The Graveyard Apartment Page 19

  When Misao thought about the traffic accidents, and the clogged roads, and the cranky drivers trying to get from point A to point B out there in the world, it felt very strange to her. The things that had happened in the basement of this bright new apartment building had just been too unfathomably alien, as if that underground room were part of some eerie parallel universe.

  The three Kanos sat down to a late lunch, during which they carried on a conversation that struck Misao as almost theatrically boisterous. The rain outside the windows was pelting down harder than ever.

  It was around two o’clock when the entire Inoue family showed up at their door to say good-bye. “These are for Tamao,” Kaori and Tsutomu chorused, holding out their parting gifts: a lollipop wrapped in polka-dot paper, a handful of multicolored marbles, and a small plastic action figure of a cyborg.

  “Can you stay for a cup of tea?” Misao asked, but Eiko shook her head regretfully. “We’re already running late,” she said, “and my folks are getting impatient. They keep calling and asking when we’ll be arriving.”

  It occurred to Misao that this might be the last time she ever saw Eiko’s smiling face in her doorway, and she was suddenly overcome by a feeling of profound loneliness. It wasn’t as though their friendship had a long history. They were just a couple of neighbors who had hit it off, and now one of them was moving away; that was all. Misao felt as if she had turned into a weak, pathetic person, to be taking Eiko’s departure so hard. It’s probably because my nerves are basically fried, she thought. Too many weird things had happened lately, and the parade of distressing events had taken a toll on her mental state.

  Teppei looked at Eiko and her husband and said, “We’re really going to miss you,” in a way that came across as sincere rather than emptily formulaic. Then he added in a more jocular tone, “I mean, who am I going to run my ad copy past to find out if it works or not, now that the perfect family is moving away?”

  It was a rather meager attempt at a joke, but everyone chuckled nonetheless.

  The entire Inoue clan, along with Teppei, Misao, and Tamao, crowded into the elevator, filling the air with animated conversation. Even Cookie was allowed to join the party, to the dog’s tail-wagging surprise. The mood was buoyant, but all the adults were making a conscious effort to avoid looking at the indicator panel. No one wanted to see (or even think about) the “B1” button.

  When the group disembarked on the ground floor, Mitsue and Sueo Tabata emerged from the caretakers’ apartment to join them. Being surrounded by such a large group of people was more excitement than Cookie could handle, and her loud, staccato barks filled the lobby.

  After the Tabatas and Inoues had voiced the usual expressions of reciprocal gratitude and farewell, Sueo patted Kaori and Tsutomu on their heads and handed them each a piece of candy wrapped up in old-fashioned handmade Japanese paper. No one made any mention of the basement.

  Beyond the glass entrance door, the graveyard fence was clearly visible through the mist. The Inoues’ car, a gray Honda Civic, was parked in front of the building, off to one side. The rain was still pelting down.

  “It’s just now hitting me that this is really good-bye, and I’m starting to get all soppy and sentimental,” Eiko said, looking at Misao. “Please take good care of yourselves, okay? And do come and visit us sometime very soon.”

  “Of course we will,” Misao said. As she was speaking, she and Tamao both put their hands on the glass door. The entrance, usually a neutral zone, now seemed to be transmitting a tangle of heavy, dismal, depressing feelings directly into the palm of Misao’s hand.

  “Well, then, shall we be on our way?” Mr. Inoue said in a firm voice. Misao gave the glass door a push.

  The door didn’t budge.

  “Huh,” Eiko said, turning to look at the Tabatas. “Did you lock the door again? The guy from the noodle shop was saying that—”

  Mitsue Tabata cut Eiko off in midsentence. “No,” she said. “We didn’t lock it, then or now.”

  Until that moment, everyone in the group had been wearing a congenial expression, but now the smiles froze on their faces. Sueo rushed up and gave the glass door a forceful shove. “What’s going on?” he demanded.

  Teppei was speechless. Silently, he stretched out one hand and jiggled the metal handle, but the door didn’t move.

  “What…?” Eiko’s lips were trembling. “What’s the problem here, anyway?”

  “Oh no. It’s beginning again,” Sueo whispered, almost inaudibly. He looked at the thunderstruck faces around him, one by one. Misao felt a shudder travel down her backbone.

  Cookie, meanwhile, was behaving very oddly indeed. She had been frolicking agreeably around the lobby, wearing what appeared to be the canine equivalent of a human smile. Now she stopped abruptly, with a ferocious glint in her eyes. Tamao had been holding the dog’s leash, but as her own fear took over she loosened her grip and Cookie ran free.

  “Open up! Open the damn door!” Eiko shouted, pounding on the door with both hands. Her damp palms left a faint afterprint on the glass.

  Kaori was on the verge of tears. “I’m scared, Mama,” she whimpered.

  Misao put her arms around Kaori and pulled her close. The men all stood rooted to the spot, like a cluster of statues. Teppei was visibly shaken, but after a moment he made a supreme effort to appear unperturbed. “Is this door the only way in or out?” he asked.

  “Ye-yes, that’s correct,” Sueo stammered.

  “No, that isn’t correct at all!” Mitsue contradicted, her eyes gleaming wildly. “Our apartment’s on the first floor, so someone should be able to get out through one of the windows.”

  “Oh, of course, you’re right,” Sueo said in a relieved tone.

  Mr. Inoue, who was holding Tsutomu’s hand, said, “Well, I guess that’s our only option, then. I’ll squeeze out through a window and come back around to the door.”

  “Oh no, what’s happening now?” Eiko pointed an unsteady forefinger at the door, and everyone turned to look. Misao was shocked at the incomprehensible sight that met her eyes, but she managed to keep from crying out.

  On the surface of the glass door, a large quantity of ghostly white handprints had appeared. They looked as if they were being made by rubber stamps. While the little group in the lobby watched, aghast, the handprints rapidly multiplied before their disbelieving eyes.

  Slap, slap, slap … The sound of damp flesh meeting glass reverberated through the lobby with every new handprint.

  Mitsue let out a shrill cry. The children began to sob. Cookie seemed to have been transformed into a rabid beast, barking her head off, with fangs bared and flecks of white foam flying out of her mouth.

  The scenario unfolding before them was, unmistakably, not of this world.

  Misao recoiled, then bent down to comfort Tamao and Kaori with a hug. Sueo Tabata collapsed in a wilted heap on the floor near the entrance, breathing heavily and clutching the left side of his chest while his wife hovered over him in concern.

  On closer inspection, the handprints weren’t identical. Some were large; some were small; some had the fingers spread wide apart, while on others the digits were close together. All the prints were white, but it wasn’t the white of house paint or of milk. It was a more ephemeral kind of whiteness, almost like the effect you sometimes see when children slap their sticky hands all over the front windshield of a car, and then the sun shines through those marks: a gummy, translucent white.

  An agonized shriek escaped from Misao’s mouth, followed by another. The small screams kept on coming, welling up in the back of her throat and forcing their way out into the air, for what seemed to her like a very long time.

  Almost unconsciously, Teppei enfolded Misao in an embrace, then grabbed his daughter’s arms and pulled her into the hug, as well. Tamao hadn’t stopped crying since the handprints first appeared, and now she was wheezing and gasping like someone in the throes of an asthma attack. To make matters worse, she had started hiccupping uncont
rollably, as well.

  No one had any sense of how much time had passed, but at some point the handprints stopped appearing, then began to fade away. Through the gaps among the remaining prints, the fence that surrounded the graveyard came dimly into view. The rain had been falling all along, and the cemetery was shrouded in haze.

  Eiko’s teeth were chattering noisily, and Cookie was still out of control. With a huge leap, the dog hurled herself against the glass door, banging her nose so hard that she let out a yelp of pain. It was painful to watch, too.

  Slap, slap, slap … Strangely and illogically, the same adhesive smacking sound was heard (albeit not so loudly) every time a handprint vanished from the window, as well.

  Misao closed her eyes. Leave us alone, she screamed silently, from the depths of her heart. Please. These people are supposed to leave here today, and before too long we’ll be moving away, too. Why is that so upsetting for you?

  Wait—who was she pleading with, anyway? Misao didn’t know the answer to that question. Wave after wave of chills ran down her spine, and it felt as though someone had applied an extra-large ice pack to her back.

  When she opened her eyes again, all the handprints were gone and the glass door had completely returned to normal. Mr. Inoue yelled something inarticulate and flew toward the entrance. The door opened easily, but he had pushed it so hard that his forward momentum carried him all the way outside, and he nearly fell down in the driveway.

  “Quickly!” he shouted. “Let’s get out of here, while we can!”

  Eiko appeared to have regained her faculties, and she grabbed her children’s hands and dragged them along behind her. A lukewarm wind mixed with rain was blowing through the open door. Cookie bolted outside and sped away as fast as her legs could carry her.

  “Cookie!” Tamao wailed between sobs. “Where are you going?”

  Mr. Inoue got into the Civic and started the engine while Eiko and their two children ran up. After Eiko had strapped Kaori and Tsutomu into the backseat, she turned around and gazed at her friends and neighbors with a gutted expression. She seemed to be barely holding back a flood of tears. “I’m so sorry,” Eiko said, and the desperate look in her eyes was like a silent scream.

  “Well, then, we’ll be off now,” Eiko called over her shoulder as she climbed into the car. The sound of the rain grew louder and more violent. Misao was still staring straight ahead, numb with horror, but she acknowledged Eiko’s words with a slight nod. Mr. Inoue revved the engine, and the car took off.

  Cookie came galloping back, soaked to the skin. The highly domesticated dog seemed to have reverted to a feral state. She glanced at the humans with an unapproachably fierce expression on her furry face, then lay down and began to moan softly into her paws.

  14

  June 14, 1987

  Two Sunday mornings later, Teppei was awakened by the sound of his own panting and wheezing. He had dreamed that Reiko came back from the dead and whispered something in his ear. In the nightmare, Teppei opened his mouth very wide and let out a scream, but when he woke up his lips were tightly closed and stuck together with a viscous residue of drool. Perspiration was pouring down his forehead. He glanced at the bedside clock: nine a.m. Tamao’s voice wafted faintly down the hall from the living room.

  For a long while Teppei lay motionless on his back, staring up at the ceiling. What the hell was that dream about? he asked himself as he struggled to catch a proper breath. He couldn’t shake the distinct feeling that Reiko really had been in this room a short while ago, standing next to the bed gazing down at him with her hands resting on the sheets. She was deathly still, but the expression on her colorless face seemed to suggest that she had something important to tell him. What had she whispered in his ear? Teppei couldn’t remember his dead wife’s words, no matter how hard he tried.

  Gingerly, he extended a hand and groped around until he found the place where Reiko had been touching the sheets in his dream. The spot felt slightly warm and a bit damp, though there was nothing unnatural about that. But when he discovered upon further exploration that the sheets were perfectly dry and cool apart from that one spot and the place where he had been lying, he began to have his doubts.

  Languorously, Teppei sat up in bed and experimentally wagged his head from side to side. He didn’t merely have a headache; his brain seemed to be throbbing with pain all the way down to its very core. While the sensation was nothing new—he had felt this way upon awakening every morning of late—today his hangover was particularly excruciating. The only thing he recalled with any degree of certainty was that he had drunk too much the night before.

  It wasn’t just the mornings, either. The daily headaches nearly always lingered past the middle of the day, although their severity gradually abated. Teppei’s alcohol consumption had more than doubled in recent weeks, but he didn’t think his nightly benders were entirely to blame for the hellish hangovers; their intensity was surely exacerbated by the fact that he had taken to chain-smoking, as well.

  On top of the headaches, there was the constant anxiety that went with trying to find a new place to live, along with the cumulative stress of feeling compelled to say a prayer—Please, let me find Misao and Tamao waiting in our apartment, safe and sound—every time he climbed into the elevator on his way home from work. The bottom line was that there was never a single moment when his mind was at ease and he could simply relax.

  When Teppei wandered into the living room, still dressed in his pajamas, he found Tamao enjoying her breakfast “dessert” of fruit-topped yogurt, scooping it out one spoonful at a time.

  “Good morning,” Misao said brusquely. “You were drunk as a skunk last night. Again.”

  “So it seems,” Teppei replied laconically.

  “I had to haul you to our room and put you to bed. Do you remember?”

  “Not at all,” he answered with complete honesty. He had started drinking around dinnertime, and while he did remember having a verbal altercation with Misao at some point in the evening, everything after that was a blur. He had no idea what else he might have said or done.

  “Look, I understand what you’re going through,” Misao began, flipping the switch to start the coffeemaker. The machine made a harsh metallic noise and Tamao yelled, “Be quiet!”

  “I understand what you’re going through,” Misao repeated, catching Teppei’s eye, “but I really need to ask you to get a grip.”

  “I’ll be more careful from now on,” Teppei said glumly. But what am I promising to be more careful about? he wondered. The drinking?

  In his heart of hearts he really felt like saying, “Hey, give me a break, would you? I mean, how else do you suggest that I get through the infinitely long evenings on days when I don’t have to go to work? Are you saying it should be enough for me to watch my baseball games on TV, and sip my after-dinner coffee, and sit in the bathtub thinking about what I’m going to do the following day, and maybe make love to my wife? And after all those normal little rituals, I ought to be able to drift peacefully off to sleep without a care in the world? Are you really suggesting that if I just behave myself like a good boy and try to keep it together, one morning we’ll get a phone call from the real estate broker saying something like, ‘I’ve found a buyer for your apartment!’? Yes, everything would be great if only someone with exceedingly outré tastes turned up tomorrow and said, ‘Wow, this deserted shell of a building totally checks all the boxes for me! It’s located right next to a graveyard, and there’s a basement where scary things happen, and the elevator keeps breaking down for no reason, and as a bonus, ghostly human handprints suddenly show up all over the main door—which, incidentally, has a habit of locking itself at inopportune moments. Seriously, what’s not to like? Where do I sign?’”

  While he was in the bathroom washing his face and brushing his teeth, Teppei made a concerted effort to remember what he had said to his wife the previous night. He had a vague recollection of discussing the things Misao had researched on her expe
dition to the library: the underground shopping mall, the abortive excavation, and the proposed relocation of the graves.

  Misao’s theory was that an underground road had, in fact, been dug out beneath the graveyard, and had never been completely filled in after the project was abandoned. She believed the existence of that subterranean tunnel had created some kind of paranormal phenomenon in and around the Central Plaza Mansion that couldn’t be explained by science or reason. Teppei remembered now that he and Misao had engaged in a heated argument about this matter, but he couldn’t summon up any of the details of who said what. He did recall getting angry at the end of the conversation and slamming the tumbler containing his whiskey-and-water down on the table. The glass hadn’t shattered, but the contents had sloshed all over the white lace tablecloth, leaving a large amber stain. After that, he had hurled some insults at Misao, although the only thing he clearly remembered saying (or, more precisely, bellowing) was, “Fine! Do whatever you want! I don’t give a damn anymore!” That was as far as his recovered memories went, so he must have passed out not long after that.

  I need to try to make things right with Misao, he thought. This may be part of their plan: setting us against each other. Maybe they’re trying to ruin our relationship and force us to leave this place, so they can have it all to themselves. Are we really going to play into their hands like that, and let them win? No way!

  They … Their … Them … As Teppei gazed at his haggard, baggy-eyed reflection in the mirror, he was overcome by a sudden urge to spit venomously at the glass and splatter saliva all over the place.

  What in the name of everything holy are “they,” anyway? he asked himself. Are they invisible human beings who go around leaving handprints on glass surfaces, just for fun? Or are they fiendish specters who are somehow connected with this building and have randomly decided to nest inside the head of this ancient-looking person in the mirror?