Birthday Read online

  B I R T H D A Y

  KOJI SUZUKI

  Translation

  Glynne Walley

  CONTENTS

  This much-awaited return to the Ring universe features three short stories focusing on its female characters, with a theme of birth. An exploration of extraordinary circumstances from the perspectives of memorable women, Birthday is no mere sequel - as fans of Spiral and Loop should know.

  Coffin in the Sky

  Fast forward past the events of Ring. Ryuji Takayama's distraught lover, Mai Takano, is struggling in the wake of the professor's mysterious demise. Mai visits Ryuji's parents' house to look for the missing pages of his soon-to-be published article. There she is drawn to a curious videotape and a fate mor terrifying than Ryuji's.

  Lemon Heart

  Thirty years before the tragic events of Ring, Sadako Yamamura is an aspiring stage actress on the verge of her theatrical debut. The beautiful and ravishing Sadako is the object of desire of every male at the company including the director. There is one thespian she is interested in, but ...

  Happy Birthday

  Reiko Sugiura questions the purpose of bringing a child into a world where there is only death. She has already lost one son, and the father of her unborn child, Kaoru Futami, has disappeared in search of a cure to the deadly disease that threatens all life. Despite Kaoru's promise to meet again in two months, he has not returned. Despondent but driven for answers, Reiko is led to the Loop project, where she will discover the final truths of the Ring virus.

  Koji Suzuki is based in Tokyo but spends most of his time traveling. An avid motorcyclist, an accomplished yachtsman, and a respected authority on child-rearing, Suzuki is at the vanguard of modern horror fiction writers.

  COFFIN IN THE SKY

  1

  November 1990

  Even before she'd regained consciousness, her retinas were registering the scene above her. Not that there was much to be seen: her field of vision was terribly re-stricted, as if she were lying in the depths of the earth gazing up at a cut-out rectangle of sky. A single vertical stripe of blue, outlined entirely in black. At first she did not know what it meant. She had no idea where she was.

  The sensation was that of having just awakened, the boundary between dream and reality blurry.

  Concrete walls pressed in on her from the left and the right, and she could feel the same hard substance beneath her back. Had the sky above her been round, she might have surmised that she was at the bottom of a well. But, judging from the shape, she thought it had to be a rectangular fissure several meters deep.

  She couldn't see the sun directly. The clean, brisk air on her skin suggested that it was early morning. Now and then she heard crows calling with unusual presence, quite close by. They didn't show themselves, and she heard no wing beats, just their cries echoing in the narrow space.

  The crows' calls abruptly ceased; in their place the sound of a ship's horn reached her ears. She was near the ocean. The faint tang of seawater tickled her nostrils.

  She gradually began to grasp where she was: on the roof of a building at the edge of Tokyo Bay.

  Thrusting up her chin, she saw a pair of rusty pipes crossing overhead. The walls on either hand were close—too close for her to be able to move her shoulders or arms. Iron rebar poked like thorns out of the cracked concrete. It looked painful to the touch and made the space seem even more constricted. All she could do was just lie there stiff as a rod, face up, arms and legs straight.

  She raised her head to try and cast a glance towards where her feet lay. Perhaps her eyes had deceived her, but she thought she'd seen something flutter in the breeze that at first she'd taken for a thin iron bar. When she focused her eyes she realized that it wasn't an iron bar at all, but a thin strip of cloth, like the sash from a bathrobe. One end was tied to something, she didn't know what, and the other end danced lazily by her feet.

  ...The spider's thread.

  She recalled a short story by that title, by Ryuno-suke Akutagawa. Hell came to mind, and every pore in her body seemed to clench.

  She could not recall why she'd come to such a place.

  Her memories were fragmentary, scattered, like broken and discarded tiles. She tried to remember, but the bits and pieces refused to form any meaningful pattern, and she couldn't distinguish cause and effect.

  Where am I? Why am I here?

  Clearly there were gaps in her memory, but she had no idea how much blank time they added up to.

  She tried uttering her name, deep inside her breast.

  Mai Takano.

  That was probably correct. She was fairly certain that she was, in fact, a woman named Mai Takano. Yet, it somehow didn't feel right. She had the inescapable feeling that some strange entity had entered her body—

  she felt like she wasn't herself. She'd felt like that for a while now.

  She tried to recall her age, her address, the chronology of her life, any information she could come up with that might sharpen the outlines of who she was.

  I'm 22. I'm a college student. I'm a liberal arts

  major, and I'm hoping to go on to grad school to study

  philosophy.

  Suddenly her legs hurt. Or, rather, for the first time since she'd awakened, she registered the fact that her ankles were giving her pain.

  Mai Takano raised her head apprehensively and looked toward her feet. A shock greeted her: she couldn't see them.

  Some object was obstructing her vision, something she couldn't identify. She squinted at it. Finally, her eyes grew wide and her expression became one of astonishment as she realized that it was her own swollen belly.

  She had tucked her sweatshirt into her jumper skirt, but now her midriff under the skirt was swollen tight as a drum. Forgetting the pain in her legs, Mai placed one hand gingerly on her abdomen. She no longer felt as if a foreign object had lodged itself within her belly. Now she could feel that her belly and the hand that was touching it were contiguous, part of the same flesh. The swelling came from within her body, stretching taut the skin of her abdomen. As far as she could remember, she was a thin girl—breasts not at all on the large side, waist size proudly smaller than average.

  She was not afraid. Nor did she despair. After her initial astonishment passed, she just lay there in a daze for a while running her hands over her abdomen. She couldn't believe she'd been placed in such a situation.

  She didn't know what to feel.

  A cool, objective gaze examined her body. Her mind was a blank, as though her intellect had ceased to function. She scrutinized her swollen belly with the gaze of another; no matter how she looked at it, she was a woman about to give birth. The word "pregnant" came to mind.

  That was the catalyst. Fragmented images revived one after another in Mai's mind. Her intuition told her why she was where she was. It had begun with—yes, a videotape.

  It's because I watched it.

  She'd had a bad feeling about it, but she'd watched it anyway. And she shouldn't have.

  Mai remembered inserting the tape into the video deck, the touch of her finger on the play button—it all came back to her now. It all felt real.

  2

  It was a simple chain of events, really, that brought the tape into her hands and that led her to watch it. Mai had no way of knowing whether a will operated behind the veneer of chance. Perhaps, too afraid of a power that couldn't be seen, she bullied herself into believing that it was all mere coincidence. Maybe she wanted not to know the truth.

  Ryuji Takayama's friend Asakawa had told her, in so many words, that a videotape had been involved in his demise. No one bothered to tell her exactly what the connection might be. Perhaps Ryuji watched something so strange, he died of shock—that was the preposterous theory of Mai's concoction. But how else coul
d a videotape cause a man's death? What other explanation could there possibly be?

  And otherwise, Asakawa's question made no sense.

  He'd asked Mai, since she'd been in contact with Ryuji in his final moments, "He didn't tell you anything there at the end? No last words? Nothing, say, about a videotape?"

  He'd made it sound like some videotape had brought about Ryuji's death.

  Mai didn't believe it, in the end. And that was why she allowed herself to be led—quite easily at that—into watching it herself.

  Ryuji had taught logic at the university. He'd been writing a philosophical treatise and serializing it in a monthly journal. Mai, a student of his, was in charge of making a clean copy of each month's installment for submission; Ryuji's handwriting was all but illegible to anybody who hadn't spent time getting used to it. Mai had volunteered for the job not out of slavish sacrifice but because the task would secure her the honor of being her mentor's first reader.

  Ryuji had just finished the final installment when he'd suddenly departed this life. According to Mitsuo Ando, the coroner who performed Ryuji's autopsy, he'd died from sudden myocardial infarction due to a block-age in the coronary artery. But questions remained, and then there was what Asakawa had said. He was Ryuji's friend, and he'd implied that a videotape he'd watched had caused his death. The circumstances of Ryuji's death got murkier and murkier.

  Mai, meanwhile, was due to hand in Ryuji's final installment to his editor when she discovered that there were pages missing from the manuscript. This was the conclusion, the wrap-up to a year-long project, and there were pages missing.

  She went over his apartment with a fine-toothed comb, with no luck. Her last hope was Ryuji's parents'

  home in Sagami Ohno. Immediately after his death, everything in his apartment had been packed up and sent back there; it was the only place she could imagine the missing pages being.

  So Mai explained the situation to Ryuji's mother and got permission to visit. Mai was shown to the second floor of the house and to the room that Ryuji had used as a study from elementary school through his sophomore year in college. Ryuji's mother told Mai she could search the room to her heart's content.

  Books, clothing, appliances, small pieces of furni-ture: everything Ryuji had had in his one-bedroom apartment was there, stuffed into the cardboard boxes stacked randomly around the room. Mai was looking for a few pieces of paper—they could be anywhere. Foreseeing a lengthy slog, Mai took off her cardigan and set to work.

  After a while the search began to seem a pointless one for the proverbial needle in a haystack. But she couldn't think of any other way to plug the gap in the manuscript. She'd just have to keep looking.

  But as her will weakened so did her body. Fatigue came into her hunched shoulders. Now and then she thought she could feel someone's gaze fixed on her back, and the sense that she was being watched only grew stronger as the minutes went by.

  In high school, she had modeled—just once—for an oil painting by her homeroom teacher, an art instructor.

  Needless to say she'd been fully clothed, but all the same she'd had the impression that the teacher's gaze had passed right through her clothing to lap at her skin, indeed to penetrate right to her skeletal structure. She'd known a curious arousal, half embarrassment and half rapture. Later she'd heard that when painting a person's head, the artist's eyes are really seeing the skull. Her intuition hadn't been far off and she'd thought, That stare of his saw straight to my pelvic bone.

  That same powerful, razor gaze was boring into her back, penetrating her skin, gouging away her flesh, trying to feel her bones.

  Mai couldn't bear it any longer. She turned around.

  Behind her she saw a black object, half covered by the pink cardigan she'd taken off prior to beginning her search. She'd placed her cardigan on the object without noticing it.

  She moved the garment to reveal a black-bodied VCR. The unit wasn't turned on, but its pilot light glowed a dull red. Mai remembered what Asakawa had said to her.

  He didn't tell you anything there at the end? No last words? Nothing, say, about a videotape?

  Those words urged her to it. She turned on the video deck.

  3

  She began to think, gradually with greater certainty, that she was there because she was supposed to be there.

  It was no accident, but a necessary thing.

  Now that she thought about it, the shape of the rooftop fissure where she was resembled a videocassette.

  A long, narrow rectangle. No, that wasn't quite it. It was more accurate to say that it was shaped like the case of a videocassette.

  She wasn't sure what the purpose of the hole was in terms of the building's design. An exhaust shaft, maybe a drainage shaft? Skyscraper construction was a field she knew nothing about. She could hear the whine of a motor beneath the concrete, which suggested the building had an elevator. She was somewhere near the machine room, then. She knew that much.

  The sky suddenly brightened, going from a whitish to a truer blue. A line that divided light from shadow was crossing the shaft wall fast enough that she could actually see it advancing downward. Light was moving into the giant videocassette case.

  Mai recalled the moment at Ryuji's parents' house when she'd taken the tape from the VCR. She'd plugged in the machine, turned it on, and pressed eject. A

  kachunk, and the tape popped out like a child sticking its tongue out at her.

  She remembered the touch of it, hard, inorganic but strangely warm. She'd only just turned on the power, but it communicated to her fingers an almost living heat.

  A title was written on the spine.

  Liza Minnelli, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Jr. /1989.

  The handwriting wasn't very good, and she didn't think the inscription described the contents of the tape.

  She doubted it actually contained a concert. Most likely someone had recorded something else over it, but left the title.

  What she regretted most now, more than watching the tape, was sneaking it out of Ryuji's parents' house and taking it home with her. Why couldn't she just leave it alone? She'd gone there to find those missing pages.

  She should have ignored the odd tape. The moment she took it home with her, her fate was sealed: sooner or later, she'd watch it.

  The line descended along the wall of the shaft in leaps. Suddenly, the light hit her straight in the eyes. The sun was directly overhead now.

  Time was flying; it was not passing in an analog manner. She'd awakened only just now, in the early morning, but the sunlight had reached the bottom of the hole. It had to be noon or thereabouts.

  She lifted her left arm, weakly. No wristwatch.

  She'd have to tell time by the position of the sun.

  She was probably still losing memory—a block at a time. That would explain the jerky, disjointed passage of time. She was alternating between awareness and blank-outs. She'd spent the hours since her first awakening in a state of idleness, drifting in a daze or lost in flashbacks.

  But now she knew exactly what she had to do.

  I need to figure out how to get out of here.

  She'd die if she didn't escape—and death would come slowly, at its leisure, nibbling away at her soul.

  Have I already gone crazy?

  She knew, considering her predicament, that she should be terrified, perhaps even in a state of panic, yet she was calm. It was as if there was another her somewhere watching it all as a bystander. She wondered if she was capable of fully appreciating her situation given the gaps in her awareness, the tenuousness of her hold on consciousness.

  For no apparent reason, Mai found herself thinking of a pretty girl rotting at the bottom of a well. The image had to have been triggered by something, but what? The smell? She was aware of a citrusy scent wafting on the air that seemed to stimulate her imagination. The image of the girl became more and more real; it leaned heavily on Mai's body, and then drew back.

  Mai had imagined a girl as if she w
ere really there.

  She listened closely and tuned herself to her surroundings. It was terrifying, this being utterly alone, and she wanted someone—anyone—to come to her.

  Her ears were all she could rely on, and she waited desperately for the sound of footsteps. She was vexed at her own powerlessness.

  So I have to wait to be rescued? She'd never liked to be so passive about anything.

  The thread dangling down into the shaft was her lifeline, her only connection with the bustling world below. She wondered how many bathrobe sashes had been tied together to make it. Looking up at it, she could only see one knot. What was it doing there anyway? If the sash was a snake, the knot would be its head.

  It looked too slender to hold her weight, but it was the only way out she could see. The end of the sash-rope swung lazily in the air a foot above the floor.

  She decided to try to force herself into a sitting position to see how much she could move. As she made the attempt, she banged her injured left ankle into the wall and nearly screamed from the pain. Was it broken or just sprained? The intense pain proved to her, at any rate, that she was indeed conscious, and it ended up giving her a little courage.

  She broke into a cold sweat as she tried to steel herself against the pain. But how could she expect to climb out on her own if she couldn't even sit up?

  Call for help.

  Mai racked her brain for a way to let the inhabitants of the outside world know she was there.

  She cried out, just to see how it went. "Help! Help me!" The sky above swallowed her words. She seriously doubted anybody could have heard her. Unless somebody came up onto the roof, yelling wasn't going to do her any good.

  She pondered. If nobody was going to come up to the roof on their own initiative, she'd have to do something to draw attention to herself, to bring somebody up.

  Maybe passersby would look up if something came falling out of the sky.

  Is there anything I can throw!

  She stretched out her arms and felt around above her head until she found a few chunks of concrete. She picked one up and examined it. It was about the size of her thumb. It was just a little piece of old concrete from the crumbling wall; even if it happened to hit somebody in the head it probably wouldn't cause serious injury.