Chapter 2: Dreams of Red
Throughout that fateful day four months ago, it was unlucky.
I was late for work due to an accident that stopped the trains in the morning and I felt irritable because of a series of minor mistakes I don’t usually make. And then I was thrust into cleaning up a massive blunder made by a junior colleague.
I was so annoyed by her whimpering, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry…’ , that I gave her a little hard time, and my male boss, who doted on her, gave me a stinging snide remark. I didn’t miss how she was sticking out her tongue in the background, but that didn’t go over well with my boss, who had long since decided that I was the villain.
‘Moreover, she’s leaving early.’
Maybe she’s good at conducting herself. In a way, that’s a talent of its own.
A talent that I don’t possess.
I can’t even say the number of times I felt numb looking at the deserted office without the person who made the mistake.
Even the last train of the day had left. I paid out of my own pocket for the taxi back home. I missed the evening dinner. Far from taking a shower, I didn’t have the energy to wipe off my make-up. Even changing my clothes was annoying. Tomorrow, reporting for work had to be done early in the morning. I collapsed onto the bed and at that moment, I fell with a thump.
That day was really, really an unlucky day.
It was the kind of exhausting day, both physically and mentally, that would normally cause me to sleep so deeply that I wouldn’t even dream.
In the first dream, I was still living.
The first dream… it might not have sounded right, but there was no other way to describe it.
It was a very ominous dream. The sky, even the ground, just about everything was red in the dream.
The scenery flickered, perhaps because it was burning, and perhaps the blood reeked because it got wet―it was almost like Hell.
The me who was in the dream came to grips with that eerie-ness as a matter of course. I didn’t think it was frightening. All my feelings eroded away, and just like as if they had been annihilated, no deep emotions welled up.
Dead bodies were scattered about at my feet. Perhaps, the red was the blood of the dead bodies.
A bit farther away, many dead bodies were being roasted. Maybe, the red was the color of that flame.
The me inside the dream accepted everything dispassionately.
Walking for a bit, I stumbled upon a river. A deep reddish stream. A river of blood. Rising to the surface face-down were naked bodies. It was very clear that they were dead. The white back of the body that was clad in slushy dark reddish blood clearly belonged to a woman.
Walking a bit more unraveled a thicket. The leaves had withered completely and fallen, and a large number of dead bodies had been dangling from it in its place. It was almost as if it was a tree that bore dead bodies. Among them, there were also bodies that had decayed right down from the neck, but I didn’t find them even a little bit scary, as expected.
I kept walking.
Silently in the dream.
Crossing the stream, Passing through the thicket, I came across the moor. In the way flowers bloomed, white arms stuck out of the ground and were shaking. The fingers were squirming as if it wanted to grasp something. The fingertip was dripping red with blood. All the hands seemed to be facing towards me. They seemed to be entreating for help, but I ignored them all and proceeded forward.
Passing through the flowerbed of arms, entering what seemed like a town of hard stone paving that only exists in fairy-tales, people had died here and there.
They seemed like twisted, broken, severed, pierced, torn to shreds, plucked, scattered pieces of dead lumps of meat. A rotten smell enshrouded over. Even that terrible spectacle didn’t deter my journey. I was the only one alive.
――I dare say.
Although there were corpses with no physical defects, the thought that they were perhaps still alive never crossed me. Even if that was ascertained, the gaping hole in the stomach wouldn’t be plugged up, and the entrails that were spilling over from it wouldn’t go back to how it originally was.
Death is, after all… death.
It wasn’t to be discredited even inside a dream.
I kept walking inside Death. I had no idea where I was heading. Just had a feeling that to stop walking was never an option. I didn’t want to turn back.
In case I stop.
In case I turn back.
The me inside in the dream didn’t want to think what would happen of me then.
Stepping over the corpses that had frozen and stiffened, pushing through the viscera that had rotten and throwing up the sticky pool of blood…
Valiant―perhaps not a right way to describe it―I kept walking beyond the point that I had finally found my way to…
“Mikage-san, you alright?”
My consciousness abruptly surfaced to the warm aroma of coffee and the latent voice that worried about me. It was not as if I had fallen asleep, I had merely immersed myself in deep thought. With a thump, a cherry-blossomed colored mug was placed on the low table.
“I remembered.”
“Yes. About what?”
“The first dream.”
Natsumura-sensei, as opposed to the previous time, sat next to me while saying, ‘the first dream’. Even if him sitting next to me suggested something else, it was merely a sofa that didn’t allow the 160-cm tall me to stick out my legs when I laid horizontally. There was enough space for another person to sit comfortably between the two of us. Having someone stare at me intently from directly opposite of me wasn’t my cup of tea, so I had requested him to sit next to me.
I wasn’t like this before. After all, nobody’s gaze seemed scary to me…
But I had changed.
“The first dream… you mean, the thing you call the red dream?”
“Yes.”
I nodded and held the mug between my two hands. Even though the make of the cup was very bulky and a very hot steam rose from it, what transmitted to my hand was a very lukewarm warmth.
“…”
Sensei didn’t try to force anything out of me when I had sunk into silence at that point.
One, two, three―I kept counting my breaths as I saw my reflection in the coffee. Before I reached ten, I took a fleeting glance at the person next to me. Natsumura-sensei was slowly tilting a palish-green mug, a different color from mine.
It has been a month since I have been in the care of Sensei. More than half of that time was spent in absolute silence.
In the beginning, that period of silence was nothing but agony. My anxiety would take over if I didn’t end up speaking anything, and so at any rate I had to end that quiet atmosphere, for which I would keep rattling on about things that weren’t asked of me, and would repeatedly sink into silence when I came back to my senses.
After all, nightmares were something anyone would see, insomnia was temporary, I was very normal with just occasional sleep troubles―is what I wanted to think. I kept stacking up excuses and excuses on top of each other. In hindsight, that state of affairs was in itself certainly abnormal.
“…”
I stole a sidelong glance at Natsumura-sensei’s downward-slanted eyelashes. They were small, and blinked every few seconds. Quivered. On the opposite side of the rising steam. The eyelashes slowly opened and shut like the wings of a butterfly. Inside it, the eyes turned toward me with a slumped look, and the face followed my gaze. In a rather pompous manner, the downturned eyelid lifted up, and the expressionless eyes captured me.
It was a transparent gaze. For an instant, the gaze that was expressionless and devoid of color, was lit with the warmth of the shining spring sun, and leisurely narrowed.
There were no words. Sensei placed the mug silently. He turned his body in my direction, and tilted his head so as to inquire of me.
Unconsciously, I let out a sigh with an ‘ah’. It was like a ritual to convince myself that it was okay to talk to this person for a couple of hours.
I dropped my gaze to the mug at once.
I hadn’t talked to Sensei about the Dream of Red and the accurate description of what I had seen in it for the first time. I wasn’t determined to because I was scared of being labelled as a deviant.
‘But…’
Maybe Sensei… will be understanding.
I bit my lip once. Sensei was waiting for me to speak.
“I can’t remember the ending of the Dream of Red”
“Can’t remember?”
My lips trembled a bit in response to Natsumura-sensei who had parroted back what I had said.
“Even though there had to be someone in there…”
As I tried to recall that person, I got an intense headache. As if, they were corrupting my train of memories…
And then, I had reasonable conviction.
That the ringleader of this whole mess was “someone” who was waiting at the very edge of the Dream of Red―
(To be continued.)
Chapter 2: Dreams of Red
Throughout that fateful day four months ago, it was unlucky.
I was late for work due to an accident that stopped the trains in the morning and I felt irritable because of a series of minor mistakes I don’t usually make. And then I was thrust into cleaning up a massive blunder made by a junior colleague.
I was so annoyed by her whimpering, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry…’ , that I gave her a little hard time, and my male boss, who doted on her, gave me a stinging snide remark. I didn’t miss how she was sticking out her tongue in the background, but that didn’t go over well with my boss, who had long since decided that I was the villain.
‘Moreover, she’s leaving early.’
Maybe she’s good at conducting herself. In a way, that’s a talent of its own.
A talent that I don’t possess.
I can’t even say the number of times I felt numb looking at the deserted office without the person who made the mistake.
Even the last train of the day had left. I paid out of my own pocket for the taxi back home. I missed the evening dinner. Far from taking a shower, I didn’t have the energy to wipe off my make-up. Even changing my clothes was annoying. Tomorrow, reporting for work had to be done early in the morning. I collapsed onto the bed and at that moment, I fell with a thump.
That day was really, really an unlucky day.
It was the kind of exhausting day, both physically and mentally, that would normally cause me to sleep so deeply that I wouldn’t even dream.
In the first dream, I was still living.
The first dream… it might not have sounded right, but there was no other way to describe it.
It was a very ominous dream. The sky, even the ground, just about everything was red in the dream.
The scenery flickered, perhaps because it was burning, and perhaps the blood reeked because it got wet―it was almost like Hell.
The me who was in the dream came to grips with that eerie-ness as a matter of course. I didn’t think it was frightening. All my feelings eroded away, and just like as if they had been annihilated, no deep emotions welled up.
Dead bodies were scattered about at my feet. Perhaps, the red was the blood of the dead bodies.
A bit farther away, many dead bodies were being roasted. Maybe, the red was the color of that flame.
The me inside the dream accepted everything dispassionately.
Walking for a bit, I stumbled upon a river. A deep reddish stream. A river of blood. Rising to the surface face-down were naked bodies. It was very clear that they were dead. The white back of the body that was clad in slushy dark reddish blood clearly belonged to a woman.
Walking a bit more unraveled a thicket. The leaves had withered completely and fallen, and a large number of dead bodies had been dangling from it in its place. It was almost as if it was a tree that bore dead bodies. Among them, there were also bodies that had decayed right down from the neck, but I didn’t find them even a little bit scary, as expected.
I kept walking.
Silently in the dream.
Crossing the stream, Passing through the thicket, I came across the moor. In the way flowers bloomed, white arms stuck out of the ground and were shaking. The fingers were squirming as if it wanted to grasp something. The fingertip was dripping red with blood. All the hands seemed to be facing towards me. They seemed to be entreating for help, but I ignored them all and proceeded forward.
Passing through the flowerbed of arms, entering what seemed like a town of hard stone paving that only exists in fairy-tales, people had died here and there.
They seemed like twisted, broken, severed, pierced, torn to shreds, plucked, scattered pieces of dead lumps of meat. A rotten smell enshrouded over. Even that terrible spectacle didn’t deter my journey. I was the only one alive.
――I dare say.
Although there were corpses with no physical defects, the thought that they were perhaps still alive never crossed me. Even if that was ascertained, the gaping hole in the stomach wouldn’t be plugged up, and the entrails that were spilling over from it wouldn’t go back to how it originally was.
Death is, after all… death.
It wasn’t to be discredited even inside a dream.
I kept walking inside Death. I had no idea where I was heading. Just had a feeling that to stop walking was never an option. I didn’t want to turn back.
In case I stop.
In case I turn back.
The me inside in the dream didn’t want to think what would happen of me then.
Stepping over the corpses that had frozen and stiffened, pushing through the viscera that had rotten and throwing up the sticky pool of blood…
Valiant―perhaps not a right way to describe it―I kept walking beyond the point that I had finally found my way to…
“Mikage-san, you alright?”
My consciousness abruptly surfaced to the warm aroma of coffee and the latent voice that worried about me. It was not as if I had fallen asleep, I had merely immersed myself in deep thought. With a thump, a cherry-blossomed colored mug was placed on the low table.
“I remembered.”
“Yes. About what?”
“The first dream.”
Natsumura-sensei, as opposed to the previous time, sat next to me while saying, ‘the first dream’. Even if him sitting next to me suggested something else, it was merely a sofa that didn’t allow the 160-cm tall me to stick out my legs when I laid horizontally. There was enough space for another person to sit comfortably between the two of us. Having someone stare at me intently from directly opposite of me wasn’t my cup of tea, so I had requested him to sit next to me.
I wasn’t like this before. After all, nobody’s gaze seemed scary to me…
But I had changed.
“The first dream… you mean, the thing you call the red dream?”
“Yes.”
I nodded and held the mug between my two hands. Even though the make of the cup was very bulky and a very hot steam rose from it, what transmitted to my hand was a very lukewarm warmth.
“…”
Sensei didn’t try to force anything out of me when I had sunk into silence at that point.
One, two, three―I kept counting my breaths as I saw my reflection in the coffee. Before I reached ten, I took a fleeting glance at the person next to me. Natsumura-sensei was slowly tilting a palish-green mug, a different color from mine.
It has been a month since I have been in the care of Sensei. More than half of that time was spent in absolute silence.
In the beginning, that period of silence was nothing but agony. My anxiety would take over if I didn’t end up speaking anything, and so at any rate I had to end that quiet atmosphere, for which I would keep rattling on about things that weren’t asked of me, and would repeatedly sink into silence when I came back to my senses.
After all, nightmares were something anyone would see, insomnia was temporary, I was very normal with just occasional sleep troubles―is what I wanted to think. I kept stacking up excuses and excuses on top of each other. In hindsight, that state of affairs was in itself certainly abnormal.
“…”
I stole a sidelong glance at Natsumura-sensei’s downward-slanted eyelashes. They were small, and blinked every few seconds. Quivered. On the opposite side of the rising steam. The eyelashes slowly opened and shut like the wings of a butterfly. Inside it, the eyes turned toward me with a slumped look, and the face followed my gaze. In a rather pompous manner, the downturned eyelid lifted up, and the expressionless eyes captured me.
It was a transparent gaze. For an instant, the gaze that was expressionless and devoid of color, was lit with the warmth of the shining spring sun, and leisurely narrowed.
There were no words. Sensei placed the mug silently. He turned his body in my direction, and tilted his head so as to inquire of me.
Unconsciously, I let out a sigh with an ‘ah’. It was like a ritual to convince myself that it was okay to talk to this person for a couple of hours.
I dropped my gaze to the mug at once.
I hadn’t talked to Sensei about the Dream of Red and the accurate description of what I had seen in it for the first time. I wasn’t determined to because I was scared of being labelled as a deviant.
‘But…’
Maybe Sensei… will be understanding.
I bit my lip once. Sensei was waiting for me to speak.
“I can’t remember the ending of the Dream of Red”
“Can’t remember?”
My lips trembled a bit in response to Natsumura-sensei who had parroted back what I had said.
“Even though there had to be someone in there…”
As I tried to recall that person, I got an intense headache. As if, they were corrupting my train of memories…
And then, I had reasonable conviction.
That the ringleader of this whole mess was “someone” who was waiting at the very edge of the Dream of Red―
(To be continued.)
