The Graveyard Apartment (37 page)

“Now!” Teppei shouted. “Ready, aim, fire!” On that cue, he and Tatsuji proceeded to toss their missives off the roof. They all fell straight down, and one or two caught the sunlight and flashed silver as they plummeted toward the ground. The hail of spoons landed on the driveway side of the stone steps with an unexpectedly loud clatter. The driver immediately looked up.

“Hey!” Teppei called, waving one arm. The driver was glaring at him, but the expression on his face didn't seem to indicate mistrust or suspicion. He simply appeared angry that anyone would engage in such risky behavior.

“Please read the notes!” Teppei shouted.

“Huh?” the man said, cupping a hand around one ear. Then, evidently catching on, he gazed with obvious interest at the memos littering the ground around him. Picking up one of the spoons, he unfolded the note. After he had finished reading, he looked up again. Flinching slightly at the prospect of a further onslaught, he demanded loudly, “What's going on?”

“Please, just call the police!” Teppei shouted back.

“Say what?” Again, the man put a hand to one ear.

“Police! CALL … THE … PO … LICE!”

“Oh, I see,” the man said, clearly flustered. His hands were shaking, and he looked as though he might keel over at any moment.

Right about then, the brothers heard the sound of another vehicle in the near distance. Turning to look toward the temple, they saw a white hatchback sedan approaching along the access road. “That's probably the guy from the electrician's place,” Teppei said.

A minute or two later the hatchback pulled up and stopped directly behind the phone company van, just as the first man was about to climb back into his vehicle. When the telephone repairman noticed the newcomer, he ran toward the hatchback, yelling something unintelligible and pointing frantically at the rooftop. After a moment a corpulent, middle-aged man emerged from the driver's side of the hatchback sedan. It was the same employee who had been diligently picking his nose in the middle of the electrician's shop, apparently making productive use of his afternoon break, earlier that week when Teppei stopped by to set up an appointment to have the air-conditioning unit uninstalled, so it could be moved to the new place today. (Teppei had thought, more than once, that the absence of central air conditioning was another piece of evidence that the Central Plaza Mansion had been designed to look alluring on the surface, while every possible corner was being cut in order to reduce construction costs.)

Now the electrician looked up at the roof. Leaning over the railing, Teppei waved both arms and shouted, “Help us, please!”

The man from the phone company handed the memo to the electrician. As he read, the new arrival's plump body began to tremble visibly, like that of a hippo emerging from a wallow. He gave a cry of alarm, then conferred briefly with the telephone repairman. After that they hustled to their respective vehicles, and a moment later the engines roared to life.

All at once a flash of what appeared to be an unnaturally strong ray of sunshine blasted through the rear windshields of both cars, shattering the glass to bits. The vehicles were engulfed in a colossal whirl of light, followed by a blinding afterglow that was almost too bright to look at. The radiance was truly fearsome to behold, like the aftermath of a nuclear explosion. To Teppei and Tatsuji, watching in open-mouthed horror, it seemed as if the sun's rays were being absorbed into a gigantic mirror, then refracted directly into their eyes.

In the same instant, the two drivers and their vehicles disappeared from sight. A couple of brief, terrified screams arose from the vicinity of the vehicles, but those heartrending sounds soon faded away, leaving only silence.

Teppei witnessed this appalling scene in a state of nauseated disbelief. He saw two large plumes of white smoke rising from the road, while a singularly gruesome sound filled the air. It was the kind of sizzling you might hear if you immersed something fragile (fabric, say, or flesh) in a vat of sulfuric acid. The entire sequence couldn't have taken more than five or six seconds. The plumes combined into a single thick cloud billowing up from the area where the men and their cars had been, and then the haze began to clear, revealing several large black blobs on the road.

Tatsuji reached out and grabbed Teppei's arm with a hand that was cold as ice, and Teppei wondered fleetingly whether the parade of shocking occurrences had caused his brother's body temperature to plummet. He himself was feeling extremely dizzy and disoriented, and he found it difficult to catch a proper breath. The summer sun seemed to burn hotter by the minute, almost as if it were trying to set Teppei's scalp on fire, just for fun.

“Come on, Tats, let's go downstairs,” Teppei said. Or rather, he intended to speak those words, but no sound came out when he opened his mouth, which didn't surprise him at all. The amazing thing, he thought, was that he was even able to remain on his feet.

Stumbling along together, he and Tatsuji made their slow way across the roof and began to descend the emergency staircase, heading for the one place in their topsy-turvy world that still felt like a safe haven. When they were about halfway there, Tatsuji suddenly plopped down on one of the stairs and began to scream incoherently.

Teppei couldn't understand a word his brother was saying. Stretching out a hand, he pulled Tatsuji to his feet and forcibly hauled him down the remaining stairs, praying with every fiber of his being that they would both make it to their destination alive.

 

21

July 26, 1987 (2:00 p.m.)

Misao was the first to notice that there was no electricity. Tamao was whining about the heat, and how thirsty she was, so Misao had wandered over to the refrigerator with the intention of offering everyone something refreshing to drink.

Normally, the light inside the fridge came on as soon as the door was opened, but when that didn't happen Misao knew immediately that the problem was more than just a burned-out bulb. The power had evidently been down for some time, because drops of condensation were already forming on the outside of a jar of strawberry jam.

Tatsuji hadn't yet begun to recover from the most recent events, and he was sitting on the living room floor, hugging his knees to his chest and staring straight ahead with shell-shocked eyes. Weaving her way between him and Naomi, whose pallid face wore the same look of stunned bewilderment, Misao went to check on the air conditioner. When she got there she found that the on button, which should have been illuminated, was dark.

She shot Teppei a look that clearly conveyed
We need to talk,
then led him into the hall. “There's a power outage,” she said quietly.

“What?”

“The fridge and the air conditioner are both off.”

“Now that you mention it, the air in here does feel kind of hot and muggy.”

“Could you go take a look?”

Teppei nodded, then went into the entry hall, where the fuse box was located. He pulled it open and peered inside. None of the breakers had been tripped, and there was nothing to indicate a blown fuse. He tried flipping the switches back and forth a number of times, with no success.

His next move was to step out into the corridor and push the elevator's call button. The light went on and the door slid open, as usual.

“It looks like the electricity's only off inside our apartment,” he reported when he returned to the kitchen a moment later.

“How is that even possible?” Misao asked incredulously. “A selective power outage? That makes no sense.”

“I guess they're at it again,” Teppei said nonchalantly, as though that statement constituted a normal, rational explanation.

“What's going on?” Tamao asked as she joined her parents in the hallway.

“The electricity's been acting funny, so—” Misao broke off in midsentence to ruminate. There was still quite a bit of food in the refrigerator, and a fair number of drinks, as well, but without electricity a lot of things were going to start to spoil very quickly in the heat. And, speaking of heat, how were they supposed to go on living in a place where the windows wouldn't open and the air conditioning didn't work?

“I wonder what we ought to do,” she said aloud, half to herself. “It's just going to keep getting hotter and hotter in here, and as for food…”

Teppei looked at her with a glum expression. “I wouldn't be surprised if the water stopped running before too long, as well,” he said, wiping the sweat from his brow. Tamao skipped off, calling for Cookie to come and play.

“Oh no. I never thought about that,” Misao said.

“They're going to try to starve us out,” Teppei stated matter-of-factly.

“But if we don't have any water…”

“I don't know. I mean, we have no idea what we're dealing with here, so how are we supposed to understand their end game?”

This is just too much,
Misao thought. Her eyes filled with tears, and she looked around to make sure Tamao was out of earshot. No matter what happened, Misao felt it was her duty as a parent not to do or say anything that might make this ordeal any more upsetting for her little daughter.

“What's left in the way of food?” Teppei asked in a subdued tone.

“Not a whole lot,” Misao replied. “There's a bit of ham, and some cheese, and a few pickled plums. I think there might be three slices left from the loaf of bread I used for our breakfast sandwiches. I made a point of emptying out the fridge so we wouldn't need to cart a lot of perishable food over to the new place, and there's really nothing else except for some ice in the freezer. Oh, wait: there's one jar of jam, and a container of miso paste, and some salad dressing. I think that's about it, though I may be forgetting some small things.”

“Okay. What about drinks?”

“We have a few cans of cola and beer in the fridge, and there might be another couple of dozen in the cupboard, in cartons. I was planning to wait and put them in the refrigerator when we got to the new place.”

“How about canned goods?”

“There are some tins of corned beef, and tuna, and vegetable soup. Not very many, though.”

As a family, their diet had never included much in the way of so-called convenience food, but Misao now found herself wishing she had kept more canned goods and instant mixes on hand for emergencies.

“And that's all? Please tell me that isn't everything we have on hand to feed five people,” Teppei said reproachfully. Misao understood his sentiments with excruciating clarity, but she couldn't stifle the knee-jerk reaction.

“Yes,” she snapped, “that's all. I was just trying to be practical and simplify the move. If I'd known we were going to end up trapped in this building, I would have done a big shopping. I mean, who could have foreseen something like this?” She was unable to hold back her tears any longer and they streamed from the corners of her eyes, blurring her vision. Lowering his gaze apologetically, Teppei reached out to pat her forearm.

It was two o'clock in the afternoon. The windows still refused to open, and whenever anyone went downstairs to check the lobby door, they found it tightly closed. The people at the moving company were probably waiting impatiently for the truck to return, perhaps assuming that the crew had decided to freelance by taking on another job after they finished with the Kanos' move. Or maybe they'd already begun calling around, following up on hunches about where the crew might have gone. At some point, perhaps they might send someone to the Kanos' new address. When they discovered that not a single stick of furniture had been delivered there, they might think it was odd and swing by the Central Plaza Mansion to investigate.

That's a nice fantasy, but even if it came true nothing would change,
Misao thought.
If more people from the outside world show up here—colleagues of the missing workers, or someone from this building's management company, or postal carriers, or people from Teppei's office, or whoever—the same thing will just keep happening, over and over again. The new arrivals will go up in smoke, and their cars and trucks will vanish into thin air, as well …

If enough missing-person reports came in, the police might eventually dispatch some officers to check out the building, but perhaps they would find the door locked and conclude that everyone had simply moved away. No, on second thought, they would never get that far. If any members of the police force did turn up they would simply be zapped like all the other visitors, reduced to a cloud of steam before they even reached the door.

Teppei went back into the living room and stood in front of Tatsuji and Naomi. “I need you to listen to me,” he said gravely. “The power's gone off for some reason, and—”

“Oh, no wonder it seems so much hotter than before,” Naomi interrupted, glancing listlessly up at the wall-mounted air conditioner.

“Anyway,” Teppei went on, “even if we can manage to cope with the heat by leaving the front door open or going up to the roof to get some fresh air, the food supply is actually a more pressing concern. I think it would be a good idea to make a comprehensive inventory and list all the food we have right now.”

Tatsuji met his brother's eyes. “Make a list? What is this, fun and games on a camping trip?”

“Look, we need to agree to get serious and adopt a siege mentality from now on, because we're going to be fighting for our lives. The food is the fuel to keep us going, so we have to be careful to make the most of what's on hand.”

“I have, like, zero appetite,” Naomi muttered. “You can all go ahead and eat everything without me. I really don't care.”

“Okay, listen,” Teppei said, taking a deep breath. “We need to find a solution by tomorrow at the latest. We don't have enough supplies to keep going very long beyond that, so there's no time to spare. Rather than sitting around hoping to be rescued, we need to try every possible way of getting out of here, and saving ourselves. To do that, we'll need energy, and to generate energy we need to eat. The fact is, our food supplies are already dangerously low.”