Birthday

1

November 1990

Even before she'd regained consciousness, her retinas were registering the scene above her. Not that there was much to be seen: her field of vision was terribly re-stricted, as if she were lying in the depths of the earth gazing up at a cut-out rectangle of sky. A single vertical stripe of blue, outlined entirely in black. At first she did not know what it meant. She had no idea where she was.

The sensation was that of having just awakened, the boundary between dream and reality blurry.

Concrete walls pressed in on her from the left and the right, and she could feel the same hard substance beneath her back. Had the sky above her been round, she might have surmised that she was at the bottom of a well. But, judging from the shape, she thought it had to be a rectangular fissure several meters deep.

She couldn't see the sun directly. The clean, brisk air on her skin suggested that it was early morning. Now and then she heard crows calling with unusual presence, quite close by. They didn't show themselves, and she heard no wing beats, just their cries echoing in the narrow space.

The crows' calls abruptly ceased; in their place the sound of a ship's horn reached her ears. She was near the ocean. The faint tang of seawater tickled her nostrils.

She gradually began to grasp where she was: on the roof of a building at the edge of Tokyo Bay.

Thrusting up her chin, she saw a pair of rusty pipes crossing overhead. The walls on either hand were close—too close for her to be able to move her shoulders or arms. Iron rebar poked like thorns out of the cracked concrete. It looked painful to the touch and made the space seem even more constricted. All she could do was just lie there stiff as a rod, face up, arms and legs straight.

She raised her head to try and cast a glance towards where her feet lay. Perhaps her eyes had deceived her, but she thought she'd seen something flutter in the breeze that at first she'd taken for a thin iron bar. When she focused her eyes she realized that it wasn't an iron bar at all, but a thin strip of cloth, like the sash from a bathrobe. One end was tied to something, she didn't know what, and the other end danced lazily by her feet.

...The spider's thread.

She recalled a short story by that title, by Ryuno-suke Akutagawa. Hell came to mind, and every pore in her body seemed to clench.

She could not recall why she'd come to such a place.

Her memories were fragmentary, scattered, like broken and discarded tiles. She tried to remember, but the bits and pieces refused to form any meaningful pattern, and she couldn't distinguish cause and effect.

Where am I? Why am I here?

Clearly there were gaps in her memory, but she had no idea how much blank time they added up to.

She tried uttering her name, deep inside her breast.

Mai Takano.

That was probably correct. She was fairly certain that she was, in fact, a woman named Mai Takano. Yet, it somehow didn't feel right. She had the inescapable feeling that some strange entity had entered her body—

she felt like she wasn't herself. She'd felt like that for a while now.

She tried to recall her age, her address, the chronology of her life, any information she could come up with that might sharpen the outlines of who she was.

I'm 22. I'm a college student. I'm a liberal arts

major, and I'm hoping to go on to grad school to study

philosophy.

Suddenly her legs hurt. Or, rather, for the first time since she'd awakened, she registered the fact that her ankles were giving her pain.

Mai Takano raised her head apprehensively and looked toward her feet. A shock greeted her: she couldn't see them.

Some object was obstructing her vision, something she couldn't identify. She squinted at it. Finally, her eyes grew wide and her expression became one of astonishment as she realized that it was her own swollen belly.

She had tucked her sweatshirt into her jumper skirt, but now her midriff under the skirt was swollen tight as a drum. Forgetting the pain in her legs, Mai placed one hand gingerly on her abdomen. She no longer felt as if a foreign object had lodged itself within her belly. Now she could feel that her belly and the hand that was touching it were contiguous, part of the same flesh. The swelling came from within her body, stretching taut the skin of her abdomen. As far as she could remember, she was a thin girl—breasts not at all on the large side, waist size proudly smaller than average.

She was not afraid. Nor did she despair. After her initial astonishment passed, she just lay there in a daze for a while running her hands over her abdomen. She couldn't believe she'd been placed in such a situation.

She didn't know what to feel.

A cool, objective gaze examined her body. Her mind was a blank, as though her intellect had ceased to function. She scrutinized her swollen belly with the gaze of another; no matter how she looked at it, she was a woman about to give birth. The word "pregnant" came to mind.

That was the catalyst. Fragmented images revived one after another in Mai's mind. Her intuition told her why she was where she was. It had begun with—yes, a videotape.

It's because I watched it.

She'd had a bad feeling about it, but she'd watched it anyway. And she shouldn't have.

Mai remembered inserting the tape into the video deck, the touch of her finger on the play button—it all came back to her now. It all felt real.

2

It was a simple chain of events, really, that brought the tape into her hands and that led her to watch it. Mai had no way of knowing whether a will operated behind the veneer of chance. Perhaps, too afraid of a power that couldn't be seen, she bullied herself into believing that it was all mere coincidence. Maybe she wanted not to know the truth.

Ryuji Takayama's friend Asakawa had told her, in so many words, that a videotape had been involved in his demise. No one bothered to tell her exactly what the connection might be. Perhaps Ryuji watched something so strange, he died of shock—that was the preposterous theory of Mai's concoction. But how else could a videotape cause a man's death? What other explanation could there possibly be?

And otherwise, Asakawa's question made no sense.

He'd asked Mai, since she'd been in contact with Ryuji in his final moments, "He didn't tell you anything there at the end? No last words? Nothing, say, about a videotape?"

He'd made it sound like some videotape had brought about Ryuji's death.

Mai didn't believe it, in the end. And that was why she allowed herself to be led—quite easily at that—into watching it herself.

Ryuji had taught logic at the university. He'd been writing a philosophical treatise and serializing it in a monthly journal. Mai, a student of his, was in charge of making a clean copy of each month's installment for submission; Ryuji's handwriting was all but illegible to anybody who hadn't spent time getting used to it. Mai had volunteered for the job not out of slavish sacrifice but because the task would secure her the honor of being her mentor's first reader.

Ryuji had just finished the final installment when he'd suddenly departed this life. According to Mitsuo Ando, the coroner who performed Ryuji's autopsy, he'd died from sudden myocardial infarction due to a block-age in the coronary artery. But questions remained, and then there was what Asakawa had said. He was Ryuji's friend, and he'd implied that a videotape he'd watched had caused his death. The circumstances of Ryuji's death got murkier and murkier.

Mai, meanwhile, was due to hand in Ryuji's final installment to his editor when she discovered that there were pages missing from the manuscript. This was the conclusion, the wrap-up to a year-long project, and there were pages missing.

She went over his apartment with a fine-toothed comb, with no luck. Her last hope was Ryuji's parents'

home in Sagami Ohno. Immediately after his death, everything in his apartment had been packed up and sent back there; it was the only place she could imagine the missing pages being.

So Mai explained the situation to Ryuji's mother and got permission to visit. Mai was shown to the second floor of the house and to the room that Ryuji had used as a study from elementary school through his sophomore year in college. Ryuji's mother told Mai she could search the room to her heart's content.

Books, clothing, appliances, small pieces of furni-ture: everything Ryuji had had in his one-bedroom apartment was there, stuffed into the cardboard boxes stacked randomly around the room. Mai was looking for a few pieces of paper—they could be anywhere. Foreseeing a lengthy slog, Mai took off her cardigan and set to work.

After a while the search began to seem a pointless one for the proverbial needle in a haystack. But she couldn't think of any other way to plug the gap in the manuscript. She'd just have to keep looking.

But as her will weakened so did her body. Fatigue came into her hunched shoulders. Now and then she thought she could feel someone's gaze fixed on her back, and the sense that she was being watched only grew stronger as the minutes went by.

In high school, she had modeled—just once—for an oil painting by her homeroom teacher, an art instructor.

Needless to say she'd been fully clothed, but all the same she'd had the impression that the teacher's gaze had passed right through her clothing to lap at her skin, indeed to penetrate right to her skeletal structure. She'd known a curious arousal, half embarrassment and half rapture. Later she'd heard that when painting a person's head, the artist's eyes are really seeing the skull. Her intuition hadn't been far off and she'd thought, That stare of his saw straight to my pelvic bone.

That same powerful, razor gaze was boring into her back, penetrating her skin, gouging away her flesh, trying to feel her bones.

Mai couldn't bear it any longer. She turned around.

Behind her she saw a black object, half covered by the pink cardigan she'd taken off prior to beginning her search. She'd placed her cardigan on the object without noticing it.

She moved the garment to reveal a black-bodied VCR. The unit wasn't turned on, but its pilot light glowed a dull red. Mai remembered what Asakawa had said to her.

He didn't tell you anything there at the end? No last words? Nothing, say, about a videotape?

Those words urged her to it. She turned on the video deck.

3

She began to think, gradually with greater certainty, that she was there because she was supposed to be there.

It was no accident, but a necessary thing.

Now that she thought about it, the shape of the rooftop fissure where she was resembled a videocassette.

A long, narrow rectangle. No, that wasn't quite it. It was more accurate to say that it was shaped like the case of a videocassette.

She wasn't sure what the purpose of the hole was in terms of the building's design. An exhaust shaft, maybe a drainage shaft? Skyscraper construction was a field she knew nothing about. She could hear the whine of a motor beneath the concrete, which suggested the building had an elevator. She was somewhere near the machine room, then. She knew that much.

The sky suddenly brightened, going from a whitish to a truer blue. A line that divided light from shadow was crossing the shaft wall fast enough that she could actually see it advancing downward. Light was moving into the giant videocassette case.

Mai recalled the moment at Ryuji's parents' house when she'd taken the tape from the VCR. She'd plugged in the machine, turned it on, and pressed eject. A

kachunk, and the tape popped out like a child sticking its tongue out at her.

She remembered the touch of it, hard, inorganic but strangely warm. She'd only just turned on the power, but it communicated to her fingers an almost living heat.

A title was written on the spine.

Liza Minnelli, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Jr. /1989.

The handwriting wasn't very good, and she didn't think the inscription described the contents of the tape.

She doubted it actually contained a concert. Most likely someone had recorded something else over it, but left the title.

What she regretted most now, more than watching the tape, was sneaking it out of Ryuji's parents' house and taking it home with her. Why couldn't she just leave it alone? She'd gone there to find those missing pages.

She should have ignored the odd tape. The moment she took it home with her, her fate was sealed: sooner or later, she'd watch it.

The line descended along the wall of the shaft in leaps. Suddenly, the light hit her straight in the eyes. The sun was directly overhead now.

Time was flying; it was not passing in an analog manner. She'd awakened only just now, in the early morning, but the sunlight had reached the bottom of the hole. It had to be noon or thereabouts.

She lifted her left arm, weakly. No wristwatch.

She'd have to tell time by the position of the sun.

She was probably still losing memory—a block at a time. That would explain the jerky, disjointed passage of time. She was alternating between awareness and blank-outs. She'd spent the hours since her first awakening in a state of idleness, drifting in a daze or lost in flashbacks.

But now she knew exactly what she had to do.

I need to figure out how to get out of here.

She'd die if she didn't escape—and death would come slowly, at its leisure, nibbling away at her soul.

Have I already gone crazy?

She knew, considering her predicament, that she should be terrified, perhaps even in a state of panic, yet she was calm. It was as if there was another her somewhere watching it all as a bystander. She wondered if she was capable of fully appreciating her situation given the gaps in her awareness, the tenuousness of her hold on consciousness.

For no apparent reason, Mai found herself thinking of a pretty girl rotting at the bottom of a well. The image had to have been triggered by something, but what? The smell? She was aware of a citrusy scent wafting on the air that seemed to stimulate her imagination. The image of the girl became more and more real; it leaned heavily on Mai's body, and then drew back.

Mai had imagined a girl as if she were really there.

She listened closely and tuned herself to her surroundings. It was terrifying, this being utterly alone, and she wanted someone—anyone—to come to her.

Her ears were all she could rely on, and she waited desperately for the sound of footsteps. She was vexed at her own powerlessness.

So I have to wait to be rescued? She'd never liked to be so passive about anything.

The thread dangling down into the shaft was her lifeline, her only connection with the bustling world below. She wondered how many bathrobe sashes had been tied together to make it. Looking up at it, she could only see one knot. What was it doing there anyway? If the sash was a snake, the knot would be its head.

It looked too slender to hold her weight, but it was the only way out she could see. The end of the sash-rope swung lazily in the air a foot above the floor.

She decided to try to force herself into a sitting position to see how much she could move. As she made the attempt, she banged her injured left ankle into the wall and nearly screamed from the pain. Was it broken or just sprained? The intense pain proved to her, at any rate, that she was indeed conscious, and it ended up giving her a little courage.

She broke into a cold sweat as she tried to steel herself against the pain. But how could she expect to climb out on her own if she couldn't even sit up?

Call for help.

Mai racked her brain for a way to let the inhabitants of the outside world know she was there.

She cried out, just to see how it went. "Help! Help me!" The sky above swallowed her words. She seriously doubted anybody could have heard her. Unless somebody came up onto the roof, yelling wasn't going to do her any good.

She pondered. If nobody was going to come up to the roof on their own initiative, she'd have to do something to draw attention to herself, to bring somebody up.

Maybe passersby would look up if something came falling out of the sky.

Is there anything I can throw!

She stretched out her arms and felt around above her head until she found a few chunks of concrete. She picked one up and examined it. It was about the size of her thumb. It was just a little piece of old concrete from the crumbling wall; even if it happened to hit somebody in the head it probably wouldn't cause serious injury.

Mai had been on the track team in middle school and high school, as a sprinter, and she had confidence in her athletic ability. She'd been able to throw a softball farther than almost anybody in her class. But she'd never tried throwing from her current position before—flat on her back. The only feasible motion was to swing her right arm in an arc from her head toward her feet; it meant there was only one direction in which she could toss the concrete. If she couldn't get it over the railing at the edge of the rooftop, the whole thing would be a waste of effort.

The sun was descending into the west. She realized that if she was going to try this, she should do it in day-light when there would be a maximum number of people walking by. She flung the piece of concrete into the air.

It immediately disappeared from sight, swallowed up soundlessly by the sky.

She was astonished how little of the world she could see. Her entire world was that narrow strip of sky. The ease with which the concrete had disappeared made her wonder if the place she was in really connected to the world below.

She felt around again and this time found a four-inch length of iron pipe. Big enough and heavy enough, she thought, to carry farther than the fragment of concrete. On the other hand, if it hit someone in the head it could do considerable damage.

She wanted to minimize the pipe's potential to do injury. She also wanted to lend it some trace of herself, to make it seem like a message.

She fished in her pockets for a scrap of cloth. A handkerchief would do—anything, really. If she could tie something to the pipe, then whoever found it would be less likely to think it had simply fallen at random.

But she had no handkerchief in her pockets. She tried to tear off a piece of her sweatshirt, a bit of the hem of her jumper, to no avail. She closed her eyes to think of her options, and an idea came to her. The odder the item attached to the pipe, the more attention it would elicit.

She'd take off her panties and tie them to the pipe.

She'd have one chance. If she screwed it up, that would be it. But her only fear at the moment was that getting them off her legs might hurt too much.

She slowly hiked up her skirt and felt around in the area of her hipbone. Her skin was bare. She should have encountered the elastic band of her underwear, but all her fingernails found was her own skin. She felt all around but couldn't locate her panties.

What the.. ? I'm not wearing any underwear!

This was not normal for her. She'd never gone out in public wearing nothing under her clothes.

She raised her head and craned her neck to a painful angle in order to get a glimpse of her groin, but her dis-tended belly was in the way. She had to judge by feel. At the very moment she realized she really wasn't wearing any underwear, her arm felt something moving inside her abdomen.

It felt precisely like a baby stirring in her womb. But then she remembered that she was still a virgin, and her consciousness threatened to recede again. Her puzzle-ment as to why she wasn't wearing panties gave way instantly: what was this in her womb?

She could see part of her belly now, peeking out of her rolled-up skirt. It was swollen, but it was also moving, changing shape before her eyes, in response to pressure from within.

She remembered a scene from a movie she'd seen years ago. The sheer abnormality of her situation chilled Mai to her core now.

4

Her memories couldn't be wrong about it. Mai knew it was foolish even to examine them.

Once, and only once, she'd nearly yielded herself physically to a boyfriend. She'd been in the same position she was in now, flat on her back, arms and legs extended. On the single bed in his apartment... They'd had long, serious discussions about it, and she was ready.

His name was Sugiyama, and he was a student at her college; both of them were in the school of liberal arts.

Sugiyama was slender, pale, and handsome. A little taller than Mai, with something of the beautiful boy about him. In terms of looks, he and Mai were a fine couple.

Mai, though, wasn't attracted to his looks, but to his precociousness as a scholar. Sugiyama prided himself on knowing everything about everything, and he could answer seemingly any question with ease. It was fun just to ask him questions, so sharp was his mental razor, and conversation with him was a joy.

He was well versed in literature and was a real charmer the way he peppered conversation with bits of astrology or Greek mythology. Having devoted most of her attention to sports in high school, Mai had vowed to focus on academics in college. She fell head over heels for Sugiyama's mind—not that his androgynous good looks didn't help.

Friends who knew her as a dedicated member of the track team expressed doubts about her choice of boyfriend. Hey, I thought you went for jocks! That was the gist of their doubts. But Mai knew that if she had to choose between body and mind, she'd choose the latter as the locus of talent without hesitation. Of course, to have both would be ideal. But she wouldn't meet a man like that until Ryuji.

Several upperclassmen had asked her out back in high school. Although they were all pretty naive and none of them actually tried to move on her, just sitting across the table from that type came to be a burden for Mai, what with their masculine passions and ghastly thirst for sex.

Sugiyama's androgyny comforted her, in a way. She didn't have to worry about blocking his lust, or taming it and diverting it. That was a relief and it made him relaxing to be around.

That time in his apartment when they nearly hooked up, it began almost as a sort of ritual. They proceeded with great deliberation, and only after confirming each other's feelings and intentions. At that moment, Mai had no reservations about discarding her virginity.

Following his instructions, she lay down on his bed and shut her eyes tightly. Her nervousness had made her arms and legs tense. Just as now, her limbs were straight and rigid. Sugiyama didn't try to alleviate her tension.

Rather, he went about his business in stony silence, almost seeming to enjoy the stiffness of her body.

He slowly took off her clothes and exposed her skin.

Mai could see her own naked body in her mind. He simply undressed her, with no kisses or caresses, nothing to blur the roles of undresser and undressee. As pre-inter-course ceremonial, it was strangely monotonous, but Mai didn't have enough experience to think it odd.

It happened when she'd been reduced to bra and panties, and Sugiyama laid his hands on her chest. Her bra slipped upward and exposed her smallish breasts.

Never very big at the best of times, they looked perfectly flat when she was supine. She imagined her breasts the way Sugiyama would be looking at them. Her nipples, large in proportion to her breasts, must have been erect and pointing at the ceiling.

The image of that moment remained vivid in Mai's memory, no doubt because it had been the product of her imagination to begin with.

She was left in that state for a dozen or more seconds, her breasts visible beneath her displaced bra. It was an awkward limbo that emphasized the flatness of her chest. She thought she could feel Sugiyama's gaze. Then the current shifted subtly—she detected a change in the air that filled her with unease.

What are you doing I Hurry up!

But he didn't hurry. In fact, he started to replace her bra.

At the touch of his hands on her chest, Mai's eyes popped open. She stared in disbelief as he covered up her breasts. And not only her breasts. He put all her clothes back on her, retracing his earlier steps in reverse. He closed her away, just as innocent as she had been before, with not so much as a drop of his saliva upon her.

She looked the question into his eyes.

...Why ?

Sugiyama leaned close and whispered into Mai's ear,

"I guess we'd better not."

The blunt inadequacy of the words belied his usual eloquence. Sugiyama should have been able to come up with some pretty-sounding explanation for why he'd stopped in the middle. But he hadn't even tried. He had simply said "let's not."

Mai's mind went blank with confusion. She felt humiliated, robbed of her dignity as a person, reduced to the status of a dress-up doll.

They'd agreed to have sex. Why did he feel it necessary to do a u-turn like that? Was her body so unattractive? His refusal to explain allowed all sorts of doubts to bloom in her mind. She couldn't understand what had killed his desire. She could only despair.

Is it because my breasts are so small? she asked herself. But he hadn't needed to undress her to find that out.

It was obvious, to a degree, even when she was clothed.

Hurt, and without finding out why, she left Sugiyama's apartment and went home.

Their relationship ended there.

She'd had boyfriends since, and they'd tried, but she'd never crossed the line. Those dozen or so seconds of blankness always came back to haunt her. She felt like he'd evaluated her nakedness; she didn't like it. She'd rather stay a virgin for the rest of her life than go through that again.

There could be no mistake, no gap in her memory, about it. There was no point to any further scrutinizing the fact that she'd never had sex. That was a sure premise.

So then why am I pregnant?

Cause and effect. When something happened, there was a reason for it. The only immediate cause she could think of—yes, having watched that tape.

Then, she remembered something else, too.

I was ovulating the day I watched it.

She knew it, based on her cycle and on the ther-mometer. Her ovulation, that tape. The two had somehow come together to produce the change in her body.

The line between shadow and light was climbing the wall now. The sun was sinking, and the rectangular space was coming under the inexorable rule of darkness again.

Mai felt an appraising gaze on her body, like Sugiyama's. But there was nobody at the lip of the fissure peering in. The gaze emanated from within her own womb. The eyes she carried within were watching her.

As if to prove it, her belly undulated again with small but sharp movements.

5

In the end, she never was able to locate the missing pages among Ryuji's household effects. She'd promised the editor she'd have the manuscript to him by the next day. She had until the next afternoon to provide a clean copy of the final installment of the series.

It was late in the evening. Mai had locked herself in her studio apartment. She had spread the manuscript out before her on the table, and now sat there groaning, her head in her hands. It was a small room—five mats or so in size. She sat on the floor with a backrest propping her up at a low table that she used as a desk. This was how she always studied. From where she was sitting, her bookcase was close enough that she could reach out and touch it. The bookcase housed a fourteen-inch TV with a built-in VCR.

She didn't know what to do about the manuscript.

Over and over she'd look up and heave a sigh. How was she going to make up for the missing section?

Mai had been concentrating on filling in the gap with her own words. There was a clear leap in logic from the previous installment to this final one. She'd been trying to supplement the argument; that was what had her stalled and groaning, her head aching.

Suddenly it occurred to her. Instead of trying to add, why not subtract? I'm stuck because I'm trying to add words, and they won't come. It would be much easier to pare down what was there until it made sense. She wouldn't be as liable to twist Ryuji's thoughts that way.

As soon as she'd decided on her new plan, her spirits rose. Now there looked to be a good chance of getting it done by morning.

The videotape seized that moment to catch her eye.

It was what she'd found instead of the missing pages.

She'd brought it back with her and placed it carelessly on top of her television. She could watch the tape now, to refresh her mind, and still have time to finish the manuscript by morning.

Thinking back now, Mai felt she had been snared, and quite cunningly. She didn't know who had set the trap, but she'd certainly been carried along by that un-seen being's schemes.

From where she sat on the floor it was a natural motion for Mai to reach out and pick up the videotape.

Liza Minnelli, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Jr. / 1989.

There was no case, just the cassette.

The handwriting on the label told her that the tape didn't belong to Ryuji. Made by an unknown third party, brought into his apartment by some unknown route, it had made its way into Mai's room now to emit its strange pull.

She reached out and put the tape into the VCR. The unit came on automatically. She switched the channel to video and pressed play.

There's still time—throw it away!

But the static of the tape drowned out the voice of instinct.

She couldn't fight her curiosity. The screen dis-solved into a chaos to match the static. Then an image like spilled ink leapt into her vision. It was too late to turn back now. Mai steeled her nerves and sat up straight. The tape seemed to emanate arrogance, to demand close attention from whoever watched it.

Watch until the end. You will be eaten by the lost.

The thick stream of ink formed itself into a threat.

The blinking points of light emitted an artificial brightness not possible in reality. When it pierced her eyeballs it should have been unpleasant, but she couldn't look away.

The tape was a collection of fragmentary images whose meaning was unclear. But each scene, taken on its own, had great impact, a real you-are-there quality that seemed to come straight at her. She began to wonder if the images weren't having a physical effect on her, so powerful they were.

A spray of red flashed across the screen at one point, then to change into a stream of lava that Mai saw at once was flowing down the scorched sides of a volcano.

Sparks danced up into the night sky. A perfectly natural scene.

The next moment, the character for "mountain," yama, was floating in black against a white background, fading in and out of view. Then a pair of dice were tumbling around in a lead bowl.

In the following scene, a person appeared for the first time. An old woman sitting on a tatami mat, facing forward and mumbling something. It was a dialect Mai couldn't make out. The old woman seemed to be lectur-ing somebody, preaching.

A newborn baby gave its first cry. As Mai watched it, the baby grew larger and larger. Mai felt that she was holding the onscreen baby with her own two hands. Her palms touched skin covered in amniotic fluid. It was slick, and she felt like it slipped out of her hands. Reflex-ively she drew back her hands.

At the same time, the baby disappeared, and a crowd of voices erupted in cries of "Liar!" and "Fraud!" She saw a hundred faces crammed into a grid like a huge chess-board; each face wore an accusatory expression when she looked at them. The faces divided like cells until they became tiny dots filling the screen.

In the center of the black screen floated the character sada.

A man's face suddenly came into view. An abrupt transformation. His breathing grew ragged and huge beads of perspiration appeared on his face. Scattered trees stood behind him.

He seemed to be running—his naked shoulders gleamed with sweat. His sunburned skin was peeling.

Both the background and the man's appearance were summer itself. His eyes were bloodshot, murderous. His mouth was twisted, and he was drooling; he looked upward, and then disappeared from view.

When he reappeared, a chunk of flesh had been gouged out of his shoulder, and he was bleeding pro-fusely. Great drops of blood fell onto the screen.

The baby cried again, somewhere. A chaotic cry, it vibrated not against her eardrums but directly against her skin cells. Mai recalled the touch of the infant's flesh.

In the center of the screen there was a bright, round hole. It was like looking up in the dark at a full moon directly overhead. After a while, a rock fell from the moon, then another.

This person's looking up from the bottom of a well.

The moment she saw the scene, Mai grasped the situation. Maybe her intuition was at work, guessing at the fate that would later befall her.

Because, at that point, there was no reason for her to think that the moonlike circle was the lip of a well.

Finally, more words appeared. Those who have viewed these images are fated to die at this exact hour one week from now. If you do not wish to die, you must follow these instructions exactly...

And then the scene changed. The concatenation of images was replaced by a commercial for mosquito-re-pelling coils that she'd seen on TV numerous times. A commercial had been taped over the instructions for avoiding death. They had been erased.

With a trembling hand Mai pushed the stop button.

Her jaw was shaking; she was trying to speak, but the words wouldn't come. But she was alone—who was she trying to talk to?

The existence of a videotape that killed its viewers in a week's time...

When Asakawa had asked her about Ryuji's death, he'd said, He didn't tell you anything there at the end?

No last words? Nothing, say, about a videotape?

The tape had been in Ryuji's room. Ryuji had watched it, and a week later he'd died mysteriously.

If she hadn't watched the tape herself, she'd never buy such a scenario. But she had watched it. Every scene had exuded a reality that she could feel in her very cells.

Something was rising within her. She'd been sitting, stunned, in front of the VCR, but now she felt like she had to throw up. She dashed into the bathroom.

I shouldn't have watched it.

It was too late for regrets. Besides, she hadn't so much watched it of her own free will as been forced to watch it, by the will of another, she felt.

Mai stuck her finger down her throat and vomited until her stomach was empty. At that moment she wanted to rid herself of everything that was inside her.

She felt like some foreign object had gotten into her.

Choking on bile, she began to weep. She knelt in front of the toilet, weakened, gasping for breath.

For a time, she could feel herself slowly vanishing—

and then she passed out.

Since watching the tape, Mai suffered frequent lapses in her consciousness. She was unable to recall the events of the preceding week in order and complete.

She'd suddenly realize that several hours had passed and not know where she was. It was as if something had possessed her soul.

... As if something had possessed my soul.

That was definitely the phrase for it. She was dimly aware that her body was being controlled.

The foreign object that had entered her during her viewing of the tape gradually grew. Perhaps her watching it while ovulating had facilitated the thing's invasion of her. Or maybe it happened to everyone who watched the video—maybe it was how they went down the road to death.

Mai pictured countless sperm charging toward the egg in her oviduct. Once, in a sex-ed textbook, she'd seen a very graphic representation of it. Viral microorganisms, generating and proliferating within her from watching that tape, overwhelming her oviduct—if that wasn't it, then she had no idea how she'd ended up a virgin with the body of a pregnant woman.

There was life within her belly, that was for sure. It pulsed, and it waved its arms and legs inside her tightly-stretched womb.

6

The end of the rope tickled her somewhere in the vicinity of her bended knees. It seemed to hang lower than it had the last time she'd looked, at midday.

Who hung that rope there, and why?

But she hardly needed to pose the question. The sensation of tying one end of the sash to the railing on the rooftop revived in Mai's hands. Images were being inserted into her consciousness, like flash photos, and she could see herself from a bystander's perspective in the darkness. That was Mai herself tying the knot with im-patient finger, overriden by a will not her own. Her legs and waist were shaky and were ready to give out at any moment, yet, driven by an unfathomable sense of duty, she was focused on tying the makeshift rope.

The rope was all ready at the time she left her apartment. There was one other item she'd prepared along with it, but the memory was missing. She wondered what it was. Something in a plastic bag, she knew. She could recall the feel of something squishy.

The life that had started growing within her after viewing the tape had, at some point, begun to exert its influence over her body. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, she would abruptly come to, and listening she'd hear the pulse of whatever it was in her belly. It only took four or five days for her abdomen to swell to the point that she seemed ready to deliver, and the same time for her enlarged nipples to start leaking milk.

Why was she there at the bottom of the crack in the top of a building? All at once, Mai knew.

To give birth.

She didn't believe for a moment that the thing within her was her own child. She wasn't even sure it was human.

A beast.

No—she didn't even feel it was a life form.

But she felt a sense of responsibility; she had to birth this unknown thing without anybody knowing.

She didn't know where the sense came from, but come it did, and there was no resisting it. It drove her to act, to fulfill her role as a cocoon.

At around the same hour the day before, Mai had taken off her underwear, snuck out of her apartment, and ascended to the roof of this building in the warehouse district, where few people walked at night and few cars passed. A dilapidated old building by the Shore Road.

She had climbed over the gate on the second floor landing and climbed the spiraling fire escape to the top of the building. Once there, she'd climbed by ladder to the rooftop and gone over to the machine room. On the seaward side of it there was a deep exhaust shaft, like a coffin floating in the sky.

A perfect place for the pupa to escape its cocoon. A perfect place for the soul to discard its shell. It wasn't far from Mai's apartment, and it was almost guaranteed that no one would see.

Mai had tried to climb down into the shaft using the sash-rope. She'd fallen and sprained her ankle.

What time is it, I wonder.

During the day she'd been able to guess the time based on the shifting sunlight, but it was several hours past sundown now. Stars shone, but they didn't help her.

She had no way to gauge the passage of time.

Twenty-four hours, perhaps, had gone by since she left her apartment.

Suddenly sadness overcame Mai. She'd been there for twenty-four hours, but for most of that time her consciousness had been elsewhere; she'd only been herself for two or three hours at the most. During those hours, she had known astonishment, and fear, and unutterable dread, but this was the first time she'd felt sadness.

Her body no doubt knew that her time was approaching.

She tried to get up but couldn't; she tried to cry out but found her throat as though blocked. Meanwhile, the movements within her womb grew more violent as the power pressing on her from inside overflowed with life.

Her vitality was being transferred out of her. She reflected on her twenty-two years with chagrin. Had she lived merely to have her body taken over, to give birth to this unknown thing? How pitiful.

Mai knew the meaning of her own tears. Fear of the thing that was trying to nullify her life was also forcing her grief to the surface.

It was mid-November. They'd had bright, clear weather for several days now, but it was cold in the middle of the night. The chill of the concrete seeped through her back and into her bones, only adding to her sorrow.

And now a thin film of water coated the inner surfaces of the walls. A leak from somewhere? The clamminess made things still worse.

She was sobbing now.

Help! Help me!

She couldn't voice the words. Then the labor pains started, and they washed away her sadness and the cold, along with every other feeling and sensation, on a mam-moth ocean wave. The smell of the sea was stronger now. It had to be high tide.

She remembered something her mother had told her once, when she was little.

You were born at high tide.

Her mother believed that if the rhythm of nature wasn't disrupted, people were born at high tide and died at low tide.

But Mai had the encroaching feeling that life and death were going to be simultaneous. Did that mean it was high tide or low tide now? Shifts in gravity, either way, influenced life and death.

The contractions subsided a bit; the rhythm of the waves slowed. She thought she could hear a melody, low over the rhythm. The horns of ships and distant cars provided effective accents. Was it just the city's night sounds coming together in all their layers to sound like music, or was there actually a melody playing somewhere in the building? Or still...

Mai couldn't decide if she was really hearing music.

She wouldn't be able to distinguish a real sound from an auditory hallucination. All she knew was that listening to it calmed her down.

The mysterious melody softened her pain and put her into a peculiar mood. Suddenly, she knew where the music was coming from. But, no, it couldn't be. She tried to suppress her own realization, raising her head and staring at her belly.

Who's that singing—down there...

She imagined the life inside her singing to ease its mother's pain. Her dark womb, filled with amniotic fluid—didn't it bear a resemblance to the space Mai was in? And the thing singing softly in that dark place was about to show its face.

The voice was that of a young female. At moments it seemed to be coming from right next to Mai's ears, at others to wend its way up to her from below her feet. Finally, the voice stopped singing and began speaking, low and soft.

The words were those of a woman who had died, once. She said so.

I died at the bottom of a well, you know.

The woman gave her name as Sadako Yamamura.

She proceeded to describe her past in brief.

Mai was unable to disbelieve. The voice said that the images on the videotape had not been recorded by any camera. Rather, they'd been experienced by Sadako's five senses and then projected by the operation of her thoughts. It made sense to Mai and she accepted it; when she had watched the images on the tape, her perceptions had been completely fused with those of this unknown woman Sadako. The image of the baby, incredibly vivid, flashed across Mai's mind.

Her cervix was fully dilated. All alone, Mai heaved, in rhythm with her contractions. Her tortured moans echoed in the narrow space, she could hear them. But it didn't sound like her own voice and she felt strange.

The labor pains were coming closer together than at first, and as the interval shortened, energy concentrated and released itself more intensely towards birth, uterus and muscle contracting again and again.

Giant waves crashed one after another in Mai's brain. In time with them she sucked in a lungful of air, pushed, and bit back the scream that wanted to come out as she focused all her strength on her lower body.

High tide must have been approaching, the moon rounding the earth.

A sudden violent contraction came over Mai. Energy concentrated in her lower abdomen and was poised to shoot through the exit as a lump. Mai stretched out her arms, reaching for something, anything, to cling to.

It's coming!

When the intuition coursed through her, consciousness receded.

7

She had probably only been out for a few minutes.

As consciousness returned, Mai's retinas registered the small shadow wiggling between her thighs.

The baby crawled out of her womb without a cry. It twisted and turned, trying to sit up. It was using its hands skillfully, like a swimmer. Its movements, all the more because they weren't accompanied by cries, asserted that it already had a will of its own.

Mai found herself completely devoid of the joy and awe that motherhood was supposed to bring. The thing was finally born—that fact alone gradually spread across her body. Relief at having expelled the foreign object won out over all other emotion.

As her eyes adjusted, she could see the little form more clearly.

Covered with amniotic fluid, its skin glistening in the starlight, the baby was grabbing furiously at some rope-like thing with both hands. A wrinkly rope, extending from Mai's body... The baby had in its grasp the umbilical cord.

The thing had been born, but it was not yet fully separate from Mai's body. The umbilical cord still connected them. Just as the sash-rope still hung down into the rooftop crevice. Mai wanted to sever the cord and be done with it. Yet, powerless, she was forced to just lie there and let happen what might.

The baby was as active as Mai was enervated. It stretched out the ropy umbilical cord with its hands and then placed it in its mouth. It was trying to sever the cord. Naturally, its teeth hadn't come in yet; the way it clamped the cord between its red gums and shook its head from side to side, the thing was a far cry from an infant: its little face was demonic.

In the end, the process was like ripping apart sausage links. Having cut the cord, the baby took a wet towel from the plastic bag lying at Mai's feet and started to wipe off its body.

Mai herself must have prepared the wet towel at the same time she'd made the sash-rope. The bag had probably landed at her feet when she'd fallen into the hole.

She hadn't seen it from the way her head lay.

She'd been preparing to give birth without realizing it. She must have been taking commands from the embryo growing in her womb. Not that that made any sense.

Mai's uterus continued to contract. She pushed a little more, and thought she could feel the placenta coming out. Once the placenta and fetal membranes had been expelled, her belly was flat again.

Now that she could see over herself, she had a much clearer view of the baby.

It was wiping off its body, slowly, as if trying to get the wrinkles out of its skin. It had known in the womb what it had to do once it got out. It moved with alarming dexterity.

After it had finished wiping itself off, the baby assumed a relaxed, crouching pose and started moving its mouth.

What's it doing?

From the way it moved its face and hands, it looked to be eating something. Its ravenous expression stimulated Mai's own appetite, and she raised her head.

Dark, discolored blood clung to its tiny lips. She could hear it chewing flesh.

It was eating the placenta.

Stuffing its cheeks with the placenta—no doubt extremely nutritious—the baby seemed to surge with vitality. As it ate this piece of Mai, who herself was hungry and weak, it wore a satisfied smile.

Their eyes met in the darkness. For a moment, the little face took on an expression of pity.

Mai managed to speak.

"Are you Sadako Yamamura?"

The baby's gaze was steady as it bowed a head plas-tered with downy hair. The thing was apparently affirming that it was Sadako.

The sash-rope dangled just above the baby, caressing its shoulder.

Like one determined, the baby grabbed the end of the rope. Then it stood there like that for a while, staring at Mai. Mai could tell that it meant to go up into the world outside—to climb up the rope and to make its escape.

Just as she'd thought, the baby started to pull itself up the rope. Partway up, however, it stopped and looked down at Mai. It blinked and gave her a meaningful look.

Was it trying to tell her something? Its face was expres-sionless—she saw no hostility there, no sympathy, no hatred, nothing, perhaps because it wasn't possible to read any kind of expression into such a tiny, wrinkled face.

Finally it reached the rim of the exhaust shaft. It stood there, silhouetted against the stars. Mai could see the outline of its poorly severed umbilical cord—it looked like the tail of an animal or the horn of a demon.

The baby stood there at the rim for a while, looking down at her. Mai found herself clinging to that black shape.

Help me.

There was no one else around. The only one she could turn to for help was this being she'd given birth to. She would normally be caring for it, but their posi-tions were reversed.

But her wish was in vain. The baby began to pull the rope up just as it had forcibly shredded the umbilical cord. If it allowed the connection to remain, perhaps it couldn't truly stand on its own.

Mai understood, but she wished it would just leave the rope, at least. Why did it have to take away her only conduit to the outside world? Don't cut the spider's thread, I'll never be able to crawl up out of hell!

Mai begged, implored; she hated the baby's cruelty.

But its movements were calm and measured. Perhaps it, too, was acting under the compulsion of some tragic sense of duty. It gave no indication, in any case, that it would heed Mai's request.

I beg of you, don't abandon me.

The rope finished its ascent, and the baby's face disappeared from the rim of the exhaust shaft. What was it doing now? Mai could hear it doing something; it hadn't left yet.

The baby peeked back over the edge again, and then, with a quick movement of its left arm, tossed something down to Mai. Against the dim sky it looked like a snake twisted in a spiral. It was the sash-rope, all coiled up. It landed weightlessly on Mai's midsection and lay there in rings. Just a prank? Mai could detect no meaning in it, only the stench of malice.

The baby flashed her a grin. Then, without a trace of reluctance, it disappeared into the night.

Where was it going and what did it desire to become?

Mai kept seeing the umbilical cord hanging from its belly. The image resonated with her and would not leave. It reminded her of a demon—no image fit it better.

She heard the horn of a ship on Tokyo Bay. The sound was like a wolf's howl, a creature's vivid wail. In response came the faint yapping of a dog from somewhere in the residential neighborhood farther inland.

The sea was near, and there were people living surprisingly close by, but Mai was in a place governed by the laws of another world.

The tide was at its fullest, she figured: it would begin to recede now. It didn't matter. Life and death were not at odds; they coexisted snugly right where she was.

Mai gave a wan laugh and looked around at the darkness the baby had left behind, and allowed herself to think about its future.

She hoped, of course, that morning would come soon, but she had a feeling that night would continue for quite some time yet. She wasn't sure if her consciousness could hold out until dawn.

Suddenly she had the feeling that the stars had come right down close to her. Or was it that her body had started to float? It didn't feel too bad.

Death was almost there.