The Graveyard Apartment (35 page)

“Don't worry, she'll be back,” Misao consoled him. “However much she may want to leave right now, the fact is there's no way for her to get out.”

Just then Teppei, who was still standing by the unbreakable sliding door, called out, “Hey, look!”

“What is it?” Misao asked.

“The truck's here.”

Misao and Tatsuji rushed over to the window, hearts pounding. Sure enough, on the narrow road that ran along the periphery of the graveyard, a large truck was slowly making its way toward the Central Plaza Mansion. The dazzling sunlight reflected off the silvery aluminum surface of the truck's cargo hold.

“Excellent!” Teppei clapped his hands. “They'll be able to help us get out of here, for sure.”

“Those people will open the door for us?” Tamao asked her father.

“Absolutely,” Teppei replied, displaying more confidence than he felt. The doubtful expression in Tamao's eyes was replaced by hope as she looked up at Misao and said, “That's good news, right, Mama?” Misao nodded.

“Naomi's in the lobby,” Tatsuji said thoughtfully. “I need to go down and persuade her not to run off after the moving men open the door.”

“We should all go down,” Teppei said. The entire group hurtled out of the apartment, leaving only Cookie behind. The indicator light showed that the elevator was still in the lobby. Given the pervasive mood of urgency, the process of calling it up to the eighth floor, crowding in, and making the descent to the ground floor seemed to take forever.

When they reached the first floor, the other Kanos saw Naomi squatting on her haunches in the middle of the lobby as if in a trance, with her face set in a rictus of dismay. The rumble of an engine could be heard in the near distance, followed a few moments later by the sound of a heavy vehicle coming to a stop in front of the entrance to the building.

“Are you okay?” Tatsuji asked, bending over Naomi. Her breathing was rough and ragged, and as she reached up and clung to her husband's torso it almost seemed as though she might be about to faint.

“What—what's that?” she gasped, pointing toward the door.

“Don't look,” Tatsuji said, putting one hand over his wife's eyes.

“But what are all those handprints? I mean, look at the door. Who's making them, anyway?”

Outside, there was the sound of a couple of car doors slamming shut, one after the other. Misao approached the handprint-covered glass door and began pounding on it with her fist. “Help us, please!” she shouted.

There was no response, but two male voices could be clearly heard in the driveway outside. The moving men were evidently approaching the door, because both their footsteps and their conversation gradually became more audible.

“What floor was it, again?” one man asked. By the time the other replied, “Eight,” the newcomers were standing directly in front of the entrance.

Raising her own voice a notch, Misao shouted again, “Help us, please!”

Surely this time the men must have heard. Nothing was separating their faces from the anxious faces on the inside except a pane of whitened glass, but the new arrivals still made no reply.

“Hey!” Teppei yelled at the top of his lungs. “Can you hear us?”

“What's with the front door?” they could hear one of the men asking incredulously. “It's totally white. Do you think someone painted over it?”

“Hey, wait, what's that over there?”

That's when it happened. There was a strange noise on the other side of the door, followed by a rapid series of strangulated cries. Those blood-chilling sounds were like the final groans of a murder victim breathing his last in some dark, deserted alley. Misao and Teppei exchanged a horrified glance.

“Hey!” Teppei shouted again. He pounded on the door with his fists, and then began to kick it, as well. “What's going on out there? We need help!”

There was no response from outside. In fact, there was no sound at all.

Tatsuji and Naomi stood up and hurried over to join Teppei and Misao in banging noisily on the door. The louder they pounded, the faster the already thick layer of handprints seemed to proliferate on the other side of the glass, but they didn't have time to worry about that.

Behind them, in the lobby, Tamao began to bawl. Misao glanced over her shoulder and said in the most comforting tone she could muster, “Please don't cry, sweetie. Can you do that for me?” Tamao nodded dispiritedly.

“I wonder what happened out there,” Tatsuji said, taking a break from banging on the glass to press his ear against the door. “There are no sounds at all now.”

“I know, and the truck hasn't driven away, either. I wonder where they went?” Naomi tore her eyes away from the door and looked inquiringly at Teppei.

“I don't have a clue,” he faltered, putting his own ear to the glass. “Nope,” he said after a moment. “Nothing.”

“What do you suppose those dreadful noises were—the ones we heard a while ago?” Misao asked diffidently. “Did everybody else hear them, too?”

“I did,” Teppei replied. “They were like cries of agony or—”

“Hey, I just thought of something!” Naomi interrupted eagerly. “This building has a rooftop, right?” Her bright coral lipstick had begun to flake off, exposing lips that were chapped and colorless.

“I forgot about the roof!” Teppei exclaimed.

“That's right, the roof,” Naomi echoed impatiently. “Anyway, let's go up there and see what we can see. If we look down, we should be able to figure out where the moving men went.”

“Let's go, then.” Teppei led the way to the elevator. He pushed the button to open the door, and everyone filed in. The elevator didn't go all the way to the top—that was another of the building's structural idiosyncrasies—so they had to get out on the eighth floor and take the emergency stairs the rest of the way.

The door from the interior stairwell opened easily onto the roof. Letting go of Tamao's hand, Misao charged over to the iron railing. There wasn't a cloud in the sky, and the sun was shining so brightly that the rays seemed to pierce her skin like superheated needles.

Beyond the expansive graveyard, now fully green, the clustered buildings of the Takaino area were clearly visible. The crematorium's tall, cylindrical chimney was emitting the usual thick billows of smoke. Saying a silent, secular prayer, Misao took a timid peek at the ground below.

There was only one road leading to or from the Central Plaza Mansion. The building was located in a cul de sac, so there was no way someone could have driven off down a side road. Even if the movers had decided to leave while the members of the Kano family were making their way up to the roof, they would first have needed to back up their large truck and execute a U-turn, which would have taken several minutes. The entire length of the access road was visible from the roof, so the moving men couldn't possibly have gone far enough to have vanished from sight.

However, there was no activity of any kind on the road that skirted the temple grounds. No truck was parked in front of the building, either. Tatsuji's sedan was still there, but it had the loading area all to itself. In the approximate spot where they would have expected to see the truck, the only thing visible on the asphalt was what appeared to be a few shards of glass, sparkling in the sunlight.

Not only was the moving truck missing in action, but there was no sign of human presence, either. Misao made a complete circuit of the roof, holding on to the iron railing and keeping her eyes peeled for any nook or cranny where a couple of men could be hidden from sight. She checked for potential blind spots, too, but she didn't find anything at all: nothing along the low rock wall, nothing in the patch of morning glories the caretakers had planted, nothing around the area where a drainage ditch emptied onto vacant land. She didn't even see a cat, much less a human being.

When Naomi crept up to join her, Misao glanced over and caught her sister-in-law's eye. “What's that?” Naomi asked in a muted voice, pointing down at the short flight of stairs leading to the building's entrance. On the broad, flat stones that made up the three-step staircase, there were two large dark blobs. It looked to Misao as if someone had spilled stone-polishing oil on the steps, in two different places. No, on second thought, maybe the splotches were more like fresh puddles of coal tar. Clouds of steam were rising from the two wet patches, as though someone had heated up some coal tar a few moments earlier, then poured it on the steps.

Clouds of steam…?
Misao let out a long, piercing shriek, then collapsed in an insensible heap at the edge of the roof.

 

20

July 26, 1987 (11:00 a.m.)

Teppei stared down at the dark puddles on the stone steps, so stunned that it didn't even occur to him to go to the aid of his wife, who had collapsed nearby. At first his mind was a total blank, but after a moment he remembered a photograph he'd seen years before at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, where a variety of archival materials related to the atomic bomb attack on the city were on display.

The photo showed a charred blob on a stone stairway, and Teppei had immediately been reminded of the flat, limp shadows in Salvador Dalí's paintings of melting landscapes. According to the caption, the steps were attached to a building near ground zero. A profoundly unlucky human being happened to be standing on those steps when the A-bomb blast hit the city, and in that brief instant that unknown person was completely dematerialized and reduced to an amorphous smear on the ground.

This is just like that photograph,
Teppei thought as he stared down at the driveway in front of the building.
Except there's no way to ignore the fact that these puddles are shaped, vaguely, like people
. One of the blobs in front of the Central Plaza Mansion had its arms and legs splayed to either side, so that it resembled the Sino-Japanese character for “large”:
大
. The other splotch was curled in upon itself with a single arm outstretched, which gave it the look of a gigantic prawn.

When he looked more carefully, Teppei could just make out what appeared to be several scraps of khaki-colored cloth, shrouded by the steam. As he watched, he was shocked to realize that the steam was actively working to dissolve those bits of fabric. In a matter of seconds, every trace of the khaki scraps had vanished into the air, as if they had been dissolved in sulfuric acid.

“Tepp?” Tatsuji whispered weakly. He sounded as if he might be about to lose consciousness. “That's the moving men down there, isn't it? Those blobs.”

“It certainly looks that way,” Teppei replied, clutching his forehead with both hands and moaning softly. Just then the brothers heard a choking, gurgling sound off to one side. It was Naomi, bent double at the waist as she vomited up every last bit of her breakfast.

“Tats, take her downstairs and put her to bed,” Teppei ordered, indicating Naomi with a slight lift of his chin. “And could you please look after Misao and Tamao, too? The minute you've gotten them settled in the apartment, look around for some paper and pens, and bring them up here. We need to write a bunch of notes and throw them down. Oh, also, see if you can find some heavy things that we can attach the memos to, and bring those up, too.”

“Got it,” Tatsuji said weakly. Cradling Naomi in the crook of one arm, he took hold of Tamao's hand. Misao scrambled to her feet and started to follow the others, then stopped to look back at Teppei. Her face was as white as a sheet of paper. She wanted to say something to her husband, but no words came to mind. Teppei didn't speak, either; he just watched his family members until they disappeared through the door to the emergency stairwell.

The black smoke from the crematorium chimney was shooting straight up into the sky, testifying to the complete absence of wind. In the distance, on the national highway that ran along the far border of Manseiji's temple grounds, an endless parade of shiny cars streamed in both directions. From where Teppei stood, the cars looked like toys.
If that faraway vista is the real world
, he thought dreamily,
what madness are we caught up in here?
In that moment he felt like a ghost, gazing back at the living world from the other side.

There wasn't a soul to be seen in the precincts of the temple, or in the immense, sprawling graveyard. In front of some of the gravestones, bouquets of old wilted flowers were crumbling in the midsummer sun. The grayish-white grave markers stood out against a dense backdrop of
Fatsia japonica
shrubs, with their branches like long, skinny arms and leaves that resembled gigantic spread-fingered hands. Near a tall grove of elm trees was a large cluster of polished granite gravestones, and one of them in particular seemed to be reflecting the sunlight with uncannily mirrorlike brilliance.

“What the holy hell is this place, anyway?” Teppei muttered to himself. It was beginning to seem possible that the otherworldly invasion of the building and its immediate environs was even more horrific than anyone had imagined.

Clearly,
they
were all around, day and night. But who, or what, were they? Teppei still had no idea. However, he was certain that this area was their nest, and their den, and their sovereign domain.

They hate us,
he thought.
They literally hate us to death. They've decided to play some kind of malicious cat-and-mouse game, so they're going to trap us in this building, and torment us, and eventually frighten us to the point where our hearts simply give out. That is, if we don't starve first.

On the rooftop, a forest of pipes for the building's ventilation system stuck up at various places, creating an irregular obstacle course. Stepping carefully over each protrusion, Teppei made his way to the north side of the roof and put his hands on the rusty iron railing that ran all the way around.