Kojo Suzuki - Spiral

“Great. Let’s go.” Ando dropped the disk back into his jacket pocket. Then, waving to Miyashita, he followed Nemoto out of the Pathology Department.

Ando and Nemoto walked side by side down the med school’s dim hallway. Ando wore his lab coat unfastened in front, its tails swept back behind him, with his hands in the pockets of his jacket clutching the disk. Neither Miyashita nor Nemoto had asked about it. Ando wasn’t trying to keep it a secret. Had Miyashita asked, he’d intended to give him an honest answer. If they’d known it might hold the key to this whole mystery, no doubt both men would have been at his heels right now.

Of course, Ando hadn’t seen what was on the disk yet. There was always the possibility that it held something else entirely. He simply wouldn’t know until he managed to bring it up on a monitor. Still, it felt right in his hand: the disk was warm from being in his pocket. It was near body temperature. Its touch seemed to tell him that it held living words.

Nemoto opened the door to the biochemistry lab. Ando took the disk out of his pocket, switched it to his left hand, and held the door open with his right.

“Hey, Ueda.” Nemoto beckoned to a skinny young man seated in a corner of the room.

“Yes?”

Ueda swiveled in his chair to face Nemoto, but didn’t stand up. Nemoto approached him, smiling, and put his hand on Ueda’s shoulder. “Are you using your word processor right now?”

“No, not really.”

“Great. Would you mind if Dr Ando here borrowed it for a while?”

Ueda looked up at Ando and then bowed. “Hello.”

“Sorry about this. I’ve got a disk I need to access and it’s not compatible with my machine.” Ando moved to Nemoto’s side, holding up the disk.

“Go right ahead,” said Ueda, picking up the word processor from where it sat on the floor at his feet and laying it sideways on the desktop.

“Do you mind if I check it right here just to make sure?”

“Not at all.”

He opened the word processor’s lid and turned it on. Soon the initial menu appeared on the screen. From among the options displayed, Ando chose DOCUMENTS, then inserted the disk. The next screen gave him two options: NEW DOCUMENT and OPEN DOCUMENT. Ando moved the cursor to the second option and hit return. With a whir, the machine started to read the disk. Finally, the names of the files stored on the disk appeared on the screen.

Ando read the file names aloud in a delirium. “Ring, ring, ring, ring…”

Ring!

What the hell? The same word that I got from solving the code that popped out of Ryuji’s belly.

“Are you alright?” Nemoto sounded worried. He was peering at Ando’s suddenly dazed expression. Ando could barely manage to nod.

There was no way this could be a coincidence. Asakawa had composed a report detailing this whole strange train of events, saved it in nine parts, and entitled it Ring. And then that title had extruded from Ryuji’s belly.

How to explain this? There is no way.

Ando was in a state of complete denial. Ryuji’s body was completely empty; he was like a tin man. Am I saying he slipped me a message from his abdominal cavity? That he was trying to tell me of the existence of these files?

Ando recalled the way Ryuji’s face had looked right after the autopsy. His square-jawed face had been smiling. Ando had expected that any minute he’d start laughing at him, stark naked on the table, jowls shaking.

Deep down, Ando could feel Yoshino’s outlandish story starting to take on the feel of reality. Maybe it was all true. Maybe there really was a videotape that killed you seven days after you watched it.

The word processor buzzed ceaselessly as it printed out page after page. Ando tore each page from the printer as it emerged and read through it quickly.

Each page was single-spaced, but still Ando was able to read faster than the printer could spit them out. Wanting a hard copy, he’d decided to print it all out instead of reading it on the screen. Now he found himself getting frustrated by the two or three minutes it took each page to be printed.

He’d ended up borrowing Ueda’s machine and bringing it home with him. A quick check had revealed that the total report was close to a hundred pages, more than he could reasonably print out there in the lab. He had no choice but to stay up late at home.

Now he was at the end of page twenty-one of the manuscript, alternating between reading it and taking bites of the dinner he’d picked up at the convenience store on the way home. What he’d read so far followed faithfully the outline Yoshino had given him the week before. But it differed from what Yoshino had told him after lunch at the cafe in that it contained specific times and places. As a result it was a good deal more persuasive. The reporterly style-no frills-also made it harder to disbelieve.

While investigating the simultaneous deaths by heart attack of four young people in Tokyo and Kanagawa prefecture on the evening of September 5 th, Asakawa had come up with the idea that the culprit was some kind of virus. Scientifically speaking, it was the obvious conclusion. And since autopsies on the four bodies had indeed revealed a virus that closely resembled smallpox, it turned out that Asakawa’s hunch had been right. It had been Asakawa’s guess that since the four had died at the same moment, they must have picked up the same virus together at the same place. He’d figured that the key to the whole case must lie in figuring out where they were exposed to the virus, that is, in determining the route of transmission. Asakawa had succeeded in finding out when and where the four had been together: August 29th, exactly a week before their deaths, at South Hakone Pacific Land, in a rented cabin, Villa Log Cabin No. B-4.

The next page, page twenty-two, started with Kazuyuki Asakawa himself heading toward the cabin in question. He took the bullet train to Atami, then rented a car and took the Atami-Kannami highway to the highland resort. Rain and darkness limited the visibility, and the mountain road was awful. He’d made reservations for cabin B-4 at noon, but it was past eight at night when he finally checked in. So this was where those four kids had spent the night: the thought gave Asakawa a jolt of fear. Exactly a week after they’d stayed in this cabin, they were dead. He knew it was possible that the same spectral hand would touch him, too. But he couldn’t overcome his reporterly curiosity and ended up searching B-4 from top to bottom.

From something the kids had written in a notebook on the property, Asakawa determined that they had watched a videotape that night, so he went to the manager’s office to search for that tape. He’d found an unlabelled, unboxed tape lying on the bottom shelf. Was this what he was looking for? With the manager’s permission, he took the tape back to cabin B-4, and, with no way of knowing what it contained, he inserted it into the VCR in the living room and watched it all the way through.

At first, everything was dark. Asakawa described the opening scene like this:

In the middle of the black screen a pinpoint of light began 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…

Ando looked up from the page. Based on what he was reading, he was able to get a reasonably clear image of what had been on the screen. Reading Asakawa’s description of the opening, an image popped into his head that he felt he’d seen somewhere before. A firefly flitting around on a dark screen, growing gradually larger… then the point of light splays out like the fibers of a paintbrush. It was a short scene, but one that he could remember seeing, and recently at that.