Edge

by Kōji Suzuki

  The relief was just the beginning, then, the initial clue. Haruko would have looked at it and seen a resemblance to her brother-in-law, Seiji. But she had told her father something else about Seiji … Was it something about his background, his personality, something physical? Maybe Haruko had said that their faces looked similar down to the bumps on his forehead. Bumps on the forehead—horns. The symbol of the Devil.

  But that wasn’t it. Saeko was looking directly at Seiji, and there were no traces of anything like horns on his forehead. It was smooth all the way up towards his receding hairline. So it wasn’t the horns. Saeko struggled to think; she was sure that it must have been some physical characteristic that had made Haruko broach the subject in the first place. It would have been something that stood out, something obvious. Her father had no time for vague ideas.

  Saeko thought of her father. Was there anything about him that stood out, anything unique? Then she remembered:

  He had a third nipple.

  She had completely forgotten about it. When she was a kid, her father would bathe with her, and one day he had taken her hand and guided it to a bump on his chest.

  “Sae, do you know what this is?”

  The bump, she remembered, had felt like a wart, slightly rubbery under her small finger.

  “A mole? Or is it a wart?”

  Her father laughed, then began to explain:

  “It’s called an accessory mamma. It’s proof that we are descended from mammals. Dogs, cows, and horses have lots of them, right?”

  After getting out of the bath that night, Saeko had gone straight to look up the term in an illustrated encyclopedia entitled The History of Atavism. She had learned that many mammalian fetuses have four sets of breasts and that, for human ones, the rudimentary structures for five sets of mammary glands could be observed.

  True to the dictum that phenotype repeated genotype, in its development the human fetus charted the course of evolution from aquatic life to reptilian life to mammalian life before being born as a baby. Sometimes during this process remnants of that evolution remained, and the accessory mamma was one such mark.

  The accessory nipple was a remnant of earlier mammalian stages; on humans they were found somewhere along the line down from either armpit to the groin. Saeko read that up to 1.5 percent of Japanese males had this physical trait, so it wasn’t that rare in itself. Her father’s case, however, was considerably more so because he had only one extra nipple, below his right armpit. Usually they appeared in pairs, one on either side.

  That night in the bath together was the only time they had discussed her father’s third nipple. Now, remembering the fact for the first time in years, she thought again of the lump on her breast, discovered only a month ago. She had never thought to link the two together.

  Maybe the lump is an accessory mamma, like my father’s, just appearing on one side?

  Saeko wanted to put her hand to the lump and check the location, but she didn’t want to stimulate Seiji’s perversion in any way whatsoever.

  What if that was the link? What if Seiji had the same mark, just on one side? What would that have meant?

  As soon as the hypothesis formed in her head, her mind recalled some words and linked the two together. The answer came first, and her thinking struggled to catch up, lurching.

  At the hospital in Ina, someone had been there with her, run fingers over her left breast, and said something.

  Keep this up, and you’ll be one of us soon enough.

  And what had he just said?

  Want me to poke at that lump in your breast?

  The connection had been made in a mere dozen seconds, but Saeko was positive. Her thoughts were clear now, and the logic held.

  If Seiji had a third nipple, like her father, could that be what Haruko had pointed out at Tiwanaku? No, it wouldn’t have been in Bolivia. It would have been after they got back to Japan, at the hotel they stayed in Narita. It was clear from her father’s notebook that he had still planned to go to Takamatsu, and he had said so over the phone to her. Haruko hadn’t told him until after that call. But when he learned that Seiji had a third nipple, he concluded that it was something that required urgent attention and changed his plans at the last moment to make for the Fujimuras’ in Takato. He had discovered something that he simply could not ignore. So far, the logic seemed to fit. But something jarred, something wasn’t right. Saeko tried to work out what it was that was bugging her about the idea, but it wouldn’t come to her.

  She changed her line of thought.

  Her mind drifted back to her apartment, the night with Hashiba. Just as they had been about to make love, his hand had drifted towards her breasts, then stopped dead. She remembered feeling the pressure of his fingers against the lump. Then she remembered the feeling when Seiji had felt the same place. Something didn’t fit.

  As though he could read her thoughts, Seiji’s mouth curled up in an unsightly smile. He rubbed the front of his hands along his lips.

  “That reminds me, babe, I never did tell you what I thought of that article you wrote.” Seiji rolled his eyes upwards and began to pick at his nose hair.

  Saeko wondered if she should perhaps admire his ability to be so naturally, effortlessly repugnant. She sat up straight, her will galvanized for the fight. Somehow his very existence offended her. “I’d love to hear, especially from someone so obviously related to it.”

  “Related to it?” he snorted. “Ha, you didn’t write a single word about me. I might as well not have existed.”

  Seiji was exactly right. Saeko’s opinion of him had been so poor that Hashiba had actually burst out laughing when she had first mentioned him.

  “At least I didn’t try to pin the thing on you though, right?” she goaded. Just treating him as suspicious would have posed a libel risk since the article flagged a potential crime. She had wanted nothing to do with him, and it had been an easy decision to avoid bringing him up.

  “Tell me honestly, do you think I’m harmless?”

  Saeko wondered which answer he was fishing for. Did he want her to think of him as harmless, or the opposite? From his tone, she had to conclude that he wanted to think of himself as the latter. In that case, he’d be disappointed that she hadn’t given him the attention he thought he deserved. She had immediately sensed that he was dangerous, there was no question of that, but she hadn’t found anything to legitimately back up her suspicions. The only reasons she had managed to come up with were purely subjective. He had given her the creeps, but was that enough to label him as dangerous? She decided to proceed carefully. She got the feeling that the entire direction of events to come hinged on this one answer.

  Seiji leant forwards, seizing on Saeko’s indecision. “You want to know the truth? I killed them.”

  He had caught her off guard. Raising a hand over her mouth, she demanded, “What did you just say?”

  “I killed every last one of them. Disposed of the bodies.” This time he spoke purposefully, pronouncing each word with sickening clarity.

  Saeko’s mind lost focus, as though a fog had descended. The words reverberated around her skull as the world faded under the veil of white. This was not a simple confession. If Seiji had murdered them, then Saeko’s situation had just taken a turn for the worse. As the weight of the implications of what he’d said began to sink in, Saeko felt her body begin to tremble.

  “What did you do with the bodies?” she managed. Her voice was hoarse with the effort.

  Was it a bluff? The idea had crossed her mind a number of times when she was writing up the article. He would have been able to leverage his position as a family member to call everyone outside. It had just been an idea, of course, quickly dismissed. In the first place, she hadn’t really believed that Seiji had it in him to carry off such a feat; she had seen no evidence that suggested otherwise. But now, those initial convictions began to sway. There was something inhuman about him, something dark. Perhaps the incompetence she had perceived had just been an a
ct designed to mask his true nature. It would be dangerous to underestimate him now.

  “Why don’t you open the window, take a look outside.”

  His meaning was clear. Leading down from the house, halfway down the hill, was a dam. Behind the dam lay the expanse of Lake Miwa.

  “You threw them in the lake?”

  “Exactly. And I made sure they wouldn’t come floating back.”

  Saeko knew from articles she’d written that the swelling of gasses inside the intestines could cause bodies to float to the surface even with heavy stones strapped to them. Seiji was boasting that he did something to ensure this wouldn’t happen. Was there any way to check whether he was telling the truth?

  She shuddered at the possibility that he was. If he had killed the family and disposed of the bodies, then there had never been a wormhole here in the first place.

  But what about the other observations they had made? Takato was located on an active fault line. There had been abnormal levels of sunspot activity on the day the family went missing. Was it just a coincidence? Was this case unrelated to the others involving disturbances in the magnetic field? Had they simply stumbled across a completely unrelated crime? No, the facts said otherwise.

  The trembling of her body refused to subside. She had been determined to gain the upper hand, but Seiji’s manipulations kept shifting the ground, keeping her struggling to catch up, always a step behind. If she didn’t manage to make some headway, the phase transition would be upon them and everything would just cease to be. Maybe that was the best-case scenario. Of course, it was possible that Seiji would try to kill her before that even happened.

  “Why would you do such a thing?”

  “Come on,” Seiji said, ignoring her. “You still haven’t answered my question. Do you think I’m dangerous? I want to know, seriously.”

  “I can’t answer that until I know why you killed them.”

  “Such a pretty girl … You won’t be able to work it out no matter how hard you try.”

  “That’s why I’m asking.”

  “I fucking love the way you talk to me, mmm.” Seiji’s tongue darted out, snaking around his lips.

  “Was it the money? You got yourself in so much debt you couldn’t even see the light of day.”

  “Such a disappointing, run-of-the-mill answer.”

  Saeko felt herself getting angry. There was no time for this ridiculous exchange. She slammed a fist down on the table and yelled, “That’s enough!”

  She sat, bracing herself for whatever was to come. She was afraid he would say something she had once known but forgotten since—words that would establish some old link between them.

  “It all began with you, dear. It all began with you.” Seiji burped loudly, but his expression remained the same. A moment later he raised his rear end and let out a loud fart. He looked oddly pleased with himself.

  8By some point before the beginning of the sixteenth century, the inhabitants of the mountain city of Machu Picchu had disappeared. Some four hundred years later, an excavation unearthed what turned out to be a mass grave that contained 173 bodies, including those of children. The discovery’s significance remained murky, but one archeological theory held that the fleeing inhabitants had slaughtered those that would slow them down …

  When Toshiya related this fact, Kato looked disturbed. “Just because the number’s the same, does that mean anything? It’s just a damn coincidence.” His voice was rising. “Who’s to say more people aren’t going to turn up anyway?”

  This apparent match of numbers had got everyone frightened. Hashiba joined Kato and Hosokawa in looking back down the hill. Up until a short while ago there had been a steady procession of people winding their way up the paths, but now these were deathly quiet. There was nothing to suggest that anyone else would turn up. The number stood as it was.

  And here they were, all on a forested hill, isolated by the darkness. The idea of being trapped in the mountains of Peru was all too easy to imagine.

  “It’s just coincidence. There’s nothing to it.” Kato was adamant.

  “Have you forgotten?” Isogai reminded, holding up a finger. “Everything we’ve seen so far in terms of numbers has meant something. The coincidences all had significance.”

  Toshiya looked around nervously, conscious that he’d been the last one to come, and also the one to bring up the subject of Machu Picchu and the grave. “There’s a lot of women here. Do you know how many?” he asked.

  “Why the hell would that matter?” Kato retorted, quite worried.

  “It’s just that … Well, with the bodies in Machu Picchu, 150 were female.”

  A nervous silence fell among the gathered men. They had already worked out the split. Including children, the number of females totaled exactly the same—one hundred and fifty.

  “Well, that’s that then,” Hashiba broke the silence, attempting to lighten the atmosphere. “At least we know where and when we’re going—to Machu Picchu, sometime in the fifteenth or sixteenth century.”

  He looked around, but no one seemed sure how to react. Their faces told different stories, but all were combinations of unease, fear, and doubt.

  Hashiba considered what this new information meant. If they were actually headed for Machu Picchu, then at least it was guaranteed that everyone would get through the wormhole. He had prepared himself for the possibility that the wormhole would take them further than just a few years back into Japan’s past and to a completely different place and time. Besides, Machu Picchu was a place he’d always wanted to visit … If he was going to travel back in time it might as well be to somewhere interesting. Hashiba tried his best to look on this in a positive light.

  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.