The Man From Taured: A thrilling suspense novel by the new master of horror (World's Scariest Legends Book 3)

by Jeremy Bates

  “Yes, yes,” Supa-san said, nodding. “Yes, I know.”

  “If you work for a whisky company,” Wacky said, scowling, “why did you tell us you are an ambassador?”

  “Because I am an ambassador, madame,” I said. “A brand ambassador. A whisky ambassador, if you will. My job is to promote Glenfiddich throughout East Asia.”

  “Then you are not a real ambassador,” Wacky said with a heavy dose of asperity. “Do not play games with us, Mr. Green.”

  I didn’t see any purpose getting into a war of semantics with the woman, so I didn’t reply.

  Wakako Shimizu ran her tongue along the front of her teeth, distending her upper lip, and for a terrible moment I feared she was gathering saliva to spit on me. Thankfully, she only asked, “Have you been to Japan before?”

  “Yes, many times,” I said.

  “When was your last trip?”

  “Two months ago.”

  “In May?”

  “Yes, in May.”

  “What day?”

  “The exact day?” Seeing her preparing to pounce, I added quickly, “It was near the end of the month. Maybe the twenty-fifth? Or the twenty-sixth?”

  “Where did you stay?” she asked.

  “The Park Hyatt in Shinjuku. Where I should be right now enjoying the city views.” This image hit me hard, as the possibility of getting out of this airport and to the hotel any time soon seemed more distant than ever. Suddenly I just wanted to go home. “Mes amis,” I said, trying to sound reasonable, “maybe you have me confused for someone else—?”

  “Quiet—”

  “Do not tell me to be quiet!” I bellowed, slamming my hands on the table hard enough to make it jump. I’d had enough of the woman’s truculent attitude. I was not a criminal. I was innocent. And not only that, I was tired, stressed, hungry…and simply fed up with this whole charade. “You have been holding me against my will for more than fourteen hours,” I went on. “You are refusing to tell me the reason, other than it concerns some nebulous immigration matter. Well, that is not good enough. I am not answering any more of your questions until someone tells me what is going on!”

  Supa-san and Wakako Shimizu exchanged glances. Supa-san nodded slightly. Wacky shrugged.

  Taking his handkerchief from a pocket, the Special Inquiry Officer dabbed a fresh sheen of perspiration from his forehead. “You have been very patient with us, Mr. Green,” he said, meeting my eyes. “I thank you for that. But I must ask you one more time. Where are you from?”

  “My country?” I nearly rolled my eyes. “I told you. I am Tauredian. I am from Taured. Why is that so hard to believe?”

  “Because, Mr. Green,” he said, pausing almost dramatically, “the country you mention, the country of Taured, does not exist.”

  Chapter 8

  I must have sat there for about five seconds simply staring at the immigration officers. Then I issued a stiff laugh. “Taured does not exist? Taured? T-a-u-r-e-d?”

  “You seem surprised,” Wacky said.

  “This is ludicrous! Of course it exists. Is that what all this is about?” I felt a strange mix of relief and fury. The former because the unknown had finally become known. The latter because I’d been through hell all because these boneheads had failed Geography 101.

  “We have checked thoroughly,” Supa-san said. “There is no country named Taured. Not in Europe. Not anywhere.”

  “Mes amis,” I said, finding it impossible not to sound patronizing. “You have my passport. It is from Taured.”

  “Where did you get it?” Wacky asked.

  “The Tauradian embassy in Manila! It was issued February 2, 2016.”

  “Taured does not—”

  “Yes, it does!” I exploded. “Get me an atlas. I will show you where it is.”

  “We don’t have an atlas,” Supa-san said, “but we can use Google Maps on my phone.”

  “Type Taured.” I spelled it for him once again.

  While he typed the country into his phone, I began tapping my right foot. This was incredible. All this drama when all they had to do was a simple online search.

  “Taured Sa…” Supa-san said. “Rue Siggy Vue, Luxembourg.”

  “What are you talking about? It is just Taured. T-a-u-r-e-d.”

  “That is what I typed. Taured Sa is the only result that appears.”

  I clamped my jaw. “Can I see your phone, please?”

  He passed the device across the table to me. I closed the map app and swiped to his homepage. In the address bar, I typed “TAURED” and tapped Enter. The internet browser opened, displaying numerous results. The descriptions for the webpages were all written in Japanese. I could read hiragana and katagana but not kanji, the characters Japan adopted from China, so little I was seeing made sense.

  In the URL bar I typed “WORLD MAP IMAGES” and pressed Enter.

  This time a number of colored maps appeared. A couple of taps later and I was looking at a detailed map of Europe. I zoomed in on it—and blinked in confusion. The principality of Taured was incorrectly labeled Andorra. My immediate thought was that the map had been Photoshopped. I was in some conspiracy, and the immigration officers were in on it too. Yet this thought was instantly followed up by a second: I did the search. I chose the map.

  I tapped the Back button, scrolled down, and randomly clicked a different map.

  Taured was Andorra.

  Or rather, Andorra was Taured.

  “Are you okay, Mr. Green?” Supa-san asked me.

  His voice sounded far away. I didn’t answer him. I was feeling hot, lost, and muddled.

  “Mr. Green…? Mr. Green…?”

  I finally looked up. “Is this a joke?” I asked without any real conviction, for I knew it wasn’t. Without waiting for a response, I added, “Taured is there. The country is on the map. But it is called…Andorra.”

  “Yes, Andorra,” Wacky said, eyes smoldering. “We know Andorra. Are you from Andorra, Mr. Green?”

  “I am from…where Andorra is on the map…but…” I shook my head. “My country is called Taured. I cannot understand this…”

  “Is your passport counterfeit, Mr. Green?”

  “No—no, it is real. Why would I…? If you think Taured does not exist, why would I…?” I could barely get my thoughts, let alone my words, to make sense. “Why would I ever make a counterfeit passport for a country that does not exist?”

  “So you admit Taured does not exist?”

  “No! I am saying…”

  A sick, empty feeling rushed through me. I looked dully at the two immigration officers. It was like looking at a pair of photographs. They didn’t seem real.

  “What is happening?” I asked quietly, the question—my voice—sounding alien in my ears.

  “We’re waiting for you to tell us that,” Wacky said.

  Chapter 9

  In one of the first clear childhood memories I could recall, I was kneeling in the sandbox in the backyard of my family home, shaded from the sun beneath the canopy of an old walnut tree, playing with my Tim Mee plastic army men. I moved a prone green rifleman through the sand, sneaking him up behind a blue minesweeper. Before he could strike, a blue bazookaman fired a rocket. I made an exploding sound, vibrating my lips the way you might when blowing air from your mouth underwater. I threw the green rifleman up in the air, mumbling that he was dead now—at the same time as I spotted movement from the corner of my eye. A fox was slinking through my mother’s flowerbed not a dozen feet away from me. It pushed past a patch of daisies and came right up to the sandbox, its oversized triangular ears erect, its pointed snout sniffing the ground, following some invisible scent trail. It passed to within a few feet of me, unperturbed by my presence, and continued on its way across the green lawn, disappearing into the forest that bordered the backyard. It had been such a bizarre yet magical encounter that foxes became my favorite animal for years thereafter.

  Another early childhood memory was of my fourth or fifth birthday party. I had invited
about ten of my classmates over to my house. While we were sitting around the dining room table eating chocolate cake and drinking cola, a girl named Eloise had an allergic reaction to an insect bite and was taken to the hospital. Later that afternoon, when my mother and I paid her a visit, we found her in a room with other kids, sitting on a mechanical bed, her face red and puffy. When I gave her the loot bag I’d brought for her, she kissed me on the cheek—and she became my favorite friend for years thereafter.

  I had a hundred more equally vivid memories of growing up in Taured, a thousand: trick-or-treating in a Superman costume on a cool October Halloween night; sneaking down the staircase in my pajamas before my parents woke to see how many presents lay beneath the Christmas tree on Christmas morning; the family trips to our lakeside cabin in the summers; swimming in the alpine water and catching frogs along the mucky shores; camping with my brothers and buying homemade pizza from a friendly family in one of the villages we passed. And let us not forget the night I should have died in the mountains.

  How could I have all these memories if Taured didn’t exist?

  Simple: It did exist. It had to exist.

  Supa-san was saying something to me. I focused on him.

  “Do you have other identification on you?”

  Nodding belatedly, I took out my wallet and slid the plastic cards free: a Manila driver’s license; an Alien Certificate Registration card (a requirement for all foreign nationals living in the Philippines to hold); a debit card; two credit cards (one MasterCard, one VISA); and a green PhilHealth card. “They were all issued to me in the Philippines,” I said.

  Wakako Shimizu picked up my driver’s license. “Gaston Green,” she said. “The same name on your passport.”

  “That is my name.”

  “May we make copies of these?” Supa-san asked.

  “Go ahead.”

  He collected the six cards and stacked them neatly on his clipboard.

  “Do you have an alias, Mr. Green?” Wacky asked me.

  “Yes,” I said.

  An eagerness animated her expression. She leaned forward slightly.

  “Mr. Brown,” I told her.

  “Mr. Brown…?” she repeated.

  “If I am in a particularly bad mood,” I went on, “I use Mr. Blue. If I am in a sunny mood, I use Mr. Yellow. Angry—Mr. Red.”

  Wakako Shimizu’s face darkened, while Supa-san had enough of a sense of humor to chuckle to himself.

  “This is not the place to tell jokes,” Wacky quipped.

  “I do not have any aliases,” I told her with a pleasant smile.

  “You don’t have an alternative passport—with a different name on it?”

  “No, I do not have an alternative passport with a different name on it. The only one I have is the one that was taken from me.”

  “And that is the passport you used to board flight JL077?”

  “Yes,” I answered.

  “Our problem, Mr. Green,” Supa-san said, “is that we can’t find a record of anyone with your name or passport number having purchased a ticket for flight JL077.”

  “I purchased it online from the same website I always use. With my credit card—the MasterCard. Look up my transactions.”

  “We will do that,” he assured me.

  “Also, my seat was 6-A. That is connected to my ticket. You can look that up too.”

  “6-A,” he repeated, jotting the information onto his clipboard.

  Wakako Shimizu was eyeing me expectantly.

  “What?” I asked her. “I do not know what else to tell you. I checked in at the Japan Airlines counter at Ninoy Aquino in Manila with the passport you confiscated. I had a drink in the Sakura Lounge. I went to my gate and boarded the plane. That is it. No aliases. No fake passports—”

  Wacky cut me off, demanding, “How is it there is no record of a passenger named Gaston Green on the flight?”

  “I do not know! But why would I ever travel on a fake passport, Shimizu-san?” It was the first time I had addressed Wakako Shimizu by her name. Doing so left an unpleasant taste in my mouth. “Actually, no,” I added, “why would I travel on a fake passport from a country that does not exist?”

  “It was a mistake.”

  “That would be a pretty stupid mistake to make, yes?”

  “Mistakes happen, even stupid ones.”

  “All right,” I said. “Let us imagine I commissioned a fake passport, and both the counterfeiter and I were too stupid to realize it was from a bogus country. Let us accept that premise for the moment, mes amis. The question remains: Why would I get a fake passport in the first place? Why would I not simply use my ‘real’ passport?”

  “Because you feared it might raise a red flag,” she opined. “Passengers often travel on fake passports if they are involved in illicit activity, or have criminal records and are banned by certain countries.”

  “You think I am a criminal? A murderer, perhaps?” I shook my head. “To be honest, madame, if I was a murderer on the run, Japan, with its homogenous population, would not be my first choice of places to blend in.”

  “I did not say you were a murderer, Mr. Green,” Wacky said. “But it is a fact that we stop people from Southeast Asian countries—such as the Philippines—every day for attempting to bring drugs into Japan.”

  “Ah! I see now. You think I am smuggling drugs? The only problem with this hypothesis is that I am not. You can search me, if you want. Search my suitcase too, if you want.”

  The immigration officers appeared surprised.

  “Your suitcase?” Supa-san said. “What suitcase?”

  “My suitcase. Merde, do not tell me it has been sitting down there at the baggage claim all this time? Nobody has collected it for me?”

  “There was no unclaimed luggage from Flight JL077, Mr. Green.”

  “It is bright red. Ben Sherman. You cannot miss it.”

  “Do you take any prescription medication, Mr. Green?” Wacky asked me.

  “No,” I replied tightly to the pejorative question.

  “Have you taken any illicit or illegal drugs within the last twenty-four hours?”

  I was about to offer a glib retort, but I hesitated. Could I be tripping out on some unknown drug? Obviously I would know if I were presently high on LSD. But could someone else have slipped me something else? Something that messed subtly with my thinking…something that…what? Made me think I was from a country that didn’t exist?

  Ridiculous, I thought dismissively.

  “If you know of any drugs capable of making one believe he is from a country that does not exist, Shimizu-san, please let me know.”

  Wacky’s lips puckered distastefully. “Do you have any mental illnesses, Mr. Green?” she asked.

  “You mean like Alzheimer’s? I am forty-two years old.”

  “There are many forms of dementia—”

  “I have never been diagnosed with a brain disease, madame,” I said. “Nor do I take mind-altering drugs. In fact, I would go so far as to offer that I am in perfect health.”

  Supa-san spoke to Wakako Shimizu in Japanese at length, then passed her my identity cards.

  She stood. “I am going to photocopy these now,” she told me.

  “I know,” I said, using Japanese for the first time. “And you are also going to confirm my seat number on flight JL077 and check the Unclaimed Baggage Center for my suitcase.”

  Her beady eyes narrowed. “You can speak Japanese?”

  “One other thing you might want to do while you are up and about?” I offered. “Check the passenger manifest for a woman named Hallie Smith.”

  “Hallie Smith? Who is this?”

  “She was in the SkySuite next to mine when I boarded the flight in Manila. After lunch was served, I took a nap. When I woke up, a fat man was in her seat. I do not know where she went. I did not see her again.”

  “This…man…was still in the seat when the plane landed in Japan then?” Supa-san asked.

  “Yes. But I do not kn
ow his name. He sounded American, if that helps.”

  Wakako Shimizu exchanged a final glance with Supa-san, then left the room.

  “How did you learn Japanese, Mr. Green?” Supa-san asked me.

  “Books,” I told him. “I enjoy learning different languages. I am a…I think the English word is a polyglot.”

  “How many languages can you speak?”

  “French, Spanish, and English fluently. I can get by with most of East Asia’s non-tonal dialects, but the tonal ones still give me trouble.”

  “How many times have you been to Japan?”

  “More than one hundred, I would guess.”

  “For business?”

  “Always for business.”

  “You must have many business associates here then, yes? Is there one we can call to confirm your identity?”

  “Yes, of course!” I said, surprised I hadn’t thought of this. “I have an event at a restaurant in Ginza on Thursday. It is a whisky dinner. I pair whisky cocktails with the food that is served. I have been in touch with the chef all week. He is a friend.”

  “Do you know his telephone number?”

  “It is your lucky day, monsieur, as I have a very good memory for numbers.” I picked up his phone from the table and dialed the chef’s number. A prerecorded female voice, speaking Japanese, informed me the call had not been successful. Frowning, I hung up and said, “Perhaps I have confused his number. But that does not matter. I can find the restaurant online.” I performed a quick internet search for Matsuoka and dialed the telephone number on the contact page of the restaurant’s website. When a woman answered, I asked in Japanese to speak to Toru Matsuoka.

  “Unfortunately,” she replied, “Matsuoka-sama is in Osaka right now.”

  “Osaka?” I said, surprised. “For how long?”

  “Until the end of the month.”

  “The end of the month! He is supposed to be at Matsuoka this Thursday. He is doing a dinner with me.”

  “Who am I speaking with, please?”