It was a perfect swing. I caught him somewhere high on the neck. There was a sickening sound of cracking bone. A third swing hit home- the skull-and sent him flying. He let out a weird sound and slumped to the floor. He lay there making little gasps, but those soon stopped. I closed my eyes and, without thinking, aimed one final swing in the direction of the sound. I didn't want to do it, but I had no choice. I had to finish him off: not out of hatred or even out of fear, but as something I simply had to do. I heard something crack open in the darkness like a piece of fruit. Like a watermelon. I stood still, gripping the bat, holding it out in front of me. Then I realized I was trembling. All over. And there was no way I could stop it. I took one step back and pulled the flashlight from my pocket.
Don't! cried a voice in the darkness. Don't look at it! Kumiko's voice was calling to me from the inner room, trying to stop me from looking. But I had to look. I had to see it. I had to know what it was, this thing in the center of the darkness that I had just beaten to a pulp. Part of my mind understood what Kumiko was forbidding me to do. She was right: I shouldn't look at it. But I had the flashlight in my hand now, and that hand was moving on its own.
Please, I'm begging you to stop! she screamed. Don't look at it if you want to take me home again!
I clenched my teeth and quietly released the air I had locked in my lungs. Still the trembling would not subside. A sickening smell hung in the air-the smell of brains and violence and death. I had done this: I was the one who had made the air smell like this. I found the sofa and collapsed onto it. For a while, I fought against the nausea rising in my stomach, but the nausea won. I vomited everything in my stomach onto the carpet, and when that was gone I brought up stomach fluid, then air, and saliva. While vomiting, I dropped the bat on the floor. I could hear it rolling away in the darkness.
Once the spasms of my stomach began to subside, I wanted to take out my handkerchief to wipe my mouth, but I could not move my hand. I couldn't get up from the sofa. Lets go home, I said toward the darkness of the inner room. This is all over now. Lets go.
She didn't answer. There was no one in there anymore. I sank into the sofa and closed my eyes. I could feel the strength going out of me-from my fingers, my shoulders, my neck, my legs.... The pain of my wounds began to fade as well. My body was losing all sense of mass and substance. But this gave me no anxiety, no fear at all. Without protest, I gave myself up- surrendered my flesh-to some huge, warm thing that came naturally to enfold me. I realized then that I was passing through the wall of jelly. All I had to do was give myself up to the gentle flow. I'll never come back here again, I said to myself as I moved through the wall. Everything had come to an end. But where was Kumiko? Where did she go? I was supposed to bring her back from the room. That was the reason I killed the man. That was the reason I had to split his skull open like a watermelon. That was the reason I... But I couldn't think anymore. My mind was sucked into a deep pool of nothingness.
When I came to, I was sitting in the darkness again. My back was against the wall, as always. I had returned to the bottom of the well.
But it was not the usual well bottom. There was something new here, something unfamiliar. I tried to gather my faculties to grasp what was going on. What was so different? But my senses were still in a state of near-total paralysis. I had only a partial, fragmentary sense of my surroundings. I felt as if, through some kind of error, I had been deposited in the wrong container. As time passed by, though, I began to realize what it was.
Water. I was surrounded by water.
The well was no longer dry. I was sitting in water up to my waist. I took several deep breaths to calm myself. How could this be? The well was producing water-not cold water, though. If anything, it felt warm. I felt as if I were soaking in a heated pool. It then occurred to me to check my pocket. I wanted to know if the flashlight was still there. Had I brought it back with me from the other world? Was there any link between what had happened there and this reality? But my hand would not move. I couldn't even move my fingers. All strength had gone out of my arms and legs. It was impossible for me to stand.
I began a coolheaded assessment of my situation. First of all, the water came up only to my waist, so I didn't have to worry about drowning. True, I was unable to move, but that was probably because I had used up every ounce of strength. Once enough time had gone by, my strength would probably come back. The knife wounds didn't seem very deep, and the paralysis at least saved me from having to suffer with pain. The blood seemed to have stopped flowing from my cheek.
I leaned my head back against the wall and told myself, Its OK, don't worry. Everything had probably ended. All I had to do now was give my body some rest here, then go back to my original world, the world above-ground, where the sunlight overflowed.... But why had this well started producing water all of a sudden? It had been dried up, dead, for such a long time, yet now it had come back to life. Could this have some connection with what I had accomplished there? Yes, it probably did. Something might have loosened whatever it was that had been obstructing the vein of water.
Shortly after that, I encountered one ominous fact. At first I tried to resist accepting it as a fact. My mind came up with a list of possibilities that would enable me to do that. I tried to convince myself that it was a hallucination caused by the combination of darkness and fatigue. But in the end, I had to recognize its truth. However much I attempted to deceive myself, it would not go away.
The water level was rising.
The water had risen now from my waist to the underside of my bent knees. It was happening slowly, but it was happening. I tried again to move my body. With a concentrated effort, I tried to squeeze out whatever strength I could manage, but it was useless. The most I could do was bend my neck a little. I looked overhead. The well lid was still solidly in place. I tried to look at the watch on my left wrist, without success. The water was coming in from an opening-and with what seemed like increasing speed.
Where it had been barely seeping in at first, it was now almost gushing. I could hear it. Soon it was up to my chest. How deep was it going to get?
Be careful of water, Mr. Honda had said to me. I had never paid any heed to his prophecy. True, I had never forgotten it, either (you don't forget anything as weird as that), but I had never taken it seriously. Mr. Honda had been nothing more than a harmless episode for Kumiko and me. I would repeat his words as a joke now and then when something came up: Be careful of water. And we would laugh. We were young, and we had no need for prophecies. Just living was itself an act of prophecy. But Mr. Honda had been right. I almost wanted to laugh out loud. The water was rising, and I was in trouble.
I thought about May Kasahara. I used my imagination to picture her opening the well cover-with total reality and clarity. The image was so real and clear that I could have stepped right into it. I couldn't move my body, but my imagination still worked. What else could I do?
Hey, Mr. Wind-Up Bird, said May Kasahara. Her voice reverberated all up and down the well shaft. I hadn't realized that a well with water echoed more than one without water. What are you doing down there? Thinking again?