Japanese Tales of Mystery & Imagination

by EDOGAWA RAMPO

  Holding her breasts, she suddenly uttered a piercing cry. Then she looked at her husband intently, like a child gazing at a broken doll. He was still looking at the same spot on the ceiling, taking absolutely no notice of her.

  "He is thinking again," she told herself.

  Even at the best of times it was an eerie thing to see a man whose only organ of communication was his eyes lie there with those eyes fixed forever on just one spot, and now how much more so in the middle of the night. Of course his mind has become dull, she thought, but for a man so completely crippled as he, there undoubtedly exists a world completely different from any I can ever know. Is it a pleasant world, she wondered. Or is it a hell. . . .

  For a while she closed her eyes again and tried to sleep, but she found it impossible. She felt as if flames were whirling around her with roaring sounds, and her mind ached. Time and again various illusions and hallucinations would wantonly appear and then vanish. Into them were woven the manifold tragic happenings which had changed her normal life into this miserable existence since three years back. . . .

  When she first received the news that her husband had been wounded and would be sent back to Japan, she felt indescribably relieved to know that at least his life had been spared. The wives of his fellow officers even envied her "good fortune."

  Presently the distinguished services rendered by her husband were written up in the newspapers. She knew at the time that his wounds were serious, but she never imagined for a moment that he had been crippled to such an extent.

  Never would she forget the first time she was permitted to visit her husband in the garrison hospital. His face was completely covered with bandages, and there was nothing but his eyes, gazing at her vacantly. She remembered how bitterly she wept when they told her that his wounds and the shock had left him both deaf and dumb. Little did she dream, however, of the horrible discoveries that were still to come.

  The head physician, dignified as he was, tried to appear deeply sympathetic and turned up the white bed-sheets cautiously. "Try to be brave!" were his very words.

  She tried to clasp her husband's hands—but could find no arms. Then she discovered that his legs were also missing; he was like a ghost in a bad dream. Beneath the sheets there lay only his trunk, bandaged grotesquely, like a mummy.

  She tried to speak, and then to scream, but no sounds came out of her throat. She, too, had been rendered momentarily speechless. God! Was this all that was left of the husband she loved so dearly! He was no longer a man, but only a plaster bust.

  It was after she had been shown to another room by the head physician and nurses that she completely broke down, bursting into loud weeping despite the presence of the others. Throwing herself down on a chair, she buried her head in her arms and wept till her tear-cups ran utterly dry.

  "It was a real miracle," she heard the physician say. "No other person could possibly have survived. Of course it's all the result of Colonel Kitamura's wonderful surgical skill—he's a real genius with the operating knife. There's probably no other such example in any garrison hospital in any country."

  Thus the physician tried to console Tokiko. The word "miracle" was continually repeated, but she did not know whether to rejoice or grieve.

  About half a year had passed in a dream. The "living corpse" of Lieutenant Sunaga was eventually escorted home by his commanding officer and comrades in arms, and everyone made quite a fuss over him.

  In the days that followed, Tokiko nursed him with tender care, shedding endless tears. Relatives, neighbors, and friends all urged her on to greater self-sacrifice, constantly dinning their definitions of "honor" and "virtue" into her ears. Her husband's meager pension was scarcely enough to keep them, so when Major General Washio, Sunaga's former commanding officer at the front, kindly offered to let them live in the detached cottage on his country estate free of charge, they accepted gratefully.

  From then on their daily life became routine, but this too brought maddening loneliness. The quiet environment, of course, was a prime cause. Another was the fact that people were no longer interested in the story of the crippled war hero and his dutiful wife. It was stale news; new personalities and events were commanding their interest.

  Her husband's relatives seldom came to call. On her side, both her parents were dead, while all her sisters and brothers were indifferent to her sorrows. As a result the poor crippled soldier and his faithful wife lived alone in the solitary cottage in the country, completely isolated from the outside world. But even this state of affairs would not have been so bad if one of them had not been like a doll made of clay.

  Lieutenant Sunaga was at first quite confused. Although aware of his tragic plight, his gradual return to normal health brought with it feelings of remorse, melancholy, and complete despair.

  Whatever Tokiko and her husband said to each other was through the medium of the written word. The first words he wrote were "newspaper" and "decoration." By the first he meant that he wanted to see the clippings of the papers which had carried the story of his glorious record; and by "decoration" he was asking to see the Order of the Golden Kite, Japan's highest military decoration, which he had been awarded. These had been the first things Major General Washio had thrust before his eyes when he had recovered consciousness at the hospital, and he remembered them.

  After that the crippled man often wrote the same words and asked for the two items, and each time Tokiko held them before him, he gazed long at them. Tokiko felt rather silly while he read the newspapers over and over, but she did derive some pleasure from the look of deep satisfaction in her husband's eyes. Often she held the clippings and the decoration until her hands became quite numb.

  As time passed, Lieutenant Sunaga became bored with the term "honor." After a while he no longer asked for the relics of his war record. Instead, his requests turned more and more frequently toward food, for despite his deformity, his appetite grew ever larger. In fact, he was as greedy for food as a patient recovering from some alimentary disorder. If Tokiko did not immediately comply with his request, he would give vent to his temper by crawling about madly on the mats.

  At first Tokiko felt a vague fear of his uncouth manners and disliked them, but in time she grew used to his strange whims. With the two completely shut up in the solitary cottage in the country, if one of them had not compromised, life would have become unbearable. So, like two animals caged in a zoo, they pursued their lonely existence.

  Thus, from every viewpoint, it was only natural that Tokiko should come to look upon her husband as a big toy, to be played with as she pleased. Furthermore, her crippled husband's greed had infected her own character to the point where she too had become extremely avaricious.

  There seemed to be but one consolation for her miserable "career" as nursemaid to a cripple: the very fact that this poor, strange thing which not only could neither speak nor hear, but could not even move freely by itself, was by no means made of wood or clay, but was alive and real, possessing every human emotion and instinct— this was a source of boundless fascination for her. Still further, those round eyes of his, which comprised his only expressive organ, speaking so sadly sometimes, and sometimes so angrily—these too had a strange charm. The pitiful thing was that he was incapable of wiping away the tears which those eyes could still shed. And of course, when he was angry, he had no power to threaten her other than that of working himself into an abnormal heat of frenzy. These fits of wrath usually came on whenever he was reminded that he would never again be able to succumb, of his own free will, to the one overwhelming temptation which was always lurking within him.

  Meanwhile, Tokiko also managed to find a secondary source of pleasure in tormenting this helpless creature whenever she felt like it. Cruel? Yes! But it was fun —great fun!. . .

  These happenings of the past three years were vividly reflected inside Tokiko's closed eyelids, as though cast by a magic lantern, the fragmentary memories forming themselves in her mind and fading away one after the
other. This was a phenomenon which occurred whenever there was something wrong with her body. On such occasions, especially during her monthly periods of physical indisposition, she would maltreat the poor cripple with real venom. The barbarity of her actions had grown wilder and more intense with the progress of time. She was, of course, fully aware of the criminal. nature of her deeds, but the wild forces rising inside her body were beyond the control of her will.

  Suddenly she felt that the interior of the room was becoming darker, that another nightmare was about to overtake her. But this time she determined to see it with her eyes open. The thought frightened her, and her heart began to skip beats. But she calmed her mind and persuaded herself that she was prone to imagine things. The wick of the lamp at her bedside was spent, and the light was flickering. Climbing out of bed, she turned the wick high.

  Quickly the room brightened up, but the light of the lamp was blurred in colors of orange, and this increased her uneasiness. By the same light Tokiko looked again at her husband's face, and was startled to see that his eyes were still fixed on the same spot on the ceiling, not having changed position even a fraction of an inch!

  "What could he possibly be thinking about?" she asked herself with a shiver. Although she felt extremely uneasy, hers was even more a feeling of intense hatred of his attitude. Her hatred again awakened all her inherent desires to torment him—to make him suffer.

  Suddenly, without any warning, she threw herself upon her husband's bed, grabbed his shoulders with her large hands, and began to shake him furiously.

  Startled by this sudden violence, the crippled man began to tremble. Biting his lip, he stared at her fiercely.

  "Are you angry? Why do you look at me like that?" Tokiko asked sarcastically. "It's no use getting angry, you know! You're quite at my mercy."

  Sunaga could not reply, but the words that might have come to his lips showed from his penetrating eyes.

  "Your eyes are mad!" Tokiko shrieked. "Don't stare at me like that!"

  On a sudden impulse she thrust her fingers roughly into his eyes, shouting: "Now try to stare if you can!"

  The cripple struggled desperately, his torso writhing and twisting, and his intense suffering finally gave him the strength to lift his trunk and send her sprawling backward.

  Quickly Tokiko regained her balance and turned to resume her attack. But suddenly she stopped. . . . Horror of horrors! From both her husband's eyes blood was spurting; his face, twitching in pain, had the pallor of a boiled octopus.

  Tokiko was paralyzed with fear. She had cruelly deprived her husband of his only window to the outside world. What was left to him now? Nothing, absolutely nothing. . .just his mass of ghastly flesh, in total darkness.

  Stumbling downstairs, she staggered out into the dark night barefooted. Passing through the back gate of the garden, she rushed out onto the village road, running as though in a nightmare pursued by specters—fast and yet seeming not to move.

  Eventually she reached her destination—the lone house of a country doctor. After hearing her hysterical story, the doctor accompanied her back to the cottage.

  In the room her husband was still struggling violently, suffering the tortures of hell. The doctor had often heard of the limbless man, but had never seen him before; he was shocked beyond words by the gruesome sight of the cripple. After giving him an injection to relieve his pain, he dressed the blinded eyes and then hurried away, not even asking for any explanation of the "accident,"

  By the time Lieutenant Sunaga stopped struggling it was already dawn. Caressing his chest tenderly, Tokiko shed big drops of tears and implored: "Forgive me, my darling. Please forgive me."

  The lump of flesh was stricken with fever, its red face swollen and its heart beating rapidly.

  Tokiko did not leave the bedside of her patient all day, not even to take any food. She kept squeezing out wet cloths for his head; and in the brief intervals she wrote "Forgive me" again and again on her husband's chest with her finger. She was utterly unconscious of the passing of time.

  By evening the patient's temperature showed a slight drop, and his breathing seemed to return to normal. Tokiko surmised he must also have regained consciousness, so again she wrote "Forgive me" on his chest. The lump of flesh, however, made no attempt to make any kind of a reply. Although he had lost his eyes, it would still have been possible for him to answer her signals in some way, either by shaking his head or by smiling. But his facial expression remained unchanged. By the sound of his breathing she knew for sure he was not asleep, but it was impossible to tell whether he had also lost the ability to understand the message traced on his chest or was only keeping silent out of anger.

  While gazing at him, Tokiko could not help trembling with terror. This "thing" that lay before her was indeed a living creature. He had lungs and a stomach as well as a heart. Nevertheless, he could not see anything; he could not hear anything; he could not speak a word; he had no limbs. His world was a bottomless pit of perpetual silence and boundless darkness. Who could imagine such a terrible world? With what could the feelings of a man living in that abyss be compared? Surely he must crave to shout for help at the top of his lungs. . .to see shapes, no matter how dim. . . to hear voices, even the faintest of whispers . . . to cling to something . . . to grasp. . . .

  Suddenly Tokiko burst out crying with remorse over the irreparable crime she had committed. Fear and sorrow gnawing at her heart, she left her husband there and ran to the Washios in the main house: she wanted to see a human face—any face that was not deformed.

  The old general listened anxiously to her long confession, made incoherent at times by fits of weeping, and when she was through he was momentarily too astounded to utter a word. After a while he said he would visit the lieutenant immediately.

  As it was already dark, a lantern was prepared for the old man. He and Tokiko plodded through the grassy field toward the cottage, both silent and engrossed in their own thoughts.

  When they finally reached the ill-omened room the old man looked inside and then exclaimed: "Nobody's here! Where's he gone?"

  Tokiko, however, was not alarmed. "He must be in his bed," she said.

  She went to the bed in the semi-gloom, but found it empty.

  "No!" she cried. "He—he isn't here!"

  "He couldn't have gone out," reasoned the general. "We must search the house."

  After a thorough search of every nook and corner had proved quite fruitless, General Washio had to admit that his former subordinate was indeed not in the house.

  Suddenly Tokiko discovered a penciled scrawl on one of the paper doors.

  "Look!" she said with a puzzled frown, pointing to the scrawl. "What's this?"

  They both stooped to look. After a few moments spent deciphering the almost illegible scribble, she made out the message.

  "I forgive you!" it said.

  Tears immediately welled in Tokiko's eyes, and she began to feel dizzy. It was evident that her husband had managed to drag his truncated body across the room, picked up a pencil from the low desk in his mouth, laboriously written the curt message, and then—

  Suddenly Tokiko came alive with action.

  "Quick!" she shouted, her face paling. "He may be committing suicide!"

  The Washio household was quickly aroused, and soon servants came out with lanterns to search the field. Hither and thither they looked, trampling down the weeds between the main house and the cottage.

  Tokiko anxiously followed old man Washio in the dim light of the lantern which he held. While she walked the words "I forgive you" kept leaping to her mind; clearly this was his answer to the message she had traced on his chest. Turning the words over and over in her mind, she came to realize that his message also meant: "I'm going to die. But do not grieve, because I have forgiven you!"

  What a heartless witch she had been! In her mind's eye she could vividly see her limbless husband falling down the stairs and crawling out into the darkness. She felt that she would choke with so
rrow and remorse.

  After they had walked about for some time, a horrible thought struck her. Turning to the general, she ventured: "There is an old well hereabouts, isn't there?"

  "Yes," he replied gravely, immediately understanding what she meant.

  Both of them hurried in a new direction.

  "The well should be around here, I think," said the old man finally, as if talking to himself. Then he held up his lantern to spread as much light as possible.

  Just then Tokiko was struck by some uncanny intuition. She stopped in her tracks. Straining her ears, she heard a faint rustling sound like that made by a snake crawling through the grass.

  She and the old man looked toward the sound, and almost simultaneously they both became transfixed with fear.

  In the dim light a black thing was wriggling sluggishly in the thick growth of weeds. Suddenly the thing raised its head and crawled forward, scraping the ground with projections like excrescences at the four corners of its body. It advanced stealthily inch by inch.

  After a time the upraised head suddenly disappeared into the ground, dragging its whole body after it. A few seconds later they heard the faint sound of a splash far beneath the ground in what seemed like the bowels of the earth.

  Tokiko and the general finally mustered enough courage to step forward . . . and there, hidden in the grass, they found the old well, its black mouth gaping.

  Strangely enough, in those timeless moments it had been the image of a caterpillar which had flashed again into Tokiko's mind—a bloated creature slowly creeping along the dead branch of a gaunt tree on a dark night . . . inching its way to the end of the branch and then suddenly dropping off . . . falling down... down into the boundless darkness beneath.