The Graveyard Apartment (36 page)

Looking down from there, he didn't see anything that could be described as scenery. There were a number of what must once have been small, city-sponsored housing units scattered about, but they had all been abandoned long ago. Now they looked like fossilized remains, hidden in the shadows and nearly engulfed in the weeds that grew in every direction. In all likelihood, these residential areas had been designed to house lower-income families. People had moved into them, and for a time the white flags of everyday laundry had fluttered above the flowerbeds in the back gardens. Children had probably frolicked happily while grown-ups enjoyed afternoon chats with their neighbors, and the family dogs would have added to the festivities with a chorus of joyful barks.

Picturing that pleasant, long-vanished scenario, Teppei shivered involuntarily despite the warmth of the sunshine. He didn't need to speculate about why all those blocks of housing had ended up empty and forsaken; he knew now that there was something sinister about this pocket of the city. While the details remained a terrifying mystery, he was certain that the ill-starred land around this apartment building was somehow governed or controlled—he almost wanted to say “ruled”—by
them
, whoever they might be.

The door to the rooftop opened, and Tatsuji appeared. In one hand he carried a pad of lined writing paper, which looked familiar to Teppei.
Oh, that's right,
he thought with a pang. It was the sketch pad he and Misao had used to draw schematics of the rooms in the place they were supposed to move into today—indeed, they should have been walking through the door of that house right about now. They'd spent an enjoyable evening perusing the floor plan while they decided where to place each piece of furniture. Remembering those carefree hours, Teppei was suddenly overcome with deep desolation.

“I put Naomi to bed on the sofa,” Tatsuji mumbled absently. “There was a can of cola in the fridge, so I gave her some of that to settle her stomach. Do you think we can use these for weights?” He handed Teppei the pad of paper, along with a handful of coffee spoons.

“Thank you,” Teppei said sincerely. Even as he uttered that word, he was thinking,
This is the first time in a long while that I've felt the urge to thank my brother for anything
. “Before too long an electrician who deals with air conditioners and someone from the phone company should be stopping by, since we put in requests regarding both those things when we moved out,” he explained. “We'll wait here till those people show up, and then we'll shout and call for help. But we need to let them know that this is a dangerous place, too, so we'll throw down the notes at the same time.”

“I wonder if they'll land in the right place.”

“Well, there's no wind today, so they ought to drop straight down.”

Tatsuji nodded, but there was no spark of life in his eyes, and he didn't say anything else.

Teppei took the felt-tipped pen his brother handed him, and on one sheet of paper he wrote in large letters:

PLEASE HELP US. WE'RE THE KANO FAMILY FROM UNIT 801, ALONG WITH TWO OF OUR RELATIVES (FIVE PEOPLE IN ALL) AND WE ARE TRAPPED IN THIS BUILDING. PLEASE CONTACT THE POLICE RIGHT AWAY. THANK YOU VERY MUCH.

As he was composing the message, Teppei was thinking,
I can't believe I'm writing these words. When someone reads the notes, they'll probably think we're being held captive by armed burglars or a gang of marauding psychos.
After a pause, he added another line:

THIS BUILDING SEEMS TO HAVE SOME KIND OF DESTRUCTIVE ENERGY. PLEASE BE EXTRA CAREFUL AROUND THE STONE STEPS AT THE FRONT ENTRANCE.

“No, no, this won't do,” Teppei said abruptly, tearing up the page and tossing the pieces onto the ground. “Anyone who read a message like that would just assume it was a joke, or a prank.”

Tatsuji, meanwhile, had slumped to the ground and was staring vacantly into space, as if his mind had gone on strike and was refusing to function. Teppei tore a fresh sheet from the pad and began to write again.

PLEASE HELP US. WE'RE THE KANO FAMILY FROM UNIT 801. PLEASE CALL THE POLICE. WE'LL EXPLAIN LATER, BUT THERE ARE REASONS WHY YOU SHOULDN'T COME INTO THIS BUILDING. PLEASE DON'T EVEN TRY TO ENTER UNTIL AFTER THE POLICE HAVE ARRIVED. THANK YOU.

Satisfied with this revision, Teppei proceeded to write the same message over and over, on numerous sheets of paper. He then rolled each page into a long, tight cylinder, and twisted it securely around a coffee spoon.

“You knew there was something going on with this building before today, didn't you?” Tatsuji said, rubbing his face with both hands. “Why didn't you tell us about it up front?”

“We never dreamed something like this would happen,” Teppei replied. “I'm really sorry.”

“You're
sorry
?” Tatsuji stopped massaging his face and glared at Teppei through spread fingers. “You think being sorry will make everything okay?”

“Yes, I'm sorry. You have a problem with that?” Teppei asked quietly.

Tatsuji stared at his brother with a face as stiff and impassive as a mask. When he finally spoke, nothing moved except his lips.

“You're the one who got us into this situation—Naomi and me. And yes, I have a huge problem with that. You've obviously known for a while that this place is haunted, or possessed, or whatever. Why didn't you at least give us a heads-up about the negative energy, before we came over?”

“Because we really didn't understand what was going on ourselves—and we still don't. We gradually realized there was something wrong here, and that's why we've been trying to move away. That's all there is to it, but it looks as if we may have waited too long. We were hoping we could make the move without needing to worry you and Naomi about all this weird stuff.”

The hot summer sun beat mercilessly down, scorching the brothers' backs and shoulders through their cotton shirts and turning their exposed skin increasingly red. Sweat poured from their brows and ran down their faces.

Tatsuji jumped to his feet and drew himself up to his full height in an almost warriorlike stance. He untucked the tails of his white button-down shirt from the waistband of his chino pants, then stood there looking uncharacteristically unkempt. “So just how far do you think it's okay to go, when it comes to causing inconvenience to other people?” he asked confrontationally.

Teppei scowled at Tatsuji. “What's your problem, anyway?” he grumbled.

“You have a lot of nerve, asking me that. This is the second time, too.”

“The second time for what?”

“The second time you made me look like a fool. It's just like what happened with Reiko.”

Teppei was squatting on the ground. Now he raised his head, very slowly, and looked directly at his younger brother, but the harsh sunlight streaming into his eyes made it impossible to read the expression on Tatsuji's face. “What do you mean, this is just like what happened with Reiko?” Teppei asked in a carefully controlled voice.

“Okay, if you really want to know, I'll tell you. I've been holding back on saying anything for years now, but I still can't forgive you for what you did. The truth is, I think you're a terrible person. You've always been so completely wrapped up in yourself that you never stop to think about other people, even a little bit. I mean, when Reiko died, I was the one who got stuck with cleaning up the mess you made with your sordid affair. I took care of every little detail—making the funeral arrangements, getting in touch with your office to explain why you hadn't come to work, even apologizing to Reiko's family on your behalf. I really covered your ass, but I'll be honest: I wasn't doing any of that for you. I did it all for Reiko because I felt so sorry for her, suffering alone while you were out feeding your giant ego and tomcatting around with another woman…”

“Shut up!” Teppei shouted, hurling one of the coffee spoons onto the concrete floor of the roof. It landed with a loud clang and bounced away.

Shaking with anger, Tatsuji glowered down at his brother. Teppei picked up another coffee spoon and as he was twining one of the rolled-up memos around it, he once again looked up and caught Tatsuji's eye.

“Okay, let's get this straight,” he said. “You will never again take that kind of self-righteous tone with me, do you understand? What happened with Reiko is our problem—Misao's and mine—and nobody else's. It has nothing to do with you. You may be my brother, but when it comes to my first marriage you're nothing but an outsider. Don't
ever
forget that.”

The brothers glared at each other in silence for a few moments, finally averting their glances so nearly in unison that it would have been hard to say who was the first to look away.

Tatsuji walked over to the iron railing with a weary gait. Leaning against it, he let out a long, deep sigh. “Just go ahead and tell me already,” he said.

“Huh?”

“Tell me what's been going on in this building.”

“Even if you heard the whole story, it probably wouldn't make sense to you. I mean, it wouldn't make sense to anyone in his right mind.”

“I don't care. I want to know. You got me into this predicament, and I think I have a right to know what's going on.”

Holding a bundle of memo-encased coffee spoons in each hand, Teppei went to stand next to Tatsuji at the railing. “Okay,” he said, “here goes nothing.”

Once Teppei began talking, it only took a few minutes to summarize the frightful and baffling events that had taken place since they moved into the building back in March. Simplifying each anecdote as much as possible, he gave his brother a compressed rundown, starting with the peculiar shadow on the TV screen, then moving on to the mysterious (or, at best, unsatisfactorily unexplained) injury Tamao had sustained while playing in the basement. He talked about his surreal walk-and-talk conversation with the bar hostess who used to live on the fifth floor, and the bloodcurdling—and, again, inexplicable—phenomena he and the two caretakers had encountered when they went down to the basement to look for the source of some midnight noises. He also touched briefly on the elevator outages, and the warnings he and Misao had received from Mr. Shoji, the yoga instructor. (He made no mention of the sudden death of their pet bird the night they moved in, because he still couldn't see how that tied in with the other occurrences.)

“And then Misao went to the ward library and did some research into the history of this area,” Teppei continued, without pausing to give Tatsuji a chance to respond to the first installment of revelations. “Back in the 1960s, there was apparently a plan to relocate the graveyard and build a big high-rise housing complex on the land. Naturally, that would have resulted in an increase in the area's population, so the master plan included the creation of an underground shopping mall, which would have extended all the way from the train station to right about here. The people who represented the temple and the graveyard rejected the plan outright, but it's possible that the city ignored them and went ahead with the excavation for the underground street.”

“And exactly what does that have to do with our situation right now?” Tatsuji asked impatiently, making no attempt to hide his irritation.

“I don't know,” Teppei replied. “There may be no connection at all.”

Both brothers lapsed into silence. They could hear the creaky songs of cicadas wafting up from the weed-choked fields in the near distance.

“I'm sorry about the things I said before,” Tatsuji finally murmured.

“That's okay,” Teppei replied equably. “I've known for a long time now that you were harboring those feelings.”

“It's just that I really liked Reiko a lot and I still feel sorry for her, even after all these years.”

“Look, I don't care if you want to blame me, but you need to leave Misao out of it,” Teppei said, shooting Tatsuji a warning look. “She's suffered plenty herself.”

Tatsuji gave an almost imperceptible nod. “I know. I'm not trying to place any of the blame on her, at all.”

Then, from not too far away, they heard the sound of an engine. Teppei had been sitting on his haunches, but now he jumped up and ran over to the railing that bordered the south-facing side of the roof.

On the narrow road that flanked the temple and the graveyard, a van was approaching. The distinctive blue logo of the telephone company was clearly visible on one side.

“Tats, come here, quick!” Teppei called.

Tatsuji rushed over to join his brother at the edge of the roof. “Somebody's coming!” he said excitedly. “Thank god, we're saved!”

“Okay, listen,” Teppei said. “We need to watch for the exact moment when they step out of the van, and then throw these notes at their feet. I mean, one of the spoons might end up hitting someone on the head, by mistake, but at this point we can't be worrying about that sort of thing. It probably wouldn't cause much of an injury, even if it did happen. Anyway, as soon as they look up, we'll start yelling for help as loudly as we can.”

Teppei handed Tatsuji a fistful of the memo-bearing coffee spoons and then, hoping against hope, he focused his attention on the approaching van.
Please help us,
he pleaded, silently.
Please just read these notes and then do what needs to be done.

Teppei couldn't help noticing that the van's engine didn't seem to be running very smoothly, as the vehicle juddered up the driveway and wheezed to a stop in front of the entrance. The two large, dark stains were still visible on the stone steps, but the steam, at least, had dissipated.

The driver's door opened, and a fortyish man in a blue uniform stepped out. He appeared to be alone. After a moment, he stuck his torso back into the van, as if searching for something. Finally, he extracted a small black satchel, then slammed the door behind him.