Ring (28 page)

"Hello?"

Now the manager was worried that there was nobody on the other end of the line. Without even knowing why, Asakawa felt joy flood his breast. Ryuji rolled over and opened his eyes slightly. He was drooling. Asakawa's memories were hazy; all he found when he searched his recollections was darkness. He could more or less remember visiting Dr Nagao and then heading for Villa Log Cabin, but everything after that was vague. Dark scenes came to him, one after another, and his breath caught in his throat. He felt like he did after waking up from a powerful dream, one that left a strong impression even though he'd forgotten what it was about. But for some reason, his spirits were high.

"Hello? Can you hear me?"

"Uh, yeah." Asakawa finally managed to reply, adjusting his grip on the receiver.

"Check-out time is eleven o'clock."

"Got it. We'll get our things together and leave right away." Asakawa adopted an officious tone to match the manager's. He could hear a faint trickle of water from the kitchen. It seemed someone hadn't turned the faucet tight last night before going to sleep. Asakawa hung up the phone.

Ryuji had closed his eyes again. Asakawa shook him. "Hey, Ryuji. Get up."

He had no idea how long they'd slept. Ordinarily, Asakawa slept no more than five or six hours a night, but now he felt like he'd been asleep for much longer than that. It had been a long time since he'd been able to sleep soundly, untroubled.

"Hey, Ryuji! If we don't get out of here they're going to charge us for another night." Asakawa shook Ryuji harder, but he didn't wake up. Asakawa raised his eyes and saw the milky-white plastic bag on the dining room table. Suddenly, as if some chance happening had brought back a fragment of a dream, he remembered what was inside it.
Calling Sadako's name. Fulling her out of the cold earth under the floor, stuffing her into a plastic bag.
The sound of running water… It had been Ryuji, last night, who had gone to the sink and washed the mud from Sadako. The water was still running. By then, the appointed time had already passed. And even now, Asakawa was still alive. He was overjoyed. Death had been breathing down his neck, and now that it had been cleared away, life seemed more concentrated; it began to glow. Sadako's skull was beautiful, like a marble sculpture.

"Hey, Ryuji! Wake up!"

Suddenly, he got a bad feeling. Something caught in a corner of his mind. He put his ear to Ryuji's chest. He wanted to hear Ryuji's heart beating through his thick sweatshirt, to know he was still alive. But just as his ear was about to touch Ryuji's chest, Asakawa suddenly found himself in a headlock, held by two powerful hands. Asakawa panicked and started to struggle.

"Gotcha! Thought I was dead, didn't you?" Ryuji released his grip on Asakawa's head and laughed an odd, childlike laugh. How could he joke around after what they'd just been through? Anything was liable to happen. If at that instant he'd seen Sadako Yamamura alive and standing by the table, and Ryuji tearing at his hair dying, Asakawa would have believed his eyes. He suppressed his anger. He owed Ryuji a great deal.

"Stop fooling around."

"It's payback time. You scared the bejeezus out of me last night." Still on his side, Ryuji began to chuckle.

"What did I do?"

"You collapsed down there at the bottom of the well. I really thought you'd gone and died. I was worried. Time was up. I thought you were out of the game."

Asakawa said nothing, just blinked several times.

"Hah. You probably don't even remember. Ungrateful bastard."

Now that he thought about it, Asakawa couldn't remember crawling out of the well on his own. Finally he recalled dangling from the rope, his strength totally spent. Hauling his sixty kilogram frame four or five meters straight up couldn't have been easy, even for someone of Ryuji's strength. The image of himself hanging suspended reminded him somehow of the stone statue of En no Ozunu being pulled up from the bottom of the sea. Shizuko had gained mysterious powers for fishing out the statue, but all Ryuji had to show for his troubles were aches and pains.

"Ryuji?" asked Asakawa in a strangely altered voice.

"What?"

"Thanks for everything you've done. I really owe you."

"Don't start getting mushy on me."

"If it hadn't been for you, I'd be… well, you know. Anyway, thanks."

"Cut the crap. You're going to make me puke. Gratitude isn't worth a single yen."

"Well then, how about some lunch? I'm buying."

"Oh, well in that case." Ryuji pulled himself to his feet, staggering a little. All of his muscles were stiff. Even Ryuji was having trouble making his body do what he wanted it to.

From the South Hakone Pacific Land rest house, Asakawa called his wife in Ashikaga and told her he'd pick her up in a rental car Sunday morning, as promised.
So, everything's all taken care op
she asked. All Asakawa could say was, "Probably". From the fact that he was still here, alive, he could only guess that things were resolved. But as he hung up the phone, something still bothered him deeply. He couldn't quite get over it. Just from the mere fact that he was alive, he wanted to believe that everything was wrapped up neatly, but… Thinking that Ryuji might have the same doubts, Asakawa walked back to the table and asked, "This is really the end, right?"

Ryuji had wolfed down his lunch while Asakawa was on the phone.

"Your family doing alright?" Ryuji wasn't going to answer Asakawa's question right away.

"Yeah. Hey, Ryuji, are you feeling like it's not all over yet?"

"You worried?"

"Aren't you?"

"Maybe."

"About what? What bothers you?"

"What the old woman said.
Next year you 're going to have a child.
That prediction of hers."

The moment he realized Ryuji had exactly the same doubts, Asakawa turned to trying to dispel those doubts.

"Maybe the 'you', just that once, was referring to Shizuko instead of Sadako."

Ryuji rejected this straightaway. "Not possible.

The images on that video come from Sadako's own eyes and mind. The old woman was talking to her. 'You' can only refer to Sadako."

"Maybe her prediction was false."

"Sadako's ability to foresee the future should have been infallible, one hundred percent."

"But Sadako was physically incapable of bearing children."

"That's why it's so strange. Biologically, Sadako was a man, not a woman, so there was no way she could have a kid. Plus, she was a virgin until right before she died. And…"

"And?"

"Her first sexual experience was Nagao. The last smallpox victim in Japan. Quite a coincidence."

It was said that in the distant past God and the Devil, cells and viruses, male and female, even light and darkness had been identical, with no internal contradiction. Asakawa began to feel uneasy. Once the discussion moved into the realm of genetic structures, or the cosmos before the creation of the Earth, the answers were beyond the pale of individual questioning. All he could do at this point was to persuade himself to dispel the niggling uncertainties in his heart and tell himself that it was all over.

"But I'm alive. The riddle of the erased charm is solved. This case is closed."

Then Asakawa realized something. Hadn't the statue of En no Ozunu
willed
itself to be pulled up from the bottom of the ocean? That will had worked on Shizuko, guiding her actions, and as a result she was given her new power. Suddenly that pattern looked awfully familiar. Bringing Sadako's bones up from the bottom of the well, fishing En no Ozunu's statue up from the ocean floor… But what bothered him was the irony: the power Shizuko was given brought her only misery. But that was looking at things the wrong way. Maybe in Asakawa's case, simply being released from the curse was the equivalent of Shizuko's receiving power. Asakawa decided to make himself think so.

Ryuji glanced at Asakawa's face, reassuring himself that the man before him was, indeed, alive, then nodded twice. "I suppose you do have a point." Exhaling slowly, he sank back into his chair. "And yet…"

"What?"

Ryuji sat up straight and asked, as if to himself, "What did Sadako give birth to?"

Asakawa and Ryuji parted company at Atami Station. Asakawa intended to take Sadako's remains back to her relatives in Sashikiji and have them hold a memorial service for her. They probably wouldn't even know what to do with her, a distant relative they hadn't heard a peep out of in nearly thirty years. But, things being what they were, he couldn't just abandon her. If he hadn't known who she was, he could have had her buried as a Jane Doe. But he knew, and so all he could do was hand her over to the people in Sashikiji. The statute of limitations was long past, and it would be nothing but trouble to bring up a murder now, so he decided to say she'd probably been a suicide. He wanted to hand her off and then return immediately to Tokyo, but the boat didn't depart that often. Leaving now, he'd end up having to spend the night on Oshima. Since he'd have to leave the rental car in Atami, flying back to Tokyo would just make things more complicated.

"You can deliver her bones all by yourself. You don't need me for that." As he'd said this, getting out of the car in front of Atami Station, Ryuji seemed to be laughing at Asakawa. Sadako's bones were no longer in the plastic bag. They were wrapped neatly in a black cloth in the back seat of the car. To be sure, it was such a small bundle that even a child could have delivered it to the Yamamura house in Sashikiji. The point was to get them to accept her. If they refused, then Asakawa wouldn't have anywhere to take her. That would be troublesome. He had the feeling that the charm would only be completely fulfilled when someone close to her held services for her. But still: why should they believe him when he showed up on their doorstep with a bag of bones, saying this is your relative whom you haven't heard from in twenty-five years? What proof did he have? Asakawa was still a little worried.

"Well, happy trails. See you in Tokyo." Ryuji waved and went through the ticket gate. "If I didn't have so much work, I wouldn't mind tagging along, but you know how it is." Ryuji had a mountain of work, scholarly articles and the like, that needed immediate attention.

"Let me thank you again."

"Forget about it. It was fun for me, too."

Asakawa watched until Ryuji disappeared into the shadow of the stairs leading to the platform. Just before disappearing from view, Ryuji stumbled on the steps. Although he quickly regained his balance, for a brief moment as he swayed Ryuji's muscular form seemed to go double in Asakawa's vision. Asakawa realized he was tired, and rubbed his eyes. When he took his hands away, Ryuji had disappeared up the stairs. A curious sensation pierced his breast, and somewhere he detected the faint scent of citrus…

That afternoon, he delivered Sadako's remains to Takashi Yamamura without incident. He'd just returned from a fishing voyage, and as soon as he saw the black wrapped bundle he seemed to know what it was. Asakawa held it out in both hands and said, "These are Sadako's remains."

Takashi gazed at the bundle for a while, then narrowed his eyes tenderly. He shuffled over to Asakawa, bowed deeply, and accepted the bones, saying, "thank you for coming all this way". Asakawa was a bit taken aback. He hadn't thought the old man would accept it that easily. Takashi seemed to guess what he was thinking, and he said, in a voice full of conviction, "It's definitely Sadako."

Up until the age of three, and then from age nine to age eighteen, Sadako had lived here, at the Yamamura estate. Takashi was sixty-one now. What exactly did she mean to him? Guessing from his expression as he received her remains, Asakawa imagined that he must have loved her dearly. He didn't even ask for assurance that this was Sadako. Perhaps he didn't need to. Perhaps he knew intuitively that it was her inside the black cloth. The way his eyes had flashed when he'd first seen the bundle attested to that. There must be some sort of power at work here, too.

Having completed his errand, Asakawa wanted to get away from Sadako as quickly as possible. So he beat a hasty retreat, lying that "I'll miss my flight if I don't leave now." If the family changed their minds and suddenly decided they wouldn't accept the remains as Sadako's without proof, all would be lost. If they started asking him for details, he didn't know what he'd say. It would be a long time before he'd be able to tell anyone the whole story. He particularly didn't feel up to telling her relatives.

Asakawa stopped by Hayatsu's "bureau" to say thanks for all his help the other day, and then he headed for the Oshima Hot Springs Hotel. He wanted to soak away all his fatigue in a hot bath and then write up the whole sequence of events.

Just about the time Asakawa was settling into bed at the Oshima Hot Springs Hotel, Ryuji was dozing at his desk in his apartment. His lips rested on a half-written essay, his spittle smudging the dark blue ink. He was so tired that his hand still clutched his beloved Montblanc fountain pen. He hadn't switched over to a word processor yet.

Suddenly his shoulders jerked and his face contorted unnaturally. Ryuji leapt up. His back went ramrod-straight, and his eyes opened far wider than they usually did when he woke up. His eyes were normally slightly slanted, and when they were wide open like this he looked different, somehow cuter than usual. His eyes were bloodshot. He'd been dreaming. Ryuji, normally not afraid of anything, was shaking through and through. He couldn't remember the dream. But the tautness of his body, and his trembling, bore witness to the terror of the dream. He couldn't breathe. He looked at the clock. 9:40. He couldn't immediately figure out the significance of the time. The lights were on-the overhead fluorescent bulb and the desk lamp in front of him- and there was plenty of light, but things still felt too dark. He felt an instinctual fear of the dark. His dream had been ruled by a darkness like no other.

Ryuji swiveled in his chair and looked at the video deck. The fateful tape was still in it. For some reason, he couldn't look away again. He kept staring at it. His breathing became rough. Misgiving showed on his face. Images raced through his mind, leaving no room for logical thought.