When it rains, it pours. There was nothing new about that. But after so much bad luck, I was starting to wonder if there was someone conspiring against me.
First, our flight was canceled due to strong winds, throwing our whole itinerary out of whack. And then it snowballed, and our new itinerary overlapped with some days that Miyaki absolutely couldn’t be scheduled due to something to do with the handover at her old department. I tried telling them I’d be fine on my own, but apparently, something concerning was going on in the village we were headed to, so I was forced to take a partner, just in case. That wasn’t even the worst part, though. The worst part was who that partner turned out to be.
I was pouting in the office as Miyaki attempted to mollify me with a gentle smile, when I spotted a car roll silently into the parking lot. I recognized the vehicle. As well as the person sitting in the driver’s seat behind the windshield’s glare.
“When the guy in that car comes in, tell him that I died,” I said to Miyaki. A knock sounded at the door as I went to leave the room.
Miyaki dutifully opened the door and bowed to the person on the other side.
“Sorry, Katagishi is…”
“Let me guess, dead again?” said the voice, dry and solemn.
“Thoroughly deceased,” Miyaki responded. The owner of the voice chuckled softly in response.
“My poor brother-in-law. Please let him know I’ve come to pay my respects.”
I leaned against the steering wheel of the rental car and glanced at the passenger seat.
Apparently, for the time being, I was stuck staring at the pale, morbid face of my brother-in-law, Rokuhara, as I worked. Just my luck.
“You don’t seem enthused to be here.”
“Gee, I wonder why that could be. I told you what happened in that last village you sent me to, didn’t I?”
Rokuhara’s eyes, along with his tear-shaped mole, contracted into a smile.
“This case should be easier. The village in question is already underwater, after all.”
“Are you kidding? That only makes it worse.” Raindrops splattered across the windshield, forming shapes like crushed flowers. “The whole reason we don’t try to destroy divine incursions is because we know that we can’t. And because the fallout could lead to something that can’t be undone.”
“Much like human relationships.”
I pretended not to hear Rokuhara’s stupid comment. I used the wipers to clear the windshield, causing the massive wall of the dam to unfurl into view, hazy against the gray sky.
I turned off the engine. As soon as I exited the car, I was greeted by the sound of water howling like a giant beast. The rain, which had started the day before and continued to fall in sparse spells even now, had caused the water in the lake to rise. The discharge was several times what it would usually be. The dam looked like a prison wall, wet and buried among the dark-green trees. White streaks, like claw marks, were visible where the water usually passed.
A man who appeared to be a guard rushed toward us with a red baton in hand, his vinyl raincoat whipping in the wind.
“Thank you for coming all this way from Tokyo! We probably should have called before things got so urgent, but well, it’s an unusual situation,” he said in a fluster.
The guard paused for a moment before speaking again. “This way,” he said, waving his baton toward a building at the other end of the parking lot. Rokuhara and I steered ourselves in that direction, like cars being directed in traffic.
In contrast to the cold darkness outside, the inside of the control station was bright with fluorescent light and heated. Something about the space, however, still felt unpleasant. There were desks and computers arranged in an orderly fashion inside the room the guard ushered us into, with one wall filled with monitors that flickered with green graphs and rows of mysterious numbers. A worker sat inside, apparently having nothing to do, his face illuminated by the weak glow of the LCD screen. He turned to stare at us. Rokuhara and I sat down in front of him.
“This is the witness, by the way,” the guard said while doling out mugs of coffee.
“Witness? Witness to what?”
The worker glanced down, twiddling his interlocked fingers. The shoulders of his navy-blue work jacket, which he wore over a button-up shirt, were wet.
“There’s been a lot of rain lately… Last night, a strange noise was detected out by the dam, and my boss and I were trying to figure out the cause. We don’t usually go out there in person on account of how dangerous it is, but my boss said he had to go and see. I tried to stop him… He even used the elevator. Everyone knows you can’t use the elevator when it rains.”
“Why can’t you use the elevator? Does the rain put it out of order?” Rokuhara asked, interrupting the man. The man shook his head.
“No, not exactly. You just can’t… Anyway, I waited for thirty minutes, then an hour, and he still hadn’t come back. I started to worry he might have fallen into the dam. But it wouldn’t help if I fell in, too, so I telephoned another worker first before I went to look. He hadn’t fallen into the dam, though; he was still sitting there inside the elevator. His face was pale, like his knees had gone out from underneath him.”
The man finally lifted his head.
“I tried speaking to him, but all his responses were strange. ‘Let’s just eat when we get back.’ ‘We’ll pick something up on the way home.’ Stuff like that. I had to shake his shoulder hard to get him to finally look at me, but all he said was he could hear his dead wife’s voice.”
I made eye contact with Rokuhara as he glanced my way. I decided not to ask about the boss’s prior mental state or if he had ever been known to use drugs.
“My boss couldn’t stand by himself right away. I know it sounds stupid. But I swear, I saw it for myself. When I dragged him out of that box. At first, I thought it was the light from the dam reflecting off the windows of the pitch-black elevator… When I asked one of the higher-ups about it, they didn’t really answer. They just said, ‘Now you know’…”
“And what did you see?”
Instead of answering, the worker hunched over the desk and tapped at the keyboard with the fingers of one hand. One of the monitors switched from a green graph to a camera feed showing the dam. I could see the water tracks, like claw marks, and the drab, impossibly dingy walls. The turbid, mud-colored water and the rows of trees visible in the background made it look more like a dismal stretch of dirt with a forest behind it. I knew that some dams were supposed to be popular tourist attractions, but I doubted anyone would be lining up to see a place like this, which managed to combine mechanical coldness with the fathomless dread of nature.
As we continued to stare at the great volume of water as it hovered, fell, and broke, I realized there was one spot—maybe it was a glitch with the camera—that seemed to form a giant shadow. The area around it was faintly lit by searchlights. I squinted. Eventually, I was able to make out what I was supposed to be seeing, but my brain still refused to accept it.
The water continued to fall, sending up a spray from the pool below. A person was protruding from the surface. Considering the height of the wall, they would have had to have been at least four meters tall in order to be visible like that. Of course, no flesh-and-blood human could stand there unfazed underneath all that pressure.
“It’s not lights. It’s eyes,” Rokuhara said.
He placed his chin in his hand and peered at the screen. What had appeared to be searchlights at first were, in fact, emanating from the head of this shadowy, indistinct figure. Like the two oval yellow glints in a person’s eyes.
“Does it always just stand there like that, not doing anything?”
“Yes, according to the others, it shows up like that every now and again when it rains.”
The worker stood up and stared at the monitor with us.
“Whatever this is, does it have anything to do with the fact that you’re not supposed to use the elevator?” Rokuhara asked, bringing the rim of his mug to his lips. I don’t know how he managed to drink coffee while locking eyes with that creature through the monitor.
“I think so… Maybe. It’s hard to say for sure… I just started, though. My boss would probably know more.”
Rokuhara glanced toward me.
“Well? Care for a trip in the elevator?”
“You go right ahead. I’m staying here.”
I turned to the monitor again. The long, black figure was completely still. I didn’t sense anything malicious in the golden glow of its eyes, which seeped into the cloudy sky and murky surface of the water. If anything, the creature almost looked lonely.
If all it did was stand there, there wasn’t much that we could do. Nothing new there. Life would have been much simpler if the entities we encountered could have been clearly classified as good or evil. But it was no use speculating about their intentions when most of them left behind reverberations simply by existing.
“Where is your boss now?”
“In the hospital.”
The control station fell silent, as if time had paused. Even the video on the monitor could have been mistaken for a still image.
“Well, it looks like we’ve hit a dead end. Maybe we should go out and investigate, then come back here later,” I said.
“It’s getting late; why not have lunch first? I think my brother might have skipped breakfast this morning.”
“Good point,” I answered without thinking.
A moment later, my breath caught in my throat. The voice had interjected itself so naturally into our conversation that I hadn’t even questioned it. But who had spoken?
Rokuhara and the worker were quietly setting their mugs down on the tray. It couldn’t have been either of them. Besides, it had been a woman’s voice. One I hadn’t heard in a long, long time, though I could remember how it had sounded whether I wanted to or not, as if I had heard it just the previous day.
Rokuhara gestured for me to hand him my cup. There was only one person who would refer to this man as “my brother”—
I glared at the shadow in the monitor. There was no way it could possibly see me through the screen, but I could have sworn that the golden light contracted ever so slightly. Though whether in a smile or in pity, I couldn’t say.