Brave Story - Miyuki Miyabe [3]
“Now, with its neighbor being a shrine and all, they couldn’t rent the building out to just anyone. The area is zoned for industry, but it’s right up against a residential zone,” Kuniko told them at the dinner table, repeating what she had heard from the real estate agent’s wife. “Still, they went around to a lot of potential tenants: a coffee shop, a beauty parlor, a cram school. They were going to make the upper floors into rental apartments. Until…”
Days after the building’s steel frame had gone up, the first contractor on the job went bankrupt. Daimatsu Properties quickly began a search for another contractor to pick up where they left off, but since starting that kind of work halfway through is much more difficult and costly than starting from scratch, it was hard for the company to find a deal. After a two-month delay, they finally found a new contractor to resume construction. Thus the blue tarps changed for the first time.
“So this new place came, and they got started, and then…”
Unbelievably, after only a few months, the new contractor, too, went bankrupt.
“As you can imagine, Mr. Daimatsu was in quite a fix, and went dashing about looking for another contractor. He finally found a small one interested in the property. In fact, just like Daimatsu Properties, this new contractor was basically a one-man operation.”
It was the last job he ever took. Three days after the paperwork was signed, the third contractor died of a stroke.
Kuniko shook her head. “Such a small operation couldn’t run without its foreman, and there was no one to take his place. There was a son, but he was still in college. Ultimately, the contract was voided, and so the building still stands, unfinished.”
Walking by the building on his way to school every day, even Wataru could clearly see the signs of deterioration on the abandoned edifice. The concrete had dried out and begun to flake at the corners. Exposed steel struts were stained gray by the rain. Inconsiderate passers-by had thrown garbage at the base of the tarps, and stray dogs and cats had taken to using the building grounds as a litter box.
One day in early spring, a strong wind blew off one of the tarps, exposing a steel support post and a steel staircase and landing on the second floor. This was the only part of the building interior visible from the outside. If the ghost had been seen anywhere, that was the place.
Whose ghost was it supposed to be, anyway, Wataru wondered. If it was an old man, then, based on what he knew of the story of the site’s construction, maybe it was the ghost of the third contractor who had died from a stroke just after taking on the project. But why would he be wearing a hooded cloak? Wataru couldn’t imagine the foreman of a building contractor walking around dressed like that. Even if, for argument’s sake, the man had owned a favorite hooded coat, and now wore it as he haunted the empty halls of the building, that still didn’t explain why he was haunting it in the first place. Was he concerned about the progress of construction? Did he regret having died unable to fulfill his contractual obligation? It seemed a little dry, for a ghost story. And, if he was in the construction business, surely he would realize that rumors of a haunting would drive away other potential contractors, making things even worse for Mr. Daimatsu, the very client he had promised to help.
Wataru had thought about it all through recess, and when he got back