Ring (15 page)

"There it is again," cried Ryuji. For a time he arched his back like a cat and stared at the screen intently, and then he moved his head back and his eyes darted around the room. He was thinking furiously, Asakawa could tell by the movements of his eyes. But he had no idea what Ryuji was thinking. In all, the screen went dark thirty-three times during the course of the two-minute scene.

"So what? Are you telling me you've been able to figure something out just from this? It's just a glitch in the filming. The video camera was defective."

Ryuji ignored Asakawa's comment and began to search through other scenes. They heard footsteps on the outside stairs. Ryuji hurriedly pushed the stop button.

Finally the front door opened and Mai appeared, saying, "I'm back." The room was once again wrapped in her fragrance.

It was Sunday afternoon, and families with children were playing on the lawn in front of the city library. Some fathers were playing catch with their boys; others were lying on the grass, letting their kids play. It was a beautiful clear Sunday afternoon in mid-October, and the world seemed blanketed in peace.

Faced with the scene, Asakawa suddenly wanted nothing more than to rush home. He'd spent some time on the fourth floor in the natural sciences section, boning up on airwaves, and now he was just staring out the window, looking at nothing in particular. All day he'd found himself drifting off like this. All sorts of thoughts would come to him, without rhyme or reason; he couldn't concentrate. Probably it was because he was impatient. He stood up. He wanted to see the faces of his wife and child, now. He was overcome with the thought.
Now.
He didn't have much time left. Time to play with his daughter on the lawn like that…

Asakawa got home just before five. Shizu was making dinner. He could read her bad mood as he stood behind her and watched her slice vegetables. He knew the reason, too-all too well. He finally had a day off, but he'd left her early that morning, saying only, "I'm going to Ryuji's place." If he didn't look after Yoko once in a while, at least when he had a day off, Shizu tended to feel swamped by the stresses of raising a child. And to top it off, he'd been with Ryuji. That was the problem. He could have just lied to her, but then she wouldn't have been able to contact him in an emergency.

"There was a call from a realtor/' said Shizu, not missing a beat with the knife.

"What about?"

"He asked if we were thinking about selling."

Asakawa had sat Yoko on his knee and was reading her a picture book. She most likely didn't understand, but they were hoping that if they exposed her to a lot of words now, maybe they'd accumulate in her head and then come flowing out like a burst dam when she got to be two or so.

"Did he make a good offer?"

Ever since land prices had begun to skyrocket, realtors had been trying to get them to sell.

"Seventy million yen."

That was less than before. Still, it was enough to leave quite a bit for Shizu and Yoko, even after they paid off the mortgage.

"So what did you tell him?"

Wiping her hands on a towel, Shizu finally turned around. "I told him my husband wasn't home."

That's how it always went.
My husband's not at home,
she'd say, or
I'd have to talk it over with my husband first.
Shizu never decided anything on her own. He was afraid she'd have to start soon.

"What do you think? Maybe it's about time we considered it. We'd have enough to buy a house in the suburbs, with a yard. The realtor said so, too."

It was the family's modest dream: to sell the condo they were living in now and build a big house in the suburbs. Without capital, a dream was all it would ever be. But they did have this one powerful asset: a condo in the heart of the city. They had the means to make that dream come true, and every time they spoke of it now it was with excitement. It was right there-all they had to do was reach out their hands…

"And then, you know, we could have another baby, too." It was perfectly clear to Asakawa just what Shizu was seeing in her mind's eye. A spacious suburban residence, with a separate study room for each of their two or three kids, and a living room large enough that she needn't be embarrassed no matter how many guests dropped in. Yoko, on his knee, started to act up. She'd noticed that her daddy's eyes had strayed from the picture book, that his attention was focussed on something besides herself, and she was registering her objections. Asakawa looked at the picture book once more.

"Long, long ago Marshy-land was called Marshy-beach, because the reed-thick marshes stretched all the way down to the seashore."

As he read aloud, Asakawa felt tears well up in his eyes. He wanted to make his wife's dream come true. He really did. But he only had four days left. Would his wife be able to cope when he died of unknown causes? She didn't yet know how fragile her dream was, how soon it would come crashing down.

By 9 p.m. Shizu and Yoko were asleep as usual. Asakawa was preoccupied by the last thing Ryuji had brought up.
Why did he keep replaying the scene with the baby? And what about that old woman's words
-
"Next year you're going to have a child."
Was there a connection between the baby boy and the child the old woman mentioned? And what about the moments of total blackness? Thirty-odd times they occurred, at varying intervals.

Asakawa thought he'd watch the video again, to try and confirm this. Ryuji had been looking for something specific, no matter how capricious it had seemed at the time. Ryuji had great powers of logic, of course, but he also had a finely tuned sense of intuition. Asakawa, on the other hand, specialized in the work of dragging out the truth through painstaking investigation.

Asakawa opened the cabinet and picked up the videotape. He went to insert it into the video deck, but just at that moment, he noticed something that stayed his hand.
Wait a minute, something's not right.
He wasn't sure what it was, but his sixth sense was telling him something was out of the ordinary. More and more he was sure that it wasn't just his imagination. He really had felt something was funny when he touched the tape. Something had changed, ever so slightly.

What is it? What's different?
His heart was pounding.
This is bad. Nothing about this is getting any better. Think, man, try to remember. The last time I watched this… I rewound it. And now the tape's in the middle. About a third of the way through. That's right about where the images end, and it hasn 't been rewound. Somebody watched it while I was away.

Asakawa ran to the bedroom. Shizu and Yoko were asleep, all tangled up together. Asakawa rolled his wife over and shook her by the shoulder.

"Wake up. Shizu! Wake up!" He kept his voice low, trying not to awaken Yoko. Shizu twisted her face into a scowl and tried to squirm away.

"I said, wake up!" His voice sounded different from usual.

"What… what's wrong?"

"We have to talk. Come on."

Asakawa dragged his wife out of bed and pulled her into the dining room. Then he held the tape out to her. "Did you watch this?"

Taken aback by the ferocity of his tone, Shizu could only look back and forth from the tape to her husband's face. Finally, she said, "Was I not supposed to?"

What're you so mad about?
she thought.
Here it is Sunday, and you're off somewhere, and I'm bored. And then there was that tape you and Ryuji were whispering over, so I pulled it out. But it wasn 't even interesting. Probably just something the boys in the office cooked up anyway.
Shizu remained silent, only talking back in her mind.
There's no call for you to get so upset about it.

For the first time in his married life, Asakawa felt a desire to hit his wife. "You… idiot!" But somehow he managed to resist the urge and just stood there, fist clenched.
Calm down and think. It's your own fault. You shouldn't have left it where she could see it.
Shizu never even opened mail addressed to him; he'd figured it was safe just leaving the tape in the cabinet.
Why didn’t I hide it? After all, she came in the room while Ryuji and I were watching it. Of course she'd be curious about it. I was wrong not to hide it.

"I'm sorry," Shizu mumbled, discontentedly.

"When did you watch it?" Asakawa's voice shook.

"This morning."

"Really?"

Shizu had no way of knowing how important it was to know exactly when she watched it. She just nodded, curtly.

"What time?"

"Why do you ask?"

"Just tell me!" Asakawa's hand started to move again.

"Around ten-thirty, maybe. It was right after
Masked Rider
ended."

Masked Rider?
That was a children's show. Yoko was the only one in the family who'd have any interest in that. Asakawa fought desperately to keep from collapsing.

"Now, this is very important, so listen to me. While you were watching this video, where was Yoko?"

Shizu looked like she was about to burst into tears.

"On my lap."

"Yoko, too? You're saying both of you… watched… this video?"

"She was just watching the screen flicker-she didn't understand it."

"Shut up! That doesn't matter!"

This was no longer just a matter of destroying his wife's dreams of a house in the suburbs. The entire family was threatened now-they could all perish. They'd all die an utterly meaningless death.

As she observed her husband's anger, fear, and despair, Shizu began to realize the seriousness of the situation. "Hey… that was just a… a joke, right?"

She recalled the words at the end of the video. At the time she'd dismissed them as just a tasteless prank. They couldn't be real. But what about the way her husband was acting?

"It's not for real, right? Right?"

Asakawa couldn't respond. He merely shook his head. Then he was filled with tenderness for the ones who now shared his fate.

October 15
-
Monday

Every morning when he woke up now, Asakawa found himself wishing that it had all been a dream. He called a rent-a-car place in the neighbourhood and told them that he'd be in on schedule to pick up the car he'd reserved. They had his reservation on file, no mistake. Reality marched on without a break.

He needed a way to get around if he was going to try and find out where that broadcast had originated. It would be too hard to break in on TV frequencies with an off-the-shelf wireless transmitter; he figured that it had to have been done with an expertly modified unit. And the image on the tape was clear, with no interference. That meant that the signal had to have been strong, and close. With more information he might have been able to establish the area in which the broadcast was receivable, and thus to pinpoint the point of origin. But all he had to go on was the fact that the television in Villa Log Cabin B-4 had picked up the transmission. All he could do was go there, check out the lay of the land, and then start going over the area with a fine-toothed comb. He had no idea how long it would take. He packed enough clothes for three days. He certainly wouldn't need any more than that.

He and Shizu looked at each other, but Shizu didn't say anything about the video. Asakawa hadn't been able to think of a good lie, and so he'd let her go to bed with only the vaguest of excuses about the threat of death in a week. For her part, Shizu seemed to fear finding out anything specific, and seemed happy to let things remain ambiguous and unexplained. Rather than questioning him like she usually would, she seemed to guess at something on her own that made her keep an eerie silence. Asakawa didn't know exactly how she was interpreting things, but it didn't seem to assuage her uneasiness. As she watched her usual morning soap opera on TV she seemed extraordinarily sensitive to noises from outside, starting from her seat any number of times.

"Let's just not talk about this, okay? I don't have any answers for you. Just let me handle it." This was all Asakawa could think to say to calm his wife's anxieties. He couldn't allow himself to appear weak to his wife.

Just as he was stepping out of the house, as if on cue, the phone rang. It was Ryuji.

"I've made a fascinating discovery. I want you to tell me what you think." There was a hint of excitement in Ryuji's voice.

"Can't you tell me about it over the phone? I'm supposed to go pick up a rental car."

"A rental car?"

"You're the one who told me to find out where the broadcast originated from."

"Right, right. Listen, put that on the back burner for a while and get over here. Maybe you don't have to go looking for an antenna after all. Maybe that whole premise will just crumble away."

Asakawa decided to pick the car up first anyway, so that if he still needed to go to South Hakone Pacific Land, he could leave straight from Ryuji's place.

Asakawa parked the car with two wheels up on the sidewalk and banged on Ryuji's door.

"Enter! It's unlocked."

Asakawa jerked the door open and deliberately stomped through the kitchen. "So what's this big discovery?" he asked, forcefully.

"What's eating you?" Ryuji glanced over from where he sat, cross-legged on the floor.

"Just hurry up and tell me what you've found!"

"Relax!"

"How am I supposed to relax? Just tell me, already!"

Ryuji held his tongue for a moment. Then, gently, he asked, "What's wrong? Did something happen?"

Asakawa plopped himself down in the middle of the floor, clenching his hands on his knees. "My wife and… my wife and daughter watched that piece of shit."

"Well, that's a hell of a thing. I'm sorry to hear that." Ryuji watched until Asakawa began to regain his composure. The latter sneezed once and blew his nose loudly.

"Well, you want to save them too, don't you?"

Asakawa nodded his head like a little boy.

"Well then, all the more reason to keep a cool head. So I won't tell you my conclusions. I'll just lay out the evidence. I want to see what the evidence suggests to you first. That's why I couldn't have you excited like that, see."