Free Ring by Kôji Suzuki Page A

to this page. And maybe whatever they'd placed on top of the page was the "it" that he'd "better not see". That must be it.
    Asakawa looked around anxiously, searching every corner of the shelf beneath the telephone stand. Nothing. Not even a pencil.
    He sat back down on the sofa and continued reading. The next entry was dated Saturday, September 1st. But it said only the usual things.
     
    It didn't say if the group of students who had stayed here had seen it. None of the remaining pages mentioned it, either.
    Asakawa closed the guest book and lit a cigarette. You 'd better not see it unless you 've got the guts. He imagined that it must be something frightening. He opened the notebook at random and pressed down on the page lightly. Whatever it was must have been heavy enough to overcome the pages' tendency to close. One or two photos of ghosts, for example, wouldn't have done the trick. Maybe a weekly, or a hardcover book… Anyway, something you look at. Maybe he'd ask the manager if he remembered finding anything strange left in the cabin after the guests had checked out on August 30th. He wasn't sure if the manager would even remember, but he figured that if it had been strange enough he would. Asakawa began to get to his feet when the VCR in front of him caught his eye. The TV was still on, showing a famous actress chasing her husband around with a vacuum. A home appliance commercial.
    … Yeah, a VHS tape would be heavy enough to keep the notebook open, and they might have had one handy, too.
    Still in a crouch, Asakawa ground out his cigarette. He recalled the video collection he had seen in the manager's office. Maybe they'd happened to watch a particularly interesting horror flick, and thought they'd recommend it to the next guests- hey, this one's cool, check it out. If that's all it was… But wait. If that was it, why hadn't Shuichi Iwata used the name? If he wanted to tell somebody that, say, Friday the 13th was a great movie, wouldn't it have been easier just to say Friday the 13th was a great movie? He didn't need to go to all the trouble of actually leaving it on top of the notebook. So maybe it was something that didn't have a name, something they could only indicate with the word it. … Well? Worth checking out?
    Well, he certainly didn't have anything to lose, not with no other clues presenting themselves. Besides, sitting around here thinking wasn't getting him anywhere. Asakawa left the cabin, climbed the stone steps and pushed open the office door.
    Just as before, there was no sign of the manager at the counter, only the sound of the television coming from the back room. The guy had retired from his job in the city and decided to live out his years surrounded by Mother Nature, so he'd taken a job as a manager at a resort, but the work turned out to be utterly boring, and now all he did every day was watch videos. That's how Asakawa interpreted the manager's situation. Before he had a chance to call the guy, though, he crawled to the doorway and stuck his head out. Asakawa spoke somewhat apologetically.
     
    "I thought I'd maybe borrow a video after all."
    The manager grinned happily. "Go right ahead, whichever you'd like. They're three hundred yen each."
    Asakawa scanned the titles for scary-looking movies. The Legend of Hell House, The Exorcist The Omen. He had seen them all in his student days. Nothing else? There had to be some he hadn't seen. He searched from one end of the shelves to the other, and saw nothing that looked likely. He started over, reading the titles of every one of the two hundred or so videos. And then, on the very. bottom shelf, way over in the corner, he noticed a video without a case, fallen over on its side. All the other tapes were encased in jackets with photos and imposing logos, but this one lacked even a label.
    "What's that there?" After he'd asked the question, Asakawa realized that he'd used a pronoun, that, as he pointed to the tape. If it didn't have a name, what