Koji Suzuki - Dark Water

He brought his headlamp closer to a stalactite. The longer he inspected the wall, the more apparent became the bizarre pattern fashioned there. Daubed onto the contrasting ochre of the cave surface was dark-gray mud. He stretched out his hand to feel the surface. The pattern was clearly different from the cave surface. He wondered whether it was a motif that someone had intentionally fashioned there. No, he felt sure that wasn’t the case. He concluded that it was more likely to have been a muddy stain on the back of someone who had passed through the shaft just as he was doing now. As this person had been passing through, the mud on his back must have rubbed off onto the limestone wall.

Sugiyama felt his energy rapidly ebbing away. The only reason he’d been tempted to this madcap adventure was the belief that no man had ever set foot in this grotto before. There was all the world of difference between being first and being second. Viewing this as a good a time as any, he called out to Sakakibara. As soon as he shouted, however, a hail of small stones struck him in the face. He immediately covered the top of his helmet with both hands for protection. Once the stones stopped falling, he looked up to see Sakakibara’s blue overall-clad form bumbling about, and then enter and block the shaft.

“Say, Sakakibara!” he shouted even louder.

“Hang on! I’m coming down!”

Unable to contain himself, Sakakibara appeared to be lowering himself down the shaft, feet first.

“No, get out of there!”

Their ensuing argument over who was going down or up lasted but a few seconds. A sudden shower of small stones was immediately followed by a loud boom, a brief scream, and the horrible sound of crushing bone. Then, as quickly, the shower of stones subsided. The lower half of Sakakibara’s body blocked the mouth of the shaft, preventing Sugiyama from appreciating the extent of the catastrophe that had just befallen him.

“What’s happening up there?”

He voice began to quiver, for he already instinctively knew that something was very wrong. Sakakibara failed to respond, but a short moan percolated through the gloom instead.

Sugiyama made his way up until he could feel Sakakibara’s feet on his head. He flashed his light up through the gap between Sakakibara’s waist and the wall of the shaft. To his amazement, the space above the mouth of the shaft was no longer open; it was blocked by the boulder.

He was stupefied. He felt the blood drain from his head. As he braved the dizziness, he regretted that they hadn’t properly secured the boulder. With every rock-slide, the boulder had tilted under its own weight to fall back to its original position, encountering and crushing Sakakibara’s head in the process. It was too cruel a punishment to be meted out to someone for simply having deserted his post. Yet Sugiyama could not suppress his desire to curse Sakakibara for his stupidity.

The beam of his flashlight caught the ghastly white of Sakakibara’s jaw, under which the sinews of the neck were strained tight. His head was wedged between the side of the shaft and the edge of the boulder so that Sugiyama could not see the face from the nose up. For some time, Sugiyama just stared in blank disbelief. His legs trembled, and he felt nauseous.

“Are you okay?” He tried to say this, but the words would not come out of his parched mouth.

Yet the truth was only too obvious. No amount of talking would make any difference now. Down the strained neck ran thick rivers of blood. Sugiyama was on the point of reaching out for Sakakibara’s foot to check for signs of life, when suddenly Sakakibara’s body arched backwards and began to convulse. The movements were too unnaturally spasmodic to be anything but the throes of death. His eyes transfixed by the horrendous sight, Sugiyama shivered and tasted bile.

There could be no denying that his situation was desperate. It was like being trapped under a manhole capped with a one-ton manhole cover. Sugiyama was a trapped rat.

He felt he’d been there in the darkness much longer than just two days. He had spent the first few hours after being trapped floundering about trying to find a way out, wasting a good deal of time and energy. Now that he’d been there for a full forty-eight hours, he was huddled up almost motionless by the waterside, resigned to the fact that he had but two options, and only two options. The problem was which to choose. It had occurred to him that he could try pushing up the boulder blocking the mouth of the shaft. Yet he’d already tried to move it and knew just how much it weighed. It had taken every ounce of his and Sakakibara’s energy as they had strained in unison. There was no way he could push that boulder up while dangling in the pit with no foothold. Moreover, Sakakibara’s corpse was dangling down from his trapped head, blocking any space there may have been. The corpse prevented him from even reaching the boulder, and Sugiyama didn’t have the courage to pull Sakakibara’s gradually chilling body down from between the boulder and the shaft’s edge.

Giving up the idea of getting out through the shaft, Sugiyama decided to focus on the opposite direction, making his way downward. In any direction he looked, the interior of the limestone cavern was intricately configured like a labyrinth. It might conceivably be possible to find a way out by a different route. Yet he ended up in a tubular cavern with a radius of about thirty feet. The low portion of the sloping floor was flooded with underground water, forming a subterranean lake. Whichever route he followed ended up at this subterranean lake. He vainly searched every nook and cranny along the edge of the lake for a passageway to another chamber. He realized he was trapped in a sealed cave.

For the past ten hours, he had not switched on his headlamp except to glance at his watch. Although he carried two headlamps, he had long switched over to the spare and could not afford to waste a second’s worth of power.

It was now Tuesday afternoon — half past five. Under normal circumstances, he would have been getting ready to leave work and head for home.

He made it a rule to have supper with his family at least three times a week. No sooner would he open the front door of his home than his son Takehiko would come running up to him. Sugiyama loved to hear his son as he tried to enunciate the words he’d just learned. As he lifted his son into his arms, the boy would utter faltering sounds in an attempt to give his father an account of every little thing that had happened that day. The moments offered great relief and comfort to Sugiyama. The desire to experience the joy of those moments inspired him with the energy he needed to finish up work quickly so he could return home.

Sugiyama remembered that his wife had wanted him to take the oil heater out of storage. He had put the bulky oil heater at the back of the closet and it was more than his wife could handle. It would soon be getting chilly, and all he could think about now was that his wife and son might feel the cold. It was the only heater they had, and he simply couldn’t get it out of his mind. He regretted not having taken it out for them before setting out on Sunday morning. It was very cold inside the cave, although temperatures were supposed to remain constant throughout the year. It was probably under fifty degrees where he was at that moment. Although it was odd that anyone in such a predicament should be worrying about others, it didn’t occur to him that it was incongruous.

Sugiyama felt the urgent need to get out of there, fuelled by an irresistible desire to get back to his family. Once again he pondered all the conceivable possibilities open to him. Although he knew he had covered everything over and over again in his head, there was always the possibility that he may have overlooked something.