The Mists of Osorezan

by Zoe Drake

  Despite how tiny it was, David could see every detail sharply and clearly. The mantis turned its flat, triangular head up towards him in a slow rotating motion. It knew he was there. It looked directly at him, and he imagined his own face, reflected over and over in its emerald compound eyes.

  He straightened up. The dream therapy seemed to have sharpened his senses; the color of the mantis was brighter, the smells of the flowers and trees were stronger, the sounds of the girls, both inside and outside the school – all seemed to be much clearer than usual. His usual aches and pains after football were gone. Was all this down to the Modulator?

  Entering the cool of the staff room, David encountered his second surprise of the morning. A Japanese police officer in full dark blue uniform, standing next to the Vice Principal. The man gave David a long, unsmiling stare. David bowed quickly in greeting and walked to his desk, trying to hide himself behind the overflowing shelves of books and folders.

  Perhaps they were putting on some kind of public information display, he thought. Or one of the students was in trouble? A big scandal in a small town?

  The chimes sounded to signal the start of the meeting. Standing up with the microphone, Ogura-sensei introduced the stern-looking individual who stood surveying the assembled teachers from underneath the brim of his peaked cap.

  Listening intently, David knew enough Japanese to make out the general sense of what had happened. There’d been a break-in at the school. Last night. Nothing had been stolen, and nothing in the teachers’ room or classrooms had been damaged, but for the time being the building known as the old gymnasium – as opposed to the new gymnasium, where the regular PE lessons were held – was out of bounds.

  After the meeting, he walked to the vending machine in the student’s hall. From the middle of the hall he saw the colored police tape surrounding the old gymnasium.

  Holding a can of café au lait, the condensation cool against his fingers, he walked down the corridor past the sick bay and the library. Behind him, the students hurried up the stairs to their homerooms for morning assembly. One door had been propped open, and he stepped through, looking cautiously at the building opposite. The doors were open, and two uniformed officers stood in front of it.

  “Sumimasen,” one of them said, turning to David. “Kono tokoro wa ikenai-n desu.” In other words, please go about your business, there’s nothing to see here.

  But David had seen. Through the glass doors of the entrance, he noticed a gap inside the building. A yawning rectangle of shadow in the place where the disused elevator should be.

  The elevator doors were open.

  He walked back to the student hall, mystified by the whole business. What was going on? What was this peculiar atmosphere of tension that hung over everything? It was like he’d walked into the wrong school by mistake.

  “Ne, ne ne, sensei, sore mita-no?”

  To his right, Maki leaned against a pillar in the hall, her hands behind her back, apparently in no hurry to go to class. She watched David approach with a languid expression on her face. “David-sensei, did you watch the elevator?”

  “Well, I saw the elevator, Maki. Do you know anything about it?”

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  “You’re joking again, aren’t you?”

  He returned her stare. The girl didn’t add anything else. She stood there, looking at him with an open-mouthed smile on her face.

  “Yes, well, Maki, I think you should get to class. And be careful. Somebody got in last night, and we don’t want the police to think you had something to do with it.”

  “Nanika deta, kamo.”

  She slouched past him, on her way to the stairs. David made a conscious effort not to follow her with his eyes, not to look at the backs of her legs beneath her short skirt as she climbed. It was only after she was out of sight that it fully registered what she’d said.

  Nanika deta, kamo.

  Maybe something got out.

  Later, in the English department, David went to his usual source of information. “Wada-sensei…you said every school’s got an urban legend. Surely there’s got to be more to it than this?”

  She sighed. “The full story the girls tell is like this. There was a bad man who lived in this town, a Yakuza, and he had a mistress. She wanted him to leave his wife, and one day when she complained too much the gangster got crazy and cut her. He cut her mouth wide…” Wada-sensei’s finger traced the movement, on either corner of her own lips. “Like this. You talk like Kuchisake-Onna, he said, now you look like her too.”

  David flinched. “That’s horrible.”

  “The woman used to wear a gauze mask to cover up the scars on her mouth, but the experience really did drive her crazy. No, what’s the word in English, the really serious one?”

  “Insane?”

  “Yes, that’s it! She went to the school where the gangster’s two daughters were. She waited for them outside the school gate, and when they came out, she…” Wada-sensei paused, her mouth a grim line. “She threw acid in their faces. Both of them.”

  David stared back at her.

  “So now the girls had scarred faces too. They hanged themselves because of the shame. Both the daughters hanged themselves in the school elevator.”

  “The one downstairs?”

  “That’s right.”

  David swallowed. “Wada-sensei, none of that really happened, did it?”

  “Of course it didn’t. We explained to the girls that it’s not a true story, but they don’t listen. The rumor goes on. Anyway, I’m sorry, I have to go now. There is a meeting.”

  Wada-sensei got to her feet and walked briskly down the corridor, the sound of her trainers on the polished floor receding. David sat motionless at his desk. There is a meeting, but I’m not invited. The school drama is going on without me, he thought.

  Does anything I do make a difference?

  Chapter Thirty

  Shadowplay

  David was close to putting the phone down when the ring tone abruptly stopped, and Lisa’s voice answered.

  “Hi, David! Where’ve you been, stranger? I was wondering when we were going to catch up with each other.”

  David laughed and stumbled his way through some pleasantries.

  “The girls and I were talking about you the other day,” Lisa said. “There was another documentary on March 11th and rebuilding Tohoku.”

  “Well, we’re not totally back to normal yet,” he said, but Lisa’s reply was swallowed in a burst of noise. He had to ask her to speak up.

  “Sorry, some friends stayed over last night and we’re having brunch. I haven’t bought my plane ticket yet, David. The office is asking me to stay on – well to be honest, Vicki doesn’t want me to leave.”

  “Who’s Vicki?”

  “My boss. Anyway, whatever happens, I’ll be over for Christmas, yeah?”

  He didn’t stay on the phone too long. He had an appointment. An all-night stay at the laboratory.

  “How are you feeling, Mr. David?”

  David dropped his hands into his lap to conceal their trembling. “Not like I did last week, to be honest. Then I had lots of energy, but now, in the afternoons, I get very sleepy.”

  “That’s a perfectly normal response, Mr. David. It means you are getting used to the treatment.”

  “I’m not getting used to the dreams. They’re really vivid.”

  “Ah! On that subject, I would like to know if your dreams are primarily visual phenomena. Do you remember any other sensations? Noise? Touch and texture? Perhaps even tastes?”

  David didn’t have to think very hard before replying. “Smell. The smell of Osorezan. I see the place a lot in my dreams, and I remember the smell.”

  With those words, he saw the alien landscape stretch before him. The desolate beach, the misty craters haunted by the statues of Jizo and the melancholy remnants of childhood lying near.

  “Interesting. Now then,” Nozaki said, “do you think your lucidity has been helped b
y the visualization exercises?”

  “Yes. Yes, I do. Believe it or not, when you said that about the kanji it made me think of Kobo Daishi.”

  Nozaki laughed and picked two delicately wrapped wagashi sweets from the plate on the table, offering one to David. “So you know about Kobo Daishi!” he said. “Wonderful.”

  “I read about him in a book on Japanese myths and legends,” David said. “The Buddhist saint who brought the custom of drinking tea from China to Japan. Doing these exercises reminded me of Daishi’s gift for calligraphy.”

  Nozaki smiled in recognition. “It was said he performed miracles. He could write with his calligraphy brush upon the water of the river, and the clouds in the sky.”

  “There’s a legend,” David continued, “that says after he wrote the kanji character for dragon, a real live dragon appeared and flew up into the heavens. That’s what reminded me, you see. Using the kanji writing to summon things into the dream.”

  “Well, that’s an extremely interesting way of looking at it. Perhaps you could try it tonight? I’m looking forward to your report.”

  It happened again, it happened beautifully, David awakening within the dream and feeling in complete control.

  He found himself within the same tunnel, flanked by the rows of statues. The place was absolutely still, the gloom lit by dozens of candles placed on blackened metal holders between the statues, and the heavy smell of incense hung in the air. David shut his eyes for a moment and breathed. It was so realistic it was astonishing. There was something about the smell that quickened his pulse, made him aware of himself as a strong, dynamic, living being.

  It was like he had always known this place. Like a place he used to visit in his childhood. Impossible. He walked to the nearest statue and looked at its face. He remembered Kobo Daishi; he could choose. He could be the master of the dream.

  The character for ‘school’ was easy to write. First, the element for roof, then the strokes meaning two hands holding up the roof, and beneath that, the character for child.

  He wanted to see his school. He wanted to see if he could do it.

  Light burst through cracks in the wall until an aperture appeared that was big enough for him to walk through. On the threshold, he noticed something, a flicker of motion that made him glance to his left. The stone heads of the Jizo statues were turning, grinding around on their blackened necks, their blind eyes following his movements.

  And he was through. He recognized Hirosaki West High School immediately. He stood in the old gymnasium, facing the doors to the music room.

  For a moment, he wondered why he’d arrived here first, because he’d only been inside the rarely used building once. Maybe it was… No. Don’t think about that. he had exploring to do.

  He walked out into the East Wing, past the reference library, past the nurse’s room, towards the student hall and the cloakrooms. It had the same dim light as in real life, corridors in shadow, student hall in sunlight from the windows on the main staircase. He walked through the hall, turned right through the covered walkway, walked into the main staff room.

  The staff room was empty. He left, closing the door, standing in the corridor. The school was empty, still, quiet. No, not quiet; there was something at the edge of his hearing. A steady clicking, a rattling. He couldn’t tell where it was coming from.

  With the fingers of his right hand upon the palm of his left, David traced the kanji character for ‘earth’. Two horizontal lines, and a vertical line joining them, representing a flower sprouting from the soil.

  He waited, with no sense of impatience. Another character suggested itself to him. He raised his hands in the air, like a conductor before the orchestra. When the ground nurtures a flower coming out in full bloom, he remembered his textbook saying, the meaning changes from ‘the ground’ to ‘ the act of coming out’. Four vertical stokes, added to each end of the horizontal lines of the first character. The Japanese word deru. Come out.

  Come out.

  Next to the character deru, it seemed natural to trace the figure of a square – the ideogram for mouth. Deru. Guchi. Deru-guchi, the word for exit.

  Traveling effortlessly, without walking, David found himself moved to the student hall and the school’s front entrance.

  *

  Tonight there were a few more TV screens than usual in the security guard’s booth. After consultations with the Principal’s Office, the PTA and the police, the security firm that sent guards to the school had agreed to provide – free of charge – half a dozen more cameras and monitor screens for both the inside and the outside.

  The guards on the day shift had spent all day putting them up. Now the night shift had taken over; Hiroshi Sawada and his colleague, Soichi Kurishima.

  Sawada took his bento box – tonight’s dinner – from his bag and tried to relax in the cramped cubicle. It was a hot night; the electric fan under his desk just seemed to be moving the warm air around.

  “So, do you really think they were kids?” he said.

  Kurushima pointed in the direction of the old gymnasium. “You mean the ones who did that? Sure they were kids. Burglars wouldn’t bust up an old elevator, they’d make off with the computers. Nah, the only question is, were they this school’s kids, or from somewhere else?”

  Sawada delicately took the lid off his bento box and looked inside. Fried chicken, konyaku jelly, sliced carrot and burdock salad, rice with the crimson blob of pickled sour plum right in the center.

  “You mean, like a rival gang of kids?”

  Kurushima shrugged. “Sure, why not? Stranger things have happened around here.”

  “So how’s your son, Hiroshi?”

  Sawada grunted. “Still the same. Hanging around in Tokyo, no steady job, no wife.”

  Kurushima nodded in sympathy. “Well, at least he’s not still at home.”

  “Yeah, I’ve got enough to worry about at home without him getting under my feet.” Sawada sat back, mumbling his words through a mouthful of greasy chicken. “The wife doesn’t see it like that, of course. She’s always writing him letters asking him when he’s coming back, when he’s going to settle back down with his family.”

  Kurushima shook his head. “Some women don’t get it, do they?” He stood up with a decisive gesture, taking his heavy black flashlight from his bag and holding it in front of him like a sword. “Well, time to go on the rounds. Enjoy your dinner.”

  Sawada held up a morsel of food in his chopsticks. “The rice is too soggy.”

  *

  The rattling, clicking sound continued. It seemed oddly familiar. David stood at the school’s front entrance, looking out towards the sunlit park. Turning his head, he realized he wasn’t alone any more; on his left stood the cubicle where the security guards were stationed, and there was someone in there now, a male figure in silhouette, standing to attention like a shop window dummy in uniform and peaked cap.

  He looked back at the park, and noticed the mist for the first time. It oozed through the trees, the color of dirty cobwebs. The rattling sound faded away as the mist poured across the ground, staining the grass with sickly yellow dew that reminded David of sweat.

  The whole scene was alive with something more than a sound, it was a vibration, more felt than heard. It kept time with the beating of David’s own heart, as elemental as thunder.

  *

  Nozaki had sat at the screens again with a fresh cup of hot green tea when he noticed Yamada moving quickly up the stairs. “Can you come down, Mr. Nozaki? I’m very sorry to disturb you, but there’s something you ought to see.”

  Sighing, he sipped a mouthful of tea and stood up once more. Following Yamada, he descended to the main floor of the lab, and walked along one of the aisles between beds, past the rows of tranquil sleepers. The man in the white coat ahead of him hurried along, not pausing to turn around or say anything, until they arrived at the bed where the foreigner was sleeping. “What’s the problem?”

  Yamada gestured to the sensors
on top of the visor, above the English boy’s head. “Please look at the sensors, Mr. Nozaki.”

  He looked.

  No. It wasn’t possible. Not now, not again…

  “Pulse?” Nozaki snapped. “Temperature?”

  “Up slightly.”

  “What do you mean, slightly?” Brushing the assistant away from the bed, Nozaki checked the readings himself. He leaned over the bed, examining David’s face. The young man’s eyes moved beneath the closed eyelids, watching events unfold somewhere deep inside his own head. As he continued to watch, the foreigner’s right arm twitched.

  “What do you want me to do?” Yamada asked, still hovering.

  “Stay with him.”

  Nozaki hurried back to the control room, rushing up the steps. He sat in front of his laptop and clicked on David’s name to show the full range of EEG readings – stripchart, histogram, compressed spectral array, hemispheric display, neuromaps. He clicked on the hemispheric display to bring it up full screen. He looked at a vertical row of colored bars extending horizontally to both left and right, fluctuating onscreen as brain activity changed. Blue meant delta waves, green meant theta – but as Nozaki watched, the pigments of all the bars were changing to a fiery red.

  The color of gamma waves.

  The color and length of the columns on the left now balanced those on the right. David Keall’s brain was becoming synchronized; the various areas working together, resonating at gamma frequency, causing his neural pathways to fire more and more rapidly.

  Nozaki’s throat dried up, and sweat pooled and itched beneath his armpits. All he could do was watch. Watch helplessly.

  And try not to think of what had happened before.

  *

  The mist came down like a cloud, drifting through the gate. The security guard stood impassive in his booth like a big toy soldier. The cubicle was filling up with fog, wisps trailing up from the ground like smoke…