EDGE (55 page)

But the issue of the number of bodies found in the grave kept pulling, and he couldn’t shake the nasty feeling it gave him. The numbers were exactly the same.

“Their … their … their …” Toshiya started to say something. Each time he stopped short, taking a step backwards. His face had gone pale.

“Toshiya, are you okay?” Hashiba asked, trying to calm him down. “What is it?”

“Th-Their …” he stuttered. “Their arms, their legs—they were all severed. The bodies had their limbs severed …”

Hashiba and the crew stood absolutely still as the shock took hold. A dry wind rustled the branches overhead; it sounded like it was mocking them somehow, laughing at their misfortune. The image seeded itself in his mind before he could do anything to stop it: hacked-off limbs strewn around empty mountain slopes like a gruesome collection of broken branches.

The image leeched away at the courage he had built up, and he felt his reserves of hope drain away. He tried to pull himself together and looked at the others, trying to work out who had been within earshot. Just Isogai, Kato, and Hosokawa. That made just five of them, including himself and Toshiya. Kagayama was talking to his mother and sister in the distance. Chris was standing with Isogai but had switched off as everyone had been talking in rapid Japanese. Isogai, for his part, didn’t look inclined to share the horrifying information with his lover.

“They would have found the bodies hundreds of years after we died. Maybe the bones had just turned to dust …” Hosokawa’s voice trembled. He stood, arms crossed, hugging himself.

Toshiya shook his head. “No, the limbs had been severed while the people were still alive.” He had decided that any attempt to hide or embellish the facts would just make things worse.

So that was their destiny? To have their limbs torn off, to be tossed into a mass grave?

“I told you,” Isogai screamed out, staring at Hashiba, Kato, and Hosokawa in turn. He started to stamp at the ground, losing his temper completely. “This is because of you! We’re all going to be punished because of this, this parody.”

“And this coming from a scientist!” Hosokawa sneered back. “How very unscientific, to bring up the wrath of God!”

“Listen, fuckwit. Shall I explain to you what’s going to happen to us?” Rather than explode, Isogai just grinned. “We’re going to be sacrificed. We will go back to the Machu Picchu of five hundred years ago. There, our own foolishness will bring about a calamity. We’ll be unable to fulfill our roles as gods. We will reap only the anger of the people. One by one, we will be taken up to an altar and have our limbs torn off. We will be cast into a mass grave. The people will then abandon their city. That is our history.”

Isogai’s prediction sounded logical enough, but it was just an interpretation. Hashiba had come up with his own interpretation of what lay before them. They could arrive after Machu Picchu had been deserted and find nothing but the empty remains of the place. They would all pitch together and succeed in forging a new life, but something would happen. Perhaps an attack by a nearby tribe; they would be captured and then killed.

Hashiba looked over to Toshiya and asked, “Did they find signs of a battle?”

“None,” he answered simply.

Even if there were no signs of a battle, that didn’t necessarily negate his theory. Faced with overwhelming force, they would likely surrender. Perhaps attacked by the Spanish, or maybe a force that wasn’t even human, an unknown beast, a demon, the devil … Hashiba’s thoughts grew increasingly dark, and he pictured ancient and grotesque objects of fear.

Still, whether as an offering to the gods, the result of a foreign attack, or the acts of a malign entity, one thing was painfully clear. All 173 of them would be captured and dismembered, probably sooner rather than later.
That much could be deduced from the fact that the number of people was exactly the same.

Hashiba recalled Buddhist, Christian, and other religious paintings. People fled from a dark shadow that plucked them one by one from the muck, suspended them upside down, and tore off their limbs. In the underground gloom, patches of fire lit up the victims’ agony. Depictions of hell were found all across the world.

The vivid rush of images proved too much for Hashiba. He collapsed to his knees, and a cracked noise escaped from his throat. It struck him that he had subconsciously taken the pose for prayer.

He didn’t know how much time they had left; it might be a matter of minutes, or perhaps hours. But the end was near. He had to make a decision, and he had to make it now. He could just get up and leave and not go through the wormhole. But it was precisely this need to choose on the spot, rather than his fear of the unknown, that was enervating him.

If he did leave and only 172 people remained, would that be enough to change their destiny? Leaving meant exposing himself to the phase transition. It was hell either way. Even so, he knew that he had to force a decision. One path meant a slow, tortured death; the other, the possibility of a painless and sudden end. He didn’t know what waited for him through the wormhole; he could only see ambiguity and chaos. Faced with an impossible decision, Hashiba gave up all his efforts to think rationally and craned his neck upwards. Stars continued to blink out one by one, each one seeming to accentuate the relentless passage of time. His nerves were on fire.

Hashiba closed his eyes and clasped his hands together in prayer.

9
It all began with you …

Saeko replayed Seiji’s words in her head. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t work out what he meant. The only option was to ask him directly. Seiji’s mouth hung half open, and his brow was furrowed. Saeko had never seen a snake about to deliver its venomous charge, but that was the image that came to mind looking at him now.

“You still don’t know how the world works, do you, little girl?”

Saeko sat bolt upright.
How the world works
. That was a phrase her father had used countless times. “And you suppose that you do?”

“Well, you know, it’s like a bundle of threads rolled together. Each end has its own idea, the exact opposite of the other end.”

“And?” she pushed for more.

“You can’t think of these ideas as isolated things, separated by the length of the thread. Each helps the other. Each complements the other. The thread joins them. You know of how the Devil came to be, right? The Devil is a fallen angel.” He let out a vulgar, croaking laugh.

Again, Saeko felt afraid of something she couldn’t quite place. Her father had once explained to her that the universe was composed of opposing ideas. “God and the Devil complementing each other?”

“Every little thing that happens is related to something else.” Seiji brushed his fingers along the table next to him. “It’s like a spider’s web, an amazingly intricate tapestry of threads. The world is built on the shoulders of these relationships. The passage of time is simply an expression of the development and change in these relationships.”

Saeko glanced at her wristwatch. Why was she sitting here listening to him talk at her? If it were her father, she would probably be impatient for more, but the words of this grotesque man … All she could see was a feeble attempt to hide his disgusting nature. She wanted to get out of this situation as soon as she got the chance, and every moment was precious.

She glanced at the plaster casts on his legs. If she made a run down the corridor it was unlikely he would be able to give chase, but she had to be sure about the wormhole. Would it open in this room or not? Besides, she had to know what he meant when he said that it had all begun with her. She had to know what happened to her father. She had to get him to talk.

“Let’s get back to the point. Enough rambling.”

“Not exactly the attitude you’d expect when someone’s asking a favor, now, is it? So, you want to know what happened, yes?”

Saeko began to nod but stopped herself in mid-movement. She glared at the man before her, her heart thumping wildly. All she could do was wait.

“All right, then. Humans are only aware of a tiny, infinitesimal part of the world. It’s like an iceberg, most of it hidden below the sea. What most people see is just the visible bit, but some people see more. They can discern the tangle of relationships hidden beneath the surface. Those with a third nipple—in other words, us. That old bag Shigeko was one too. Some of her better predictions were right on the mark.

“Life is full of traps, catastrophe is never far away. The contract between God and the Devil has always been in force, but cleverly kept
secret. That’s why people put things down to luck, whether good or bad, unable to see the truth. It’s easy to wrap inevitability in the guise of coincidence.”

Seiji pulled the crutches around from behind him and placed them on his lap. He rested his elbows on his knees and bent forward, cradling his head in his hands. The movement was designed to arrest her attention, but Saeko caught a glimpse of something like fatigue. The threatening, challenging look that had been there when she first entered the room seemed to be fading away.

Saeko seized the opportunity. “You said just now that you killed the family. That was a lie, wasn’t it?”

Seiji raised his brows and opened his eyes wide. He scratched at his throat as though it ached under the skin. With what vigor he had left he let out, “What makes you say that?”

“You wouldn’t dirty your own hands. It’s clear, listening to you talk.”

“Well, you’re entitled to your opinion I guess.”

“Just answer me one thing,” Saeko was pleading now, holding her anger in reserve. “What happened to my father?” If nothing else, she at least wanted to know that.

“You sure you want to know?”

“Please, just tell me …”

“You already know what happened.”

“Don’t jerk me around.”

“Think about what happened here, those eighteen years ago. You work it out yourself now. Think about the order of events.”

Saeko’s eyes darted around.

Work it out yourself. Grasp the logic …

It was her father’s teaching. Only when she was completely stuck, he’d provide an image in the way of a hint. Visualization was indispensable; reasoning that wasn’t accompanied by any tended to be bankrupt.

She decided to take Seiji up on the challenge. In order to replay her father’s movements on that August day eighteen years ago, she tried to picture details as vividly as she could.

For some reason, after 8 p.m., at a hotel in Narita, he had suddenly changed his plans and decided to head for Takato. At that time of day it would have been impossible to get there by train; the only possible mode of transport would have been a cab. Kitazawa had confirmed that her father hadn’t rented a car for the trip.

Saeko didn’t have much to work with to guess what his companion, Haruko, might have been thinking. Traveling in Bolivia, perhaps she’d fallen in love with Saeko’s father, but just how serious was their relationship? Had Haruko resolved to throw away everything? Or had she just been out to play around a bit? What were her feelings for her husband?

Saeko stopped there. Why had she never considered Haruko’s husband in the equation? If her father had fallen in love with Haruko, then it was her husband, Kota, that he needed to confront. It just hadn’t crossed her mind to think of him. She tried to visualize Haruko and her father leaving the airport hand in hand. And then, waiting at their destination, Haruko’s husband: Kota Fujimura.

And now she saw something else too, realizing her error as soon as she pictured her father and Haruko in an embrace. Both image and logic indicated that it wasn’t Seiji who had the third nipple, but Kota.

Considering the scene between her father and Haruko all of eighteen years ago in conjunction with her own experience, her hunch became conviction. They had met in Bolivia and decided to travel together, but they hadn’t consummated their relationship. Perhaps mindful of Haruko’s marriage, her father had managed to hold back his passion and not cross that line. In other words, he loved Haruko deeply enough to respect her situation.

There was no other way to explain the timing of her father’s sudden change of plans. The two of them had come back to Japan and booked a hotel room for their last night together. Haruko had been planning to return to her husband the next day. Maybe the impending sadness of parting had pushed them to cross the line. After he called Saeko, something happened and they moved to consummate the relationship. Caught up in the moment, they tore each other’s clothes off, but something stopped them—just like with her and Hashiba.

The fragmented images ran across her mind like a cinematic flashback. She saw two bodies, tangled together in a passionate embrace, fumble their way to bed. Haruko’s hands traced her father’s chest and came to a halt. Discovering his third nipple, her thoughts immediately returned to her husband, the tactile sensation dissipating her lust, as with Hashiba when he found the lump on her breast.

Seiji was right. Saeko was surprised at how easy it was to see the links between each event. Haruko would have explained why she’d stopped, whispering into her father’s ear, “My husband also …”

What if the locations of the third nipple were a mirror image? If Kota’s
was on the right side, while Saeko’s father’s was on the left, what would he have made of the reverse symmetry? Matter and anti-matter—those were the words that came to Saeko’s mind, and she was sure her father had thought the same.

Despite having the same mass and spin, matter and anti-matter had opposing electrical charges. If her father and Kota were somehow mirror images of each other too, then the analogy was nagging. The revelation must have astounded her father, who interpreted alignments of numbers and phenomena not as mere coincidence but as signs of a higher force.

By falling for the same woman, he’d discovered the existence of his mirror image. He would have been convinced that this fact concealed an important secret that could wreak havoc if ignored. The key to finding out its meaning was Kota himself. That was why her father acted right away.

So that was it. Her father’s purpose in coming to Takato on that August day eighteen years ago had never been to confront Seiji. It had been Kota all along.