The Ark E-Book

Haruo Yuki

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Vertigo
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 359

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2026

Beschreibung

'A pure action horror movie set-up, a life-or-death moral dilemma and a terrific, devious twist... I could hardly look away' GILLY MACMILLAN, AUTHOR OF THE BURNING LIBRARY One week to escape High in the mountains, a sudden rockslide traps ten hikers in an abandoned bunker, nicknamed 'The Ark'. Then it starts to flood. One person will be sacrificed There is only one chance of survival - in order for the rest of them to escape, someone must be left behind. But one of them has other plans As they struggle to decide who to abandon, the group is torn apart by a brutal murder. And it won't be the last. Can they unmask the murderer and reach safety before the water rises? Or will The Ark become their tomb?

Leseprobe

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THE ARK

HARUO YUKI

TRANSLATED FROM THE JAPANESE BY JIM RION

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Contents

Title PageEpigraphPrologue1:The Ark2:Disaster and Murder3:Severed Head4:Knife and Nail Clippers5:ChoiceEpilogueAvailable and Coming Soon from Pushkin VertigoCopyright5

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And behold, I Myself am bringing floodwaters on the earth, to destroy from under heaven all flesh in which is the breath of life; everything that is on the earth shall die.

But I will establish My covenant with you…

genesis 6: 17–18

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Prologue

The fluorescent lights on the hallway ceiling flickered dizzyingly.

The floor at our feet had an industrial feel, made of steel plates welded to a metal frame and covered with plastic sheeting. The walls, too, were steel plates, giving way in sections to protrusions of bare rock.

We were on the highest floor of three in this underground building. Even so, it was nearly ten metres below the surface.

Nine of us stood in the corridor, as solemn as a congregation preparing for service.

The door to room 120 stood open. A corpse, rope tied around its neck, lay in the narrow storage room.

The murderer had to be one of the nine people standing there. And no one knew who it could be except the murderer themselves.

No one spoke. Our ears were filled with the far-off hum of the generator.

It seemed, too, as if we could hear the sound of water filling the floor below. But that steady flow made no sound. It must have been our imagination.

We wanted to call for help, but our phones got no reception. Not just because we were below ground. Even if we could get out to the surface, we were deep in the mountains, far from any towns. There was no signal.10

Someone had been murdered. Strangled to death.

For almost anyone, being faced with such a crime would be the shock of a lifetime.

But at that moment, it was not the murder that weighed most heavily on us.

The threat we faced was far greater than any single murderer. In fact, some of us were likely thinking that this murder might be the key that allowed us to break free of the trap we were caught in.

To escape this underground building, shaped like some kind of cargo ship buried in the mountains, one person among the nine of us would have to be sacrificed.

We would have to choose one person to die. Otherwise, we all would.

How to make that choice? Who among these nine people could… or should be sacrificed?

It had to be the one who killed our friend.

Every one of us except the murderer was thinking the same thing.

We had one week. We had to find the murderer before our time ran out.

11

ONE

The Ark

I

The seven of us left the path running alongside the highway and entered the woods. We stepped over fallen logs and waded through dead leaves along the way until we broke through to a secluded clearing overgrown with dead weeds.

Before us was an ancient-looking wooden bridge spanning a ravine about ten metres deep. The sun was already sinking out of sight behind the mountain peaks.

Ryuhei reached out one thickly muscled arm to grasp the railing of bundled staves and gave it a shake.

The bridge creaked, and at the sound, his chiselled wrestler’s face crinkled. He turned to Yuya, standing beside him, and asked, ‘Are we seriously going to cross that? You never said anything about this. It’ll collapse!’

‘Nah, it’s fine. I went over before. It wasn’t that bad. It’s all right, see?’

Yuya stepped out onto the bridge and spread both arms wide as he rocked his body back and forth, showing off the bridge’s stability.

Of course, it was not like there was any other choice. The rest of us followed him.

12After we crossed the bridge, I took my smartphone out of the pocket of my jacket to check the time. It was 4.48 p.m.

When she saw me holding my phone, Hana, in her neon-coloured hiking outfit, sped up to walk next to me. She was holding her own phone in her right hand.

She asked, ‘Shuichi, are you getting a signal?’

‘No. Mine’s been at zero bars for almost an hour.’

‘Right. Mine, too. What do you think? We’re not getting back to the house today, are we?’

No one answered. It was obvious there was no way we’d be making it back.

The terrain on the other side of the bridge was a rough meadow surrounded by steep mountainside. A few hundred paces on, Yuya suddenly shouted.

‘There it is! I can see it! Just a little further. It’s right there!’

Yuya, who must have been feeling our dissatisfied and doubtful glares burning into his back for some time, sounded relieved. But none of the rest of us saw anything like the entrance to a building.

This little adventure had started that morning. After we had all gone out for a boat ride on the lake, Yuya told us a story.

‘There’s this mad place within walking distance of here. Want to go and see? It’s out in the woods, right, and there’s this massive underground building. And, like, way back I bet they did messed-up shit there, but now no one even knows about it. No way.’

The day before, we had come to stay at a vacation house in Nagano Prefecture that belonged to Yuya’s old man.

13Yuya was a friend from our university days, and he’d invited us to all come out. There were six of us who had hung out together back then, so it was also a bit of a reunion.

It had been two years since we had last seen each other. Yuya, who had been known for his bleached hair and piercings, had let his hair go natural and taken the metal out, so he was almost a stranger in my eyes.

A certain sense of foreboding had driven me to bring my cousin along, making it seven of us in total.

An underground building in the mountains. It sounded like pure fantasy.

It’s incredibly difficult to build anything underground, and Yuya made the place sound huge, so who would be able to construct something like that so far out in the mountains? And for what? It was hard to believe, but Yuya said he had actually been there about six months before.

It started to sound interesting, so we all agreed to go see it if it wasn’t that far.

But now the reality was not living up to the promise. We walked and walked and never seemed to reach this ‘underground building’. Yuya had made it sound like it would be maybe twenty or thirty minutes, but he had spent the past few hours staring uneasily at his map app.

This place was, of course, not listed on the map. Yuya said he’d dropped a pin in his app when he’d come here on his own, but it turned out the pin had actually been quite a bit off the mark. After wandering lost for a while, it was already nearing sundown by the time he figured out where we were.

14‘Well, Yuya? What’s your plan? Are you seriously thinking we should spend the night in this underground building of yours? Cause there’s no time to get back now. Is it safe? You did say it was really messed up, didn’t you?’

‘No, no, I said they got up to some messed-up shit there way back, is all. It’ll be fine. There’s no way anyone’s there now. We can try out some abandoned building exploration.’

Ryuhei and Yuya had gone on about ten metres ahead of the rest of the group.

That was the way it had been the whole trip. Ryuhei acted like he spoke for all the rest of us and kept telling Yuya how unhappy we were.

Mai, walking beside me, shot me a strained grin. She seemed embarrassed by Ryuhei’s bluster. In the gloom of nightfall, her long-lashed eyes seemed to float against her pale face.

I wanted to talk to her but kept my mouth shut, worrying that Ryuhei would notice. Mai didn’t seem to want that either, since she quickly looked away before he could see us.

I looked behind me and saw Sayaka rushing to catch up. Her thick brown hair was up in a bun and her brow was running with sweat.

She asked something that seemed to have been worrying her for some time.

‘Um, what is the toilet situation in this underground building of yours? And it looks like we’ll be sleeping on the floor with our backpacks as pillows. Are you all OK with that?’

Yuya hadn’t shared any details of the amenities with us before we left. We hadn’t been planning on spending the night, anyway.

15Shotaro, my cousin, who was walking nearby, answered her. ‘You shouldn’t get your hopes up. I imagine it’s not going to be too pleasant. It’ll surely be better than sleeping rough, though. And if it’s underground, it shouldn’t be too cold, at least.’

‘Ah. You’re right. And it does get cold out at night.’ Sayaka accepted Shotaro’s opinion easily enough.

The day before had been the first time my university friends ever met my cousin. He had fit in even better than I’d imagined.

Shotaro had inherited a fortune from his mother five years before, and ever since he’d avoided working. Instead, he went on trips, studied geology, just bounced around from here to there. At first it had seemed like he was planning on just burning through his inheritance, but then he would sometimes go overseas with a few million yen and come home with several times that.

As his cousin, I had known him much longer than any of my friends, of course. While I was closer to him than anyone else in my life, there was still a lot about him I didn’t really understand.

The reason I’d invited him along was that I’d had a feeling this little gathering would end up stirring up some old conflict with another member of the group, and I’d wanted someone on my side. It had been easy to convince him to come. He said he wanted to check out the local rock formations.

The trouble I’d been fearing hadn’t happened yet, but instead, now we had this surprise trip to some mysterious underground building. I was glad to have him there, since I was sure he could handle whatever happened, if anything did. 16

II

Yuya stopped short in the middle of a withered meadow. He pointed at the ground.

‘Here! It’s right here! The entrance!’ he shouted.

He crouched down and pushed his hand though clumped dead weeds. He flipped up a round metal hatch, like a manhole cover, about eighty centimetres across.

We looked inside. The hole went straight into the ground. The sides were lined with concrete and steel bars embedded in the side formed a ladder.

‘This is how we get in—’

‘What?! No way. No. Look at how tight that is!’ Hana interrupted him. She shone her smartphone light into the darkness. It was not bright enough to illuminate the floor.

I felt the same way. Of course we shouldn’t have expected anything more comfortable than an old coal mine all the way out here, but from the way Yuya had been talking I’d expected something a bit more civilized.

‘Yeah, sure, the entrance is a bit scary, but once we’re inside it’ll be fine. It’s huge in there, I’m telling you. There are three floors. One night will be no problem.’

Hana and the others were clearly not convinced. I wasn’t particularly keen on it, either.

Ryuhei was the first to break.

‘Right, fine. I’m going to go see it. I just go through here, right?’

Ryuhei climbed down the ladder, trying not to let his backpack scrape against the concrete sides. Yuya glanced at the 17three women as if to gauge their reactions, then hurried after Ryuhei as if to keep him from claiming all the glory of being out in front.

Hana, Sayaka and Mai stood quietly whispering ‘What are you going to dos’ and ‘Who’s going to go firsts’ back and forth until, finally, they took it in turn to climb down the ladder. Shotaro and I brought up the rear.

After climbing down seven or eight metres, we touched ground.

A cave-like tunnel stretched out in front of us. It was quite high, so we could all pass through without so much as stooping.

It went down in a gentle slope. We all walked along it, shining our phone lights ahead.

A little way in, a massive boulder almost closed off the tunnel completely.

It looked too heavy for anyone to move by hand. And, for some reason, it was wrapped tightly in thick chains.

‘What the hell? Were they trying to drag it out and gave up halfway or something?’ I asked.

‘I wonder,’ Shotaro answered. His tone hinted at some deeper meaning.

We squeezed past the boulder and saw an iron door.

In front of it, the raw stone floor gave way to dirty wooden planking. Clearly, we were entering the main structure.

Yuya opened the door and shone his light inside.

‘Whoa, it’s true. Look at that!’ Ryuhei said. It was hard to tell if he was impressed or intimidated.

The door had opened onto a wide corridor with a low ceiling. It twisted to one side up ahead, so we couldn’t see very 18far along it, but from the way the sound of the door opening echoed, we could tell it must stretch out for a long way.

‘Ugh. It reeks of mould,’ Mai muttered.

The air was filled with a spoiled, stagnant odour. It was like the mouldy depths of a damp forest where the sun never reached, mixed with an almost chemical smell.

‘How did they light this place? There’s no way the mains reach out here.’

‘They don’t. There’s a massive generator, though. It looked like it might actually run. If it doesn’t, well, we’ll just have to make do with our phones. I’ve got a power bank.’

Ryuhei and Yuya stepped through the doorway and into the dark corridor. Everyone filed fearfully after, holding up their lights like a parade of fireflies in the dark.

The floor was covered with a deteriorating layer of cheap-looking plastic, and the walls to either side were lined with doors like a hotel.

Just before the corridor turned left, Yuya pointed to the room door on the right. It had a plate reading 107.

‘This is where the generator is. It didn’t look broken, but still…’ He turned the doorknob and shone his light into the room.

It looked like a general machinery room. The walls were lined with black cables which were bundled together and connected to a generator at the far end.

It was a fairly standard commercial power generator, about the size of a bathtub. I’d seen the same type once when working part-time at a hospital. An exhaust pipe ran up the wall and out through the ceiling. It looked older than I was, but 19the many liquid propane tanks fuelling it all looked relatively new.

We checked the tank gauges and saw they still had fuel left. Yuya and Ryuhei walked around the generator, trying to figure out how to start it up.

When he realized they had no idea what they were doing, Shotaro quietly said, ‘First, make sure the tanks are hooked up properly. After that, I think we can get it going by turning on the engine switch and pulling the starter cord.’

Yuya did as he said, and the engine started up with a sound like a motorcycle.

A moment later, the fluorescent lights hanging from the ceiling began to flicker. Their blue-white light soon filled the facility.

‘Oh, lovely. It would have been a real pain without any lights,’ Sayaka said, glancing at the others’ faces as she did.

With relief in the air, we left the machinery room.

The underground facility was filled with mystery. Now that the lights were on, we wanted to explore, but exhaustion won out over curiosity.

Yuya led everyone a few steps back up the corridor. He opened the door to room 106, on the opposite side.

‘This used to be the dining room, it looks like. Might be nice to take a rest, yeah?’ he said.

It was a large, rectangular room filled with long tables, which were all lined with decrepit old chairs. It looked like it could seat dozens of people at once.

Hana pulled out the nearest chair.

‘Ugh, filthy. You think they’ll hold?’ she said.

20The chairs were all simple things like you’d see in a school dining room. But they’d been in this dank underground room so long, they’d sprouted black mould and started to rot.

Hana gave the seat a wipe and gingerly sat down. The chair did not break.

On close inspection, I saw the long tables were covered with a cheap veneer. They were all rotting, and it looked like it would be dangerous to put much of your weight on one.

There was a sink in the back of the dining room. When I turned the tap, there was an airy coughing sound, then dirty water came sputtering out. I let it run for a bit. Soon it started to clear.

‘Huh. There’s still running water,’ I muttered to myself.

There was a shelf for dishes above the basin. It was lined with heavy, old-fashioned plates and glasses.

Sayaka knelt down beside the wall, fussing with something.

‘Oh, yes! The sockets are working. Look!’

She had plugged her smartphone charger into an electric socket hanging from a mess of exposed wires.

We all slowly gathered in the dining room, stretching and yawning.

There was little conversation. We all collapsed in exhaustion, like we used to do on arriving at a mountain hut to spend the night after a long hike. It was the first time during this gathering it truly felt like the old days.

But behind everyone’s conspicuous stretching and relaxing, a heavy, uneasy mood filled the room. After a while, Shotaro tapped me on the shoulder.

21‘Shuichi, do you want to look around with me? This really is an interesting place.’

I had just been thinking about eating something, but I was also curious about this underground structure.

Just then, though, Yuya broke in, an eager look on his face. ‘Um, if you’re going to go exploring, Shotaro, I can show you around, right? I saw all kinds of stuff when I came the last time.’

We agreed, so the three of us left the dining room and started our exploration.

The low ceilings, dim fluorescent lights, filthy floors and walls made of cheap, drab materials, the exposed cabling running this way and that… It all gave the feel of a battered old cargo ship.

To add to the illusion, the space and layout felt like a ship’s, too. The whole facility was built of steel plates welded to a latticed frame of steel braces. It was long and narrow, with three decks, and consisted of long corridors lined on both sides with what looked like storage rooms and bedrooms with simple bunk beds made from steel pipes.

Each door had a nameplate with a room number, like in a hotel. Going back to the entrance and standing with our backs to it, room 101 was on the right and room 102 on the left. As we went down the corridor, the numbers went up, 103, 104, and so on. Every room had a number, both storage and bedroom alike. There were crooked gaps between the doors and the surrounding wall, with no proper doorframes. The whole structure was similarly crude.

Room 104, next to the dining room, was the lavatory. It had four toilets in stalls, like you’d see in a public restroom. It also had a shower stall, though none of us felt like using it.

22The air stank, but not enough to truly bother us. It seemed the building had been out of use so long that all traces of human waste had decayed past that point.

‘The sewer pipes don’t reach here, do they? I wonder where all the waste went,’ I thought aloud.

‘They probably gathered it in septic tanks then pumped it up above ground. Same with the rest of their wastewater,’ Shotaro answered, staring into an old-fashioned squat toilet.

The toilets soon lost their fascination, and we returned to the corridor.

We went past room 107 and the machinery room, after which the corridor took a ninety-degree turn to the left. At the bend, there were metal stairs leading down to the middle floor.

We ignored them for the moment and continued along the corridor. Five metres further on, it turned back ninety degrees to the right. From there, the corridor was once more lined with doors. They started at 108, and the final room was numbered 120.

The walls outside the rooms showed bare, black stone poking through in places. It felt a lot like the stone walls of the tunnel back at the entrance. They were damp, and it looked like water was seeping out in spots.

It seemed that whoever built this underground facility had followed the shape of a naturally occurring cave. They built multiple floors, partitioned them with walls and furnished the whole like a building. That odd bend in the corridor was the result of a natural curve in the surrounding cave.

When we reached the end of the path, Shotaro spoke with the gravity of someone at the end of a museum tour.

23‘Twenty rooms. It must have cost a pretty penny. Overall, I’d say they did well. Although it was obviously totally illegal.’

‘And you haven’t seen everything yet. There are still two more floors,’ said Yuya. He took the lead and guided us back to the stairs.

The next floor down was the same as the upper: a lightning bolt-shaped corridor lined on both sides with doors. It didn’t have a large space, like the dining room above, and the area below the toilets above was occupied by the septic tanks. Still, there were twenty rooms, numbered 201 to 220, as Yuya explained.

The lower corridor was lit with fluorescents as well. However, just to the left of the stairs after coming down, the end of the corridor with lower-numbered rooms was dark. Lights were installed, but they weren’t on. Perhaps a wire was cut somewhere, but since the other end was lit, it must be on another circuit.

Before we started looking into the rooms, Shotaro asked, ‘How did you find this place, Yuya?’

‘Oh, well, it was about six months ago, yeah? I got really into solo camping, and so I wanted to find some spot that absolutely no other arsehole knew about. So, I just kept going deeper into the hills, and I found that lid thing. I came inside, and it was just wild in here,’ Yuya said. He stood in the middle of the corridor and spread his arms wide. ‘What the hell is this place? Who built it? And what for? I got to tell you, they surely did some messed-up stuff in here. I can feel it.’

Shotaro thought for a moment, then said, ‘I think this was probably a base for some kind of militant group. About fifty years ago or so.’

24‘Seriously? Militants? Like, back in the seventies?’

‘I haven’t examined it very closely, but the structure looks like something from those days. And there was that big boulder in the middle of the entrance tunnel, right? The only explanation I can think of for that is, it’s an emergency barricade. They’d use it to block that metal door if anyone tried to get in. But it looks like some other criminal group used it after them. Recently, I imagine. The wiring was installed twenty years ago, at the earliest. I don’t think any of the old militant groups lasted that long.’

A similar, if less concrete, suspicion had been forming in my mind. There really wasn’t any other explanation for why someone would build something like this underground in the mountains. They didn’t want to be found. But speaking the words aloud like that only made the place feel creepier.

Shotaro went on, his voice cheerful. ‘Well, anyway, I think I’d need to look closer to get a better idea.’

He walked into room 208, which was right in front of us. It appeared to be storage for refuse.

We poked through it looking for anything useful, but there as only a pile of rubbish: used work gloves, rusted sickles, old speakers, copper pipes and scraps of wood. Some of it was practically ancient, while some was relatively new. It was like a mounded rubbish tip.

‘Huh! It looks like even denizens of the criminal underground sometimes wear straw hats,’ Shotaro said. He was grinning as he showed me a wide-brimmed straw hat with a crumpled crown.

25I grinned back. ‘Guess so. I was wondering if we might turn up an old pistol or little bags of white powder, if you get me. But not here.’

‘They’d have taken the really bad stuff with them when they pegged it. If whoever hid out here even messed with that stuff. Maybe if we combed the place, we might find something interesting.’ Shotaro placed the hat on top of a battered wooden box.

We moved on to room 209, across the corridor at an angle from 208.

At first glance, it appeared to be dedicated to another pile of junk. It was smaller than the first one, but there was a pile of rubbish in one corner.

When we turned on the lights, though, we saw that the things inside were not nearly as mundane as those in 208. With all that talk about criminal organizations using this place, I’d imagined things like weapons and drugs, but what we actually found was somehow more unpleasant.

The first thing my eye fell on was a restraint with four hand and ankle cuffs attached to long chains. In the back of the room was a blackened chair of steel pipes with a seat that rose to an unpleasant point.

There were other things, too. A thick wooden rod wrapped in leather, and a mystifying contraption made of a metal frame just big enough for a person’s head to fit inside with vice-like devices attached. There were piles of rusted spikes and concrete blocks, as well.

Yuya, Shotaro and I exchanged looks. We were almost embarrassed, as if we’d accidentally glimpsed a stranger’s intimate secrets.

26Yuya walked over to a corner of the room and crouched down. He pointedly did not touch anything.

‘No way. Bloody hell. These are for torturing people, right?’ he said. His voice was thick with emotion.

‘Obviously,’ Shotaro replied.

It seemed Yuya hadn’t seen this room the last time he’d come. ‘You think they actually used this shit?’

‘I don’t really know, but it looks like it, right? I’ve only seen stuff like this in museums. I always doubted they were real, though.’

The torture devices were old and rusted. It’s not like they were covered in blood, but they were far too worn just to be tasteless decorations. I looked around at the floor. There were long furrows in the plastic lining, as if someone had been scratching at the floor, writhing in pain.

I’d read about incidents where internal conflict in the militant extremist groups of the 1970s had sometimes exploded into infighting, even murder. If we were right about the history of this building, then it probably shouldn’t be so shocking to find implements of torture here.

The dead metallic structure suddenly seemed to take on an aura of bloody violence.

‘But, you know, there’s no proof they were used, right?’ Yuya pressed him.

‘No. And even if they were, it would have been ages ago. These are all just relics of history.’

Yuya seemed relieved at Shotaro’s calm pronouncement.

I decided to let his words convince me not to let whatever had happened here in the past bother me too much. Naturally, 27I’d never had any contact with torture devices in my life before, and no matter how twisted things might get in my future, I surely never would again.

We went and had a look around the other rooms nearby, but there wasn’t anything else even half as troubling.

‘Oh, hey, Yuya, you said there were three floors, right? How do we get down to the bottom one?’ Shotaro asked. We couldn’t see any stairs going down from where we were.

‘Right, the way down is at the very end of the corridor, but you don’t really want to go down there. For all kinds of reasons. Well, let’s go over and see. You’ll understand.’

Yuya led us onward.

The numbers on the doors got lower as we walked. The lights were off in this part of the corridor. It wasn’t so dark we couldn’t see our way, but I turned my phone light on all the same.

We saw a heavy steel door at the very end. It was similar to the door at the entrance to the building, but smaller scale.

He pointed at it.

‘I think the way into this place is right above us, see?’

Thinking back on the way we’d come, I guessed he was right.

Yuya slowly opened the door.

This was a space totally unlike the other rooms. Inside, there was a narrow opening in the rock, like the mouth of a bottle, and beyond that, all the walls were exposed black stone. The ceiling was lined with metal plates only at the very entrance, and it was lower here than anywhere else. Beyond that lining was a lip of stone. This room alone remained an unfinished cave.

28On the wall at the very back of the room was a device like a winch off some sunken ship.

‘What the hell is that? It’s covered in rust.’ The winch was wound with thick chain. The chain ran round a pulley, then up through the ceiling to the upper floor.

‘Ah! I bet that’s the chain wrapped around that huge boulder!’ I said.

‘It must be. I told you it was a barricade,’ Shotaro replied.

Turning the winch would drag that rock down the tunnel to block the metal door above.

‘Right. Just like you said, isn’t it? A barricade. I didn’t really give it much thought. That’s why this is the only room without any lining on the ceiling, so they can run the chain through more easily.’

‘I suppose. There might be more to it than that, though,’ Shotaro said, sounding intrigued.

‘Oh, and then the stairs down to the bottom floor are over here. But we can’t use them. See?’

Yuya pointed toward the back right of the room.

There was a large square hole cut in the floor, and stairs leading down.

We went over close to look down and immediately understood what Yuya meant.

The stairs to the bottom floor were underwater from the fourth step down. It looked like the water almost came up to the ceiling of the floor below. I crouched down and stretched my hand as far as I could. I could just barely touch the surface.

‘It’s cold!’ I exclaimed. ‘Are you serious? The place is flooded?’

29‘It’s underground. And it was built by amateurs. Since it’s surrounded by natural rock, of course it’s flooding. Nature is just taking its course. I imagine the pump that would normally take the water out is broken. That might even be why they abandoned the place,’ Shotaro explained.

The bare rock on the walls of the floor above had, in fact, felt like they were seeping water.

‘Yeah, I doubt they were hoping for some kind of holiday home with a pool. Honestly, I’m a bit scared now. This is going to eventually flood the whole building, isn’t it? If it doesn’t stop, I mean,’ I said.

Yuya laughed out loud.

‘Yeah, eventually, if you want to speak theoretically or whatever. But it’s going to take a while. It doesn’t look like the water level has changed at all since I was here six months ago. It might have come up a bit. So, maybe in five years or something.’

That was a relief, at least.

I shone my light down into the water and could see that the bottom floor looked like it had been left mostly unfinished, with exposed girders and bars held in place with concrete.

There wasn’t much else to see, so we went back out into the corridor and returned the way we came.

As we approached the stairs, we saw Sayaka walking down the other end of the corridor with her smartphone held out. It looked like she was taking pictures of everything.

‘Yuya, is that tunnel we came through the only way in? It seems odd that they’d only have one entrance or exit,’ Shotaro asked.

30‘No, actually, there is one more, but we can’t use it. You know that bottom level? There’s a narrow tunnel from there leading up to the surface, almost like a rubbish chute or something. But we can’t get there because it’s flooded.’

‘I see.’

‘Oh, right! There’s kind of a map in the machinery room. You could see for yourself,’ Yuya offered.

The three of us went back there together.

Yuya went over to a desk and opened the drawer. It was packed with random things. Old sticking plasters, nail clippers, biros and stationery.

He pulled it all out and put it on the desktop. Finally, he dug out a piece of A2 sized paper folded into fourths. It had a diagram printed on it.

‘Here it is. I stuffed it way in the back last time.’

It wasn’t exactly what I would have called a map, more of a building plan for the whole facility. It was yellowed and tattered and looked like it was made when the place was first built.

At the top, someone had later written in biro, ‘The Ark’. That must be the name they’d used for this place.

The Ark was, as we had already seen, a long, narrow three-level structure with a bend in the middle like a backwards zed. The diagram showed that the bottom floor was not divided into many smaller rooms like the upper two, but a few large ones. The tunnel we’d taken was at the western end, and at the east end of the lowest floor there was another tunnel leading up to the surface.

‘You see. The tunnel that opens near the bridge must have been an emergency exit. It has the same kind of flip-up hatch as the one we came through. We passed it on the way here, actually. And I bet no one even noticed it,’ Yuya said.31

THE ARK: FLOOR PLAN

THE ARK: CROSS-SECTION

32So, the other hatch had been just by that terrifying bridge we’d crossed. I hadn’t noticed, of course, but neither had Shotaro. It had already been dusk by that time, so that was no surprise.

‘Did you look inside, Yuya? Is it just like the layout shows?’ I asked.

‘Oh, yeah, I did. I even tried climbing down into it. There’s a ladder, and I got all the way down to around where the ceiling of the bottom floor would be, and that’s where I hit the water. So, I came back up.’

‘Not much of an emergency exit, then, is it?’ Something else caught my attention. ‘What are those?’ I said, pointing at the wall above the desk.

There were two CRT monitors there. They were the kind of old fifteen-inch screens we used to have in our library at school to watch video cassettes. Each had a label on its bezel. One read ‘Entrance’ and the other ‘Emergency Exit’.

‘Right, those! I noticed them when I was here before. I think they’re monitors for surveillance cameras. See the labels? I checked at the entrances on my way home last time and saw what looked like cameras up in trees near each of those hatches. One by each. So, I figure the video must feed to here, right? But last time the power wasn’t on so I couldn’t check.’

While he rattled on, Yuya reached out and switched the two monitors on.

‘Oh, they’re working! And the camera feeds are coming through!’

33The two monitors came to life with a quiet electric buzz and displayed the video from the two surveillance cameras.

The sun had already set, so the images were as murky and blurry as an old woodcut. The cameras were certainly as old as the monitors, so the image likely never got very clear.

Even so, we could make out the withered grass of the meadows above. The moonlight showed a peculiar hump in the middle of each: the entrance hatches. The video feeds would show if anyone came near either one.

Yuya traced the shape of each hatch with a finger as he went on.

‘Look, here, this is the entrance we came in through. And this one is the emergency exit, near the bridge.’

‘So that would put them about a hundred metres apart from each other.’

‘That’s right. About that much. East and west. If anyone stumbled on either one, whoever was in here could escape through the other one,’ Yuya answered.

Setting up and running the wiring for cameras must have been a real effort. I was astonished.

‘This is some tight security. What did they get up to in here?’ I wondered aloud.

‘This place might actually have been used by some kind of cult for special discipline or the like. The way they set up the cameras is a bit weird if they were just worried about people sneaking in. It looks to me more like they were worried about people escaping,’ Shotaro said.

It was a convincing argument.

34‘You think they really did name it after Noah’s ark, like in the Old Testament?’ I asked.

‘I can’t think of any other place they could have got the name from.’

I thought back on my limited experience with the Bible. I’d flipped through it for a cultural anthropology lecture in my university days. The famous story of Noah and his ark was just a short section at the beginning of the Old Testament.

The Lord found that the world was overcome with wickedness. He then came to Noah, the only righteous man, and told him that he had decided to destroy humanity. Noah was to build an ark to survive the coming flood. When the ark was complete, Noah and his family and two of every animal on the earth, male and female, went into the ark, and waters covered the surface of the earth. Or, that was how I remembered the story going. The original text was relatively direct, just talking about Noah building the ark and riding out the flood. Many of the stories based on it, though, both novels and films, showed people mocking the pious Noah and his family as they built the ark on a mountaintop.

A facility built deep in the mountains in the shape of a ship… The ‘Ark’ name might have been a later addition, but it certainly seemed to fit.

It seemed a pretty poor joke to me. I could see no signs of piety in this weird old building underground. All we’d found of note was a pile of torture devices.

None of our group were particularly religious or political. Rather than being part of Noah’s pious clan, we would surely have ended up on the other side with the mocking bystanders.

35‘Hey, what are you lads up to?’ Sayaka stood looking in through the open door. The sound of our voices must have leaked from the machinery room.

She was soon followed by Hana, who’d apparently been looking for Sayaka.

‘There you are, Sayaka. Were you out taking pictures?’

‘Oh, yeah. I wanted to record it all, since I doubt I’ll ever come back.’

She explained how she’d looked into quite a few of the rooms and taken pictures of what was inside.

‘That’s fine and all, just don’t be posting them online anywhere. If any of the old owners saw, it could be a pain.’

‘Oh, right. That makes sense. I’ll keep them to myself.’

While Sayaka and Hana stood talking, Mai and Ryuhei came up together.

All the others had been as curious about the inside of the building as we had been and gone on their own explorations. Now, all seven of us were gathered in the machinery room.

The others were surprised to see the monitors switched on.

Yuya started filling them in on what he’d already shared with Shotaro and me: the flooded bottom floor, the emergency exit and the cameras.

‘Yeah, all right. I think we get it,’ Hana interrupted him. ‘But right now, I want to go outside for a bit. I got a message from my boyfriend around noon. If I don’t answer today, he might end up dropping by the house while I’m out.’ She tapped the smartphone in her hand as she spoke.

Yuya’s face wrinkled in a frown. ‘Oh, but listen, the reception out here is really bad.’

36‘I know. I just want to go out and try it out. If it doesn’t work, I’ll give up. Anyone want to come with me?’

Anyone would be nervous walking around alone in pitch dark mountain woods.

‘Well then, I’ll come along, shall I?’ Yuya offered.

Hana, though, seemed less than pleased at the idea of going out alone with Yuya.

Sayaka threw her a lifesaver.

‘I suppose I should try, too. I’ve probably got some work emails waiting. Is that all right?’

‘Oh, really? Great! Thank you!’

And it was settled. Hana, Sayaka and Yuya would be going outside for a bit.

When the three of them left, Ryuhei came up behind me and stood staring at the monitors.

‘Are those really live?’

From a distance, the poor quality meant the screens almost looked dead.

But before I could answer, there was movement on the monitors.

‘Oh, there they are.’

The camera looking over the entrance hatch caught the three signal seekers arising from the tunnel.

The silhouette in the lead waved a hand at the camera. That must have been Yuya. Then came Hana in her gaudy jumper, followed by Sayaka. Their faces were hidden in the dark.

A little while later, three figures holding glowing smartphones appeared in the emergency exit feed. They crossed the bridge, probably heading for higher, open ground in search of a signal.

37‘I guess they are working,’ Ryuhei muttered, apparently convinced.

Then he and Mai went over to the desk and started rifling through the stuff Yuya had piled there. Eventually, they got tired of it. Ryuhei took Mai’s hand, and they left.

Shotaro and I stood silently in the machinery room, staring at the monitors.

With nothing better to do, I asked my cousin a question that had just popped into my head.

‘Do you think the others have eaten?’

‘No idea.’

We’d all been so caught up in exploring the place, I doubted any of us had eaten anything yet.

Yuya, Hana and Sayaka came back about thirty minutes later. We spotted them through the monitors easily enough.

But something was different.

‘Wait… There’s more of them now? How could that be?’

The three figures on the monitor had doubled. There were six people out there now.

It was like something out of a horror film. Shotaro and I headed to the entrance to see what was going on.

Yuya was the first through the door. He was followed by Hana. Her jumper was muddy now. She must have fallen somewhere.

Then came Sayaka.

And behind her, a family of three, clearly nervous about the whole situation.