Ring

by Kōji Suzuki

  "I have a reservation, name of Asakawa."

  The man opened his notebook and confirmed the reservation. "You're in B-4. Can I get you to write your name and address here?"

  Asakawa wrote his real name. He'd just sent Nonoyama's membership card back to him, so he couldn't use it.

  "Just you, then?" The manager looked up at Asakawa, suspiciously. He'd never had anybody stay here alone. At nonmember rates, it was more economical for one person to stay at the hotel. The manager handed over a set of sheets and turned to the cabinet.

  "If you'd like you're free to borrow one. We have most of the popular titles."

  "Oh, you rent videos?" Asakawa ran his gaze casually over the titles of the videos covering the wall. Raiders of the Lost Ark, Star Wars, Back to the Future, Friday the 13th. All popular American films, mostly science fiction. A lot of new releases, too. Probably the cabins were mostly used by groups of young people. There was nothing that grabbed him. Besides, Asakawa had ostensibly come here to work.

  "I'm afraid I've brought work with me." Asakawa picked up his portable word processor from where he'd placed it on the floor and showed the manager. Seeing it, the manager seemed to understand why he was staying here alone.

  "So, there are dishes and everything?" Asakawa said, just to make sure.

  "Yes. Use anything you like."

  The only thing Asakawa needed to use, though, was a kettle to boil water for his cup o' noodles. He took the sheets and his room key from the manager, who told him how to find B-4 and then said, with odd formality, "Please, make yourself at home."

  Before touching the knob Asakawa put on his rubber gloves. He'd brought them to give him peace of mind, as a charm to ward off the unknown virus.

  He opened the door and flipped on the light switch in the entry hall. A hundred-watt bulb lit a spacious living room. Papered walls, carpet, four person sofa, television, dinette set: everything was new, everything was functionally arranged. Asakawa took off his shoes and went in. There was a balcony on one edge of the living room and small Japanese-style rooms on the ground and first floors. It was a little luxurious for a single guest, after all. He drew the lace curtains and opened the sliding glass door to allow the night air in. The room was perfectly clean, as if to betray his expectations. It suddenly occurred to him that he might go home clueless.

  He went into the Japanese-style room off the living room and checked the closet. Nothing. He took off his shirt and slacks and changed into a sweatshirt and sweatpants, hanging his street clothes in the closet. Next he went upstairs and turned on the light in the Japanese-style room. I'm acting like a child, he thought wryly. Before he'd realized it he'd turned on every single light in the place.

  With everything sufficiently illuminated, he now opened the bathroom door, gently. He checked inside first, and left the door slightly ajar while he was inside. It reminded him of his fear rituals as a child, when he was too scared to go to the bathroom alone on summer nights. He used to leave the door open a crack and have his dad stand watch outside. A neat shower room stood behind a pane of frosted glass. There wasn't even a hint of steam, and the area outside the tub and the tub itself were both dry as a bone. It must have been some time since anybody had stayed here. He went to take off his rubber gloves; they stuck to his sweaty hands. The cool highlands breeze blew into the room, disturbing the curtains.

  Asakawa filled a glass with ice from the freezer and poured it half full of the whiskey he had bought. He was about to top it off with tap water, but then hesitated. Turning off the tap he persuaded himself that he'd really rather have it straight, on the rocks. He didn't have the courage to put anything from this room into his mouth. He'd been careless enough to use ice cubes from the freezer, but he was under the impression that micro-organisms didn't like extreme heat or cold.

  He sank back deep into the sofa and turned on the TV. Singing filled the room: some new pop idol. A Tokyo station was showing the same program right about now. He changed channels. He didn't really intend to watch anything, though, so he adjusted the volume to a suitable level and then opened his bag. He took out a video camera and placed it on the table. If anything strange happened, he wanted to catch it all on tape. He sipped a mouthful of whiskey. It was only a little, but it strengthened up his courage. Asakawa went over in his head again everything he knew. If he couldn't find a clue here tonight then the article he was trying to write would be dead in the water. But on the other hand, maybe it was better that way. If not finding a clue meant not picking up the virus, well… after all, he had a wife and child to think about. He didn't want to die, not in some weird way. He propped his feet up on the table.

  So, what are you waiting for? he asked himself. Aren't you afraid? Hey-shouldn't you be afraid? The angel of death might be coming to get you.

  His gaze darted around the room nervously. Asakawa couldn't fix his eyes on any one point on the wall. He had the feeling that if he did so, his fears would begin to take physical form while he watched.

  A chill wind blew in from outside, stronger than before. He closed the window and as he went to draw the curtains he happened to glance at the darkness outside. The roof of B-5 was directly in front of him, and in its shadow the darkness was even deeper. There had been lots of people on the tennis courts and in the restaurant. But here Asakawa was alone. He shut the curtains and looked at his watch. 8:56. He hadn't even been in this room for thirty minutes. It easily could have been an hour or more, he felt. But just being here wasn't dangerous in and of itself. He tried to believe that, to calm himself down. After all, how many people must have stayed in B-4 in the six months since these cabins were built? It wasn't like all of them had died under mysterious circumstances. Only those four, according to his research. Maybe if he dug deeper he'd find more, but at the moment that appeared to be all. Thus, simply being here wasn't the problem. The problem was what they'd done here.

  So, what did they do here?

  Asakawa then subtly rephrased the question. What could they have done here?

  He'd found nothing resembling a clue-not in the bathroom, not in the bath, not in the closet, not in the fridge. Even assuming there had been something, the manager would have disposed of it when he cleaned the place. Which meant that, instead of sitting here drinking whiskey, he should be talking to the manager. That would be quicker.

  He'd drained his first glass; he made his second a little smaller. He couldn't afford to get drunk. He put a lot of ice in it, and this time he cut it with tap water. His sense of danger must have been numbed a little. He suddenly felt foolish: stealing time from work, coming all the way up here. He took off his glasses, washed his face, then looked at his reflection in the mirror. It was the face of a sick man. Maybe he'd already caught the virus. He gulped down the whiskey-and-water he'd just made and fixed himself another.

  Returning from the dining room, Asakawa noticed a notebook on the shelf beneath the telephone stand. The cover said Memories. He leafed through a few pages.

  Saturday, April 7

  Nonko will never forget this day. Why? That's a

  s-e-c-r-e-t. Yuichi is wonderful. Hee-hee!

  -NONKO

  Inns, B&B's, and the like often had notebooks like this in the rooms, so that guests could write down their memories and impressions. On the next page was a crude drawing of mommy and daddy. Must have been a family trip. It was dated April 14th-also a Saturday, naturally.

  Daddys fat,

  Mommys fat,

  So Im fat too.

  Aprul 14nth

  Asakawa kept turning pages. He could feel some sort of force urging him to open the pages at the end of the book, but he kept going through them in order. He was afraid that if he messed up the chronology he might miss something.

  He couldn't say for sure, since there were probably a lot of guests who didn't write anything, but it seemed like there were only people here on Saturdays until summer started. After that the time between each entry shrank. By the end of August there was a steady
stream of entries lamenting the end of summer.

  Sunday, August 20

  Another summer vacation come and gone. And it sucked. Somebody help me! Rescue poor little me!

  I have a motorbike, 400cc. I'm pretty good-looking.

  A bargain!

  - A.Y.

  This guy looked like he'd decided the guest book was a means to advertise himself, maybe find a pen-pal. It looked like a lot of people had the same ideas about the place. When couples stayed here, their entries showed it, while when single people stayed, they wrote about how much they wanted a companion.

  Still, it made for interesting reading. Presently his watch showed nine o'clock.

  Then he turned the page:

  Thursday, August 30

  Ulp! Consider yourself warned: you 'd better not see it unless you 've got the guts.

  You'll be sorry you did. (Evil laughter.)

  S. I.

  That was all there was to the message. August 30th was the morning after the four had stayed here. The initials "S.I." would stand for "Shuichi Iwata". His entry was different from all the rest. What did it mean? You 'd better not see it. What in the world was it? Asakawa closed the guest book and looked at it from the side. There was a slight gap where it didn't close tightly. He put his finger there and opened it to that page. Ulp! Consider yourself warned: you 'd better not see it unless you 've got the guts. You'll be sorry you did. (Evil laughter.) S.I. The words jumped out at him. Why did the book want to open to this exact page? He thought for a moment. Perhaps the four had opened the book here and set something heavy on top of it. The weight had created this force that remained even now, trying to open to this page. And maybe whatever they'd placed on top of the page was the "it" that he'd "better not see". That must be it.

  Asakawa looked around anxiously, searching every corner of the shelf beneath the telephone stand. Nothing. Not even a pencil.

  He sat back down on the sofa and continued reading. The next entry was dated Saturday, September 1st. But it said only the usual things.

  It didn't say if the group of students who had stayed here had seen it. None of the remaining pages mentioned it, either.

  Asakawa closed the guest book and lit a cigarette. You 'd better not see it unless you 've got the guts. He imagined that it must be something frightening. He opened the notebook at random and pressed down on the page lightly. Whatever it was must have been heavy enough to overcome the pages' tendency to close. One or two photos of ghosts, for example, wouldn't have done the trick. Maybe a weekly, or a hardcover book… Anyway, something you look at. Maybe he'd ask the manager if he remembered finding anything strange left in the cabin after the guests had checked out on August 30th. He wasn't sure if the manager would even remember, but he figured that if it had been strange enough he would. Asakawa began to get to his feet when the VCR in front of him caught his eye. The TV was still on, showing a famous actress chasing her husband around with a vacuum. A home appliance commercial.

  … Yeah, a VHS tape would be heavy enough to keep the notebook open, and they might have had one handy, too.

  Still in a crouch, Asakawa ground out his cigarette. He recalled the video collection he had seen in the manager's office. Maybe they'd happened to watch a particularly interesting horror flick, and thought they'd recommend it to the next guests-hey, this one's cool, check it out. If that's all it was… But wait. If that was it, why hadn't Shuichi Iwata used the name? If he wanted to tell somebody that, say, Friday the 13th was a great movie, wouldn't it have been easier just to say Friday the 13th was a great movie? He didn't need to go to all the trouble of actually leaving it on top of the notebook. So maybe it was something that didn't have a name, something they could only indicate with the word it. … Well? Worth checking out?

  Well, he certainly didn't have anything to lose, not with no other clues presenting themselves. Besides, sitting around here thinking wasn't getting him anywhere. Asakawa left the cabin, climbed the stone steps and pushed open the office door.

  Just as before, there was no sign of the manager at the counter, only the sound of the television coming from the back room. The guy had retired from his job in the city and decided to live out his years surrounded by Mother Nature, so he'd taken a job as a manager at a resort, but the work turned out to be utterly boring, and now all he did every day was watch videos. That's how Asakawa interpreted the manager's situation. Before he had a chance to call the guy, though, he crawled to the doorway and stuck his head out. Asakawa spoke somewhat apologetically.

  "I thought I'd maybe borrow a video after all."

  The manager grinned happily. "Go right ahead, whichever you'd like. They're three hundred yen each."

  Asakawa scanned the titles for scary-looking movies. The Legend of Hell House, The Exorcist The Omen. He had seen them all in his student days. Nothing else? There had to be some he hadn't seen. He searched from one end of the shelves to the other, and saw nothing that looked likely. He started over, reading the titles of every one of the two hundred or so videos. And then, on the very. bottom shelf, way over in the corner, he noticed a video without a case, fallen over on its side. All the other tapes were encased in jackets with photos and imposing logos, but this one lacked even a label.

  "What's that there?" After he'd asked the question, Asakawa realized that he'd used a pronoun, that, as he pointed to the tape. If it didn't have a name, what else was he supposed to call it?

  The manager gave a bothered frown and replied, none too brightly, "Huh?" Then he picked up the tape. "This? This isn't anything."

  … Hey, I wonder if this guy even knows what's on that tape.

  "Have you seen it? That one," asked Asakawa.

  "Let me see." The manager cocked his head repeatedly, as if he couldn't figure out what something like this was doing here.

  "If you don't mind, could I borrow that tape?"

  Instead of replying, the manager slapped his knee. "Ah, I remember now. It was kicking around in one of the rooms. I just figured it was one of ours and brought it here, but…"

  "This wouldn't have happened to be in B-4, I don't suppose?" Asakawa asked slowly, pressing the point home. The manager laughed and shook his head.

  "I haven't the foggiest. It was a couple of months ago."

  Asakawa asked once more, "Have you… seen… this video?"

  The manager just shook his head. The smile disappeared from his face. "No."

  "Well, let me rent it."

  "You going to record something on the TV?"

  "Yeah, well, I, ah…"

  The manager glanced at the video. "The tab is broken. See? You can't record on it."

  Maybe it was the alcohol, but Asakawa was getting irritated. I'm telling you to rent it to me, you idiot, just hand it over, he griped to himself. But no matter how drunk he was, Asakawa was never able to come on very strong with other people.

  "Please. I'll bring it right back."

  He bowed. The manager couldn't figure out why his guest was showing so much interest in this old thing. Maybe there was something interesting on it, something somebody had forgotten to erase… Now he wished he'd watched it when he found it. He felt the sudden temptation to watch it right now, but he couldn't very well refuse a guest who had asked for it. The manager handed over the tape. Asakawa reached for his wallet, but the manager stopped him with his hand.

  "That's alright, you don't need to pay. I can't charge you for this, now, can I?"

  "Thanks a lot. I'll bring it right back."

  "If it turns out to be interesting, then please do!" The manager's curiosity had been piqued. He'd already seen every video here at least once, and most of them had ceased to interest him. How did I miss that one anyway? It would have killed a few hours. Aw, but it probably only has some stupid TV show recorded on it anyway.

  The manager was sure the video would come back right away.

  2

  The tape had been rewound. It was an ordinary 120-minute tape, the sort you could get anywhere, and, a
s the manager had pointed out, the anti-erasure tabs had been broken off. Asakawa turned on the VCR and pushed the tape into the slot. He sat down cross-legged right in front of the screen and pressed play. He heard the capstans start to turn. He had high hopes that the key to unlock the riddle of four people's deaths was hidden on this tape. He'd pushed play fully intending to be satisfied with just a clue, any clue. There can't be any danger, he was thinking. What harm could come from just watching a videotape?

  Random sounds and distorted images flickered on the screen, but once he had selected the right channel, the picture steadied. Then the screen went black as ink. This was the video's first scene. There was no sound. Wondering if it had broken, he brought his face close to the screen. Consider yourself warned: you 'd better not see it. You'll be sorry you did. Shuichi Iwata's words came back to him. Why should he be sorry? Asakawa was used to things like this. He'd covered the local news. No matter what sort of horrific images he might be shown, he felt confident he wouldn't regret watching.

  In the middle of the black screen he thought he saw a pinpoint of light begin to flicker. It gradually expanded, jumping around to the left and right, before finally coming to rest on the left-hand side. Then it branched out, becoming a frayed bundle of lights, crawling around like worms, which finally formed themselves into words. Not the kind of captions one normally saw on film, though. These were poorly-written, as if scrawled by a white brush on jet-black paper. Somehow, though, he managed to make out what they said: WATCH UNTIL THE END. A command. These words disappeared, and the next floated up into view. YOU WILL BE EATEN BY THE LOST… The last word didn't make much sense, but being eaten didn't sound too pleasant. It seemed that there must have been an "or else" implied there. Don't turn off the video halfway through, or else something awful will happen: it was a threat.