Kojo Suzuki - Spiral

It didn’t take long for the memory to come to him. It was when he’d gone to Mai’s apartment to try and track her down. He’d found a videotape still in her VCR, and he’d pressed the play button. The one with Frank Sinatra, Liza Minnelli, etc., written on the label in a man’s hand. The first few seconds of that tape had fit this description perfectly.

But on the tape in Mai’s apartment, this scene had only lasted a few seconds, before the screen suddenly became a lot brighter. In what had evidently been an attempt to erase whatever was on the tape, Mai had recorded morning variety shows, samurai melodrama reruns, whatever, until the tape ran out. Ando immediately figured out what this meant. Somehow, probably through Ryuji, Mai had acquired the problem tape and watched it in her apartment. Then, when she’d finished, she’d eradicated it, whatever it was, from the tape. She must have had her reasons. But she hadn’t been able to erase the very beginning of the tape, so those first few seconds had remained there, lurking. Did it mean that the tape Asakawa had found in Villa Log Cabin had somehow made its way into Mai’s hands?

Ando tried to organize his thoughts. No, that can’t be it. The tape Asakawa found and the tape Mai had were clearly two different things. According to the report, the one in the cabin was unlabelled. But the one in Mai’s VCR had a title written on it in black marker. Which meant it must have been a copy.

The one in the cabin was the original, and the one in Mai’s place a copy. So that tape had been copied, erased, disguised, transported-a dizzying series of changes. In Ando’s mind, the tape, occupying a point between the animate and the inanimate, began to resemble a virus.

So, was Mai’s disappearance a result of her having watched that tape? The possibility worried him. She hadn’t been back to her room since then. She hadn’t been showing up at school, and she hadn’t even called her mother. On the other hand, he hadn’t heard anything about a young woman found dead from unexplained causes.

Ando let his mind wander for a while, considering all the things that could have befallen her. Maybe she’d died alone someplace unbeknownst to anybody. The thought pained him-she was only twenty-two. The fact that he could feel the first twinges of a crush on her only made it harder to bear.

The printer finally came to the end of another page, with a noise that snapped Ando out of his reverie. In any case, now was no time to be borrowing trouble. At the moment, he’d be better off finding out what was on that tape first.

The next few pages contained a thorough description of the contents of the videotape. As he read, Ando could see a TV screen in his mind, filled with shifting images.

Something red and viscous spurted across the screen. This was followed by a view of a mountain that he could tell at a glance was an active volcano. Lava flowed from its mouth; the earth rumbled. The eruption lit up the night sky. Then this scene was suddenly cut off, replaced by a white background, in front of which the character for “mountain”, written in black, faded in and out of view. Then a scene of two dice bouncing around on the bottom of a bowl.

Finally a human figure appeared onscreen. A wrinkled old woman sat on a tatami mat. She was facing the camera and saying something. She spoke in a nearly incomprehensible dialect, but he could tell, more or less from the sound of her words, that she was predicting somebody’s future, warning him or her.

Next, a newborn baby, wailing. There was no discernible link between scenes. One followed another with all the abruptness and randomness of someone flipping over cards.

The infant disappeared, replaced by hundreds of faces, filling the screen and multiplying as if by cellular division, all against the background of a multitude of voices intoning accusations: Liar! Fraud! Then an old television set, displaying the character sada.

Then a man’s face appeared. He was gasping for breath and dripping with sweat. Behind him could be seen a lush thicket of trees. His eyes were red and full of bloodlust; his mouth was contorted with screams and drool. His bare shoulder was deeply gouged, and blood flowed from the wound. Then came again, from nowhere in particular, the cry of a baby. In the center of the screen was a full moon, from which fell fist-sized stones, landing with dull thuds.

Finally, more words appeared on the screen.

Those who have viewed these images are fated to die at this exact hour one week from now. If you do not wish to die, you must follow these instructions exactly…

And then the scene changed entirely. Instead of the prescribed method for avoiding certain death, the screen now showed a common television commercial for mosquito coils. The ad ended and the previous eerieness returned, or rather, the memory of it.

At the end of this series of bizarre visions, Asakawa had managed to understand exactly two things. First, whoever watched this tape was doomed to die in exactly a week. And, second, there was a way to avoid this fate, but it had been deliberately recorded over. The four kids who’d watched the video first had erased it in a fit of malice or mischief. It was all Asakawa could do to slip the tape into his bag and flee cabin B-4.

Ando took a deep breath and lay the manuscript aside.

Holy shit.

In his report Asakawa had given a painstakingly elaborate account of the strange twenty minutes of images on the tape. He’d made every effort to recreate, using only words, what the video conveyed directly through sound and visuals, and he’d largely succeeded. The scenes still swirled around in Ando’s mind, as vividly as if he’d seen and heard them himself. He sighed again, suddenly exhausted. Or maybe it wasn’t fatigue. Perhaps it was that he now felt Asakawa’s fear as his own, and wanted somehow to push it away.

But even a moment’s pause only whetted his desire to know more. Taking a sip of tea, he picked up the next page of the report, and started reading ahead, even faster than before.

The first thing Asakawa did upon returning to Tokyo was to call Ryuji Takayama and tell him what had happened. Asakawa had neither the time nor the courage to solve this thing alone. He needed a reliable partner, and so naturally his thoughts turned to Ryuji, whom he’d known since high school. He also approached Yoshino, but Yoshino refused to watch the video. Regardless of whether or not he actually believed in it, if there was even a slim chance that calamity would befall him as a result of watching the video, he wanted to avoid doing so.

But not Ryuji. As soon as he heard about this video that’d kill in a week’s time anyone who watched it, the first words out of his mouth were, First let’s have a look at this video.

So Ryuji watched the video in Asakawa’s apartment, fascinated. And when it was over he asked Asakawa to make him a copy.

The word “copy” made Ando sit up and take notice. Now he thought he could figure out the route the tape had traveled. The original tape from Villa Log Cabin had most likely stayed in Asakawa’s possession. It had been in the VCR in Asakawa’s car at the time of the wreck, had passed to Asakawa’s brother Junichiro, and been thrown away. There was one more tape, the one in Mai’s apartment, the one with only the very beginning remaining. This was probably the copy Asakawa had made for Ryuji that first night. It had a title on the label, written in thick letters in a man’s hand. It was probably Asakawa’s handwriting. When Ryuji had asked Asakawa to make him a copy, instead of using a brand-new tape, Asakawa had recycled an old tape on which he’d originally recorded a music program. This had passed through Ryuji’s hands into Mai’s. That much made sense. But when had Mai received it? Mai had never mentioned having the tape to Ando. Which meant, Ando supposed, that she’d come across it by chance, several days after Ryuji’s death, and watched it not knowing it was dangerous.