The Mists of Osorezan

by Zoe Drake

  The cultists stopped, looking around uncertainly. There was nothing to be seen. One figure on the left began to tremble violently, and holding up his sword, he whipped it across the throat of his companion.

  It didn’t take long. Left to itself, Orobas would have played with the acolytes, driving them mad before leaving them half-dead and crippled. But now the agent of the Goetia was working under express orders from Weiss. It disabled the enemy with the maximum of efficiency and the minimum of pain.

  Not what they had planned for Weiss and Namiko, the old man pondered gravely.

  When it was over, Weiss walked swiftly across the leaf-strewn earth, bending down to examine each acolyte in turn.

  *

  “Move! Move!”

  Nozaki had no time to take in what was happening. His first instinct was to stop, to turn to David and ask him if he knew what he was doing, to ask him if what was happening was real. It was so pathetic, Nozaki knew, this need for comfort, to depend on someone else’s experiences to confirm his own.

  No time.

  As they scrambled down the stairs and rounded a corner of the stairwell, two swarthy youths ran upwards into view, their faces turned towards the small group. Their jackets were daubed with the white Imperial insignia of the men upstairs.

  David pushed him and Saori off the stairwell and through the open doors, out onto the fifth floor. Chaos greeted his eyes. There were cult members already there, standing at the nurse’s station, their swords drawn, blades glittering in their hands. The air was full of shouts and screams. The nurses and patients were running in all directions through the reception area and the corridors, too panicked to listen to what the intruders were shouting.

  It was mindless chaos. It was a TV afternoon melodrama so overdone that he and Aiko would have laughed at it.

  One middle-aged doctor stepped up to the cult members, yelling incoherently, and then jumped backwards as they waved their swords at him. Nozaki, David and Saori pelted down the corridor, joining the melee of hysterical staff and patients who ran with them, their bodies bumping and colliding as they fought to stay on their feet.

  Up ahead, at the end of the corridor, Nozaki saw the figures of three more intruders emerge into the corridor from the northern stairwell. They’re everywhere, he thought, we can’t get out…

  The chase was taking them past a series of alcoves, doorways set back in shaded archways. Some of the doorways had electronic signs flashing above them, the kanji letters for ‘NO ENTRANCE’ flashing in red. These, Nozaki knew, were the rooms where the MRI scans were conducted. When the machine was on, the door was automatically locked.

  He stopped. In one of the alcoves, one of the lights was off, the screen a blank lozenge. Nozaki saw the cultists advancing down the corridor driving the screaming crowd before them, bodies pushing into and past each other, almost knocking him over. In the few seconds he had stopped running, David had grabbed Saori’s hand and changed direction, both of them running back the way they’d come.

  Unable to think things out properly, Nozaki stepped into the alcove, pulling the heavy wooden door open. There was nobody inside. He swung the door shut behind him. He found himself in a small antechamber, and through the huge window, there gleamed the smooth metal bulk of the MRI machine, its circular maw open and empty, the walls around it pristine white.

  Reaching to the circuit box on the wall, Nozaki located the button that activated the machine and switched it on. With a heavy, metallic click, a deep hum started up in the white room in front of him, and he heard the electronic lock on the door click into place.

  He sat down in the chair in front of the console, panting with exertion and shock. His arms were trembling, and his legs felt as if they would give way if he tried to stand up again. Calm down, he told himself, you must calm down. Beyond the door, Nozaki heard the shouts and screams of the bedlam that had descended upon the hospital.

  He’d lost David and Saori. Separated, they might be being slaughtered by the raiders at this very moment. Nozaki was alone. And with the door locked, he was safe.

  But for how long?

  *

  “Move! Come on!”

  Spinning around, David tried to get his bearings. Two cultists had appeared at the exit up ahead, and at the other end, the two they’d seen coming up the stairs stepped out onto the fourth floor.

  Running back the way they came, David glanced back at Saori. Her face was pale, her eyes were wild, but she didn’t look hysterical and she kept up with the pace he set, her fingers gripping his hand tightly.

  Just before they reached the nurse’s station, David found the thing he’d glimpsed. He hadn’t been mistaken. There was a door marked ‘emergency exit’ in Japanese, and behind it, another stairwell. David cursed as he saw shadows flickering on the wall below, the guttural voices of men giving orders to each other, more cult members on the way.

  “Come on! We’ve got to go up!” But what was up, he thought, what was ahead of them? Only the roof. The roof? Was there a way out there? Was there a door that led out onto a fire exit, an escape route down the side of the building?

  They ran, shoes clattering on the steps, around and up the stairwell, the numbers of the floors appearing and disappearing and they climbed. Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen.

  At the top of the sixteenth floor, the staircase terminated in a plain, unmarked, door. David tried the handle; it rattled but the door wouldn’t move either inward or outward.

  “There is nothing which is closed to us,” Weiss had told him.

  He closed his eyes. He tried to ignore the girl beside him, the sounds of rapid footsteps clattering on the stairs below. He focused all his will on the black screen beneath his eyelids and the glowing silver lines that he traced upon them; the kanji for ‘open’.

  David reached out and yanked the door open, pushing himself and Saori through it.

  “How did you do that?” she asked.

  “Never mind. Do you have a pen? Anything to write with?”

  She looked at him in surprise, and then opened her shoulder bag. Fumbling through it together, she pulled out a ball pen and David grasped it from her. Holding it up, he frantically scrawled a network of connected strokes on the door. The kanji for ‘close’.

  Saori looked baffled. “What are you doing?”

  “It’s a trick the Professor taught me.”

  “A trick? They’re coming up here and you’re doing magic tricks?”

  Something hit the outside of the door with an impact that shook it on its hinges. The handle turned repeatedly as someone rattled it in fury.

  But the door did not open.

  “Looks like a good trick,” David whispered. There was a sudden swelling feeling in his chest, and the corridor glittered with stars before his eyes. He focused on Saori. She stared back at him with something between panic and awe in her eyes.

  “Never mind,” he said, shaking his head to clear it. “Let’s find out where we are.”

  They stood in semi-darkness, a window up ahead illuminating weakly a long, narrow corridor, walls of unpainted wood, devoid of plaster. The air smelt of dust and gauze bandages. They moved down the corridor, their eyes adjusting to the dark. Open doorways led into rooms filled with chairs, stretchers on wheels, folded hospital beds; the shadowed bulk of unfamiliar medical machinery.

  “Looks like storerooms,” Saori said quietly.

  “Yeah. Let’s see if there’s a door out onto the roof.”

  The corridor led them through twists and turns past rooms of wooden partitions, broken air conditioners and other outdated machinery lining the walls. The ghostly outline of a door loomed up ahead, the night sky framed in its square of glass.

  “That must lead to the roof,” Saori said.

  David stopped, his head full of clashing ideas.

  “David? David, what are we going to do?”

  “Just a minute, he said urgently. “I’m trying to think…”

  *

  “Did you have some
company?”

  He turned, and saw Namiko watching him. She had approached silently across the forest leaves and ferns.

  He drew himself up, all charm and effusiveness. “These are the so-called Heralds of the Storm. Had no idea what they were getting into, of course. Terrible waste. What about up on the hill?”

  Namiko raised her hand. For a moment, Weiss saw a tiny, dancing figure in white on the palm of her hand, something like an origami bird brought to life, and then she closed her fingers upon it. “There were more of the Arashi no Maebure waiting by the pyramid. The Shikigami took care of them.”

  “Ah, yes.” Weiss took off his hat and ran a hand through his long grey hair.

  “So how do we restore the potency of the sigil, Professor? How do we close the gates against it?”

  Weiss held up his hand for silence. He thought of the Talmud and Torah, centuries of labor by rival teams of scholars, drawing on knowledge stored in libraries and synagogues around the world. He thought of the Book of the Veils, back in Namiko’s car, and he thought of scores of silent figures, lying prone on hospital beds.

  He gasped. It hit him with the force of the Tsimstum, the lightning flash that connected the crown Sephiroth to its base.

  “Namiko,” he said softly, “we’ve made a terrible mistake. Those two books – they don’t mean anything at all.”

  “The Heralds of the Storm are trying to decode one of them!”

  “But there’s no inherent meaning in the text. Everyone assumes that the meaning lies in the code, not the method of deciphering it. People think they’re listening to the record, not the jukebox. But this time they’re wrong. The books are only a set of triggers to activate a different kind of mechanism.”

  “The Dream Modulator,” she said after a pause.

  “Yes. Dreams aren’t decoding mechanisms, and they don’t reveal the meaning of the language of the Book of the Veils. They reveal meanings concealed within themselves. That’s how they’re planning to bring the King of the Veils into this world.”

  He looked out over the valley, his expression livid.

  “And that’s how we’ll have to destroy it.”

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  War

  Fujita stared down at his belly in shock. He felt cold, distant, as if he were looking at a body that didn’t belong to him. His heart was racing. He felt someone pulling at his shoulder, became aware of a voice yelling in his ear. Of course. Mr. Yoshida.

  A woman’s warm hands were on his arm, as a nurse knelt down by him, giving him instructions in a tense, but controlled voice. She started to unroll some bandages. If I’m going to get stabbed, thought Fujita, I couldn’t have picked a better place to do it. The idea made him light-headed. He felt a laugh building up inside him, threatening to spin out of control into a scream.

  “I think you’re going to be all right,” the nurse was saying. “The sword nearly came out the other side of your body, but it hasn’t pierced any of your major organs. It’s good they didn’t stab you lower down, near your liver or your kidneys.”

  While listening to the nurse’s voice, he kept his hands pressed firmly on his midriff, as the nurse slipped a dressing pad under his fingers. She began to wind bandages around his torso, getting tighter and tighter. All the hairs on his arm were standing up.

  Fujita’s ear was caught by the shouting of the leader, as he stood close to them. Sitting on the floor, with the Yoshidas and the nurse both talking at him, the lawyer struggled to make out what the intruder was saying to his men.

  “What do you mean, you don’t know how many? Can’t you count? Go around here, get everyone’s name, check them off on the list. If we don’t have enough, you’ll be the next to get a taste of this sword, do you hear?”

  The underling bowed and apologized in furiously rapid Japanese. Another cult member stepped forward, voicing a question that Fujita couldn’t hear.

  “No. Don’t worry about them now. We need to get the subjects upstairs as soon as we can. We’ll track down the boy and the others later. They didn’t get past the guards downstairs, so they’re still in the hospital somewhere.”

  With a brief, imperious gesture, the leader dismissed the two thugs and then turned around. He looked straight at Fujita, his sword still in his hand, held loosely, point down towards the floor.

  “All of you!” he bellowed, in a tone of voice that made the nurse beside Fujita visibly flinch. “Get on your feet. We’re moving you upstairs,” he pronounced, with an upward flick of his eyes. “To the laboratory.”

  *

  Alone in the MRI room, Nozaki tried to calm his thoughts.

  Beyond the walls, the panic had subsided. He could no longer hear the screams of the patients, only the steady footsteps and low voices of the cultists as they stalked the corridor outside. They had cleared the fifth floor; what they had done to the staff and patients, Nozaki refused to contemplate. Someone had tried to open the door, and then surprisingly, they had stopped.

  But they would return. They would come for him.

  Nozaki took his cell phone out of his lab coat, turning it over and over in his hands. Should he call Aiko? What would he tell her? When would she find out what had happened? Surely the police would get here soon?

  Nozaki looked up at a laminated sign on the wall: CELL PHONES ARE TO BE SWITCHED OFF AT ALL TIMES. In different circumstances, he might have smiled.

  What of David and Saori? Had they been recaptured by the cult, or had they managed to get out of the hospital? How long was he going to stay here, doing nothing?

  Sighing, Nozaki took out his phone and pressed the text icon.

  *

  The buzzing of the cell phone was so unexpected it made David jump. “It’s Nozaki,” he said in surprise.

  “What happened to him?” Saori asked. “Did he get out?”

  David looked at the tiny kanji scrolling on the screen. It was so hard for him to focus, he handed the phone to Saori who read it briefly. “He’s still in the hospital,” she said. “He’s locked himself in a room on the eighth floor. David, what are we going to do?”

  “Maybe we should go down the fire escape, if there is one. The police are bound to be here soon.”

  “I’m not going.” She lifted her arms and hugged herself. A reflex action. “I’m not going without my parents.”

  David stared at her, his mind racing. “OK,” he said. “I’d better call the Professor, tell him what’s happening.”

  *

  “It’s from David. Something’s happened at the hospital,” Weiss read out, frowning.

  “Nan datte?” Namiko was once more behind the wheel as they drove away from Shingomura, back towards Aomori. “What does it say?”

  “I don’t know. Can hardly read this bloody small screen…” Weiss screwed up his eyes, holding the cell phone up to his face. He took in the news, letting his breath out in a controlled hiss. “He says the hospital is under siege. The subjects in the Treatment have been taken hostage.”

  “Do yuu koto?”

  Weiss related, as much as he could, the bare facts contained in the mail. He passed a hand over his brow; it came away wet with sweat, despite the breeze blowing through the open car window. “David says he and Saori are all right. They’re hiding out on the top floor.”

  “All the volunteers? What were they doing there anyway?”

  “There for the meeting. A private coach picked them all.”

  “But I thought the meeting was tomorrow?”

  “So did everyone else, but Kageyama changed the date of the meeting. He wanted to catch us off guard. Whatever he’s been planning with the Heralds, he’s starting it now.”

  “So what are we going to do?”

  Weiss put his head in his hands, rubbing his eyes. “Give me a minute.”

  The old man tried to clear his mind, ignoring the grumblings from his abdomen. Nozaki. The girl, Saori. David. David was inside the hospital. It was all happening too soon. What was the boy capable of doing? What wa
s he ready for?

  Weiss lifted his head. “Namiko, how soon can you get us to Aomori city?”

  “If the roads are clear, one hour. Do suru no? What are we going to do, Sensei?”

  “Any way you look at it, one thing’s certain. We need to get inside that hospital.”

  *

  “He’s going to try to get in,” said David.

  “Get in where?”

  “Get in here, to the hospital.”

  “He’s crazy! Even if he could get in, he’ll be another hostage. They might kill him!”

  “I think the old man might be tough to kill. He asked me about ways to get up here, to the roof.”

  Saori’s eyes flashed. “Give me your phone,” she said. “Nozaki might know how to get in. It’s about time he did something useful.”

  Chapter Fifty

  Locked In

  Incredibly, Tetsuo Nozaki was yawning.

  His eyes felt like sandpaper had been rubbed into them, and his head was too heavy for his neck. He sat in the supervisor’s chair in the MRI room, the circular machine glittering behind the glass of the observation window. He felt himself drifting away. Flashes of light and scraps of sound from beyond the door resonated like transmissions from distant planets.

  He knew what was happening. Microsleeps. Repeated periods of time, mere seconds, when he blacked out and his brain refused to process information. But how long had he been awake? Thirty-six hours? Forty?

  The buzzing of his phone was a blessing. He swiped the screen, looking for Aiko’s name.

  It was the foreign boy.

  As he scanned the kanji, the flowing of the characters, he realized that the Yoshida girl must have written it for him. David was dictating, and she was entering it into the keypad. They were still in the hospital. Barricaded in on the top floor. And what they were asking…

  It was insane. The foreign professor, the Jew, he was insane. He wanted to get into the hospital. But any attempt by a civilian to help, to stand up against the fanatics, would be suicide.