Spiral by Kôji Suzuki Read Free Book Online Page A

medium for the spread of the disease. Visions of Mai's lips touching Ryuji's danced in his head. He hurriedly shook them off.
    He poured whiskey into a glass and drank it down straight. The alcohol, after a year and a half of temperance, had a powerful effect on him. As it burned his throat and seeped into his stomach, he was engulfed in lethargy. He sat on the floor, leaned back against the bed, and spread his limbs carelessly. Only a part of his brain remained alert. He stared at the stains on the ceiling.
    The day before his boy had drowned, Ando had dreamed of the ocean. Looking back now, he knew the dream had come true. He'd known his son's fate ahead of time, and he still hadn't been able to do anything about it. Regret had made him a more cautious man since.
    And now, he was having a definite premonition. A piece of newspaper had poked its way out of Ryuji's belly after the autopsy, and he'd been able to take the numbers written on it and find the word "ring". He couldn't believe it was just a coincidence. Ryuji was trying to tell him something-in his own way, using a medium only he could manipulate. By now, most of Ryuji's body had been reduced to ash, all but a small part which remained in the form of a tissue sample. Ando got the feeling that even in his dismembered, tissue-sampled state, Ryuji was speaking to him. Which was why he felt his friend was still alive. His body had been cremated, but Ryuji was not without words and some means to communicate them.
    Ando kept fiddling with this notion as he loitered just this side of incoherence. A certain delusion-it could be a joke or it could be for real-was producing a new storyline.
    Utterly ridiculous.
    Objective reason reared its head. In that instant, Ando felt as if he were gazing with the eyes of a disembodied spirit at his own body, spread-eagled on the bed. His body posture looked familiar to him. He'd seen that pose somewhere recently. In the midst of an overpowering sleepiness, he recalled the Polaroids of Ryuji's dead body. It was the same pose: head back on the bed, arms and legs flung wide. He fought off sleep and got to his feet so that he could crawl into bed and pull up the covers. He couldn't stop trembling until he dropped off to sleep.
     
     

6
     
    He finished his second autopsy at the M.E.'s office, then headed back to the university, leaving the clean-up to his colleagues. Miyashita had contacted him, hinting at a development in the pursuit of Ryuji's cause of death, and Ando had been on tenterhooks ever since. He darted up the steps out of the subway.
    He entered the university hospital by the main entrance and then crossed over to the old wing. The new wing, which housed the main entrance, was only two years old. It was a totally modern seventeen-story building connected by a complex of halls and stairways to the old wings, which crowded around like high-rise apartments. The whole place was like a maze. First-time visitors invariably got lost. New and old intertwined, and the color, width, and smell of the hallways-even the squeak of his shoes on the floor-shifted as he pressed on. When he stopped at the iron door that marked the boundary and glanced back at the new wing's wide corridor, he lost his sense of perspective momentarily. He was overcome by an illusion that he was gazing at the future.
    The door to the Pathology Department was open a crack, and he could see Miyashita's back where he sat on a stool. Rather than being ensconced in his lab equipment as Ando had expected, he was turned toward the central table, going through some literature. His face was down close to the book opened before him, and he was flipping its pages rapidly. Ando approached him from behind and tapped him on a burly shoulder.
    Miyashita turned around and took off his glasses, then turned the book over and laid it on the table. The title on the spine read, A Beginner's Guide to Astrology. Ando was taken aback.
    Miyashita twirled on his stool until he was facing