……This is something I heard from someone else.
I can't say I've verified any of it myself, but apparently this sort of story is still whispered around the Sennichimae area, even now.
It happened one night, or so I was told. There was a man who ran a restaurant in Sennichimae — I won't give his name — somewhere around forty, quiet by nature, the serious type. He'd stayed behind late at the premises, alone, to oversee some renovation work. The contractors had already gone home, and the place had fallen into a deep, still silence. The time, as I understand it, was just past midnight.
Because of the construction, the flooring had been pulled up, leaving the ground itself exposed. Beneath the concrete, old soil had come to the surface — dark, they said, in a way that seemed off. One of the workers had mentioned it during the day: *this soil smells strange, doesn't it.* The man hadn't thought much of it at the time.
But alone in the middle of the night, that smell suddenly reached him.
Something half-damp, and beneath that, faintly sweet — a peculiar smell. Not the smell of earth. More like cloth that had stayed wet and never dried, or old timber that had soaked up water and gone soft and sodden. The man was bent over his blueprints, thinking vaguely, *what is that.*
And then.
From the corner of the exposed floor, right along the base of the wall, there came a sound.
*Knock.*
At first he assumed it was the building settling. An old structure like that — when the temperature drops at night, it makes noises, that sort of thing. But then, a moment later: *knock.* And after a brief pause: *knock knock knock.* A steady rhythm, he said. Coming from beneath the floor. Like something tapping.
From below.
The man found he couldn't move. Not from fear exactly — his body had simply locked before any feeling had the chance to form. He stood there holding the blueprints, doing nothing but listening.
The sound went on for a while, and then it stopped.
After that, the man gathered his things, went outside, hailed a taxi, and went home. The next day he fell ill, and spent the better part of a week in bed.
Perhaps he was simply exhausted. Perhaps the smell was nothing more than what construction sites smell like. Perhaps the sound was a pipe, or something in the walls. You could say all that, and you wouldn't be wrong to.
But Sennichimae — as many of you may already know — has been home to a graveyard and an execution ground since the Edo period. Decades ago, a great fire tore through a department store on that very site, and many people lost their lives. What lies sleeping beneath that ground, no one can say.
The man, speaking of it later, said this.
That sound, he said. He wasn't sure it was knocking after all. It might have been more like — scratching, he thought. Like fingernails, dragging.
……Against the underside of the ground.
