“Shall we start?” Tanaka said. We'd finished our drinks.

Mizuo had become very quiet. No doubt he was thinking of the things that had happened when he'd come here himself, long ago.

“What do you mean? How do we start?” I asked.

“It's simple. You don't have to take any drugs, and there's no counting involved. All you've got to do is close your eyes and keep quiet and you'll go to this room. That's the room where the meetings take place. There's just one thing I ought to warn you about, and that's that even if she invites you to leave, you can't step outside that door. You remember what happened to Earless Hōichi in the old ghost story when he went along with the ghost. That's how he became earless. And there have been plenty of people like that—people who leave the room and then realize that they can't get back. A few of them never returned. So you've got to be careful, see?”

I was now so scared I couldn't even speak.

Mizuo saw this and laughed. “Don't worry, you'll be fine,” he said. “You're strong.”

I nodded and closed my eyes. I sensed that Tanaka had come out from behind the counter again. Almost immediately I felt a smooth coolness spread quietly through my body.

Suddenly I found myself in the room.

It was a strange, cramped room, with one small frosted glass window. I was sitting on a worn red sofa. There was a second small sofa shaped just like mine directly across from me—there wasn't even a table in the middle. It was a lot like the House of Surprises that they used to have way back when, in amusement parks, that thing where the walls rotate, and even though you're not moving you have the illusion that the whole house is spinning. The lights were dim, and I felt sort of melancholy.

And then there was the wooden door.

I figured it would probably be okay if I just touched it, so I stretched my hand out toward the doorknob. It was narrow and soothingly cool, a dull gold in color. The moment I closed my hand around it, I felt a sweep of vibrations come throbbing up into my arm. If I had to describe the feeling, I'd say it was as if the door were holding something back, as if this were the only quiet place in an incredible whirl of energy that was spiraling around outside, someplace like the eye of a hurricane, or like walled-off sacred ground. Every cell in my body started to quake and gibber. I realized that I had an instinctive fear of the world beyond that door.

Yet at the same time I could understand that certain people might be tempted to open this door. I understood that Mizuo must have felt that urge. And that several people had stepped outside, and that it was true—those people had probably never come back.

Yeah, it makes sense.