EDGE (23 page)

The young teacher and the teenagers had stood at the same spot and
painted the same view in nearly the exact same manner.

They had made use of a stationary windsurfer to emphasize the stillness of the lake, using light and shadow to evoke the strong autumn light. Perhaps all four of them had painted the same subject matter for educational purposes. The teacher might have chosen to have all of the girls undertake the same subject matter so that she could better critique the nuanced differences of each student’s approach.

Not unexpectedly, the teacher’s painting was executed with a finesse of a different caliber, in a style that went beyond photorealism. The branches that framed the lake were arranged almost symmetrically, and the windsurfer loomed larger-than-life in the center of the painting. The air between the leaves of the trees seemed absolutely still.

And yet, there was also a strange tension, as if at any moment something held captive within the canvas might suddenly burst forth. In the foreground, the shore of the lake seemed distorted and lacking a normal sense of perspective. It was unclear what its unnatural undulations were meant to convey. The lake was still and glassy, but pregnant with suspense, as if some unknowable being might at any moment rise up from its depths and shatter its surface.

Seen from a slight distance, the landscape suggested the features of a face. The tree branches hanging down from above suggested eyes, the surfboard a nose, the shoreline a mouth. The face’s expression was serene for the moment but imbued with an ominous air as if rage lurked just beneath the surface. There was only a paper-thin line between the opposing forces of stillness and movement, inspiring a feeling of apprehension in the viewer.

The three students’ paintings seemed to take their cue from the teacher’s. Perhaps the girls had unconsciously imitated the teacher’s style. They had done their best to render the landscape faithfully, resulting in an awkward style that was neither photorealistic nor abstract. Only Christine’s painting had a unique feature that set it apart from the others: she had blacked out the face of the surfer in the lake’s foreground.

The windsurfer had gotten too close to shore and was now having a hard time getting back out into the open water. Apparently he was new to the sport and not yet competent at it. His sail hung shapeless, fluttering uselessly, and he seemed stumped as to what to do next. The art teacher had done a remarkable job of portraying his hapless stance and expression as he waited for the wind to pick up.

By contrast, Christine had painted the young windsurfer’s face as
black as his wetsuit. At first glance it seemed as though perhaps she had intended to silhouette his form against the afternoon sun, but that wasn’t it. She had rendered the surfer smaller than her teacher had, cramming him into the left-hand corner of the canvas. Despite his small stature, he seemed as heavy as metal, like he might sink straight to the bottom of the lake were he to fall in. Completely devoid of any hint of an inner life, he seemed more like a robot than a human being.

The teacher’s painting, and Christine’s painting … Both were imbued with a disturbing quality. The teacher had drawn inspiration from the menacing air of the lake’s surface and had chosen to distort the shoreline with surreal undulations, while Christine had rendered the surfer like a dead man.

That afternoon, a surfboard was found washed up to the bank at another area of the lake. Still half in the water, the outhaul line connected to the boom was tangled in the thick brush at the water’s edge. The surfer was nowhere to be seen, but it didn’t take the police long to identify him as a U.C. Berkeley student. The missing boy had shared an apartment with a fellow student, and the roommate reported that the surfer had never returned home the night before. The roommate hadn’t thought much of it at the time since the other boy had frequently stayed out all night without checking in with anyone.

Counting the windsurfer, a total of five people had disappeared. No trace had been found of any of them to this day.

As Kitazawa ended his account, he paused for a moment before adding, “There appears to be a connection between these disappearances in the U.S. and the ones in Japan. Or is it just coincidence? All of these mysterious, unnatural disappearances have taken place directly over a fault line.”

Kitazawa stopped there, waiting for the others to respond as he slowly took a seat on the sofa.

The computer monitor still showed the map of the suburbs of San Francisco, but nobody was looking at it anymore. It was clear that Kitazawa’s story wasn’t a lie or an exaggeration. He had simply presented the facts, pure and simple. But all three of them were at a loss for words. They had no idea how a geological phenomenon like a fault line could play a part in human disappearances.

Before starting grade school, Saeko had spent most of her summers with her paternal grandparents. Built in a traditional Japanese style,
their home stood on a large lot, lush with greenery, behind the Atami Kinomiya train station. The garden exuded a heady scent of earth and the wind often brought in gusts of salty sea air, muffling the mountain’s own scent. On the other side of the hedge that enclosed their property, there ran a small brook called Ito Creek whose soft susurrations seemed to cool the air. Whenever Saeko’s father could get time away from his job, he had enjoyed taking Saeko fishing there.

It had been Saeko’s job to find the bait. When she turned over large rocks in the garden to expose the damp earth underneath, the pungent smell of earthworms and mud wafted forth.

Whenever she found a sizeable earthworm, she pinned it down with the toe of her shoe and the edge of a rock to sever it in two. She plopped half of the worm into her bait box and left the other half under the rock.

Even if you cut an earthworm in half, it’ll grow back if you give it enough time
.

Saeko’s father had taught her about the regenerative abilities of earthworms. Loath to diminish the precious supply of worms, she made it a practice to always only harvest half of each worm.

When she was finished collecting bait, Saeko’s father would emerge from the house.

“Sae, let’s go!” he would call, affectionately shortening her name. Then he would thump her on the shoulder and start down the path towards the creek. On the way, he made no effort to match his stride to his daughter’s, and she had to scamper to keep up. She kept her gaze locked on her father as she scrambled after him, always lagging behind by a few paces, determined not to be left behind.

As she ducked through the trees, her package of severed earthworms under one arm, sometimes Saeko lost sight of her father for a moment. “Papa!” she would shriek, oddly panicked, even if he’d only disappeared for a second. Her father, for his part, seemed amused by his daughter’s exaggerated reaction and enjoyed making it into a game of hide-and-seek.

The intense heat of summer, the rustle of foliage, the hum of mosquitoes. Perhaps on some level, Saeko already had a premonition then of what was to come. The summer when she was seventeen years old, she would lose her beloved father. Somehow, that fear already loomed large.

With a start, Saeko snapped out of her reverie. What had triggered her memory of the earthworms? At first, she couldn’t draw any connection. Then she realized that the image of a rift in the earth had spawned the
idea of a long, thin creature of some sort lurking within. In the back of her mind, a serpentine form slithered along active fault lines. Its tongue darted in and out of its mouth as if to tickle the walls of her brain …

If Saeko were still a child, surely she would have imagined that the missing people had been spirited away deep into the earth by some sort of monster.

Without realizing it, Saeko had drawn both of her feet up away from the floor. She knew there was no fault line under Tokyo, and yet she could almost feel the presence of a long, thin, reptilian creature drawing silently closer and closer.

A deep abyss, a world beyond the reach of the sun’s rays …

The sun. Right
. Saeko’s thoughts of darkness reminded her of the corresponding opposite concept. Just two days ago, browsing the newspaper archives at the library, she had learned that there had been unusual sunspot activity the day her father had disappeared.

Saeko leapt towards the computer. “May I?” she asked Kitazawa.

“Please, be my guest.”

Saeko opened the browser and ran a search on “sunspots,” pulling up calendars that went back to March 2011. When she clicked on a date, a picture of sunspot activity for the date in question came up on the screen.

Saeko tried to rein in her anticipation as she clicked on September 13, 2011, the date three people had vanished from Itoigawa. Then she tried September 25th, the date the passengers of two cars had vanished near Soda Lake in the U.S. And October 22nd, the day five people had vanished at Lake Merced near San Francisco.

On most days, only a few specks the size of sesame seeds marred the images of the sun. But on the three dates of the mysterious disappearances, there was a clear difference. Ugly black amoeba-like blobs writhed across the sun’s surface almost like living organisms.

Peering into the monitor over Saeko’s shoulder, Kitazawa and Hashiba still didn’t comprehend what Saeko had discovered.

“What is it?”

When both Hashiba and Kitazawa thumped Saeko’s shoulders at the same time, she finally turned away from the screen.

“On all three dates of these missing persons cases, unusual sunspot activity was recorded.”

Saeko manipulated the pointer once again to illustrate the incredible correlation between the incidences of human disappearances and sunspot activity.

Under any normal circumstances, she would have expected her colleagues to instantly reject the notion of a connection between human disappearances and sunspots. But just moments ago, Hashiba and Kitazawa had come to the realization that a string of such cases was occurring directly over active fault lines.

“Active fault lines and sunspots. What do the two phenomena have in common?” Hashiba asked.

Saeko swiveled her chair to face the other two. “The magnetic fields that cause sunspots break through the surface and assault the Earth in the form of magnetic storms. It’s also possible that active fault lines have a powerful influence on the magnetic fields in the spaces above them. Magnetic fields—they’re the connection between the two.”

Saeko chewed her lower lip as Hashiba and Kitazawa sat motionlessly mulling this over, their lips pressed together tightly. Nobody argued with her contention—in their silence, they were tacitly acknowledging the connection. The unusual geophysical conditions of the locations and the timing of the disappearances suggested a causal relationship. It had to be more than just coincidence.

1
As Saeko and Hashiba walked towards the subway station after leaving Kitazawa’s office, it seemed only natural that they should have dinner together.

“There’s an Italian place in this neighborhood that has a unique flair. What do you say?” Hashiba suggested.

“Sure. Anything goes,” Saeko replied, her response an approval of the proposed cuisine rather than of the invitation itself.

Hashiba led the way, and they arrived at the seven-story building in only a few minutes. The restaurant was on the top floor. It was the first time Saeko had been here, and yet she had an odd sense of déjà vu. For a moment, she stopped in her tracks and pondered why that was. Whenever she noticed a strange glitch in her perceptions, Saeko had the habit of analyzing the possible causes.

The building was on a one-way street, with a tree planted in front of its vestibule. Something about the tree seemed to be causing the strange sensation. Four low posts were staked around its roots and the ground was littered with its leaves, whose prominent veins reminded Saeko of blood vessels. Pebbles were scattered on top of the carpet of leaves. As she marveled at how small the tree looked under the starry sky, Saeko had the sudden sensation of being watched from above. She looked up. Against the glare of the neon signs on the surrounding buildings, the starry sky seemed lacking in luminosity. Hadn’t they been a bit brighter just moments ago?

In the thickest part of the tree’s canopy, right in the middle, a black shadow loomed, as if a cat had climbed the tree and gotten stuck up there. It was only natural that the night sky and trees would create dark shadows, but the blackness at the center of the tree was a shade deeper and undulated slightly in the treetop, almost like a writhing worm.

Saeko squinted, trying to get a better look, but suddenly her eyes refused to focus as if she’d lost a contact lens. She glanced down and then back up again, and as she did, she shuddered as a feeling of foreboding washed over her. Part of it was the chilly December evening air, but she
had also detected a disagreeable stench. It was a smell she was sure she recognized but couldn’t quite place. Her senses seemed to be blocking out the memory.

“What’s wrong?”

When Hashiba’s hand found the small of her back, Saeko quickly pulled her attention back to the present moment. His touch seemed almost to dispel her fears, and Saeko remembered her growling stomach.

“I’m starving,” she replied. They had arrived at Kitazawa’s office at seven o’clock, and in the subsequent two hours had consumed nothing but coffee. “Shall we?” Saeko strode quickly through the vestibule, keeping her gaze straight ahead.

At the table, Saeko and Hashiba sipped glasses of red wine as they waited for their food and reassessed the discoveries they had made at Kitazawa’s office. Still flushed with excitement, Hashiba enthused about having to drop the approach they had taken for the previous installment. He seemed to be reacting to the latest developments not with fear or disappointment but with pure delight, relishing the possibilities they implied for the project. Seldom did the opportunity arise to expose a freakish natural phenomenon in his line of work.

“This is really getting good. The tricky part will be when and how to let Shigeko Torii down gently.”