Awaken from a Dream Page 12

  Lifting her in his arms, the rabbit walked to the rear of the staff room and dumped her onto the linoleum floor. The cold tiles pressed into her back.

  I have to escape, she thought, pushing herself up from the floor, but the rabbit pinned her in place. The suit’s stench was overwhelming and nearly gagged her.

  The rabbit lay down beside Yukiko, as if they were cuddling. He pulled her against his chest. Her eyes were now level with the rabbit’s mouth. In the back of that gaping maw, two small points glistened. She looked at those points—not with any purpose, but because there was nowhere else for her to look. Her eyesight wasn’t perfect, and at first, she couldn’t tell what she was seeing. Then, after a moment, she thought she might know what they were.

  They were the eyes of the man inside the costume. That had to be it. They were the eyes of the unknown man who had relentlessly stalked and tormented her. They were staring at her with ominous excitement.

  Yukiko saw the obsession in those eyes, and it gave her goosebumps.

  The rabbit tightened his arm around her, and with his free hand—an oversized, soft hand—he caressed her long hair.

  “Yu…ki…ko…”

  His hoarse voice stabbed into her ears. Sticky breath fell across her face. As if that weren’t unsettling enough, the rabbit pressed his giant face against hers, and a warm, sluglike thing popped out from its mouth.

  Then, it licked across her face.

  It was his tongue, wet and slimy, but also with an animal’s rough, sandpapery texture. The urge to vomit filled her chest, and she pushed at the rabbit’s face with both hands.

  “Stop it!” she shouted. “Please, stop!”

  The rabbit redoubled the strength of his grasp. With his scratchy voice, he coaxed her, “Yukiko… I love you. I don’t want anyone else to have you.”

  Even without all that was happening to her, the freak’s confession of love would have been enough to repulse her to her core.

  The rabbit’s hand began feeling at her chest, squeezing her smallish breasts like he knew what he was doing. He let out a deep breath in ecstasy, and his fingers moved down between her legs. Yukiko’s body began to tremble, but certainly not from pleasure. The sheer horror of it all sent shivers cascading through her nervous system.

  Desperately seeking to escape from this hell, Yukiko flailed her arms and legs. But the rabbit’s oversized body was all around her, and it would have taken a lot more than that to break free.

  The rabbit hugged his arms around her and slithered his tongue across her face. “I love you so much,” he whispered with his foul breath. “So, so much.”

  Yukiko managed to wrestle her right arm free. “I don’t want to be loved by someone like you!” she shouted.

  She jabbed her hand into the rabbit’s gaping, grinning mouth. Her fingers made contact with something squishy—the eyes of the man inside the suit, she thought. She was quickly proved right as the man’s unrelentingly powerful arms slackened, and a muffled grunt escaped the rabbit’s head.

  Yukiko shoved away his weakened arms and kicked at him as hard as she could with both feet. Her skirt fluttered up distastefully, but she had no time to worry about appearances.

  The rabbit rolled about on the floor holding his arms to his mouth. She watched him for a moment then snapped out of it and left the room. When she reached the landing to the stairs, she faced a choice. Go up to the roof or down to the lower floors. She hesitated for a moment. Then, thinking that the panic might have settled down by now, she chose the roof. As she started climbing the stairs, she heard a doleful voice coming from behind her.

  “Yu…ki…ko.”

  She looked, and the rabbit was there, blindly swinging his arms about as he came toward her. He seemed to be having a great deal of trouble seeing after her eye jab. Watching him stagger and wind toward her, she froze for a second but quickly recovered and fled up the stairs.

  As she stood at the doorway leading to the rooftop, the rabbit crawled up the stairs after her, slowly and steadily, moving like a lizard on his hands and feet.

  Yukiko flung open the door and found a small, separate rooftop occupied by a water tower and a fenced-in power transformer unit. Her heart sank. Where was she? She must have taken a wrong turn and now she was cornered.

  The rabbit was still coming after her. If she didn’t quickly find a way to escape, he’d capture her again. But there was nowhere to run.

  She turned and watched him coming up the stairs. She must have really hurt his eyes, because he appeared to be climbing each step with great effort.

  She wondered if she could jump over him and run back downstairs. Yet injured eyes or not, he still possessed overwhelming strength. If he managed to catch her again, it would likely mean her life.

  She slipped around the side of the water tower and stood beside the chain-link fence. A metal sign affixed to the fence read DANGER: HIGH VOLTAGE CURRENT. The idol started to climb over the fence, but the sign gave her a moment’s pause.

  That pause was her ruin.

  The rabbit had managed to catch up to her. He put his hand on the back of her head and twisted it toward him until her eyes were on his ugly face. A lazy trail of blood dangled from the rabbit’s mouth. She must have scratched his eyes.

  His shoulders rising and falling with each breath, the rabbit said, “That was cruel, Yukiko. Why would you hurt me like that? Can’t you see how much I love you? How could you be so mean to me?”

  He rattled her head, and then again, and then once more.

  His voice went eerily quiet. “I could just keep turning your head around.”

  His fingers tightened around the back of her skull.

  Maybe he’s serious, she thought. Maybe he’s really going to twist until my neck snaps.

  The rabbit’s ears stood up. He put more force into his arm, and her neck twisted to an almost impossible degree. Her muscles cried out in unimaginable pain. Yukiko grunted as saliva started to run out from the edges of her lips.

  I’m… I’m going to die.

  As her head turned past ninety degrees, her mind struggled to find any avenue for survival.

  Still twisting her head, the rabbit leaned its weight against her and threw her to the floor. First she felt the sting of the concrete, and then the rabbit’s fur enveloped her.

  “I have to do this,” he said. “I just want you to know that. There’s no other way.”

  The rabbit bent his arm, and her neck craned with it. She could no longer breathe. Convulsions shot through her body. She began to lose her vision, as if a strip of gauze had been placed over her eyes.

  Is this what it’s like to die?

  In her mind’s eye, she saw herself as a little girl. She was giggling, cradling a dirty doll in her arms.

  So it’s true then, what they say—that the moment you die, your life flashes before your eyes. Is this the moment I die? I don’t want to die!

  Her refusal to let go of life roused her from her descent into death.

  I can’t die here. I can’t die at the hands of this rabbit.

  Her eyes opened wide.

  Yukiko could see the side of the water tower just beyond the rabbit’s furry arm. Valves of various sizes came out from the side of the tower. Below them was a row of metal outflow spigots.

  Yukiko reached for a red valve and turned it. The valve hadn’t been worked loose in a long time, and Yukiko was not particularly strong to begin with. She shouldn’t have been able to turn it, but her determination to survive gave her the strength she needed.

  With a deafening roar, reddish-brown water sprayed from the spigot. The torrent hit the rabbit perfectly in the face and knocked him backward. Yukiko rolled to the side, got to her feet, and scrambled to the opposite side of the water tower, while the gushing water pushed the rabbit almost all the way back to the top of the stairs.

  Yukiko peeked around the far side of the tank and saw the rabbit reeling in pain and confusion. She nodded with satisfaction.

  She had
her opening, but now she needed to do something with it. She focused with every scrap of willpower she possessed.

  Her eyes glistened.

  She had an idea.

  The rabbit was soaked through, every last hair matted to his body. Coughing and sputtering, he slowly stood. The pain from the torrential water’s impact was matched by the anguish at being taken so completely by surprise.

  The rabbit despaired.

  While he had been struggling against the seemingly endless deluge, Yukiko had almost certainly escaped. By now, she probably wasn’t even in the department store. How would he ever be able to catch her again?

  His ears drooped, and he sank down onto the concrete floor.

  He had been so close. Just a few moments longer, and he’d have taken his beloved Yukiko’s life with his own hands. A few moments longer, and he’d have twisted her head fully backward, and she would have been dead.

  He looked up to the sky through eyelids half closed over by blood.

  Scaffolding had been erected around and above the water tank that had brought about his failure. It looked like the building’s owners were intending on installing an even larger reservoir. The scaffolding held platforms that spiraled up to the top of the tank, with more framework going higher still, leaving a void in the middle.

  Slowly, he put a hand on one of the scaffolding tubes and leaned back against the wall next to the stairway door. For now, he needed a break. He’d get some energy back, gather himself, and think of how he would handle Yukiko.

  His ears folded back against his head, and his eyes closed—but then he let loose a small, startled exclamation and opened his eyes. He sensed someone nearby. Above. Someone was above him.

  His ears stood straight up as he looked up at the scaffolding. “She’s… she’s here.” Yukiko was there.

  He had been wrong. She hadn’t escaped far away, but was right there, partway up the scaffolding.

  Yukiko was standing still, gripping the guardrail, but when the rabbit took his first awkward, water-soaked step onto the decking, she quickly turned and began ascending the ramp to the next platform.

  “Yukiko,” the rabbit rumbled, “give it up. You’ve got nowhere to run.”

  With her lithe body, Yukiko climbed her way from level to level with ease, while the rabbit’s encumbered, leaden steps prevented him from closing in. In the end, that wouldn’t matter, because what the rabbit said was right. Once she’d reached the top of the structure, there was nowhere farther for her to go. Even if he couldn’t catch up with her before then, he would still reach her.

  Yukiko must have known that, but still she climbed.

  There was no guarantee she’d even manage to ascend that far. The scaffolding was by no means sturdy. With each step she took, the platforms shook, and the connecting bolts gave a loud and dissonant creak. Even attempting the ascent was dangerous—and that was only under her comparatively light weight. The giant, waterlogged rabbit was climbing after her now, and he was much heavier.

  When Yukiko neared the top of the water tower, she stumbled and leaned against the guardrail. The platform had suddenly bowed beneath her. It seemed that some careless worker had only half-fastened the bolts in that section.

  Yukiko looked down, and her head spun. The water tower stood several stories tall above the rest of the roof. She had a fear of heights, though not on the same level as James Stewart in Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Still, she clung to the handrail and did her best not to look down again.

  Yet she couldn’t just remain standing there, without doing anything. The rabbit, slow as he was, was coming for her, closing in. She risked another glance down and found that he was quite close now, moving faster even as his footsteps made the rickety scaffolding creak and groan.

  Yukiko looked up. At the top of the tower was a small square landing just one meter long on each side. The terminus of the water tower. The only way back down was the same way the rabbit was coming up.

  She could hear him now, muttering in that scratchy voice. “Yu…ki…ko.”

  The rabbit’s fingertips appeared on the lip of the platform one level down. Yukiko drew in her legs and hugged her arms around her knees. The rabbit laughed and ran the remaining distance with surprising speed. And then his hand was on her ankle. His grip was incredibly strong. She kicked her leg as hard as she could, but his fingers held on tight.

  Slowly, he pulled her toward him by the ankle. As her body was dragged down, the rabbit rose up and soon their faces met. The rabbit let out a delighted sigh.

  As she suffered under the stench of his rotten-meat body odor, she moved a hand behind her back and begin loosening one of the bolts holding the scaffolding together. When it had been first constructed, the bolt would have been far too tight to loosen with her bare hands, but after extended exposure to wind and small vibrations, the bolt had gradually worked itself loose.

  Careful not to let the rabbit catch on, she shifted her weight toward the wall of the tower so that the scaffolding pressed against the tower’s surface. With some of the strain taken off the bolt, it began to turn more easily. The bolt had rusted over, and Yukiko still had trouble turning it, but as she kept putting her muscle into it, the layer of rust flaked away, and the bolt itself popped free from the joint.

  Yukiko shoved at the rabbit’s face with both hands and threw her weight backward. With a shrill creak, the scaffolding sagged and began tipping away from the tank.

  Taken by surprise, the rabbit let go of Yukiko and grabbed for the scaffold’s vertical tube—which was quickly becoming rather less vertical. Yukiko hooked her arm around the railing at the top landing, lifted her feet, and used her stomach muscles to raise her lower body up and onto the platform.

  The scaffolding began to buckle under the rabbit’s weight, and it twisted toward the next section where the bolt still held. The rabbit’s platform traced a wide and slow arc until it came back to slam into the side of the tower.

  The rabbit’s hand jolted free from the handhold, and he smacked hard into the wall. Pancaked against the curved surface, he slid and skidded down, gravity winning the fight against friction. As he fell, his arms searched about for anything to grab that might arrest his descent, but they found nothing.

  Yukiko sat motionless on the platform atop the water tower.

  She was relieved to have defeated the rabbit, but now it seemed she was stuck, with nothing to do but wait until help came for her.

  Since panicking would get her nowhere, she simply sat hugging her knees while gazing up at the empty sky.

  After watching the rabbit fall with the scaffolding, she was confident he couldn’t have survived. Though she felt a little uneasy being entirely alone on her high-up perch, she was free from the terror the rabbit had struck into her.

  What she didn’t know was that the rabbit, driven by his obsession, was slowly working his way back up the tower. He took whatever small handholds it had to offer, moving his oversized body with the deftness of a rock climber.

  Holding fast to the curved wall, he climbed all the way to the top. When he crested the top edge, he saw Yukiko on the platform, her back turned to him. A low laugh of victory threatened to come up, but he stifled it so as not to spoil the surprise.

  The metal railing of the upper platform was nearly within his grasp.

  When they had at long last managed to quell the mass panic, Kanda and Yoriko went to the roof to look for Yukiko.

  “Where in the world could she have gone?” Yoriko wondered.

  Kanda said, “If she wasn’t in the green room or backstage, she must be out on the roof somewhere. She probably waited for everything to settle down and then went out there to find us.”

  From the stage, they looked out across the vacant roof. The scattered heaps of folding chairs spoke to the severity of the chaos that had occurred.

  “Surely she wouldn’t have left the department store,” Kanda said, sounding unsure. “Would she?”

  “Not a chance,” Yoriko replied. She surv
eyed the rooftop with worry in her eyes. “She may be young, but she has a strong sense of duty. She wouldn’t have left her fans—or us—behind.”

  “You’re right. Well, where else could she be?” Kanda thought for a while, then muttered, “Wait, what about…” Then to Yoriko, he said, “Follow me,” and started jogging to the emergency stairs. “The original part of the building has its own little roof—it’s still there today. Maybe that’s where she went!”

  Yoriko hurried after him.

  The rusty door opened onto a small, dilapidated roof dominated by a weatherworn water tower.

  Yoriko shouted, “Up there!”

  Kanda saw it at the same time.

  Yukiko was sitting, arms around her knees, at the top of the half-collapsed scaffolding. She seemed to be staring off into the distance, lost in her thoughts—oblivious to the monster coming up on her from behind, his arms spread wide.

  Opening his mouth so wide his jaw might have fallen off, Kanda shouted, “Yukiko! Behind you! Yukiko!”

  But even yelling as loud as he could, his voice didn’t reach her.

  The rabbit put his hands on her shoulders. Watching helplessly from below, Yoriko could feel his fingers digging painfully into her flesh, as if she were the one up there.

  Yukiko remained still, stoically enduring the rabbit’s cruel touch.

  “That’s good,” Yoriko said. “Don’t upset him. Fighting will only make things worse. Just do as he says.” If Yukiko tried to fight him off and failed, it might anger him into doing something terrible.

  Yukiko couldn’t have heard her, but she seemed to have gotten the message, as she remained entirely pliant and passive. Whether she was choosing not to struggle or just didn’t have the strength left to try it, Yoriko didn’t know. Whatever the case, complying with the rabbit was the safest route.

  “Yoriko-kun, bring the police,” Kanda said. “And get word to management and security.”