Suddenly Toyama sensed a presence behind him. He turned around.
The door was ajar, and a woman was standing just outside it. In the dim light of the booth he couldn't make out her face. Toyama got up and opened the door wider.
"Oh, Sada. It's you."
Sadako Yamamura stood in the doorway blankly.
Toyama took her hand and brought her into the booth, shutting the door again behind her. The door was heavy, soundproof.
He waited for her to say something, but she just stared past him, tight-lipped, at the almost-complete stage below. The living room set was being assembled, and the director was giving detailed instructions regarding the placement of its various components.
"I'm afraid."
The words resonated with all the naive simplicity of an aspiring actress facing her first appearance onstage.
Sadako had graduated from high school on the island of Izu Oshima and immediately come up to Tokyo; she'd made a remarkably rapid transition from intern to actress. She had every right to be nervous and uneasy.
Needless to say, out of the eight interns, she was the only one going onstage tonight.
Toyama tried to encourage her. "Don't worry. I'll be cheering for you up here."
Sadako shook her head. "That's not what I mean."
Her gaze was hollow as she shifted it from the stage to the spinning tape reel. It was blank—he'd just checked it, but he'd neglected to push stop, so on it spun.
Toyama stopped it and rewound it.
"Everybody's scared when they debut," he said over the sound of the tape rewinding. But Sadako's reply was strangely off, like an out-of-focus picture.
"Hey, is there a woman's voice on that tape?"
Toyama laughed. As far as he could recall, he'd never recorded a solo human voice: playing something like that while an actor was delivering his lines would kill the performance. Under normal circumstances they'd never overlay dialogue with dialogue like that.
"What kind of question is that, out of the blue?"
"It's something Okubo said a few minutes ago, you know, when you were checking your sound levels. He made a funny face, like he was afraid of something. He said there was a woman's voice on the tape. Not only that, he said he'd heard it before. So I..."
Okubo was another one of the interns, multital-ented but short, and so sensitive about it that it had given him a complex of sorts. He was another one who had a crush on Sadako.
"I know what you're talking about. That's crowd noise. You know, what we play in the background during your scene."
They'd taken the crowd noise for that scene from a movie. The voices were just supposed to be submerged in the background; no one voice was supposed to be heard above the others. But it might be possible for someone to have the auditory illusion that he or she was hearing one of them in particular, in an aural close-up, as it were.
"No, that's not it." Her denial was forceful enough to bother Toyama.
"Well, then, do you know what scene it was?"
If he could figure out where it was on the tape, he could check it now on the headphones. If there was a strange woman's voice on there, he had to deal with it now, or it would be trouble later.
But the chances of that were next to nil. He couldn't count the number of times he'd listened to the tape during rehearsals. Not to mention the repeated scrutiny he'd given it on his headphones when he'd edited it together. There was no way a stray sound could have gotten on there at this point.
"Okubo's been saying strange things. You know that little Shinto altar backstage?"
"Most playhouses have 'em."
Toyama was beginning to guess what Okubo must have been telling Sadako. Just as theaters all had Shinto altars, they all had scary stories whispered about them.
Handling the set pieces and props allowed for lots of accidents and injuries, and wherever actors gathered there were bound to be vortices of ill feeling—as a result there probably wasn't a theater around without one or two spook tales. Okubo had probably been scaring Sadako with some nonsense like that. In which case, her insistence on there being a woman's voice on the tape was probably groundless.
"No, there's another one."
"Another what?"
"Altar."
Toyama had seen the altar himself any number of times, set into the concrete wall stage left, at the back.
But that was the only one he knew of.
"Where?"
Still standing in front of the door, Sadako raised her left hand and pointed. The spot she indicated was behind the table. Toyama couldn't see it from where he was. But all of a sudden a chill ran down his spine. This room was his castle: he liked to think he knew what was where.
There couldn't be an altar here.
He started to get up.
She giggled. "Startled?"
"Don't scare me like that!" He sat back down. The chair felt cold somehow.
"Come on, it's over here." Sadako took Toyama's hand and pulled him out of his chair, seating herself in front of a cabinet built into the wall. A pair of doors were set into the wall about ten centimeters from the floor; they opened outward. Sadako looked from Toyama to the doors, as if suggesting he open them.
A storage space. He hadn't expected one. The doors were about fifty centimeters square. There were no handles, so they blended in with the rest of the wall, and he hadn't noticed them.
He placed a finger in the center of the doors, pressed, and released. The doors opened without a sound. He'd expected to find old tape reels and cords piled randomly inside, but what he found was something rather different. Two metal shelves, on the upper of which sat two rows of tapes in carefully labeled boxes. No doubt left-overs from previous productions. The bottom shelf contained a little wooden box that looked, just as Sadako had said, like an altar.
All he'd done was open those two little doors, but the atmosphere in the sound booth was utterly changed.
A foreign space had suddenly opened up right next to the table he was so accustomed to working at. He wasn't sure whether there was actually a smell or not, but Toyama at least had the illusion that his nose detected the scent of rotting meat.
Toyama sat down next to Sadako, in front of the altar, hugging his knees. There was an offering in front of the altar, right in front of his nose now. It was a desic-cated and wrinkled thing no bigger than the tip of his little finger, and at first he thought it was a shriveled piece of burdock.
Without a hint of hesitation, Sadako picked up the piece of whatever-it-was and placed it in Toyama's hand, as if giving him a piece of candy.
Toyama allowed himself to be led along. He accepted the offering on the palm of his hand and studied He only realized what it was when Sadako brought her nose close to his palm and sniffed it. Suddenly a thought wedged its way into his brain. Not just a thought—a woman's voice, whispering.
The baby's coming.
In a flash, Toyama understood.
It's an umbilical cord. A baby's umbilical cord.
There was no mistaking it now: it was indeed an umbilical cord, severed long ago.
The instant he realized it, Toyama jumped back from the altar, flinging the thing in his hand at Sadako.
She caught it and said, calmly, as if to herself, "Looks like Okubo was right."
Toyama slowly brought his breathing under control, trying not to appear too foolish in front of a younger woman. Feigning calm, he asked, "What do you mean?"
"About the woman's voice on the tape. He said he'd heard it before, moaning, like she was in pain. He said if he had to describe it, he'd say it sounded like she was suffering the pains of childbirth. That's what he said.