The Graveyard Apartment (40 page)

“But where does it lead to—whatever's on the other side of this wall?” Tatsuji muttered, half to himself. “Maybe this room is somehow connected to the basement of a private house or a store or something, like by a tunnel?”

Teppei immediately thought of the story Misao had told him, about the “phantom road” she had researched one day at the ward library. Could something like that really exist? Was it possible that whoever did the initial excavation for the underground shopping mall simply paved over the surface and left the gigantic hole intact, after the developers failed to get permission to move the graves and were forced to abandon the entire project?

“Remember what I told you up on the roof about how some developers might have dug a hole for a belowground shopping arcade, before the project fell through?” Teppei said reluctantly, not wanting to stoke his brother's optimistic fantasies any more than necessary.

“Oh, right! So there must have been a big underground space left over, and the owners of the land probably divided it up and rented it to shops, for storage and whatnot. That would explain it!” Tatsuji said with rising excitement.

“I doubt it,” Teppei said slowly. “I've never heard about anything like that. And even if such a space had existed, it would have been filled in when they built these apartments, don't you think?”

“No, but still, there's something happening here, right now. I can—” Tatsuji stopped and jammed his ear against the hole. “Yes, I can hear it clearly. First there were footsteps, and now there are people talking.”

Teppei found this entire situation patently implausible, but he couldn't help garnering a small ray of hope from Tatsuji's words. Pushing his brother aside, Teppei applied his own ear to the hole.

He couldn't make out any words, but in the distance—the very far distance—he could hear the unmistakable sound of conversation, along with a repetitive clinking noise. It sounded like someone making a pile of glass bottles, and a torrent of images flooded into Teppei's mind.
Could it be an underground wine cellar, or the basement storeroom of a sake shop, or the subterranean meeting chamber of some secret society? (No, that last one was beyond ridiculous.) Or maybe it was an underground sarcophagus that was used as a repository for the bones of priests and their families by the ancient temple Manseiji?
For the moment, any explanation would do. The important thing was that he could hear human voices.

And now there was the sound of laughter: a goodly number of men, roaring loudly with amusement. Middle-aged men, or maybe older.

The next thing Teppei heard was several female voices, engaged in animated conversation. So there were women in the group as well. Overall, it sounded like the sort of wholesomely constructive hustle and bustle you might hear in any busy corner of the city: people cheerfully performing some task or other while chatting among themselves in an easy, carefree manner.

Teppei stuck one index finger through the opening, and an icy draft instantly chilled it to the bone. Tatsuji, apparently impatient with waiting his turn, roughly shoved Teppei aside and shouted frantically into the hole, “Hey! We need help! Is anybody there?” Then, placing his ear to the opening, he listened intently. As before, faraway voices talking among themselves could be heard, but there was no change in the timbre of those murmurs, and no one responded to Tatsuji's plea.

“Give me the hammer!” he yelled, snatching the tool from Teppei's hand. Raising it over his head, Tatsuji brought the hammer down on the wall next to the hole. The dull sound of metal meeting concrete echoed through the basement. With each successive blow the cement crumbled a bit more, raining powdery gray rubble onto the floor. It was such absurdly easy work that the poured concrete wall might have been nothing more than a rudimentary layer of painted plaster.

In a matter of seconds, the hole had grown perceptibly larger. Teppei remembered now that when he came down to the basement to carry out a nocturnal inspection with the Tabatas, he had sensed something different about this particular section of the basement, and the back wall in particular. It was starting to look now as though his initial hunch that the concrete might be thinner in this area had been correct, after all.

Tatsuji's face was covered with tiny beads of sweat that glimmered in the light. The hole had now doubled in size, and as Tatsuji, who appeared to be enjoying himself immensely, continued to hack away, it soon grew large enough to accommodate the head of an average-size person. An unnaturally cold, damp wind streamed into the basement through the aperture.

Tatsuji flung the hammer to the floor, then stuck his head and neck through the newly enlarged hole. “Hey!” he shouted. “Is anybody there?”

Teppei had his ear to the wall nearby, listening for a response, and he was astounded to hear the escalating buzz of a group of people in deep discussion, followed by a distinct question.

“What's going on?” called a faraway male voice.

“Hello!” trilled a female voice in the background.

Teppei extricated his head from the opening. His sweaty face was transformed by joy. “We're saved!” he exulted. “We're going to be rescued, all of us!”

Without waiting for his brother to respond, Tatsuji stuck his head back into the hole and yelled, “Help us, please! We're trapped in here! This is the basement of the Central Plaza Mansion. There are five of us: four adults and a child. Please help us get out of here!”

At that moment, the lively sounds beyond the wall abruptly ceased. Then Teppei heard his brother shouting urgently from inside the opening, “Hey, Tepp, can you hand me the flashlight?” Reluctantly, Teppei complied.

Momentarily withdrawing his head, Tatsuji aimed the flashlight beam through the opening, then peered in again. “Hey!” he called to Teppei. “You've got to see this. There really is an underground road!”

Teppei edged up to the hole and took a peek. What he saw was so incredible that it took a minute for his brain to process the scene that greeted his eyes. On the other side of the wall was an excavated road, wide and tall enough for several adults to walk abreast while standing fully upright. The long, straight path appeared to extend in the direction of Manseiji, just as the ward reports had suggested. Of course, the flashlight's illumination didn't extend that far so it was impossible to say for sure, but there didn't seem to be any major obstacles along the way, and there was no end in sight.

The unpleasant aroma of ancient, fermented earth filled Teppei's nostrils. Stepping back from the opening, he looked at his brother's face and said vaguely, “The thing is, I think…” He was feeling more and more certain that the underground road might be a trick or a trap of some sort, but he knew his suspicion would sound ridiculous if he tried to put it into words.

“Thank god, we're saved!” Tatsuji whooped. “That wild story you told me turned out to be totally true. Right? The one about an underground road running from here to the train station. It actually turned out to be true! I don't know how it's even possible, but what's the saying, ‘Ours not to reason why'? Anyway, bottom line, there are people at the end of the road, so we can get out!”

Tatsuji was so galvanized by enthusiasm that his saliva ducts seemed to be working overtime, and long strings of drool oozed from both corners of his mouth. He gave his brother a look that radiated hope and exhilaration, then stuck his head into the hole again. “Hey!” he shouted. “Hello!”

“Hey!” The voices that responded this time were all male. There seemed to be three of them, at least. It definitely wasn't an echo.

“Help us, please!” Tatsuji pleaded.

“Come to us!” a male voice yelled. “You can get here, can't you?”

“Where are you, anyway? Is there some kind of underground storehouse or something?” At that, the faraway chorus fell silent for a few seconds. Then there were distant sounds of shrill, cackling laughter and general commotion. A woman's voice—so pure and high that she might have been singing a soprano role in an opera—rang out above the others, but her words were indistinct.

With one ear still mashed against the wall, Teppei reached out and grabbed his brother's arm. “Hang on a minute,” he said.

“What? What's the problem?” Tatsuji demanded, pausing with his head half in and half out of the opening.

“Don't you think there's something strange about this?”

“Strange? Don't be stupid. Those voices belong to human beings. It isn't a bunch of ghosts or goblins, if that's what you're thinking.” As he spat out those words, Tatsuji sprayed saliva in every direction. He immediately jammed his head through the hole again and called out, “Hey! Hello! What should we do now?”

The underground cavity erupted in an incomprehensible hubbub, as if a great many people were talking at once. There was a mixture of other noises, as well: metallic clangs; the lucent tinkle of glass being rung like a bell; and oddest of all, a sound that made Teppei picture a battalion of medieval samurai warriors, dressed in full battle regalia, crawling along on the ground.

Teppei began to tremble. He was sure of it now: these … these were not human beings. They may have sounded like people, but they were something else. Something very different, and infinitely more dangerous.

Tatsuji didn't seem to have noticed. “Please come here!” he was yelling into the hole. “Come over here right now, and help us out! We're in the basement of the Central Plaza Mansion!”

“Ho-oh!” came the response. It sounded like a very large number of male voices—several dozen, at least—all shouting at once.

What the hell?
Teppei thought with a frisson of dread.
What possible reason could there be for such a huge crowd of men to be gathered in an underground cave, or grotto, or storeroom, or whatever it was?

Tatsuji extracted his flushed, perspiring face from the hole and took off toward the elevator at top speed, calling over his shoulder, “Come on! Let's go upstairs and get everybody! We need to bring them down here!” Teppei followed behind at a normal pace. He could feel a cold, clammy draft—the same abnormally frigid breeze he remembered from his nightmarish evening in the basement—eddying around on the floor of the basement.

“Tats, wait!” he shouted. “I think we should just forget about this.”

Tatsuji was already in the elevator, jabbing at the “8” button. “I don't see why,” he whined. “They just want to help us. I don't know what you're so afraid of. If you don't want to be rescued, Naomi and I will go by ourselves.”

“Listen,” Teppei said sternly as he joined his brother in the elevator. He thought of grabbing a box of protein bars, but he decided that could wait. “First of all, how do you explain the small hole that suddenly appeared in the wall? Like I told you, it wasn't there before. I've racked my brain, and I can't remember ever seeing a hole like that anywhere else in the basement, and there's no way it could have simply occurred naturally. Someone made it, on purpose.”

“Well, you haven't been down here in quite a while, so as you say, maybe somebody came along and made that hole when no one was looking.”

“But who? And why would anyone do such a thing?”

“How the hell am I supposed to know!” Tatsuji bellowed, stamping his foot on the elevator floor. “The only thing that matters right now is that there are people out there, and there's a road, and we're going to be saved. After they rescue us we can ask for a detailed explanation, if that's so important to you.”

When the elevator arrived at its destination, Tatsuji bounded through the doors and into the apartment with such an overabundance of energy that he nearly fell flat on his face in the entryway. The sky outside was already completely light and the apartment was flooded with morning sunshine, the same as always.

“Naomi! Naomi! We're saved! We found some people!”

“What? Where?” Naomi came running down the hall dressed in nothing but blue jeans and a brassiere, with her disheveled hair flying every which way.

Tatsuji burst into the living room, where he began picking up clothes and miscellaneous items and cramming them into the Louis Vuitton overnight bag.

“Go and get dressed,” he ordered Naomi. “They're going to be sending a rescue party to the basement any minute now, so we need to be there.”

“A rescue party? In the basement?” Misao echoed doubtfully.

“No, that isn't happening,” Teppei whispered in his wife's ear. “It's true, we did hear something, but I seriously doubt whether it's a rescue party.”

“Will someone please tell me what's going on?” Misao asked, looking around helplessly, but no one seemed to hear her plea.

Naomi appeared again, dressed in the gaudy floral-patterned blouse she'd worn the day before. When she began to paint her lips while looking into the miniature mirror of her compact, Teppei walked up to her and shouted, “Stop primping, dammit! You aren't going anywhere!” His voice was so loud that Cookie began to howl in confusion. Naomi stopped with her lipstick tube in midstroke and gaped at her brother-in-law, speechless with astonishment.

“Nobody's coming to save us,” Teppei continued in a calmer tone. “That isn't what's going on down there at all. You need to understand. Those sounds we heard—those voices? They don't belong to people.”

Tatsuji let out a long, dry, artificial-sounding laugh. “I think my big brother here has lost touch with reality. I heard them with my own ears. They were definitely people, and they were answering me with perfectly normal words and sentences. Misao, you're the expert on the underground road that might never have been filled in, right?”

“Wait, how do you know about that?”

“Your husband told me.”

“Well, it's just speculation,” Misao demurred. “We have no idea whether such a road exists or not.”