Ghostwritten Read Online Free PDF Page A

sir.”
    “Which are?”
    “Patrolling this tunnel, sir.”
    He whistled between his teeth. “As usual, a muddle at Sanctuary. There’s a new threat down here. The evil can only consume you when it knows about you. If you maintain your anonymity, all will be well. Now, officer. Give me your name.”
    “Quasar, sir.”
    “And your name from your old life? Your
real
name?”
    “Tanaka. Keisuke Tanaka.”
    “What is your alpha quotient, Keisuke Tanaka?”
    “16.9.”
    “Place of birth?”
    Suddenly, I realize that I have walked into a trap! The evil is my superior officer, ploughing me with questions so it can consume me. My last defense is not to let it know that I have caught on. I am still floundering when a new character walks down the tunnel toward us. She is carrying a viola case and some flowers, and I’ve seen her before somewhere. Someone from my uncleansed days. The evil that is in the guise of my superior officer turns to her and starts the same ruse. “Haven’t you heard about the evil? Who authorized your presence here? Give me your name, address, occupation—immediately!”
    I want to save her. Lacking a plan, I grab her arm and we run, faster than air currents.
    “Why are we running?”
    A foreign woman on a hill, watching a wooden pole sinking into the ground.
    “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 realize 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. Field-workers’ 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 sugarcane 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 quotation marks.
    •  •  •
    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