by Kōji Suzuki
His sneakers were waterlogged and heavy. Each step squeezed out a little flow of water. Waterfalls ran down his back and belly under his heavy jean jacket. He couldn't see where he was walking anymore, and he began to be afraid he'd stumble into one of the torrents that had appeared from nowhere. All he could do was find slightly higher ground, firm footing, and crouch there.
His last bread was in his rucksack, wrapped in plastic, but he knew he hadn't wrapped it very well. It was bound to get wet and dissolve. But he couldn't eat it in this downpour. He was forced to stand there helpless while his food supply was destroyed. Then again, he thought, at least he'd have enough water. He opened his mouth wide to take in as much of it as possible.
But the rain was falling too mercilessly: it hurt to stand there with his face exposed to it like that. He had to squat on his heels again.
Looking down, however, exposed the back of his neck to pain. He couldn't leave any skin uncovered, it seemed. He moved his pack so it covered his neck, then hugged his knees and waited for the rain to pass. He had the impression that rainstorms in the desert never lasted very long.
But this one did. The raindrops did get smaller and smaller until they seemed to turn to mist, but then, instead of stopping, they returned to their former size and force, pelting the ground. It was as if the storm was mocking him.
His fear grew. The rain had robbed his body of all warmth, and he was chilled through and through. On top of that, it was getting late. Darkness, cold, and hunger. He thought of this rain continuing all night, and it nearly paralyzed him.
The temperature of the air was falling, too. The dimness of evening turned into pitch blackness, and the rain sounded even louder. He couldn't see, but he could feel someone close at hand, striking him on the back and the head. He was surrounded by people kicking and hitting him. He felt like he'd been cornered by a lynch mob.
But even worse misfortune awaited him. Suddenly muddy water was flowing around his feet, and when he jumped in surprise, he dropped his pack. He lost his footing, twisted and fell, and as he did so he lost his sense of direction. Based on recalled sounds, he groped around for his pack, but to no avail. He touched the ground with both hands, feeling out a circle around where he lay on his back, but found nothing. It could be just a little ways away, or it could have been carried off by the current. It was all the same to him: the pack was gone.
Kaoru stayed still in the midst of the darkness, unable to move freely. He'd have to rely on his sense of touch and his hearing now. If the water eddying around his feet rose to cover his ankles, he decided, he'd have to move, but to where? He'd have to hear and feel his way to where the water wasn't as deep.
He was a worm, squirming in the mud. He'd seen worms that had crawled up out of cracks in the asphalt after days of heavy rain, only to be caught and dried up by the burning sun. Why did worms crawl out of the ground after the rain anyway? One theory was that they were trying to escape the carbonic acid gas dissolved in rainwater; Kaoru didn't know if this was right or not. Poor creatures-they finally crawl out of the dirt and get out of the rainwater, only to be dried up by ultraviolet light. Was it the light that drew them, despite their weakness to it?
Kaoru would settle for even the tiniest bit of light at the moment. He'd been in utter darkness for hours now. How many hours, he didn't know, as he'd lost all sense of time. He couldn't even see the hands on his watch.
Without being sure of the lay of the land around him, he couldn't walk anywhere. On the way up he'd seen numerous hundred-yard drops. If he wandered off now he might step right into a yawning crevice.
He thought he heard the sound of falling rock somewhere close by. He stiffened with fear. Several boulders rolled by, shooting pebbles when they hit them-he could feel the air move with their passage. The rain must have softened the ground enough to start a landslide. But then the rumbling abruptly stopped, right in front of him. There could be only one explanation: there must be a ravine directly in front of him. As the falling rocks pitched into empty space, they ceased making any sound. He was sure of it. He was on the edge of a gaping maw.
He backed up, sliding along the ground on his back. He had to put some distance between himself and this pit whose depth he couldn't know. It was an instinctive thing. His feet slipped once, and he slid back down a couple of feet, and even that was enough to set the muscles of his buttocks trembling.
He was taking the rain full in the face now, and by and by he was becoming oblivious to the drops pounding his cheeks. No doubt tears were coursing down his face, too, but the Kaoru that wept seemed like somebody else.
Illusions crowded in on him with frightening force. He saw himself clinging to a rocky outcropping amidst towering waves, waist washed by the sea, and then again he saw himself being sucked into a bottomless swamp, sinking deeper into the ground the more he squirmed.
And then every time he managed to shake off the delusions, to recover his grip on reality, he was left with an overpowering consciousness of death. His body was nearly frozen, and his senses were about to give out.
I'm going to die from rain.
He'd never, not once in his life, worried about rain. It had simply never occurred to him that it could kill him. It was comical, really. Here the whole world was about to die of cancer, and meanwhile he was going to die of a little rain.
He realized it had been quite some time since he'd been rained on enough to get wet. He remembered a late afternoon shower about a month ago: he'd stood by the window on the top floor of the hospital and watched it. One moment the clouds beyond the thick pane of glass were changing color, and the next moment the streets below were wet. That pane was all that separated him from the outside, but it looked at that moment like another world.
Reiko had been with him. Shoulder to shoulder they'd stood in the air-conditioned hallway; Kaoru had been glad for the shower, as it hadn't rained for a while. He'd looked on it as a blessing then. Ryoji was still alive, and new life had just begun in Reiko's womb.
Rain was rain, but what had once seemed like heaven now felt like hell.
He tried to drive away negative thoughts with memories of Reiko's face. He thought of his father and his mother; He tried to muster some courage. But he was too weakened. The moment he let his guard down, the shadow of death crept back over him.
All he had to do was go to sleep and it would all be over. The cold would take care of him, the darkness would carry him off.
Kaoru strove to retain his grip on consciousness.
He was fading fitfully in and out now. When he came to, he sometimes didn't know where he was. If he stayed out for longer, death would take him.
As he shivered from the cold, he longed for the dawn. Once the sun came up, the temperature was bound to rise. Then, if nothing else, he'd be delivered from this fearsome darkness.
As it was, the unrelieved blackness was a breeding ground for delusions. He thought he sensed somebody nearby. Not the familiar Indian, but somebody whose scent was far stronger as it wafted past his nose. Voices of indeterminate gender whispered back and forth. There had to be at least two of them, shadows in communication.
"Is somebody out there?" Kaoru yelled as loud as he could, loud enough to be heard over the rain, loud enough to chase away evil spirits.
But the shadows didn't recede. Instead they increased-there were three of them now, four, five. They surrounded him, muttering. Kaoru couldn't make out what they were saying, couldn't even identify what language they were speaking. They sounded like they might be sympathizing with him, but then he thought he caught a mocking undercurrent. Maybe they were laughing at him after all.
At length, the rain began to lessen and the darkness started giving way. He could gradually make out his surroundings. Everything was gray as of yet-that distant peak that poked up like some sort of religious monument should be brownish-red, but instead it was just a black shape. A monochrome world was better than an invisible one though.
Watching the scenery around him
change for the better should have given Kaoru courage. The dawn had come. The rain was stopping. But he was feverish now, his mind dazed, and he was still chilled and exhausted. Budding doctor though he was, Kaoru had trouble explaining his condition.
He hoped he'd simply caught a cold, but he could feel a tortuous rasping in his lungs. He'd never experienced these symptoms with a common cold. Pneumonia? He put his hand to his forehead, his chest, under his arm, trying to gauge his temperature. He seemed to be running a considerable fever. He couldn't make himself move.
The rain had stopped and morning had come, but he was still curled up in the mud. He wiggled like a shrimp, trying to get to someplace out of the standing water.
What he wanted now was sunlight. He wanted to bask in it, to dry his body and his clothing. His waterlogged clothes were warm now, but from his fever, and he couldn't stand the feel of them.
He took them off and wrung them out. Even that was a hard task in his present state of weakness. When the wind hit his bare skin, he shivered so much that he almost fell over. Still, he managed to get rid of enough water that he felt lighter.
He crawled into a space between the rocks to get out of the wind whipping up the ravine. There he rested for a while. He'd have to husband his strength by staying still until the temperature rose.
As he lay there among the rocks, fighting his fever, the world around him continued to transform. Colours appeared, and distant objects became clearer.
He watched it all, waiting for the clouds to part.
Hours passed. As the temperature climbed, Kaoru was able to sleep for short periods of time. Every time he opened his eyes he gazed vacantly at the movements of the clouds. Still the sun hadn't broken through.
He awoke to a roar. Reminded of his sufferings of the previous night, he sat bolt upright in terror.
He saw something hovering in the sky. Right behind it, the sun was finally emerging. The clouds split apart and rays of sunlight shone on the floating object. Kaoru squinted against the brightness, staring at the heavens beyond the gleaming black thing.
This thing that had appeared was not what Kaoru had imagined. He'd expected to find ruins that bespoke the very beginnings of time, a group of people shrouded in mystery. Instead, what hovered there in the sky backlit by the sun was the product of the most cutting-edge modern science: a jet helicopter. And, just like the Indian's bow had been, the antenna projecting in front of it was aimed straight at Kaoru.
The wind from its rotors buffeted him. Appearing like this, it was almost as if it had been waiting for him to arrive. For a time the helicopter stayed in one spot in the middle of the air, bombarding his ears with its noise. Then it turned, showing him its underbelly, and climbed.
Its rotors rent the clouds, enlarging the hole through which the sun shone. The light that came through now looked to Kaoru like a halo.
PART IV - THE SPACE UNDERGROUND
1
The first thing he saw when he opened his eyes was the whitish ceiling. Kaoru next turned his gaze on all four walls in succession, then on anything else that came within his field of vision.
The room was perfectly sealed off, with no windows. There was a rectangular grating in one corner of the ceiling, most likely a vent for the climate control system. That had to be what kept the room at such a steady, comfortable temperature.
There were two cracks in the walls, each tracing the shape of a rectangle. Doors, of course, but since they were exactly the same colour as the walls he wouldn't have noticed them had it not been for the cracks. One had a sturdy-looking doorknob. He guessed this door connected to a hallway. The other door only had a little handle, and looked like it couldn't be locked from either side; probably it led to a bathroom or something.
The walls were covered not with wallpaper but with leather. At first he'd thought they were white, but as his eyes got used to what they were seeing he realized the walls were actually a light beige.
Over the course of these observations, Kaoru was able to confirm that his consciousness was in good working order. He was still alive, or so it seemed.
Still lying on his back, he stopped looking at things for a while, instead concentrating on each part of his body in turn. He commanded his chest to move, then his belly, his arms, his legs, and finally his fingers and toes. He was relieved to note that he could feel them all move.
It was easy enough to explain to himself the situation in which he'd been placed. He was in a little room with leather-covered walls, lying on a bed. It was that simple. Kaoru was the only person in the room.
Naturally, he was put in mind of hospital rooms, which made it even harder to figure out where he was.
He'd travelled to America alone and ridden a motorcycle to a point in the desert-or had he? Had he done all that in reality, or in a dream? He wasn't sure he could say. At the moment it would have been easier for him to believe he was in his father's hospital room, and that the whole thing had been a dream.
He'd been walking along the ridge in search of the cavern containing the long-lived ones, along the way glimpsing rock-paintings done by ancient Indians on the walls of little caves, illustrations that created an irresistible sense of mystery and perhaps foreshadowed the underground space that he believed was soon to manifest itself to him. But then had come the rainstorm, casting him into the depths of terror, pummelling him half to death.
His head still echoed with the sound he'd heard at dawn, just before the sun came out. That thunderous roar, that strangely out-of-place object hovering in space. An ultramodern jet helicopter painted gunmetal black. It seemed to him now that he'd lost consciousness just as it had flown up and away, showing him its underside.
He could string together the recollections, alright, but there was no way of verifying them. Reality and virtuality had become so confused that he didn't trust his memories.
The only way to confirm things would be to wait for the testimony of a third party. But he'd been awake for an hour now, and he'd been left alone the whole time.
Maybe I'd better get up and leave the room on my own… Kaoru sat up slowly. He felt no pain, but the difficulty with which he managed to raise himself told him that his body was still exhausted. He sat there on the bed trying to bring his breathing under control-he felt a rasp in the back of his throat. Sitting up was one thing. Moving around was another thing altogether.
He looked down to find a pair of sandals waiting for him beside the bed. They didn't belong to him. Somebody had put them there. Huge sandals. They'd dwarf his feet.
In the end it seemed that those sandals were urging him into action. He summoned all his willpower and lowered his feet over the side of the bed and into the sandals. They felt just as oversized as they looked, and they were heavy as well.
He tried walking across the room in them. He made for the room's single point of interface with the outside: the door.
But his feet were tired, and the footgear was bulky and heavy. His feet dragged. The hem of his white gown parted and he saw his thighs. He suddenly realized that he was wearing no underwear beneath the gown. He was buck naked except for this flimsy white gown he'd been dressed in.
The door was right in front of him now. He had no idea where he'd go once he opened it; he just wanted to know where he was. That was his only motive. What kind of place was this? He wanted to see what was outside. And if there was somebody, anybody, there, he wanted to hear what they had to say.
Kaoru placed a hand on the doorknob. Up until that moment it hadn't occurred to him that the door might be locked, but as he touched the knob, his intuition told him that it was. He turned the knob, pushed and pulled, but the door wouldn't budge.
So now Kaoru had achieved a deeper understanding of the situation into which he'd been placed. He'd been confined.
Even standing up was tough. He felt he'd better give up on going out and go back to bed instead. He released his hold on the doorknob and turned around.
At that moment, though, he sensed somebody
on the other side of the door. Kaoru froze in place and listened to the click as the door unlocked.
He took a couple of steps backward and waited for it to open. He'd been denied any information about the person or thing about to appear. The person could walk through that door and introduce himself as a Martian and Kaoru wouldn't have been surprised.
The door opened quietly. He'd been expecting to see someone standing there. Instead, he saw someone sitting there: an old man in a wheelchair, staring straight ahead.
"I see you're awake," the man said in English. Kaoru nodded reflexively.
"You're Kaoru Futami. A pleasure to make your acquaintance. My name is Cristoph Eliot."
The old man held out his hand for Kaoru to shake. Kaoru glanced at the hand: it was abnormally large.
As were the feet that stuck out in front of the wheels of the wheelchair. Even seated as the man was, Kaoru got a good idea of his size. Overall, he was on the small side for a foreigner, but his hands and feet were disproportionately big.
Kaoru then wondered at himself and the way he was remarking on the irregularity of this man Eliot's body. Shouldn't he be in shock right about now? Why does this old man know my name? All of his identification, all his papers, had been lost with the rucksack.
He shook the man's hand, observing him closely. He had a head like an egg: not a single hair grew on it. His skin was porcelain white and lustrous. Judging by the hue of his skin, it was probably unfair to think of him as an old man. At the same time, he had a dark spot on his neck and left cheek, the kind of mark peculiar to old age. It contrasted sharply with his pale skin.
From Eliot's grip, Kaoru realized the man bore him no ill will, so he decided to ask the question that had been on his mind.
"What is this place?"
Eliot's greyish eyes narrowed and a smile played over his lips.
"The place you were trying to get to."
