Domesday

by Kei Urahama

  Those who were abruptly thrown into this extraordinary world were hungry for some kind of explanation. It was to the extent that if anyone had shown up with any sort of answers, no matter how contradictory, they were grateful for it. Basically ‘faith’ is just such a thing, Ishida thought.

  Only a few days prior the entire group of believers had made a major move to the upper floors.

  Mounting the dimly lit stairs with candles in hand, or in their words ‘moving closer to God’, seeking the place where the apartment building met the wall of flesh. Immediately after the Dome appeared there were only a handful of believers, but now there were almost thirty of them. Mostly they were housewives, the elderly and the traumatized people who’d been attacked by the angels outside but survived.

  I could never be a believer, Ishida thought. I can’t accept their explanations. I don’t have the ability to ignore contradictions like they do.

  How can they believe God would do such a thing?

  For the sake of argument, assuming that this is an act of God, then that God must be insane.

  Chapter 8

  So the angels revive and return those who’ve died after taking them away to heaven.

  But the body that returns in their stead is so horrible that it can’t be deemed ‘human’ anymore.

  When the corpses were returned that first time, no one could have confused them for the elderly couple who had committed suicide.

  It was Yuriko Endo, once a front desk receptionist, who first noticed them. She had chosen to live with her colleague, Haruo Chikama, in an available room on the first floor. She ventured alone into the entrance hall taking artificial flowers to put at the site where the elderly couple had died. It was not more than one hour after the angels had taken their broken bodies away.

  As soon as she entered the hall, she witnessed the extraordinary spectacle beyond the glass doors and became frozen with shock.

  Two people were crawling in the area where the couple had died. Wearing gowns, or maybe robes, they scuttled around like crocodiles bathing in the sun, legs splayed and arms propelling them forward like a swimmer’s breaststroke. Or like crucified bodies, stiffly skulking on the ground.

  What could they be? They were too oddly flat to be human bodies, yet… As she thought this, one of them raised its face.

  But it couldn’t really be called a face. It was crushed beyond anything resembling human features. Two eyes jutted out incongruously as if a blindfolded child had drawn them.

  Upon hearing her scream, the two monsters angled in her direction and scrambled toward the glass doors. Terrified, Yuriko crushed the artificial bouquet to her chest and ran to call Chikama.

  Fortunately most of the garden where the creatures were crawling was enclosed inside a concrete wall. It was decided that they would follow the proposal of the building guard, Mikami, to confine the monsters by blocking the gap in the wall with boards. Ishida and Kyoko assisted in this operation. As Kyoko and others attracted the things by standing in front of the glass doors, men went out to construct the barricade. Thankfully the task was completed without incident.

  As three days passed, the monsters began to cannibalize each other. When one would die, a sphere would appear again and carry the corpse back to the wall of the Dome. After a half hour or so, it would return with an even more grotesque version of the thing. And once again the cycle would be repeated.

  Even now the creatures were still there. More and more transformed into horribly disfigured shapes by multiple deaths.

  The appearance of the reanimated dead exacerbated the sense of desperation amongst the survivors within the enclosed world, and this led to more and more people killing themselves, one after another.

  Suicides became a kind of epidemic. A contagion that spread through the passage of information. One person’s final decision inducing that of another.

  The most likely to opt for this end were those separated from family by the Dome’s impenetrable walls, forced to live in solitude inside the huge building without electricity or water.

  The Dome materialized on a weekday at approximately 3pm, Monday, October 22nd.

  This was the time when ordinary office workers were at their job sites, a majority of housewives were either shopping or participating in some activity or other, and children were not yet home from school.

  Hence the majority of remaining residents in the apartment at this time were the housewives awaiting the return of their families, the rich and retired elderly, and those like Fukazawa with careers calling for odd hours of work. A group of spheres had invaded the building, of course, indiscriminately abducting even small children or babies before their mothers’ very eyes. Incidentally, the suicide following that of the elderly couple was one such mother.

  Some climbed the dark stairs to the roof half dissected by the Dome and jumped just as the elderly couple had done. Others chose to hang by the neck or cut their wrists in their own rooms.

  Each time they died, the angels would come.

  The angels would take the unfortunate deceased’s corpse away then return it in the form of a hungry monster.

  Yes, they were hungry. They had no intellect to speak of, only hunger.

  Ishida happened to be on the scene once when one of them was about to pounce on an infant.

  Two weeks before, Kyoko and Ishida had ventured down the stairs together to reach the first floor, relying on a flashlight to negotiate the dark stairwell. Upon reaching the fourth floor landing they’d heard a scream.

  Rushing to the source, they found the screamer to be a young housewife named Masami Ohno, who lived in Apartment 401. She had a newborn baby named Shin, born late the year before. He was the only baby who hadn’t been carried away by the spheres that first day. Perhaps because children could fit perfectly inside them, they were favored as easy targets. For this reason youngsters were rarely seen within the building. In fact the number of children under the age of ten amounted to zero. That is to say, aside from Shin. He was the sole exception. Other than him, all the young children had been sucked up into walls of the Dome.

  Shizuka Takahashi, who lived on the same floor as Masami, was one of the housewives whose children had been abducted that first day. Her son had just celebrated his first birthday.

  Before the advent of the Dome, Masami and Shizuka were friends. Both housewives with babies, they would come and go into each other’s rooms, go for walks together on the square, and spend most of their days together without their husbands around. But the appearance of the Dome changed all this.

  After losing her child, Shizuka started visiting Masami’s room more frequently than ever before. “Let me hold the baby. Let me take care of him too.”

  At first Masami was grateful for the offer. It was definitely true that she was lonely, not knowing the fate of her husband outside the Dome. Anyone would become lonely under such circumstances, being confined with a newborn baby in this unusual world. Shizuka’s presence became such a big support for her in a time of fear and anxiety. Yes, at first this was how it went.

  One day Shizuka asked insistently if she could nurse the baby. Compassionately, Masami allowed her to do so, but this created a rift in their relationship.

  Shizuka wanted the baby to suck her milk whenever her breasts became full. She nursed for such a long time, Masami said it was enough and tried to take her baby back. Shizuka glared with hatred in her eyes, ignoring the request. “No, just a little more won’t be a problem, don’t you think?” This went on until one day she finally yelled, “Go away! What are you trying to do with my baby?!” Masami realized that her best friend had gone insane.

  After that, Masami no longer let Shizuka into her room. No matter how many times or how strongly Shizuka would rap on her door, Masami resolved never to open it to her again. Still, Shizuka persisted, banging harder and harder. Masami couldn’t go out anymore. In a sense she became twice as trapped in this crazy world.

  Surprisingly, it was Masaki’s believers who spare
d her from her hardship. Somehow they persuaded Shizuka to stop her visits to Masami’s room.

  In addition, they delivered food and water to the room daily. Yet due to her trauma-induced fear of repeating a similar episode, Masami avoided becoming close to any of the believers more than was necessary. She received the water and food but refused their invitation to go and live with them on the floor above. I will care for this child alone. She’d made up her mind.

  Masami never let anyone set foot in her room, not even the believers who were so kind to her. She only spoke to others from the entryway.

  Over many peaceful days, the believers supplanted Shizuka in coming to visit her on a regular basis. She did her best to push her former friend from her mind. The only priority was her child. She committed to this objective and banished Shizuka from her thoughts.

  So that day when somebody knocked on the door, she had no doubt that it would be the believers for one of their regular visits. When she opened the door, however, still holding her baby, she found her former best friend, but much transformed.

  Shizuka had once been a petite and plump woman. She was at least ten centimeters shorter than Masami, yet she now appeared bizarrely thin and about equal height. But she hadn’t grown taller. It was only her neck that had extended. Ugly and twisted like an ancient tree, yet something resembling a belt from a bathrobe was tightly wound into the flesh. Under the belt around the base of the neck was an ugly, vertical tear in the flesh that formed an uncanny organ. That vertical gash kept opening and closing with struggling breaths like an asthmatic’s mouth.

  The scream Kyoko and Ishida heard at this time was Masami’s.

  The monster shot straight for the baby in Masami’s arms and attacked. It tried to grab the child with both hands and yank him from his mother. Shin cried like he was on fire. A horrid face atop the long neck stretched like a figure from a Munch painting, reaching for the baby like a hungry snake. Drool dripped from the extended jaws. The protruding eyeballs fixated wildly on the baby.

  Ishida wrestled the thing from behind, managing to pry it away from Masami, not even realizing yet that it was a monster. If Ishida had noticed this first, he would have been too rattled to save them. He would have probably either fled in panic or stayed rooted on the spot, terrified, as he watched the baby get devoured by that horrible face.

  Fortunately, in not realizing what he was fighting he managed to pry it away and restrain it on the hallway floor. The extended neck twisted and the face of the monster turned to Ishida sitting astride it. He screamed frantically at this point, and Kyoko cried out for help.

  The few minutes it took Kyoko to bring back Mikami and Chikama were the longest of his life.

  They eventually corralled the monster in the garden, leaving it with the other creatures there. However, it soon became food for the others and was taken away by an angel. Of course a few minutes later it was brought back in a new, uglier form.

  When it returned, the belt around its neck had disappeared and all traces of the hanging had faded. It couldn’t be clearly confirmed but it seemed the strange organ on its neck had also disappeared. Instead, the thickness of the neck had increased to about twice the normal size. It was logical in a strange way, Ishida thought. When it attacked Masami Ohno and her baby, even if it had been successful and eaten the child, the devoured flesh wouldn’t have reached the stomach of the monster. At that point the throat had been completely blocked by a tightened belt. Even if it hadn’t become zombie food, it was destined to die from starvation anyway.

  Would you call the one who creates such a thing a ‘God’?

  Chapter 9

  “Ishida, are you awake?”

  The shadow of a woman moved across the frosted glass doors of the guest room where Kyoko and Ishida were.

  When Kyoko opened the door, it was the famous horror actress, Ami Mizuno, whose face peered in. The wife of Naoki Fukazawa.

  “Mr. Ohizumi is here…”

  “I’ll go, but I can’t vouch for Ishida there,” said Kyoko who quickly slipped past Ami and left in the direction of the entrance.

  “Oh dear, another fight?” Ami smiled at Ishida.

  Even in the dark, Ishida was able to vividly imagine her smile. He had known her longer than Kyoko. Moreover, the smile of Ami Mizuno was well known to any Japanese person who watched films or television.

  This place is like a celebrity museum, Ishida thought. Actually he himself had been on television several times, but of course he was nowhere near as recognizable a figure as the actress who stood before him.

  Ami had debuted in the starring role of a superhero-themed TV show for children some six or seven years before. But she became truly famous for playing a witch-like character for a horror movie released at the peak of the horror boom in the previous century. She hadn’t played the starring role, but was rather a supporting character to the lead actor. Yet once the film became a hit, she achieved greater popularity than the lead ever had. One after another she played supporting roles in the movie’s sequels until finally she graduated to the starring role. She was also cast as the lead for a prime-time TV drama related to the film franchise, also in the horror genre. Her acting was conspicuously better than her contemporaries and she had the talent to play both good and evil characters equally well.

  Ishida mused that even if she played a debased or horrid character, she wouldn’t lose her dignity, her defining quality. Unlike other young actresses who could only pull off bright and sexy in their repertoires, she had a deeper shade of intellect that could call upon a purity and fragility, invariably charming the audience. Ishida had considered her special qualities to the point of analyzing them.

  The Queen of Japanese Horror. This title had stuck. She suffered for it quite a lot. She confessed once at an after-party for the launch of a TV drama. “I’m fed up with monster movies. I don’t want to star in that kind of film anymore.”

  The person that this was directed at advised her as follows.

  “Let’s assume that you stop acting in horror films and start doing shit dramas or epic artsy films. Let’s say your acting is perfect and all the great critics praise your performances. But what then? One year, two years go by and even the great epic films in which you act, even the perfect acting won’t remain in the minds of the audience one bit. You would soon fade from their collective conscience. On the other hand, the memory of that children’s superhero show that you first did, even now that many years have gone by, is firmly etched in the minds of its fans. They’ll probably remember it until the day they die. Do you know why? Fairy tales and horror films for children, that type of thing, have the power to reach deep into the human mind, the mythical part rather than the primitive. In contrast: specious literary masterpiece films, originally adapted from pure literature. At best they only tickle the thin surface of the human brain. The brain dies from its surface. The intellect and the rational mind exist vainly upon that surface. It is doomed to disappear eventually. But the root part at the brain’s center, the oldest part is not that way. This part of the brain involving the appetite or libido, as long as genes are passed on, will not die. Fairy tales and horror movies stimulate this part of the brain. It is not the surface of the brain that formed at most 300 million years ago, but the center of the brain that has existed since the beginning. The alligator brain.”

  Ishida didn’t know if she was convinced by his words or not. But it was just one month after the night of the party that the front page headlines of the sports newspapers blared out, ‘Lightning Marriage of Ami Mizuno!’

  The lucky man was the speaker of those words at the after-party, Naoki Fukazawa, a budding filmmaker himself. At the same time, she also announced her retirement from show business.

  “Ishida?” Ami ‘Fukazawa’ who cut her hair very short, just like Kyoko, tilted her head slightly. Since she was an actress she looked good with that casual, short hair. Unlike Kyoko, it didn’t look gawky.

  But you couldn’t escape from the world of h
orror after all, Ishida said in his heart. You can retire from show business but as long as you live as a human, you can’t retire from fear.

  “OK. I’m coming.” Ishida finally got out of bed. But Ami seemed to want to say something to him, pausing near the door.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Please keep an eye on him. He’s been getting reckless lately.”

  Ami’s eyes were serious. Ishida, feeling a little jealous, nodded silently.

  Everyone had gathered in the living room. When Ishida entered, the glass doors to the balcony were opened wide and he could see the back of Hiromu Ohizumi leaning out to look over the balcony railing.

  Speaking of reckless, this sci-fi writer was far more reckless than himself, Ishida thought.

  Ishida didn’t like the guy much. Frizzy hair still tousled with sleep, round glasses always slightly askew, wearing a shabby long coat, the man seemed like he was playing the role of a mad scientist a bit more than entirely necessary. He was certainly in his element now. Obviously he was enjoying this situation more than anyone in their right mind should.

  Ohizumi turned and spoke softly. “No doubt about it. Room Eight underneath us. The sphere hasn’t gone inside yet either.”

  The area behind him was illuminated by the angel’s light, forming a halo behind his legs. The sci-fi writer’s face was lit up with an elated expression, like an elementary schoolboy who’d found a rare insect.

  “Well then, we need to call the doctor as soon as possible,” said Kyoko, her eyes glaring at the writer. She despised the man more than Ishida did.

  “No worries. I’ll get my son to call Chikama. Then Shimada and the others will surely follow along. Let’s meet at the emergency stairs.”