Chapter 46 Storm Raging

The building stood on higher ground. He climbed a gentle slope, following a winding stone path, and after roughly ten minutes the building's outline came into view. Despite the noticeable incline, his body felt surprisingly light — like walking on the moon, he thought, not that he'd ever been there; it was just that the absurdly oversized celestial body hung overhead, making the comparison difficult to resist.

Whether walking or breathing — any sensation producible by moving his limbs — was suffused with an unreal quality. Even so, Ma En couldn't help worrying about one thing: how, exactly, was he supposed to wake up from this? Everything around him, everything he felt, was shot through with the quality of unreality; yet it was also so vivid, so palpably present, that he couldn't shake the question of what would happen if he were hurt here, if he died here. Would that carry over into reality?

He'd tested it himself, pinching his own skin — and felt clear, distinct pain, almost indistinguishable from the real thing. That settled it: this was a dangerous dream.

Ma En didn't know what else might exist here beyond himself and the scenery. Most likely something did. In his experience, when things became sufficiently abnormal, they didn't simply pass in quiet — more abnormal things always followed, layering on without end. Tonight itself had been proof of that.

The two strange entities had vanished, but he hadn't stepped off the track of the abnormal. Reality had given way to dream, and the abnormal had come in succession — how long would it continue? How far would it go?

He had no way of knowing.

The night felt very long.

Ma En exhaled, pressed down his hat brim, and walked on. Ahead, the stone path became flagstones. Between the slabs, moss had crept through; they were slick with moisture, scattered with muddy clumps of soil and broken plant debris. Disordered footprints covered the surface — many of them. The flagstone path was three or four meters wide with shrubs on either side; behind the shrubs grew lower vegetation, and further back the plants grew taller and denser until they merged into proper forest, the tree trunks buried a third of the way up by other growth, only the contorted branches above visible. The way those branches jutted and twisted couldn't help but suggest unpleasant things — it was genuinely difficult to associate them with anything beautiful.

Looking in any direction from where he stood, almost every tree leaned or twisted. Roots, trunks, limbs, and clinging vines formed dense, vigorous tangles — you might have thought you'd wandered into a tropical jungle — but not one of them was anything other than ugly. Words of beauty applied to them would only ring false.

These disfigured, malformed, densely shadowed trees radiated a steady, held-in-reserve sense of danger. When Ma En looked away from them and tried to think of something else, they immediately produced a sound — saya, suga, kara — saya, suga, kara —

Nothing like any natural sound. Not the wind.

Even though Ma En had steeled himself in advance, hearing it raised goosebumps along his arms. He turned to find the source and found only that it came from everywhere — not loud, muted, drifting from some great and indeterminate distance. From the forest. Falling from the sky. Rising from the ground. This unmistakably unnatural sound was not something any creature he knew could make. Possibly not something from the natural world at all.

Initially the sounds seemed chaotic, but as Ma En listened carefully, a faint, uncanny rhythm emerged.

Saya, suga, kara.

Sound without a visible source.

He tightened his grip on the black umbrella, stopped trying to locate where the sounds came from, stopped trying to name what they were. As he continued up along the flagstone path, the sounds faded back gradually; and when the building's front face came fully into view, they were gone entirely.

It was some kind of hall or venue — four-square, its exterior clearly divided into left, center, and right sections. By any reasonable standard, the central section, occupying the largest area, was the main hall. The main entrance had three wide steps, laid in smooth marble, but at the moment they were far from clean. Fragments of tree branches and grass, mixed with muddy soil, were scattered everywhere, as though a violent storm had blown through. Like the flagstone path, distinct footprints were unmistakable — many of them.

The disordered footprints seemed to describe a scene of panic. In Ma En's mind arose an image: people running like maniacs up the stone path, then into this building. But it wasn't something he'd actually seen, and it wasn't a good image. Even inside a dream, he had no desire to witness something that grim.

He had a tender place in him that particular images hit harder than others — specifically, people being hurt, crying, breaking in pain. Even photographs of such things made his chest tighten. He'd hated tragic stories since school. Perhaps because his sensitivity ran too strong; he was easily infected by others' emotions, felt their joy as something like happiness and their grief as something like sorrow.

Even so, Ma En could always rely on the mental defenses he'd built over years to conceal that part of himself, to wear an expression of indifference when it mattered.

His expression grew serious as image after image rose in his mind. He couldn't treat this strange dream as purely his own nightmare — but if it wasn't his nightmare, whose was it? Who had left all those footprints? And the source of that terrible sound — what did it represent in this dream?

In the worst interpretation, the people hurt in this dream were real — and their hurt in reality hadn't ended when they woke.

That would be a terrible thing.

If this dreamscape was tightly linked to the Room 4 Ghost Story, did that mean all the victims spread across Bunkyo District — an unknown number — were enduring this kind of aberrant terror?

He stood outside the hall for a long while, and the world seemed to shift with the turn of his mood. The scene-painting trees began to sway; clouds had gathered across the sky unnoticed, and from the horizon came a series of low, rolling thunderclaps; then purple-red lightning tore through the clouds in jagged streaks, like livid wounds. Everything unpleasant was becoming more so.

The wind rose. Rain began to fall. Things that had been motionless and unreal — like painted props — began to tremble under the wind and rain, as if performing the violence of the storm. Debris on the ground scattered and tumbled; even the distant treetops looked as though they might be ripped from the earth.

Ma En's necktie and the hem of his jacket whipped in the gale. Without his hand clamped down on his hat, it would have been gone. Above him, thunder bellowed and lightning cracked; flying leaf fragments beat against his body. But he stood as though he felt none of it, straight as a javelin.

In a dream, no matter how vicious the environment, it had no hold on him. What kept his nerves taut was what was inside the hall — something that might be people, might not; something that was definitely there. From where he stood he couldn't make it out; inside was pure black, and even the shapes of furniture couldn't be distinguished through it.

That darkness looked like it wanted to swallow anyone who walked in.

The main entrance had opened at some point. Ma En had been staring directly at it, and he couldn't understand how the glass doors had come open. He was certain — just a few seconds ago the doors had been shut. But without his gaze wandering, without so much as a moment of distraction, the closed doors had become an illusion.

The rain poured down in sheets. Water ran past Ma En's shoes; in no time he was soaked through — but he felt no wetness or cold. What genuinely made him feel cold was the darkness beyond the main entrance. A powerful instinct rooted him here, unwilling to take one more step toward those three marble stairs. Whatever truly dangerous and lethal thing was inside — he hadn't clearly seen it yet, but he had the sense that if he walked over there and saw it, that would be the moment he died.

Even though he'd never stopped believing this was just a nightmare, being unable to wake no matter what and unable to escape whatever happened in it made him acutely sensitive to any harm or death within this dream.

Yet standing here wasn't a solution either. The weather around him growing ever more violent felt like a goad — push forward. He didn't dare look back; he had the feeling that if he turned, something would put him down instantly. He couldn't name what that something would be. His eyes stayed locked on the entrance while his ears reached in all directions; the rain, thunder, and wind were drowning too much, stripping his intelligence down to single brute note — dangerous, and nothing else.

He no longer believed there were still people in this hall.

The building was a trap. If this dream held other people, and if those people made the same choice he was about to — walking toward this structure — they would be swallowed by it. He had no doubt: compared to an ordinary person, he had overwhelming advantages. His work at the postal service and the risks he'd absorbed while pursuing the bizarre had honed his body, his nerves, and every one of his senses beyond the normal range. He could perceive the danger here; others might not.

Look at the footprints on the flagstones — they'd started at the path and continued right up these steps. If those had been real people, they certainly hadn't gotten through this the way Ma En was getting through it now.

And he was also certain: this was not his nightmare. A mind in his condition didn't produce landscapes this menacing.

He'd thought about going to the forest side first. He'd probably have encountered something different and equally strange there.

He was at an impasse. He understood his capabilities surpassed the ordinary, but against the bizarre things he'd encountered so far, his own fragility was just as evident. To pursue the bizarre — to exist in the middle of the inexplicable and abnormal, to face things that exceeded common sense — was to accept exactly this kind of impossible position.

And, he reflected: if he could understand it, could resolve it through understanding, it wouldn't be the bizarre anymore. It would certainly not be worth chasing.

Genuinely terrifying.

He thought this, touched his tongue to his dry lips. The hand he'd kept clamped on his hat seemed to be running warm.

Then, without further hesitation, he pushed off hard and ran for the stairs. His right hand whipped the black umbrella into a sharp arc, snapping out the blade at its tip — like a short spear held level across his chest.

The instant Ma En began to run, he felt something launch itself at him from behind, moving at the same moment. Eyes couldn't catch it; under the cover of the wind and rain's roaring force, almost nothing from his skin or his ears could get through. Only a razor of instinct, like an electric current through his spine, snapped his nerves taut as a sprung wire.

No thinking. No time. His body had already rolled sideways. Something black came from nowhere and hurtled through the exact space where he'd been, vaulting overhead. He hadn't seen what it was — the rain was breaking off it in sheets, making it solid inside this dream, but its shape was something his memory had no category for.

He'd slid three meters across the mud-slicked ground, umbrella blade already leveled at the creature. His instinct told him its back was toward him; without deliberating, he squeezed the trigger and sent the blade flying.

Rolling thunder swallowed the mechanism's snap and the blade's shriek through the air.

And then purple-red lightning tore the sky open.

The blade divided the rain curtain; Ma En could clearly see a bright flash along its surface.

And at the same moment he saw what the creature actually was — because it had no back. What he'd taken for its back, at the center, was packed densely with eyes: dozens of them, blinking in irregular patterns, the majority locked dead on him. The cold of that gaze was sharper against his skin than any blade held close.