And he ordered Sayoko to build him a shelter without angles as quickly as possible, because there was so little time left.
Sayoko thought it was just a figure of speech, his saying there was no time left. She didn’t worry too much about it, shrugging it off as just another obsession of an occultist client.
A little less than a month after Manabe urged her to push ahead, though, it happened. Four prefectures facing the Pacific Ocean — Ibaraki, Chiba, Kanagawa and Shizuoka — suffered a catastrophic earthquake and vanished. They didn’t burn down, or sink, they literally vanished. Naturally the government, the earthquake experts, the mass media, even my wife and I, believed it was the work of some giant earthquake and the resulting tidal wave.
Manabe called us very early the next morning. I distinctly remember being rudely awakened at four in the morning by the phone. I picked up the receiver, and the first thing I heard was “Put Sayoko Izumo on.” Manabe was extremely excited, sounded almost furious.
“It’s started,” he told Sayoko. “Exactly where Teizo Akechi predicted in his Traditions of Esotericism, and exactly as catastrophic. They are returning, and the Gods and Buddhas cannot save us any longer. It is the End Times. We must flee to the Womb in Nagano at once!”
“Sir? Excuse me, sir?” Sayoko broke in. “The Womb is still incomplete. Your plan calls for fifty years, but I doubt it would support people for even twenty the way it is now.”
“It’s too late now. Even twenty would be excellent. You mustn’t waste a minute — my wife and I are fleeing to the Womb at once. You and your husband should join us.”
“My husband and I?” she countered, unable to stop herself. “But why?”
“The more people we have, the better, for saving the human species. The ideal would have been to build a huge Womb, a colony holding ten thousand people, but no longer. You are healthy and intelligent, and from what you have told me your husband is as well. You will bequeath excellent genes to the next generation of humanity. Make ready at once, and come with your husband to pick us up. Within three hours. And keep the Womb secret. not a word to your families!”
Then he cut the phone, leaving us no chance to refuse.
“He’s out of his gourd,” said my wife, putting the phone down with a frown. “I’ve been playing along with him until now, because he’s an important client and a sponsor for my research. but this! This is just insane! I’m not going to work for someone who’s plain nuts!”
“Of course you can’t! Even painters wouldn’t work for anyone that far ’round the bend! And especially. ”
The world shook around me, and nausea and dizziness cut off my words. I thought for a second I must be having a stroke, but then the books began falling off the shelves and the paintings on the walls began banging. It’s an earthquake! And even as I framed the thought, the shaking intensified. It was like no earthquake I’d ever felt before, more like standing on top of a record player and spinning around and around and around. and counterclockwise, at that! The feeling of rotation jumped yet again, and suddenly I felt as if I were standing on the deck of a wave-tossed ship at the mercy of the storm.
And my brain was shattered by a piercing impact. Pain seared through my head, as if a thick nail had been driven into my brain through my retina, bringing a host of visions. The waves of the nighttime sea, rolling back as the seabed surged to the surface. Soft mud, seaweed, flopping deep-sea fish unable to escape in time. Like flash shots in a movie, the pictures appeared and vanished again, a bursting flood of imagery. Giant structures rising out of the ocean depths, covered in millennia-old mud. They looked as if they were of ancient stones, but the structures themselves writhed and quivered constantly like something alive. And from the shadows of the columns something crawled out, something shining. something that could only be called the natural enemy of humanity itself.
Sayoko shrieked before I had a chance to. When I saw her white face and hollow eyes, I knew she had seen what I had, in that brain-shattering instant.
No, not only Sayoko.
In that instant all of humanity saw the same visions, the same horror — the instant when the Damned Gods returned.
Sayoko always wore glasses, suffering from both near-and far-sightedness. Even so, her face was attractive, the type you’d describe as an intellectual beauty.
Maybe Manabe brought Sayoko and me with him to the Womb was because he had some plans for her.
Whatever disgusting plans he might have had, though, they were shattered before she ever entered the Womb.
What am I saying? Every time I think of it I lose it again. cool, gotta stay cool. calm, rational.
Reeling from illusionary visions, attacking my senses like some cerebral stroke, I turned on the cable TV and clicked to the all- news channel. The newscaster who popped up on the screen looked almost like he was smiling.
“The Tokyo city government office building is collapsing.”
Simultaneously the screen switched to a video feed, showing City Hall shining metallic blue under dozens of searchlights in the early morning dimness. Covered in metal frames and huge sheets of glass, City Hall’s surface was covered in angular shapes, a huge crystal reflecting the searchlights. When it was built people had laughed, saying the mayor had built a modern pyramid to cover his own underground mausoleum, or Godzilla had come out of the ocean and turned into a robot. That had been back in the ’90s. a gigantic building fusing postmodernism with New Gothic architecture in the height of the economic boom years.
And now from protruding angles covering its surface, hundreds and hundreds of yellowish ropey things stretched out, quivering up into the pre-dawn sky. Semitransparent tentacles like some huge jellyfish writhed and slimed from angular alcoves and setbacks inside the building. A newspaper copter drifted in a bit closer, trying to capture the metamorphosis of City Hall more clearly, and suddenly a piss-yellow rope snapped up, whipping around the copter and yanking it from the sky. The blades snapped off, still whirling as they flew toward City Hall, smashing into the side of the building in a glittering waterfall of glass shards. The waterfall poured down on the heads of the emergency personnel clustered below — police, JSDF, fire and ambulance — slicing through heads and hands and legs with bloody abandon. The tentacle obliterated their screams in an explosion of greasy flame as it smashed the crumpled helicopter down on top of them, smoke and fire shooting up the walls.
“. a monster movie. ”
I turned the TV off.
“It’s just special effects, computer graphics. Things like that just don’t happen!”
Behind me, I heard Sayoko hang up the phone.
“That was President Manabe. He said to come to his house at once. He said he was watching City Hall on the TV. He said they attack from other dimensions, through the angles. ”
“They?”
Her face began to crumble, tears and fright shining through.