“Are you okay?!”
Mitsuhiro couldn’t help but shout to the man at the bottom of the hole.
The man with the shaggy gray hair leaned his back against the wall and twitched his chained leg, flexing and straightening his knee a bit. It was a reflex movement, like a sleeping person trying to shake off the discomfort in their chained ankle. The resulting jingle of the metal links made Mitsuhiro flinch. The eerie sound, echoing across a room an unknowable number of floors below the ground, sent chills down his spine. His headlamp and the four orange lights in the corners were now working in tandem to fend off the darkness, but the abnormally dry air was still making his skin tingle, and the discomfort and irritation were now accompanied by an undeniable fear.
This smell, especially. It wasn’t a musty basement smell or the stench of sewage, but rather the lingering scent of a raging fire. Mitsuhiro had associated it with things like ovens left on by mistake or incinerators that had just burned a load of trash, but now he couldn’t help but think of a different scene. The relaxed expression on the face of his father, lying there in his formal suit as if he had been freed from something. The distinctive smell of a crematorium hanging in the air.
Human bones are coming out from that hole
He wasn’t sure if he’d soon fall into another panic—but just then, the chain jingled again. Mitsuhiro wanted to beg him to please stop doing that, but of course the man wasn’t doing it on purpose.
“Can you hear me? What happened?”
But the man was either asleep or didn’t want to be in the light, because he twisted his head and kept his face down.
Why was he in this hole deep underground? The first idea that came to mind was that he was a victim of an attack by his fellow construction workers. That sort of thing used to happen a lot, he had heard. The rough types you saw in this business would get into arguments over gambling debts or who loaned money to whom, or fought over who’d get work and who wouldn’t. Sometimes, they just liked bullying the weak. Occasionally it would get way out of hand—literally hanging people up in the air or leaving them in unventilated containers in the dead of summer. All sorts of things.
That was back when there were more workers than jobs, and people had to fight for whatever they could get. With the chronic worker shortage now, that sort of behavior would quickly scare away whatever applicants they could find.
In fact, maybe this was the man who sent out that series of tweets? Had this guy’s coworkers found him disparaging their worksite, and they decided to take matters into their own hands? That made more sense…except the man in that hole didn’t strike him as the type to be very social-media savvy.
“Um… Can you hear me? Are you awake?”
Mitsuhiro called out to him a few times but stopped as he became aware—and afraid—of two things. One was that the echoing made his voice sound just as eerie as the chains. The other was that he feared the edge of the hole might collapse if he leaned over it too much, sending him down with it.
He stepped away from the hole, covering his mouth and nose with the handkerchief again. Unconsciously, he was heading toward the small shrine…and from there, he remembered that there was a safer way to reach out. That large stepladder in front of the table.
Taking the handkerchief off his face, he put it in his pants pocket, not doubting for a moment that the air was perfectly fine around the shrine. He put his tablet in his bag, placed the bag on the table, and then took out the right work glove he had jammed in his jacket pocket. After putting it on, he looked at the stepladder in thought. There was a good chance this would reach the bottom of the hole. There’d be no reason to leave it here otherwise.
That, and he was weirdly convinced about one other fact. The air in that hole had to be incredibly dry. If the altar was seemingly “generating” clean air, that hole must be the source of the not-so-clean air.
Clink.
The sound of the chain made him jump again, as grateful as he was for the interruption to his idle thoughts. There was no time to waste. He had already gone through a lot of trouble tracking down these images, and now he had run into this emergency. He needed to do what he had to and get back to HQ.
But he also knew deep down why he was taking his time. He didn’t want to leave that shrine. He wanted to cling to that table and pray that the hole in front of him would just disappear. The fear of going down into it was almost primal.
Of course, as part of the crisis-management team, he couldn’t just run away without even trying to figure out what was going on. If he did, he’d be kicked off the team and lose the job he had spent so much time hunting down. A job he chose because he didn’t want to wind up like his father.
—You’re letting your mind wander again.
Get moving. Get this over with fast, go back to the office, and regale your team with your little heroic tale. Add in a joke or two.
As he gave himself this order, he was about to lift up the stepladder when his eyes were drawn to something on the table. One of the trays, covered with Japanese paper and the shide streamers, had a key on it. He had thought it went to the door on the wall, but then a flash of an idea suggested otherwise. If it was placed right by the stepladder, he might as well take it with him. It seemed like a rational idea—proof, he felt, that he had regained his composure.
So Mitsuhiro took the key and slipped it into the breast pocket of his jacket. Then, with a quick “Okay” to himself, he picked up the stepladder and approached the edge of the hole. As long as he held on to this, he was sure, he’d be able to manage even if he fell in somehow. It was such a reassuring thought, he almost wanted to hug this thing.