Koji Suzuki - Edge

She forced herself to think clearly. Seiji had no right to follow her into this other world. Was there a way to get through the wormhole without him? She was conscious of time passing but forced herself to slow down; she wouldn’t be able to think properly if she gave herself to panic. She had to examine all the available information and find the thread that would lead her out of this safely.

Somewhere, there was a link between her father’s disappearance in 1994 and that of the Fujimura family. There was some causal relationship. What was it? Then Saeko realized: there had always been someone in the background pulling strings. That someone was Seiji Fujimura.

The carving of the bird-like creature leering out from behind Viracocha had caught her father’s attention back at the Tiwanaku site in Bolivia. Haruko had seen it and pointed out its resemblance to Seiji. She must have said something else. Her father wouldn’t have come all the way to Takato because of a chance resemblance, no matter how much the image looked like Seiji. No, there had to have been something else. Greek and Roman carvings were known to be realistic, but ancient carvings tended towards the abstract. Her father had discovered something else that compelled him to cancel his trip to Takamatsu and head directly for Takato on coming back to Japan. What could have had that effect on him?

The relief was just the beginning, then, the initial clue. Haruko would have looked at it and seen a resemblance to her brother-in-law, Seiji. But she had told her father something else about Seiji … Was it something about his background, his personality, something physical? Maybe Haruko had said that their faces looked similar down to the bumps on his forehead. Bumps on the forehead — horns. The symbol of the Devil.

But that wasn’t it. Saeko was looking directly at Seiji, and there were no traces of anything like horns on his forehead. It was smooth all the way up towards his receding hairline. So it wasn’t the horns. Saeko struggled to think; she was sure that it must have been some physical characteristic that had made Haruko broach the subject in the first place. It would have been something that stood out, something obvious. Her father had no time for vague ideas.

Saeko thought of her father. Was there anything about him that stood out, anything unique? Then she remembered:

He had a third nipple .

She had completely forgotten about it. When she was a kid, her father would bathe with her, and one day he had taken her hand and guided it to a bump on his chest.

“Sae, do you know what this is?”

The bump, she remembered, had felt like a wart, slightly rubbery under her small finger.

“A mole? Or is it a wart?”

Her father laughed, then began to explain:

“It’s called an accessory mamma. It’s proof that we are descended from mammals. Dogs, cows, and horses have lots of them, right?”

After getting out of the bath that night, Saeko had gone straight to look up the term in an illustrated encyclopedia entitled The History of Atavism . She had learned that many mammalian fetuses have four sets of breasts and that, for human ones, the rudimentary structures for five sets of mammary glands could be observed.

True to the dictum that phenotype repeated genotype, in its development the human fetus charted the course of evolution from aquatic life to reptilian life to mammalian life before being born as a baby. Sometimes during this process remnants of that evolution remained, and the accessory mamma was one such mark.

The accessory nipple was a remnant of earlier mammalian stages; on humans they were found somewhere along the line down from either armpit to the groin. Saeko read that up to 1.5 percent of Japanese males had this physical trait, so it wasn’t that rare in itself. Her father’s case, however, was considerably more so because he had only one extra nipple, below his right armpit. Usually they appeared in pairs, one on either side.

That night in the bath together was the only time they had discussed her father’s third nipple. Now, remembering the fact for the first time in years, she thought again of the lump on her breast, discovered only a month ago. She had never thought to link the two together.

Maybe the lump is an accessory mamma, like my father’s, just appearing on one side?

Saeko wanted to put her hand to the lump and check the location, but she didn’t want to stimulate Seiji’s perversion in any way whatsoever.

What if that was the link? What if Seiji had the same mark, just on one side? What would that have meant?

As soon as the hypothesis formed in her head, her mind recalled some words and linked the two together. The answer came first, and her thinking struggled to catch up, lurching.

At the hospital in Ina, someone had been there with her, run fingers over her left breast, and said something.

Keep this up, and you’ll be one of us soon enough .

And what had he just said?

Want me to poke at that lump in your breast?

The connection had been made in a mere dozen seconds, but Saeko was positive. Her thoughts were clear now, and the logic held.

If Seiji had a third nipple, like her father, could that be what Haruko had pointed out at Tiwanaku? No, it wouldn’t have been in Bolivia. It would have been after they got back to Japan, at the hotel they stayed in Narita. It was clear from her father’s notebook that he had still planned to go to Takamatsu, and he had said so over the phone to her. Haruko hadn’t told him until after that call. But when he learned that Seiji had a third nipple, he concluded that it was something that required urgent attention and changed his plans at the last moment to make for the Fujimuras’ in Takato. He had discovered something that he simply could not ignore. So far, the logic seemed to fit. But something jarred, something wasn’t right. Saeko tried to work out what it was that was bugging her about the idea, but it wouldn’t come to her.

She changed her line of thought.

Her mind drifted back to her apartment, the night with Hashiba. Just as they had been about to make love, his hand had drifted towards her breasts, then stopped dead. She remembered feeling the pressure of his fingers against the lump. Then she remembered the feeling when Seiji had felt the same place. Something didn’t fit.

As though he could read her thoughts, Seiji’s mouth curled up in an unsightly smile. He rubbed the front of his hands along his lips.

“That reminds me, babe, I never did tell you what I thought of that article you wrote.” Seiji rolled his eyes upwards and began to pick at his nose hair.

Saeko wondered if she should perhaps admire his ability to be so naturally, effortlessly repugnant. She sat up straight, her will galvanized for the fight. Somehow his very existence offended her. “I’d love to hear, especially from someone so obviously related to it.”

“Related to it?” he snorted. “Ha, you didn’t write a single word about me. I might as well not have existed.”

Seiji was exactly right. Saeko’s opinion of him had been so poor that Hashiba had actually burst out laughing when she had first mentioned him.

“At least I didn’t try to pin the thing on you though, right?” she goaded. Just treating him as suspicious would have posed a libel risk since the article flagged a potential crime. She had wanted nothing to do with him, and it had been an easy decision to avoid bringing him up.

“Tell me honestly, do you think I’m harmless?”

Saeko wondered which answer he was fishing for. Did he want her to think of him as harmless, or the opposite? From his tone, she had to conclude that he wanted to think of himself as the latter. In that case, he’d be disappointed that she hadn’t given him the attention he thought he deserved. She had immediately sensed that he was dangerous, there was no question of that, but she hadn’t found anything to legitimately back up her suspicions. The only reasons she had managed to come up with were purely subjective. He had given her the creeps, but was that enough to label him as dangerous? She decided to proceed carefully. She got the feeling that the entire direction of events to come hinged on this one answer.