The Graveyard Apartment (42 page)

“Cookie?” Misao's tone was filled with dread. “What's the matter, girl?”

Teppei was suddenly seized by a powerful premonition. Turning to Misao, he said, “Hold on to Cookie's collar, tightly. Whatever you do, don't let go.” Then he stuck his entire torso through the opening and yelled, “Tatsuji! Naomi! Get back here right now! Hurry! Run!”

There was no answer, and for an instant the excavated area beyond the wall was enveloped in an eerie silence. Then, somewhere very far away, there was the sound of something coming toward them: something massive and squirmy, like an army of giant worms rolling along in monstrous waves.

Teppei's entire body erupted in goose bumps, and he could hear his teeth chattering. “Tatsuji! Naomi!” he shouted. “Where are you? Come back!”

And then it happened.

“
Gyaah!
” A high-pitched wail echoed through the underground cavern, and that single inarticulate syllable somehow conveyed a sense of overwhelming terror. A moment later a voice called out weakly, “Help us, please!” And then: silence.

After a second there was an uncanny sound of upheaval, as if tremendous quantities of earth were shifting or being moved, followed by a chorus of cackling laughter that made the family's blood run cold. Suddenly, a vile stench filled their nasal passages, making it almost impossible to breathe. It was like the smell of fish guts that have been hastily dumped into a barrel behind some seafood shop and left to fester in the midsummer sun—except this indescribably foul odor was a hundred times stronger, and a thousand times worse.

Misao screamed. Cookie thrashed around wildly, trying to loosen Misao's hold on her collar. Tamao let out a piercing shriek, then burst into tears.

“Tatsuji! Tatsuji! Tatsuji!” Teppei hollered over and over, nearly out of his mind with worry and fear. He stuck one leg through the hole.

“Stop!” Misao grabbed his shirt from behind. “Don't go in there!”

From deep inside the cavern they heard a horrific slurping noise. The soul-chilling sound of muffled laughter, clearly not of this world, reverberated through the basement and seemed to ricochet off the walls.

“Tatsuji! Answer me! Are you okay?” In his panic-stricken state, Teppei couldn't tell whether the liquid coursing down his face was sweat or tears.

There was no reply. Tatsuji and Naomi had taken the only flashlight, and no matter how intently Teppei peered into the dark space, he could see just a few feet ahead. He heard something writhing and squirming in the inky blackness, and then, gradually, the stomach-turning sounds began to recede. The insidious hiss of whispering voices, the sinister rumble of suppressed laughter: after a few minutes those, too, began to fade away.

Everyone in the basement was paralyzed with shock, and it was Cookie who broke the momentary spell. Misao had unconsciously relaxed her grasp on the collar, and in that brief instant the dog broke free and raced toward the ragged opening in the wall. Hurtling over Teppei, she attempted to launch herself through the hole. Teppei grabbed hold of Cookie and, using all his strength, managed to wrestle the frenzied, whimpering dog to the ground.

“Hurry up!” Teppei yelled. “We've got to get back upstairs—quick!”

He started toward the elevator, gripping Cookie's collar with one hand and pulling Tamao along with the other, but Misao stood rooted to the spot, all the color drained from her face.

Once again, the hideous fishy stench—coupled this time with an arctic blast of air—began to fill the basement. When Teppei looked back, he saw Misao still standing by the back wall, wearing a befuddled expression and staring open-mouthed into the hole. “Come on!” he roared. “What are you doing?”

“But…” Misao protested in a small, weak voice. Every cell in her body seemed to be electrified with horror. “What about Tatsuji and Naomi?”

Teppei felt as if he might pass out any minute; it was all he could do to remain upright and conscious. He took a shallow, choking breath and looked at Misao. “It's over,” he said quietly, shaking his head. “There's nothing we can do to help them now.”

As he spoke, Teppei's eyes filled with tears. His lips began to quiver, and he let out a brief sob. Then Misao came rushing toward him and the two of them, with Tamao and Cookie in tow, sprinted toward the elevator as fast as they could go.

 

Epilogue

Three days had passed, and the situation was as dire as ever. Day after day the summer sun blazed down on the Central Plaza Mansion, almost as though it were trying to set the building on fire. The apartment felt hotter than an oven, and when Misao, Teppei, and Tamao were quietly lying down, hoping to catch a few winks of sleep, suffocating waves of heat would pour into their mouths and nostrils like an avalanche of scalding mud.

They still had running water, at least, but the pressure had been diminishing with every passing hour, until there was only a tepid trickle from the faucets and the shower nozzle. Even so, once a day, the entire family would crowd into the shower stall together to rinse off. If they hadn't preserved that small daily ritual, they felt as if their bodies would have simply melted away in the heat.

The TV reception was long gone, of course, but the radio still worked, and a number of stations came in loud and clear: news, weather, baseball, popular music. The local news programs focused most of their attention on the record-shattering hot weather and on the various accidents (mainly involving water sports) that had befallen people on their summer vacations. As the heat wave sizzled on, the meteorologists seemed to take a kind of proprietary pride in reporting that thermometers all over Tokyo were registering temperatures of 99˚ Fahrenheit and above, day after day.

As for food, there was no way for the Kanos to ignore the fact that they were gradually running out of things to eat. The cupboard was very nearly bare aside from a cup and a half of rice, six pickled plums, and a few desiccated lettuce leaves. Teppei had made several quick, cautious forays into the basement to fetch the boxes of high-calorie protein bars, and those sawdust-colored, overly sweet rectangles were now the main staple of their daily diet.

“This could just be my imagination,” Teppei said when he returned with the last few boxes, “but the hole in the wall seems to be a bit larger every time I see it.” He and Misao agreed that it almost felt as if they (whoever
they
might be) were waiting for the three survivors to return to the basement and step through that sketchy portal into the ominous blackness beyond.

Teppei reported that the entire basement was filled with an unspeakably putrid stench, and the revolting odor had even permeated the bars to some extent. Misao thought the smell was enough to spoil the most robust appetite, but they were in no position to be picky eaters, and right now the protein bars were their primary lifeline. Those unappetizing snacks were also the source of the one and only joke Misao and Teppei shared these days.

“Hey,” they would say with forced cheerfulness, “we should thank our lucky stars we didn't find a stash of zero-calorie weight-loss bars instead!”

The triple whammy of suffocating heat, privation, and anxiety had sapped Tamao's physical energy, but she was still in surprisingly good spirits. Once in a while she even flashed a grin, and Misao and Teppei would both make a point of beaming back at her. Truth be told, these days Teppei's smile was a rather wan and pitiful thing, and Misao had an almost clairvoyant sense of what was going through his mind.

Sometimes at night, after Tamao had trundled off to bed, Teppei would tell Misao stories about his childhood. He never seemed to tire of repeating the same anecdotes, and these days all his reminiscences revolved around his vanished brother.

“I think my brother had some kind of complex about me,” Teppei kept saying, over and over. “That's why he always chose to live his life in a way that was the polar opposite of how I've lived mine: you know, getting a job right out of college with a solid company; becoming a solid salaryman; making a solid match with a pampered, self-involved girl like Naomi. And I understand now why he never let me forget about the way things ended with my first wife. I think it's because that was the only weapon he could use against me.”

Three o'clock in the afternoon.
The battery-powered clock on the wall kept ticking away without a pause, though Misao and Teppei had lost track of what day of the week it was. They could probably have figured out the date, but it just seemed like too much trouble.

Cookie lay sprawled in the hall with her long pink tongue hanging out, panting heavily. Tamao had curled up nearby, next to the seam that separated the living room from the hallway, and was starting to nod off. A few minutes earlier she had been almost hyperactive, shrieking loudly about wanting to drink some juice—
with ice!
—but it was clear to Teppei and Misao that their little daughter was running out of steam.

The mattresses remained spread on the floor of the living room, where a faint breeze wafted through the front door from time to time, and no one even ventured into the airless bedrooms anymore. Misao had flopped down on one of the mattresses, which was sticky from all the perspiration it had absorbed, and now she reached out and switched on the radio.

The familiar show-biz baritone poured out of the speakers, sounding absurdly upbeat and energetic. “Okay, folks, it's time for our perennially popular ten-thousand-yen giveaway. Who'll be the big winner today? If your telephone number ends with 96, please call the station right away. We're talking ten thousand yen here, people. Ten thousand yen! Think of the possibilities! This weekend, you could take your entire family to a swimming pool to cool off. TEN THOUSAND YEN! Ladies, whatever you say, it's unbelievably hot this time of year, and if you don't get yourselves down to the pool as quickly as possible you might just shrivel up and die. Wait, what's that I hear? Have the phones already started ringing off the hook? Let's go check it out. It's the ten-thousand-yen challenge! Okay, caller number one, you're on the air!”

“Too bad our phone isn't working,” Teppei said as he drained one of the last remaining cans of beer. “Just one call and we could win ten thousand yen, and maybe even get ourselves rescued, to boot.”

“But—I don't think our phone number ended in 96, did it?”

“You're probably right.” Teppei gave a short, rueful laugh. “What
was
our phone number, anyway?”

Misao smiled feebly. “I have no idea,” she said, shaking her head.

On the other side of the permanently closed door to the balcony, the cloudless blue sky stretched toward the far horizon. Whenever Misao and Teppei stopped to realize that, beneath the same summer sky, millions of people were still going about their daily lives in the usual way, it struck them as ineffably strange. Tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow, and the day after that, all those people out there in the world would go on living their normal, ordinary lives: working, playing, laughing, falling in love, burning with jealousy, dealing with money, fretting about their health …

“I wonder how many more days we can survive like this,” Misao mused.

Teppei came up beside her and softly traced the curve of her bare shoulder with his index finger. “How many days?” he echoed. “Let's not even think about that.”

“No matter what happens in the end, you turned out to be an incredibly strong person,” Misao said.

“Why do you say that?”

“Because you're always so brave and cool and copacetic.”

“Nah, not really,” Teppei said lightly. “I just react instinctively as I go along, same as anyone else.”

“Seriously, though, don't you have any regrets?” Misao asked.

“Regrets about what?”

“It's just—if you hadn't met me, you wouldn't be here now, like this.”

Teppei shook his head, as if to say,
No regrets at all
. He pressed his dry lips to Misao's shoulder. “Do you feel like making love?” he asked softly.

“Yes,” Misao said. “Always.” She stood absolutely still as he continued caressing her body. His hands, she thought dizzily, were like the hands of a magician.

Their bodies should have been too weak to feel anything but, amazingly, their weary flesh began to throb with desire. Beads of sweat dripped from their foreheads, the napes of their necks, their shoulders, their backs.

“I have no regrets at all,” Teppei whispered between increasingly ragged intakes of breath. “And I'm still alive.”
I'm a man, and I … am … still … alive.

Misao had expected her body to be dry as a bone, and she was surprised to feel it springing to life.
That's right
, she thought.
We're still alive. Something unimaginably terrible may be lying in wait for us down the road, but it doesn't matter because right now, in this lovely, perfect moment, we are still alive.

The front door had been left open for ventilation and beyond it, in the outside corridor, there was a sudden, faint sound:
ga-tonk.

Misao and Teppei were immersed in joyful, life-affirming rapture, and they didn't hear a thing.

In the hot, humid, utterly deserted outside corridor, the numerals on the elevator panel were suddenly alight: 2 … 3 … 4 …

The elevator was on its way up.

Cookie remained fast asleep.

5 … 6 … 7 …

Tamao tossed and turned, but she didn't open her eyes.

Ga-tonk.

On the indicator panel, the number eight was illuminated and the elevator whooshed to a stop. Behind the closed door there was a rustling sound, like a great many voices all talking at once. It was a low, indistinct murmur, like an army of otherworldly monks chanting a Buddhist sutra under their breaths.

The elevator door slid open, and a foul, fishy-smelling breeze drifted out into the hall. There was the sound of stifled laughter.