As she ducked through the trees, her package of severed earthworms under one arm, sometimes Saeko lost sight of her father for a moment. “Papa!” she would shriek, oddly panicked, even if he’d only disappeared for a second. Her father, for his part, seemed amused by his daughter’s exaggerated reaction and enjoyed making it into a game of hide-and-seek.
The intense heat of summer, the rustle of foliage, the hum of mosquitoes. Perhaps on some level, Saeko already had a premonition then of what was to come. The summer when she was seventeen years old, she would lose her beloved father. Somehow, that fear already loomed large.
With a start, Saeko snapped out of her reverie. What had triggered her memory of the earthworms? At first, she couldn’t draw any connection. Then she realized that the image of a rift in the earth had spawned the idea of a long, thin creature of some sort lurking within. In the back of her mind, a serpentine form slithered along active fault lines. Its tongue darted in and out of its mouth as if to tickle the walls of her brain …
If Saeko were still a child, surely she would have imagined that the missing people had been spirited away deep into the earth by some sort of monster.
Without realizing it, Saeko had drawn both of her feet up away from the floor. She knew there was no fault line under Tokyo, and yet she could almost feel the presence of a long, thin, reptilian creature drawing silently closer and closer.
A deep abyss, a world beyond the reach of the sun’s rays …
The sun. Right. Saeko’s thoughts of darkness reminded her of the corresponding opposite concept. Just two days ago, browsing the newspaper archives at the library, she had learned that there had been unusual sunspot activity the day her father had disappeared.
Saeko leapt towards the computer. “May I?” she asked Kitazawa.
“Please, be my guest.”
Saeko opened the browser and ran a search on “sunspots,” pulling up calendars that went back to March 2011. When she clicked on a date, a picture of sunspot activity for the date in question came up on the screen.
Saeko tried to rein in her anticipation as she clicked on September 13, 2011, the date three people had vanished from Itoigawa. Then she tried September 25th, the date the passengers of two cars had vanished near Soda Lake in the U.S. And October 22nd, the day five people had vanished at Lake Merced near San Francisco.
On most days, only a few specks the size of sesame seeds marred the images of the sun. But on the three dates of the mysterious disappearances, there was a clear difference. Ugly black amoeba-like blobs writhed across the sun’s surface almost like living organisms.
Peering into the monitor over Saeko’s shoulder, Kitazawa and Hashiba still didn’t comprehend what Saeko had discovered.
“What is it?”
When both Hashiba and Kitazawa thumped Saeko’s shoulders at the same time, she finally turned away from the screen.
“On all three dates of these missing persons cases, unusual sunspot activity was recorded.”
Saeko manipulated the pointer once again to illustrate the incredible correlation between the incidences of human disappearances and sunspot activity.
Under any normal circumstances, she would have expected her colleagues to instantly reject the notion of a connection between human disappearances and sunspots. But just moments ago, Hashiba and Kitazawa had come to the realization that a string of such cases was occurring directly over active fault lines.
“Active fault lines and sunspots. What do the two phenomena have in common?” Hashiba asked.
Saeko swiveled her chair to face the other two. “The magnetic fields that cause sunspots break through the surface and assault the Earth in the form of magnetic storms. It’s also possible that active fault lines have a powerful influence on the magnetic fields in the spaces above them. Magnetic fields — they’re the connection between the two.”
Saeko chewed her lower lip as Hashiba and Kitazawa sat motionlessly mulling this over, their lips pressed together tightly. Nobody argued with her contention — in their silence, they were tacitly acknowledging the connection. The unusual geophysical conditions of the locations and the timing of the disappearances suggested a causal relationship. It had to be more than just coincidence.
Chapter 3: Chain
As Saeko and Hashiba walked towards the subway station after leaving Kitazawa’s office, it seemed only natural that they should have dinner together.
“There’s an Italian place in this neighborhood that has a unique flair. What do you say?” Hashiba suggested.
“Sure. Anything goes,” Saeko replied, her response an approval of the proposed cuisine rather than of the invitation itself.
Hashiba led the way, and they arrived at the seven-story building in only a few minutes. The restaurant was on the top floor. It was the first time Saeko had been here, and yet she had an odd sense of déjà vu. For a moment, she stopped in her tracks and pondered why that was. Whenever she noticed a strange glitch in her perceptions, Saeko had the habit of analyzing the possible causes.
The building was on a one-way street, with a tree planted in front of its vestibule. Something about the tree seemed to be causing the strange sensation. Four low posts were staked around its roots and the ground was littered with its leaves, whose prominent veins reminded Saeko of blood vessels. Pebbles were scattered on top of the carpet of leaves. As she marveled at how small the tree looked under the starry sky, Saeko had the sudden sensation of being watched from above. She looked up. Against the glare of the neon signs on the surrounding buildings, the starry sky seemed lacking in luminosity. Hadn’t they been a bit brighter just moments ago?
In the thickest part of the tree’s canopy, right in the middle, a black shadow loomed, as if a cat had climbed the tree and gotten stuck up there. It was only natural that the night sky and trees would create dark shadows, but the blackness at the center of the tree was a shade deeper and undulated slightly in the treetop, almost like a writhing worm.
Saeko squinted, trying to get a better look, but suddenly her eyes refused to focus as if she’d lost a contact lens. She glanced down and then back up again, and as she did, she shuddered as a feeling of foreboding washed over her. Part of it was the chilly December evening air, but she had also detected a disagreeable stench. It was a smell she was sure she recognized but couldn’t quite place. Her senses seemed to be blocking out the memory.
“What’s wrong?”
When Hashiba’s hand found the small of her back, Saeko quickly pulled her attention back to the present moment. His touch seemed almost to dispel her fears, and Saeko remembered her growling stomach.
“I’m starving,” she replied. They had arrived at Kitazawa’s office at seven o’clock, and in the subsequent two hours had consumed nothing but coffee. “Shall we?” Saeko strode quickly through the vestibule, keeping her gaze straight ahead.
At the table, Saeko and Hashiba sipped glasses of red wine as they waited for their food and reassessed the discoveries they had made at Kitazawa’s office. Still flushed with excitement, Hashiba enthused about having to drop the approach they had taken for the previous installment. He seemed to be reacting to the latest developments not with fear or disappointment but with pure delight, relishing the possibilities they implied for the project. Seldom did the opportunity arise to expose a freakish natural phenomenon in his line of work.
“This is really getting good. The tricky part will be when and how to let Shigeko Torii down gently.”