Ring (17 page)

"Who?"

"Actually, we don't know the name. That's why we're here."

"I'm afraid I don't follow you." Tetsuaki looked troubled, as if to urge his visitors to make a little more sense.

"We can't even say for sure if this person is still alive, or has already died. What's clear is that this person had powers that ordinary people don't."

Ryuji paused to watch Tetsuaki, who seemed to understand immediately what he meant.

"Your father was probably Japan's greatest collector of this sort of information. He told me that, using a network of connections he himself had forged, he had assembled a list of people all over the country with paranormal powers. He said he was storing the information."

Tetsuaki's face clouded over. Surely they weren't going to ask him to search through all those records for a single name. "Yes, of course the files have been preserved. But there are so many of them. And many of those people are frauds anyway." Tetsuaki blanched at the thought of looking through all those files again. It had taken a dozen of his father's students several months to organize them. Following the wishes of the deceased, they'd included even uncertain cases, swelling the number of files even further.

"We certainly don't intend to put you to any trouble. With your permission, we'll search through them ourselves, just the two of us."

"They're in the archives upstairs. Perhaps you'd like to take a look at them first?" Tetsuaki stood up. They could only talk like that because they had no idea how much there was. Once they had a look at all those shelves, he had a feeling they wouldn't feel like tackling them. He led them to the second floor.

The archives were in a high-ceilinged room at the head of the stairs. They entered the room to find themselves facing two bookcases of seven shelves each. Each file-book contained materials relating to forty cases, and at first glance there seemed to be thousands of file books. Asakawa didn't notice Ryuji's reaction, he was too busy turning pale himself.
If
we spend time on this, we could well die here in this gloomy room. There's got to be another way!

Ryuji, unfazed, asked, "Do you mind if we have a look?"

"Go right ahead." Tetsuaki stayed and watched them for a little while, half out of astonishment and half out of curiosity to see just what they thought they'd find. But eventually he seemed to have given up on them. "I've got work to do/' he said, leaving.

When they were alone, Asakawa turned to Ryuji and spoke. "So, want to tell me what's going on?" His voice was a bit thick, because he was still craning his neck looking at all the files. These were the first words he'd spoken since entering the Hall. The files were arranged in chronological order, beginning with 1956 and ending in 1988. 1988-that was the year Miura had died. Only death had brought down the curtain on his thirty-two-year quest.

"We don't have much time, so I'll tell you while we look. I'll start with 1956. You start with 1960."

Asakawa tentatively pulled out a file and flipped through it. Each page contained at least one photo and a piece of paper on which was written a short description as well as a name and an address.

"What am I looking for?"

"Pay attention to names and addresses. We're trying to find a woman from Izu Oshima Island."

"A woman?" asked Asakawa, cocking his head questioningly.

"Remember that old woman on the video? She told somebody they were going to give birth to a daughter. Think she was talking to a man?"

Ryuji was right. Men could not bear children.

So they started searching. It was a simple, repetitive task, and since Asakawa asked why these files existed in the first place, Ryuji explained.

Professor Miura had always been interested in supernatural phenomena. In the '50s, he'd begun experiments with paranormal powers, but he hadn't got any results reliable enough to allow him to formulate a scientific theory. Clairvoyants would find themselves unable to do in front of an audience what they had done easily before. It took a lot of concentration to be able to display these powers. What Professor Miura was searching for was the kind of person who could exert his or her power at any time, under any circumstances. He could see that if the person failed in front of witnesses, then Miura himself would be called a fraud. He was convinced that there must be more people out there with paranormal powers than he knew about, so he set about finding them. But how was he to do this? He couldn't interview everybody to check for clairvoyance, second sight, telekinesis. So he came up with a method. To anybody who might possibly have such powers, he sent a piece of film in a securely sealed envelope and asked them to imprint upon it with their minds a certain pattern or image, and then send it back to him, still sealed. In this way he could test the powers of people even at great distances. And since such psychic photography seemed to be a fairly basic power, people who possessed it often seemed to be clairvoyant as well. In 1956, he'd begun to recruit paranormals from all over the country, with the help of former students of his who had gone to work for publishers and newspapers. These former students helped set up a network which would report any rumour of supernatural powers straight back to Professor Miura. However, an examination of the film returned to him suggested that no more than a tenth of claimants actually had any power. The rest had skillfully broken the seal and replaced the film. Obvious cases of deception were weeded out at this point, but cases where it wasn't clear one way or the other were kept, ultimately resulting in the unmanageable collection Asakawa saw before him. In the years since Miura had started, the network had been perfected through the development of the mass media and an increase in the number of participating former students; the data had piled up year after year until the man died.

"I see," murmured Asakawa. "So that's the meaning of this collection. But how do you know that the name of the person we're looking for is in here?"

"I'm not saying it definitely is. But there's a strong possibility it's here. I mean, look at what she did. You know yourself that there are a few people who can actually produce psychic photos. But there can't be too many paranormals who can actually project images onto a television tube without any equipment whatsoever. That's power of the very highest order. Someone with that kind of power would stand out, even if they didn't try to. I don't think Miura's network would have let someone like that slip through."

Asakawa had to admit that the possibility was genuine. He redoubled his efforts.

"By the way, why am I looking at 1960?" Asakawa suddenly looked up.

"Remember the scene on the video that shows a television? It was a rather old model. One of the early sets, from the '50s or early '60s."

"But that doesn't necessarily mean…"

"Shut up. We're talking probabilities here, right?"

Asakawa chided himself for being so irritated this last little while. But he had good reason to be. Given the limited time frame, the number of files was huge. It would have been more unnatural to be calm about it.

At that moment, Asakawa saw the words "Izu Oshima" in the file he was holding.

"Hey! Got one," he yelled, triumphantly. Ryuji turned around, surprised, and peered at the file.

Motornachi, Izu Oshima. Teruko Tsuchida, age 37,
Postmarked February 14, 1960. A black-and-white photograph showing a white lightning-like slash against a black background. The description read:
Subject sent this with a note predicting a cross-shaped image. No traces of substitution.

"How about that?" Asakawa trembled with excitement as he waited for Ryuji's response.

"It's a possibility. Take down the name and address, just in case." Ryuji turned back to his own search. Asakawa felt better for having found a likely candidate so soon, but at the same time he was a bit dissatisfied with Ryuji's brusque reaction.

Two hours passed. They didn't find another woman from Izu Oshima. Most of the submissions were either from Tokyo itself or the surrounding Kanto region. Tetsuaki appeared, offering them tea and two or three possibly sarcastic comments before leaving. Their hands on the files were getting slower and slower; they'd been at it for two hours and hadn't even polished off a year's worth.

Finally, somehow, Asakawa got through 1960. As he went to start on 1961 he happened to glance at Ryuji. Ryuji was sitting cross-legged on the floor, motionless, face buried in an open file.
Is he asleep, the idiot?
Asakawa reached out his hand, but then Ryuji emitted a stifled groan.

"I'm so hungry I could die. How about you go buy us some takeout and oolong tea? Oh, and make reservations for this evening at
Le Petit Pension Soleil."

"What the hell?"

"That's the inn the guy runs."

"I know that. But why would I want to stay there with you?"

"You'd rather not?"

"For starters, we haven't got time to lounge around at an inn."

"Even if we find her now, there's no way to get to Izu Oshima right now. We can't go anywhere today. Don't you think it'd be better to get a good night's sleep and marshal our energies for tomorrow?"

Asakawa felt an indescribable aversion to spending the night with Ryuji at an inn. But there was no alternative, so he gave up and went out to buy food and tell Tetsuaki Miura they'd be staying the night. Then he and Ryuji ate their takeout and drank their oolong tea. It was seven in the evening. A brief respite.

His arms were tired and his shoulders stiff. His eyes swam, he took off his glasses. Instead, he held the files close enough to his face that he could lick them if he wanted. He had to use all his concentration or he was afraid he'd miss something, which tired him even more.

Nine o'clock. The silence of the archives was broken by Ryuji's mad screech. "I've found it, finally! So that's where she was hiding."

Asakawa felt himself drawn to the file. He sat down next to Ryuji and put his glasses back on to look at it. It said:

Izu Oshima, Sashikiji. Sadako Yamamura. Age 10.
The envelope was postmarked August 29, 1958.
Subject sent this with a note predicting it would be imprinted with her own name. She's the real thing, without a doubt.
Attached was a photograph showing the character
yama,
"mountain", in white against a black background. Asakawa had seen that character somewhere before.

"That's… that's it." His voice trembled. On the video, the scene of the eruption of Mt Mihara had been followed immediately by a shot of the character for "mountain", identical to this one. Not only that, the screen of the old television in the tenth scene had displayed the character
sada.
This woman's name was Sadako Yamamura.

"What do you think?" asked Ryuji.

"No question about it. This is it."

At long last Asakawa found hope. The thought crossed his mind that maybe, just maybe, they'd beat the deadline.

October 16
-
Tuesday

10:15 a.m. Ryuji and Asakawa were on a high speed passenger boat that had just left port at Atami. There was no regular ferry linking Oshima and the mainland, so they'd had to leave the car in the parking lot next to the Atami Korakuen Hotel. Asakawa was still clutching the key in his left hand.

They were scheduled to arrive on Oshima in an hour. A strong wind blew and it looked like rain. Most of the passengers hadn't ventured out onto the deck, but stayed huddled in their reserved seats. Asakawa and Ryuji had been in too much of a hurry to check before buying their tickets, but it looked like a typhoon was approaching. The waves were large, and the rocking of the boat was worse than usual.

Sipping a can of hot coffee, Asakawa went over the whole chain of events again in his mind.

He wasn't sure if they should congratulate themselves for having come this far, or reproach themselves for not having found out about "Sadako Yamamura" and set out for Oshima Island earlier. Everything had hung on noticing that the black curtain flashing momentarily over the images on the video was eyelids, blinking. The images had been recorded not by machine but by the human sensory apparatus. Essentially, the person had focused her energies on the video deck at cabin B-4 while it was recording, and created not a psychic photo but a psychic video. This surely indicated paranormal powers of immeasurable proportions. Ryuji had assumed that such a person would stand out from the crowd, and gone looking for her, and had ultimately found out her name. Not that they knew for sure that "Sadako Yamamura" was, in fact, the culprit. She was still just a suspect. They were heading to Oshima in order to follow up on their suspicions.

The sea was rough, causing the boat to pitch and roll violently. Asakawa felt an ugly premonition come over him. Maybe it hadn't been such a good idea for both of them to go to Oshima. What if they got tied down by the typhoon and couldn't leave the island? Who'd save his wife and daughter? The deadline was almost at hand. 10:04 p.m., the day after tomorrow.

Asakawa warmed his hands with the coffee can and shrank down into his seat. "I still can't believe it, you know. That a human being could really do something like that."

"It doesn't matter if you believe it or not, now, does it?" Ryuji answered without taking his eyes from his map of Oshima. "Anyway, it's a reality staring you in the face. You know, all we're seeing is one small part of a continuously changing phenomenon."

Ryuji set the map down on his knee. "You know about the Big Bang, right? They believe that the universe was born in a tremendous explosion twenty billion years ago. I can mathematically express the form of the universe, from its birth to the present. It's all about differential equations. Most phenomena in the universe can be expressed with differential equations, you know. Using them, you can figure out what the universe looked like a hundred million years ago, ten billion years ago, even a second or a tenth of a second after that initial explosion. But.
But.
No matter how far we go back, no matter how we try to express it, we just can't know what it looked like at
zero,
at the very moment
of
the explosion. And there's another thing. How is our universe going to end? Is the universe expanding or contracting? See, we don't know the beginning and we don't know the end; all we can know about is the in-between stuff. And that, my friend, is what life is like."