Reiko

by James Avonleigh

  It struck me as odd that I should be so calm now I was confronted by the sum of all my fears. I was no longer shaking. I was no longer afraid.

  I glanced into the room, wanting to tell Sarah to stop fretting, that everything was all right. I could see her tearing at her hair, still clutching Charlie’s weird rag doll. There was nothing to fear from Reiko. Sarah had said so herself. She wasn’t the beast.

  Reiko began walking slowly towards me and I stood rooted to the spot, waiting for her to come. A strange feeling came over me. A feeling that I was losing a grip on my sensations, that my spirit was preparing itself to leave my body.

  Then with a sudden jolt the panic returned and I tried to step away from the approaching figure. But I had lost all sensation in my body. I was paralyzed.

  Reiko crept ever closer, her gaze never wavering, her expression emotionless.

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw Sarah, oblivious to my plight, rummaging around in her bag. Could she not see what was happening? Could she not pull me inside, away from this approaching figure, away from Reiko? What was she doing?

  Then it was too late. Reiko had come within a few yards, her eyes boring into the depths of my being, drawing my soul from my body. In that final moment I realized two things. I realized she was taking possession of me, just as she’d done with all the others. And I realized that her eyes were the last thing I’d see in this life.

  Her face loomed before me, my lids grew heavy and darkness swept over my soul.

  29. A NEW DAWN

  ‘James?’

  I opened my eyes. Sarah was kneeling over me, touching my forehead.

  ‘That’s quite a fall you had.’

  I sat upright, confused and disoriented. I couldn’t remember what had happened or why I’d been lying on the corridor floor.

  Sarah smiled at me. ‘You’re living,’ she said with a heavy sigh. ‘You’re living.’

  I started to remember things: the wind and rain shaking the foundations, the candles spluttering in the bedroom, my trembling hands, the confusion. But there was something else.

  ‘Reiko,’ I said, gripped with panic. ‘Where is she?’

  I remembered it now. Reiko, walking slowly towards me down the long corridor, her eyes filled with fire; and I standing motionless, powerless to move, as all sensation drained from my body. I remembered the feeling of falling from a great height. And then darkness.

  ‘I think she’s gone.’

  ‘Where? What happened?’

  Sarah sighed and sat herself down on the floor next to me. ‘Where, I have no idea. I really don’t. But I know she was there. I know she was walking towards you. I saw your face.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I don’t know. I followed Charlie’s instructions. That’s all.’

  She pointed to the homemade doll, lying face down on the floor. It was all flooding back. Professor Atami appearing with the doll, but no instructions on how to use it; opening the file with trembling fingers, finding Charlie’s diagram; Sarah poring over it, just as I was drawn out into the corridor to face Reiko.

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘It said the doll could be a representation of a living person, if it was made according to certain principles. I suppose Charlie must have made it.’

  As I looked at Sarah her face creased up and she put her head in her hands. ‘I don’t know what I’ve done, James.’

  I leaned forward and put my arms around her, desperate to love and protect her in this ungodly hour. I didn’t know what had happened or why she was sobbing, but I held on to her with everything I had.

  After a while she raised her head and looked at me with teary, bloodshot eyes. ‘If I did what I think I did, I may have hurt someone.’

  I sensed what was coming, but thought it best to let her speak.

  ‘That’s the point of the doll – to hurt someone. According to Charlie all you need is some blood or skin or something of your victim. That’s all you need.’

  I closed my eyes, overcome with emotion.

  ‘Do you think my host mother hurt Reiko? Do you believe that?’

  I nodded

  ‘Do you believe she was the beast Charlie spoke about?’

  I nodded again.

  ‘Then I think I hurt her.’

  And then I saw it, an image so clear in my mind that I felt I was actually there.

  I saw Mrs Azuma standing in her living room, gathering the dinner plates from the table. I saw Mr Azuma sitting there smoking a cigarette, ignoring her. Then, as she turned to the kitchen, she staggered and the plates began dropping from her hands, hitting the floor with a crash. Mr Azuma looked up with alarm as his wife clutched her hands to her neck and sunk to her knees. But it was not suffering I saw on her face. It was a lifetime of bitterness and loathing struggling against some force of its own making. Some would call it karma. Perhaps in those last moments she thought she didn’t deserve to die, that she shouldn’t be held accountable for the terrible things she had done, that she had only acted in the interests of her own born. Perhaps as she sunk to the ground and breathed her last anguished breaths, she faced death without remorse for her crimes. I saw Mr Azuma drop his cigarette and rush to her side. And all that time, the incense burned in the ancestral shrine and the dolls in their glass cases looked on with indifference.

  ‘How?’ I said.

  Sarah leaned over and picked up the doll and held it gingerly in her hands. There was a pencil stabbed straight through it, just below the neck.

  ‘The flesh or blood? How did you do that?’

  She pointed to the doll’s neck and I noticed there were strands of hair wrapped round it in a knot.

  ‘The brush,’ she said, motioning to a hairbrush lying in the middle of the floor. ‘She lent me her hairbrush this morning. I still had it in my bag. It still had her hair.’

  So that was it. Mrs Azuma had lent Sarah her hairbrush and unwittingly signed her death warrant. As though some invisible force had willed it so. As though, amidst all the evil, there were still benign forces at work in the universe.

  ‘And Reiko?’

  ‘I think I got there just in time. I tried to call to you, but you didn’t respond. You just stood there, eyes fixed straight ahead, arms outstretched. I strangled the doll’s neck and then you collapsed.’

  I drew her towards me again and held her close. I held her as though it were life itself I was embracing. What had I been waiting for in those last moments? What would have happened if Sarah hadn’t been there to deliver me?

  Relief swept through my tired, broken body and lifted me a few inches off the ground. And overcome with love for the life I’d come close to losing, I began to cry loudly and desperately.

  I don’t know how long we sat there holding one another. Time seemed to have stopped in the Tower, grown sick of the endless succession of minutes and hours. I held on to Sarah as though letting go meant losing her forever. The wind calmed and the rain eased and the candles blew themselves out one by one, until only one remained, giving off a small halo of light.

  It was with an effort that we remembered we were not alone in the building, that our friends had left us and not come back. But the sound of footsteps on the stairs brought reality back into focus.

  ‘Hi.’

  Josh came into view through the door and shuffled along the corridor like someone just woken from a long sleep.

  ‘Where have you been?’ I asked, as Sarah and I finally relaxed our grip on one another.

  Josh appeared a little confused and held a hand to his head.

  ‘I think I passed out. Then I found Etsuko on the stairs. She had the same experience. She’s not feeling too good, so I was coming to get her a glass of water.’

  ‘Why did you pass out?’ I asked.

  ‘Honestly, I can’t remember. When I came to, I was lying on the ground, but my mind’s a total blank. It’s the weirdest thing.’

  Sarah and I joined Josh to bring Etsuko a glass of water. She was sitti
ng on the top stair on the fifth floor, complaining of a headache. She claimed to remember nothing of what had happened the whole evening. The last thing she recalled was walking up the stairs towards my room when she’d arrived with Shinichi.

  We found Shinichi lying on the ground in the foyer, either unconscious or asleep, though Etsuko quickly roused him with some cold water on the face. After sitting up and composing himself, he admitted he too had no idea how he’d got there.

  The only person we couldn’t find was Professor Atami, despite searching the building from top to bottom. Only he seemed to have escaped the building.

  As for what had happened, Josh came up with the fanciful theory that the beer had been spiked, that back at the factory they’d slipped some powerful hallucinogen into that particular batch. I was happy to go along with that. Neither Sarah nor I mentioned Reiko or the circumstances that had prevented my death that night.

  Josh made his way back up to his bachelor room, vowing to stay off alcohol for a long time. Shinichi and Etsuko walked off into the night, hand-in-hand, vowing to come back when the dorm was a little livelier. As for Sarah and I, we chatted in my room until the first light of dawn.

  ‘Nothing will ever be the same,’ she said, as we stood at the window and watched the light spreading over the world. ‘After this night, nothing will ever be the same.’

  I looked out over the university’s campus, over the suburbs of Osaka and the hills in the distance. And I had a sense that something had resolved itself that night, some ancient wrong righted, some balance restored to the world.

  ‘It’s a beautiful place, a beautiful country. I’m glad I came.’

  Sarah put her arm round me and laughed. ‘You’ve only just arrived. You’ve still got rose-tinted glasses on. Come back to me in nine months and then tell me what you think.’

  We fell asleep soon after, lying on the bed in one another’s arms. And the last thing I remember before giving myself up to sleep was opening my eyes to see a dim figure standing by the door, watching us. Perhaps it was a figment of an exhausted imagination, perhaps a symptom of the stress of the night just gone or perhaps it really was the shadow of a dead scholar. But I thought I saw Charlie standing there, watching us from a discreet distance, checking that all was well. And I sensed that I owed my life to him, that he had been with me from the moment I arrived, anxious that I should succeed where he had failed. I sensed that the file, the doll, the brush that Sarah had borrowed were not just fortuitous props in a drama, but that Charlie had somehow placed them in our way. If so, this was a very English ghost. Passive, unthreatening and wanting only to right some terrible wrong.

  Professor Atami had been right. Japanese ghosts were different.

  30. EPILOGUE

  I never spoke to Professor Atami about it, so I never knew what he saw that night. I think it was better that way. He never asked me to return either the file or the doll, nor whether they’d been useful in any way. But I sensed his relief that I’d succeeded where Charlie hadn’t and survived my return from Izumi.

  I did, however, change the subject of my thesis and this seemed to please him. It was something unmemorable about Japanese folklore traditions, which involved reading a few dry textbooks and distilling their arguments. I decided to follow Josh’s lead – do the bare minimum and get on with having a social life.

  Sarah returned to Izumi to find a village pretending to mourn the passing of Mrs Azuma. She told me about it matter-of-factly, as though it were someone we had no connection with. She said she had seen the two sons, Kenji and Osamu, at the wake and neither of them had showed the slightest emotion. A great many people turned up out of duty to pay their respects, but she realized for the first time how much people had disliked her. She had even seen Odagiri-san stopping by to light an incense stick in her memory.

  It made me wonder how many people in the village suspected her as much as Odagiri-san, whether others had made the same shocking assumption. But neither Sarah nor I ever raised the question of whether to bring our own conclusions about Mrs Azuma to light. After all, who would we have told and what evidence would we have had to present? Dreams? Visions? A visitation from a dead high school student?

  Romance didn’t blossom between us, but perhaps that was for the best. What we saw and experienced that night would have been too much to live with. Neither of us said much about it, but we knew we could never have a normal relationship. Sarah packed her bags at the end of her contract in Izumi and headed to Southeast Asia, vowing to keep in touch.

  As for me, I made a host of new friends at the university, though I continued to see a lot of Josh, Shinichi and Etsuko. We never spoke about the evening the power failed and the beer was spiked. I had the feeling that each of them had seen things that night they would never be able to talk about. And maybe that was for the best.

  I look back and remember everything with the greatest clarity. But there is one thing I remember more clearly than anything else. It is the figure of a high school girl cut down in her prime; the almond-shaped eyes, the high cheekbones, the delicate lips; the three white stripes on her collar; the red ribbon tied around her neck. God knows I wish I could forget. But I can’t.

  I sincerely hope she no longer wanders the margins of the world looking for redress. And I sincerely hope that she found the peace denied her in life. But sometimes, in dark moments, I find myself wishing that she hadn’t left me that stormy night in Osaka. I find myself looking suddenly at my reflection, hoping to catch another glimpse of her unearthly beauty. However perverse it seems, I find myself wishing that she’d taken that final step towards me and that we’d become one.

  And I console myself with the knowledge that whatever else I do in life, Reiko will always be with me.