Spiral

by Kōji Suzuki

  "Tell me. Where did she come from?"

  Miyashita turned the question back on Ando. "Don't you know?"

  Still supine, Ando shook his head. "No, I do not."

  "You really don't know?"

  "Tell me! Where did she come from?"

  "Mai Takano gave birth to her."

  Ando forgot to breathe for a few moments while he tried to think of an alternate explanation. But he could hardly think at all. He'd lost the power of cogitation. All he could do was repeat what he'd heard.

  "Mai Takano gave birth to her?"

  "The evil video was born from Sadako's mind. Mai watched it on a day when she was ovulating. The ring virus was born in her body and then fertilized her egg. 'Fertilized' isn't the right word, though. It's probably more accurate to say that the nucleus of Mai's egg was replaced with Sadako Yamamura's genes."

  "I hope you're going to tell me you can explain the mechanism by which all this happened."

  "Think back to when we ran the ring virus through the genetic sequencer. We discovered that it contained smallpox genes and human genes mixed together in a fixed ratio."

  Ando sat up and reached for his glass. But the glass was empty.

  "So the human genes were…"

  "Sadako's. Split into hundreds of thousands of parts."

  "Hundreds of thousands of ring virus specimens, each carrying a tiny segment of Sadako's DNA?"

  "Despite its being a DNA virus, the ring virus has reverse transcription enzymes. So it ought to be able to insert those fragments into the nucleus of a cell."

  A single virus specimen would be incapable of carrying the entirety of a person's genetic information. It simply wasn't big enough. But things would be otherwise if a person's DNA could be split into hundreds of thousands of segments, and each segment parceled out to a different piece of virus. In the photos taken by the electron microscope, they'd seen what looked like countless numbers of ring viruses, mobs of them. It turned out that each one of them had been carrying a part of Sadako Yamamura's genetic code, and together they'd ganged up on Mai's egg.

  Ando started to stand up, but thought better of it and sat down again. He always got fidgety when he tried to counterargue.

  "But Sadako died twenty-five years ago. Her genetic information shouldn't be able to manifest itself anymore."

  "Let's think about that. Now, why do you think Sadako projected those images on a tape?"

  What had she been obsessed with at the bottom of that well, on the brink of death? The idea of packing all her hatred for the masses into images that would bring terror to anyone who saw them? Practically speaking, what would she get out of that? There had to be some deeper purpose. But Ando couldn't comprehend what Miyashita was trying to say.

  Miyashita tried to guide him toward the answer. "She was only nineteen."

  "So?"

  "So she didn't want to die."

  "She was too young to die."

  "Isn't it conceivable that she transformed her genetic information into a code and left it behind in the form of energy?"

  Ando's only answer was a sigh.

  She translated her genetic information into images and then projected those images? True, Ryuji had succeeded in communicating with them by encoding the word "mutation" into his own DNA base sequence. But the human genome was huge, much too big to be translated into a single videotape.

  Ando finally countered with, "Impossible. The human genome is too large."

  Miyashita spread his arms to point at the corners of the room. "Take this room, for example.

  Let's say we were to express the totality of this room in words."

  The study was about eight mats large. A desk stood next to the bed. There was a computer on the desk, and next to that a pile of dictionaries. Most problematic were the bookshelves that took up one wall. They were crammed with what had to be a few thousand books ranging from works of literature to specialist works on medicine. It could easily take a day just to list all the titles and authors.

  "That's a lot of information."

  "But what if…" Miyashita mimed holding a camera. Click. "… you took a picture. You've got it all in an instant. With just one photo you can store most of the information that makes up the sight of this room. And think, continuous images would increase the capacity that much more. It wouldn't be impossible to encode Sadako's complete genetic information that way."

  Ando saw what his friend was trying to say, but he still wasn't ready to go along. "Let me think about it for a while," he said, shaking his head. He needed to go back and retrace for himself a path through what Miyashita was saying.

  "Go ahead and think. I'm going to go take a leak." Miyashita disappeared down the hall, leaving the study door open.

  Of course, what Miyashita had spelled out was merely a hypothesis. But regardless of whether or not the mechanism Miyashita had suggested was actually how it had happened, the fact remained that Mai Takano had given birth to Sadako Yamamura a week after insemination. That seemed to be beyond question at this point. A week from insemination to birth was an awfully short time. Something must have served to hasten the process of cellular division. A cell's nucleus contains chemical compounds called nucleic acids, and cellular division only occurs when the levels of these nucleic acids exceed a certain level. Accordingly, the only way to drastically accelerate the frequency of cellular division is to provide excess quantities of nucleic acids. Perhaps the ring virus had managed this somehow, making it possible to force an incredible rate of growth in the fetus.

  The first time he'd visited Mai's apartment he'd felt the presence of something hidden, even though there was nobody there. His feeling had been right. The newborn Sadako had been hiding somewhere in that room. No doubt she'd been very small still. She could have easily found a place to secrete herself, in the wardrobe, maybe, or in the cabinet under the sink. Ando hadn't gone so far as to search those places. And because she was still so young, when she'd seen Ando in such a compromised position in the bathroom, she'd laughed. The thing that had touched his Achilles tendon had most likely been little Sadako's hand.

  Sadako took over that room in the absence of its rightful inhabitant and grew there, away from the eyes of other people. A week was enough time for her to reach adulthood. And when Ando visited the apartment a second time, she emerged from within it as a full-grown woman.

  Ando went over the sequence in his head over and over until he managed to wrap his mind around the hypothesis of Sadako's birth and growth. The theory accorded with what he himself had experienced.

  But what about the following days? Having reached adulthood in a week, her lifespan would have been just a few more weeks unless she somehow didn't keep on aging at the same rate. Sadako had come back to life at the beginning of last November, ten weeks ago. And yet her skin retained the youthfulness of a girl of nineteen. Perhaps maturation for her meant simply reaching the age she'd been at when she died?

  Miyashita came back, shaking his wet hands, and immediately spoke. "One other thing we shouldn't forget is the vital role of the smallpox virus in all this."

  "Yeah, well, Sadako and the smallpox virus seem to be in league alright."

  Just before her death, Sadako had contracted the virus from Jotaro Nagao. It seemed that she'd somehow blended with it there at the bottom of the well, over a long period of time, until the mixture had achieved full ripeness. Two beings hounded to untimely extinction had exacerbated each other's potency in their mutual desire to come back to life someday.

  "Now, is it true that Junichiro Asakawa is going to publish Ring?"

  "Yup. Shotoku already has it listed in a brochure of upcoming releases."

  "Okay. Sadako and the smallpox virus. Those two threads were twisted into one in the form of that killer videotape. Now they're coming apart, evolving back into two separate strands. One is Sadako herself, and the other is Ring."

  Ando didn't object. A virus was something that inhabited the gray area between life and non-life anyway,
something that amounted to little more than information, whose very nature it was to effect dramatic changes in itself in response to its environment. That it should switch from the form of a video to the form of a book didn't come as much of a shock.

  "So that's why Kazuyuki Asakawa survived so long."

  Finally, that riddle was solved. In other words, there had been two exits. One was Sadako, and the other was the Ring report. And that was why both Mai and Kazuyuki had been spared death by arterial blockage. As long as they had the ability to give birth, so to speak, their lives weren't to be claimed so easily. It made sense. Just as the ring virus that had invaded Mai's body had headed for her womb, in Kazuyuki's body the virus had headed for the brain. It wasn't really Kazuyuki Asakawa who wrote Ring; he had been forced to write it. Sadako's DNA entered his brain and made him do it. And that was how he was able to describe things with such video camera-like accuracy. Only his depiction of Sadako, the main subject, was lacking in verisimilitude, according to the logic that dictated that the person looking through the viewfinder won't appear on film.

  Ando and Miyashita fell silent, trying to anticipate what was to come.

  Just what did Sadako and Ring have in mind for humanity? Ando and Miyashita didn't need to wait for the results of their blood tests. They were sure now that they had to find some way to stop Ring from being published. Junichiro simply didn't understand how much misery the human race would suffer as a result of the book he was putting his name to. He had to be their first point of counterattack. They'd have to persuade him to reverse his decision to publish the book. But would he listen to them? They weren't sure they could get him to believe their outlandish tale in the first place. Miyashita slapped his knee and stood up. "Let's go, then."

  "Where are we going?" "It's obvious, isn't it? Your place." "I told you already. Sadako's there." "That's why we're going. We're going to confront her."

  "Now, just hold on a minute," Ando recoiled. He'd come here to get away from Sadako. It was going to take a lot to get him to go back.

  "We don't have time to fart around like this. Don't you understand how deep we're into this?"

  Ando did understand. It was obvious that something had to happen to him because he'd read Ring. But he didn't care anymore. He wasn't afraid of death, not particularly. He'd been quite afraid of death while his son was alive and his wife had loved him, but not now.

  Miyashita hooked a hand under Ando's arm and tried to wrestle him to his feet. "Get a move on. This might be our last chance."

  "Chance?"

  "Listen, Sadako came to you and entered your apartment of her own free will."

  "Well, yes."

  "She must have had a reason."

  "What reason?"

  "How the hell should I know? Maybe she wants you to do something for her."

  Now Ando remembered. She'd said something along those lines the second time he met her.

  I'll call on you soon with a request.

  As Miyashita dragged him out of the study, Ando was thinking that he had no idea what kind of request she might have for him, and that he didn't really care to find out.

  8

  They parked the car on a street that went by Yoyogi Park. As they climbed out onto the sidewalk, Ando and Miyashita looked up at the apartment building. Ando's windows were dark. It had been well over three hours since he'd burst out of there, chest heaving. It was now nearly one in the morning.

  Miyashita lowered his voice and asked, "Hey, are you sure the bitch is in there?" His use of the word "bitch" sounded forced. Ando figured Miyashita was trying to steel himself against the upcoming encounter.

  "Maybe she's asleep."

  The room seemed quiet, but there was no way to tell from the outside if she was still in there.

  "Hey, do the living dead need to sleep?" Miyashita was sarcastically driving at the strangeness of Sadako awakening from a long slumber just to doze off in a place like this.

  The two men stood on the empty sidewalk staring up at the fourth-floor windows for a while. Then Miyashita, with a show of fighting spirit, said, "Let's go," and barged on ahead. Ando followed meekly behind. The silence and cold of the night pierced him to the marrow, and he didn't think he could bear standing on the sidewalk much longer. Perhaps, if it had been warmer, he would have been even less willing to go back into his apartment.

  Urged on by Miyashita, Ando braced himself and turned the doorknob. It hadn't been locked from the inside. The door opened easily. The place seemed to be empty. The pumps were gone from the concrete floor of the vestibule, as was Sadako's only possession, a small Boston bag. Ando remembered seeing it sitting unceremoniously in the vestibule when he fled.

  Ando led the way into the apartment and flipped on the lights. The place was indeed empty.

  The thread of his tension severed, Ando collapsed limply onto his bed. Miyashita, though, kept his senses sharp, peering into the bathroom and out at the balcony.

  Finally, having searched the place meticulously, he was convinced. "I think she's gone."

  "I wonder where she went," Ando mumbled. But in reality, he couldn't care less where she'd gone. He never wanted to have anything to do with her again.

  "Any ideas?" asked Miyashita.

  Ando immediately shook his head. "Nope," he said. It was then that he noticed it. On the desk by the window, a notebook had been left open. Ando couldn't remember using a notebook there for some time.

  He got to his feet and picked it up. Several pages had been filled with sloppy writing. The first line said. Dear Mr Ando, and at the end it was signed Sadako Yamamura. She'd left him a note.

  Ando read the opening sentence silently to himself, and then handed the notebook to Miyashita.

  "What's this?"

  "A message from Sadako."

  Miyashita let out a gasp as he took the notebook from Ando. Though he hadn't been asked to, he read it aloud.

  Dear Mr Ando,

  As I do not wish to startle you any further, I have decided to leave you a letter. It's rather an old-fashioned thing to do, I know. Please try to remain calm as you read it.

  Surely you 've figured out by now where I came from. I borrowed the womb of a woman named Mai Takano in order to effect my rebirth into this world. I am perplexed myself as to the exact mechanism by which I was able to come back to life.

  My father was an assistant professor of medicine at a university, and he often used to speak to me about heredity when I visited him at the South Hakone Sanatorium where he was a patient. As a result, I know a little about genetics. It may be just a hunch, but I wonder if perhaps, using my psychic powers, I was able to imprint my genetic information onto something. Thinking about it now, I am quite sure that on the verge of death I willed my genetic information to remain intact in some form or other. What I felt was not so much a desire to be reborn as an unbearable revulsion at the thought that Sadako Yamamura and everything she represented would rot away at the bottom of that well, unbeknownst to anyone. What happened to me as a result is something that no doubt you, as a specialist, are better qualified to explain than I.

  My psyche, that which had died in that well, gradually took shape again within that woman. When I regained self-awareness, what I saw in the mirror was not my own face. At first, 1 did not understand what had happened. My face and my body were not my own; they belonged to another woman. But the "me" that was thinking that was indeed the true me. The city, too, looked unfamiliar. The cars lining the streets were so modern. The apartment (that tiny concrete box), the appliances, the electronics. When I looked at the calendar I found that twenty-five years had passed in the blink of an eye. I realized that somehow my spirit must have escaped my corpse and then taken up a new body twenty-five years later. The poor girl whose body I stole was Mai Takano.

  My consciousness was not born when Mai gave birth to me. A seed named Sadako was already putting forth buds in the depths of Mai's womb. As 1 grew, it grew, taking up residence within Mai, the master of that body. By
the time I was ready to be born I ruled Mai completely from my place in her womb.

  I was able to see things from two perspectives, mother and fetus, and touch and feel accordingly. With my little hands I was able to touch the soft folds of my own oviducts, feel them undulating like waves.

  As my birth approached, one thing began to bother me. After I was born, what would become of the Mai-body? Would Mai's soul return, would that body go back to wholeness as Mai Takano? Somehow I thought not. I had come to think of that borrowed body as my chrysalis. Just as the chrysalis cannot live by itself after the butterfly has grown, the body had to be discarded, having outlived its usefulness. It might have been a self-serving conclusion, but I felt that Mai had already died when her body had been usurped.

  The question then became, where should I be born? If she bore me in her room, I would be faced with the need to dispose of her decomposing corpse. Judging from how rapidly my fetus had developed, I thought it would not be long before I reached maturity, and I would need a place to live. Mai's apartment seemed the most sensible choice.

  This meant that I had no other choice but to be born somewhere out of sight of the neighbors, someplace where I could leave behind the husk and return to the apartment alone. That rooftop was made to order. If I left the husk in the exhaust shaft, it would be some time before it was discovered, and in the meantime I could use Mai's apartment freely.

  As our time approached, I made preparations and went up to the roof in the middle of the night. 1 tied a cord to the metal grate and descended into the shaft. In the process I slipped and wrenched an ankle, but this did not bother the mother-body. I was able to be reborn into this world on schedule. I crawled out of the womb, severed the umbilical cord with my hands and mouth, and cleaned myself off with a wet towel I had readied for the purpose. I was born in the early morning, before sunrise. It was only then when I looked up that I first realized, with a shock, that the exhaust shaft looked quite like the well where I had died.

  It was like a rite of passage prepared for me by the gods. I thought of it as a divinely appointed trial; I would not be able to adapt to this world, into which I'd been newly reborn, unless I crawled out of that hole on my own. But it wasn't hard to do. A cord hung down from the rim. I climbed it and was able to emerge from the hole with no difficulty. The eastern sky was growing light and the city was awakening with it. Let me tell you, I drank the air greedily. I felt, quite literally, revived.