Dark Water

Yoshimi asked herself again who on earth her ‘friend’ might be.

‘Never mind. Just get out,’ she told her daughter.

Ikuko put the washbasin in the sink and stood up with a swoosh. Yoshimi wrapped Ikuko in a bath towel and held her. Despite having been immersed in the tub for so long, Ikuko’s shoulders were strangely cold to the touch.

Ikuko fell asleep on her futon, with the picture book she had been reading open in front of her. Yoshimi debated whether to stay up for a while and read, but finally decided to turn the light off and go to sleep. She fell asleep as soon as she pulled the light summer sheet over her chest.

She had been asleep for about two hours when her consciousness began to edge its way back up from slumber to wakefulness; her casually extended hand could no longer detect that familiar warm presence at her side. Yoshimi’s body rolled frantically to and fro. Sliding her hand along her side, she could feel nothing. She was wide awake in an instant. Half sitting up, she groped the surface of the futon where Ikuko had been sleeping, and began calling her daughter’s name. The tiny nightlight at the foot of the futon was enough to reveal the emptiness of the small room: Ikuko wasn’t there.

‘Ikuko! Ikuko!’ Yoshimi tried shouting louder.

This kind of thing had never happened before. Ikuko was a deep sleeper. Once she had snuggled down to sleep, she always slept soundly through to the next morning without ever waking up during the night. She would rarely get up to go to the toilet.

After checking the living room and dining area, Yoshimi was about to check the toilet, but the bathroom light was out so Ikuko obviously wasn’t there. Just then, she heard the sound of tiny footsteps in the passage outside.

Yoshimi dashed to the door, where she noticed that the door chain was not fastened. Did she forget to fasten the chain when they returned from the rooftop, or did Ikuko unchain the door?

Unconcerned about being clad in nothing more than her negligee, she rushed out into the corridor outside. She could hear the sound of the elevator moving. The elevator hall was halfway down the corridor. She stood there and watched the floor numbers light up in succession. The fifth-floor lamp went out and the sixth-floor lamp came on. Then the sixth-floor lamp went out, the seventh-floor lamp blinked on, and it stopped. The elevator had gone to the top floor, where no one lived. Someone had just gotten off on the seventh floor. In that instant she suspected that that someone was Ikuko. That suspicion was being confirmed in her mind. Ikuko could not bear the thought of the red Kitty bag being left out there on the apartment rooftop, Yoshimi concluded. She must have been desperate for that bag. At the same time, though, Ikuko knew better than to believe that her mother would allow her to pick up something that someone else had thrown away. That’s why she had waited until her mother was asleep before heading for the apartment rooftop. Although Yoshimi doubted that Ikuko had the courage to overcome her fear of the dark, she pressed the elevator button to call the cage back down from the seventh floor. The elevator stirred, made its way down to the fourth floor, and flung its doors open. Yoshimi pulled the sides of her negligee close together over her chest as she entered the elevator. She pushed the button for the seventh floor, only to feel the elevator plunge softly downward, contrary to her expectations. Yoshimi took several steps away from the door, until her back was against the wall of the elevator. She brought her clenched elbows together to cover her chest more closely.

‘Oh dear, someone’s getting on.’

That someone, thought Yoshimi, must have called the elevator from one of the floors below before she pushed the button at her end. Whoever it was had to be on the ground floor, actually. No doubt it was one of those men living alone on the fifth or sixth floor coming home drunk. It was already past one o’clock in the morning. Her horror of being harassed by a drunk made her resent the cramped elevator itself, which offered her no means of escape. As the elevator began its descent, the scorched buttons began to light in succession.

The elevator came to a sudden halt. She looked up at the row of numbers indicating the floor. It had stopped at two.

…Why the second floor?

She braced herself. She’d never get used to riding elevators late at night; it was a nerve-wracking experience. The doors opened, but no one was waiting for the elevator. Yoshimi gasped, made her way slowly forward, then peered outside, scanning both sides twice. The dark deserted passage seemed to stretch on to infinity. Obviously, there was no one there. Who on earth then, had summoned the elevator? The doors started to slide shut automatically. Yoshimi stepped back reflexively. Yet, the second before the door had shut completely, she was quite certain that she sensed a presence steal swiftly into the elevator. Maybe it was just her imagination, but the temperature in the confined space of the elevator seemed to have dropped suddenly. She was not alone in the elevator; there was something else with her. She felt someone’s breath on her abdomen, the kind that turns white on a cold winter’s day.

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 streetlamps 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 aluminum 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 spiderlike up the side of a wall, would normally be difficult for someone of Yoshimi’s delicate build, she hauled herself up, fueled 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 pajamas.

‘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 behavior 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 center 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.’