls all wore the same smile and the same clothes. They all walked in quick, short steps as if gliding along the ground, all in the same pose with arms outstretched on both sides, all issuing the same hollow chuckle.
“Ho ho ho. Ho ho ho.”
“Ho ho ho. Ho ho ho.”
It was this bizarre happening that caused many people to go mad. The dolls were typical examples of the “spooks” deeply rooted in the Japanese sentiment. In them resided a primordial fear that prickles the subconscious, a fear well known to all Japanese. The dolls formed an army that filled the roads and marched forward en masse. A woman who caught them in her headlights couldn’t stop laughing at the sight of them, causing an accident that killed two pedestrians.
Asmodai eventually disappeared, leaving the remains of the destroyed wall as his calling card. But then a gigantic Buddha tens of meters tall appeared in the garden in front of the Institute. With the merciful compassion of the enlightened one, it started to trample down the media personnel who came tumbling out of the Institute buildings. Several of them died the absurd death of being crushed by a nightmare. Then the Great Buddha began to chase their fleeing cars. From the main thoroughfare outside the Institute’s gates, it walked off in search of the nightlife district, where it started indiscriminately attacking any passersby and cars it found. As it continued on its trail of death and destruction, the Buddha emitted a vulgar laugh from the back of its throat, exposing the crimson lining of its mouth.
A flock of akbabas soared through the night sky. Akbabas are vultures that feed on the carcasses of the dead and are said to live for a thousand years. From time to time, these phantom birds of the night would swoop down to attack passersby in the nightlife district, or peck out the eyeballs of the Great Buddha’s trampled victims.
Sakurada-cho, seat of the Metropolitan Police Department, was visited by a variety of creatures diabolically converted from Christian-inspired constructs. One of them was the water-beast Hydra, which had a crown on each of its seven heads. Another was the buer; with five legs radiating from its head, it moved by rolling like a wheel. Then there was the fire demon Haborym, a monster with the three heads of a serpent, a cat, and a man. It was running around the center of Tokyo holding a firebrand and setting fire to everything it found. Fires started burning in wooden buildings, as well as parks and gardens where trees stood closely together. It was no coincidence that these phantoms all started appearing after Konakawa and Noda had taken the storage box containing the DC Minis back to the Department.
On arriving there, Konakawa had received reports of calamitous events occurring elsewhere in the capital, and had immediately sent Yamaji, Saka, and Ube to the Inui Clinic. He suspected that Inui was still sleeping there, sending phantoms from his dreams to the waking world as surrogates of himself. The three officers were joined by Tatsuo Noda, who would serve as a civilian adviser. This was an exceptional measure; Konakawa knew that the officers, equipped only with their waking awareness, wouldn’t be able to cope with Inui’s unpredictable attacks.
As the four drove up to the Inui Clinic, they found the place unlit and deserted. Doctors, nurses, and patients had probably fled in fright at the monstrous happenings, especially as the Clinic was at the center of them all. But now the Clinic itself seemed to house a spirit, an energy, like an organic being crouching quietly in the darkness. It even seemed to be breathing.
“It’s alive!” exclaimed Saka.
“It might attack us if we go in!” Even Ube was scared.
Yamaji turned to Noda with a questioning look.
“Let’s push on,” Noda said resolutely. “We’ve got to wake Inui. If we can do that, we’ll only need to deal with the remaining creatures.”
They’d started to suspect that the Clinic itself was Seijiro Inui, the entire building transformed into a living thing. They had found only a solitary DC Mini in the chemical storage box after wrenching it open at the Department. That left one more still in the possession of Inui; he was probably wearing it. In view of that, and the fact that the device made it harder for the wearer to wake up, this case wouldn’t be closed until they’d captured Inui and woken him.
The officers entered the Clinic with Noda. Passing through the mouth-like lobby, they proceeded along endlessly winding corridors and stairways lit only by red night lights, like a journey through the innards of a body, before at last finding themselves on the fourth floor. Yamaji’s research had already told them that Inui lived on the fourth floor, but it would have been too dangerous to use the elevator. Elevators commonly appear in dreams as symbols of sexual desires. As such, they thought it highly probable that the elevator would be used for an attack from the subconscious.
They broke down the door to Inui’s apartment and made their way to the bedroom. The bed emitted a continuous moan, yet Inui was not there. There was a lingering warmth in his bedding, as if he’d just gotten up. The four searched the spacious study and library, the not-so-spacious other rooms, and even the wards and examination rooms downstairs. But there was no sign of Inui anywhere.
“He could have burrowed through his dreams like a tunnel and escaped to a different place in reality,” said Noda. “I know that’s possible.”
“You’re kidding?!” Yamaji stared in disbelief. “In that
case, it’s futile to search. He could be anywhere.”
“No. There’s one place we could look,” Noda countered.
At around the same time, just before eleven o’clock that night, Atsuko was running along Gaien Higashi Avenue toward Roppongi, chased by phantoms. She’d been traveling with Tokita and Shima in her moss-green Marginal, but it had been crushed underfoot by the Great Buddha. The three had jumped clear moments before the giant foot descended. They’d quickly agreed that it would be best to run in separate directions, for it was patently obvious that the phantoms were targeting the three of them in particular. Tokita and Shima were rescued by separate media vehicles and driven off in different directions. Atsuko alone escaped on foot, deliberately moving away from the Institute’s apartments.
But phantoms from the realm of dreams don’t give up that easily. Wherever Atsuko went, wherever she ran, her relief at making a momentary escape would dissolve when they reappeared from the brightness of the nightlife district or the darkness of the night. Just as in a nightmare. These were specters and hobgoblins driven by subconscious energy. As such, they would attack haphazardly, to the detriment of passersby. As in a nightmare, they would change the scenery ahead to obstruct Atsuko’s progress. The roadside trees would wriggle and squirm, the road would bend and twist. An akbaba flew down and crashed into the window of a coffee shop in front of her.
Near the Roppongi crossing, a wheel came to attack her from the road. It was about a meter in diameter, and in its middle was an old man’s face leering at Atsuko. It was a buer. Atsuko had changed into Paprika without knowing it. She adopted a martial arts pose, poised to kick in self-defense. The buer passed beside her and disappeared into the wall of a building, leaving behind a laugh that sounded like coarse sand being rubbed together. Most of the nightlife revelers and passersby were blissfully unaware of the crazy things happening elsewhere that night. These people had nothing to do with Paprika in the first place, but were merely human-interest items who would get caught up in things and be haplessly killed or injured.