Some years before, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport, and Tourism issued something called a Dam Card for every dam in Japan. Each card contained information on that dam and could only be obtained by visiting the location in person. Though initially popular only among a small community of enthusiasts, these cards soon caught the attention of the general public, and special tours began to fill up with people looking to collect them.
B was hired by a leisure magazine to take photos promoting tours of a certain dam.
Constructed during the mid-1950s in , the towering concrete wall was typical of the numerous gravity dams scattered throughout Japan. No particular feature set it apart visually, and it was mostly famous as a place where people jumped to their death.
That morning, B, the editor, and the writer rented a car and drove up to the site, then began capturing the scenery around the dam and the lake. After that, an administrator for the dam took them on a mock tour.
First, they walked along the top of the dam’s massive concrete wall while the administrator described the structure and how it worked. As the writer scribbled notes, B took photos of the grounds and surrounding scenery.
Next, they moved into the inspection gallery, an area only accessible to the general public during the tour. They walked down a long flight of stairs along the dam’s outer wall and entered a tunnel penetrating the massive structure. This tunnel was used to manage and maintain the dam, and a thick iron door was installed to keep out intruders. As B stood near the entrance, the cold air leaking out from the tunnel chilled him.
The tunnel was kept at 15 degrees Celsius year-round and was wide enough for two adults to stand side by side. The space, with its arched ceiling, seemed to stretch out infinitely before them, branching off here and there. The atmosphere was quite eerie, the darkness interrupted only by a series of weak fluorescent lights.
When the editor commented on this, the administrator flicked the light switch by the entrance, and their surroundings went pitch-black. He said the staff always carried a flashlight when they went into the tunnel, just in case. B could understand why.
Their group turned corner after corner, descending a flight of stairs to view the displacement monitoring room and the discharge gate room. B started to feel anxious. If he somehow got lost down here, he’d never find his way out.
At last, they reached the tour’s last stop—the valve room.
Though staff usually controlled the valves directly from the monitoring room, this place allowed workers to operate them manually during an emergency. The room was surprisingly spacious, and valves with handles lined the walls.
The editor and the writer stood near the entrance and listened to the administrator’s explanation, but B walked farther into the room in order to take pictures.
Right at the back, he found a locker hidden behind one of the valves.
The tall, narrow locker looked like the kind you could find in any office, and B assumed it contained cleaning supplies.
Its door was cracked open slightly.
Possessed by a desire to tidy up, B decided to shut it. First, though, he peeked inside on a whim.
But there weren’t any cleaning supplies. Instead, a fancy porcelain doll sat at the bottom, staring up at him.
B reflexively yelped in surprise, prompting the editor and the writer to jog over.
Neither could believe what they were seeing.
At last, the writer calmed down enough to ask what the doll was doing there.
This is what the administrator said:
“It’s been there since before I started. My predecessor told me it has to stay where it is, though I have no idea why.”
The administrator’s casual tone only unsettled B further. Soon, the administrator was back to explaining the valves, as if nothing had happened. At that point, the editor grinned at B. He probably wanted a photo of the doll to liven up their return trip.
The tactless request bothered B, but he couldn’t refuse a client, so he surreptitiously snapped a picture of the doll when the administrator wasn’t looking.
“It was the fifty-third photo of the session. In the car, on the way back, I checked IMG_0053, and the thing in it was completely black. I couldn’t make it out at all. The editor was disappointed. And after that, every fifty-third photo I take has something black in it. It interferes with my work, and I really wish it would stop.”
The makeup artist next to A shrieked in terror, but A was more curious.
“Why is it black, though? If the doll was cursed, shouldn’t the photo have a ghost in it or something?”
B looked at A for a moment, then said, “Who knows? …Anyway, that’s all I have to say about it.”
“I interview people from all walks of life in this job, and I can tell when someone is hiding something. I realized immediately that B wasn’t telling us everything,” A continued. “I thought the image was just black when I saw it. But B kept saying it was a photo of ‘something black.’ That caught my attention. You wouldn’t describe a blank image that way. It felt like he knew there was something in the photograph, and he was trying to keep me from noticing.”
The next day at work, A checked the black image B had sent her.
“It was pitch-black, and I couldn’t see anything. So I started messing around with it.”
A opened the photo in her image-editing program and increased the brightness to maximum.
It took her a moment to understand what she was looking at.
There was a row of white shapes at the top and bottom, and something curved that seemed to be set above and inside the bottom row.
“It was the inside of a mouth. I think it was a human mouth. It looked like someone had taken a picture of another person with their mouth wide open. The white rows at the top and bottom were teeth, with a tongue in the middle.”
B had probably avoided telling her about the image because he didn’t want to scare her. A never mentioned what she found to B.
“But after that, I started to have weird dreams. I couldn’t really remember them when I woke up, but I knew they were nightmares. Some guy would chase me around a mountain, his mouth wide open. Maybe I’m cursed now, too.”
To this day, B’s submissions are missing the file marked IMG-0053.