Paprika (41 page)

“Wha—?!”

A dizzy, falling sensation made Osanai sit up with a jolt. He was in the Vice President’s office at the Institute for Psychiatric Research, sitting opposite Inui’s desk. They had just been discussing the Board of Directors. Inui was staring at Osanai with a look of astonishment.

“Sorry. I just felt a bit dizzy,” said Osanai. “Trouble is, I’m not getting enough sleep these days. Especially last night, as you know …” They’d both shared the same dream. It didn’t need to be discussed. Osanai’s speech trailed off.

“Are you all right?” asked Inui.

“I’m all right,” answered Osanai.

But was he? He’d felt a certain emptiness since the morning; now he wondered if he could have lost part of his ego during that dizzy spell just now.
What’s going on?
he wanted to ask himself. A void had formed in his senses. He shook his head vigorously to regain some vitality.

“What was that just now?” Inui asked, still staring at Osanai with his head tilted questioningly.

“What was what?”

Inui removed his glasses, put them on the desk and rubbed his eyes. “For a fraction of a second there, you seemed to disappear from your chair. Then you reappeared as a samurai warrior holding a sword. Your chest was stained with blood – you looked as though you were in your death throes. It was so unspeakably heart-rending, yet so indescribably beautiful. What on earth
was
that?” A gleam of eroticism hovered faintly over Inui’s eyes. He got up slowly. His face softened into a look of lechery. “It was so very attractive. As if the dream you had last night had become manifest in reality for a moment, through the power of the Devil’s seed. But who could it have been that killed you?” Inui walked behind Osanai’s back and gently placed both hands on his shoulders. “My, but you were beautiful. I fell in love with you again.”

17

Sleeping scared Atsuko as much as it did Osanai. The difference was that Atsuko had a mission: she had to get the DC Minis back. That fully justified the aggression she meted out to Inui, Osanai, and Hashimoto in the dreams she shared with them. What did it mean to have the upper hand in those dreams? It meant she was free to dictate the setting and progression of the dreams to her own advantage, and to invade her opponents’ dreams at will.

What scared Atsuko was the possibility that, while she continued to dream, she could fall into an even deeper sleep, become trapped in her unconscious and eventually be unable to escape from her dreams. To prevent this, Atsuko devised ways of sleeping lightly, disregarding the adverse effects on her health over the long term. Among others, these involved using drugs or self-waking devices, or sleeping on her chair in front of the PT devices.

That night, she had decided to use a self-waking device. She’d set it to ensure that she would remain in shallow sleep without fully waking. She had also placed her telephone near her pillow. She had an arrangement with Tokita and Shima that they would phone each other every few hours, in case the device failed to work properly.

Despite the shallowness of her sleep, there were times when her body slept deeply and only her brain waves followed waking patterns. This was during REM sleep. It was quite impossible to operate PT devices while dreaming at such times; usually, she wasn’t even aware that she was dreaming then.

It may have been during her first REM sleep that night. Atsuko was dreaming but unaware that it was a dream. She was in a laboratory with Hashimoto, back in the days when they were still on amicable terms. It looked like a biology lab, or perhaps chemistry. In front of them were a number of test tubes containing what seemed to be bacteria; they may have been experimenting on bacteriophages. Atsuko felt unbearably thirsty, and went to drink from a bottle of mineral water. On closer inspection, the bottle was full of tiny, wriggling green things.

“Bacteria!”

“You need to boil that,” advised Hashimoto, standing next to her.

Atsuko transferred the water to a flask and went to light a bunsen burner.

“Wait a minute!” Atsuko stopped the gas and held the flask up to the light.

The bacteria were growing.

“Not bacteria – fungi!”

Hashimoto nodded. “Mmm. Incomplete fungi, more like myxomycetes. Probably some kind of mutabile-type mutation.”

There were three fungi, colored in malignant shades of dark green, dark red, and dark yellow. Due to contact with air, they’d already grown to a length of about three centimeters. They were like gigantic larvae, their bodies shaped like spindles with something resembling a face at the top. Traces of eyes and noses could even be seen on those faces.

“I can’t drink this,” declared Atsuko, her thirst more intense still.

“These are carbohydrates,” said Hashimoto. He poked a chopstick into the flask, snared the yellow larva, took it out, and bit its head off.

Yeurghhh! Almost retching, Atsuko peered into the flask to see her own face on the red larva.

“Wahahahahahahaha!” Hashimoto laughed loudly beside her. He was the green larva, which now bore Inui’s face. He proceeded to coil his spindle-like lower body around Atsuko’s larval form.

“It’s a dream!” The shock of Inui’s appearance made her realize that. She instantly changed her red body to a red shirt and turned into Paprika. She had fallen asleep unusually early; it was only seven o’clock in the evening. Like her, Inui must also have wanted to enjoy a nice, relaxing sleep without meeting anyone in his dreams. But Inui concealed his true intentions. He was exercising supreme self-control and restraint.

Hashimoto! Help! Help me!
Paprika tried to call out. Perhaps it really had been Hashimoto just now. Perhaps he too was sleeping early, and had been dreaming of that experiment with Atsuko. In that case, Inui and Osanai must also have taken to sleeping early, hoping to prevent the weak-willed Hashimoto from revealing their secrets under pressure from Paprika.

They were in Hashimoto’s favorite noodle bar. Hashimoto was reaching across from the other side of the table, trying to wrench the larval Inui from his coiled embrace of Paprika. Hashimoto’s subconscious was preoccupied with that past time when he was on amicable terms with Atsuko. Paprika realized that Hashimoto had been in love with Atsuko, though fully aware that she was out of his reach.

“Ah, so you’re sleeping after all!” said Paprika.

You idiot!
Inui sneered as he lunged at Hashimoto. Paprika could read Inui’s cruel intention: even if he didn’t actually kill this bothersome traitor, this former ally who’d been nothing but a liability all along, he would at least drive him insane.
Hashimoto, run! No – wake up!
Paprika shouted. Flames shot up from a frying pan in the kitchen.

Inui turned into the devil Amon, a serpent’s tail entwined around his body. Fire spewed from his mouth. Lord Amon, a Marquis of Hell with the face of an owl. The terrifyingly vivid presence of this occultic apparition was enough to scare Hashimoto out of his wits. He screamed. He’d suddenly seen his conciliatory gesture to Paprika as an act of betrayal, and could read the terrible punishment now being planned in his master’s mind. The terror of induced madness or gruesome death at the hands of Lord Amon made Hashimoto urinate long and hard in his sleep. Whether he was in a dream or not, he knew there was no way of escaping his fate.

Both Hashimoto and Amon vanished from Paprika’s dream. She knew, even before the warm sensation and smell from Hashimoto’s nether regions reached her senses, that he had wet himself. That meant he’d woken up, but why had Lord Amon, the incarnation of Seijiro Inui, disappeared with him? Paprika shuddered with horror. She felt as though she could hear, from the distant reaches of the waking world, the sound of Hashimoto’s dying cries. It sounded as if Amon had appeared in reality at the moment Hashimoto awoke, and was in the process of strangling him in his own bed.

But Hashimoto was not sleeping in his own bed, in his own apartment. He’d been taking a nap on the sofa in his research lab. He’d brought the torment of death back from his dream to the real world, and had awoken together with that torment. What a hideous reality, that even after waking from a dream to escape its torments, those torments still remain! What a heartless, cruel reality that, with no means of escape, the only possible conclusion was death! Hashimoto’s chest was tightly bound by the demon’s serpentine tail, its sharp claws clutching his scrotum, the flames that spewed from its beak-like mouth burning his face. Asphyxiated by fire, his testicles burst and his ribs broken simultaneously, Hashimoto suffered three deaths at once. A red death, a yellow death, and a purple death. Having savored Hashimoto’s three-fold agony to its fullest possible extent, the Marquis of Hell moaned in satisfaction and disappeared.

Choosing to kill a disobedient underling for the slightest act of betrayal, even before pursuing the enemy, was an act truly befitting Lord Amon, a demon who commands forty legions in the realm of hell. Or perhaps, since Amon can discern the past and foretell the future, it was a deed done in the foreknowledge that Hashimoto would oppose him in the future. After completing his butchery, Lord Amon hurried back to the dream where he’d left his real enemy, his reason restored as that of Seijiro Inui.

Left alone in her dream, Paprika finally remembered her original mission there. She was near the exit on the quieter side of a station in central Tokyo. As she walked out of the station building she saw a vast swamp spread out before her, a stark contrast to the high-rise buildings and bustling city center she’d left behind. There she roamed about in the mud, seeking the atmosphere of Morio Osanai.

“Osanai? Morio? Where are you?!” she called. There was no reaction. He obviously wasn’t asleep yet, and Paprika would be unable to locate his DC Mini this time. Even then, there was no room for complacency; it would still be too dangerous for her to fall into a sound sleep, believing herself to be alone. Inui seemed to have woken up with Hashimoto while still in the guise of Amon, but would almost certainly return. Paprika’s only option was to challenge Inui, force him to reveal the location of the DC Mini. But how could she overcome his will, his conscious mind, thickly coated as it was with stubborn occultism? It might be a better idea to wake up first.

A number of men who looked like vagrants or laborers were wandering around in the mud. They seemed to be stealing glances at Paprika. A woman’s sense of danger welled up inside her. The men could have been agents of Inui’s dream; the swamp could have been an image inside Inui’s mind. Paprika hurriedly changed the scene. She was in a library, a reading room where the air was cold and dry. It was a broad, clean space with a high ceiling. No one else was there; it seemed safe enough. Paprika opened out a large pictorial encyclopedia on the table in front of her. The title was
Bertuch’s Picture Book for Children
.

Oh no. He’s back!
Paprika moaned. One of the plates in the encyclopedia was a picture of a griffin. This was a hideous creature with the head and wings of a bird and the body of a lion. The griffin was shown in profile, but as soon as Paprika made the connection with Inui, it stirred and turned to look at her. It had Inui’s face and the smile of a cat.

“The DC Mini,” Paprika said, to strike the first blow. “The DC Mini. Where have you hidden it?”

Violent emotion made the griffin Inui shake its body and flutter its wings.

“
Nuh!
”

Inui was desperately trying to suppress his consciousness, but through a chink in that consciousness, Paprika could see the inside of someone’s laboratory. In a corner of the lab was a box containing dangerous chemicals.

“Inside that box, is it?” Paprika shouted.
Yes. The box is made of lead. There’s no doubt. They’ve put the device in there to block its effects
. “Whose lab is it?”

“
Gaa!
”

Inui realized that his mind had been read, and his griffin went berserk. Inui lost his self-control into the bargain.
This young trollop. Must she keep peering in?! Wherever I go!
The griffin flapped its wings. It flew up from the pages of the encyclopedia, which were unfurled by the wind from its wings. The specter flew up toward the transparent domed roof of the reading room. There it hovered as it changed direction, opened its claws wide in anger, and took aim at Paprika below.

Paprika had to avoid being attacked. Her only option was to continue her counter-offensive.

“Whose lab is it?” she shouted loudly. “Whose lab? Tell me. Tell me!”

The griffin vanished. Inui must have chosen to wake up rather than answer Atsuko’s question.

Right. Let’s go there. It’s probably Osanai’s. All I have to do is go to his lab, take the DC Mini out of the chemical box, hold it tightly in my hand, and return to reality. That’s all
. Paprika changed the scene of her dream to the Institute. She appeared at the corner of the corridor in front of the Medical Office, where the corridor widened slightly.

18

Noda and Konakawa had delayed their arrival at the Institute until most of the staff had gone home. A few would still have been engaged in hospital-related work, but that couldn’t be helped.