The Mists of Osorezan

by Zoe Drake

  Namiko shuffled back into the room, bearing a tray. She sat down, handed him the cool green tea in a white cup with no handle, and passed over a bowl of cut fruit.

  Weiss looked at the fruit and grinned. “What’s this, an apple for the teacher?”

  That laugh again. Charming. Perfectly charming.

  “Your English is excellent,” he said.

  “I spent three years in London, Professor.”

  “I might have guessed.”

  “I always had an interest in the place, and it was the Trinity that finally persuaded me to go.”

  “The Trinity?”

  Namiko smiled. “Lennon, Jagger and Hendrix.”

  Weiss laughed. “Oh, of course. That Trinity.”

  “According to the College Archives, you were very active in the Sixties, Professor.”

  “Active. Yes, that’s one way of putting it, I suppose.”

  “Did you ever meet them?”

  “Who? The Trinity? Oh, yes.” He sipped his tea thoughtfully. “The first time was early in 1968. I flew to India with my colleagues while the Beatles and Maharashi were there. Some unpleasant business in the caves of Rishikesh.”

  “What was John like?”

  He sighed regretfully. “I didn’t have much time to speak to him, I’m afraid. We were acting as…bodyguards, basically. But his aura, oh, it was one of the most splendid things I’ve ever seen. It was like fireworks going off, fireworks in slow motion.”

  Weiss cleared his throat and looked up. “We discussed the same industrial thing, funnily enough. Western colonialists invading Eastern and Southern cultures and grabbing their gold, their tea, their spices. In the Sixties, the first world countries were becoming counter-colonized by the food, the music and the psychoactive plants.”

  He put his cup on the table, leaning back in his chair. “Everything goes in stages, my dear. The tribes, the first cities, the feudal age, the industrial age, the information age. That reminds me. Is Tokyo always this clean? When we were driving through it, I couldn’t see any litter.”

  “Well, I don’t know about that…”

  “It’s a matter of saving face, I suppose. Is it true you can get arrested for throwing away a cigarette end on the street?”

  She laughed. “Well, you can get fined. But we Japanese have very selective attention. There are areas of filth and pollution in Tokyo, but we ignore them. We choose not to see the problem, so it isn’t there.”

  “Yes, well…” Weiss cleared his throat, picked up his briefcase. “Better get down to business, I suppose. Here’s the offending object.” From the briefcase, he produced the Achaz Codex, still carefully wrapped in silk, and laser-copies of the pages within. Across from him Namiko picked up a clear plastic folder that had been lying on the table.

  “I’ve been working on the information that the messenger gave me, Professor. I’ve found some things that may be of interest to you. Sleep disorders. Recently, there have been a few cases which caught the attention of the media.”

  Weiss set down the Book of the Veils carefully, the copies on top. “What do you mean by recently?”

  “Over the last two years. They get in the media spotlight for a couple of days, and then everyone forgets them. Except our agents, of course.” She slipped photocopies of newspaper articles out of the folder. “A man was run over by a bullet train while walking along the tracks…in his pajamas. A farmer beat his wife to death and claimed he was sleepwalking while he was doing it. A housewife, who also may have been sleepwalking, went downstairs in the middle of the night and drilled a hole in her head with her husband’s power tool.” She tapped one photocopy with a long fingernail. “This was in Korea, but it’s still relevant…a man was found dead and badly burnt at the bottom of an electrical pylon. It seemed he’d climbed up the side of it and tried to swing on the power cables.”

  “Don’t tell me…in the middle of the night, in his pajamas?”

  “Atari. Correct.”

  “It’s here,” he said. “I really do think we’re on to something, Namiko.”

  “What about the rest of the Lamed Vav?”

  “Marcus Jewell has sent agents to look for the second Book of the Veils in Scotland, France, North Africa, the USA…some of us are still convinced it’s in Italy. I came up with the idea it may be here in Japan, so…”

  “So here you are. Yorokonde iru…I’m glad you came.” She took another plastic folder from the briefcase and removed its contents.

  “Concerning the prophet Achaz and connections with the Holy Land…well, there are two sites in Japan that may be interesting. One of them is on the island of Shikoku, down in the South. It’s meant to be the resting place of the Ark of the Covenant.”

  Weiss couldn’t resist a smile. “There are some Templars I know who’d find that very amusing.”

  Namiko lifted another sheaf of printouts, reading them carefully. “The other site is not so far away, but it’s still a long journey. It’s in Tohoku. The Tomb of Jesus Christ.”

  “The Tomb of who?”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Obakemono

  The last lesson of the day had finished, and the girls were now getting ready for their daily ‘after-school’ activities. Taking out brooms and brushes to clean their own classrooms, getting changed for the sports club activities, or arranging their textbooks for the pre-exam cramming sessions. In David’s schooldays, the end of lessons meant exactly that; the end of lessons. The school emptied. Here in Japan, with lessons on Saturday, sports club tournaments on Sunday, special tests and seminars in summer and winter, school never seemed to end.

  Making his way through the clumps of chattering friends blocking the corridor, he walked past the stairs and entered the junior high school wing. The doors to one of the classrooms were open, and the students were busy pinning sketches onto tall display boards, manga sketches in the different stages of being inked and colored. David walked slowly through the classroom, peering at each misshapen creature – stylized, detailed drawings of figures that seemed partly human, partly animal, but all with something fundamentally wrong about them.

  A fox standing upright, wearing a kimono. A Japanese woman with her head on the end of a ridiculously long, serpentine neck, a forked tongue poking out from her lips. A man in a priest’s robe and straw hat, one huge eye in the middle of his forehead. A girl in school uniform with long hair falling over a blank, featureless face. A scowling red-faced goblin with a huge phallic nose. Paper lanterns, paper doors, and waxed cloth umbrellas that had grown eyes and had ripped holes for mouths.

  It was a tradition carried on year after year. The junior high school students were making a display devoted to the undead for the School Festival. The Japanese were very proud of their ghosts, especially in the summer. David imagined a village back in the Edo period, all of them sweating and trying to relax in the sultry night, and the traveling storytellers summoning bizarre, grotesque creatures for the audience. Tales to chill the listeners at the hottest time of the year.

  The word for ghost was Obakemono, which literally meant ‘changing thing’. The kanji for the verb bakeru, to change, was based on the ideogram meaning ‘person’ next to the same ideogram twisted into a different posture. In Japanese ghost stories, things and people changed; umbrellas, lanterns, any household object could become poltergeists, foxes could become beautiful girls, that soft-spoken old man you meet on the road to the next village could be a corpse-eating ghost…

  “Ne, ne, ne – David-sensei!”

  He turned. One of the high-school students had entered the room behind him: Maki, from his after-school conversation class. From the other teachers, David knew she had a reputation as one of the bad girls of the school – her shoulder-length hair was tinted brown, her skirt was habitually hitched up above her knees. She always came to his after-school conversation class, though; her English wasn’t bad, but she seemed more interested in gossiping than in the lesson’s subject.

  “Japanese ghost,”
she said in broken English. “It is very scared, desu sho?”

  “You mean, they’re very scary.”

  Maki pointed to one of the sketches, her finger crowned with a painted nail. “Do you know Yuki-Onna? Her love is deadly weapon, and her touching will turn you into ice and you will die of cold.”

  David moved his face closer to the portrait. It was a woman, her face the same deathly white as her kimono, her mouth and eyes delicate brush stokes in the long, triangular face.

  His gaze moved to the paper next to it on the wall. The sketch of another woman, who looked apparently normal – she wore contemporary clothes, but her nose and mouth were covered with a gauze mask, just like the ones the Japanese wore when they were suffering from colds or hay fever.

  “Who’s this?”

  Maki went through a savage parody of shivering. “She is Kuchisake-Onna, David-sensei, and she is really, really scary.”

  “What’s her story?”

  “When you are going back to home, you maybe meet a woman wearing a mask like this one. She will come to you and ask you, Do you think I’m beautiful? Do you think I’m beautiful? Then she take off her mask, and she has a really wide, ripped mouth.” Maki traced lines on her cheeks, from the corners of her mouth to her ears. “A wide, cut mouth. And teeth like wolf.”

  David took a deep breath. The Japanese, he thought, were great at finding ways to scare themselves.

  “Maki, why are these ghosts always female?”

  The girl shrugged. “What’s most scary thing for old Japanese man? A woman. A dead woman with magic powers, who want to do the revenge, for how the man treated her.”

  He went back to the English department on the second floor and made himself a cup of tea. The staff room was empty; the other teachers were in meetings, or drawing up test papers, or overseeing club activities. He checked the messages on his phone and finished preparing for the next day’s lessons.

  Still no messages from Saori, he thought ruefully.

  The cup of tea in his hands, he walked to the window and looked out at the sports grounds. About thirty students were below on the parched and faded grass, practicing tennis. “Issatsu!” they each called in singsong voices as they served – “Here’s one!” Small clouds of dust drifted close to the ground, kicked up as their uniform white trainers scuffed the soil.

  David lifted his gaze, from the students darting back and forth in their blue track suits, to the line of oak, beech and cherry trees that stood along the fence and blocked out the view of the road outside, and beyond the trees, the deeper green of the wood-covered mountains in the distance. Standing with the cup in his hands, he found it difficult to tear his eyes away. The sound of the crickets outside made the view even more exotic and foreign. Mesmeric, in fact.

  When he had learned the kanji character for north, the textbook explained the origin of the ideogram. The shape illustrated a pair of near-identical figures sitting back to back. In the minds of the ancient Japanese, turning your back on someone meant the same as heading in the coldest direction – the direction of north.

  Here they were in the north, Tohoku – and the rest of Japan had turned its back upon them. They were stuck here, with their history and their peculiar festivals, their past of tragedy and slow recovery, and their stories of girls with no faces, girls with ripped mouths, girls whose touch could freeze you to death.

  As it was a Tuesday it was his session at the hospital, so he had plenty of time to kill. He decided to go up to the computer room on the third floor and do some more research. As David left the English department and walked to the main staircase, the corridors were still bustling with students coming to and fro.

  In the computer room, Takenouchi-sensei was packing away folders in his bag, his plump face looking even more florid that usual. “Ah, David-sensei,” he said, producing a set of keys. “Owatta-ra, kagi o-kakkete-kudasai.”

  Looked like Takenouchi-sensei was going home early, because he’d just asked David to lock up after himself. “Wakarimashita,” David replied. I understand and agree.

  David switched on the aging PC and logged in.

  There was the usual mail from Mum; the rainy spell in Brentwood still hadn’t let up. Dad was in the attic, bro was off camping with his mates, little Sis was in Ibiza.

  Nothing from his Lisa.

  Nothing from Saori, either.

  Sighing, he wondered what to do. There’d been nothing to tell him not to go to the Yoshida family’s place tomorrow night; so maybe Saori hadn’t told her parents about what he was doing. Or maybe they were all waiting to confront him tomorrow night, to grill him when he turned up in their lobby? Would a Japanese family do that?

  Why did I enroll at the hospital, David asked himself. Was it something so ridiculous? Maybe I should just leave. Tell that guy Nozaki tonight that I’ve had second thoughts and resign from the program. The funny thing was that he actually felt better because of the program; he felt healthier, fitter, and when he woke every morning he felt genuinely refreshed. Also, over the last few nights, he’d been following Nozaki’s guidance, and he was actually remembering his dreams more.

  He looked at his watch. It was almost six; time to get moving. He logged out, switched off, and turned out the lights and air-conditioner before locking up with Takenouchi-sensei’s keys.

  Picking up his bag from the English department, he started walking along the long, echoing corridor that led to the stairs. As Japan had no Daylight Saving Time, it always got dark at about six o’clock, regardless of the season – something that had thrilled David when he’d first arrived. It seemed so tropical and secretive, the darkness laced with the hot smells of yakitori and katorisenko mosquito repellant, the tinkling of wind chimes outside balconies to make the occupants imagine themselves cooler.

  As he reached the last classroom before the staircase, he stopped. The school was usually quiet at this time: only the murmurs of teachers’ voice from the ground floor, or the traffic outside. But this time there was something else. There was a clicking noise, a peculiar clockwork rattle, like someone rattling a stick against metal railings as they walked by.

  He turned and looked at window of the nearest classroom. Unlike the others, this room had lights coming from inside – but not electric lights. He peered through the glass. Those flickering orange lights were surely not supposed to be in there. In fact, as he kept looking, there was only one thing they could be…

  Flames.

  He put down his bag and slid open the door. A thin, acrid smell of smoke caught at his throat. Beside the teacher’s desk, flames licked upwards from a small metal trashcan. He stepped forward, wondering what to do; it wasn’t a dangerous fire, but the paper inside was burning vigorously. No chance of putting out the fire by stamping it out with his foot.

  With a whispered curse, he reached down and picked up the trashcan. It wasn’t as hot as he’d feared. Holding it away from him, he half-ran to the washing area beside the staircase, the long metal sink where the students washed their hands. Dumping the can in the sink, he positioned it beneath one of the taps and turned the flow of water onto maximum. The fire went out fitfully, with a lot of spitting.

  “Bloody hell.” He looked at the water-spattered trashcan and the black, sodden mass inside it. Picking it up once more, he walked to the staircase entrance.

  “Do shita-n desu ka?” What’s the matter? A uniformed figure stood in the corridor, a bright circle of light in his right hand. Keibin-san. One of the several security guards who patrolled the school day and night. Retired salarymen who’d traded cheap polyester suits for a uniform of a different kind.

  David explained what had happened as best he could. The guard stared at the trashcan, mouth open in almost comic surprise. He took the can out of David’s hands, reached inside and gingerly pulled out one of the pieces of card. He held it between finger and thumb, as if trying to avoid staining his fingers, and placed it on the rim of the sink. There was something written on the card. Bold, cursive lette
rs written in hiragana script. Looking closer, David noticed something odd. The letters didn’t seem to form words. Instead, it looked as if someone had just written out the hiragana alphabet in order, using a magic marker.

  “Jya. Kyoutou-sensei tanominai-to,” the guard said at length. We have to tell the Vice-Principal.

  The guard left, taking the stairs down to the first floor, carrying the trashcan with him. David stood looking back at the classroom where the fire had been, feeling faintly troubled. He’d heard of inner city schools in London where the students would start fires, but it was pretty depressing to find it in Japan.

  He could still smell the sharp door of the smoke. But there was something else; something stronger, more pungent. He suddenly realized what it was; the volcanic, rotten-egg reek of sulphur. The sort of odour he’d smelled at hot springs.

  The sort of door he’d smelled everywhere when he’d stayed at Osorezan.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Kokkuri-san

  The pioneering sleep researcher William C. Dement had once said that dreaming permitted each and every one of us to be safely insane for every night of our lives. David had found the quotation on the Internet when he’d been doing his research; how ironic, he thought, that someone with the name of ‘Dement’ should write about insanity.

  David remembered a series of extraordinarily vivid dreams from around the age of puberty. Some of them were nightmares that had jerked him awake with a shout, but others were quite uplifting in their unreal little victories. In contrast his dreams in recent years, even since he’d started living in Japan, had seemed anemic and fragmentary, falling apart as soon as he’d opened his eyes.

  But not this morning. In the interview room, David was excitedly talking to Nozaki about what he remembered.

  “There was someone behind me on the plane. The door was open, and I could see this beautiful blue sky through it. I didn’t have a parachute, but this person behind me was telling me I had to jump.”