Koji Suzuki - The Complete Ring Trilogy - Ring, Spiral, Loop

So, what are you waiting for? he asked himself. Aren’t you afraid? Hey—shouldn’t you be afraid? The angel of death might be coming to get you .

His gaze darted around the room nervously. Asakawa couldn’t fix his eyes on any one point on the wall. He had the feeling that if he did so, his fears would begin to take physical form while he watched.

A chill wind blew in from outside, stronger than before. He closed the window and as he went to draw the curtains he happened to glance at the darkness outside. The roof of B-5 was directly in front of him, and in its shadow the darkness was even deeper. There had been lots of people on the tennis courts and in the restaurant. But here Asakawa was alone. He shut the curtains and looked at his watch. 8:56. He hadn’t even been in this room for thirty minutes. It easily could have been an hour or more, he felt. But just being here wasn’t dangerous in and of itself. He tried to believe that, to calm himself down. After all, how many people must have stayed in B-4 in the six months since these cabins were built? It wasn’t like all of them had died under mysterious circumstances. Only those four, according to his research. Maybe if he dug deeper he’d find more, but at the moment that appeared to be all. Thus, simply being here wasn’t the problem. The problem was what they’d done here.

So, what did they do here?

Asakawa then subtly rephrased the question. What could they have done here?

He’d found nothing resembling a clue—not in the bathroom, not in the bath, not in the closet, not in the fridge. Even assuming there had been something, the manager would have disposed of it when he cleaned the place. Which meant that, instead of sitting here drinking whiskey, he should be talking to the manager. That would be quicker.

He’d drained his first glass; he made his second a little smaller. He couldn’t afford to get drunk. He put a lot of ice in it, and this time he cut it with tap water. His sense of danger must have been numbed a little. He suddenly felt foolish: stealing time from work, coming all the way up here. He took off his glasses, washed his face, then looked at his reflection in the mirror. It was the face of a sick man. Maybe he’d already caught the virus. He gulped down the whiskey-and-water he’d just made and fixed himself another.

Returning from the dining room, Asakawa noticed a notebook on the shelf beneath the telephone stand. The cover said Memories . He leafed through a few pages.

Saturday, April 7

Nonko will never forget this day. Why? That’s a s-e-c-r-e-t. Yuichi is wonderful. Hee-hee! ♥

NONKO

Inns, B&B’s, and the like often had notebooks like this in the rooms, so that guests could write down their memories and impressions. On the next page was a crude drawing of mommy and daddy. Must have been a family trip. It was dated April 14th—also a Saturday, naturally.

Daddys fat, Mommys fat, So Im fat too. Aprul 14nth

Asakawa kept turning pages. He could feel some sort of force urging him to open the pages at the end of the book, but he kept going through them in order. He was afraid that if he messed up the chronology he might miss something.

He couldn’t say for sure, since there were probably a lot of guests who didn’t write anything, but it seemed like there were only people here on Saturdays until summer started. After that the time between each entry shrank. By the end of August there was a steady stream of entries lamenting the end of summer.

Sunday, August 20

Another summer vacation come and gone. And it sucked. Somebody help me! Rescue poor little me! I have a motorbike, 400cc. I’m pretty good-looking.

A bargain!

A.Y.

This guy looked like he’d decided the guest book was a means to advertise himself, maybe find a pen-pal. It looked like a lot of people had the same ideas about the place. When couples stayed here, their entries showed it, while when single people stayed, they wrote about how much they wanted a companion.

Still, it made for interesting reading. Presently his watch showed nine o’clock.

Then he turned the page:

Thursday, August 30

Ulp! Consider yourself warned: you’d better not see it unless you’ve got the guts. You’ll be sorry you did. (Evil laughter.)

S. I.

That was all there was to the message. August 30th was the morning after the four had stayed here. The initials “S.I.” would stand for “Shuichi Iwata”. His entry was different from all the rest. What did it mean? You’d better not see it. What in the world was it ? Asakawa closed the guest book and looked at it from the side. There was a slight gap where it didn’t close tightly. He put his finger there and opened it to that page. Ulp! Consider yourself warned: you’d better not see it unless you’ve got the guts. You’ll be sorry you did. (Evil laughter.) S.I. The words jumped out at him. Why did the book want to open to this exact page? He thought for a moment. Perhaps the four had opened the book here and set something heavy on top of it. The weight had created this force that remained even now, trying to open to this page. And maybe whatever they’d placed on top of the page was the “it” that he’d “better not see”. That must be it.

Asakawa looked around anxiously, searching every corner of the shelf beneath the telephone stand. Nothing. Not even a pencil.

He sat back down on the sofa and continued reading. The next entry was dated Saturday, September 1st. But it said only the usual things. It didn’t say if the group of students who had stayed here had seen it . None of the remaining pages mentioned it, either.

Asakawa closed the guest book and lit a cigarette. You’d better not see it unless you’ve got the guts . He imagined that it must be something frightening. He opened the notebook at random and pressed down on the page lightly. Whatever it was must have been heavy enough to overcome the pages’ tendency to close. One or two photos of ghosts, for example, wouldn’t have done the trick. Maybe a weekly, or a hardcover book … Anyway, something you look at. Maybe he’d ask the manager if he remembered finding anything strange left in the cabin after the guests had checked out on August 30th. He wasn’t sure if the manager would even remember, but he figured that if it had been strange enough he would. Asakawa began to get to his feet when the VCR in front of him caught his eye. The TV was still on, showing a famous actress chasing her husband around with a vacuum. A home appliance commercial.

… Yeah, a VHS tape would be heavy enough to keep the notebook open, and they might have had one handy, too.

Still in a crouch, Asakawa ground out his cigarette. He recalled the video collection he had seen in the manager’s office. Maybe they’d happened to watch a particularly interesting horror flick, and thought they’d recommend it to the next guests— hey, this one’s cool, check it out . If that’s all it was … But wait. If that was it, why hadn’t Shuichi Iwata used the name? If he wanted to tell somebody that, say, Friday the 13th was a great movie, wouldn’t it have been easier just to say Friday the 13th was a great movie? He didn’t need to go to all the trouble of actually leaving it on top of the notebook. So maybe it was something that didn’t have a name, something they could only indicate with the word it .

… Well? Worth checking out?

Well, he certainly didn’t have anything to lose, not with no other clues presenting themselves. Besides, sitting around here thinking wasn’t getting him anywhere. Asakawa left the cabin, climbed the stone steps and pushed open the office door.