The Mists of Osorezan

by Zoe Drake

  The dream diary was in his hands, full of descriptions of the visions dominating his sleeping hours. No matter how he sought for control, the same images come back. Every night, he saw the lake of Usoriyama, pale and quiet, without a wave or breeze to stir it, and he saw the peaks of Osorezan beneath the moon. The cold stars glimmered through the rips in the dark clouds that hung across the sky like tattered flags. Accompanying these visions was something else; a tension, a feeling of paranoia, as if someone or something else was in the dream with him. Watching him.

  He always saw circles carved on the rocks around him. Writing arranged in three concentric rings, like sketches of bomb explosions or radar waves. He had never seen the writing before – but yet somehow he had…

  On waking, he’d written some of it down. He looked at it now, the jagged lines, the loops and squiggles. He pulled the other notebook out of his bag; Ayano’s diary. He opened it near the final pages. There it was. The same lines of curiously shaped letters and characters.

  It was the same language.

  David paged back through both notebooks, images from his dreams and Ayano’s, and observations that Nozaki had asked him to write down. The problem was, Nozaki had told him, that imaginative interpreters could find almost anything in a dream. Free association could trace it back to both ‘daily residues’ and memories from early childhood. But we may be deluding ourselves, Nozaki had said. Perhaps nothing is concealed. Perhaps what we need to see is right in front of us.

  For their first meeting outside the Yoshida’s household, Saori had chosen a coffee shop close to the train station. The café had a German name, and the potted plants outside and brown and white wood interior were probably to give it a Bavarian atmosphere. It didn’t succeed in the slightest. Along with her usual jeans, Saori wore a black sleeveless top, and her left wrist was ringed with a number of bright copper bangles. With the breeze gently blowing strands of shining hair across her face, her eyes looked more than ever like brush strokes, impressions of eyes that a master artist had created in her gently rounded face.

  They sat in a cubbyhole booth with pillars and the backs of their bench-like seats screening them from the handful of other customers. They both ordered iced coffee.

  Saori pointed a long finger at him. “So what have you learned, Mr. Spy?”

  “I’ve been trying to get information from the other subjects. You know, to see if they’re willing to talk about Ayano.”

  “I wouldn’t think so. If they knew anything, they’d keep quiet because they’re scared of the doctors.”

  “Well…yes. It hasn’t been going well,” David admitted. “I’ve been friendly, asking them out for tea after the sessions, but they probably think I’m trying to chat them up.”

  “What, even the men?”

  He smiled and looked away. “I don’t know about that.”

  “But how do you feel after the treatment? You know, inside?”

  He took a deep breath. “I do feel different. When I wake up, I feel refreshed, fitter…full of energy.”

  Saori stared at him. “Tell me about the dreams,” she asked.

  The waitress put two tall skinny glasses on the table holding crow-black liquid with ice filling it to the brim. Two plastic straws peeked their heads out like snakes. Tiny plastic cups of artificial cream and gum syrup lay on their sides next to the glasses. The waitress told them to take their time and walked briskly away. David and Saori stared at each other. Neither of them touched the drinks.

  “Something very odd is happening,” David said finally.

  “You’re seeing things, aren’t you?”

  “That depends what you mean by things.”

  David paused, then began speaking, a swimmer taking a dive with the pool rushing up to meet him. “The security guard committed suicide. He hanged himself in his booth, while his partner was patrolling the school grounds.”

  “You saw it happen,” Saori finished for him.

  “Yeah. I saw something in the dream. It…ate him.”

  He looked at Saori, and suddenly realized there were tears forming in her eyes. “Ayano used to have bad dreams,” she said. “She started asking the Baku to take them away, to eat her nightmares. Then the thing or the person or whatever she dreamed about disappeared. In real life.”

  She sat back, crying silently and steadily. Fighting panic, David reached over and held her hand. It was the first time he’d ever touched her. Her fingers were smooth and deliciously cool.

  “What you said just now… Ayano told me the same thing a few days before she died.”

  David stared back at her, his face flushed.

  “I have to sit somewhere else for a while,” Saori said. Her cheeks were shiny with tears, and her eyes seemed twice as large. “Don’t talk to me for a moment.”

  She carried her glass to a booth somewhere on the other side of the café. David felt the eyes of the other customers in the restaurant watching them. He sat, his head in his hands, his thoughts in utter turmoil.

  It took Saori something like ten minutes to compose herself, and then make her way back through the tables, with the other customers pointedly ignoring her. She slid in and sat back with her shoulders against the dark wood behind her. “David,” she said in a defeated voice, “When I was an elementary school student, in the USA, we read a story in one of the textbooks. An African folk tale. Have you ever heard of the Loneliness Birds?”

  “No,” he said hoarsely.

  “The story said, in some parts of Africa there are piles of smooth round stones that look like eggs. The people say those places are the nests of the Loneliness Birds. If you pick one up, you would be surprised at how heavy it is.”

  She reached out and held the glass, turning it around and around on the table. David was almost burning up with tension and shame.

  “When a loved one dies, the Loneliness Birds lay a stone egg in your heart. You can feel it there inside you. You carry it around, wherever you go, and the weight pulls you down until you can’t go on any more. That’s what it feels like, David. Ever since Ayano died.”

  David thought for a moment about the image and then leaned forward urgently. “Look, think about this. If it’s an egg, then the egg is going to hatch, right? It’ll hatch and whatever’s inside is going to fly away. Then you’ll feel that the pain has gone – and you’ll be back in the world, Saori. The whole world will look different.”

  She looked back at him with a gaze so intense it was almost painful. “I hope so,” she said finally. “Yeah, I really hope so.”

  He signaled for the check. The waitress, who had been staring at them fixedly, rapidly moved to their table.

  “I’m going to quit the program,” David said. “We’ve learned enough. The next time I have an appointment at the hospital I’ll tell them.”

  Saori looked at him, smiled wanly, and nodded. “Thanks.”

  Outside, the air had changed slightly, shifting down towards dusk, but the heat hadn’t abated.

  “My family have found a new lawyer,” Saori said. “He’s coming up from Sendai next week. He specializes in malpractice, and apparently he’s a bit of a big shot.”

  David mumbled a few phrases of good luck. He looked back at her. She seemed to be hesitating, waiting for him to say something, to do something.

  “See you at the next lesson?” he asked eventually.

  The evening train was quiet as usual; just a few passengers on their way back home. High school students. Youngish construction workers with bleached blonde hair, baggy pants and open-toed soft boots. A solitary-middle-aged woman, her face screwed up with fatigue. Diagonally opposite David sat a woman wearing one of those white gauze masks that the Japanese habitually wore in public whenever they had colds or hay fever.

  David opened his bag and looked at Ayano’s dream diary. Suddenly he felt very self-conscious about reading it in public. Instead, he took out his textbook, hoping to test himself on some kanji.

  He looked up. There was something odd abo
ut the woman opposite, something that bothered him. He was used to seeing people with masks in public, but this woman had it pulled up over her nose, and wore dark glasses and a hat pulled down over her brow.

  Dark glasses and a sun hat. At night.

  And there was something about her skin, the small amount that could be seen. The skin above her mask had a peculiar sheen to it, as if she had applied cosmetics to cover up something, a discolouring rash or birthmark or something. He couldn’t identify whatever it was that repelled him, but the impression of an accident victim was so intense that he couldn’t keep his eyes away.

  While David was still looking at her, she jerked her head toward him, the twin black shells of the sunglasses catching his gaze. Instantly, he lowered his eyes to his textbook. Something about the quick, sharp way she jerked her head made him think of the scuttling movement of a cockroach.

  The train pulled into Okunai station, and David felt relieved to see that the woman wasn’t getting off at his stop. He stood at the doors, waiting for them to open, slyly glancing at the woman’s reflection in the glass.

  Outside the station, he went into the Family Mart convenience store opposite the exit. Orange juice and milk for tomorrow’s breakfast. There was a scattering of other customers, all of them from the same train he’d got off, making their take-home purchases of rice-cakes, microwave dinners, cigarettes, beer.

  He turned round a corner to go into the next aisle, and stopped in shock.

  It was the woman from the train. The same mask, same glasses and sun hat, long black hair spilling out from under the hat and flowing over her shoulders. She walked down the aisle straight towards him, a basket held in her white-gloved hands. She walked with a peculiar rolling motion, tilting from side to side, the hem of her long grey skirt almost brushing the ground.

  Suddenly panicked, he ran back to the sliding doors, not daring to look behind him. But she stayed on the train, he thought. He’d seen her sitting in the carriage as he walked down the platform. It was impossible for her to be in the shop if she hadn’t got off the train.

  He turned left, down the road back to his apartment building, away from the brightly lit shops of the town’s tiny town center. He walked swiftly down a lifeless avenue, its sides lined with metal shuttered storefronts, the kanji signs above their doors faded by decades of sunshine. The red paper lanterns hanging from the overhead cables suddenly reminded him of empty chrysalis shells, as if things had crawled out of them and flown away into the night. The random, disturbing image made him walk even faster.

  Light from the vending machines spilled out across the concrete like liquid. He had to fight an overwhelming impulse to look behind him. She’s not following you, he kept telling himself. You don’t have strange women following you, David Keall, you’re not that sort of guy.

  Then she stepped right out in front of him.

  “Don’t you think I’m beautiful?” came the voice, muffled by the mask but still icily clear. He stopped, too shocked to say anything.

  “Don’t you think I’m beautiful?”

  He knew he had to move, to push past her, to get away from this horrible wrongness. But he couldn’t. The eyes held him. The black, blank frames of the sunglasses, glistening under the streetlight like the chitin shells of insects. Something moved in front of her face. It was her hand, reaching up, reaching up to pull down her mask.

  Oh, Jesus Christ–

  The woman’s mouth wasn’t a mouth, it was a scar. A long, ragged slash, no lips, just a flap that yawned wider and wider as her jaw descended and her face lengthened. It wasn’t possible. It wasn’t possible for a human face to do that. As the skin stretched further, David saw inside the mouth, rows of sharp, glimmering shark teeth that lined the revolting soft mess that was her palate–

  There was an incoherent shout. David suddenly realized it was his voice, but it sounded like nothing he could recognize. He got past her. Somehow. He broke into a run, without looking back.

  The elevator was on the ground floor as he ran into the lobby and up the steps, and thankfully the doors slid open as soon as he pressed the button. He rushed inside, stabbing repeatedly at the button for the third floor.

  The doors closed and the elevator started to rise. Fumbling for his apartment key, David peered through the small slit of glass in the elevator door. One second before the lobby sank out of sight, he saw the doors open as she pushed her way inside, the mask back over her face.

  Shit, she’s followed me inside. She’s going to take the stairs–

  He woke up.

  He was still on the train. He looked groggily around. Men in suits, construction workers, high school students in uniform. No sign of a woman in gloves, sunglasses and mask. He looked at his watch; he’d only been asleep for a few minutes.

  The train slid to a halt, and he looked out at the white signs heralding the station’s name. Okunai. Blinking stupidly, he grabbed his bag with trembling hands and ran out just before the doors closed.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Night School

  The night before, David had left the window’s paper screens open, and he blinked into a molten blue sky, slit and dissected by thick black power cables, with the morning sun picking out the dust on the floor around him in merciless detail. The hammering of metal on metal from the construction sites nearby rang through his head.

  David had sat up the whole night. The banality of television had helped to distract him, but now it was time to leave the apartment. He stepped into the shower, closed his eyes, and fought for breath when he opened them again. Someone’s behind the door, the outline of a hooded figure through the frosted glass–

  No. He forced himself to be calm, blinked the water out of his eyes. It was his towel, hanging on a peg outside. But he held the door open while he finished his shower, trying to keep his eyes open as much as he could.

  Out of the shower, he stood in his boxer shorts in front of the window, gazing out across the street. The Japanese kanji for the word ase, meaning sweat, was a combination of the characters for ‘water’ and ‘pushing out’, and that’s exactly what it felt like. Even though he’d had a shower, even though he wasn’t physically exerting himself, the sweat forced itself out of his skin and formed a horrid greasy film on his face and around his body. Even doing nothing, people here drenched themselves in sweat; and that’s what the residents of this godforsaken town seemed to spend their days doing. Nothing.

  He wiped his face with the towel. He looked around, gazing at the things he’d stuck to the walls to try to personalize his tiny three-room apartment – the photocopies of humorous news stories and misprinted headlines, the pencil sketches he’d made on his hiking trips, the photographs of his family and Lisa.

  Something was different. Something was bothering him. Opposite the window, a huge sheet of yellowish-green plastic billowed in the wind, sunlight rippling across its surface. Where had that come from? Moving closer, he remembered that construction had recently started across the street, in what used to be the parking lot. A new apartment building was being put up, a skeleton of metal poles holding up the temporary skin of yellowish fabric. Brilliant stars of reflected sunshine throbbed on the bodywork of the cars parked on the street below.

  Wasn’t the color of tarpaulin usually blue?

  He went to the sink, poured a glass of water for his parched throat, and thought about getting dressed. His eyes throbbed in sympathy to the pain at the back of his head. Everything had an oddly beautiful aura around it, a persistent lucidity in the ambient light. The odors inside his apartment seemed to be sharper, more pungent.

  It was time to go outside. He couldn’t put it off any longer.

  In the covered walkway leading to the staff room, the biggest dragonfly David had ever seen was bumping its sticklike body against the glass. It shimmered in the sun, jade green and fire engine red.

  David watched it, his hands burdened with textbooks and card folders. He stood hesitantly in the doorway, ready to step b
ack and close the door if the insect swooped towards him. It didn’t. It found an opening and flitted away across the school grounds, its shell glittering in the steely daylight.

  The staff room interior was cool, quiet, and almost empty. A few of the senior teachers were still at the desks, but most of the staff was absent. There were no police officers here, but even so, there was a solemn hush over the room. Anyone standing at the back would be able to see the booth for the security guards, and the police tape surrounding it.

  The Vice-Principal stood up as he saw David approach, his round tanned face more lined than usual. “Otsukara-sama desu, David-sensei. Thank you for your hard work.”

  David handed over the sheaf of reports, columns of kanji names filled in with numbers one to five in pencil. “That’s the last of the grades. Would you like me to put them into the computer?”

  “No, that’s quite all right! You can go home now, if you wish.”

  “Thanks. I’ll just clear things out upstairs.”

  Walking past the entrance to the English department, David went straight up to the computer room on the third floor. It was empty. He switched on the lights, the air conditioning, and booted up the computer. He yawned massively as he waited for the screen to glow into life.

  He couldn’t stop yawning. His jaws gaped wide, breath escaping in a hiss.

  No emails. Had everyone back home decided to take the whole of August off? They called it the dog days, the no-news season when nothing happened and nobody wanted to do anything. Yeah, right. If only. Tragedy never takes a holiday, people.

  He stretched in his chair, lifting up his arms, pain lancing through his shoulders. He missed his soccer practice. Really have to get back into condition when the weather cools down. On top of that, he was out of touch with his drinking gang. Once they got back from their trips home, back to see their families, or trips over to Thailand and Vietnam to hit the beach, once they got back he’d have someone to talk to again.