15. His Stalking Feet

It doesn’t take long to disappear in a city like Tokyo. Exiting the building, I turned left, heading up Roppongi-dori away from the crossroads. I continued along Higashi-dori until I came to a series of multi-story towers that caught the glint of the setting sun in their steel and glass...

14. Three-days-dead (3)

“Oh,” stammered my lame-brained escort, “Someone broken in,” stating what he thought was the obvious. If he’d been more observant, he’d have noticed that though the place had been ransacked, there were no signs of forced entry. The vandals, whoever they were, had let themselves in . . ....

14. Three-days-dead (2)

“Oh my, what has happened here?” gasped my companion. He made his way through the apartment, drawn, no doubt, by a fascination with despoiled opulence. The hall, which stretched from the left side of the entrance toward a distant back wall, was flanked by a series of doors that opened...

14. Three-days-dead

The phone was ringing and ringing and the apartment looked like a typhoon had blown through it. The intern delivered me to my father’s residence while insisting that I should actually have stayed at St. Luke’s Hospital. “You’ve been through a major physical trauma,” he insisted. “You...

13. Live Dead Girl (6)

“My fan club,” he confided. “They just won’t leave me alone. Just as I won’t leave you alone,” he tittered. Then he tried, with a furious twitching, to wink. By this time the nurse and two orderlies had arrived. They lifted the skinny little man as if he weighed no more than a sack of...

13. Live Dead Girl (5)

It’s funny how living moments can become friezes, stiff, like the past caught in the flash of a camera, like photographs. What a fright, I thought. Then I saw myself as he saw me: the girl—a once-dead one—standing naked upon a chair in front of her mirror. So, I looked straight at him...