When he stopped again, he was on a pedestrian path weaving diagonally up a hill that looked down on Athletics Square. One side of the path traced a gentle slope downwards and was covered in rosemary, the tips of the bristling oval leaves flowering white, its grassy scent so heady as to interfere with breathing. Sodeyama wondered whether it could actually be these flowers blooming out of season that gave him the odd sense. He stopped and leaned against the handrail on the valley side and looked back the way he’d come. Through the gap in the valley he could see a section of the serpentine Route 135. As though the earlier lines of traffic had been a mirage, it was almost empty of cars now. Now and then, white shapes meandered across his V-shaped vista.
Sodeyama shivered and pulled his jacket closed. Standing here alone seemed terribly lonely, unbearable. As he forsook the handrail and essayed to continue up the path, pure-white rosemary burst into view even brighter than before. Their whiteness netted his consciousness and halted his step. From tiny frays that gaped all over the place a subtle shift showed its face, and Sodeyama was unable to put the change into words.
He usually drove the bus up and down and didn’t take the pedestrian paths much. Perhaps staff that tended to the gardens could pinpoint the change. All he could do was describe the scene impressionistically, but a simple question reared its head: Did we ever have white rosemary planted here?
Maybe that was it, the color; in his recollection the slope had been covered in red and purple herbs. He found his gaze being pulled towards the dense growth of rosemary. The stem was jostling — thickening and thinning like the throat of an animal swallowing its chewed-up prey. He looked more closely and saw that the impression was caused by a swarm of ants crawling upwards, only upwards, thousands in layer upon layer in an undulating motion. The ants surged up to the base of the petals, then along their shaded sides, toward the tips. From there they could only fall off. The sight somehow brought to mind a crowd of elderly people jostling down a narrow mountain path.
The swarm fell off from the petal tips at a leisurely speed — much more slowly than their own legs had taken them up. They fell in formation and remained in a clump even after they arrived on the ground. Where they fell was a conical mound four inches tall from whose center ants poured out anew, crowded out, overflowing like foam, latching onto the rosemary stem and scrambling towards the white petals at the top. What had seemed like thousands seemed more like millions. Entranced, Sodeyama observed the intense welling. In thrall to a sight he’d never seen before, he nevertheless felt calm. While he maintained the customary poise of an observer, his breathing was becoming even more labored.
For a moment, the air itself seemed to halt. Was it a trick of the eye? The ants falling from the petals appeared to stop all and one, hanging in mid-air. As though that were the signal, the swarm changed course.
The falling ants, the welling ants, all joined into a mottled pattern on the ground, a sharp, narrow spearhead forming on the valley side, and they started making for the tips of Sodeyama’s feet. Overwhelmed, he took a few steps backwards and prepared to flee. There were two options: up and down.
Just then, he heard voices from above. It was the film crew, shouting something. Sodeyama couldn’t stand to be alone; he wanted to be near people and to feel their warmth. Relying on the voices, he ran upwards, ever upwards on the path, but it was like eluding the pursuit of something in a dream: his legs wouldn’t take him forward. At any moment, he felt, the millions of ants would reach his ankles, climb up his Achilles’ heels, and scurry over the back of his knees, up to his buttocks, and he felt his spine tingling — or rather, wasn’t that the sensation of innumerable ant legs scratching at his back?
Sodeyama nearly tripped, his torso twisting, and he saw what was behind him: a black band two feet wide cutting diagonally across the white cobbled path. The swarm was almost geometrical, the seething mass forming a long, narrow parallelogram.
Then, with amazing teamwork, the shape began to morph. The edges began to soften and clamber towards the center. In the blink of an eye, the parallelogram was swelling out into a circle. Enchanted by a change in formation reminiscent of mass choreography, Sodeyama stood staring, torso still twisted back unnaturally.
Achieving a perfect black circle on the white cobblestone path, the mass of ants maintained the shape as it slowly recommenced moving towards him. A ring filled with darkness, it was a moving pitfall gouged into the earth to trap prey. He pictured internal organs, small and large intestines, and somehow felt an intense urge to urinate.
At that moment, he heard the rustling of leaves and the fluttering of innumerable birds, and above them a woman’s scream. Released from his paralysis, Sodeyama charged up the incline.
After getting off the bus at the top of the gardens, Hashiba and the others headed straight for the stone steps above the parking lot. A sign at the foot indicated the way to the Soga Shrine. It seemed that the current theory the police were following was that the tourists and staff had been forced back up the paths, passing the shrine, up into one of the mountain footpaths beyond. Whether the case or not, this was somewhere to stake out with the crew. A helicopter sounded overhead, describing a route towards Amagi. They had heard word that the search parties had already reached close to the Ito Skyline Road; now that it was getting dark they were probably getting ready to call it a day. Nakamura had promised to call Kagayama if there were any developments. The fact that he hadn’t meant that the police were yet to find anything.
Shigeko Torii walked a few paces behind Hosokawa and Kato who were carrying the heavy camera equipment. Every few steps she would stop and take a deep breath, exhaling heavily and stretching her back. Hashiba made sure to follow beside her, supporting her with an arm over one of her shoulders. He was feeling guilty as hell for forcing an elderly person to struggle so.
“Are you okay?” he asked, concerned.
A small stone shrine stood at the top of the steps. By the time they reached it, Hashiba had already begun to suspect that Shigeko’s fatigue was more a physical manifestation of mental exhaustion than simple tiredness. Standing next to the small shrine, Shigeko straightened up and made a show of looking around as though listening out for signs or indications of what might have happened. Every now and again her shoulders would shiver in resonance to something as she looked here and there; the way she peered through the air around the shrine gave Hashiba the impression that she was listening for something a normal human could not detect, as though with her entire being. She wore a long cashmere coat that covered her completely, exposing only a small part of her neck to the elements. The exposed skin was prickly with goose bumps, and Hashiba couldn’t help wondering whether they were simply from the cold, or whether they were caused by something she was detecting in the atmosphere around the shrine. The old woman had always said that she was able to detect things through her body first, as though her whole being was an eardrum, finely tuned to pick out anomalous vibrations in the air.
Hashiba tiptoed away and waved the cameramen to start filming, pointing for them to keep out of Shigeko’s way as they did. The low undergrowth that bristled around the roots of the trees surrounding the shrine undulated slowly from a breeze that had already died down. Towards the right Hashiba could make out the beginning of a footpath leading away from the shrine. Could so many people have disappeared down there?