Spiral

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Mitsuo Ando awoke from a dream in which he was sinking into the sea. The trilling of the telephone insinuated itself into the sound of the surf, and the next minute he was jerked into wakefulness, as though the waves had taken him.

He stretched his arm out over the side of the bed and picked up the receiver.

“Hello.”

He waited, but no sound came through the line.

“Hello,” he said again, sternly this time, urging the caller to reply. There came a woman’s voice, so morose it made him shudder.

“Did you get it?”

The voice filled Ando with fatigue. He felt as if he were being dragged into a dark ditch. The dream from which he’d just awakened flashed before his eyes. A huge wave had suddenly sucked him up off a beach: as he sank to the bottom of the sea he lost all sense of up or down, right or left, until he was helpless against the current… As always, he’d felt a tiny hand grasping at his shin. Every time he had the dream, he felt on his feet the touch of that little hand, those anemone-like fingers slipping away to vanish into the depths of the ocean. There was absolutely nothing he could do to prevent it, and it tortured him. He stretched out his arms, sure that he should be able to reach the body, but he just couldn’t get a grip on it. It eluded his grasp every time, leaving behind only a few soft, fine strands of hair.

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