Ghostwritten Read online

  ‘I’m sorry! I didn’t have time to explain! That officer wasn’t a real officer. It was a disguise. It was the evil that lives in these tunnels!’

  ‘You must be mistaken!’

  ‘Yeah? And how would you know?’

  As we run, our fingers lock together, I look at her face for the first time. Sidelong, she is smiling, waiting for me to get this most grisly of jokes. I am looking into the real face of evil.

  I set off early the next morning to walk around the island. The sea was milky turquoise. The sand was white, hot and yielding. I saw birds I’d never seen before, and salmon-pink butterflies. I saw two lovers and a husky dog walking down the beach. The boy kept whispering things to the girl, and she kept laughing. The dog wanted them to throw the stick, but was too stupid to realise that first he’d have to give the stick back to one of them. As they passed I noticed neither of them wore wedding rings. I bought a couple of riceballs for lunch in a little flyblown shop, and a can of cold tea. I ate them sitting on a grave, wondering when it was that I last belonged anywhere. I mean apart from Sanctuary. I passed an ancient camphor tree, and a field where a goat was tethered. Fieldworkers’ radios played tinny pop music that drifted down to the road. They sweltered under wide, woven hats. Cars rusted away in lay-bys, vegetation growing up out of the radiators. There was a lighthouse on a lonely headland. I walked to it. It was padlocked.

  A sugar-cane farmer pulled up by the roadside and offered me a lift. I was footsore, so I accepted. His dialect was so heavy I could barely make out what he was trying to say. He started off talking about the weather, to which I made all the right noises. Then he started talking about me. He knew which inn I was staying at, and how long I was staying, my false name, my job. He even gave his condolences for my dead wife. Every time he used the word ‘computer’ he sealed it in inverted commas.

  Back at the inn, the gossip shop was open for business. The television flashed and blinked silently on the counter. On the coffee table five cups of green tea steamed. Seated around on low chairs were a man who I guessed was a fisherman, a woman in dungarees who sat like a man, a thin woman with thin lips, and a man with a huge wart wobbling from one eyebrow like a bunch of grapes.

  The old woman who ran the inn was clearly holding court. ‘I still remember the television pictures on the day it happened. All those poor, poor people stumbling out, holding handkerchiefs to their mouths . . . a nightmare! Welcome back, Mr Tokunaga. Were you in Tokyo during the attack?’

  ‘No. I was in Yokohama on business.’

  I scanned their minds for suspicion. I was safe.

  The fisherman lit a cigarette. ‘What was it like the day after?’

  ‘It certainly took a lot of people by surprise.’

  Dungaree-woman nodded and folded her arms. ‘Looks like it’s the beginning of the end for that bunch of lunatics, however.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ Keeping my voice steady.

  The fisherman looked surprised. ‘You haven’t heard? The police have raided them. About time, too. The Fellowship’s assets have been frozen. Their so-called Minister of Defence is being charged with murder of ex-cult members, and five people have been arrested in connection with the gas. Two of those five hanged themselves in their detention cells. Their suicide notes provided enough evidence for a new round of arrests. Would you like to see my newspaper?’

  I flinched from the shuffling sheets of lies. ‘No, it’s all right. But how about the Guru?’ The branches may burn in the forest fire, but new growth sprouts from the pure heart.

  ‘The who?’ Wartman blubbulled his rubbery nose. I wanted to kneel on his neck and cut that abomination off with a sharp pair of scissors.

  ‘The Leader of the Fellowship.’

  ‘Oh, that maggot! He’s hiding, like the coward he is!’ Wartman choked on the hatred in his voice! What a sick zoo the world has become, where angels are despised. ‘He’s a true devil, is that one. A devil from hell.’

  ‘Walking evil, he is! Here you are, Mr Tokunaga.’ The old woman poured me a cup of green tea. I needed to escape to my room to think, but I wanted more news. ‘He fleeces the poor fools who run along to him. Then he acts their father, orders them to do his dirty work, plays out his wicked dreams, then scurries away from the consequences.’

  Their ignorance makes me gasp! If only I could make these vermin understand!

  ‘It’s beyond my comprehension,’ said Dungaree-woman, ‘how such things can happen. It wasn’t just him, was it? There were bright people in the Fellowship, from good universities and good families. Policemen, scientists, teachers, and lawyers. Respectable people. How could they go along with that alpha Fellowship nonsense, and choose to become killers? Is there so much evil in the world?’

  ‘Brainwashing,’ said Wartman, pointing to everybody. ‘Brainwashing.’

  The thin woman examined the dragon curled around her cup. ‘They did not specifically choose to become killers. They had chosen to abdicate their inner selves.’ I didn’t like her. Her voice seemed to come not from her, but from a nearby room.

  ‘I don’t altogether follow you,’ said Dungaree-woman.

  ‘Society,’ and from the way the thin woman said the word I knew she was a teacher, ‘is an outer abdication. We abdicate certain freedoms, and in return we get civilisation. We get protection from death by starvation, bandits and cholera. It’s a fair deal. Signed on our behalf by our educational system on the day we are born. However, we all have an inner self, that decides to what degree we honour this contract. This inner self is our own responsibility. I fear that many of the young men and women in the Fellowship handed this inner responsibility to their Guru, to do with as he pleased. And that,’ she flicked the newspaper, ‘is what he did with it.’

  ‘You sound like you have fairly entrenched opinions,’ I remarked.

  The thin woman looked at me straight in the eye. I looked straight back. Our sisters at Sanctuary are taught humility.

  ‘But why?’ The fisherman lit his pipe and bulged his cheeks in and out. ‘Why did his followers want to give him their will?’

  The thin woman looked at me as she spoke. ‘You’d have to ask them yourself. Maybe there are many answers. Some get a kick out of self-abasement and servitude. Some are afraid or lonely. Some crave the camaraderie of the persecuted. Some want to be big fish in a small pond. Some want magic. Some want revenge on teachers and parents who promised success would deliver all. They need shinier myths that will never be soiled by becoming true. The handing over of one’s will is a small price to pay, for the believers. They aren’t going to need a will in their New Earth.’

  I couldn’t listen to this any more. ‘Maybe you’re reading too much into it. Maybe they just did it because they loved him.’ I downed my tea in one gulp. It burned my tongue and it was too bitter. ‘Could I have my key now, please?’

  The old woman idly passed me the key. ‘You must be exhausted after your long walk. My nephew’s wife saw you out by the lighthouse!’

  Secrets on islands are hidden from mainlanders, but never from the islanders.

  I lay on my bed, and wept.

  My brothers and sisters, committing self-slaughter! Which of my co-cleansers had fallen at this last hurdle, and why? We were heroes! Just a few months before the end of the unclean world! Paradise had been so near for them! I was further surprised at the Minister of Defence allowing himself to be captured. He has a high enough alpha quotient to displace molecules and walk through walls.

  The spider in the jar had died. Why? Why, why, why?

  After my evening cleansing I walked around this fishing village. Squealing children were playing some incomprehensible game. Teenagers hung around on street corners in their trendiest gear, doubtless imitating the Tokyo teenagers they see in their magazines. Mothers stood gossiping outside the supermarket. I want to shout at them, The world is going to end soon, you are all going to fry in the White Nights! Okinawan music blared out of a bar, all twinky-twanky and jangling . . . And at
the end of the street I reached the mountains, the sea and the night.

  I walked along the pebbly beach. Plastic buoys. A sea coconut, shaped like a woman’s loins. Junk, washed up with the driftwood. Cans, bottles, rubber gloves, detergent containers. I heard grunts and squeals from under a peeling boat, never to float again. In the distance a shadow lit a fire.

  His Serendipity speaks to me in the crashing of the waves, and the sucking of the shingle. Why telephone when telepathy is possible? His Serendipity told me that his trusted cleanser Quasar had the greatest role to play. The Days of Persecution had begun, as prophesied in the 143rd Sacred Revelation. My Master told me I shall be a shepherd for the faithful during the White Nights. And after the comet ushers in the New Earth, I shall be at the right hand of His Serendipity, administering justice and wisdom in His name. I replied to His Serendipity that I was ready to die for Him. That I loved Him as a son does his father and would protect Him as a father does a son. His Serendipity, hundreds of miles away, smiled. The comet will be here by Christmas. The New Earth is not far away now. The Fellowship of Humanity will gather together on a purer island, and the survivors will call me ‘Father Quasar’. There will be no bullying. No victimising. All the selfish, petty, unbelieving unclean, they will fry in the fat of their ignorance. We will eat papayas, cashew nuts and mangos, and learn how to make traditional instruments and beautiful pottery. His Serendipity will select our mates according to our alpha quotients, and teach us advanced alpha techniques, and we will travel astrally, visiting other stars.

  I knelt, and thanked my Lord for his encouragement. The moon rose over the open bay, and those same stars came on, one by one.

  The baby in the woolly cap, strapped to her mother’s back, opened her eyes. They were my eyes. A disembodied voice was singing a chorus over and over again. And reflected in my eyes was her face. She knew what I was going to do. And she asked me not to. But she was fated to die anyway, Quasar, when the comet comes! You shortened her suffering in the land of the unclean! The innocents, surely, will be reborn into the Fellowship of the New Earth! Cleanse yourself, and anchor your faith, deep and fast!

  The radio alarm clock glowed 1.30 a.m. Bad karaoke throbbed through the walls. I was wide awake, straitjacketed by my sweaty sheets. A headache dug its thumbs into my temples. My gut pulsed with gamma interference: I lurched to the toilet. My shit was a slurry of black crude oil. I kept thinking of the thin teacher, and what I should have said to her to put her in her place. My eyes wandered around the labyrinth on the worn lino. I took a shower, as hot as the flesh could bear.

  For the first time since my initiation ceremony into the Fellowship I bought some cigarettes, from a machine in the deserted lobby. I lit one, walking back up to my room. I was going to be up for a while.

  My palms have become blotchy. I clean myself eight or nine times a day, but something is wrong with my skin. I have taken to watching the television every morning. Proceedings are under way to disband the Fellowship, and make membership illegal. I have been named, and my photograph shown, ransacked from Fellowship archives. Luckily it was taken with my scalp shaved and an alpha energiser on my head, so the likeness isn’t close. I am the last of the Tokyo cleansers to evade capture. I saw my skin father and mother being chased into my skin sister’s car by a baying pack of reporters. The whole scene was lit by flashbulbs. His Serendipity has been caught and charged with conspiracy to commit genocide, and with fraud, kidnapping and possession of Category 1 nerve agents. The news showed the same clip of His Serendipity being bundled into a car by agents of the unclean and driven through a mob shouting for His blood. They showed it over and over again, to a sinister soundtrack, to tell the mindless that He is a villain, like Darth Vader, to be loathed and feared. The rest of the Cabinet have also been arrested. They are falling over themselves to denounce each other, hoping their death sentence will be commuted to life imprisonment. I myself was denounced by the Minister of Education. Even His Serendipity’s wife has denounced our Master, saying that she didn’t know anything about the production of the gas. She, who was so zealous about the cleansing! One television news station flew their jackals to Los Angeles, to film the elite school in Beverly Hills where His Serendipity’s sons were boarded.

  I telephoned Sanctuary from the port.

  ‘State your name, business and present location,’ said the cold voice. A cop. Even with the alpha quotient of a fruitfly, you could spot them a mile off. I hung up.

  But this is bad. I have run out of Japan. My passport is in the possession of the Fellowship’s Foreign Office, so seeking assistance with our Russian or Korean brothers and sisters is impossible. I am running out of money. Of course I have no money of my own: after my initiation every last yen was transferred to the Fellowship. My skin family have disowned me, and would turn me in. So would my skin friends from my life of blindness. This causes me no sorrow. When the White Nights come, they shall reap what they have sown. The Fellowship are my true family.

  I had one final resort. The Fellowship’s Secret Service. The media had mentioned nothing about their arrest, so perhaps they had gone to ground in time. I dialled the secret number, and gave the encoded message: ‘The dog needs to be fed.’

  I kept on the line, saying nothing, as instructed during my cleansing training sessions at Sanctuary. The Secret Serviceman on the other end hung up when enough time for my call to be traced had elapsed. Help would be on its way. A levitator would be despatched, bearing a wallet of crisp ten-thousand yen notes. He will scan for my alpha signature, and find me during one of my rambles around the island, when I am alone, or asleep in a grove of palm trees. He will be there when I awake, glowing, perhaps, like Buddha or Gabriel.

  Kumejima is a squalid, incestuous prison. To think, this lump of rock was once the main trading centre of the Ryuku Empire with China. Boats laden with spices, slaves, coral, ivory, silk. Swords, coconuts, hemp. The shouts of men would have filled the bustling harbour, old women would have knelt in the market place, with their scales and piles of fruit and dried fish. Girls with obedient breasts lean out of the dusky windows, over the flower boxes, promising, murmuring . . .

  Now it’s all gone. Long gone. Okinawa became a squalid apology for a fiefdom, squabbled over by masters far beyond its curved horizons. Nobody admits it, but the islands are dying now. The young people are moving to the mainland. Without subsidies and price-fixing the agriculture would collapse. When the mainland peaceniks get the American military rapists off the islands the economy will slow, splutter and expire. The fish are all being fished out by factory trawlers. Tracks lead nowhere. Building projects have been started, but end in patches of concrete, piles of gravel and tall, thorny weeds. Such a place would be ripe for His Serendipity’s Mission! I long to awaken people, to tell people about the White Nights and the New Earth, but I daren’t risk bringing attention to myself. My last defence is my ordinariness. When that wears out, I have nothing but my novice’s alpha potential to protect me.

  The island’s bewhiskered policeman spoke to me yesterday. I passed him outside a snorkel shop while he was bent over tying up his shoelaces.

  ‘How’s your holiday, Mr Tokunaga?’

  ‘Very restful, officer. Thank you.’

  ‘I was sorry to hear about your wife. It must have been terribly traumatic.’

  ‘Kind of you to say so, officer.’ I tried to focus my alpha-coercion faculty to make him go away.

  ‘So you’ll be off tomorrow, Mr Tokunaga? Mrs Mori at the guest house said you were staying for a couple of weeks.’

  ‘I’m thinking of extending, actually, just a few more days.’

  ‘Is that a fact? Won’t your company be missing you?’

  ‘Actually, I’m working on a new computer system. I can do it here just as well as in Tokyo. In fact, the peace and quiet is more conducive to inspiration.’

  The policeman nodded thoughtfully. ‘I wonder . . . At the junior high school the youngsters have recently started up a computer club. My
sister-in-law’s the headmistress there. Mrs Oe. You’ve met already, I believe, at Mrs Mori’s. I wonder . . . Mrs Oe is far too polite to dream of imposing upon your time herself, I know, but . . .’

  I waited.

  ‘It would be a great honour for the school if you could go along some time and tell the computer class about life in a real computer company . . .’

  I sensed a trap. But it would be safer to get out of it later than refuse now. ‘Sure.’

  ‘That would be very kind of you. I’ll mention it when I see my brother-in-law next . . .’

  I met the husky dog on the beach. His Serendipity chose to address me in its barks.

  ‘What did you expect, Quasar? Did you think raising the curtain on the age of homo serendipitous was going to be easy?’

  ‘No, my Lord. But when are the yogic fliers going to be despatched to the White House and the European parliament, to demand your release?’

  ‘Eat eggs, my faithful one.’

  ‘Eggs, my Lord?’

  ‘Eggs are a symbol of rebirth, Quasar. And eat Orange Rocket ice lollies.’

  ‘What do they symbolise, Guru?’

  ‘Nothing. They contain vitamin C in abundance.’

  ‘It shall be so, my Lord. But the yogic fliers, my Father—’

  My only reply was a barking dog, and a puzzled look from the two lovers, jumping up suddenly from behind a stack of rusty oil drums. The three of us looked at each other in confusion. The dog cocked its leg and pissed against a tractor tyre. The ocean boomed its indifference.

  The little baby girl in the woolly cap, she had liked me. How could she have liked me? It was just some facial reflex, no doubt. She gurgled at me, smiling. Her mother looked at who she was smiling at, and she smiled at me too. Her eyes were warm. I didn’t smile back. I looked away. I wish I had smiled back. But I wish they hadn’t smiled at me. Would they have survived? Or would the gas have got them? If they hadn’t moved, it would have leaked out of the package and straight into their noses, eyes, and lungs . . .