She stirred noiselessly, and Stephen felt the movements as if the night had constricted around the two of them. There was a tense intimacy between them, as between strangers in dreams. Her presence was instinct with some significance for him or intent towards him, like a swelling in the throat that won’t become words.
There passed a few moments of expectant ambiguity, bobbing moistly like an Adam’s apple. Then he realised why this intimacy existed. He knew her. It was Mariko, the girl whose clothes had been found in a heap beside the lake. The photograph in the newspaper may as well have been a photograph of a corpse, so different was it to the brightness of the living article before him. But what was she doing here? Suddenly the simple presence of another human being seemed a supernatural, even a sinister thing, enough to paralyse and dumbfound him, as if with a fever. Were not all human beings, after all, a species of ghost, a strange impossible flavour called identity that haunts and fades? But then it occurred to him that there was something else that was pricking him with cold fear. It was the idea that she was not real at all. Her movements were vivid and lively with all the subtleties of a human personality. An ambrosial glow surrounded her like the halo of a candle flame. Yet she was empty as a husk.
In the next moment she vanished from existence, usurped by a sudden inrush of emptiness and cold, and for a while Stephen could do nothing but shiver. She had been only an image, not a three-dimensional thing. He felt a sudden stab of fear as he consciously recalled for the first time since setting eyes on her that she had died some twenty or more years ago. That fear was indistinguishable from the sting of loneliness. There was only him in that place.
He shuddered again and rubbed his face, still a little wet from the rain. Of course, like most people, he had heard stories from others who had experienced such things; ghosts, visions, hallucinations; but had been utterly unable to imagine what it must be like to see something that was not really there. He felt his seeming unlikelihood of ever experiencing anything similar to be a personal lack. There must have been a whole dimension of life to which he was denied access. But now that unimaginable thing had happened, quite as if it had nothing to do with him at all. He was glad, relieved to be able to experience such a thing and still return unchanged to the certainties of the rational world.
He turned to cast his gaze over the night sky. The silently racked clouds had been hauled apart like heavy stage curtains, and between them resounded a lucid darkness. Then Stephen’s relief of a moment before shrank and vanished. In its stead there intruded a new and terrible confusion. The darkness was endlessly deep with infinitesimal points of radiating gloom, like veil after veil of rain seen from afar. But in that darkness there was one great arcing band of darkness of a deeper hue, as resonant with power as a colossal bronze statue. What could it be, this sombre, unresplendent coil? It was as if the night had formed a smooth body of muscle and sinew that caught no reflection, only glimmered a wan darkness. Stephen thought suddenly, with a grasping panic, of the shower that had soaked him. Surely this was not a rainbow?
Perhaps things would have turned out very differently, but, as not infrequently happens, at just the time when Stephen would have benefited from the attention of others, those others were temporarily busy with their own concerns, and did not notice anything amiss. Besides, at this juncture, rather than seek help, Stephen was inclined to conceal what was occupying him, as if it were the guiltiest of secrets.
The Sugimoris begged Stephen to excuse their busyness and to amuse himself as best he could. And so Stephen had no difficulty in coaxing the keys to Komakichi’s car from his fingers. So much hinged on the simple relinquishment of those keys. Stephen took a profound satisfaction in the casualness of the exchange when they dropped into his palm, like an escapologist slipping out of chains and through the bolted door of a cell with ridiculous ease.
The week following the second visit to the lake had been hectic. The Sugimoris had dashed in and out, stopping only briefly, oblivious to the scenes that passed upon the stage where they made their hurried entrances and exits. Stephen spoke to them with appropriate nonchalance and composure. They might greet him as he sat in his room, unaware that only the door frame prohibited their view of something sinister and uncommon. And perhaps, if they had looked around the door frame they would have seen nothing at all. And perhaps they would have seen something very different to the beauty that Stephen saw—a corpse softened and shredded by water.
Stephen was on a yo-yo, swinging back and forth between the normality of pleasantries and a day-lit room, and a world that, whilst appearing to be the same world, felt pressurised and dangerous, like the atmosphere of a crippled, sinking submarine. This quality of mixed oppressiveness and instability had become so consistent to Stephen that he was no longer aware of it. What did hold his attention were the visitations he was now receiving regularly from Mariko. Upon returning to his room on the very first evening he saw her, the rain had rattled its beads against the window and he had caught her reflection in it, raising an arm to adjust her hair. He had turned swiftly and seen the reflection in perfect verisimilitude, shockingly solid, in the wardrobe mirror. But she had been nowhere in the room.
From then onwards she visited him frequently, the presence stealing over him like exhaustion. He would often become aware of her first as a sort of poisonous perfume. She might occupy a corner of the room like the darkened intensity of an underwater grotto. At other times there would be nothing to differentiate her from the objects of the present moment. And the unannounced lightness of this latter kind of visitation always shocked and chilled him, leaving a strange aftertaste, as if such lightness were the real nature of the physical world, which remained unchanged no matter how Stephen blinked. She never spoke, and yet Stephen was teased by a tight expectancy as if she were always about to speak. Surely there was some message to her visits other than her presence itself? And then, she was not the only visitor, for in her wake their came, like the evil mischief of a poltergeist, all manner of strange manifestations—pains and anxieties that lurked like stinking damp patches, waiting for Stephen to squelch into them, and sudden involuntary visions that overwhelmed him with horrible images of decay and violence.
If there was a message in these visits then Stephen felt it in the scene that billowed up in his mind one midweek evening when Mariko appeared once again, a glowing reflection in mirror and window, waiting for Stephen to cross some threshold and join her. Like someone totally exposed to the eyes of a captor, Stephen did not hide his weakness. He only gazed at the glowing flame of the body, and suddenly he was taken, escorted to another place encircled by the pale blue of dusk. It was the lake. Mariko was there at the lake’s margin. But he was not there. He was less real than this, the air of a summer evening in 1969. Why should Mariko come alone to the edge of the water in the pale gloom? Whatever her purpose was it was as tentative as seduction.
Without the Madonna-like glow of the usual apparition, her movements in the dusk were as fascinating as a rare glimpse of deer. She picked her way along the rocks ringed by water, the trees behind her a matted, swaying canopy of luxuriant dark, pierced by prickly light. This was a stretch of the shore that Stephen did not know. Now she slipped off her shoes and began to paddle, her feet breaking the water, entering the bodeful forcefield of the lake. The water clung to her skin coldly, but somewhere in it was the blush of the evening’s warmth, so that it was a pleasant cold. She took ginger steps back to the shore. She had lost her hesitation. On the shore she undressed, so that her whole body was vulnerable to the air, and to the water.
She splashed in up to her thighs, watching her body disappear into the water’s opacity. She slipped in further, until her feet no longer touched the layer of soft fur and slime, the silt that covered the rocks. Her toes were suspended in the dark unseen void of water. Now even her tumbling hair was wet, clinging about her neck and shoulders.
Stephen, who was not there, could see the pale, naked form of Mariko, performing its soft, f
luid dance of breaststroke and frog kick through the dull, greenish murk of the waters. It was as if the very act of swimming were a sort of amphibious yoga, opening her up completely, offering her beauty to the liquid spores of disease that threatened to obliterate it from sight. She swam until the cold opened out beneath her in a fatal, foundering depth, like the watery terror that now swirled in her bowels. The lake was cavernous beneath her, deeper than her height from head to toe many times over. There was nothing for her searching, pedalling feet to kick against. Soon the icy, unknown cavern beneath her seemed like the cavern of her own exhaustion, into which her weaving, panicking limbs were bound to sink and flail, as into a net. The water ceased to support her. Her face went under. Her body was vertical now, not horizontal. If she could climb into horizontal again she could swim back to the shore. The body thrashed in frustrated eagerness for land. But she turned towards deeper water and let her foolish body struggle in the wrong direction. She colluded with the heaviness of fatalism that had numbed her limbs, acting, but making sure she acted too slowly or clumsily, rolling and flailing helplessly in the water. If she could struggle, struggle till the last, she might be able to endure it. But she struggled knowing already she was dead. The struggle was not a short one. She had to win her death. Stephen witnessed the thrashing till its end, in an agony of mind that seemed insupportable. He saw the waters eventually take her down, seeming to pass her from one pair of wraithlike hands to the next.
He awoke from this vision with the muscles of his throat and stomach so tight they were bruised, as if he had been retching violently with nothing to bring up. He was confident that he had somehow been allowed to witness the actual last moments of Hara Mariko. He thought of her bare feet breaking the surface of the lake. The glow that was hers now when she paid her silent visits was also imparted to the lake. If he could become so intimate with her death, he could become intimate with that after-death glow too. After all, she must still be there, in the lake.
He decided to try and find the shrine first. He set out soon after everyone else had left the house. His memory held good, and he arrived without mishap at the lake. There was a road half hidden by trees that followed the joined bases of the encircling mountains. Nosing tentatively along it, Stephen found it passed by the mountain where Komakichi had indicated that the shrine was sited.
He found a lay-by in which to leave the car and walked along the road looking for some route of ingress to the mountain’s slopes. Finally he came to a set of old, narrow steps cut into the stone. Higher up, where they began to cut across the slope, Stephen could see that huge bundles of brushwood had been tied together and piled up in an attempt to render the way impassable. He climbed the steps to get a closer look. He found that there were warning signs planted at the sides of the bundles. Leaning and rusty though the signs were, the single word ‘danger’ still silently maintained an atmosphere of emergency. What danger, exactly? It must have been landslides, he concluded. Anyway, he thought he could crawl past the bundles if he tried.
He began to climb the rocky slope. Trees had toppled here and there, and their unearthed roots thrust up from beneath the carpet of needles and soil. It was hard to tell where the steps must have once led. They appeared to exist almost at random, joining two precarious points on the slope together like the ladders on a snakes and ladders board. If there had been proper paths here before, they were now unrecognisable. He thought that a wide and general reconnaissance of the lower slope, if he kept his head up and his eyes open, should disclose signs of the likely whereabouts of the shrine. Following this plan, it was not long before he came upon something that could well be called a sign.
He had scaled a sort of tumulus of rocks, and, virtually falling through the screen of trees at their summit, was surprised to find the rocks dropping away suddenly on the opposite side. He only just managed to keep his feet, and found himself standing on a flat platform of earth that was obviously part of a stairway. He was momentarily startled by the impression that he was not alone, but this immediately subsided into mere unease. Two dark statues stood in the far corners of the platform. They were Oni, Japanese demons, standing remarkably erect with legs apart, as if taut with some wicked zeal. Despite their stillness, Stephen felt them capable of suddenly leaping or darting away with such speed as to render their movements invisible. Something ominous in their positioning made Stephen guess they belonged in some way to the shrine. Were the Mamushi, then, so audacious as to advertise their presence? Or, rather than announcing their presence, was it more in the spirit of a warning? In any case, looking at the dark metal of the demons’ skins, he was oddly certain that surprisingly few other eyes had rested here.
The horns and tusks, the pointed tongues, were features surely not so very different to those of western demons. Yet these were divorced from the Christian tradition utterly, and from Stephen’s vestigial sense of good and evil. He did not understand their origin, so they were merely mysterious and grotesque. They seemed to forbid his way by the force of this disturbing ambiguity. For all this, Stephen knew that they would not move, that they presented no danger. What really proved a barrier for him was the impression that he knew what sort of eyes had rested here, and what sort of fate those eyes had witnessed and finally closed upon.
Until he had passed these dark and weather-dulled sentinels, Stephen felt a terrible repulsion, such as that between the same poles of different magnets. Then he found himself in the unresistant air of desolation that reigned over the ruptured stairway beyond. In places the way became obliterated by rocks, trees and other detritus, but it never ceased entirely. Before long the path levelled out, and at length, sooner than he expected, Stephen shuffled through a curtain of withered and knotted creepers and onto a dry grassy plateau where the heat and silence were spun into the singing of insects. The shrine itself stood on the other side of the creepers, its wooden planks sere and rickety. The whole clearing, desiccated by the sun, had almost the quality of an old sepia photograph, and Stephen was near convinced that with a single step he had crossed a threshold of one or two hundred years. There had apparently been no interference here from more recent ages.
Stephen turned his attention first to the shrine itself. Weeds and grasses had grown up around it, and what had once been some sort of banner now hung in filthy tatters. It had clearly never been a shrine of wealth and repute. No sponsors had paid for exquisite carvings of dragons and pine trees. Yet neither was it so ramshackle that it would never be taken for the genuine article. If Stephen did not know better he would think it just another Shinto shrine, albeit badly neglected. He might even be able to persuade himself that the sinister quality in its leaning timbers and inky interior was pure imagination on his part.
This was the site from which the author of that anonymous volume had claimed to gather much of his evidence. Unless that evidence was still in his keeping, Stephen too should be able to find some of it here. He thought of the darkness pressed between the leaves of that book, like the darkness of the matted vegetation around the clearing. He wiped his forehead. He was sweating profusely. In a conscious effort to break out of the strange stupor that had descended on him, he began to cast about the clearing for any remnants of that evidence.
He was puzzled to find the earth baked flat in a number of places, and smudged with ashes. Perhaps they were not very recent, but these traces of fire could not have been centuries, or even decades old. If only he knew more about such things. In one of these patches the ash was quite deep. Stephen kicked at it and his toes struck something solid and weighty that shifted under the crumbling wasp-nest of grey. Crouching down he fished the object out with his fingers. It was a knife, its blade and hilt now a smouldered, smoky black. Beneath the surface layer of soot were evil-looking shadows that may have been rust, or may have been stains of another kind.
He stood once more, with the knife in his hand like a dowsing rod, turning slightly on his heels as he did so. Looking up suddenly he was struck at once by something
he had not noticed until then. Before him was a gap in the trees, and through it could be seen almost the whole lake, the sun beating upon its shimmering surface as upon a vast mirror. The prospect leapt up at him like a sulphurous revelation, sending his heart into such fibrillation that it took on a lightness and fragility that almost sickened him. Now the lake was a drum pounded by the sun, and Stephen felt his bones shake with its reverberations. He almost put his hands to his ears, but realised the pounding was that of silence. He spun away from the lake and saw wooden posts of grim aspect standing at the fringes of the plateau. A swelling dizziness had overcome him as if he were under an immense magnifying glass focusing a ray of solar intensity upon him. Now a confusion of voices, like chanting, rising in an invisible tide. The poles appeared to be tilting, but perhaps it was him. He looked towards the shrine. His attention was caught by the ropes bellying from the eaves. The ropes of shrines were some symbol of atrophied meaning, and traditionally they grew thick towards their impendent centre. There was something wrong with the bulge in these intertwined ropes, however. They were bloating and writhing before his eyes. In their animated frenzy they twisted off the eaves altogether and dropped slowly to the ground. Stephen could see now they were not ropes at all but white, corpulent snakes, threshing venomously. Were they furiously coupling, or trying to devour each other? Were these the throes of coition, or the agonies of death? But then, the ropes began to fray, or rather, the grappling serpents began to burst and disintegrate, becoming a mass of wriggling, seething worms.
Stephen covered his face with his hands. The clamour of chanting rose, a cracked, washed-out sound like static in the air, floating and distending in Stephen’s hearing the way transparent strings and globules sometimes float before the eyes. Whether there were clouds or not, the air in itself felt overcast with the voices. Stephen thought he could feel the movement of bodies, the beat of feet on the earth. He tried to bury himself deeper into a corner of his internal darkness. So intent was he on cowering away from the lowering storm of chanting that it was a few moments before he realised it had tuned out and ceased. Taking his hands away he looked about. There were no leaning posts, and the shrine ropes were where they should be, suspended from the shrine’s eaves. All was as it had been when he first arrived. But the shrine looked even more now like a congeries of terrible carrion poles, and the insect-spun silence bellied with some ghostly potential, like pure malice. As if speed alone might save him, he dashed from the clearing, back through the curtain of creepers. As he rushed past he saw the luminiferous figure of Mariko standing serenely by the edge of the curtain, silent as a film and vivid as delirium, raising an arm as if showing him out. He felt thoroughly used and tricked.
Morbid Tales Page 15
