by Zoe Drake
Would Lisa actually go to Ibiza? They were both getting a bit old for that, but maybe curiosity would get the better of her. She knew to stay away from the crappy places, after all. Surely there must be some beaches that weren’t spoiled by the clubbers…
His chin was dropping further and further on to his chest and his head felt like it was too heavy for his neck. He took his fingers off the keyboard, rubbed his eyes. How long can people go without sleep? Last night he’d looked it up on the Internet and found the unofficial record was a man from Cornwall who’d stayed awake for eleven days and nights. The Guinness Book of Records had refused to endorse it, though, because of the health risks.
Health risks. For David, closing his eyes had become a health risk. But he had to do it, just for a moment…a moment’s rest, and then he would stand up, get his second wind, get moving…
He opened his eyes, twitching around in his seat.
The windows were pitch black, the room illuminated only by the off-white overhead lights. He looked blearily at his watch. Five fifty-six. How long had he been asleep?
Rubbing life back into his eyes, he stood up, stretched, and went outside. There were no lights on in the corridor. He rushed back inside and switched off the computer. What if everyone’s gone home, he wondered, and thought I’d already left?
What if they’ve locked the school doors and the gates? Oh, the shame…
His trainers made soft sounds on the smooth flooring as he crept down the hallway, his eyes slowly adjusting to the dim light. He turned the corner into the main third floor corridor, the long, echoing space stretching away into the shadows, the green exit signs glowing softly overhead.
There was no sound. No club activity, no laughing, no screeching of girlish chatter, no music. Only silence. The school seemed oddly different; there were peculiar highlights in the pools of light lying in the corridors of shadow. The glow from the exit lights seemed abnormally bright. As he passed each classroom, David noticed subtle, gradient hues in the window glass, as if things were moving around inside.
He quickened his pace, suddenly hit by the need to get out of the building as quickly as possible.
Up ahead, someone stood in the corridor. David hadn’t seen anyone move, nobody had appeared from the stairwell entrance, no doors had opened. But there was someone there who hadn’t been there before. Not moving, just standing there. He stopped in his tracks.
“David-sensei,” a girl’s voice called softly.
He knew her voice, even if he couldn’t see her face clearly. Maki. “I thought all the girls had gone home,” he said.
“I didn’t want to go home. I’ve been waiting for you,” she said. “Ne, ne ne, sensei – come here! I’ve got something to show you.”
She slowly went back inside the classroom. Looking around, David remembered that this was the same room where he’d found the fire and the Ouija-board Kokkuri-san.
He followed her inside. “OK, what do you want to show me?”
In answer, the girl turned round, bending over one of the desks. She reached behind herself with both hands, and slowly pulled up her skirt.
“Kore,” she said. This.
She wore white T-back panties, and in the soft dusk light David stared at the magnificent smoothness of her buttocks. He gasped in shock as Maki moved her legs apart, balancing herself across the desk.
“I’m no good, David-sensei, I’m a bad girl, and bad girls have got to be punished.” She turned her head to the side, looking back at him through her hair.
He couldn’t stop himself. His hands trembled as he reached out to pull down her panties. She moaned as he slid them off her bottom and then let them fall down to the white socks around her ankles. He touched the skin of her buttocks, caressed it, kneading it with his fingers.
Then she gasped out loud as he brought down the flat of his hand and slapped it against her cheeks.
Six of the best, he thought. He spanked her hard. Four, five, six times. Maki put her hand to her mouth and bit down on her fingers, trying to stifle her cries of pain and pleasure. He stopped, breathing harshly. “You deserve it,” he said hoarsely. He reached down to his trousers, unzipped his fly. “You’re a bad girl.”
“But don’t you think I’m beautiful?”
He froze, his erection suddenly fading. “What? What did you stay?”
She twisted around on the desk to look back at him through her long black hair. Her face was a mass of swollen scar tissue. The one eye that stared at him was a blank, milky white mass. Her mouth, a twisted hole of broken, discolored teeth, twitched as she slurred the words again: “Don’t you think I’m beautiful?”
David screamed.
He rammed back the sliding door with a crash and fled the classroom.
He took the main staircase three steps down at a time. The student hall was also in darkness, the large open space lit up softly by the moonlight coming in from the tall windows by the staircase, and the soft glow of the exit signs. The mournful light picked out the dead white features of the school founder’s bust at the foot of the staircase. It picked out the gently ticking bulk of the grandfather clock near the entrance. It picked out the white blouses of the two girls who stood motionless next to the clock, in their sailor-suits and short skirts, long black hair swept over their faces.
I have to hold it together, David thought, have to hold myself together long enough to get out.
He reached the bottom step and sprinted for the side door. Heading for the main entrance would mean trying to get past the girls and he would be within touching distance. The side door would take him out to the covered walkway leading to the staff room.
Even as he ran, from the corners of his eyes he saw the girls turning their heads to follow his movements. Through the curtains of hair he glimpsed their scorched and blistered faces. He heard someone else approaching, light, quick footsteps coming along the corridor leading from the elevator.
The door rattled as David ran into it but it refused to open. Locked. He made stupid whimpering noises as he shook the handles up and down. Behind him, the footsteps were louder and closer as whatever followed him rushed into the hall.
He turned round; he couldn’t stop himself. He put his hands up to protect himself. She stood a few meters away from him, the pale mask hiding her nose and mouth, the black screens of her sunglasses emotionless and dead.
Her arm came up, and David screamed as something wet and warm splashed over his hands and face.
“David-sensei. David!”
David looked up at the Vice-Principal in shock, for a moment totally confused as to where he was. That liquid sensation on his face; he was covered in sweat.
He was still in the computer room.
“We thought you’d gone home,” Ogura-sensei said. “Are you sure you are all right?”
David couldn’t answer. He felt as if his head was full of oily smoke, like burning fat. He stood up, and felt his legs trembling and cramped, as if he’d run a marathon.
“No,” he said finally, “I’m not all right.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
Up All Night
What was the difference between dreaming and insanity, if you were inside the dream? Nothing, David realized. Nothing at all.
It was the morning of August 15th. The dawn broke, and the morning sun turned the window’s paper screens into blazing lanterns. He’d spent the night sitting in front of the television, making coffee, ironing, surfing the Internet, doing anything that might keep him awake. If he waited a little longer, the Yoshidas would arrive, and they would all leave together for the hospital.
He took a shower, pausing every few seconds to switch off the stream of water and open the frosted glass door, peering out into his apartment through his dripping hair. Alert for any sights, sounds or smells that shouldn’t be there.
Alert for the smell of sulfur.
He ate breakfast mechanically. Checked his mail and Facebook again. Nothing from Lisa. Nothing from his parents. He stood
at the window, staring at the yellowish tarpaulin covering the bones of the half-finished building opposite, watching it flap and twitch in the fetid breeze. There was something vile about the color. It reminded him of pus and vomit and so many other things.
He turned round to face the hallway and the apartment’s only entrance, the view sectioned up by the eight square panes of glass in the kitchen door. The light in the hallway was on; he wanted no shadows in the hallway, no place where things could hide.
This was what Ayano had been trying to warn her sister about. The Kageyama Treatment was dangerous. It had done something to his brain, made him hallucinate. The schoolgirls had told him about the Kuchisake-Onna, and the image had sunk into his subconscious. The elevator door vandalism and the security guard’s suicide had spooked him enough to send his imagination into overdrive. The Loneliness Birds had hatched an egg, not in his heart, but in his head. And the eggs had hatched not birds but insects, poisonous little dream maggots crawling through his brain, eating away at it, keeping him awake, driving him into despair.
Nine o’clock, and he stood in front of the building, ready with his bag. He looked uneasily back at his current home. There was something unfamiliar about the façade of the apartment building, the ugly reinforced concrete he had seen almost every day for seventeen months. In the glassy light, the gray walls curved at unreasonable angles, and the shadows were not where they were supposed to be.
The Mitsubishi Airtrek saloon car cruised into view and stopped to open its side door. “Good morning,” said Mrs. Yoshida as David climbed into the back seat. Saori smiled a hello from beside him.
“Would you like some breads?” asked her mother.
“I’ve already had breakfast, thanks.”
David rested his head on the window, feeling the car’s vibrations through the bodywork, across the glass. Write it all down. That’s what he would do, write it all down. In the dream diary. He would catalogue exactly what he experienced, and then present it to the hospital. They wouldn’t have a leg to stand on. They would have to help him.
He kept thinking about Lisa. His parents passing on the dream diary on to her after he–
With a huge effort, he opened his eyes. They were out among the fields and rice paddies, rusting farm shacks lining the highway.
“Do you like here, David?” Mr. Yoshida asked.
David, his tongue thick in his mouth, mumbled an incoherent question.
“There are too many things going on in the city,” Saori’s father continued. “Everything is gathered in one place and is convenient and quick to obtain, but it makes us feel tired.”
“It shortens your life span,” agreed his wife.
They had come to the bank of a river, a grassy bank lined with trees. The leaves of the trees were shiny and slimy. They didn’t look like leaves at all, but seaweed – wet, green, glistening seaweed. Hanging from the branches.
Something moved down below. The whole of the riverbank was one long field of mud. Glossy, liquid mud. Human figures crawled over its surface, trying to get to their feet, struggling to free themselves from the mud’s cold, sucking embrace. Even though their clothes were plastered to their skin, and their faces were covered with brown filth, he recognized them. Lisa. Guilherme. His old friend Phil from college.
And behind them, drifting through the trees on the other side of the river, a foul, yellowish mist, with vague things moving deep in its heart.
At his ear, Mr. Yoshida’s voice: “Do you like?”
David woke up.
Daylight streaming in through the paper screens picked out the needles of perspiration on his face. He sat up on the sofa on which he’d fallen asleep. He’d fallen asleep in his clothes and they felt sticky and sweaty, his eyes were pasted half shut, and his hair stood up in tufts at the back. He staggered to the bathroom and shucked off his jeans and T-shirt. The cold water in the shower left him gasping for breath.
In the bedroom the alarm clock started to buzz. He took a grapefruit out of the fridge, stood at the sink with the knife in his hand, but couldn’t bring himself to cut it open. He had no appetite. He pulled on a pair of shorts and a clean T-shirt.
Outside, the streets were in the grip of the heat, the sunlight that sucked the life out of everything. Am I dreaming, he thought, am I dreaming?
The Mitsubishi Airtrek saloon car pulled into view, and they opened the door for him to enter. Saori smiled at him again as he sat next to her. Mrs. Yoshida held out the bag of bread rolls again.
On the palm of his hand, David secretly traced the Japanese character for ‘dream’.
This time they arrived at the hospital. They walked inside and were greeted by Nozaki, his usual impeccably polite self. They all entered the elevator and ascended to the tenth floor in silence.
The lawyer waited for them in the debriefing room; a tall, swarthy individual in a dark suit and even darker glasses. “So, you don’t like hospitals, do you?” he barked, his voice thick with Osaka dialect. “Well, no hospitals or doctors can help you now!”
With a swift, sinuous movement, the ‘legal expert’ opened his jacket and pulled out a black object that glittered metallically.
Before David could register what was happening, before he could even recognize the object as a gun, Mr. Yoshida jerked backwards, a dark hole the size of a pearl between his eyes. A mandala of red and yellow viscous material spread itself miraculously on the wall behind his head.
“What!”
David looked at Mrs. Yoshida. There was shock on her face, but also sadness and somehow recognition, as if deep down she’d always known how it was going to end. The gun spat quietly once more. Mrs. Yoshida twitched, releasing her blood and brains in an explosive act of decoration, and collapsed, her head falling on her husband’s chest.
In the midst of the fear that paralyzed him, even though he couldn’t stop staring at the barrel of the gun, David noticed something with even greater horror. There was a thin, yellowish mist, like gas, seeping into the room from under the door.
“Now the foreigner,” the thug growled as he swung his gun hand towards David. “And after that, the Yoshida’s other daughter. A couple of hours with me, and she’ll wish she’d died instead of her sister!”
David woke up.
Next to him the alarm clock started to buzz.
He walked to the shower but couldn’t go inside. While he stood naked something might press its face up against the frosted glass, trying to get in. He stood at the bathroom sink, looking at himself in the mirror. His face was white, his eyes were sunken, and an angry red spot had swelled up at the corner of his mouth.
A sound came from the living room – a harsh, rapid clicking. He went back through, picked up the TV remote control, and pressed the ‘mute’ button. He stood still in the silence, his ears straining for any sound that seemed out of place. Nothing. The rattling sound had gone.
He picked up the towel and screamed into it. A full-throated scream, muffled by the towel pressed against his face. It didn’t make him feel any better.
He now realized the Yoshida family weren’t coming. There was no meeting at the hospital; he’d imagined the whole conversation. Dreamed it. But he would go to the hospital today. He would tell them what they’d done, tell them that they had to repair the damage.
Before he lost contact with reality completely.
Outside, it was the same humid morning. The train station, the train, Aomori station. He walked along under the unforgiving sun like an old man, his shoulders stooped. He had to sit down and rest frequently at bus stops and public benches – but not to close his eyes.
He walked along the main shopping street that ran through Aomori city, taking him to the hospital, the shop canopies protecting him from the sunshine. People moved past him in the street, and he tried not to look at their faces. The cars looked rubbery and small, like toys. There was a peculiar shimmering about the trees along the road, rich in color and deep in texture.
At last, he turned the
corner and Tsugaru University Hospital revealed itself to him. He’d made it. He would go inside and demand to see Nozaki. As he stood at the corner, about to cross the street, he lifted up his eyes to the top of the tower and moaned in dismay.
A huge black thundercloud hung above the building. A halo of swirling vapors, lights flickering inside the pestilent depths. He put his hands to his head. It couldn’t possibly be real; he was dreaming, and he had to wake up before–
A bolt of lightning split open the cloud, a silent dazzling slash of electricity that blotted the hospital from his eyes. The street faded away, the people around him vanished. The darkness was lined with lumpish, blackened statues, each one with a crimson bib tied around its neck, and he heard the horrible grating sound like grinding teeth as the faceless heads of the statues turned to stare at him.
Far away, over leagues of swelling waves, he saw the mountains of Osorezan rise up before the moon; and a voice sounded, rising, booming through the darkness. The Baku. He saw its head push through the storm cloud, its vast, terrible head, and soon he would see the countless eyes scattered along its body, eyes holding the horror of a universe gone mad–
David opened his eyes.
For a second he thought he was back in bed, but above him there was only cloudless sky. The sun beat down upon his face and the pavement under his back was hot and very, very hard.
He knew he was still asleep when he saw the man crouching by his side and looking down at him. Another foreigner. An elderly Caucasian man, white hair beneath a Panama hat, face dominated by his beaky Roman nose. David tried to speak, but it came out as a croak. “I’m dreaming. I’m still dreaming…”
“Well then, young man,” said the stranger, “It’s time to wake up.”