The girl who was going to be his fifth victim…was Akane?
“Was it you? Were you the fifth girl?” he asked, speaking slowly and carefully.
“I don’t really remember,” Akane eked out from the back of her throat. “My memory is all spotty. After the case, the teachers at Fureai were extra careful in how they treated me. They got rid of related newspaper articles and images at the facility. Everyone was told not to talk about it around me. So, I think I probably tried to forget about it because they were all so worried for me. But I couldn’t forget his face. I saw it from up close. My face held down on soft grass, the moist soil, the smell…”
Even those fragments were raw enough to summon a memory that had been rubbed into every cell of her body. Nauseated, she put both hands to her mouth, and her throat clogged up.
When humans experience something utterly terrifying, in order to retain our sanity, we force the memory down into the realm of the unconscious, or so they say. Akane’s mind had tried to push an unbearable reality into oblivion.
She swallowed her saliva and somehow endured the nausea.
“It’s all right,” Takanori calmed her. “He’s gone now.”
Taking her clinging hand into both of his own, Takanori whispered into her ear, then embraced her skinny body.
As he held her tight, her intermittent spasms gradually subsided and gave way to a constant, soft trembling.
It may have been a creepy video, but the fact that this live-streamed footage of a suicide hanging existed was some kind of hint that the death sentence had been carried out. If he could just confirm it and let Akane know, she would surely find some relief.
Takanori shook free of her hand, got up, and went to his computer. An online search for the “Kashiwada Case” turned up numerous hits. There were even several links including the phrase “Death row prisoner Kashiwada executed.”
There it is. The sentence was definitely carried out.
Feeling more confident now, Takanori clicked on one.
“On May 19th at 10:04 a.m., Seiji Kashiwada, convicted of abducting and murdering several young girls, was executed at the Tokyo Detention Center…”
What surprised Takanori was the date and time of the execution. May 19th at 10:04 a.m., approximately a month ago.
The date and time had been carved into his memory. Right after they’d consummated the deed that had started the life growing in her womb, the clock beside the pillow had displayed the exact same hour and minute.
Holding his head as it threatened to descend into confusion, Takanori recalled the scene at the hot spring inn where he and Akane had stayed about a month ago.
5
About a month ago…
When Akane told him that she had Monday off from work in exchange for attending an athletic meet the following Saturday, he suggested that they go for a drive. After a long stretch of hard work, Akane was in the mood for a leisurely soak at a hot spring, so she agreed right away, and together they planned an overnight excursion.
The place they chose was an inn nestled in a pastoral landscape. While they enjoyed the atmosphere of hot spring areas with traditional inns bunched together, this time they were inclined to visit a quiet little establishment that was all by itself.
They got off the bullet train at Mishima and rented a compact at the rental-car office in front of the station.
After putting her bags in the backseat area, Akane got in the passenger seat and immediately began operating the car navigation screen.
“Hey, Tak, tell me the phone number of the inn we’re going to.”
When he handed her the reservation confirmation slip that he’d printed out, Akane typed in the phone number of their destination with delight.
Finding the way she poked the screen with her forefinger adorable, Takanori purposely scowled at her.
“Hey, hey, it’s fine. We can get there without relying on that thing.”
He didn’t like depending on car navigation when he drove. It annoyed him every time the system instructed him to turn right or turn left up ahead. But Akane—who didn’t have a driver’s license—had jumped the gun out of a desire to be helpful, and setting the destination, she slapped her knee with a proud look on her face.
“There, now we won’t get lost.”
Forcing a smile, Takanori started the car and took off.
The sun was strong for May, feeling more like summer weather. Clouds accumulated here and there, creating dark spots in the sky, and seemed to caress the peak of Mt. Amagi as they moved along.
Heading south along the national highway, they turned left onto the Nekkan road and continued for some time, and signs began appearing alongside the road for the inn where they would be staying that night.
Since the inn was listed in the car navigation system, they should have been able to get there even without the signs. Yet there seemed to be some discrepancy between the signs and the navigation’s instructions.
Then Akane spotted a guidepost at the corner of a liquor store which read “** Hot Spring: Next Right.”
“Ah, up there. Go right.”
Because the right-turn arrow was also green, Takanori unthinkingly cut the wheel to the right.
“Weird,” he murmured.
From that point on, the navigation guide and the places they were driving through began to differ sharply. The navigation was guiding them straight ahead, and when the monitor encouraged them to make a U-turn, there was an almost desperate quality to its voice.
He continued along, unsure of whether to turn around or not, but less than five minutes later they arrived at the inn.
The solitary establishment’s garden offered a commanding view of the placid, rural landscape, and they were certain it was the one where they’d arranged to stay. The phone number she had input also matched.
Before cutting the engine, they took one last look at the monitor. The flag indicating their destination was planted in a mountain valley some three miles away from their location.
Takanori turned and removed the key, causing the image to vanish.
“The information you typed in must’ve been wrong. It’s your fault, Akane,” he said half-jokingly.
Akane didn’t hold her tongue. “No way, it’s the driver’s fault. You must’ve been sending out some weird signal, Tak.”
Still assuming that it was a car-navigation error, they didn’t make much of the matter.
It was slightly after 3 p.m. when they checked into the inn. Having arrived much sooner than expected, even after taking a relaxing soak in the open-air bath, they would still have to kill time before the dinner hour. Thus, they decided to go for a little drive in the area. They got back into the car, and searching the navigation system for sightseeing spots in the vicinity, Akane came up with a suggestion.
“Hey, why don’t we try going here?” she said, poking the destination flag on the monitor with the tip of her fingernail. They’d arrived at the inn just fine by following the signs, so she seemed curious as to where exactly the navigation had tried to guide them.
Now that you mention it, I’d like to know too.
“Looks like it could be interesting. Let’s go find out,” he agreed without hesitation, and when he was about to start up the car again, a thought struck him: Better set the place we’re at now as our return destination. It was easy to lose one’s way in the twists and turns of the mountains, and he was a bit worried about getting lost on the trip back to the inn.
This time, obeying the car navigation’s instructions and led on by the voice guide, they drove along the mountain road. Once they passed a hairpin curve beyond a small cluster of homes and climbed a hill, the road straightened out.
On the right was a stony riverbed, while on the left the face of the mountain was covered in a tapestry of shrubs, and this scenery stretched on and on.
“Up ahead, take a left.”
The arrow on the monitor indicated a course that would take them leftward for a time, away from the prefe
ctural route, and over the mountain. At the corner in front of them stood a road guide, with the following words written in black paint on a white panel:
South Hakone Pacific Land
That seemed to be where they were being led by the car navigation.
After driving beside a field and continuing along a hill with sharp curves, they began to see ready-made vacation homes on both sides that were part of this “South Hakone Pacific Land.” They opened the car windows, letting the brisk highland air blow in, and with it the first taste of early summer. There even seemed to be a tennis court; they heard the thwacking sound of a tennis ball being hit below them on the right. They saw an information center in front of the entrance, but the destination being shown to them by the navigation was further ahead.
Takanori drove on, proceeding onto a road curving to the left.
A look at the monitor made it clear that the destination was nearby. The voice guide indeed announced, “You are approaching your destination,” in a cheerful tone.
At its urging Takanori reduced his speed, and they accessed a more detailed screen on the monitor and verified their location.
Their destination was diagonally to their right up ahead, and on the screen they gradually moved closer and closer to the flag. The view of the gentle mountain slope through the windshield showed no signs of any structures that could be the right spot.
A vague sense of desolation drifted into the scenery before them. Something just felt wrong. Not only had they found nothing as far as their eyes could see, but their surroundings were getting drearier. Where the hell were they being led?
“You are approaching your destination.”
Stopping the car when the flag was to its immediate right on the screen, Takanori turned his gaze in that direction. Akane turned her head in an identical motion.
The shrubs had been cut back entirely, revealing the surface of the mountain, which was otherwise covered in grass.
A grassy field on a gentle downward slope…that was all there was to say about it. Takanori zoomed in on the monitor. The flag showing their destination stood directly to the right roughly sixty feet from the road. From the driver’s seat, he couldn’t see down the slope, so he unfastened his seatbelt and prepared to exit the car.
“Don’t go.”
Akane reached out and grabbed Takanori’s hand. With his attention fixed solely on the scenery to the right, he hadn’t paid any attention to Akane sitting beside him in the passenger seat. Though just a few moments earlier he’d seen her in such high spirits, now she was curled up and her whole body was shaking.
“I’ll be right back,” he said, “so just hang tight.”
Rather than acquiesce to her plea, he chose to go outside. He was seized by a feeling—almost a sense of obligation—that he needed to know just what this place was. Chalking this up to a car-navigation error was too facile. Yet it wasn’t clear to him whether their guide’s intentions were benign or malevolent. If he knew it to be malicious, he wouldn’t have come near this place, but he had no reason to draw that conclusion.
When he opened the door and stepped out, he was able to get a wider view thanks to his higher vantage point.
Some kind of facility, now cleared away, must have been present once. Here and there, he saw the lingering remnants of some structures. It looked more like the ruins of bungalows or shacks rather than a larger building requiring foundation work. The remains of concrete blocks were also arranged along the boundary separating the road and the field.
Among the scattered pieces of concrete was a wooden plate, in which some letters had been carved. Without picking it up, Takanori leaned over and brought his face closer.
Villa Log Cabin
It seemed to be the name of the facility that had once stood there.
Climbing over the small mound of rubble, Takanori took a step onto the grass-covered slope.
It felt like he’d moved from hard asphalt to softer, spongier earth…His feet sank surprisingly deep, and he could sense a water vein beneath him. Perhaps there was a pond nearby. Under the grass, the soil was saturated with moisture.
Despite trying to descend slowly, he picked up momentum and stumbled down some dozen or so steps before coming to a halt. He hadn’t intended to stop. It was as if some sixth sense, together with the concerted effort of all his cells behind the other five, had forced his body to defy gravity and stop moving.
In front of him was a cylindrical object projecting a few feet out of the ground. It was shaped like the fat stump of a tree cut down just above the root, and around it the smell of soil was especially potent.
He could see some moss and weeds stuck to the surface as if they’d taken root in soft earth, but there were also stones stacked like bricks with a concrete lid on top, conveying a palpable sense of weight.
There before him, close enough to reach out and touch, was an old well.
Unconsciously, Takanori took a step backward, then another. A ghostly breath seeped out from a small gap beneath the lid and drifted over to his feet. Repulsed by this grim air—thou shalt not come near, it seemed to say—Takanori took back another few steps.
Though the sun began to set, an abundance of light still fell on the slope. Nothing about the weather conditions should have made him feel cold. Only the short, old well rising up from the ground in front of him could be depriving him of his body heat.
He rubbed his forearms with both hands, but as soon as they touched his rough skin, a chill rippled through his body.
He turned away from the old well and started scrambling up the hill.
Arriving back at the car, he opened the door, slid into the driver’s seat, and spoke to Akane.
“Let’s go.”
She didn’t answer. When he looked at the passenger seat, Akane was pale and trembling. Since she hadn’t even seen the old well, Takanori had no clue why she was so frightened. In any case, they needed to leave right now. He shifted into drive and peered closer at the monitor to check the way back.
“Ah,” he let out despite himself.
He was sure they’d entered their current location just before leaving the inn’s parking lot, but once again the destination flag on the monitor appeared someplace else.
The flag, which should have been pointing at the parking lot of the hot spring inn where they’d checked in, now appeared on the other side of the river running along the mountain road. There was no bridge in the vicinity to take them there, and simply from looking at the monitor, he saw that they couldn’t reach the spot.
Once again, the car navigation was guiding Takanori and Akane to some destination.
Takanori couldn’t decide. The weirdness was only mounting. Should they go back or follow the navigation to see what was there?
With his curiosity and dread offsetting each other, he was torn.
Let me tell Akane about it and ask her to decide, he thought. If she said no, then by all means, he would head straight back, the navigation be damned. He could get there without a map, back along the same road they’d taken.
Yet her answer surprised him.
“Seems like we have no choice.”
She sounded resigned. Or perhaps her desire to know what was there had won out.
The flag stood almost halfway between their present location and the hot spring inn. The navigation showed a route bypassing the mountain road they’d taken that would end up being a shortcut.
When their destination was immediately to their right, Takanori stopped the car on the shoulder.
As expected, it was by the river, and with no bridge the other side was unreachable.
“I’ll go and take a look. Do you want to stay?” Takanori said.
Akane shook her head and answered, “I don’t think we both need to go. I’ll leave it to you, Tak.”
Hammering the positional relationship on the monitor into his head, he exited the car, crossed the road, and stood on the bank.
The slope across the river was forested with ced
ar trees, all nearly the same height. The flag’s location was about ten feet above the river.
A single, imposing cedar stood a full head taller than the others, and he realized that its position and the flag on the monitor overlapped.
The wind was causing the branches of all the cedar trees to bend in the same direction, except for that tallest one, which stood as if unperturbed by the wind, almost contemptuous of the other trees.
Then he shifted his eyes downward. As he looked down the trunk, all the way to the root, an artificial blue color that didn’t match the natural surface of the mountain caught his eye.
And there—fluttering at the root with one side lifted up by the wind—was a blue tarp, the kind you saw at construction sites. It was exactly where the flag indicated. In fact, the tarp was also the kind you might find at the scene of a murder or some other crime.
Maybe a corpse was buried at the root of the tree…Was it why only that cedar tree grew up taller than the others, sucking the nutrients from the dead body? The way the blue tarp was fluttering, the will of a buried soul seemed to be waving a hand and inviting, “Come, come.”
With that image in mind, Takanori closed his eyes and opened them again after counting to three. The vivid blue color disappeared from the root of the cedar tree, leaving only dark brown humus peeping out between the blades of grass.
Taking a good look at this scenery and imprinting it on his retinas, he returned to the car to find Akane leaning out the window of the passenger seat.
“What happened?” she asked.
He didn’t know how to answer. If there had been an abandoned car on the grassy slope, he might have replied, “There was a car.” But the only lasting impressions of what he’d seen were a tall cedar among a cluster of shorter trees and a blue tarp fluttering at its root. He understood that the tarp didn’t exist in reality and had only been an illusion. The real scenery had overlapped with a scene from somewhere in his past and become distorted.