The Graveyard Apartment (23 page)

Mr. Inoue looked at his wife with eyes made hollow by alarm. “If someone were shouting for help in the basement, don't you think we'd be able to hear it up here, through the elevator shaft?” he asked.

Eiko responded impatiently, “Look, let's just phone somebody. I don't care if it's the police or the fire department; anybody will do. Oh, I hate this so much. I've had it up to here with living in this atrocious place!” She put both hands to her flaming cheeks. “And the TV going haywire again has some connection with this bizarre building, too—I'm sure of that. I swear, this place is cursed. No, seriously, it seems to be under some kind of spell, or possessed by evil spirits!”

“Stop it,” Mr. Inoue said quietly. “That kind of talk isn't appropriate at a time like this, especially in front of the boy.”

From inside the Inoues' apartment came the sound of pattering feet, and Kaori scampered out into the hallway again, calling, “Mama, Mama!”

“What is it?” Eiko asked, calmer now.

“The TV is fixed! The picture isn't jumping around anymore.”

As Kaori was making that announcement, Tsutomu suddenly said, “Hey!” in a loud, excited voice. Far below, in the bowels of the building, they heard a faint
ga-tonk
sound. “It's moving!” Tsutomu squealed. “The elevator is moving!”

The lights on the indicator panel were on the move, as well: from B1, to 1, to 2 …

“Oh, thank goodness,” Misao breathed, reaching out to clasp Eiko's hands. A relieved smile played around Mr. Inoue's lips. They all stood there in silence, listening to the creak of the elevator as it drew closer.

“It was probably just a loose connection or a crossed wire or something. That's the most likely explanation,” Mr. Inoue said, but it was obvious from the expression on his face that he didn't believe a word he was saying. No one even bothered to make a pretense of nodding in agreement.

The numeral 4 lit up, and the elevator doors slowly swished open.

Eiko ordered Tsutomu and Kaori to go back into the apartment and lock the door from the inside. Tsutomu balked, shouting, “No way. I'm going with you!” At that, Eiko lost patience and bodily shoved him into the apartment from behind. Tsutomu's angry parting words—“I hate you, Mama! You're an idiot!”—reverberated through the corridor.

Misao and Eiko got into the elevator, with Mr. Inoue bringing up the rear. Someone touched the “B1” button. The doors closed and the mechanism made its unvarying
ga-tonk
sound as the car began to descend: 3 … 2 … 1 … B1. Vibrating slightly, the elevator came to a halt in the basement and the doors slid open with a smooth, fluid motion.

The fluorescent lights were bright overhead, and the first thing the newcomers saw was the two caretakers slumped on the ground with their eyes bugging out and horrified expressions on their slack-jawed faces. There was a large puddle of liquid beneath Mitsue Tabata's skirt, which seemed to suggest that she had lost control of her bladder.

Misao came flying out of the elevator and immediately spotted Teppei lying in an unconscious heap a short distance from the Tabatas. She rushed to his side, grabbed his shoulders, and began to shake him as hard as she could.

“I'll go up and phone for an ambulance,” Mr. Inoue shouted.

“No, wait,” Misao called back. “Could you please just stay there for a minute?” If he went upstairs to call an ambulance, leaving them stranded in this hellhole …
I'd rather die,
she thought.

Teppei opened his eyes a crack. He took a deep breath, the way people do when they've been abruptly awakened from a deep sleep, and muttered some incoherent syllables under his breath. He gazed blankly at Misao for a moment. Finally he let out a strangled cry, and sat up.

“What's the matter with you?” Misao said anxiously. “Look, it's me!”

Teppei stared at her with big, round, vacant eyes, then blinked a few times. After a long moment he finally seemed to recognize his wife. Profound relief washed over his face, and he pulled Misao into a tight embrace. “I'm cold,” he whispered. “It's so incredibly cold down here.”

“It's okay. You're safe now,” Misao said. She was trembling all over.

The Inoues were busy helping the wobbly Tabatas to their feet and supporting them as they made their slow, silent way toward the elevator. Nobody said a word, but even though no questions were raised and no answers given, it was already clear that none of the people who were in the basement at that moment had the slightest doubt that something very ominous—and undeniably supernatural—had just occurred.

“We'd better get a move on,” Mr. Inoue said with quiet authority. Eiko, who was helping Mitsue along with one arm looped around the older woman's waist, looked back at the Kanos and shouted, “Come on, hurry up!” in a tone that bordered on the hysterical.

Teppei nodded and got to his feet, staggering a bit. Misao took his arm and then, summoning every last drop of courage, she looked back at the row of storage compartments. The lockers were lined up in neat rows, the same as always. However, there was something different about the wall at the rear of the room, beyond the last of the lockers—the same place where Tamao had been injured and where Eiko had heard voices. On that far wall Misao could see something that definitely hadn't been there before: a large black splotch or stain. She exhaled, and her breath hovered in front of her like a ghostly cloud. The air around her feet and legs was so bone-chillingly cold that she could barely remain standing.

Misao bundled Teppei into the elevator and pushed the button for the eighth floor. The door closed, and the occupants heard the familiar sound effects as the mechanism shifted into gear. Just as Misao's emotions seemed to be returning to normal, she was seized by a sudden urge to vomit. She clapped one hand over her mouth and managed, just barely, to gulp back the wave of bitter bile that rose from the depths of her esophagus and flooded into her throat.

 

13

June 6, 1987

Around noon, Misao was dithering in front of the elevator, trying to decide whether to take it down to the fourth floor. Finally, she gritted her teeth and pressed the call button. Lately she'd had to make a major effort to psych herself up to get into the elevator every time she needed to go somewhere.

In the weeks since that night in the middle of May, Sueo Tabata, in his capacity as the building's caretaker, had brought in an elevator maintenance crew not only once or twice but three times. On each visit the experts had made a complete examination of the elevator's working parts, but they hadn't been able to find anything that could have caused the stoppages.

Next, Sueo had summoned a local locksmith to remove the automatic locking mechanisms on the emergency staircase doors on every floor of the building. Once this was done, the doors could be easily opened from either the inside or the outside. While this might have appeared to be an invitation to burglars, the building's few remaining residents—the Inoues, the Kanos, and the Tabatas themselves—all agreed that it was more important to have immediate access to the emergency stairs without needing to carry a key.

Really
, they were all thinking,
suppose a prowler did somehow manage to sneak in through the lobby, then used the emergency staircase to reach the higher floors? Honestly, at this point, who cares?
They had far bigger problems to deal with, and they were past worrying about hypothetical real-world threats.

After their terrifying experience in the basement back in May, Teppei and the Tabatas were especially reluctant to use the elevator. “Suppose we get in and press the button for the lobby, and instead it goes all the way to the basement?” Teppei would say. “Or what if it suddenly stopped moving, and we were stuck? What would we do then?” However, since the Kanos lived eight flights up, it would have been exceedingly impractical to stop using the elevator entirely.

The elevator arrived on the eighth floor. Warily, Misao got in and gave the button marked “4” a forceful push. The doors closed, and she heard the usual
ga-tonk
. Squeezing her eyes shut, she said a silent prayer. A few seconds later the elevator came to a halt, and the doors slid open with a rush of air. When Misao opened her eyes she saw the hallway of the fourth floor, looking safe and familiar.

With a feeling of relief, she stepped out of the elevator. The front door of the Inoues' apartment was standing open, and there was a pile of cardboard packing boxes in the entryway. Misao gave the doorbell a cursory ring, out of politeness, then poked her head through the open door. The first thing she saw was Eiko, standing in the living room holding a telephone.

“That's right,” Eiko was saying into the receiver, “Central Plaza Mansion, apartment 402. I called in an order for four portions of cold soba more than an hour ago. What? Really? Well, I hope he gets here soon. We're moving today, and we're on a tight schedule.”

As she was hanging up the phone, Eiko spotted Misao at the door and made a beckoning gesture. “Come in, come in!” she called, smiling broadly.

Eiko's husband was in the process of detaching a hanging light fixture from the living room ceiling. “Yes, please come in!” he echoed.

“I just wanted to drop by and see how you were getting along,” Misao said as she entered the chaotic room.

“Well, I think we're nearly there,” Eiko said. “I ended up just kind of randomly tossing stuff into boxes, but I did at least take the time to pack the breakables carefully. We aren't going far, so it should be okay.”

“When is the truck coming?”

“I think it should be here before too long. I'm just hoping we'll have time to finish eating the noodles we ordered.” Eiko glanced at her wristwatch, then stared abstractedly into the distance for a long moment. The sky outside the windows was covered with clouds, and now that the overhead light fixture had been taken down, the living room seemed dark and gloomy.

The Inoues had put their apartment on the market the week after the incident in the basement, back in mid-May. Eiko had apparently talked about nothing else for days on end, but it wasn't as if her husband required much (if any) persuasion. Indeed, it turned out that even before that night he had begun thinking it might be better to move away sooner rather than later.

Since it went without saying that they wouldn't be able to find a buyer on such short notice, Eiko had spoken with her parents, who lived in Itabashi, and they had agreed to rent the Inoues a prefabricated two-bedroom house that had been installed in one corner of their property some years before. The structure had originally been built to serve as a studio where Eiko's mother could teach the neighborhood brides and housewives the complicated art of dressing in kimono, but the older woman's health had deteriorated to the point where the prefab house was hardly used anymore. Even though this move meant making the transition from a deluxe, spacious apartment to a much smaller cottage, none of the Inoues—not Eiko, not her husband, not the children—had the slightest objection to that change in lifestyle.

“It's really just a temporary measure, a place to camp out for a while,” Eiko explained when she came to tell Misao the news. “We'll stay there long enough to catch our breath and get our bearings, and then we'll start looking for something more suitable, long-term. It would be ideal if we could sell this place first, but I'm not holding my breath about that.”

Of course, everyone knew what had galvanized Eiko into taking action so quickly. After the events in the basement, she seemed to have been transformed into a different person. Overnight, her relatively mild objections to the apartment building had turned into full-blown antipathy. She even started spending the better part of the daytime hours away from home—far more time than could reasonably be explained by the need to do moving-related errands.

After everything that's happened here, Eiko can't even relax and feel secure in her own apartment,
Misao thought. Of course, she and Teppei were feeling the same way, but …

Initially, Teppei hadn't talked to Misao at all about what he experienced in the basement on the night of May 17. Misao could think of several possible reasons for his silence. It could have been thoughtful altruism, born of concern that knowing the harrowing details would make her feel afraid. Or it might have been embarrassment about having the stubbornly rational attitude he'd clung to until now regarding the basement—and the realm of paranormal phenomena in general—proved wrong. Also, in a more general sense, when someone is subjected to a traumatic experience, that person's unwillingness to discuss the event in question is likely to be in direct proportion to their degree of shock.

Teppei definitely saw something in the basement the other night,
Misao thought
. And it seems clear that whatever he saw, it was not of this world.

The first time Teppei spoke about his ordeal was five days afterward. “It was so cold,” he said abruptly. “I literally felt like I was going to freeze to death. And the wind—the wind seemed to be alive, somehow.” Then he went on to talk about some formless, numberless
something
that had seemed to be wriggling and squirming in the darkness. He could only describe the entity (or entities) by the vague word “something,” but there was no doubt in his mind that he had heard a vast rustling, as of a great many
somethings
moving in the unseeable blackness. Those ominous sounds were accompanied by an extreme escalation of the already unnatural chilliness in the basement, and a moment later Teppei began to feel lightheaded.

“And then … and then I guess I just passed out,” he stammered.

That was when Misao finally shared everything she had learned on her research trip to the ward library, and gave voice to the suspicions she had been harboring privately. Teppei didn't immediately embrace her theory about the subterranean road, but he didn't dismiss it out of hand, either.