“He said something. something about Tindalos. and, I think, Atzous. Who cares? It’s THEM! Those things! Those tentacles, reaching in through the angles and killing and killing and killing! He said we have to escape to the Womb, with him and his wife, before the invasion really begins. He said right now!”
The shock of a distant explosion rocked the building, and I instinctively looked toward the sound. South. I could see brilliant orange light there, through the curtains. I ripped them open, and heard Sayoko gasp at my side. Huge pillars of flame rose from the bustling city center of Ikebukuro.
As I drove toward Manabe’s mansion, my wife switched the Garmin over to TV and sat eyes glued to the screen. As a scientist, I guess she couldn’t wrap her mind around what was happening. She was whispering to herself, and when I glanced at her, her profile was beaded with sweat, feverish. I noticed she had starting smoking. She said she’d quit, but I guess she still had some hidden away somewhere. I didn’t say a word. If I smoked I’d damn well have wanted one myself right then.
It was stop-and-go all the way to Manabe’s mansion west of Tokyo. I wondered what was happening. No more details showed up on the TV, the radio, even the Internet sites, after that first flash. I did see a column of JSDF tanks racing along the expressway, and here and there police were out setting up roadblocks and inspection chokepoints. I didn’t stop to look, just kept on driving, silent.
When we got to Manabe’s home we switched to his shiny van. He said it could carry a lot more stuff that little Prius we drove. I guess his housekeepers and employees had all fled, because he was loading the van himself.
The boxes he was loading so lovingly, though, weren’t crammed full of cash or securities or food or clothing or medical supplies, but moldy old books. a pile of occult rubbish, magic, sacred texts from bizarre cults, collections of forgotten myths and the like.
That was when I met Manabe and his wife for the first time. He was in his mid-fifties, a striking, tall man with graying hair and a pale face. Had I met him under normal circumstances, his piercing gaze probably would have made me think of a successful entrepreneur, a fine judge of people. These weren’t normal times, and what I knew of him showed me nothing more than an eccentric millionaire.
“We can exchange greetings later,” he snapped. “We have to get out of Tokyo at once!”
And, taking his wife Kanako by the hand, he slid into the back seat.
As I slipped into the driver’s seat, I asked “Wouldn’t it make more sense to use a company helicopter than have me drive all that way?”
I wasn’t trying to be smart, I was serious. I thought Manabe could flee Tokyo faster that way.
“Even if we did go by chopper we wouldn’t be able to land near the Womb, up in the mountains like that. We’d have to land at a local airport and drive. and there’s just not enough time before They come in force. The government has begun quietly flying officials out of the country in Self Defense Force choppers and military transports, too, and if we happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time they’d shoot us out of the sky.”
A laugh bubbled up from the seat next to Manabe. Hysterical, forced laughter. I glanced back, and Kanako Manabe giggled, “Funny, isn’t it?”
“What is?”
“It’s all just so unreal! Like a shot from a movie, or a play. I mean, it’s like we’re on Candid Camera, right? Or I’m having a really bad dream. That must be it. This can’t be real! It’s just too impossible!”
“Sorry, it’s real. Unfortunately.”
Manabe’s voice was as flat as his expression. Then he told me to drive on.
And I kept driving, no sleep and no rest.
We couldn’t stay focused on news broadcasts on the TV, radio, and the Internet sites on our cellphones throughout the whole long drive to Nagano. We began to talk, slowly. Manabe and my wife didn’t want to say much at first, but Manabe’s wife turned out to be a real chatterbox and I finally learned a little bit about her. And him.
She said she’d be thirty-three soon. A little short, maybe about five feet, but she was the embodiment of female beauty: jutting breasts, slender waist, firm ass. My dad would have smacked his lips and called her a hot dame. She was beautiful, and the coquettish smile never left her round face. She always seemed to be smiling in invitation, I thought. And it turned out I was right, I guess, because until last year she had been a hostess at a Ginza club, until regular patron Manabe snapped her up.
Manabe described her quite a bit differently, though, in his disinterested tone: “I needed a healthy woman, with a healthy womb.” It sounded to me like he was just being bluntly honest, no more, no less. He hadn’t said a single kind or loving word to her since we left.
And when Kanako glanced at him, from time to time, I thought I could see cold disdain shining through.
Manabe had taken over the company founded by his grandfather about twenty years before, when his own father has suddenly died. He had been studying ethnology at the university then, he said. He had spent vast sums from his inheritance on occult books, and seemed likely to spend the rest of his life locked away in research by himself. Maybe because he hadn’t come down out of his ivory tower into the real world until his thirties, or maybe just because of his rich boy background, his insufferable attitude made it impossible to get along with him for more than an hour or so. His total lack of human warmth, his coldness, really got under my skin. He suddenly ordered the rest of us to “Stay away from angles!”
After a half a day in the car together, I was through with him. I spoke only with my wife, and Kanako.
Our flight continued, and as we crossed into Nagano prefecture I noticed that there weren’t any other cars on the roads. Driving up the winding mountain roads, there were no people at all. In fact, there were no deer, or bears, or squirrels, or even a single bird. But as dusk that day approached, we began to catch glimpses of grotesque creatures in the woods around us.
We saw a group of four- legged beasts, with hides the color of human skin, huge bodies lumpy with roiling fat, distended bellies swaying. And though many of them had brown hair on their heads, their faces were bare.
“They aren’t people. ” whispered Kanako, voice trembling. “But their eyes and noses and mouths were. ”
I ignored her and kept driving. My wife sat in the passenger seat, cigarette lit. Uneasy silence filled the cabin, pressing down on us all.
Manabe shattered the silence with his monotone. “The locals are regressing, just as Atzous wrote.”
I stepped on the gas a bit harder.
As the sun set, the darkness along the narrow road grew even blacker. There were no more houses visible, no fields, just the depths of the mountains. Sometimes we saw a pale shadow passing in the dark, a four- footed nightmare with the face of a human being.
When we finally reached the Womb, the world was wrapped in iron blue, the darkness just before dawn.
The Womb looked like a giant tennis ball half buried in the earth, I thought, seeing it for the first time. It didn’t seem to have any windows or doors.
“The surface of the sphere irises open and shut, like a camera shutter,” explained my wife. “I’ll tell you where the door is. Go ahead and get out.”
“Um,” I mumbled, opening the door to an uncanny, bestial roar from the forest. It sounded like a wild beast, but at the same like a cry of anguish a child might make.
“I hope there aren’t any juvenile delinquents up here!” half-giggled Kanako as she got out, clasping her shoulders and shrinking.