The Graveyard Apartment (18 page)

“No, no, nothing like that,” Misao protested, shaking her head.

The man shot her a warning look that reminded her of a parent trying to caution a headstrong child against doing something rash, then crossed his arms over his chest. “The thing is, it isn't exactly a pleasant topic, so people tend to avoid looking into it too deeply,” he said. “I guess most folks would rather let sleeping dogs lie.”

“No, as I said, I have no intention of writing about this,” Misao protested. “I just got interested because I live nearby, and a neighbor was talking about the development. So do you happen to know what became of the hole, in the end?”

“You really are an inquisitive one,” the man said with a laugh that showed his unnaturally white front teeth. Misao recognized them immediately as dentures. “Hey, after all, we aren't mole people, right? The hole would have been useless, so I imagine they must have filled it in after the project went belly up.”

“Of course, that must be it,” Misao said. She laughed, too. “Thank you for your help. I'm sorry to have taken up so much of your time,” she added, with a minimal bow.

The receptionist responded by bobbing his own head ever so slightly, and Misao left the building.

As she was walking back to the station, she suddenly remembered the phrase Eiko had used—“phantom road to nowhere”—and a small shiver ran down her spine.

 

10

May 6, 1987

It was the Wednesday after the annual Golden Week holiday. Sitting at her pinewood work desk, Misao looked out the window and yawned. The air in the living room was hot and sultry. Outside, the sky looked as though rain might begin to fall at any minute. It wasn't yet three in the afternoon, but the day had turned so dark and gloomy that Misao found herself craving light.

Over the long weekend the Kano family had gone to a department store to buy a new sports jacket for Teppei, then stopped off in the trendy, upscale Aoyama district to grab a bite at an Italian bistro on the way home. Aside from that outing they hadn't really done anything special, and midway through the holiday Teppei had been called away for two days to work on a TV commercial being filmed on location for one of the agency's new accounts.

During his absence, Misao's mother came up to Tokyo from the family home in Izu City for an overnight stay, which (in Misao's opinion) had ruined what would otherwise have been a pleasant couple of days. Her mother's last visit had been more than a year earlier, so she had never been to the new apartment. When she saw the graveyard in front of the building her eyebrows shot up, but she refrained from commenting.

That had always been her mother's style, Misao thought. Sometimes—though by no means always—her mother would manage to stop herself just as she was on the verge of saying something vicious, biting back the nasty words before they could slither from her mouth like a passel of hissing snakes.

Several years earlier Misao had finally confessed to her parents that Teppei's first wife committed suicide, and her mother's savage tongue-lashing still reverberated deep in Misao's psyche. As her mother spewed forth that torrent of venom, all blame and shame and animosity, Misao really did feel as if she were being flogged by a live whip of sharp-fanged, poisonous snakes.

“I'm ashamed to have brought a daughter like you into the world,” her mother had ranted. “I've never said this out loud before, but for as long as I can remember you've been a sordid, sleazy kind of girl. You never were any good. I'll bet you seduced that man while he was still married. Oh, yes, I know all about your tricks. You really are a disgusting child. You'll be going to hell, that's for sure. Maybe that dead woman—what was her name, Reiko?—will put a fatal curse on you from beyond the grave. That's exactly what you deserve.”

Misao's father had never been one to hold back when it came to nagging or criticizing his daughter, but on that painful occasion he didn't say a thing. Seven years had passed since then, and during that time her father had never once gotten in touch with Misao, much less stopped by to see her.

Misao's mother started bad-mouthing the absent Teppei (albeit in a roundabout way) soon after she arrived. Then she adopted a purring, wheedling tone and said, “You know, if it was just you and Tamao, you would be more than welcome to come home for a visit, any time at all.”

Misao refused to get angry, because she knew that was the reaction her mother was hoping to provoke. If Misao took the bait, it would only egg her mother on. When she thought about how messy and awful it would be to endure another barrage of hateful words, she decided that no matter how much unwarranted abuse her mother might heap on her, she would remain silent and ignore the invective.

Back in the present, Misao gave her head a good shake to clear away the cobwebs of memory, then returned her attention to the work on her desk. She didn't have time to worry about her mother's cruelty or her father's ongoing stubbornness (although it hurt her deeply that so many years later he was still withholding forgiveness). She had too many other things to deal with right now.

Her current assignment was an illustration for the self-promotional magazine of a cosmetics company. It was going to be a double-truck spread under the title “Urban Poetry,” and Misao had been asked to draw a picture, using a palette of pastel colors, that would evoke a sense of the city.

The poem itself had been contributed by one of the magazine's readers. Misao had been given an advance copy, and now she read it over once again.

Longing to smell the aroma of earth,

Yearning to hear the chirping of birds,

Here I dwell atop this tower of concrete.

And even though there's no soil to smell,

And no birdsong to hear,

At least I have the sun.

I have the evening.

And I have you.

The poem's author was a twenty-nine-year-old mother of one, and it wasn't clear whether the “you” in the last line was meant to be her child, or her husband, or someone else entirely. Was the poem well done, or not? Misao hesitated to judge it one way or the other, but the verse struck her as somewhat facile: designed, she imagined, to appeal to the sensibilities of women who were still very young. Nonetheless, Misao had an instinctive understanding of where the author was coming from, and what she was trying to convey.

And I have you …
The last line, in particular, resonated with Misao because it reminded her of the deep sense of camaraderie she and Teppei had felt when they finally started to move on from Reiko's death, more closely bound together than ever.

Misao hadn't told Teppei yet about the fruits of her research at the ward library. Maybe one of these days, in the not too distant future, they would end up being able to laugh about all these absurdities. When she thought about it that way, her mood lightened a bit.

The thing was, she knew without a doubt that if she were to say she wanted to put this apartment on the market right away and start looking for another place, Teppei would be flabbergasted, and irate. Really, she told herself, the only major drawback was the basement. If she didn't like going down there, she could just choose not to use the storage locker. The danger with flights of fancy was that they could easily get out of hand and lead to delusional thinking. When you started believing in the existence of things that weren't really there, that was a sign that your imagination was working overtime.

The telephone rang. It was Eiko. “Yoo-hoo!” she said playfully.

It had only been a few hours since the two women had run into each other on their way to pick up the children from kindergarten. As they walked together, Eiko had shared an animated account of the long weekend she and her family had spent at the home of her older sister in Chiba; they had all gone to Tokyo Disneyland, where, in Eiko's words, they spent “oodles of money.” Misao was surprised to hear from her neighbor again so soon.

“Is everything okay?” Eiko asked now, with a nervous giggle. It was an odd question, and Misao sensed something jittery and unbalanced beneath the laughter, as though Eiko might be about to explode at any moment.

“Everything's fine,” Misao said warily. “What's going on with you?”

Eiko laughed again and said, “Oh, nothing much,” then let out a histrionic sigh. “Honestly, though, I'm starting to think I might be losing my mind.”

“What do you mean? What's going on?”

“I'm sorry for the interruption—I know you're probably trying to work.”

“It's no problem at all.” Misao would have said the same thing to whoever was on the other end of the line, but the truth was that she actively welcomed the interruption. “I've actually been floundering around trying to figure out what kind of imagery would work best for my illustration, and I was just about to take a break anyway,” she added.

“Then would it be okay if I stopped by for a minute? Kaori and Tsutomu are at a friend's house this afternoon. Is Tamao around?”

“I put her down for a nap a while ago. Since the injury, she's been sleeping a lot more than she used to.”

“Okay, great. See you in a bit!” Eiko said in a rush, ending the call in a way that struck Misao as uncharacteristically abrupt.

Misao barely had time to pour two cups of coffee before Eiko appeared at the door, ashen-faced and agitated. She was dressed in a light gray sweatshirt with matching jodhpur-style pants, and her makeup was more minimal than usual. Misao reckoned that was why her skin appeared so pale.

“Oh, just seeing your face makes me feel better,” Eiko exclaimed with a dry, artificial laugh. She sounded a bit like a sick child trying to feign high-spirited good health to reassure (or deceive) her mother.

“What happened?” Misao asked.

“It's really nothing,” Eiko replied. “I must be getting senile before my time or something, 'cause my ears seem to be playing tricks on me.”

“Your ears?”

Eiko picked up the cup of coffee that Misao had set in front of her and took a big gulp. Only after swallowing did she seem to realize how hot it was, and she made a humorous show of clawing at her throat.

“What do you mean, your ears are playing tricks on you?” Misao repeated.

“It's just that I heard something weird. I really do feel like I'm losing my grip on reality. Okay, so I went down to the basement, right? I think it was about half an hour ago. Tsutomu had dragged his tricycle up to the apartment, and I went to stick it back in our storage locker. I swear, that kid never puts anything away after he's finished using it. It's probably my fault for not disciplining him enough. So anyway, I hoisted the trike onto my shoulder and lugged it down to the basement. And then…”

Eiko's mien turned suddenly sober. She plunked her coffee cup down with so much force that it rattled in the saucer, then looked at Misao with her face contorted into an expression that could have been the prelude to laughter or tears. Misao had been about to take a sip from her own cup, but now she put it down and waited without saying a word.

“There were voices talking on the other side of the wall,” Eiko stated in a flat, uninflected monotone. After a moment's silence she burst into laughter, then said sheepishly, “I'm probably just being stupid about this. Don't you think I'm being foolish? I mean, there's no way I could have heard that for real, right?”

Misao rubbed her lip thoughtfully. “When you say ‘on the other side of the wall,' what do you mean, exactly?”

“Look, like I said, I'm sure my ears were just playing tricks on me. As for the place, I think it was right around the spot where Tamao collapsed that day, after she was injured. I just got this weird feeling that I could hear voices whispering and muttering behind the wall. I didn't get any sense of what they were saying, but it sounded like a lot of people, all talking at once. I started to shiver, and I thought my hair was going to stand on end. There was something really ghastly about those voices. I mean, like, beyond dreadful.”

“How so?”

“It's kind of hard to explain. It was as if they were talking among themselves, and their voices were making a kind of rustling sound. You know how when you go to the movies, people will be chatting in hushed whispers before the show starts? It was sort of like that. I'm sure it was just the wind, or else maybe there were some people in the elevator lobby on the first floor, and they were all talking to each other.”

The wind? People in the elevator lobby?
Misao thought incredulously. “And you think these sounds were coming from the other side of the back wall?” she asked in the calmest tone she could muster.

“Yes, but … Oh dear, I hate this. Please don't look so serious, Misao! I'm telling you, I just imagined it. I need you to assure me it was all in my head—that's why I came up here.” Eiko laughed and put both hands on her cheeks, and Misao noticed that some of the natural color seemed to have returned to her friend's face.

“Even if it was just my imagination, it really gave me the creeps at the time,” Eiko went on. “I was just cowering there, unable to move a muscle. I couldn't make a sound, either. I wonder why I reacted that way? I mean, it was just some voices. I really am silly sometimes.”

Ever since Tamao's accident, Eiko had declared the basement off limits for Tsutomu and Kaori. She gave no specific reason for forbidding her children to play down there, but the new policy seemed to be an implicit expression of the way everyone was feeling about the basement these days.

Unconsciously, Misao rubbed her arms, which were suddenly covered in gooseflesh. “And you're sure about what you heard?” she asked.

“Yes, absolutely. Even if my ears were deceiving me about the source or the tone, the one thing I'm sure about is that I did hear voices. I was just trying to fool myself into thinking it was the wind earlier.”