by Zoe Drake
David couldn’t see the guard any more. Where he had stood was now a big box of glass and metal, filled with swirling grey fog. Although he had no conscious knowledge of moving, David was now right beside the cubicle, his face just inches away from the window.
David flinched back as the mist parted and something round and white thumped against the glass. Black, baleful eyes in shock-white bone. A skull picked clean of flesh.
Tiny hairline cracks appeared in the air, multiplying at unbelievable speed. Then, suddenly, the dream shattered.
*
Sawada froze, his eyes on the monitor.
Something had moved on the monitor screen. He’d only caught a glimpse, but someone had walked across the passage between the main building and the old gymnasium. He’d caught a glimpse of a white shirt, the back of a head: long black hair.
He picked up the walkie-talkie and pressed the ‘call’ button. “Soichi, come in please. I think our burglar’s come back. Where are you?”
His only answer was a harsh crackle of static.
He shook the walkie-talkie angrily, pressed the call-button again. “Soichi, report, please. Where are you?”
The static came again, and through it, Sawada could make out a voice. He held the device closer to his ear; there was a voice, trying to speak…but it didn’t sound like Soichi, it sounded more like a woman. Faint and distorted, whispering words that he couldn’t quite hear.
He switched off the walkie-talkie angrily. “These things never work.” Fetching his big rubber-handled flashlight from under his desk, he stood up and opened the door.
He strode along the outside of the building and turned left at the space for parking bicycles, taking the covered walkway that led to the rear of the school.
What he should do, he knew, was contact the police; but first he wanted a cautious look around. He knew how embarrassing it would be if he called the police out on a false alarm.
The more he thought about it, the more he wondered about what he’d seen. For a second, he’d seen a head of long black hair passing out of the camera’s range. Surely the burglar couldn’t be female?
And the white shirt – the same color as a school uniform, there’d been a dark stripe along the shoulders – could it have been one of the girls? Maybe a small group of them had sneaked out of their houses, to come here for a dare. Was that what he’d seen?
No. Ridiculous. No parent would let a child slip out of the house unnoticed. And if they were skulking around, they’d wear dark clothes, not their school uniform.
He arrived at the old gymnasium and shone his light over the police barrier, through the dusty windows. Only darkness. “Hello?” he called.
Wondering at the sudden boldness that filled him, Sawada tore aside the police tape and stepped up to the door. He pushed it gently; sure enough, it was open. Someone had been here.
Or was still here?
He pushed open the door, shining his flashlight around the lobby, the doors that led to the art room, the music room, the elevator. The elevator doors were still open. He moved quietly up to them, shining his torch inside.
He couldn’t help gasping in shock.
An effigy in the rough shape and size of a man hung from the ceiling. Arms and legs of straw sewn into white cloth and tied with coarse rope. Another bundle of straw making a ragged head.
It was a wara ningyo – a Japanese witch-doll from the old storybooks. There were words written on the cloth covering its chest, kanji characters smeared in a foul dark liquid. The circle of light shook as his hand holding the flashlight trembled.
Who wrote those words about me, he thought. It’s not possible, nobody knows those things about my family, nobody except me – why would they write it and leave it here, why–
Unless it’s meant for me–
There was a slight, ever so slight noise behind him. Almost lost in the heavy rasping of his own breathing. A noise like a shoe scuffed against the floor.
In the door of the elevator that hung askew, there was a small rectangular window. Sawada saw his own reflection by torchlight…and behind him, a girl wearing a school uniform – perfectly still and silent…long dark hair falling down over her face, hiding it from view…
The walkie-talkie in Sawada’s hand burst into life, voiceless static rasping the air. Behind him, something giggled.
Chapter Thirty-One
Inside and Outside
The sun hung low in the dusky sky, a distended orb filled with blood. It looked as if it were about to burst.
David stood at a giant arched window cut into a stone wall, looking out. The skyline filled him with thoughts he couldn’t define – nostalgic, melancholy, blissful? He couldn’t tell. Although he’d willed himself to visit England, or a dream version of England, the skyline was an amalgam of his memories of Brentwood and Istanbul. An early evening skyline filled with two-story houses overshadowed by giant domes, towers and minarets.
He turned away from the window. Tiny mosaic tiles in red, yellow and green covered the walls, with slivers of mirror scattered and stuck amongst them. The effect would have been beautiful if not for the inch of water covering the marble floor and splashing at David’s feet, and the naked light-bulbs that hung from the high ceiling, their light sparking and sputtering as if they were about to extinguish themselves.
Across the chamber, he saw it again. The handwriting. A plaque containing the unknown language that he kept seeing in his nightly excursions. Unreadable. But it must mean something, he thought. There must be meaning furled up in those loops and spikes and rods.
Knowing he was inside a dream fascinated him, filled him with contradicting emotions. Voyeurism. Childlike happiness. Wonder. Expectation.
The sense that he could do anything he wanted.
He moved forward, his footsteps echoing wetly, and walked through the huge arched doorway facing him. He found himself in a courtyard cluttered with the debris of construction. Half a dozen hulking army vehicles were parked haphazardly in the brick dust, their doors open as if suddenly abandoned. The ground was strewn with thick black cables and broken stretchers. One of the trucks had its back doors open and inside hung a row of shimmering bodysuits, patiently waiting to be worn, like those used by soldiers as protection during chemical attack. They hung there, inside the truck, like metallic urban ghosts.
David was no longer alone.
On the other side of the courtyard, someone sat on a low stone bench, a figure unmistakably female. She wore the familiar sailor-suit uniform of a Japanese schoolgirl, something David accepted with a strange lack of surprise. The girl sat slumped forward, her hands on her knees, her long black hair over her face. Her whole attitude suggested helpless misery.
He crossed over to her, his steps making no sound. “Hello? Can you hear me?” he called, his voice oddly resonant. She made no response. “Are you all right?”
Suddenly, she looked up, turning her head towards him in a smooth, predatory movement. She flicked her hair back, exposing her face.
David screamed.
He jerked his head up, arms and legs twitching. He could still hear the echoes of his own scream. He was back in his futon, back in his room, familiar furniture around him in shadow and the TV on with its sound muted.
That girl’s face, he thought. It must have been all those ghost stories going around the school. It put bad ideas in his head. He thought of Ayano’s dream diary. “Baku kurae,” he muttered.
He turned over, trying to get back to sleep, but nervous about what would happen when he did.
*
“I can’t believe it!” Subject Fifty-Four, Tsuyoshi Mizuno, had said this upon joining the Kageyama Treatment. “I’m sleeping, and getting pocket money for it!”
Technically, the sixteen-year-old Mizuno was forbidden by his high school from doing part-time work, but his school couldn’t decide whether the research project counted as part-time work or not; so they, like other high schools, had been seduced by the famous name of the Univ
ersity, backing in the reflected glory.
His parents were also in favor of it. They had happily signed the release papers, and made it known to Nozaki that they thought the process totally safe (and so it was), and were delighted that their son was receiving a form of electronic stimulation to his brain that wasn’t TV or anime or smartphone games. They were under the impression that it would somehow make his wits sharper, brighter.
Tsuyoshi, of course, wasn’t interested in that. He only wanted to sleep, because he knew if he were at home his parents would be making him study more.
“I sometimes dream of breaking things,” Tsuyoshi had said once. “Do you remember that student from Tochigi last year, the one who made a bomb from things stolen from the chemistry lab, and then threw it into the classroom? Yeah, I know how he feels.”
He’d found the house. Nozaki parked the car and turned off the ignition, sitting motionless in the car, the MP3 player in his hand and the twin phones plugged into his ears. Listening to the dream recorded by Mizuno in the debriefing session nine days ago, the boy’s hoarse voice see-sawing on the edge between youth and adult.
The girl who opened the door of the house looked about eleven years old. Mumbling an almost inaudible greeting, she waited patiently while Nozaki took off his shoes, put them into a wooden carved rack, and then she led him through to the kitchen.
Mrs. Mizuno wore an apron over a long-sleeved lacy blouse, and was carefully scooping rice into the family’s rice-cooker. On the table in front of her, leeks, eggplants, and tofu lay ready for dissection.
“Are you not wearing a sunhat, Mr. Nozaki?” she asked without preamble. “It’s not a good idea to walk around in the sun without protection, you know. Will you take a cup of iced coffee or tea?”
Nozaki politely asked for a cup of tea, and the mother waved at the daughter to start preparing it.
“He’s upstairs,” said Mrs. Mizuno, pointing at a white-carpeted staircase. “Studying, I hope.”
The door to Tsuyoshi Mizuno’s bedroom was open. “Excuse me for disturbing you,” Nozaki said as he entered.
The boy sat at his desk, eyes downcast, wearing Chinos and a light red and blue check shirt. He had the high school baseball player’s buzz-cut, even though he wasn’t in the baseball team. Outside the boy’s home, Nozaki knew his soft-spoken voice would change to the rolling ‘r’s and slurred vowels of the TV anime tough guys.
“First,” Nozaki said, “I’d like to express my regret at the loss of your grandfather. A terrible thing. Were you very close?”
The boy answered with a shrug.
“I remember how upset I was when my grandfather passed away,” Nozaki continued.
“My grandfather was an alcoholic,” Tsuyoshi said finally, swinging around on his chair to face Nozaki directly. There was a hardness in his eyes. “I hadn’t seen him for two years, and that was at the New Year’s holiday when everyone came up to visit.”
Nozaki swallowed. “There’s something I want to ask you, Tsuyoshi.” He produced the folder with Subject 54 stamped upon it and laid it across his knees. “The dream you had about your grandfather was quite graphic. Could you tell me a little more about it?”
Something flickered in the boy’s half-open eyes. “Why?”
“This is a rather special situation. You may have exhibited an unusual…talent.”
The boy stared at Nozaki for a moment, then turned and picked out a comic book from his satchel. “You mean, like the Espers in Bullet Force?” he said, putting the comic on the table. It was the size of a telephone book; five hundred black-and-white pages with a lurid cover crammed with katakana and ‘Mecha’ robot-figures.
Nozaki smiled. “Well we won’t know for sure until it happens again. Could you tell me as much as you can remember?”
Tsuyoshi reached down into this satchel again, this time removing his dream diary. He leafed through the pages until he came to the dream in question. His voice low and hoarse, he retold the story, the narrative that Nozaki had reviewed on the cassette before coming.
When Tsuyoshi had been a primary school student, he had a series of nightmares about the Doratoboh – a mythical Japanese creature that lived in the mud beneath rice fields. His grandfather had told him about the monster when the young Tsuyoshi asked what the protective charms surrounding the rice fields were. The dream a few nights previously, here at the research lab, had seen the return of the Doratoboh into the boy’s consciousness; and it also predicted a gruesome fate for the grandfather.
“In the dream, the monster pulled Grandpa into the rice field,” Tsuyoshi finished. “Then I woke up.”
“Yes, so you said. You mean he was pulled under the water.”
“I think so. I couldn’t really see.”
“What do you mean?”
“I couldn’t see him any more. There was a mist, sweeping over the ground, that hid him from view.”
Nozaki was silent for a while, staring at Tsuyoshi, until the boy grew embarrassed and turned away.
“Did you say a mist?”
All of a sudden, night duty wasn’t such a pleasure any more.
Seated in his position of control, watching Yamada and the others patrol the sleeping subjects, Nozaki couldn’t dispel the feelings of unease. It wasn’t helped by the fact that the assistants had taken a shine to the white coats, and now wore them all the time they were on duty. They said it made them feel more professional, but to Nozaki it was irritating.
The sleeping faces of the subjects didn’t seem to be so peaceful. Behind the closed eyes, neuronal populations struggled for dominance. The brain stem had become a battleground.
All that day he had registered a change. The pressure of the air had slightly altered. Round about the same time last year, a typhoon had blown through Aomori, rather an unusual occurrence for the north of Japan. The sensation that bothered him now felt like that: something in the air, a change in the weather.
His previous feelings of good spirits, which he had put down to the effects of the Kageyama Treatment, now seemed to have dissipated. There was tension in his shoulders and upper back, making sitting uncomfortable. He felt fatigued and lethargic, despite the nap he had taken back home before driving to work.
The urge to yawn came more and more frequently, and he felt glad there was nobody to see him, cracking his jaws open to the irresistible urge. His eyes hurt. Closing them briefly, the sounds of the control room became distant, faint, as if he were lying peacefully in bed and listening to the radio in a neighboring apartment.
He opened his eyes again and shook his head like a dog. Ridiculous; he couldn’t drift off on duty. If he felt any worse maybe he could call one of the assistants, go down for a nap–
He froze.
There was something on one of the camera monitor screens. The camera in the corridor outside showed someone moving, an elderly man in a wheelchair, rolling himself down the hallway.
Past the door to the control room.
A few more seconds, and the figure had moved out of sight, beyond the range of the camera. Nozaki sat, his feelings of sleepiness gone, his pulse and heartbeat raised in primitive alarm. There was something horribly wrong. No patients were housed on this floor; it was exclusively for the use of the research lab.
And the face – Nozaki had only a few seconds to stare at the grainy, poor resolution image on the screen, but was enough to make him feel sick with shock.
He got to his feet, turned around and pulled the door open. The corridor was empty. Nobody in sight. The doors to the elevators and stairwell were closed and silent.
But there was something different. Standing motionless, the hairs on his arms bristling and his heart thudding in his chest, he realized what it was. A heavy, sickly-sweet smell; incense. The kind of incense burned at funerals.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Invasion of Privacy
The last time Nozaki had seen his own grandfather was through a square pane of glass. Upside-down, as the child Nozaki bent over the cof
fin, staring through the small square aperture.
“Where’s Grandfather?” he’d asked, as he had first entered the funeral hall.
“Why, he’s over there,” his mother answered. At first, the child was so overwhelmed by the huge display of flowers that he hadn’t registered the presence of the coffin in front of it.
Nozaki stared down at the coffin and realized it had a small square pane of glass in it. There, behind the glass, was the waxy flesh of his grandfather’s face. The eyes were tightly closed and the brow was creased below a triangle-shaped piece of fabric, but yes, it was his face. Nozaki glimpsed a wadding of white cloth around the sides of Grandpa’s head, and beneath his chin lay the hem of the white kimono always worn after death.
“Tetsuo,” his mother had said, shaking the child’s hand. “Don’t just stand there with your mouth open. Why don’t you offer your grandfather some incense?”
The traditional Japanese custom. Lighting one stick of incense and placing it carefully in the sand-filled censer. Lifting a speck of ash to his forehead as a sign of respect. Placing his hands together and bowing, praying for his grandfather’s happiness in the afterlife.
The old man looked so calm. So peaceful. Little Tetsuo had come back from a New Year children’s party at his cousin’s house, and his parents had told him. Grandpa’s gone to hospital, they said, because he choked on something. The o-zoni rice cakes. The sticky rice cakes that were the traditional fare on New Year’s Day, the snacks that Grandpa had loved so much.
The day of the funeral had been the last time he’d seen his grandfather’s face. Until last night.
He couldn’t deny it. When he saw the old man in the wheelchair, caught on video on the eleventh floor of the hospital, the resemblance was astonishing. And that smell, the heavy, cloying odor of the incense; he had smelt it too, in the corridor. Unmistakable.