Kojo Suzuki - Spiral

Miyashita retrieved the flashlight he kept in his car and shone it into the space beneath the floorboards. Immediately they found a black protrusion, in more or less the center. The top of the well. A concrete lid lay next to it. Exactly as Ring said.

Ando had no desire to crawl in there and peer into the well, just as he’d had no desire to look into the exhaust shaft where Mai’s corpse had been discovered. He had come close but in the end hadn’t found the courage to look in. A young woman called Sadako had been thrown into the well, to end her life staring at a small circle of sky. Mai had breathed her last at the bottom of a rectangular prism made of concrete. One died in an old well at the edge of a mountainside sanatorium, and the other on the roof of a waterfront office building. One died deep in hushed woods, where branches hemming in from all sides nearly obstructed the view of the sky, and the other by a harbor road where the sea smelled strong, with nothing at all between her and the sky. One died in a barrel-shaped coffin sunk deep in the earth, and the other in a box-shaped coffin that floated high. The peculiar contrasts between the places Sadako and Mai had died only served to highlight their essential similarity.

Suddenly Ando’s heart was racing. He detested the damp air beneath the floorboards, the feel of the ground beneath his hands and knees. The smell of soil filled his nostrils until, without his realizing, he was holding his breath. He felt like he was going to suffocate.

Whereas Ando was ready to bolt from the hole, Miyashita was trying to force his fat body into the space under the floorboards. Ando feared that he meant to go all the way to the well, and said, sternly: “Hey, that’s far enough.”

Miyashita hesitated for a moment in his awkward position. “I guess you have a point,” he ceded. Obeying Ando, he started to back out of the hole. They had indeed gone far enough. What else was there to prove?

The two men crawled out from under the balcony and gulped lungfuls of the outside air. There was no need to speak. It was abundantly clear that every detail in Ring hewed to fact. They’d proved the hypothesis that the mental images created by the report were identical to the way things looked in reality. Everything was just where the text said it would be. By virtue of having read Ring, Ando and Miyashita had already “seen” the place. From the smell of the air to the feel of the dirt beneath their feet, they had experienced everything as Asakawa had.

Yet Miyashita didn’t seem quite satisfied. “As long as we’ve come this far, why don’t we have a look at Jotaro Nagao?”

Jotaro Nagao. The name had almost slipped Ando’s mind, but he could remember the man’s face clearly without ever having met him outside the pages of Ring. He was bald, and his handsome face was of a healthy hue that belied his fifty-seven years. Overall he made a first impression of smoothness, and that was true also of his speech. For some reason Ando even knew how Nagao sounded when he talked.

Twenty years ago, there had been a tuberculosis sanatorium on the ground where Pacific Land now stood. Although Nagao had a private practice in Atami now, he had once worked at the sanatorium. When Sadako Yamamura had come to visit her father, Nagao had raped her and thrown her into the well. Nagao had also been Japan’s last smallpox patient.

In Ring it was written, “In a lane in front of Kinomiya Station was a small, one-story house with a shingle by the door that read Nagao Clinic-Internal Medicine and Pediatrics.” Upon reaching the place, Ryuji, always true to form, had throttled the doctor until he confessed what he’d done a quarter century ago. Miyashita was proposing they visit the clinic and see Nagao’s face for themselves.

But when they got there, the curtain was pulled across the clinic’s entrance. The place didn’t seem to be closed just for the weekend; rather, the door looked like it hadn’t been opened for quite some time. There was dust beneath it, and cobwebs on the eaves. The whole building hinted at extended, perhaps permanent, closure.

Ando and Miyashita gave up on the idea of meeting Nagao, and walked back to the curb where they’d left the car. Just then, they noticed a wheelchair coming down the steep road that descended from Atami National Hospital. A bald old man sat hunched over in the wheelchair, steered by a refined-looking woman of around thirty. From the way the old man’s eyes lolled around looking at nothing in particular, it was clear that he had a psychiatric disorder.

When Ando and Miyashita saw his face they cried out as one and exchanged glances. Although he had aged terribly-twenty years, it seemed, in just three months-the man was instantly recognizable to them as Jotaro Nagao. Ando and Miyashita were able to remember what he had looked like and to compare that image with what they were seeing now.

Miyashita approached the man and spoke to him. “Dr Nagao.”

The old man didn’t respond, but the young woman attendant, who looked like she might have been his daughter, turned toward the voice. Her eyes met Miyashita’s. He bowed slightly, and she bowed back.

“How’s his health?” Miyashita promptly inquired with the air of an old acquaintance.

“Fine, thank you,” she said, and hurried away with a put-upon expression. But the encounter hadn’t been fruitless. Evidently, the interview with Asakawa and Ryuji that had forced the doctor to own up to quarter-century-old crimes had seriously unbalanced him. It was clear that Nagao had almost no consciousness of the outside world.

Father and daughter passed the clinic and entered a narrow road beyond it. Both Ando and Miyashita, as they watched him go, thought the same thing and it didn’t exactly concern Nagao. They were ruminating over the way they’d both instantly recognized the old man in the wheelchair as the one-time clinician. Ring, it seemed, had “recorded” not only scenery but people’s faces with absolute fidelity.

Ando looked at the sign for the Odawara-Atsugi Highway, and then at the face of his friend sitting next to him. Miyashita was showing signs of fatigue, and no wonder. He’d been gripping the steering wheel since morning.

“You can just drop me off at Odawara,” said Ando.

Miyashita frowned and turned his head slightly toward Ando, as if to ask why. “Cut it out, buddy. You know I’d gladly drive you back to your apartment.”

“It’s such a detour. Look, if I get out at Odawara I can take the Odakyu Line straight home.”

Ando was concerned about Miyashita. If he drove all the way in to Yoyogi to drop Ando off, and then back to Tsurumi where he lived, it would add miles to the drive. Miyashita was clearly exhausted, both physically and mentally, and Ando wanted him to just go home and rest.

“Well, since you insist, you shall be dropped off at Odawara!” Miyashita said it like he was indulging the odd whim of a friend, but no doubt he didn’t mind not having to drive into Tokyo and out. He was always that way, hardly ever coming right out with a “Thankyou.” He had trouble expressing gratitude in a straightforward manner.

They’d almost finished threading their way through downtown Odawara to the station when Miyashita muttered, “First thing next week, we’ll get our blood tested.

Ando didn’t need to ask why, since he’d been thinking the same thing. He had the nasty realization that he’d been transformed from an observer into a participant. All copies of the evil video had vanished, and he hadn’t watched it. He was supposed to be safe, but now that he knew the Ring report had described absolutely everything with preternatural accuracy… He felt like a physician treating an AIDS patient who suddenly found himself infected via a previously unknown route of transmission. Of course, nothing at all had been proven; it was still only a possibility. Yet Ando cowered, for he felt now that his body had indeed been invaded by something. He’d been paralyzed for a good part of the day by the fantasy that something just like the ring virus he’d seen under the electron microscope was spreading through his body beneath the skin, coursing through his veins, violating his cells. No doubt Miyashita was tasting the same fear.