Spiral (19 page)

"I don't know. The smallpox virus is tangled up in this, right? In light of that, it makes perfect sense for this 'charm' to be copying the video to help it propagate."

"It makes sense up through Ryuji's death. But the deaths of Asakawa's wife and daughter throw the question wide open all over again."

"So, being copied wasn't what the tape wanted?"

"I don't know."

He didn't know how to interpret the situation. Either the charm had aimed at something else, or something untoward had happened in the copying process. Or maybe the tape killed people who watched it regardless of whether or not they enacted the charm. But that would make it even harder to explain why Asakawa survived.

Lunch arrived, and the two men fell into silence for a while, absorbed in eating.

Finally, Miyashita rested his fork and said, "I find myself in a dilemma."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, if there is such a videotape, I'd want to watch it. But it might kill me. I'd say that's a dilemma. A week's not much time."

"Not much time?"

"To figure it out. It's really intrigued me. Scientifically speaking, what we have here is a video, a medium that attacks the human brain through its sense of sight and sound, which can somehow implant a smallpox-like virus inside the body."

"Maybe it wasn't that it implanted it. Maybe the images on the video somehow influenced the victim's cellular DNA so that it metamorphosed into the mystery virus."

"You might have something there. I'm thinking of the AIDS virus. We don't know its origins for sure yet, but it's thought that something caused human and simian viruses that had existed all along to evolve, and that's what gave birth to the AIDS virus as we know it. In any case, AIDS is not a virus that has been around for hundreds of years. Analysis of its base sequences clearly shows that it's something that branched into two strains only about a hundred and fifty years ago. Through some chance event."

"And you want to find out what that chance event is in this case."

"Me, I think it involves the mind." Miyashita leaned forward until his nose almost touched Ando's.

It was, of course, common knowledge that the mind, as abstract and immaterial as it was, could influence the body in various ways. Ando was well aware of this. One only had to think of how stress could eat holes in the stomach lining. Now Ando and Miyashita were thinking along the same lines. First, the video created in the viewer a particular psychological state that somehow influenced the viewer's own DNA to metamorphose until the mystery virus which resembled smallpox was born. Then, this smallpox-like virus caused a cancer inside the coronary artery that surrounds the heart, resulting in a tumor. In a week's time the tumor reached its peak size, cutting off the flow of blood and stopping the heart. But the virus itself was like a cancer virus-its function was to worm its way into the DNA and cause cellular mutation in the coronary arteries tunica media-and wasn't very contagious. At least, that was what their analysis so far had led them to think.

"Come on, don't you want to see it?" challenged Miyashita.

"Well…"

"I just want to get my hands on that tape."

"No, I think it's best to let sleeping dogs lie. You'd end up like Ryuji."

"Speaking of Ryuji, did you manage to break the code?"

"Not yet. Even if it is a code, forty-two bases is too small a number to work with. It could only contain a few words at most."

This was an excuse. Ando had in fact tried several times to decipher the code, but every attempt had ended in failure.

"I guess I know how you'll be spending your holiday."

That was when Ando first realized that the next day was a national holiday, Labor Thanksgiving Day. And since he didn't have to work the following day, Saturday, it meant he had a three-day weekend coming up. Ever since losing his son and his wife, he hadn't paid much attention to holidays. It was nothing but misery to be home alone, and three-day weekends that he had no plans for made him particularly depressed.

"Yeah, well, I'll give it a shot."

But spending the holiday trying to read a coded message from a dead man sounded pretty dismal. On the other hand, if he succeeded, then maybe it'd give him some sense of accomplishment. At least it would provide a distraction.

So he promised Miyashita that he'd have it figured out by the end of the weekend. "On Monday, I'll tell you what Ryuji's trying to say."

Miyashita reached across the table and clapped a hand on Ando's left shoulder. "It's up to you now."

After lunch, Ando went back to his office and put in a call to the Forensic Medicine Department of Joji University Hospital, in Utsunomiya, Tochigi Prefecture. A little research had turned up the information that Asakawa's wife's parents lived in Ashikaga, Tochigi. Any unexplained deaths in that region would fall under the jurisdiction of the doctors at Joji.

An assistant professor came to the phone, and Ando asked him if there had been any patients who'd died late last month from heart attacks caused by blockage of the coronary artery. The man responded with a curt question of his own. "Sorry, but what are you getting at?" Ando explained to him that they had seen seven deaths from the same cause in the greater Tokyo area, and there were indications that there could be many more victims. He avoided any mention of paranormal phenomena.

This didn't seem to have assuaged the man's doubts. "So you're contacting medical schools across the region?"

"No, not exactly."

"So why are you calling us?"

"Because your area is at risk."

"Are you saying we're going to find bodies in Utsunomiya?"

"No, in Ashikaga."

"Ashikaga?" The mention of the name startled the man. He fell silent, and Ando could almost sense his grip on the receiver tightening.

"This is a shock. I can't imagine how you know about it. As a matter of fact, on October 28th, the bodies of an elderly couple were discovered there. We did autopsies on them the next day."

"Can you tell me their names?"

"Their last name was Oda, I think, and the wife's name was Setsuko. I forget the husband's name."

Ando had already checked on Shizu Asakawa's parents' names: Toru and Setsuko Oda. It had to be them. Now they had proof. On the morning of October 21st, Asakawa had loaded a VCR into his rented car and driven to his in-laws' house in Ashikaga, where he'd had two copies made of the tape and shown to the old couple. No doubt he'd assured them that if they made more copies and showed them to other people within a week, their lives wouldn't be in any danger. They probably hadn't needed much convincing, regardless of whether or not they fully believed in their son-in-law's outlandish story. If there was any chance that their daughter and granddaughter's lives were on the line, they must have been more than willing to acquiesce. And so Asakawa had had copies made, believing that by doing so he'd saved his wife and child. But on the way home he lost them both at once, and then a week later, the old couple died, too.

"I'll bet you were pretty surprised by what you found in the autopsy." Ando could well imagine the staff's shock at finding the same symptoms in both bodies.

"You can say that again. I mean, given the simultaneous time of death, plus the fact that they left a note, we naturally assumed it was a double suicide. But then we cut them open, and found, instead of poison, strange tumors in their coronary arteries. Surprised isn't the word."

"Hold on a minute," Ando broke in.

"What?"

"You say they left a note?"

"Yes. It wasn't much of one, but a note was found next to their pillows. It looked like they'd written it right before they died."

Ando was disconcerted by this development. What did this mean? Why did they leave a note?

"Can you tell me what the note said?"

"Hang on." The assistant professor put down the receiver, but was back a few seconds later. "It's going to take me a while to locate it. Shall I fax it to you later?"

"I'd appreciate that."

Ando told the man his fax number and then hung up.

He couldn't leave his desk after that. The fax machine was on the middle shelf of a computer cabinet two desks away. He swiveled in his chair forty-five degrees to face the fax machine, and then waited for the transmission to arrive.

He couldn't relax; he couldn't even lean back in his chair. Instead, while he waited, he went over the course of events up to now in his head. Reviewing the past was all he could do. He was too distracted wondering when the fax machine would come to life to start a new train of thought.

Finally, the machine started to buzz and a fax began to roll out. He waited until it was finished, then got up and tore it off. He returned to his seat, spread the fax open on his desktop, and read:

To: Dr Ando, Fukuzawa University Medical School

Here's the note Mr and Mrs Oda left. Please let me know of any new developments.

Dr Yokota

Medical School

Joji University

Under the professor's scrawled note were a few lines of text accompanied by the Odas' names. The handwriting wasn't Yokota's; he must have made a photocopy of the original.

October 28, morning

We took it upon ourselves to dispose of the videotapes. There's nothing more to worry about. We're tired. Yoshimi and Kazuko, please take care of everything.

Toru Oda

Setsuko Oda

The message was short, but even so it was enough to make it clear that they knew they were facing death. Yoshimi and Kazuko were probably their other two daughters. But who had the previous sentence been addressed to?

What did they mean, they'd disposed of the videotapes?

Did it mean they'd gotten rid of them? It certainly couldn't be taken to mean that they'd copied them.

Ando decided to try and recreate the Odas' state of mind from the beginning.

On Sunday, October 21st, their son-in-law showed up on their doorstep and told them that Shizu and Yoko's lives were threatened by a curse embedded in a videotape. The Odas agreed to copy the tape. But then, that same day, Shizu and Yoko died at the time foretold. Even if the Odas had been skeptical about Asakawa's story at first, now they surely had to believe in the video's power. Then, after the funeral, they had learned the results of the autopsies: inexplicable heart attacks. At this point the Odas must have decided to give up hope of saving themselves. Their daughter and granddaughter had lost their lives in spite of the fact that they'd followed the videotape's demands. The Odas must have thought that they couldn't escape death no matter what they did. Exhausted from all the effort that had gone into the funerals, and perhaps weary of life in general, they decided to refrain from copying the videotape and meekly awaited the approach of death. But if their note was to be believed, while waiting, they had "disposed" of the videotapes that were the source of all this misery.

There was no way for Ando to know how they had disposed of the tapes. They might have erased them completely and then thrown them away, or they might have buried them in the yard. In any case, as Ando now attempted to diagram the video's path on a piece of scratch paper, he decided to grant for the moment that those two copies had been obliterated.

First there had been the one in Villa Log Cabin No. B-4, the source of all the evil, created when a VCR left to record had captured the images on tape. Asakawa had taken that back to his apartment and made a copy for Ryuji. At this point there were two copies, two strains as it were. However, it seemed that Ryuji's copy had found its way into Mai's hands, and had then been erased, all except for the first ten seconds. Asakawa's copy, meanwhile, had passed to his brother Junichiro, who had discarded it along with the damaged VCR. Asakawa's original had begotten two further strains in the form of copies given to the Odas, but these too had been disposed of. In short, the videotapes born of Sadako Yamamura's wrath had now vanished from the face of the earth.

Ando went over the tree he'd constructed again and again, to make sure he had it right. But the tape did indeed seem to have gone extinct. A mere two months after it had come to life at the end of August, having claimed only nine victims, the scourge had died out.
But…
Ando thought. If the videotape killed everybody who watched it regardless of whether or not they copied it, it was obvious that it was going to go extinct sooner or later. Only by virtue of its threat would it be able to reproduce itself, to adapt to its environment and survive. Once the threat was exposed as a lie, the tape would inevitably be driven into a corner.

If it was extinct, that would mean they'd seen the last of these mysterious deaths. If nobody else could be exposed to those images, then there was no fear of anybody dying from inexplicable heart attacks. But a fundamental point now stole back into Ando's mind.

Why is Asakawa still alive?

This was followed by another question.

Where is Mai Takano?

Logically, the videotape seemed to have died out. But Ando's intuition denied it. This wasn't going to be over that easily. Something didn't sit right.

Ando picked up a locker key at the front desk of the library, and then took off his jacket on his way to the lockers. It was almost winter. Anybody who saw him, wearing nothing but a shirt, would shiver in sympathy. But Ando perspired easily, and even in his shirtsleeves, he felt hot in the climate-controlled library. He took a pen and a notebook out of his briefcase, then wrapped his jacket around it and stuffed it in a locker.

The notebook was where he'd put the page containing the DNA analysis of the virus found in Ryuji's blood. Ando was determined to have a go at cracking the code today, which was why he was here in the library first thing in the morning, but the moment he looked at the meaningless array of letters on the printout, his eyes glazed over. There was no way he'd be able to figure this out. But when he thought about it, he recalled that he was doing this partly to kill time. He couldn't think of anything better to get him through the empty three-day weekend.