Ring (8 page)

So, what did they do here?

Asakawa then subtly rephrased the question.
What
could
they have done here?

He'd found nothing resembling a clue-not in the bathroom, not in the bath, not in the closet, not in the fridge. Even assuming there had been something, the manager would have disposed of it when he cleaned the place. Which meant that, instead of sitting here drinking whiskey, he should be talking to the manager. That would be quicker.

He'd drained his first glass; he made his second a little smaller. He couldn't afford to get drunk. He put a lot of ice in it, and this time he cut it with tap water. His sense of danger must have been numbed a little. He suddenly felt foolish: stealing time from work, coming all the way up here. He took off his glasses, washed his face, then looked at his reflection in the mirror. It was the face of a sick man. Maybe he'd already caught the virus. He gulped down the whiskey-and-water he'd just made and fixed himself another.

Returning from the dining room, Asakawa noticed a notebook on the shelf beneath the telephone stand. The cover said
Memories.
He leafed through a few pages.

Saturday, April 7

Nonko will never forget this day. Why? That's a

s-e-c-r-e-t. Yuichi is wonderful. Hee-hee!

-NONKO

Inns, B&B's, and the like often had notebooks like this in the rooms, so that guests could write down their memories and impressions. On the next page was a crude drawing of mommy and daddy. Must have been a family trip. It was dated April 14th-also a Saturday, naturally.

Daddys fat,

Mommys fat,

So Im fat too.

Aprul 14nth

Asakawa kept turning pages. He could feel some sort of force urging him to open the pages at the end of the book, but he kept going through them in order. He was afraid that if he messed up the chronology he might miss something.

He couldn't say for sure, since there were probably a lot of guests who didn't write anything, but it seemed like there were only people here on Saturdays until summer started. After that the time between each entry shrank. By the end of August there was a steady stream of entries lamenting the end of summer.

Sunday, August 20

Another summer vacation come and gone. And it
sucked. Somebody help me! Rescue poor little me!

I have a motorbike, 400cc. I'm pretty good-looking.

A bargain!

- A.Y.

This guy looked like he'd decided the guest book was a means to advertise himself, maybe find a pen-pal. It looked like a lot of people had the same ideas about the place. When couples stayed here, their entries showed it, while when single people stayed, they wrote about how much they wanted a companion.

Still, it made for interesting reading. Presently his watch showed nine o'clock.

Then he turned the page:

Thursday, August 30

Ulp! Consider yourself warned: you 'd better not see it unless you 've got the guts.

You'll
be sorry you did. (Evil laughter.)

S. I.

That was all there was to the message. August 30th was the morning after the four had stayed here. The initials "S.I." would stand for "Shuichi Iwata". His entry was different from all the rest. What did it mean?
You 'd better not see it.
What in the world was
it?
Asakawa closed the guest book and looked at it from the side. There was a slight gap where it didn't close tightly. He put his finger there and opened it to that page.
Ulp! Consider yourself warned: you 'd better not see it unless you 've got the guts. You'll be sorry you did. (Evil laughter.) S.I.
The words jumped out at him. Why did the book want to open to this exact page? He thought for a moment. Perhaps the four had opened the book here and set something heavy on top of it. The weight had created this force that remained even now, trying to open to this page. And maybe whatever they'd placed on top of the page was the "it" that he'd "better not see". That must be it.

Asakawa looked around anxiously, searching every corner of the shelf beneath the telephone stand. Nothing. Not even a pencil.

He sat back down on the sofa and continued reading. The next entry was dated Saturday, September 1st. But it said only the usual things.

It didn't say if the group of students who had stayed here had seen
it.
None of the remaining pages mentioned it, either.

Asakawa closed the guest book and lit a cigarette.
You 'd better not see it unless you 've got the guts.
He imagined that
it
must be something frightening. He opened the notebook at random and pressed down on the page lightly. Whatever it was must have been heavy enough to overcome the pages' tendency to close. One or two photos of ghosts, for example, wouldn't have done the trick. Maybe a weekly, or a hardcover book… Anyway, something you look at. Maybe he'd ask the manager if he remembered finding anything strange left in the cabin after the guests had checked out on August 30th. He wasn't sure if the manager would even remember, but he figured that if it had been strange enough he would. Asakawa began to get to his feet when the VCR in front of him caught his eye. The TV was still on, showing a famous actress chasing her husband around with a vacuum. A home appliance commercial.

…
Yeah, a VHS tape would be heavy enough to keep the notebook open, and they might have had one handy, too.

Still in a crouch, Asakawa ground out his cigarette. He recalled the video collection he had seen in the manager's office. Maybe they'd happened to watch a particularly interesting horror flick, and thought they'd recommend it to the next guests-
hey, this one's cool, check it out.
If that's all it was… But wait. If that was it, why hadn't Shuichi Iwata used the name? If he wanted to tell somebody that, say,
Friday the 13th
was a great movie, wouldn't it have been easier just to say
Friday the 13th
was a great movie? He didn't need to go to all the trouble of actually leaving it on top of the notebook. So maybe
it
was something that didn't have a name, something they could only indicate with the word
it. … Well? Worth checking out?

Well, he certainly didn't have anything to lose, not with no other clues presenting themselves. Besides, sitting around here thinking wasn't getting him anywhere. Asakawa left the cabin, climbed the stone steps and pushed open the office door.

Just as before, there was no sign of the manager at the counter, only the sound of the television coming from the back room. The guy had retired from his job in the city and decided to live out his years surrounded by Mother Nature, so he'd taken a job as a manager at a resort, but the work turned out to be utterly boring, and now all he did every day was watch videos. That's how Asakawa interpreted the manager's situation. Before he had a chance to call the guy, though, he crawled to the doorway and stuck his head out. Asakawa spoke somewhat apologetically.

"I thought I'd maybe borrow a video after all."

The manager grinned happily. "Go right ahead, whichever you'd like. They're three hundred yen each."

Asakawa scanned the titles for scary-looking movies.
The Legend of Hell House, The Exorcist The Omen.
He had seen them all in his student days.
Nothing else?
There had to be some he hadn't seen. He searched from one end of the shelves to the other, and saw nothing that looked likely. He started over, reading the titles of every one of the two hundred or so videos. And then, on the very. bottom shelf, way over in the corner, he noticed a video without a case, fallen over on its side. All the other tapes were encased in jackets with photos and imposing logos, but this one lacked even a label.

"What's that there?" After he'd asked the question, Asakawa realized that he'd used a pronoun,
that,
as he pointed to the tape. If it didn't have a name, what else was he supposed to call it?

The manager gave a bothered frown and replied, none too brightly, "Huh?" Then he picked up the tape. "This? This isn't anything."

…
Hey, I wonder if this guy even knows what's on that tape.

"Have you seen it? That one," asked Asakawa.

"Let me see." The manager cocked his head repeatedly, as if he couldn't figure out what something like this was doing here.

"If you don't mind, could I borrow that tape?"

Instead of replying, the manager slapped his knee. "Ah, I remember now. It was kicking around in one of the rooms. I just figured it was one of ours and brought it here, but…"

"This wouldn't have happened to be in B-4, I don't suppose?" Asakawa asked slowly, pressing the point home. The manager laughed and shook his head.

"I haven't the foggiest. It was a couple of months ago."

Asakawa asked once more, "Have you… seen… this video?"

The manager just shook his head. The smile disappeared from his face. "No."

"Well, let me rent it."

"You going to record something on the TV?"

"Yeah, well, I, ah…"

The manager glanced at the video. "The tab is broken. See? You can't record on it."

Maybe it was the alcohol, but Asakawa was getting irritated.
I'm telling you to rent it to me, you idiot, just hand it over,
he griped to himself. But no matter how drunk he was, Asakawa was never able to come on very strong with other people.

"Please. I'll bring it right back."

He bowed. The manager couldn't figure out why his guest was showing so much interest in this old thing. Maybe there was something
interesting
on it, something somebody had forgotten to erase… Now he wished he'd watched it when he found it. He felt the sudden temptation to watch it right now, but he couldn't very well refuse a guest who had asked for it. The manager handed over the tape. Asakawa reached for his wallet, but the manager stopped him with his hand.

"That's alright, you don't need to pay. I can't charge you for this, now, can I?"

"Thanks a lot. I'll bring it right back."

"If it turns out to be interesting, then please do!" The manager's curiosity had been piqued. He'd already seen every video here at least once, and most of them had ceased to interest him. How did I miss that one anyway?
It would have killed a few hours. Aw, but it probably only has some stupid TV show recorded on it anyway.

The manager was sure the video would come back right away.

The tape had been rewound. It was an ordinary 120-minute tape, the sort you could get anywhere, and, as the manager had pointed out, the anti-erasure tabs had been broken off. Asakawa turned on the VCR and pushed the tape into the slot. He sat down cross-legged right in front of the screen and pressed play. He heard the capstans start to turn. He had high hopes that the key to unlock the riddle of four people's deaths was hidden on this tape. He'd pushed play fully intending to be satisfied with just a clue, any clue. There can't be any danger, he was thinking. What harm could come from just watching a videotape?

Random sounds and distorted images flickered on the screen, but once he had selected the right channel, the picture steadied. Then the screen went black as ink. This was the video's first scene. There was no sound. Wondering if it had broken, he brought his face close to the screen.
Consider yourself warned: you 'd better not see it. You'll be sorry you did.
Shuichi Iwata's words came back to him. Why should he be sorry? Asakawa was used to things like this. He'd covered the local news. No matter what sort of horrific images he might be shown, he felt confident he wouldn't regret watching.

In the middle of the black screen he thought he saw a pinpoint of light begin to flicker. It gradually expanded, jumping around to the left and right, before finally coming to rest on the left-hand side. Then it branched out, becoming a frayed bundle of lights, crawling around like worms, which finally formed themselves into words. Not the kind of captions one normally saw on film, though. These were poorly-written, as if scrawled by a white brush on jet-black paper. Somehow, though, he managed to make out what they said:
WATCH UNTIL THE END.
A command. These words disappeared, and the next floated up into view.
YOU WILL BE EATEN BY THE LOST
… The last word didn't make much sense, but being eaten didn't sound too pleasant. It seemed that there must have been an "or else" implied there. Don't turn off the video halfway through, or else something awful will happen: it was a threat.

YOU WILL BE EATEN BY THE LOST
… The words grew larger and chased all the black from the screen. It was a flat change, from black to milk-white. It was a patchy, unnatural colour, and it began to resemble a series of concepts painted on a canvas, one over another. The unconscious, squirming, worrying, finding an exit, spurting out-or maybe it was the throb of life. Thought had energy, bestially satiating itself on darkness. Strangely, he felt no desire to push stop. Not because he was unafraid of whatever wanted to eat him, but because this intense outpouring of energy felt good.

Something red burst onto the monochrome screen. At the same time he heard the ground rumble, from an indefinable direction. The sound seemed to come from everywhere, such that he began to imagine that the whole cabin was shaking. It didn't feel like the sound was coming from those little speakers. The sluggish red fluid exploded and flew about, sometimes occupying the whole screen. From black to white, and now red… It was nothing but a violent succession of colours, he hadn't seen any natural scenery yet. Just concepts in the abstract, etched vividly into his brain by the brilliantly shifting colours. It was tiring, actually. And then, as if it had read the viewer's mind, the red retreated from the screen, and a mountain vista stretched out. At one glance he could tell it was a volcano, with a gentle peak. The volcano was sending up white puffs of smoke against a clear blue sky. The camera seemed to be situated somewhere at the foot of the mountain, where the ground was covered with rugged blackish-brown lava.