Book Read Free

Reiko

Page 7

by James Avonleigh


  ‘It’s not as bad as it sounds,’ I said earnestly. ‘I’m actually researching differences in Eastern and Western attitudes towards the supernatural.’ I knew I had to whittle my self-introduction down to something more manageable, but I just hadn’t had the time. Maybe I would have to resign myself to being a ‘ghost-hunter’.

  ‘I’m Aya. I’m an English teacher.’ Her pronunciation was excellent and I guessed she’d studied abroad at some point.

  ‘I’m going to give James the tour now,’ Sarah said. ‘Do you want to come along?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I have to meet the Headmaster now. But I can see you after that.’

  Standing next to Aya I could feel myself blushing. She had a natural grace and elegance and, within sixty seconds, had won me over completely.

  ‘What do you think of her?’ Sarah asked, as we made her way back down the corridor.

  ‘Seems very nice.’

  ‘She is. She’s the staffroom heartthrob actually. Between lessons, the men form an orderly queue to speak to her. A queue you jumped by the way so if you see any of them giving you looks, that’s the reason.’

  Once again we passed the fateful spot at the bottom of the steps and I found myself giving it a wide berth.

  Sarah spotted this. ‘I thought you told me you weren’t superstitious.’

  ‘I didn’t think I was. But there’s something about this thing…’

  She laughed. ‘Conquer your fears. We’re going up.’

  I followed her, our footsteps echoing round the walls, up to the first floor where a long gloomy corridor stretched out in front of us.

  ‘Come on. I’ll show you.’

  The corridor was cold and devoid of features and seemed more suited to a prison camp than a school. To my right were windows which faced on to gravel playing fields behind the school. To my left were the classrooms, large and plain, with the chairs stacked up on the desks for the holidays.

  ‘These are the first years’ classrooms,’ Sarah said, pushing back the sliding door of the first and stepping inside. The sign on the door announced it as classroom 1A. ‘I’ve had some fun times in here.’

  We stood at the back and I counted about forty desks, spaced apart in neat rows. I had imagined that in a country famed for its group mentality, the desks might also be in groups, but here each student was on their own. The window looked out on the forecourt and the hills beyond, so I pulled back a seat and sat down to admire the view. For a moment I was transported back to my own schooldays, sitting in a classroom on a warm June afternoon, dreaming of summer, of adventure, of escape from the endless monotony of hours and lessons.

  ‘Did you enjoy school?’ Like me, Sarah was staring out of the window.

  ‘No. I suppose I didn’t.’

  ‘That’s what I always think when I’m teaching. I’m thinking: I hated school, I hated my teachers, I counted down the days until the torture ended. And here I am standing in front of this lot inflicting the same ordeal on them. I shouldn’t be doing this.’

  ‘Someone has to do it.’

  She turned away from the window. ‘I suppose you’re right. Someone does have to do it. Listen, do you want to see any more classrooms?’

  ‘Those ghosts your students saw, where did they see them?’

  She beamed. ‘All right then, Mr Ghost-hunter, let’s do the tour.’

  ‘Isn’t there a lift or something?’ I was completely out of breath as we arrived at the third floor. It was hardly a mammoth climb and Sarah mocked me by offering a helping arm.

  ‘Come on, old man, we’re here.’

  I got to the top of the steps and stared down at an exact replica of the last two floors: a long gloomy corridor, windows on one side, classrooms on the other. As soon as the echo of our footsteps died down an eerie silence took hold, like the silence of an empty chapel. I had the same feeling I used to have in the old country churches my parents used to drag me to in the summer holidays: the feeling that I was not alone, that unseen eyes were observing me from the shadows. Though I resolutely refused to believe in ghosts, the idea that the passing generations somehow left their mark was a compelling one.

  ‘These are the third grade classrooms.’

  ‘This is where the ghosts appear?’

  Sarah nodded. ‘One girl told me she saw a figure of a boy disappear into 3C. It was after school and there were only a few of them left doing club activities. She thought it was one of her friends, so she went to see and found the room empty. She told one of the teachers about this and they said that the dead students’ classroom was 3C.’

  ‘What about the one who jumped? Where did he jump from?’

  ‘Classroom 3C. And there are other stories about that room. Strange figures walking towards it. Screams of pain, laughter, whispering, all sorts of things. Basically, the students are scared of this corridor, and at the end of the day there’s a scramble to get out. No one wants to be the last one left in the evening. Just in case.’

  ‘What about you? Do you get the creeps?’

  ‘Listen, there’s no way in hell I’d come up here on my own. No way in hell.’

  We started to walk down the corridor, pausing to look in at the first classroom, 3A, an identikit version of 1A on the first floor.

  ‘What about the current 3C crop? Does it bother them that their classroom is haunted?’

  ‘There is no 3C. The classroom’s still there, but there aren’t enough third years to have more than two classes. After what happened there was a sharp drop-off in the number of enrolments. Parents would rather send their kids to private schools in Shirakawa. The school was built to accommodate five classes per year, so whoever designed it was being wildly optimistic.’

  As we walked slowly past 3A and 3B, I noticed the extent of the school’s disrepair. There were loose fittings on the lights, graffiti on the classroom doors, cracks on the dingy walls. And with dwindling numbers of students, who was going to stump up the money for a new paint job? Could a school ever recover from such a tragedy?

  ‘3C will probably be empty,’ she said as we approached the door. ‘I don’t know what they use it for.’

  Maybe it was a culmination of all the things I had seen and heard over the past few days, but I had a strange sense of foreboding as Sarah ushered me towards the open door of room 3C: a sense that my destiny was bound up with this room, that it had always been there waiting for me to arrive.

  I think it was this knot of tension that made me recoil in terror on entering the room. An old man with white hair and a scruffy blazer sat on a solitary chair in the middle of the room, staring down at the floor. He didn’t move for several seconds, time enough for a cold chill to creep slowly up my spine. He was so oblivious to our presence that I started to believe this really was an apparition.

  ‘Hello,’ Sarah said quietly.

  The man started violently and stood up, very much in the land of the living.

  ‘Ah, hello,’ he stuttered, trying to compose himself. I saw from his terrified expression that we’d startled him more than he’d startled us.

  ‘I was giving a tour of the school to my friend,’ Sarah said in slow, deliberate English.

  The man nodded and bowed in my direction and I suddenly felt bad about the unwanted intrusion and suspecting him of being a ghost. It wasn’t a nice thing to suspect of someone.

  ‘It’s Shirakami-san, one of the teachers,’ Sarah whispered to me. ‘I don’t think he hears very well.’

  ‘Nice to meet you,’ I said, trying to muster a smile. Looking at the man I guessed he was about sixty, but prematurely aged. He was certainly close to retirement age.

  ‘Shall we?’ Sarah tugged at my shirt and I backed out of the room after her, returning the man’s polite bow as I went. She shut the door and started to walk down the corridor, clearly disturbed by the encounter.

  ‘Who is he?’

  She ignored the question. ‘That was weird. What was he doing there?’

  ‘Maybe he was getting some pea
ce and quiet.’ I didn’t know why I was making excuses, but for some reason I felt sorry for him. He’d simply looked old and vulnerable.

  ‘There are a hundred empty classrooms in this place. Why does he choose that one?’

  I shrugged my shoulders.

  ‘He’s a weird guy. He’s never been friendly to me. Kind of keeps himself to himself. Sorry, but that just freaked me out. To go out of your way to sit in the haunted classroom, the classroom that everyone else tries to avoid.’

  We reached the stairs and started down, Sarah hurrying on ahead of me. I didn’t know the man, but there didn’t seem anything threatening about him. And I recognized the urge to seek out the very places no one else wanted to go. In this case the one place he knew he wouldn’t be disturbed.

  ‘I think he’s a very unhappy man.’ Aya shook her head slowly, then breathed in heavily.

  We’d managed to smuggle her away from her fan club in the staffroom and she’d joined us on a walk around the gravel playing pitches.

  ‘He was just sitting there, looking at the floor,’ Sarah said.

  ‘He always looks at the floor, also when he talks to you.’ Aya illustrated this with an exaggerated stare at the ground. ‘I think he’s had an unhappy life. He never got married and he’s lived alone all his life. I think it’s very hard to be so alone.’

  ‘Does he always sit in that room?’

  ‘I don’t know. But I’ve heard that he goes there sometimes.’

  ‘Is it anything to do with what happened?’ Sarah asked.

  We had got to the far side of the grounds and Aya stopped and looked across at the school, weighing up her response. Sarah had told me that if any of the teachers could talk about what happened then it was Aya. But having drawn a blank from Shinichi and Etsuko in Osaka, I wasn’t holding my breath.

  ‘I’ve heard some things about that. Shirakami-san was the homeroom teacher to those five students when they were in their first year. He was a very popular teacher and was always joking with the students. I think he was very close to Reiko Shimura, before she disappeared.’

  ‘I can’t imagine him joking,’ Sarah exclaimed.

  ‘Ah yes, it’s the same for me. I only knew him after it happened, so I’ve never seen him laughing. He was a different man after those students died. He didn’t make jokes and he didn’t laugh anymore.’

  Sarah seemed dissatisfied. ‘If it was so bad, why didn’t he leave?’

  Aya shook her head. ‘I don’t know. In the past some of the teachers discussed the change in his personality, but not anymore. Like me, many of the teachers are new so they didn’t know him before.’

  ‘Do any of the old teachers ever talk about what happened? Or is it a taboo subject?’ I felt presumptuous asking the question, but I knew Aya was my best hope in Izumi of learning something.

  She started to walk again, her brow furrowed. ‘We don’t talk about it openly. Never. But some of us – the new teachers – talk about it privately. When I arrived I was very nervous. I didn’t apply for a job in this school and I didn’t want to come. I was placed here by the regional Board of Education. I could have refused, but I wouldn’t have found another job. All the other new teachers had the same feeling.’

  ‘Why didn’t you want to come here? Were you afraid?’

  ‘It was a very famous news story in Japan, so everyone knows Izumi high school. But it’s not for a positive reason. When I meet people I don’t like to say the name of my school, because I know how they’ll react. I want to be a normal teacher so every year I apply to be placed in another school.’

  For a while we walked in silence, a gloom descending over the conversation. I felt bad that I was responsible for the gloom. It was starting to hit home what an awful gloomy subject I’d chosen and what an awful gloomy decision it had been to come to Izumi. Here was Aya, the cheeriest person I’d met in Japan and within minutes I’d made her depressed. And Sarah, who’d welcomed me so kindly, was probably counting the days until I left. Was it really worth it?

  ‘The mystery was never solved,’ Aya said with a sudden resolve. ‘No one knows what happened to Reiko Shimura. Perhaps she was murdered. Perhaps she is still alive. Nobody knows. And how did the other four students die? Nobody knows.’ She shook her head in anguish, biting her lip.

  ‘They charged someone with the murder of Reiko,’ I said.

  ‘Nobody believes it. Nobody. There is no proof. We often talk about this. The other four students all died after the man was charged and nobody knows why.’ Aya lowered her voice. ‘So, for certain, the killer is still around.’

  ‘What do they say?’ Sarah asked. ‘Is there anyone they suspect? One of the teachers?’

  This was a question too far and Aya shook her head abruptly, clearly uncomfortable. But she had said enough to reveal that the debate was still alive and well. And how could it not be, with five probable murders and no one to answer for them.

  As Sarah and I were walking back to the car, I looked up at the school, at the dark windows of the classrooms, and I found my gaze drawn like a magnet to the top floor. I counted across to what I thought was room 3C and for a fleeting moment I saw, outlined in the window, the figure of an old man looking down at us, then quickly withdrawing into the shadows. And not for the first time since arriving in Japan, I felt afraid.

  11. MRS AZUMA

  I had come a long way in ten days.

  I’d seen and heard things I wouldn’t have believed when I’d boarded the plane in Heathrow. That seemed like a whole different life, certainly a less complicated one. Ever since leaving home at eighteen, I’d led a closeted student existence, preoccupied only with the minutiae of student life: sleeping in, trekking to the library, last-minute essay crises, late-night conversations setting the world to rights. All that time, I’d existed in a cosy cocoon, my only real concern being where my next funding would come from. My studies had always been a side-issue and the last thing I’d expected, embarking on my Japanese adventure, was that my thesis would start to exact a psychological toll. I had never aspired to have an intimate insight into the dark heart of humanity.

  Lying on Sarah’s tatami mat floor in the late afternoon I could see a hazy sun hovering above the hills to the west of Izumi. She was taking a shower and I lay back listening to the splash of water and trying to compose my thoughts.

  I’d come to Japan to study differences in the way Eastern and Western cultures perceive supernatural phenomena. It was supposed to be a sociological and scientific study based on observation and reason. So what was I doing in Izumi? What was I there to achieve? Did I actually have a sound reason? I’d originally conceived of the trip as a way of crystallizing my ideas for my thesis and the direction I was going to take. It was meant to be part field-trip, part sightseeing trip. Most of all, it was meant to give me time to think.

  But far from becoming clearer, my thoughts about my thesis were in complete disarray. Maybe Professor Atami had been right to dissuade me from coming to Izumi. Perhaps that had been his intention all along when he handed me Charlie’s file to read. If he’d glimpsed the complete mental breakdown Charlie had experienced in Izumi, he may have kept the evidence as a cautionary tale. If so, he’d been unsuccessful. Not only had I carried out my threat to go to Izumi, but I’d also brought the file with me, its grim fascination getting the better of me. And it was grim fascination that was drawing me further into the story of the five tragic high school students, however much I’d promised myself not to bring sensationalist stories into my thesis.

  I knew I’d gone too far to ignore it now. I’d seen their photographs, heard their stories and I’d wanted to find out more. And so I’d come to Izumi, seen their school and their classroom, met their teachers, stood on the exact spot where Kanae Kubota had plunged to her death. The mystery was too compelling to pass up. Perhaps if I declared it as my case study, it could be a handy point of reference for the serious analysis that was to follow.

  Only my better nature told me that what I did
was folly. Only a small persistent voice warned that I had no business here, that Izumi held secrets that were best left alone, that I should pack my bags and catch the first train out. All my life I had lived vicariously, learning about life from books, with nothing to threaten my safe little world. But within a short space of time I’d come into contact with the brutal spectres of madness, suicide and cold-blooded murder.

  The splashing of water stopped and Sarah emerged from the bathroom, wrapped in a towel and rubbing her wet hair. I looked away quickly so as not to appear immodest.

  ‘It’s all right. It’s tightly fastened.’

  She was smiling at me, tickled by my embarrassment.

  ‘Well, that feels better.’ She came over and knelt down on the mat beside me with a satisfied sigh. She had come back from our visit to the school still creeped out about meeting Shirakami-san in room 3C. This hadn’t been helped by Aya’s speculating that a killer might still be at large, might even be connected to the school. I felt I’d at least done well not to mention that Shirakami-san had been watching us from the classroom window as we left. In fact, I’d tried to steer the conversation on to lighter topics, such as her flower arranging classes and things she missed about England.

  ‘Should be a good evening,’ she said, combing out her hair. ‘I think you’ll like Mrs Azuma. She’s a bit of a gossip, so that probably suits you just fine.’

  ‘What about her English?’

  ‘Very good. She lived abroad for a couple of years. Her husband’s a manager at a local factory and they spent some time in the States, then in Indonesia with his company. She’s apparently got a good degree from a good university. And that stuff’s important to her.’

  ‘What stuff?’

  Sarah looked thoughtful. ‘Education. She’s very big on education. She’ll want to know all about where you studied, what you studied. And make sure to ask her about her children, where they’re studying, what they’re studying. One of her sons went to Meiji University, one of the top places in the country, so he’s a bit of a local celebrity. The other only managed some small regional college, but she’s still pretty proud. Yeah, that stuff means a lot to her.’

 

‹ Prev