Kojo Suzuki - Spiral

“Where are we going?” “It’s obvious, isn’t it? Your place.” “I told you already. Sadako’s there.” “That’s why we’re going. We’re going to confront her.”

“Now, just hold on a minute,” Ando recoiled. He’d come here to get away from Sadako. It was going to take a lot to get him to go back.

“We don’t have time to fart around like this. Don’t you understand how deep we’re into this?”

Ando did understand. It was obvious that something had to happen to him because he’d read Ring. But he didn’t care anymore. He wasn’t afraid of death, not particularly. He’d been quite afraid of death while his son was alive and his wife had loved him, but not now.

Miyashita hooked a hand under Ando’s arm and tried to wrestle him to his feet. “Get a move on. This might be our last chance.”

“Chance?”

“Listen, Sadako came to you and entered your apartment of her own free will.”

“Well, yes.”

“She must have had a reason.”

“What reason?”

“How the hell should I know? Maybe she wants you to do something for her.”

Now Ando remembered. She’d said something along those lines the second time he met her.

I’ll call on you soon with a request.

As Miyashita dragged him out of the study, Ando was thinking that he had no idea what kind of request she might have for him, and that he didn’t really care to find out.

They parked the car on a street that went by Yoyogi Park. As they climbed out onto the sidewalk, Ando and Miyashita looked up at the apartment building. Ando’s windows were dark. It had been well over three hours since he’d burst out of there, chest heaving. It was now nearly one in the morning.

Miyashita lowered his voice and asked, “Hey, are you sure the bitch is in there?” His use of the word “bitch” sounded forced. Ando figured Miyashita was trying to steel himself against the upcoming encounter.

“Maybe she’s asleep.”

The room seemed quiet, but there was no way to tell from the outside if she was still in there.

“Hey, do the living dead need to sleep?” Miyashita was sarcastically driving at the strangeness of Sadako awakening from a long slumber just to doze off in a place like this.

The two men stood on the empty sidewalk staring up at the fourth-floor windows for a while. Then Miyashita, with a show of fighting spirit, said, “Let’s go,” and barged on ahead. Ando followed meekly behind. The silence and cold of the night pierced him to the marrow, and he didn’t think he could bear standing on the sidewalk much longer. Perhaps, if it had been warmer, he would have been even less willing to go back into his apartment.

Urged on by Miyashita, Ando braced himself and turned the doorknob. It hadn’t been locked from the inside. The door opened easily. The place seemed to be empty. The pumps were gone from the concrete floor of the vestibule, as was Sadako’s only possession, a small Boston bag. Ando remembered seeing it sitting unceremoniously in the vestibule when he fled.

Ando led the way into the apartment and flipped on the lights. The place was indeed empty.

The thread of his tension severed, Ando collapsed limply onto his bed. Miyashita, though, kept his senses sharp, peering into the bathroom and out at the balcony.

Finally, having searched the place meticulously, he was convinced. “I think she’s gone.”

“I wonder where she went,” Ando mumbled. But in reality, he couldn’t care less where she’d gone. He never wanted to have anything to do with her again.

“Any ideas?” asked Miyashita.

Ando immediately shook his head. “Nope,” he said. It was then that he noticed it. On the desk by the window, a notebook had been left open. Ando couldn’t remember using a notebook there for some time.

He got to his feet and picked it up. Several pages had been filled with sloppy writing. The first line said. Dear Mr Ando, and at the end it was signed Sadako Yamamura. She’d left him a note.

Ando read the opening sentence silently to himself, and then handed the notebook to Miyashita.

“What’s this?”

“A message from Sadako.”

Miyashita let out a gasp as he took the notebook from Ando. Though he hadn’t been asked to, he read it aloud.

Dear Mr Ando,

As I do not wish to startle you any further, I have decided to leave you a letter. It’s rather an old-fashioned thing to do, I know. Please try to remain calm as you read it.

Surely you’ve figured out by now where I came from. I borrowed the womb of a woman named Mai Takano in order to effect my rebirth into this world. I am perplexed myself as to the exact mechanism by which I was able to come back to life.

My father was an assistant professor of medicine at a university, and he often used to speak to me about heredity when I visited him at the South Hakone Sanatorium where he was a patient. As a result, I know a little about genetics. It may be just a hunch, but I wonder if perhaps, using my psychic powers, I was able to imprint my genetic information onto something. Thinking about it now, I am quite sure that on the verge of death I willed my genetic information to remain intact in some form or other. What I felt was not so much a desire to be reborn as an unbearable revulsion at the thought that Sadako Yamamura and everything she represented would rot away at the bottom of that well, unbeknownst to anyone. What happened to me as a result is something that no doubt you, as a specialist, are better qualified to explain than I.

My psyche, that which had died in that well, gradually took shape again within that woman. When I regained self-awareness, what I saw in the mirror was not my own face. At first, 1 did not understand what had happened. My face and my body were not my own; they belonged to another woman. But the “me” that was thinking that was indeed the true me. The city, too, looked unfamiliar. The cars lining the streets were so modern. The apartment (that tiny concrete box), the appliances, the electronics. When I looked at the calendar I found that twenty-five years had passed in the blink of an eye. I realized that somehow my spirit must have escaped my corpse and then taken up a new body twenty-five years later. The poor girl whose body I stole was Mai Takano.

My consciousness was not born when Mai gave birth to me. A seed named Sadako was already putting forth buds in the depths of Mai’s womb. As 1 grew, it grew, taking up residence within Mai, the master of that body. By the time I was ready to be born I ruled Mai completely from my place in her womb.

I was able to see things from two perspectives, mother and fetus, and touch and feel accordingly. With my little hands I was able to touch the soft folds of my own oviducts, feel them undulating like waves.

As my birth approached, one thing began to bother me. After I was born, what would become of the Mai-body? Would Mai’s soul return, would that body go back to wholeness as Mai Takano? Somehow I thought not. I had come to think of that borrowed body as my chrysalis. Just as the chrysalis cannot live by itself after the butterfly has grown, the body had to be discarded, having outlived its usefulness. It might have been a self-serving conclusion, but I felt that Mai had already died when her body had been usurped.

The question then became, where should I be born? If she bore me in her room, I would be faced with the need to dispose of her decomposing corpse. Judging from how rapidly my fetus had developed, I thought it would not be long before I reached maturity, and I would need a place to live. Mai’s apartment seemed the most sensible choice.

This meant that I had no other choice but to be born somewhere out of sight of the neighbors, someplace where I could leave behind the husk and return to the apartment alone. That rooftop was made to order. If I left the husk in the exhaust shaft, it would be some time before it was discovered, and in the meantime I could use Mai’s apartment freely.