Ring Page 20

  Suddenly, he spoke, as if it had just occurred to him. "Maybe we'd better get this straight. What exactly are we doing here?"

  "We're going to look for Sadako, of course." "And what do we do once we've found her?" "Take her back to Sashikiji and lay her to rest."

  "So that's the charm. You're saying that's what she wants."

  Ryuji chewed loudly for a while on a big mouthful of rice, eyes staring straight ahead, unfocused. Asakawa could tell from the look on his face that Ryuji wasn't entirely convinced, either. Asakawa was scared. It was his last chance, and he wanted some sort of assurance that they were doing the right thing. There were to be no second chances.

  "There's nothing else we can do now," said Ryuji, tossing away his empty lunch box.

  "What about this possibility? Maybe she wants us to clear away her resentment toward the person who killed her."

  "You mean Jotaro Nagao? You mean if we exposed him, Sadako would be appeased?"

  Asakawa looked deep into Ryuji's eyes, trying to figure out what he really thought. If they dug up the remains and laid them to rest and it still didn't save Asakawa's life, maybe Ryuji was planning to kill Dr Nagao. Maybe he was using Asakawa as a test case, trying to save his own skin…

  "Come on. Don't be stupid," said Ryuji with a laugh. "First of all, if Nagao had really incurred Sadako's resentment, he'd already be dead."

  True. She definitely had that kind of power.

  "So why did she let herself be killed by him?"

  "I can't say. But look: she was surrounded by the deaths of people close to her. She knew nothing but frustration. Even disappearing from the theatre company like that was essentially a frustration of her goals, right? Then she visits her father at the sanatorium and finds out that he's near death."

  "A person who's given up on the world harbours no resentment toward the person who takes her out of it, is that what you're saying?"

  "Not exactly. Rather, I think it's possible that Sadako herself caused those impulses in Old Man Nagao. In other words, maybe she killed herself, but borrowed Nagao's hands to do it."

  Her mother had thrown herself into a volcano, her father was dying of tuberculosis, her own dreams of becoming an actress had been shattered, and then there was her congenital handicap. She had any number of reasons to commit suicide. And there were things that just didn't add up unless one assumed she'd killed herself. Yoshino's report had mentioned Shigemori, founder of Theatre Group Soaring. He'd got drunk and dropped in on Sadako, and died the next day of cardiac paralysis. It was almost certain that Sadako had killed him using some abnormal ability of hers. She had that kind of power. She could easily kill a man or two without leaving any evidence. So why was Nagao still alive? It made no sense, unless one decided that she must have guided his will in order to kill herself.

  "Well, okay, let's say it was suicide. But why did she have to be raped before she died? And don't tell me it's because she didn't want to die a virgin."

  Asakawa had hit the nail on the head, and as a result Ryuji was at a loss for an answer. That was exactly what he was going to say.

  "Is that really so stupid?"

  "Huh?"

  "Is it really so foolish to not want to die a virgin?" Ryuji pressed his point with a desperate earnestness. "If it were me… if by some chance it were me, that's how I'd feel. I wouldn't want to die a virgin."

  This wasn't like Ryuji, Asakawa felt. Asakawa couldn't explain it logically, but neither the words nor the facial expression were like Ryuji at all.

  "Are you serious? Men and women are different. Especially in the case of Sadako Yamamura."

  "Heh, heh. Just kidding. Sadako didn't want to be raped. Of course she didn't. I mean, who'd want a thing like that to happen to oneself? Plus, she bit Nagao's shoulder down to the bone. It was only after it had happened that the thought of dying occurred to her, and without even considering it she guided Nagao in that direction. I think that's probably what happened."

  "But then, wouldn't you still expect her to have a lingering resentment toward Nagao?" Asakawa still wasn't convinced.

  "But aren't you forgetting? We need to imagine the spear-tip of her resentment being pointed, not at any one individual, but at society in general. Compared to that, her hatred of Nagao was as insignificant as a fart in a windstorm."

  If hatred toward society in general was what was incorporated into that video, then what was the charm? What could it be? The phrase indiscriminate attack came into Asakawa's mind, before Ryuji's thick voice interrupted his thoughts.

  "Enough already. If we have time to think about crap like this, we should be spending it trying to find Sadako. She's the one who'll solve every riddle."

  Ryuji drained the last of his oolong tea and then stood up and tossed the empty can out toward the valley floor.

  They stood on the gentle hillside looking around at the tall grass. Ryuji handed Asakawa a sickle and pointed with his chin to the slope on the left side of B-4. He wanted him to cut away the tangles of grass and examine the contours of the ground there. Asakawa bent down, dropped his knee, and began to swing the sickle in an arc parallel to the ground. Grass began to fall.

  Thirty years before, a dilapidated house had stood here, with a well in its front yard. Asakawa stood up again. He looked around again, wondering where he'd build his dwelling if he were to live here. He'd probably choose a site with a nice view. There was no other reason to build a house up here. Where was the best view? Eyes trained on the greenhouse roofs shining far below, Asakawa walked around a bit, paying attention to the shifting perspective. The view didn't seem to change much no matter where he went. But he thought that if he were building a house, it would be easier to build it where cabin A-4 stood than where B-4 was. When he bent down to the ground and looked he realized that was the only level area. He crawled around in the space between A-4 and B-4, cutting the grass and feeling the earth with his hands.

  He had no memory of ever drawing water from a well. He realized that he'd never even seen a real well. He had no idea what one really looked like, especially one in a mountainous area such as this. Was there really groundwater here? But then, a few hundred meters east along the floor of the valley there was a patch of marsh, surrounded by tall trees. Asakawa's thoughts weren't coming together. What was he supposed to concentrate on during a task such as this? No idea. He felt the blood rush to his head. He looked at his watch: almost three o'clock. Seven hours left. Would all this effort get them any closer to meeting the deadline? The thought sent his mind into further disarray. His image of the well was hazy. What would remain to mark the site of an old well? A bunch of stones piled up in a circle? What if they'd collapsed and fallen into the earth? No way. Then they'd never make it in time. He looked at his watch again. Exactly three now. He'd just drunk 500 millilitres of oolong tea on the balcony, but already his throat was dry again. Voices echoed in his head: look for a bulge in the earth, look for rocks. He jabbed the shovel into the exposed dirt. Time and blood assaulted his brain. His nerves were shot, but he didn't feel fatigued. Why was time flowing so differently now than it had on the balcony, when they were eating lunch? Why had he started to panic so much the minute he'd set to work? Was this the right thing to do, really? Weren't there a lot of other things they should be doing?

  He'd dug a cave once as a child. He must have been in the fourth or fifth grade. He laughed weakly as he recalled the episode.

  "What in the world are you doing?" At the sound of Ryuji's voice, Asakawa's head jerked up. "What've you been up to, crawling around over here. We've got to search a wider area."

  Asakawa gaped up at Ryuji. Ryuji had the sun at his back, his face was shadowy. Drops of sweat from his dark face fell to the grass by his feet. What was I up to? A little hole had been dug in the ground right in front of him. Asakawa had dug it.

  "You digging a pit or something?"

  Ryuji sighed. Asakawa frowned and moved to look at his watch.

  "And stop looking at your fucking watch!" R
yuji slapped his hand away. He glared at Asakawa for a little while, then sighed again. He squatted and whispered, calmly, "Maybe you ought to take a break."

  "No time."

  "I'm telling you, you need to get a hold of yourself. Panicking won't get you anywhere." Asakawa was crouching, too, and Ryuji poked him lightly in the chest. Asakawa lost his balance and fell over backwards, feet up in the air.

  "That's it, lie down just like that, just like a baby."

  Asakawa squirmed, trying to get to his feet.

  "Don't move! Lie down! Don't waste your strength." Ryuji stepped on Asakawa's chest until he stopped struggling. Asakawa closed his eyes and gave up resisting. The weight of Ryuji's foot receded into the distance. When he gently opened his eyes again, Ryuji was moving his short, powerful legs, crossing over into the shade of B-4's balcony. His gait was eloquent. He'd had an inspiration as to where they could find the well, and his sense of desperation had faded.

  After Ryuji had left, Asakawa lay still for a while. Flat on his back, spread-eagled, he gazed up into the sky. The sun was bright. How weak his spirit was compared to Ryuji's. Disgusting. He regulated his breathing and tried to think coolly. He wasn't confident he could keep himself together as the next seven hours ticked away. He'd just follow Ryuji's every order. That'd be best. Lose himself, place himself under the sway of someone with an unyielding spirit. Lose yourself! You'll even be able to escape the terror then. You're going to be buried in the earth-you'll become one with nature. As if in answer to his wish, he was suddenly overcome by drowsiness and began to lose consciousness. At the very threshold of sleep, in the midst of a daydream about lifting Yoko high into the air, he remembered once again that episode from his grade school days.

  There was a municipal sports ground on the outskirts of the town where he'd grown up. There was a cliff at its edge, and at the foot of the cliff was a swamp with crayfish in it. When he was a schoolboy, Asakawa often went there with his buddies to catch crayfish. On that particular day, the sun shining on the exposed red earth of the cliff next to the swamp was like a challenge. He was tired of sitting there holding his fishing pole anyway, so he went over to where the sun was shining on the cliff and began to dig a hole in its steep face. The dirt was soft clay, and it crumbled away at his feet when he thrust in an old piece of board he'd found. Before long his friends joined him. There'd been three of them, he seemed to recall, or maybe four. Just the perfect number for digging a cave. Any more and they would have been bumping heads, any fewer and it would have been too much work for each of them.

  After an hour of digging they'd made a hole just the right size for one of them to crawl into. They kept going. They'd originally been on their way home from school, and soon one of his friends said he had to be getting home. Only Asakawa, whose idea it had been in the first place, kept at it silently. And by the time the sun set the cave had grown large enough for all the boys who were left to squeeze into. Asakawa had hugged his knees; he and his friends giggled at each other. Curled up in the red clay like that, they felt like the Stone Age people at Mikkabi, whose remains they'd just learned about in Social Studies.

  However, after a little while the entrance to the hole was blocked by a lady's face. The setting sun was at her back, so her face was in shadow and they couldn't make out her expression, but they realized it was a fiftyish housewife from the neighborhood.

  "What are you boys doing digging a hole here? It'd be pretty disgusting if you got buried alive in there," the lady said, peering into the cave. Asakawa and the two other boys exchanged glances. Young though they were, they still noticed something odd about her warning. Not, "Cut it out-that's dangerous," but, "Cut it out, because if you got buried alive in there and died it would be disgusting to people in the neighborhood, such as me." She was cautioning them purely for her own good. Asakawa and his friends began to giggle again. The lady's face blocked the entrance like a figure in a shadow play.

  Ryuji's face gradually superimposed itself over the lady's.

  "Now you're a bit too relaxed. Imagine being able to go night-night in a place like this. Hey, you jerk, what are you giggling at?"

  Ryuji woke him up. The sun was nearing the western horizon, and darkness was fast approaching. Ryuji's face and figure against the weakening sunlight were even blacker than before.

  "Come over here a minute." Ryuji pulled Asakawa to his feet and then silently crawled back under the balcony of B-4. Asakawa followed. Under the balcony, one of the boards between the supporting pillars had been peeled partway back. Ryuji stuck his hand in behind the board and pulled it out with all his might. With a loud snap the board broke in half diagonally. The decor inside the cabin was modern, but these boards were so flimsy you could break them by hand. The builders had thoroughly skimped on the parts you couldn't see. Ryuji poked the flashlight inside and shined it around under the cabin.

  He nodded as if to say, come look at this. Asakawa fixed his gaze on the gap in the wall and looked inside. The flashlight beam was trained on a black protrusion over by the west side. As he stared at it he noticed that the sides seemed to have an uneven texture, like a pile of rocks. The top was covered with a concrete lid; blades of grass poked out of cracks in the concrete and between the stones. Asakawa immediately realized what was directly overhead. The living room of the cabin. And directly over the round rim of the well were the television and VCR. A week ago, when he'd watched that video, Sadako Yamamura had been this close, hiding, watching what went on above.

  Ryuji pulled off more boards until there was an opening large enough for a man to pass through. They both ducked through the hole in the wall and crawled to the rim of the well. The cabin was built on a gradient, and they'd entered from the downhill end, so the further they went the lower the floorboards got, creating a sense of something pressing down on them. Even though there should be plenty of air in the dark crawl space, Asakawa began to find it hard to breathe. The soil here was clammier than outside. Asakawa knew full well what they must do now. He knew, but he felt no fear yet. He felt claustrophobic just from the floorboards over his head, but maybe he'd have to go down into the bottom of the well, into a place ruled by an even deeper darkness… Not maybe. To pull Sadako out, they'd almost certainly have to descend into the well.

  "Give me a hand here," said Ryuji. He'd grabbed a piece of rebar poking out from a crack in the concrete lid and was trying to pull the lid onto the downhill slope. But the ceiling was too low, and he couldn't get much leverage. Even someone like Ryuji who could bench 120 kilos was down to half strength if he didn't have the right footing. Asakawa went around the well until he was uphill from it and lay down on his back. He placed both hands on a support column to brace himself and then pushed against the lid with his feet. There was an ugly sound as concrete scraped against stone. Asakawa and Ryuji began to chant in order to synchronize their efforts. The lid moved. How many years had it been since the well's face was exposed? Had the well been capped when Villa Log Cabin was built, or when Pacific Land was established, or when the sanatorium closed? They could only guess, based on the strength of the seal between the concrete and the stones, on the almost-human screech as the lid was torn away. Probably more than just six months or a year. But no longer than twenty-five years. In any case, the well had now started to open its mouth. Ryuji stuck the blade of the shovel into the space they'd made so far and pushed.

  "Okay, when I give the signal, I want you to lean on the handle."

  Asakawa turned around.

  "Ready? One, two, three, push!"

  As Asakawa leaned on the makeshift lever, Ryuji pushed on the side of the cap with both hands. With an agonized shriek, the lid fell to the ground.

  The lip of the well was faintly damp. Asakawa and Ryuji picked up their flashlights, placed their other hands on the wet rim, and pulled themselves up. Before shining light into the well, they moved their heads and shoulders into the roughly fifty-centimetre gap between the top of the well and the floor above. A putrid smell arose on
the cold air. The space inside the well was so dense that they felt if they let go their hands they'd be sucked in. She was here, all right. This woman with extraordinary supernatural power, with tes-ticular feminization syndrome… "Woman" wasn't even the right word. The biological distinction between male and female depended on the structure of the gonads. No matter how beautifully feminine the body, if those gonads were in the form of testes it was a male. Asakawa didn't know whether he should consider Sadako Yamamura a man or a woman. Since her parents had named her Sadako, it seemed they had intended to raise her as a woman. This morning, on the boat to Atami, Ryuji had said, Don't you think a person with both male and female genitals is the ultimate symbol of power and beauty? Come to think of it, Asakawa had once seen something in an art book that had made him doubt his eyes. A perfectly mature female nude was reclining on a slab of stone, with a splendid example of the male genitalia peeking out from between her thighs…

  "Can you see anything?" asked Ryuji. The beams of their flashlights showed that water had collected in the bottom of the well, about four or five meters down. But they didn't know how deep the water was.

  "There's water down there." Ryuji scuffled around, tying the end of the rope to a post.

  "Okay, point your flashlight downward and hold it over the edge. Don't drop it, whatever you do."

  He's planning to go down in there. As he realized this, Asakawa's legs began to shake. What if I have to go down … Now, finally, with the narrow, vertical tunnel staring him in the face, Asakawa's imagination started to work on him. I can't do it. Go into that black water and do what? Fish around for bones, that's what. There's no way I can do that, I'll go crazy. As he gratefully watched Ryuji lower himself into the hole, he prayed to God that his turn would never come.

  His eyes were accustomed to the dark now, and he could see the moss covering the inner surface of the well. The stones of the wall, in the orange beam of his flashlight, seemed to turn into eyes and noses and mouths, and when he couldn't tear his gaze away, the patterns of the stones transformed into dead faces, distorted with demonic cries at their moment of death. Innumerable evil spirits undulated like seaweed, hands outstretched toward the exit. He couldn't drive away the image. A pebble fell into the ghastly shaft, barely a meter across, echoed against the sides of the well, and was swallowed into the gullets of the evil spirits.