_OceanofPDF.com_Dance_Dance_Dance_-_Haruki_Murakami

calling out. And this was when the hotel was almost full. You’d’ve
thought a lot of people would be making noise. Not this time.”
Our drinks arrived, and we each took sips. Then she set hers down
and adjusted her glasses.
“Did you follow me so far?”
“Pretty much,” I said. “You got off the elevator on the sixteenth
floor. It’s pitch black. It smells strange. It’s too quiet. Something funny
is going on.”
She let out a sigh. “I don’t know if it’s good or bad, but I’m not
especially a timid person. At least I think I’m pretty brave. I’m not the
type who screams her head off when the lights go out. I get scared but
I don’t freak out. I figure that you ought to go check things out. So I
started feeling my way blind up the hallway.”
“In which direction?”
“To the right,” she said, raising her right hand. “I felt my way along
the wall, very slowly, and after a bit the hallway turned to the right
again. And then, up ahead, I could see a faint glow. Really faint, like
candlelight leaking in from far away. My first thought was that
someone had found some emergency candles and lit them. I kept
going, but when I got closer, I saw that the light was coming from a
room with the door slightly ajar. The door was pretty strange too. I’d
never seen an old door like that in the hotel before. I just stood there
in front of it, not knowing what to do next. What if somebody was
inside? What if somebody weird came out? What was this door doing
here in the first place?
“So I knocked on the door softly, very softly. It was hardly a knock
at all, but it came out sounding really loud—maybe because the
hallway was dead quiet. Anyway, no response. I waited ten seconds,
and during those ten seconds, I was just frozen. I hadn’t the slightest
idea what I was going to do. Then I heard this muffled noise. I don’t
know, it was like a person in heavy clothing standing up, and then
there were these footsteps. Really slow, shuffle … shuffle … shuffle …,
like he was wearing slippers or something. The footsteps came closer
and closer to the door.”
She stared off into space and was shaking her head.
“That was when I started to freak out. Like maybe these footsteps
weren’t human. I don’t know how I came to that conclusion. It was