Ring

No matter how easy a job was physically, if it didn't involve any imagination, it usually ended up exhausting you.

A woman’s resentment toward the masses who had hounded her father and mother to their deaths and the smallpox virus’s resentment toward the human ingenuity that had driven it to the brink of extinction had fused together in the body of a singular person named Sadako Yamamura, and had reappeared in the world in an unexpected, unimagined form.

First of all, we didn’t really figure out the charm—the way to escape death. Sadako didn’t want her bones to be found and laid to rest with an appropriate memorial service. She wanted something entirely different. What? What is it? And why am I still alive like this if we didn’t figure out the charm? What does that mean? Tell me that! Why did only I survive?

Just before he slipped into the void, Ryuji realized he wouldn’t be saved, and he remembered to wish with all his might that he could teach that asshole Asakawa the secret of the videotape.

The receiver fell, but he didn’t care; he just stared at his face in the mirror. Somebody else was reflected there. The cheeks were yellowish, dried and cracked, and hair was falling out in clumps to reveal brown scabs.

The hint was right here, so close at hand. He hadn’t realized that Sadako’s power had become fused with another power. She’d wanted to have a child, but her body couldn’t bear one. So she’d made a bargain with the devil—for lots of children. What effect is this going to have? Ryuji wondered. He laughed through his pain, an ironic laugh.

Asakawa understood what Ryuji was saying, most of it anyway, but it didn’t sit very well with him. We may not be able to scientifically explain what we’re facing. But it’s real, and because it’s real we have to face it as a real phenomenon and deal with it as such, even if we don’t understand its cause or effect. What we need to concentrate on right now is figuring out the riddle of the charm and saving our own asses, not unlocking all the secrets of the supernatural. Ryuji might have some good points. But what Asakawa really needed from him were clearer answers.

“Heh, heh, that’s too bad. You were just getting to the good part. The Professor could really make me laugh, the way he’d set out in all seriousness things that would shock normal people. What the old man was saying, basically, is that ideas are life forms, with energy of their own.”

“Huh? You mean, the thoughts in our heads can turn into living beings?”

“That’s about the size of it.”

“Well, that’s a rather extreme suggestion.”

“It is indeed, but similar ideas have been propounded since before the time of Christ. I suppose you could just look at it as a different theory of life.”

“After death? When you die, that’s the end, you just disappear. That’s all, right?”

“Hey, have you ever died?”

“No, I haven’t.” Asakawa shook his head with utter earnestness.

“Well then you don’t know, do you? You don’t know where you go after you die.”

These chills, this shivering, were from somebody’s shadow sneaking into him through his sense organs. Asakawa had been watching the video from the same perspective as this thing within him.