Koji Suzuki - Dark Water

The elevator made its ascent, then stopped at the seventh floor.

When she reached the landing of the staircase leading to the rooftop from the seventh floor, Yoshimi turned on the lights of the penthouse. Two fluorescent tubes on the ceiling flickered to life. Encouraged by the light, Yoshimi bounded up the staircase to the rooftop.

She pushed the door wide open and left it there so that the fluorescent lighting would spill out to the roof.

“Ikuko!” she called.

No matter how much she strained her eyes, she couldn’t locate the small figure she sought. She looked down from the western edge of the rooftop, but the light of the street-lamps along the road did not show the dark stain that would signal tragedy. She heaved a sigh of relief. Ikuko hadn’t fallen to her death. The northern, southern, and eastern sides of the building all had balconies protruding on the seventh floor. Even if Ikuko had fallen, the fall wouldn’t be fatal.

Where did she go?

Yoshimi’s stomach threatened to rise to her gorge. Who knew? Ikuko could be somewhere in the apartment. Was it too much to hope? Such thoughts passed through her mind as she looked back at the penthouse. The white fluorescent light spilled out onto the rooftop. Immediately above the penthouse sat the creamy-skinned overhead water tank, held aloft by a turret of iron poles. Bathed in light from beneath, the coffin shaped body protruded straight up in the center of the clear night sky, holding water within its walls. This was where the household water was collected and stored before being fed to each of the apartments below.

Two cord-like objects could be seen swaying in the shadows of iron poles that supported the overhead tank. Straining her eyes further, Yoshimi was just able to make out a tiny shadow playing under the tank. It puzzled her that she could only see the shadow, but not the object casting it. The image she began to conjure up in her mind was that of a little girl crouching directly beneath the overhead water tower.

“Ikuko, is that you?”

There was no reply. To search the top of the penthouse, she’d have to scale the perpendicular aluminium ladder set in the concrete wall of the penthouse. It was a vertical climb of more than six feet that would fully engage both her hands and feet. Though such a climb, crawling spider like up the side of a wall, would normally be difficult for someone of Yoshimi’s delicate build, she hauled herself up, fuelled by the desperate desire to get a look at what was up there. No more than halfway up, she looked down to gauge how far she had climbed. She spied a dark object lodged in the darkness of the drain that ran the length of the penthouse wall. It was just where it had been the night before, where she had swept it from Ikuko’s grasp and caused it to roll away. Yoshimi’s mind began to race in confusion. Something didn’t fit. She was missing some essential point.

It couldn’t have been Ikuko!

Her right foot almost missed a step as this realization came to her. It could not have been Ikuko who’d come up to the seventh floor in the elevator; her daughter was too short to be able to reach the button for the seventh floor. A shiver ran down Yoshimi’s spine. As she looked up she saw the shadow gaining greater substance. There could be no doubt that someone or something was up there. She heard the joints in her legs crack from the strain.

If it wasn’t her daughter, who was it?

She only needed to heave herself up a little further to have her entire face level with the upper edge. Yet her courage failed her. All kinds of images flashed one after another in her mind’s eye. Her body stiffened, making it difficult to climb up or down.

At that instant, she heard the voice that she most longed to hear, calling out from directly beneath her.

“Mommy.”

Yoshimi’s strength nearly left her. Her exhaustion was so great that it was all she could do to keep her hands and feet from losing their hold on the aluminum ladder. Her jaw pressing against her left armpit, she saw Ikuko standing there in pyjamas.

“Mommy? What are you doing up there?”

There was a hint of reproach in Ikuko’s tearful question.

In the morning, she led her daughter by the hand to the elevator at the usual time. Once in the elevator, she noticed that the straining sound of the elevator cable was subtly different from how it had sounded late last night, although she couldn’t articulate the exact change. All she could say was that the light of day had brought a totally different nuance to the noise. Yoshimi unconsciously tightened her grip on Ikuko’s hand.

Yoshimi had spent a sleepless night during which she had repeatedly asked herself whether Ikuko had lied, or whether her own behaviour had been the impulsive result of an obsessive delusion.

Ikuko had insisted that she’d been in the bathroom when her mother had inexplicably dashed out of doors. “You can’t imagine how hard it was to go up the stairs to the rooftop by myself! What on earth were you doing there?” her daughter had said.

Seeing her mother clinging to the wall of the penthouse, Ikuko’s heart had pounded violently as if to prove that she’d just rushed up the stairs. The anger in her voice came from the terror of having been left alone. As an infant, she would always cry hysterically if she ever woke up to find herself alone. She couldn’t possibly have been feigning all this. It must have happened just as Ikuko said it had. Yoshimi had rushed out into the passage without thinking that her daughter might have gone to the bathroom without turning the light on. The numbers on the elevator floor indicator had put the notion of the rooftop in her head. In the absence of any other possible interpretation, she had to take her daughter’s word for it. While she was ashamed over having behaved like a possessed woman, something still failed to convince her. Why did the elevator stop at the second floor? There had been nobody there. Yoshimi remembered quite distinctly the presence that had sneaked into the elevator. She remembered the moment the warm air had turned chilly inside the elevator.

As soon as the elevator doors slid open on the ground floor, Yoshimi took in the morning sun as it streamed all the way to the centre of the lobby. The powerful rays of the sun seemed to banish the morbid aura of the night before. She spied the super ahead of her, broom in hand.

“Morning, ma’am,” he greeted her with a broad smile.

Yoshimi tried to walk past, avoiding his gaze and with only a token greeting. But changing her mind, she stopped and said, “Excuse me.”

“Ah, if it’s about that bag…” he offered.

“No, it’s not that.” There was something else on her mind that Yoshimi didn’t know whether to ask him about or not.

He no longer held his broom upright, and his hand hung casually by his side as he turned to Ikuko and asked affably, “You’ll be on your way to nursery school, then?”

“It’s nothing to do with me, I know, but you mentioned that the family that used to live on the second floor suffered some kind of tragedy. What exactly was it that

Yoshimi let her inquiry trail off unfinished. The super reined in the cheery smile, contriving an expression more suited to recounting the misfortunes of others.

“Ah, that? Well, it all happened two years ago. The little girl was about the same age as little Ikuko is now. She was playing somewhere around here and went missing, you see.”

Yoshimi placed her hands on Ikuko’s shoulders and pulled her daughter closer to her.

“When you say that she went missing, do you mean she was kidnapped?”

The super leaned his head to one side. “I don’t think it was done for a ransom. You see, the police turned it into an open criminal investigation.”