S

by Kōji Suzuki

  The peculiar relationship between murderer and victim had imparted tension to the compositions, giving them a decadent aesthetic. No other situation could rival these pictures as far as how well they captured beauty in the moment before it vanished, in its very evanescence.

  Analyzing the pictures, Takanori almost felt awe for Niimura’s talent. The feeling disappeared right away, however, when he opened folder S-5.

  Pictures with Akane as the subject were saved in S-5. Niimura had stalked her as she’d grown up, taking photos of her when she was in junior high, high school, and college, and leaving the gate of the school where she worked, or standing on the platform at a station, or walking through a shopping concourse. Given that the number of pictures of her far exceeded that of all the pictures in S-1 through S-4, Takanori could tell how strong the killer’s obsession was. No, it wasn’t just strong—it was obviously still ongoing and had never lapsed.

  The last photo was from the day before yesterday. It showed the first floor of the condo where Takanori lived and had been shot just as Akane was about to go through the auto-locking entrance.

  The culprit behind the serial abduction and murder of the young girls wasn’t Kashiwada, but Niimura. Worse, he was roaming around the neighborhood and had a complete grasp of Akane’s commute.

  Wondering how to protect her, Takanori had tried to fulfill his wish in a dream.

  Worried about where she was now, he looked at the clock. It was 6:35 p.m. Around that time, she was usually on the Keihin Express. He turned on the GPS tracking app to pinpoint her current location.

  There was no guarantee that she wasn’t about to be attacked by Niimura right then.

  As he expected, she was on a train in motion. Skipping North Shinagawa, it was about to enter Shinagawa station.

  Were she on the special express, the train would proceed without stopping. But evidently Akane had taken one that required a transfer, and she seemed to step onto the platform there. At Shinagawa station, her movement completely stopped.

  The time kept ticking away on the display of Takanori’s cell phone. It felt like it was taking too long, even if she was waiting for a connecting train to arrive.

  He spent ten minutes on pins and needles. Unable to endure it any longer, he called Akane’s phone, when suddenly the target disappeared from his screen.

  Akane had turned off her phone.

  The time was 6:44 p.m.

  Takanori slumped over his desk and cradled his head. Once her phone was off, there was nothing he could do.

  How long can it go on like this?

  He banged his fists on the table. Doing that didn’t make him feel any better, though, and the disturbing sensation from when he’d smashed Niimura’s chin in the dream came back.

  As long as Niimura was out there on the loose, Takanori and Akane would never know peace in their life together.

  It seemed he was in store for another sleepless night worrying about Akane’s every move. In fact, he’d been unable to get a decent amount of sleep for the past few days. No matter how long he spent lying on his bed, unless his nerves calmed down, rest eluded him.

  If their child were born into such circumstances, Takanori’s worries would be twofold. When he realized that, he suddenly raised his head.

  Niimura’s probably waiting for Akane to have the baby.

  He was leaving her be for now, letting her go free as he waited for his one target to become two. Having only one mark meant his enjoyment would quickly be over. Yet if he had two, the fun could go on.

  Just thinking about it made Takanori feel like he was going crazy. Even if he copied the images and brought them to the police, there was no way that they’d take it seriously and make a move. Seiji Kashiwada had been sentenced to death as a serial abductor and murderer of young girls, and he’d already been executed. Japanese law didn’t envision a scenario where the real culprit came to light after an execution had been carried out. And the only evidence he could offer were these photos, insufficient grounds for reopening an investigation; Takanori was a pro at processing images who made a living creating fake ones using CG technology. He knew full well what would happen if he went to the police. They’d just send him away.

  No matter how hard he tried to devise a way to escape the threat, there was only one answer. The sole option was to eliminate it by force. In other words, he had no choice but to kill Niimura.

  Takanori opened his hands.

  Can I really kill somebody with these hands?

  If the enemy attacked with murderous intent, Takanori’s despair might give him the courage to lash out in self-defense. But it would be too late if he waited for his enemy to act first. Unless he moved preemptively, the likelihood of losing his loved ones would only grow.

  In a dream, you could kill any sort of monster. In the real world, that didn’t happen so easily. Takanori could scarcely picture himself killing somebody on purpose. Just imagining it made the tips of his fingers shake.

  Next to those shaking hands, the GPS tracking app on his cell phone started working again. It seemed Akane had turned her device back on.

  It was 6:49 p.m. Her cell phone had been turned off for only five minutes.

  The app showed a change in Akane’s location. She appeared to have exited the ticket gate and picked up a taxi proceeding north along the Keihin No. 1 Road.

  Perhaps some kind of trouble at Shinagawa station had forced her to give up waiting for the train and to take a taxi instead…that possibility made the most sense.

  In any case, he figured, she’d be home in twenty minutes or so.

  7

  Well, I’ve finally lost the ability to tell dream from reality.

  Takanori rubbed his eyes and shook his head.

  He was now sitting at the table, but it wasn’t to turn on his computer. Its very sight disgusted him at the moment. But despite having no intention of sitting, with his head in a haze, he’d staggered around and come over to the table to rest his body.

  The computer had been off, with no light coming from the screen, and the display background was completely black.

  Takanori dug his fingernails into his thigh and slapped his cheeks, but the scene before him didn’t change.

  It meant that this was real.

  There was a man standing in the display.

  Poised there in the middle of the monitor’s black background, he looked like an actor greeting his audience from the stage in front of a closed curtain.

  He wasn’t standing straight. Judging from the angle of his crossed legs and the position of his hips, he was perched on a stool. However, the black stool blended into the dark background and was invisible, so he looked like he was standing with his body distorted in some unnatural way.

  “Hey, brother. Don’t be so depressed.”

  That’s Seiji Kashiwada. Or should I say, Ryuji Takayama.

  Stuck onto the black display, he looked like a cartoon character.

  “Mr. Takayama,” Takanori replied respectfully to Ryuji, who’d been his father’s friend.

  “Do you remember me? We’ve met before.”

  “Yes.” Intimidated by the man’s powerful aura, Takanori felt like a schoolboy.

  “There’s someplace I gotta go, so I don’t have much time. But there were some last words I definitely wanted to tell you before I go, and that’s why I’m here. I couldn’t just watch you suffer without doing something for you. You can think of this place I’m in now as a two-dimensional digital space.”

  Shortly after Takanori had copied the hanging video of Kashiwada from the USB stick, just the human figure had disappeared from the screen and run off to nowhere, almost as if he’d gained another life limited to digital spaces. Had he now come back?

  “I think you know this already, but our pasts share a certain fact. We were both born from Sadako’s womb. Your dad has been trying like mad to hide that. You know why? Because he believes that he released an evil into this world in exchange for your life. It’s not that
he’s trying to hide his own guilt. He’s simply worried that you might needlessly feel ashamed of yourself if you found out the whole truth. There are things in this world that are better left unknown, if you can do without knowing them. Don’t blame your dad. Everything he did, he did to bring his beloved son back to this world. If Mitsuo had done nothing, you wouldn’t be here.

  “You know about Mai Takano. Twenty-five years ago, she lived in Room 303 at the Shinagawa View Heights. She happened to watch that demonic videotape on her ovulation date and gave birth to a girl who carried Sadako’s DNA. Her name on the family record is Masako Maruyama. She was Akane’s mother, and I knew her very well.

  “Masako had a peculiar womb. If you took an ovulated egg out of her body, injected a dead person’s genetic information into the egg, and put it back in her womb, she’d give birth in a week, and the baby would grow to the age when the person had died and regain his or her old memories.

  “You must think that’s impossible. But there’s a mechanism at work that you people will never be able to understand. I couldn’t explain it even if I wanted to, and I’m not even supposed to. Because this all has to do with a world that exists in a higher dimension than the one you live in. The denizens of a two-dimensional plane couldn’t glimpse the world of those living in three-dimensional space, or even imagine that world. Yet the opposite is feasible: if you live in a higher dimension, you can interfere with and manipulate the lives of those residing in a lower dimension.

  “You’re good at that, aren’t you? Processing images, I mean. It’s the same thing.

  “If a person living in three dimensions picks up an ant that’s crawling on a two-dimensional plane, the ant will seem to have disappeared instantly from that world. Conversely, if the ant gets placed back down from the sky above, it’ll seem like the ant has appeared from nowhere. Even so-called occult abilities can be explained easily if you posit a higher-dimensional world. The word ‘psychic’ means someone with the special power to access that higher dimension. Prediction, mental projection—you name it, they can do it. You can lead somebody wherever you want by manipulating their car navigation system or mischievously send them a video. Like I did to Kiyomi Sakata.

  “The same goes for information. All the data from a lower-dimensional world are saved in the high dimension. That includes individual biological info. And that means you can easily call up any information that’s been saved. All you need is an interface.

  “You’ll get what I mean if you see that the interface happened to be Masako’s womb.

  “Her womb was like an umbilical cord connecting the higher dimension and the lower ones.

  “Now, this is very important: information exists in units. For example, genes are units of collated info, and when the DNA’s double helix is converted into RNA, there needs to be a start code to begin the read-in process as well as an end code. With a beginning and an end, information can then be treated as a single unit.

  “Human beings are the same. You’re born, you live, and you die, and then finally you can tell what kind of life you led. No matter how happily you live, if you lose somebody you love right before you die, your life will turn out to be miserable at the last minute. You have to complete your life at some point—it doesn’t matter where—or else it won’t become a coherent unit of information, and it’ll be impossible to transcend dimensions. Maybe it’ll be easier to understand if I put it this way: Human beings can’t go to heaven while they’re still alive. Only after you’re confirmed to be dead can you get there. It’s the same thing.

  “I’m now alive in this two-dimensional plane. I came here after I was officially certified to be dead in your world. That happened when the moment of my execution was recorded digitally.

  “It wasn’t like I wanted to take Niimura’s place. I did need to undergo a public death, though, and an execution perfectly met all the requirements.

  “That’s why I can be here now, in the same bodily condition I was in when I was filmed.

  “You know why I have to transcend dimensions? Twenty-five years ago, your world was in danger of an outbreak of the ring virus. If we hadn’t done anything, the individual Sadako would have spread rapidly, ended diversity, and put the human race on the road to extinction.

  “I came back to pick up the seeds that were scattered, and did everything I could. With your dad’s help, I acquired Seiji Kashiwada’s identity, and I passed myself off as him. Your dad doesn’t know anything that happened after that point. I think he probably believes that I’m the real serial killer. Please explain to him later that I couldn’t be such a bad guy, all right?

  “Well, anyway, I became Kashiwada and tried to stop the book Ring from getting published, but didn’t completely succeed. Two thousand out of the five thousand copies of the first edition were sold in the Kanto area. I traced the route along which the books were distributed and collected them one by one, going around visiting bookshops and libraries. Unfortunately, by that time, four Sadakos had already been born.

  “I succeeded in sealing off the effect of the ring virus by adding a little trick for the revised edition and the paperback, which came out after the first edition. If you have a chance to get both editions, compare them. The inside cover is black for the first edition, but in the revised edition and the paperback, there’s an illustration of eyeballs. That illustration acts like a vaccine or an antidote. Even a glance is enough—once you start reading, the mechanism will kick in to erase the effect of the virus.

  “As for the movie, that worked out splendidly. I managed to get it shelved, as you know.

  “I’ve done pretty well in destroying the ring virus, even though some of it escaped. Sadako had been born, but just four of them wouldn’t threaten our ecosystem. We could just let them live. But of course, I kept an eye on them. I had to closely monitor where they were and how they were growing up. I even managed to collect a hair sample from one of the four girls when an opportunity presented itself. I anticipated that I might need to check their DNA, you know? But then, the fact that I kept her hair with her name labeled on it ended up being solid evidence implicating me as the serial abductor and killer of those girls.

  “Now, I have to talk about Hiroyuki Niimura. In order to come by some dirt that would force the Ring movie to get shelved, I needed to befriend his grandmother. In time, his grandma asked me to become her grandson’s home tutor.

  “She was mourning at every turn how pitiable her grandson was, practically abandoned by his mother because she was so focused on her career as an actress. I felt guilty for entrapping Kiyomi Sakata and making her suffer that setback, so I accepted the offer around the time that he entered junior high and started inviting him to my home and teaching him. He was a smart kid, but he made no effort to understand the purpose of studying, right until the end. For him, it was all about doing better than his rivals—beating others and scoring higher, nothing else. After a while he arrived at a simple logic: he started wishing for others to fail rather than working for his own success. He thought that if his rivals screwed up and got low scores, he’d still win, and it didn’t make any difference, as far as winning was concerned.

  “I taught him until he graduated junior high, and then that was the limit. He was the one who left me. At the time, I didn’t realize that he’d copied all the valuable data belonging to me. I’d underestimated him, thinking he was only a kid. But he’d tamed a monster and raised it inside him.

  “Having that information about the four living Sadakos stolen from me by Niimura was my worst blunder ever.

  “I think he loved his mother Kiyomi a lot. Since she’d once gotten the lead role in a movie, he took an interest in everything about Ring, to a bizarre degree. He’s insane. He’s an abnormal maniac. And it got to the point where he ended up living in the apartment where Mai Takano used to live, so that tells you how crazy he is.

  “For Niimura, Sadako was the only one he could play with. He must’ve frolicked with her in his fantasies all the time.
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  “Then he learned that Sadako really existed in this world. And not only one of her, but four…

  “When I found out that the first copy of Sadako had been abducted and killed, I didn’t know what had transpired behind the scenes. I just figured she’d happened to be involved in a case. And then when the second Sadako was killed, it sparked a certain wariness in me. No way, I thought. And with the third murder, I was sure of it. The criminal was targeting only Sadako, killing one of them after another. That meant the culprit had my data on Sadako. Who could have the data besides me, I asked myself. Of course, only one person could have known so much about Ring and surreptitiously seen the data in my file and stolen them—Niimura. After that, it was just a matter of time. I had to protect the fourth one before she got abducted and killed. But I couldn’t make it, and the fourth Sadako also fell into his clutches.

  “And he still didn’t stop. He was about to dig his talons into the fifth one.

  “That was Akane, your beloved.

  “I made up my mind that I had to save her no matter what, and I barely outfoxed him and rescued her. I laid her down in the backseat of my car while she was still unconscious and started driving along the highway towards Kamitaga from South Hakone Pacific Land. But then a truck came toward me from up ahead, so I pulled onto the shoulder. That’s when Akane woke up and opened the door to escape, and she fled into a tangerine farm.

  “She mistakenly believed I was the killer. I couldn’t let her go. I jumped out of the car and went to the farm to search for her. I really didn’t want her to think I was the killer. And there was something I wanted to tell her badly. With just a little more time I could’ve told her the truth, but it didn’t work out that way. The police, who’d been informed, rushed to the farm, and when I was about to hold her up, they found us and arrested me. Not only was I seemingly caught in the act, even worse, they found the evidence in my room, so all hope was gone.

  “You might be wondering why I’m telling you all this. Isn’t that right?