EDGE (24 page)

Hashiba was conspiring to shift the focus of the program away from the occult angle toward a purely scientific perspective. But given that the original project had been approved based on the producer’s interest in featuring the psychic reader Shigeko Torii, it would be something of a tricky undertaking. It was probably best to stay the course for the time being and wait for the right opportunity to change tack. In all honesty, Hashiba would have preferred nothing more than if Shigeko Torii were to step down from the project of her own volition.

The reason Hashiba was so caught up in his plans for the program and didn’t feel the slightest twinge of fear was that he perceived no threat to his person from the discoveries they had made.

During a brief lull in their animated conversation, Saeko glanced around the restaurant and was struck by the festive air of the rest of the clientele, an atmosphere unique to the Christmas season.
Something horrific is afoot right now, right under our feet, and nobody knows about it but us
, she mused, not without an inkling of superiority. The fact that they now shared a secret made her feel closer to Hashiba, too. The evening was passing by all too quickly, and she didn’t look forward to going home.
Would Hashiba say goodnight after their meal, or would he invite her to stop in at a bar for drinks? If he did, Saeko knew she would say yes.

Hashiba seemed to have a strong tolerance for alcohol. Even after finishing a bottle of wine between them, he remained completely unaffected. As they stepped into the elevator his movements were perfectly in control as he helped Saeko with her coat, even though he had drunk about three times as much as she had.

The elevator descended slowly from the seventh floor down to the first and the door slid open. From the elevator to the entrance there was a hallway that was more than ten meters long that fed out into the walkway beyond. The corridor was dimly lit, and the tree planted outside the entrance stood out in vivid contrast. Between the garish lighting of the bar on the building’s first floor and the headlights of passing cars, a halo streamed through the spaces between the tree’s leaves.

The vestibule hallway was empty, but small clusters of people passed by on the sidewalk outside, framed by the square opening of the entrance.

It happened just as Saeko and Hashiba began to walk towards the doors. A dark shadow shot vertically through their line of vision, shaking the tree’s branches and thudding to the ground with a heavy shock. The entrance doors were open, and a gust of air seemed to reach them an instant after the impact.

Startled, Saeko and Hashiba recoiled and froze in their tracks. At first, they weren’t sure what had just happened. It wasn’t an earthquake, nor was it a traffic accident. But the image replayed in Saeko’s mind as if etched into her retinas. The dull thud, and the black shape that cut across the square entrance from top to bottom. The unnatural susurrations of the tree’s branches.

Did some person fall to the ground?

There was no other possible explanation. Saeko and Hashiba both reached the same conclusion. “Did someone just fall out of the sky?” Hashiba asked Saeko, unsure of whether to believe his eyes.

“That’s what it looked like …” Saeko swallowed, letting the thought trail off incomplete. Outside on the sidewalk, several people had begun to scream. They too, it seemed, had taken a moment to process what had happened. Soon, a small crowd had gathered in front of the tree. Cries of “Call an ambulance!” rang through the air.

“Come on,” Hashiba urged, and at his prompting, Saeko began to walk forwards. But just as she did, the sight of another figure falling through the
air rooted her to the spot. It was a man, small and thin, wearing a tracksuit. His hair was cropped short and was mostly gray. Even though she was too far away to see his face, somehow Saeko sensed that he was smirking slightly at her. She recognized that wrinkled face—it belonged to Seiji Fujimura.

Saeko found herself drained of the strength to continue walking. She grasped Hashiba’s arm.

“What’s wrong?” Hashiba turned to ask.

Saeko’s face was ashen. “Did you see that?”

“See what?”

“You mean you …”

He hadn’t seen it
. The realization sank in as Saeko registered Hashiba’s nonplussed expression. Her arm still looped through Hashiba’s, Saeko pressed both hands to her chest and stood quaking. The night air seemed to have grown suddenly chillier.

Just seconds ago, she had seen it as clear as day—whether it had been a ghost or a living soul, she didn’t know. But a man with a face identical to Seiji Fujimura’s had wafted slowly down to the ground as if to retrace the path of the body that had fallen a moment earlier. Or had it been the opposite? Perhaps the apparition had emerged from the body and floated up into the sky?

Had it fallen down to the ground, or risen up into the air? The vision had been so strange that Saeko wasn’t sure. Clearly, the figure she had seen had lacked the ordinary mass of a physical body.

In any case, Saeko felt an urgent need to get away. First, however, they would have to exit the building.

“Let’s go.” Saeko’s voice trembled as she grasped Hashiba’s hand and pulled him along.

Once outside, she turned immediately to the right, staring straight ahead as she tried to get away from the building. Even so, she glimpsed the feet of the fallen man through a gap in the flock of rubberneckers. The legs of the man’s tracksuit left his ankles exposed, and his bare feet were strangely white. He seemed to be lying face down, and his pale legs convulsed repeatedly, causing his toes to flap against the tree’s roots.

Saeko tried to look away, but as she did, she caught sight of the man’s hands. His shoulders seemed dislocated; his arms were bent at the elbows, and both hands lay next to his legs, palms up, at what would have normally been an impossible angle. The man’s hands also trembled with each convulsion, as if they were signaling to Saeko. If she placed her hands
on her hips and let them shake with her body, they’d probably execute a similar dance.
Bye
, they seemed to be saying in a half-mocking tone.

No. Perhaps it was the opposite. Perhaps rather than bidding her farewell, Seiji was beckoning to her:
Come, come …

The sensation of Seiji Fujimura standing by her bedside at the hospital in Ina, prodding the lump in her breast with his finger, came back to her. At any moment, those trembling hands seemed as if they might reach out towards her neckline again. She quickened her pace, dragging Hashiba away from the scene.

Given that he was a director at a TV station, Hashiba probably would have liked to stay longer at the scene of the incident to investigate. At the very least, he probably wanted to determine whether the fall had been a result of foul play or rather a suicide or accident. It might not yield a major news story, but it was likely to show up on the next day’s talk shows.

But Saeko was in no state to worry about that right now. In a haze of panic, her footsteps rang out loudly as she hurried off as quickly as possible, her gaze averted, pulling Hashiba along by the hand.

2
She needed something stronger than just beer or wine. Something to calm her nerves.

When she spotted a bar, Saeko shot Hashiba a pleading glance and pushed open the smoked-glass door.

It wasn’t until they were seated at the bar that she suddenly felt a twinge of embarrassment at having dragged him along so forcefully. Sighing deeply, she ordered a dark rum on the rocks to quell the emotional turmoil she was feeling.

“What’s come over you?” Hashiba leaned slightly backwards on his stool, taken aback by Saeko’s sudden transformation.

“Didn’t you see that?”

“See what?”

“The face of the person who fell.”

“Of course not! We were too far away for one thing, and for another he landed face down with his head half hidden in the tree roots.”

Hashiba was right. They had only seen the back of the falling man, and even when exiting the building, they had only glimpsed his form through a thick crowd of people at a distance of several meters. How could they possibly have seen who he was? And yet, Saeko knew. The image of Seiji Fujimura’s face was branded into her mind even if it hadn’t passed
through her retinas. No matter how she tried to dismiss it, his visage refused to disappear.

In a single drag, Saeko downed half of her glass of rum.

“It was Seiji Fujimura. I’m absolutely sure of it,” she informed Hashiba.

Hashiba was reaching for his drink but froze with a choked exclamation of surprise. “You’ve got to be kidding,” he managed.

There were two solid reasons for his denial. For one thing, it would have been too bizarre a coincidence for someone Saeko and Hashiba both knew to happen to fall to his death right in front of them. For another, there was no way they could have seen the man’s face from where they had been. How could Saeko possibly know who it was?

But as he watched Saeko tremble with fright, Hashiba didn’t know what to think. Indeed, the man’s tracksuit had seemed familiar. And even from the back, the figure had borne something of a resemblance to Seiji Fujimura.

An ambulance’s siren pierced the silence, far away at first, but growing steadily closer.

“I’ll go have a look,” Hashiba said.

The bar where they were now seated was only a couple of hundred meters from the scene of the fall. If he ran, Hashiba would get there sooner than the ambulance. Perhaps he would be able to confirm the man’s identity.

Saeko wanted to know the truth, too. Moments ago, she had been too distressed to think of anything but getting away from the scene. But now that she’d had a moment to calm down, she wanted to get to the bottom of what she had seen.

Please, let it be just my imagination …

Saeko hoped she had been wrong somehow. She didn’t welcome the idea that the bizarre vision she’d had might actually reflect reality. Especially if that reality involved Seiji Fujimura.

She still remembered vividly how she’d felt in the hospital in Ina when she’d sensed someone crawling up to her bed in the middle of the night, and her terror when she’d realized that it was Seiji Fujimura. When she recalled how his fingers had probed her breast, she was overcome with the image of hundreds of earthworms slithering all over her body. When Seiji had handed her the key to the Fujimuras’ home, it had been warm from his body heat and damp from the sweat of his palm. She still had it in her handbag, wrapped in a tissue.

Saeko shuddered, trying to dispel the repugnant image.

I don’t want to be alone tonight
, she realized.

She had no desire to spend another night in that state of terrified isolation she’d experienced in the hospital room. She wanted company—even her ex-husband would do. In her current state, if she tried to sleep alone, she knew she would be unable to distinguish reality from nightmare. She would be Seiji Fujimura’s helpless prey.

Please …

Just as Saeko pictured the face of the man she most wanted to remain by her side that night, it appeared in the doorway of the bar. Less than four minutes had elapsed since he’d shot out the door.

Hashiba wore an expression of deep consternation as he approached the counter and weakly set one hand on his stool.

“You were right,” he told her.

Instinctively, Saeko closed both eyes. Despite her fervent prayers, her bizarre vision had now been confirmed by another witness.

In confused tones, Hashiba recounted what he had just seen. But Saeko wasn’t listening. She didn’t have to. She remembered—the broken legs splayed at an unnatural angle, the two palms that seemed to beckon as they convulsed.

Her eyes still squeezed shut, Saeko’s hands searched the counter for her drink. Finding it, she downed the rest of her rum in a single drought. Only the ice cubes remained in her glass, clinking frigidly.

Hashiba continued. “At the moment, there’s no indication of foul play. He was probably tired of running from his debtors and threw himself off the roof of a building in despair. They didn’t know yet if he’s going to make it, but there’s no question that he’s in serious condition.”

Saeko released her glass and let her hand wander over to Hashiba’s stool to squeeze his hand. Cold and damp from holding her glass, her hand was quickly enveloped in Hashiba’s warmth. He responded by stroking the grooves between her fingers delicately with his fingertips.

I don’t want to let go of this hand tonight
.

Saeko interlaced her fingers tightly around Hashiba’s, gripping them with surprising strength for a woman.

3
That evening, when Saeko took his hand tightly in hers, Hashiba had a hunch that he might wind up spending the night with her. But when she pulled him along, he didn’t realize they were headed for
her apartment until she said, “Would you come home with me tonight?” Her speech was oddly rushed, as if to convince him that it was the drink talking.

After they left the bar and got into a taxi, Saeko directed the driver into a quiet residential neighborhood in Minato Ward. During the ride, and even as they emerged onto the sidewalk, Saeko made no move to release Hashiba’s hand. The strength of her grip seemed to convey a fear that he might run away if she didn’t hold on tightly enough.

But Hashiba didn’t have the slightest intention of running away. When he had invited Saeko to have dinner with him, he’d harbored a distant hope for this outcome.

When had Saeko begun to get under his skin? It seemed to Hashiba that she had first sparked his interest at the initial production meeting when she’d expressed herself in such a unique register. Ever since, his interest had escalated rapidly, into romantic desire. Saeko was completely different from any woman he’d ever met. Her manner of speaking—a mixture of worldliness and innocence—seemed fresh and original, and sometimes downright comical. And yet Saeko always seemed perplexed by his amusement, cocking her head to one side quizzically and following up with an even quainter string of expressions.

When Hashiba lay alone in his bed at night, he recalled Saeko’s words and expressions that day and basked in a cozy happiness. Thoughts of her seemed to melt away the stress of his job, and before he knew it he was drifting off into a peaceful slumber.