Somewhere far away, he heard the sound of a running toilet. Then there was a loud scream, and Mitsuhiro jumped up, kicking off his blanket.
He was in his bedroom at home. Morning light was streaming in through the curtains. He wasn’t in his company car—what a relief it was to find himself in a familiar bed.
Then Sae burst into the bedroom and clung to Mitsuhiro’s chest, crying as though something was chasing her.
“What’s wrong, Sae? Did you have a nightmare?”
“There’s something scary!” she cried loudly. “It’s scary!”
“Scary? Where is it?”
“I was in the bathroom! I went in, and I didn’t know it was there!”
Mitsuhiro got out of bed, holding Sae in his arms, and headed for the hallway. Suddenly, Sae screamed again and pulled on Mitsuhiro’s shirt, trying to keep him in the bedroom.
“Daddy, no! It’s scary!”
Tears were now streaming down Sae’s face. Her terror was almost overwhelming. “It’s okay,” he said. “I’ll just take a quick look. Stay here, Sae.”
He stroked Sae’s back to calm her down. It took some doing, but he managed to get her to let go of his hand.
“Careful, Daddy,” she said, hugging Mitsuhiro’s blanket instead.
“Don’t worry,” he gently replied and went out into the hallway, blinking his sleepy eyes.
Of course, he didn’t really think there was anything there. She was probably just being oversensitive because her mother was gone. Probably startled by her own shadow or something.
He saw that the bathroom door was open and blocking the hallway. It hadn’t been thrown open with enough force to bang against the wall—he didn’t remember hearing a sound like that. Sae must’ve used the door as a barricade to protect herself from whatever “scary” thing was there.
The poor girl. It was a childish, unfounded fear, but this was her whole world right now. With that in mind, Mitsuhiro grabbed the doorknob and pulled it toward him.
—See? Nothing there. There’s nothing to be afraid of, Sae.
He was going to say that, but when it appeared from behind the door, Mitsuhiro almost leaped backward, stifling a scream.
—Run! Run! Get away!
The words echoed in his head, but his feet were frozen to the floor.
—A horde of the dead, coming this way!
He was terrified. But nothing was physically approaching him…
…because it was just some stains. Mitsuhiro exhaled sharply. Dark-gray stains had appeared across the walls of the hallway, leaving the wallpaper warped and wrinkled in places. All together, the marks joined together to create the forms of dozens of men and women, young and old, who had either been burned to death or were currently burning, writhing in agony. It looked like a large black-and-white photograph of the gruesome scene had been pasted onto the wall.
The stains spread around the corners and onto the ceiling. Mitsuhiro could smell the dry, pungent odor of a crematorium filling the hallway.
Was it a water leak? Mitsuhiro tried hard to come up with a logical explanation. But whatever the cause, the stains were there, and the image they formed was beyond macabre.
—It only looks that way by accident, Mitsuhiro told himself. He had to tell Sae that, too. But no matter how he tried to change his perspective, no matter how much he moved around in the hope that it’d look different from another angle, that image of people losing their lives, their dignity, in fire did not disappear.
—Let’s cover it up for now.
Figuring out what this was could wait. He had to keep Sae from being scared all day. As he thought this, he sensed something moving behind him and whirled around. It was his daughter. She was holding a rolled-up blanket, crouching low as she ran across the hallway to the kitchen. Then she quickly ran back and handed Mitsuhiro something.
“Daddy, do you want the amulet?”
It was the one he had bought from Tamai Construction.
“Ah… Right, yeah.”
Mitsuhiro looked at the wall. He really didn’t want to perform the little ritual Yoshio Tamai taught him. If burning the amulet solved the problem, then great, but what if it didn’t? He’d be out another two hundred thousand yen. The money would just vanish, like ash.
“Let’s pin this amulet to the wall with a thumbtack or something.”
“Aren’t you going to do the trick?” Sae asked anxiously, unsure why he wasn’t rushing to take care of it.
“This is probably just water leaking from the floor above. It’ll be fine. If we leave the charm there until we replace the wallpaper, it won’t get any worse.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
Mitsuhiro nodded, internally hoping it was actually true.
“I’ll go get mine.”
Sae timidly shrugged and entered her room, trying not to look at the stain on the wall.
He saw her take her corkboard off the wall of her room, her blanket in the other hand. It was for pinning up her favorite postcards and pictures. She handed him the board, and Mitsuhiro took a tack out of it.
“Thank you, Sae.”
Mitsuhiro approached the wall with the charm and thumbtack, and Sae retreated back into her room, peeking out from the doorway like the wall was about to explode.
Or maybe this really is an explosion, thought Mitsuhiro. From the shades of the staining, he could tell that it had spread from the center of the wall outward in all directions.
Mitsuhiro instinctively searched for the spot where he had written the character for appease in ash. Not searching, exactly. He soon realized that he intended to put the amulet there. It didn’t take long to find, because of course there were no stains on that part of the wall. That ritual was still working. In fact, he could even faintly see that character still written up there.
鎭
Suddenly, Mitsuhiro realized why the stains had appeared here.
—This is what they’re after. The purpose of the stains is to erase the ritual characters. They want to swallow each one we put up in here one by one.
In that case, it made sense to place the amulet here, where the stains first appeared, to maintain its effectiveness. He had long since given up figuring out if this was rational or not. Right now, he just wanted to deal with it and show Sae he was at least trying to do something.
So Mitsuhiro pinned the charm to that one stainless spot with a thumbtack. He could hear Sae breathe a sigh of relief, as if she’d half expected the wall to gobble up her father.
“I think we’re safe for now,” he said, smiling at her. But Sae’s eyes were still open wide. She was beginning to panic a bit.
“That scary thing hasn’t gone away, Dad. It’s still here. It’s still here.”
Her tone was urgent, as if she suspected her father couldn’t see it.
“I know, Sae. We’ll have to replace the wallpaper, so let’s just cover it up with something for now.”
“With what?”
“Maybe newspaper?”
Mitsuhiro couldn’t think of anything else, so he went to the living room with Sae and took out a stack of Nihon Keizai Shimbun newspapers that had been stuffed into the magazine rack. It was the largest financial paper in Japan, and he purchased them whenever his boss told him to, usually when they printed relevant articles about the Shibuya area or the construction industry. Even in this allegedly digital age, people in Japan still primarily thought of newspapers as just that—news printed on paper. Maybe that showed how behind the times Japan’s media had become, but either way, it meant Mitsuhiro had enough newspaper to cover the stain on the wall.
With Sae’s help, they were able to completely cover the hallway using thumbtacks and tape. The newspaper-covered wall wasn’t much of an aesthetic improvement—it made the condo look almost dilapidated—but it beat seeing that hellish inferno every time they walked down the hallway.
“I hope it goes away,” Sae quietly muttered. He could tell from her tone that she didn’t expect it to.
“Daddy will take care of it, okay? Let’s get you ready for school.”
As he went to the bathroom with Sae and brushed his teeth, he idly wondered how much it would cost to fix the wallpaper. If they could just replace part of it, then that would be great, but what if the whole hallway needed renovations? The potential cost wasn’t just depressing; it made him feel sick. If they kept bleeding money like this, their finances would be in bad shape soon. As much as he had been working with the homeless lately, he knew that once you hit rock bottom, climbing out was extremely difficult. Like falling into that hole. If someone didn’t lower a ladder in for you, there was no way out.