The Mists of Osorezan

by Zoe Drake

  “There’s one thing I’ve got to ask first,” Kazuyuki Murata began. “If you’re saying there was an intruder in the hospital, the head doctor’s got to be informed. This could be a police matter, you know.”

  “You’re right,” Nozaki said hastily, “but before I make a report, I’ve got to find out exactly what I saw.”

  Murata looked at the other man strangely, then opened up the Scaler software and began to type commands.

  It was eight o’clock in the morning. After seeing the apparition in the wheelchair Nozaki had refused to panic. He stayed until the end of his shift, sitting in the control room, responding to his assistants’ comments and questions with distracted gestures and grunts.

  As soon as the shift had finished, he reported to the six-story F-wing building. Nozaki was proud of his almost encyclopedic knowledge of the hospital, but F-wing was a place he didn’t usually frequent. It housed storerooms, locker rooms, the employee cafeteria – and the security office.

  As security was such a national concern, the CCTV system at Tsugaru University Hospital had been upgraded several years ago. Murata himself was one of the new additions: a younger, computer-literate man replacing the retired salarymen who comprised the previous security force. The office, however, looked as if it hadn’t been changed for some years. Antiquated computer equipment lay on dusty, dimly lit shelves at the back of the windowless office. Murata and Nozaki sat on movable office chairs tucked into a stainless steel table with a Macintosh computer between two monitor screens. Murata was a large, portly man in his forties, stiff black hair swept backwards from his forehead, the stubble on his jaws standing out dramatically on his pale skin.

  He adjusted the round, rimless glasses on his nose, peering closer at the screen. The new system sent images captured by the hospital’s CCTV cameras directly to the security department’s Macintosh computers. Processed this way, it was possible to examine them on higher-resolution digital displays. “It gets rid of all the flickers,” said Murata as he rapidly clicked a number of icons on the screen. “What time this morning, did you say?”

  “Well I’m not exactly sure, but it was after two a.m.”

  “Say, sometime between two and two-fifteen. Should be easy to find.”

  An image jumped into life on the screen. A square holding a grainy, monochrome image of a bare corridor. “That’s it,” Nozaki uttered, nodding involuntarily.

  Murata made a few more clicks with his mouse. The lighting in the image fluttered as he switched from frame to frame, making adjustments in contrast and brightness. At length, the stillness in the corridor was broken by a door opening, and seconds later a shape moved into view.

  Nozaki caught his breath. There had been someone in the corridor.

  He leaned in closer. “Can you slow it down?”

  “Sure. I’ll take it frame by frame. I can resize the resolution to sharpen it up, as well.”

  In silence, both of them watched what Nozaki had seen last night. An old man in a wheelchair rolled himself into the corridor, and moved down it past the door to Nozaki’s control room, and then out of sight of the camera. Nozaki felt a cold prickling break out all over his skin. “You were right,” Murata confirmed with a sigh. “There was someone up there last night.” He clicked on an icon at the top of the screen, and the image of the old man expanded in size, square areas of the screen magnified. “Do you recognize him? Is he one of the patients?”

  Nozaki screwed up his eyes. The figure sat hunched over, withered hands on the arms of the wheelchair, dressed in a polo shirt and dark slacks. In his memories, he had always pictured his grandfather in a hakama kimono, but the polo shirt was also familiar. As familiar as the waxy, expressionless face.

  “No,” Nozaki lied. “I’ve never seen this person before.”

  Murata clucked his tongue. “There’s something else. Let me take it back to the start.”

  “The start of what?”

  “When the man first appears. I’ll take it frame by frame.”

  The same monochrome section of corridor appeared on the screen, now blank. Murata tapped keys with one hand, tracing shadows on the monitor with the other. Nozaki stared tensely at the screen. It occurred to him now which door the figure had appeared from; the debriefing room, where he interviewed the subjects from the project. None of it made sense. Even if there were a wheelchair-bound patient who resembled his grandfather in the hospital, who somehow got lost and wandered up to the eleventh floor, wouldn’t he be coming out of the elevator? The debriefing room held the subject’s records, and was always kept locked…

  But the door to the debriefing room swung silently open, and Murata tapped the screen with his forefinger. “Watch this.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “There’s something odd about this.”

  The film moved on slowly, frame by frame. The man in the wheelchair rolled into the corridor, vague outline of arms and legs, pale emotionless blob of face.

  “There, now,” Murata called.

  “What is it?”

  “Do you see the man’s arms? They’re not touching the wheels. That means he’s not under his own power, he’s just rolling down the corridor.”

  Nozaki stared at the screen. “Do you mean it’s a dummy? Someone put a manikin in a wheelchair as a joke?”

  “Could be one of the medical students, I suppose, playing a trick on you. But if it’s only a dummy, how could it turn the wheelchair around in the corridor?”

  With a vile sinking feeling in his gut, Nozaki watched Murata call up the action he’d just described.

  “And how did the wheelchair get out of the office in the first place? Did someone push him out?”

  “You mean – there was someone else in the office?” Nozaki had his handkerchief out again, mopping up cold sweat. “Zoom in on that door, could you?”

  Murata took it back to the empty corridor, and clicked on the frame that showed the door opening. There, before the wheelchair appeared, was the dark interior of the debriefing room. Dark, but not pitch black. There was a pale smudge on the image. The security officer expanded it, resolving it further and further, the pale spot growing on the screen.

  The white oval resolved itself into a face.

  Murata drew in his breath. “Your wheelchair man or dummy has got an accomplice, Mr. Nozaki. There was someone else in your office. Standing to the left of the door.”

  Another click of the mouse, and Nozaki recognized the features.

  No.

  No, it can’t be.

  Nozaki stood up, turning away from the screen. He clapped a hand over his mouth; the screaming inside his head might get out.

  “Mr. Nozaki, are you all right?”

  “Excuse me for a moment,” he said, muffled by his fingers. “I’m not feeling very well.”

  The security officer stared worriedly at the luminous white face, still up on the screen. “Do you recognize this person?” he called.

  It was often said that Tsugaru University Hospital had a lot in common with the Japanese capital, Tokyo, so far down south. Both were chaotic conglomerations of temporary measures that had become permanent. Both were sites that had grown from a small cluster of buildings too quickly to allow for long-term planning.

  The site was an architectural mess, and a nightmare to navigate around. The main buildings were built on foundations a hundred and twenty years old; the university had assumed its present role as a medical college over a hundred years ago. The entire site rang with echoes of pre-war Japan. There were five wings to the hospital, termed north, south, Rose, Lily and Chrysanthemum wings. Each wing overlapped with the others, and the well-meaning guide pamphlet often confused visitors even more.

  The north building was the largest wing of the hospital, fifteen floors above and three basement floors below. Beneath the eleventh floor Sleep Research Lab, the lower levels were given over to the Emergency Room, operating theatres, intensive care units, patients’ wards, storage rooms, all bustling wit
h activity.

  The fifteen-story main building was the central hub around which the wings spread out in different directions, all connected by covered walkways, under which wheelchairs and gurneys were rolled from room to room. The exteriors were all grey concrete; the interiors were all off-white plaster and linoleum. It was a maze, and visitors to the hospital regularly became lost.

  Which was exactly what Nozaki wanted to do now. He walked through the corridors, taking turn after turn and pushing through one swing door and another, taking no heed of where he was going. The only thing that mattered was to get away. Away from people who knew him.

  He came to a courtyard between buildings, and sat down upon a bench, his hands on his knees, his head hanging down.

  He mustn’t say her name. It had been taken care of. Dr. Kageyama had said that the hospital was not to blame, and Nozaki himself was not to blame. Nakatta koto ni shita; the authorities had resolved them of obligations and regrets.

  And ghosts – what were ghosts? There was no tangible evidence of their existence. It was purely psychological phenomena, or electrical interference. A person’s consciousness was simply the result of the concerted activity of billions of brain cells, and after the death of the body, that bundle of memories, beliefs, wishes, hopes, fears and habits was gone. Simply gone. It was regrettable, but logically sound. Therefore, those images on the screen could not be ghosts.

  It was so important that he forget her face and her name. Tell Murata it was a student prank and delete the file. Pretend nothing had happened. Carry on with his work.

  He must not say her name.

  Nozaki lifted up his head, blinking tears out of his eyes. He took in a deep, shuddering breath.

  “Ayano Yoshida,” he said.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  The Light at the End of the Tunnel

  Weiss stood motionless in Namiko’s back room, before the altar that she called the Kamidana. He breathed deeply through his nose several times, gathering the essence, feeling strength flow through him. He lifted his ceremonial dagger, slipping it from its sheath. “Modeh ani le-fanekha,” he intoned, “melekh hai ve-kayam.”

  He closed his eyes, and saw the whole of his life stretched out upon the Sephirothic Tree, reaching up to the crown. Is the time so close? Is it so close that we can now see it?

  He felt rather than heard Namiko enter the room through the open door behind him. “Professor?” she asked.

  Weiss held up a hand for patience.

  Something waited in the mountains of Shingomura. Mountains were sacred sites in the Shinto religion, but this was not one of the Kami. It was something that didn’t belong here.

  He bowed and replaced the dagger in its sheath. He sat down at the chair and table by the window, accepting a cup of milk tea from Namiko. “First things first,” he said. “The pyramid. Not exactly a pyramid, is it?”

  “Japanese people always try to make things more mysterious,” she answered. “Japan’s so-called pyramids are usually roughly triangular boulders placed in selected positions.”

  “I see. Well, this one is in a very special position. From what I felt, I think it’s at a nexus of ley-lines, a central point for the flow of earth energies. Like I told you yesterday, it has the same writing as the front page of the Achaz Codex – carved onto the stone at the base of the hill, near the shrine. I wish I still had my camera…” he trailed off, remembering the cracks in the stone. “Namiko…the March 11th earthquake and tsunami, a few years ago. How close is Fukushima from Aomori?”

  Namiko frowned. “Close enough.”

  Weiss nodded, looking out across the garden. “Yes, I see now. Let’s say our prophet Achaz, burning with forbidden knowledge and hounded by the King of the Veils, trekked across Siberia and traveled by boat to northern Japan. Finding a place where the leylines flowed with power, and using the incantations he channeled, he succeeded in finally containing the King of the Veils, binding him to the mountains of ancient Herai. He marked the area with stones and carved a seal in the rock to keep the portal closed. He settled in the area, lived to a ripe old age, died and was buried with his companion.”

  Namiko raised her finely shaped eyebrows. “After that he is mistaken for Jesus Christ?”

  “Well, you know how these things start, over the centuries details get lost and filled in with legends and fantasies. Wish-fulfillment, basically.”

  “So for all these years the sigil held the portal closed and protected the land.”

  “Yes. But the King of the Veils wasn’t dead, because you can’t kill that which is not truly alive. It was conscious, and it was dreaming. Sometimes those dreams broke through into the material world, and certain minds were receptive to them.”

  “Like Fra Mauro in Venice.”

  “Yes. Also the man who channeled the Devil’s Handwriting, and the Nazi necromancers who tried to replicate Fra Mauro’s experiments at Poveglia.”

  “Now you think someone is resuming those experiments, this time in Japan? These Heralds of the Storm who tried to kill you?”

  Weiss frowned. “Why do you call them Heralds of the Storm?”

  “That’s what their name means in Japanese. Arashi no Maebure. The forerunners of the storm. The harbingers.”

  “Oh.” Weiss sat for a moment, rubbing his chin. “Yes. I see.” He took another sip of tea. “But I don’t think they’re the main force behind this. The King of the Veils needs a physical nexus in this world. It occupies one particular mind to anchor itself here, to monitor events and plan its actions. If it were Matsuoka, I would have sensed that immediately, and I probably wouldn’t be alive now. Another thing; they’ve moved the Book of the Veils somewhere. The second time I was in the building, I could no longer sense it. They’d taken it somewhere.”

  “They changed its hiding place, you mean.”

  They sank into silence, both of them staring out into the garden. “Professor,” she asked at length. “What did you do with that bucket loader?”

  He chuckled dryly. “I’ll just say one of the elementary schools in the village next to Shingomura acquired some unusual playground equipment during the night. Now let me ask you something, my dear. What do you know about Susanoo-no-Mikoto?”

  “One of the most powerful gods in Japanese mythology. The creator goddess Izanami gave birth to Amaterasu, the goddess of the Sun, Tsukuyomi, the god of the moon, and Susanoo, the god of storms and the sea. He is a trickster god, his behavior is often unpredictable and destructive.”

  “Yes…” Weiss stoked his chin. “I see what’s at work here. The Canaanites called it Baal. The Venetians called it Satan. The Heralds of the Storm call it Susanoo-no-Mikoto. But what we’re really dealing with is the King of the Veils.”

  Weiss chewed his lip, looked back out into the garden for reassurance. “‘I saw neither a heaven above nor a firmly founded earth,’” he muttered, “‘but a place chaotic and horrible. And there I saw seven stars of the heaven bound together in it, like great mountains, and burning with fire.’”

  Turned back, he gestured to the stolen laptop lying on the tatami near the opposite wall. “What about that? Have you had a chance to look at it yet?”

  Namiko nodded. “Right after you went to bed last night, Professor, but I’m afraid there was nothing useful it could tell us. The files are mostly accounts. Ordering of catering, clothes, dry-cleaning, records of financial transactions over the last two years. There were also PDFs of pamphlets about the Heralds and Susanoo, you know, material to recruit people.”

  Weiss clucked his tongue. “Shame. I was hoping to find something on what they were actually doing to each other, you know, sleeping while hooked up to computers on those beds. Still…”

  “Oh yes,” Namiko added, “There was something I thought was strange. For the last eighteen months, the Heralds of the Storm have received regular payments from Tsugaru University Hospital, apparently for purchases of medical equipment.”

  Startled, Weiss looked up. “Did you say hospital
?”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  The Pale Mask

  The train picked up speed as it rolled through the Tohoku landscape. His textbook and iPhone were both in his rucksack, but David made no move to take them out. He let the rolling square plots of the rice paddies take his attention away, out to the shadowed bulk of the mountains in the distance. Everywhere he went in Tohoku, the pattern repeated itself. Rice fields stretched from one identikit town to the next, the monotony broken only by the occasional apple farm.

  Am I dreaming now, he muttered under his breath.

  The summer school at Hirosaki High had been cancelled. The girls were told there were no club activities until further notice, and for David, the summer holidays had started early.

  Because one of the security guards had committed suicide.

  The pleasant middle-aged man who greeted David every morning with a polite Japanese greeting, a bow, and a totally unnecessary salute. He’d hanged himself. He’d taken a roll of masking tape, walked to the broken elevator in the annex, stood on a chair, wound tape around his own neck, fastened it to the light fitting in the security booth and kicked his chair away. Slowly strangling himself to death. All in the twenty minutes that his partner had been on patrol.

  The Vice-Principal had called David up at seven in the morning to tell him what had happened, and that the summer school had been cancelled. Now there was no work to do.

  Ouija boards. Ghost stories. Suicide. David didn’t believe in haunted buildings, but this school was suddenly a frightening place to be.

  He looked around. Some of his fellow passengers dozed, their heads bent over their laps or tilted back against the window to expose their open mouths to the world. It was no wonder something like the Kageyama project was taking place in Japan. The Japanese were obsessed with sleep. All it took was a seat on a train and they were unconscious within seconds, in a shameless display of public drowsiness. In the mother tongue, there were so many onomatopoeic words related to sleep. Kokkuri kokkuri. Guu-guu. Suya-suya. Toro-toro.