Paprika

by Yasutaka Tsutsui

  Atsuko had no answer. Even if she could begin to reply, the best she could achieve would be an abstract hypothesis that would reaffirm the unfathomed power of dreams. For although they were merely messengers from the realm of dreams, these apparitions had the power to cause death or leave lasting scars in the real world.

  “It’s all my fault.” Tokita had covered his face with his hands a number of times already, but now groaned loudly as though he could bear it no longer. “I should never have invented such a stupid thing. I was too careless. I should have given it a protective code. I’m a failure. A failure as a scientist.”

  They all fell silent. None could find the words to comfort or excuse him. His sense of guilt thus reconfirmed, Tokita squirmed in his chair as he continued to release little explosions of self-reproach.

  “I didn’t think of the consequences. I was drowning in a sea of my own invention. That’s right.” He turned to Atsuko beside him and slowly extended his fat palms. “I will dismantle the DC Minis. Give them all to me. At least the ones you’ve got. I’ll dismantle them immediately.”

  “W-w-wait a minute!” Yamaji was on the edge of his seat. “I understand how you feel, but the enemy also has DC Minis. I’m not going to sit here and let you dismantle ours! It would be me who’d take the rap if we had reason to regret it later.”

  “That’s right,” agreed Noda. “At least discuss it with the Chief Superintendent first.”

  “All right. Just as long as the very existence of the DC Mini doesn’t increase the residual effects,” Tokita moaned on.

  “But even if we disposed of all the DC Minis we have,” Shima said weakly, showing signs of fatigue in his eyes, “as long as they still have them, they’ll keep invading our dreams night after night. I can’t take much more of this. Last night Osanai made a complete fool of me again.”

  He must have been talking about the way he’d been verbally abused, buried in the ground with only his head showing and made to scuttle about like a mole.

  “Our only chance of getting the devices back from them is in our dreams. I don’t think they’re wearing them anymore. But even so,” Atsuko said to encourage the weak-willed Shima, “please be patient for a little longer. I’ll always protect you, just as I did last night.”

  “Oh, yes! You did, didn’t you. And you were still fighting …” Shima said dolefully. He seemed to have aged noticeably.

  Noda and Tokita nodded toward Atsuko with the empathy of comrades who share the same dreams. Whether or not they’d actually appeared in those dreams, they had witnessed Atsuko’s nightly battles.

  “The Chief Superintendent was saying he’d had a fair old dingdong with Inui last night,” Yamaji said with a wry smile. “Ah, but of course it’s nothing to jest about.”

  “You mean after that,” Atsuko said, glancing across at Shima.

  “It was like a scene from New Year’s Eve. Osanai escaped from the Chief, but then Inui must have appeared in the hallway instead of him,” Shima said with a worried look. “But of course! That hallway must have been part of Osanai’s dream, so naturally the scene would have changed.”

  “I didn’t see that bit,” Tokita said nervously. “I wonder if he was all right, fighting with Inui?”

  “Don’t worry, he can look after himself,” said Noda, as if to banish the notion that he himself might not have been “all right.” “We’re on the offensive, after all.”

  “After that, Osanai appeared as a young samurai in an old post house,” Shima continued. “Even we were dressed in period costume. I was shocked when the samurai drew his sword, but around that time Inui and the Chief Superintendent would have been fighting in their own dreams, I suppose.”

  “Oh yes. He drew his sword,” echoed a hollow voice from somewhere else. Everyone froze and stiffened with fear. Inspector Ube alone rose and stared at the bedroom door.

  “Someone’s in there!”

  “Who is it?” Yamaji also stood. “Who’s in there? Come out now!” he demanded, already bracing himself with a sense of foreboding.

  The door opened slowly. The six in the living room gasped. There in the doorway, leaning on the doorpost, stood Morio Osanai. He was dressed as a young samurai and held a naked sword in his hand, his indistinct outline merging with the glimmering light behind him. His lifeless eyes of gloom and darkness glowered at them under heavy lids, casting a look that carried a vague threat of malice. Though his visual appearance was incomplete, he carried an evil presence that pierced the subconscious of the six. He was beautiful – so beautiful, indeed, that he could have stepped out of a sashie illustration from an Edo-period novel. But that merely enhanced the sense of danger.

  “He’s from last night’s dream,” Atsuko said as she retreated toward the kitchen. Her seat had been closest to the door.

  “Disappear! Disappear!” Tokita incanted loudly while protecting Atsuko with his massive frame, mindful of the tale he’d just heard from Noda. “You don’t exist. Disappear! Disappear!”

  The young samurai smiled thinly, then started to murmur words that were clearly those of a man talking in his sleep. “What happened after I drew the sword. In my hand, it’s in my hand. When I wake up, there’s old Tokita. Ticky tocky tacky too. There’s me. Adultery, is it. Devil of the white chair, devil of the gold chair. Wretch. Cur.”

  Ube aimed his pistol at the young samurai, who was approaching Tokita with sword poised at eye level. Unwilling to shoot, Ube turned to Chief Inspector Yamaji. “Er – what do you want me to do?”

  “If you shoot him, he surely won’t die in real life,” Yamaji said in confusion. “But what effect will it have on him?”

  The young samurai made for Tokita, wielding the blade above his head.

  “Get him off me!” Tokita yelled as he cowered before the samurai.

  “Shoot him!” screamed Atsuko. “It’ll have no effect in reality!”

  “Shoot!”

  Ube sensed that the samurai was about to bring his sword down. He pulled the trigger.

  The samurai’s body jerked as a spray of red spattered his chest. His sword sliced aimlessly through the air. The sight of his Adonisian face distorted with pain, his hair all disheveled, was not without its sordid side, as if painted with distemper. But at the same time it shone with a perverse beauty that seemed not of this world. His staggering lurch was a dance of death in full technicolor. Those faltering cries of anguish, the fresh blood that trickled from the corner of his mouth, those dying eyes staring fixedly into space – these were truly the aesthetics of death. And in the very instant before he fell facedown on the floor, he vanished.

  “Wha—?!”

  A dizzy, falling sensation made Osanai sit up with a jolt. He was in the Vice President’s office at the Institute for Psychiatric Research, sitting opposite Inui’s desk. They had just been discussing the Board of Directors. Inui was staring at Osanai with a look of astonishment.

  “Sorry. I just felt a bit dizzy,” said Osanai. “Trouble is, I’m not getting enough sleep these days. Especially last night, as you know …” They’d both shared the same dream. It didn’t need to be discussed. Osanai’s speech trailed off.

  “Are you all right?” asked Inui.

  “I’m all right,” answered Osanai.

  But was he? He’d felt a certain emptiness since the morning; now he wondered if he could have lost part of his ego during that dizzy spell just now. What’s going on? he wanted to ask himself. A void had formed in his senses. He shook his head vigorously to regain some vitality.

  “What was that just now?” Inui asked, still staring at Osanai with his head tilted questioningly.

  “What was what?”

  Inui removed his glasses, put them on the desk and rubbed his eyes. “For a fraction of a second there, you seemed to disappear from your chair. Then you reappeared as a samurai warrior holding a sword. Your chest was stained with blood – you looked as though you were in your death throes. It was so unspeakably heart-rending, yet so indescribably beautiful.
What on earth was that?” A gleam of eroticism hovered faintly over Inui’s eyes. He got up slowly. His face softened into a look of lechery. “It was so very attractive. As if the dream you had last night had become manifest in reality for a moment, through the power of the Devil’s seed. But who could it have been that killed you?” Inui walked behind Osanai’s back and gently placed both hands on his shoulders. “My, but you were beautiful. I fell in love with you again.”

  17

  Sleeping scared Atsuko as much as it did Osanai. The difference was that Atsuko had a mission: she had to get the DC Minis back. That fully justified the aggression she meted out to Inui, Osanai, and Hashimoto in the dreams she shared with them. What did it mean to have the upper hand in those dreams? It meant she was free to dictate the setting and progression of the dreams to her own advantage, and to invade her opponents’ dreams at will.

  What scared Atsuko was the possibility that, while she continued to dream, she could fall into an even deeper sleep, become trapped in her unconscious and eventually be unable to escape from her dreams. To prevent this, Atsuko devised ways of sleeping lightly, disregarding the adverse effects on her health over the long term. Among others, these involved using drugs or self-waking devices, or sleeping on her chair in front of the PT devices.

  That night, she had decided to use a self-waking device. She’d set it to ensure that she would remain in shallow sleep without fully waking. She had also placed her telephone near her pillow. She had an arrangement with Tokita and Shima that they would phone each other every few hours, in case the device failed to work properly.

  Despite the shallowness of her sleep, there were times when her body slept deeply and only her brain waves followed waking patterns. This was during REM sleep. It was quite impossible to operate PT devices while dreaming at such times; usually, she wasn’t even aware that she was dreaming then.

  It may have been during her first REM sleep that night. Atsuko was dreaming but unaware that it was a dream. She was in a laboratory with Hashimoto, back in the days when they were still on amicable terms. It looked like a biology lab, or perhaps chemistry. In front of them were a number of test tubes containing what seemed to be bacteria; they may have been experimenting on bacteriophages. Atsuko felt unbearably thirsty, and went to drink from a bottle of mineral water. On closer inspection, the bottle was full of tiny, wriggling green things.

  “Bacteria!”

  “You need to boil that,” advised Hashimoto, standing next to her.

  Atsuko transferred the water to a flask and went to light a bunsen burner.

  “Wait a minute!” Atsuko stopped the gas and held the flask up to the light.

  The bacteria were growing.

  “Not bacteria – fungi!”

  Hashimoto nodded. “Mmm. Incomplete fungi, more like myxomycetes. Probably some kind of mutabile-type mutation.”

  There were three fungi, colored in malignant shades of dark green, dark red, and dark yellow. Due to contact with air, they’d already grown to a length of about three centimeters. They were like gigantic larvae, their bodies shaped like spindles with something resembling a face at the top. Traces of eyes and noses could even be seen on those faces.

  “I can’t drink this,” declared Atsuko, her thirst more intense still.

  “These are carbohydrates,” said Hashimoto. He poked a chopstick into the flask, snared the yellow larva, took it out, and bit its head off.

  Yeurghhh! Almost retching, Atsuko peered into the flask to see her own face on the red larva.

  “Wahahahahahahaha!” Hashimoto laughed loudly beside her. He was the green larva, which now bore Inui’s face. He proceeded to coil his spindle-like lower body around Atsuko’s larval form.

  “It’s a dream!” The shock of Inui’s appearance made her realize that. She instantly changed her red body to a red shirt and turned into Paprika. She had fallen asleep unusually early; it was only seven o’clock in the evening. Like her, Inui must also have wanted to enjoy a nice, relaxing sleep without meeting anyone in his dreams. But Inui concealed his true intentions. He was exercising supreme self-control and restraint.

  Hashimoto! Help! Help me! Paprika tried to call out. Perhaps it really had been Hashimoto just now. Perhaps he too was sleeping early, and had been dreaming of that experiment with Atsuko. In that case, Inui and Osanai must also have taken to sleeping early, hoping to prevent the weak-willed Hashimoto from revealing their secrets under pressure from Paprika.

  They were in Hashimoto’s favorite noodle bar. Hashimoto was reaching across from the other side of the table, trying to wrench the larval Inui from his coiled embrace of Paprika. Hashimoto’s subconscious was preoccupied with that past time when he was on amicable terms with Atsuko. Paprika realized that Hashimoto had been in love with Atsuko, though fully aware that she was out of his reach.

  “Ah, so you’re sleeping after all!” said Paprika.

  You idiot! Inui sneered as he lunged at Hashimoto. Paprika could read Inui’s cruel intention: even if he didn’t actually kill this bothersome traitor, this former ally who’d been nothing but a liability all along, he would at least drive him insane. Hashimoto, run! No – wake up! Paprika shouted. Flames shot up from a frying pan in the kitchen.

  Inui turned into the devil Amon, a serpent’s tail entwined around his body. Fire spewed from his mouth. Lord Amon, a Marquis of Hell with the face of an owl. The terrifyingly vivid presence of this occultic apparition was enough to scare Hashimoto out of his wits. He screamed. He’d suddenly seen his conciliatory gesture to Paprika as an act of betrayal, and could read the terrible punishment now being planned in his master’s mind. The terror of induced madness or gruesome death at the hands of Lord Amon made Hashimoto urinate long and hard in his sleep. Whether he was in a dream or not, he knew there was no way of escaping his fate.

  Both Hashimoto and Amon vanished from Paprika’s dream. She knew, even before the warm sensation and smell from Hashimoto’s nether regions reached her senses, that he had wet himself. That meant he’d woken up, but why had Lord Amon, the incarnation of Seijiro Inui, disappeared with him? Paprika shuddered with horror. She felt as though she could hear, from the distant reaches of the waking world, the sound of Hashimoto’s dying cries. It sounded as if Amon had appeared in reality at the moment Hashimoto awoke, and was in the process of strangling him in his own bed.

  But Hashimoto was not sleeping in his own bed, in his own apartment. He’d been taking a nap on the sofa in his research lab. He’d brought the torment of death back from his dream to the real world, and had awoken together with that torment. What a hideous reality, that even after waking from a dream to escape its torments, those torments still remain! What a heartless, cruel reality that, with no means of escape, the only possible conclusion was death! Hashimoto’s chest was tightly bound by the demon’s serpentine tail, its sharp claws clutching his scrotum, the flames that spewed from its beak-like mouth burning his face. Asphyxiated by fire, his testicles burst and his ribs broken simultaneously, Hashimoto suffered three deaths at once. A red death, a yellow death, and a purple death. Having savored Hashimoto’s three-fold agony to its fullest possible extent, the Marquis of Hell moaned in satisfaction and disappeared.

  Choosing to kill a disobedient underling for the slightest act of betrayal, even before pursuing the enemy, was an act truly befitting Lord Amon, a demon who commands forty legions in the realm of hell. Or perhaps, since Amon can discern the past and foretell the future, it was a deed done in the foreknowledge that Hashimoto would oppose him in the future. After completing his butchery, Lord Amon hurried back to the dream where he’d left his real enemy, his reason restored as that of Seijiro Inui.

  Left alone in her dream, Paprika finally remembered her original mission there. She was near the exit on the quieter side of a station in central Tokyo. As she walked out of the station building she saw a vast swamp spread out before her, a stark contrast to the high-rise buildings and bustling city center she’d left behind. There she roamed
about in the mud, seeking the atmosphere of Morio Osanai.

  “Osanai? Morio? Where are you?!” she called. There was no reaction. He obviously wasn’t asleep yet, and Paprika would be unable to locate his DC Mini this time. Even then, there was no room for complacency; it would still be too dangerous for her to fall into a sound sleep, believing herself to be alone. Inui seemed to have woken up with Hashimoto while still in the guise of Amon, but would almost certainly return. Paprika’s only option was to challenge Inui, force him to reveal the location of the DC Mini. But how could she overcome his will, his conscious mind, thickly coated as it was with stubborn occultism? It might be a better idea to wake up first.

  A number of men who looked like vagrants or laborers were wandering around in the mud. They seemed to be stealing glances at Paprika. A woman’s sense of danger welled up inside her. The men could have been agents of Inui’s dream; the swamp could have been an image inside Inui’s mind. Paprika hurriedly changed the scene. She was in a library, a reading room where the air was cold and dry. It was a broad, clean space with a high ceiling. No one else was there; it seemed safe enough. Paprika opened out a large pictorial encyclopedia on the table in front of her. The title was Bertuch’s Picture Book for Children.

  Oh no. He’s back! Paprika moaned. One of the plates in the encyclopedia was a picture of a griffin. This was a hideous creature with the head and wings of a bird and the body of a lion. The griffin was shown in profile, but as soon as Paprika made the connection with Inui, it stirred and turned to look at her. It had Inui’s face and the smile of a cat.

  “The DC Mini,” Paprika said, to strike the first blow. “The DC Mini. Where have you hidden it?”

  Violent emotion made the griffin Inui shake its body and flutter its wings.

  “Nuh!”

  Inui was desperately trying to suppress his consciousness, but through a chink in that consciousness, Paprika could see the inside of someone’s laboratory. In a corner of the lab was a box containing dangerous chemicals.