I told myself that I was doing the right thing. He would be sent for reeducation. He would become a productive citizen, not a malcontent longing for what could never be. Perhaps some day he would even thank me.
He was sent to a reeducation camp in the north of Scotland. I graduated from basic training, went on to advanced training for the Imperial Guard, and was eventually given my wolf companion, Ulla. Together, we were sent to France, where the war had already started. We were among the first to enter Poland. We were in the squadron that summoned ice to cover the Black Sea so our soldiers could march into Turkey. My den mother had been right: science and magic together created powerful weapons. It took five years, but the fire in the east was defeated, and our empire stretched into the Russian plains, into the deserts of Arabia.
When I returned to England, I asked for Jack’s file. It told me that he had died in the camp, shortly after arriving. The causes of death were listed as cold and heartbreak.
During the Empress’s reign, England has changed for the better, some say. There is always food in the shops, although it has lost its flavor. Once, carrots were not pale, like potatoes. Cabbages were green. They were not grown in great glass houses. The eggs had bright yellow centers, and all meat did not taste like mutton. Once, there were apple trees in England, and apples, peaches, plums were not imported from the distant reaches of our empire, where winter has not yet permanently settled. There was a sweetness in the world that you have never tasted. There was love and joy, and pain sharp as knives, rather than this blankness.
Our art, our stories, our poems have changed, become ghosts of their former selves. Mothers tell their daughters about Little White Hood and her wolf companion. About Corporal Cinder, who joined the liberation army and informed on her wicked sisters.
Our soldiers move on from conquest to conquest, riding white bears, white camels. Parts of the world that had never seen snow have seen it now. I myself have sent snowdrifts to cover the sands of the Sahara, so we could deploy our sleighs. I have seen the Great Pyramid covered in ice, and crocodiles lying lethargic on ice-floes in the Nile.
Our empire stretches from sea to sea to sea. Eventually, even the republics that now fight against us will come under our dominion. And then perhaps the only part of the world that has not bowed down to our Empress, the wild seas themselves, will be covered in ice. What will happen to us then, when there are no more lands to send provisions to the empire? I do not know. Our Empress has promised us a perfect world, but the only perfection is death.
You have heard stories of primroses and daffodils, and you do not believe them. You have heard that there were once green fields, and rivers that ran between their banks, and a warm sun overhead. You have never seen them, and you believe they are merely tales. I am here to tell you that they are true, that in my childhood these existed. And cups of tea that were truly hot, and Christmas trees with candles on their branches, and church bells. Girls wore ribbons in their hair rather than badges on their lapels. Boys played King Arthur or Robin Hood rather than Wolf Scout.
I’m here to tell you that the fairy tales are true.
And that, sitting in this secret place, looking at each other in fear, wondering who among you is an informant, you must decide whether to believe in the fairy tales, whether to fight for an idea. Ideas are the most powerful things—beauty, freedom, love. But they are harder to fight for than things like food, or safety, or power. You can’t eat freedom, you can’t wield love over another.
You are so young, with your solemn faces, your thin bodies, nourished on pale cabbage and soggy beef and slabs of flavorless pudding! I do not know if you have the strength. But that, my children, you will have to find out for yourselves.
Your leaders, who have asked me here tonight, believe that winter can end, if you have the courage to end it. They are naive, as revolutionaries always are. Looking at your faces, I wonder. You have listened so intently to an old soldier, a woman who has seen much, felt much, endured. I have no strength left to fight, either for or against the Empress. Everyone I have ever loved—my mother, Mrs. Stokes, Jack Kirby, Ulla—is dead. I have just enough strength to tell you what the world was once, and could be again: imperfect, unequal, and in many ways unjust. But there was warmth and light to counteract the cold, the darkness.
What do I believe? Entropy is the law of the universe. All things run down, all things eventually end. Perhaps, after all, she is not an alien, not a witch, but a universal principal. Perhaps all you can do is hold back the cold, the darkness, for a while. Is a temporary summer worth your lives? But if you do not fight, you will never feel the warmth of the sun on your cheeks, or smell lilacs, or bite into a peach picked directly from the tree. You will never hold each other on the embankment, watching the waters of the Thames run below. The old stories will be forgotten. Our empire will spread over the world, and it will be winter, everywhere, forever.
Theodora Goss was born in Hungary and spent her childhood in various European countries before her family moved to the United States. Her publications include the short story collection In the Forest of Forgetting (2006); Interfictions (2007), a short story anthology coedited with Delia Sherman; Voices from Fairyland (2008), a poetry anthology with critical essays and a selection of her own poems; and The Thorn and the Blossom (2012), a novella in a two-sided accordion format. She has been a finalist for the Nebula, Locus, Crawford, and Mythopoeic Awards, as well as on the Tiptree Award Honor List, and has won the World Fantasy Award.
All roads lead to death. Aokigahara is death. All roads lead to Aokigahara . . .
THE SEA OF TREES
Rachel Swirsky
Not ten minutes in, I spot yellow electrical tape strung through the trees. Recent, not tattered. I grab, hold on hand-over-hand as I scramble over roots and rocks. Good to have a touch-connection to the way out. If you don’t know the way back, the trees might lure you and keep you.
The forest is all shadows. Clinging mist damps the sunlight. Light penetrates at strange angles, casting a glow over lichen-covered roots, shredded bark and rotting logs.
To the left: a rope suspended from a branch that’s too weak to support a man’s weight. Hung by someone stupid or indecisive or playing a prank. Hope that’s not all I’ll find today.
To the right: a second tape trail branching into the shadows.
Better stick to the trail I’m on for now. Hope it pays off.
A few meters later: a woman’s compact on the ground. Kick it; watch it bounce end over end, mirror flashing. It leaves an indentation in the soil. It’s lain undisturbed awhile. Good. Makes it more likely I’ve gotten here before the suicide watch. I slip the compact into my pack.
I’m feeling really good right now. This is a bingo. Can already see yurei shadows hiding behind trunks. Not long dead, this one, not with ghosts still gathering.
The scent of mandarin oranges precedes a yurei flashing next to me. She’s all floating with no feet. Her Edo-style white burial kimono casts a shadow on the lichen.
Black hair sweeps to her waist, equally covering the back and front of her head. Impossible to locate her face. Tendrils curl toward me entreatingly.
This yurei’s been around as long as I have. Likes jokes. Minor pranks. She’s harmless.
“Your life is a precious gift from your parents,” she says. “Please think about your parents, siblings, and children.”
“Ha.”
She’s quoting the signs that are posted at the edge of the forest in a weak attempt to turn back the suicidal before they add to the body count among the trees. Who gets this far to be stopped by a sign?
Tendril of hair grasps my shoulder. I bug-shudder it off. “You know that’s not why I’m here.”
“Don’t keep it to yourself,” she says, still quoting. “Talk about your troubles.”
“Only trouble I’ve got right now is where to find good scavenge.”
The yurei rotates slowly in the air. A raven lock gestures down the trail I’ve been follo
wing.
“Thief-girl.” She uses her derisive pet name for me. “That one’s got nothing. Couldn’t even take a train back to Tokyo.”
Another tendril points back to the tape fork.
“That one came with everything he’s got. Red tent under a big tree.”
Her tone is too helpful. Suspicious. This yurei likes barbs and mischief. She’s not sugar unless she’s hiding something.
“Not gone yet, is he?” I ask.
Ends of her hair curl up in a shrug. “Neck’s broken. Wait ten minutes.”
All right. I open my hydration pack. Drink.
Yurei keeps floating by. Can’t tell where her eyes are behind all that hair, but she’s watching me.
“You want something?” I ask.
She bobs silently.
Sigh. “Go ahead.”
She floats closer. Tendrils of hair reach out like tentacles. I grit my teeth as she feels my face like a blind person. Hair feels like hair feels, but this hair moves like hair shouldn’t. Body knows that. Body does not like being touched by the dead.
The scent of mandarin oranges lingers as her hair withdraws. “Just wanted to remember,” she says. “What it’s like. To touch skin that wants to live.”
I wipe my mouth, reseal the hydration pack. “It’ll be ten by the time I get there. Thanks for the tip.”
You can call this place Aokigahara or you can call it Jukal, the sea of trees. Either way, it’s haunted.
The forest grew eight hundred and fifty years ago after an eruption of Mount Fuji. Green things sank their roots after the lava cooled.
The woods are very quiet. Little lives here except for ghosts and people on their way to joining them. Wind scarcely blows. Mists hang. Overhead, branches and leaves tangle into a roof underneath which the world is timeless and directionless.
Everything is trapped.
Everything is waiting.
A pair of tennis shoes, sitting alone.
Pants, voluminous over leg bones.
A suicide note nailed to a tree: “Nothing good ever happened in my life. Don’t look for me.”
The yurei, watching.
The man hanging above the red tent smells like the shit his bowels just released. He has three gold teeth, an expensive watch, brand-name trainers, and a pack of money. I’m unclear on the point of taking cash into the forest, but people do what they do.
Good scavenge, that’s sure. Most people have nothing when they come here to die. Easier to feel empty when your bank account’s the same.
Scissors, nail clippers, a comb. Copy of Wataru Tsurumi’s Complete Manual of Suicide. Half of everyone who comes here carries that. Stupid book. Stupider people. Can’t even reject their lives without instructions.
I’m about to toss it back when I hear a crunch in the undergrowth.
Nearby.
Damn it.
Snap to my feet. Pull on my pack. Now I notice what greed blinded me to: where are the yurei around this fresh death? Other living people must be on their way. Scared the ghosts off.
That yurei must have known. She trying to get me caught?
The suicide watch is not going to be friendly when they realize I’m looting. I scramble, searching for a tree to climb. No way they won’t have heard me by now, but some are superstitious, might put noises down to yurei without really looking.
I hear the smack of someone tripping. The swearing that follows is in American English.
“Damn it to bugfucking, motherfucking hell!”
I can see her now. American tourist wearing a downy red sweatshirt over jeans with sandals of all stupid things. Half-empty hydration pack hangs from her backpack. Either she can’t ration or she’s been hiking awhile.
Young. Maybe fifteen, sixteen. Makeup and clothes are all-American, but can’t conceal Japanese eyes. Probably another fucking Nisei looking for her roots.
I push into the shadows, thinking I’ll wait her out, but it turns out that despite being clumsy and unprepared, she’s not stupid.
“Sumimasen,” she says. “Eigo hanashimasuka?”
She wants to know if I speak English. I have no intention of letting her know I do. “Gomen nasai. Eigo ga wakarimasen.”
“Figures,” she mutters. “Just another slant-eyed motherfucker with half a brain.”
I can’t stop my snarl in time. She cracks a grin.
“Ha! Thought you did!”
No point denying it. “What do you want?”
“I’m lost.”
I point over her shoulder at the tape path. “You can get out that way.”
She squints. “I recognize you. In town. I stopped to use my phone. You were on the corner.”
“Sorry, wasn’t me.”
“Someone pointed you out. They said there aren’t many women who spend time up here. They said an onryo follows you around.”
People should set up shop and charge for gossip the way they toss other people’s stories around. Everyone figures it’s fair game if there’s a ghost.
I gesture at the trees. “You see an onryo?”
“They didn’t say it followed you all the time.”
I cross my arms. “What do you want?”
“I need to find a yurei.”
I point to the newly hanged man. “Wait around.”
“No. I need to find a particular yurei. I need to find my father.”
Here’s the thing about me: I came to Aokigahara when I was twenty-two, the year my onryo came for me. I’ve been here seven years since. Sure, I leave the trees, but I’m always here.
I make my living scavenging. Selling valuables. Or, most of the time, not finding anything valuable and then hunting down buyers with too much death on their minds, people who want to thrill themselves with a hint of the haunted by buying detritus that once belonged to a suicide. Combs. Glasses. Rope from a noose. Remnants of lives abandoned.
I don’t need much to live, but I earn less. That’s why I listen when the American girl caps her plea with, “I’ll pay.”
“How much?”
The figure she names is enough to buy a day or two in the forest looking for a ghost.
I won’t even have to find her father. Just spend some time searching, then turn up any ghost at all. She’ll never tell the difference.
Still, I can’t help pressing further. See what she’s made of.
I sling my backpack off my shoulder. “Sounds like a deal.”
She smiles. Gestures to herself. “I’m Melon.”
I give her an oddball eye. She laughs.
“Mom thinks nature names sound Japanese.”
I exchange mine. “Nao.”
“Cool. Where do we start?”
“Nowhere today. It’s getting late.”
It’s early evening; we could go a couple hours. But I want to stop here.
I unpack my sleeping bag. “I’ll be fine on the ground.”
She nods.
I add, “You take the tent.”
I grin as I point. The red tent still smells like the sweat and piss of the man swinging from the tree. The girl looks up. His shadow falls over her, black as bruises. She swallows fast.
Breaking her gaze from the dead man’s eyes, she crouches to unzip the flap.
“Look comfy?” I ask.
She glances back. Her too-earnest American face has a closed, hard set.
“Looks fine.”
She crawls in. I’m not unimpressed.
Two a.m. The ghost hour.
The whistling of wind wakes me. The sound comes alone, unaccompanied by breeze.
Then she’s there. My Sayomi. My onryo.
Dead lips on mine. Cold fingers stroking my thighs. Prehensile tendrils of hair circling my waist, teasing my nipples, trailing my spine.
Creep-shudder, gullet to gut. Body does not like being touched by the dead.
But my Sayomi. Body likes being touched by my Sayomi.
Timeless at twenty-one. Smooth-cheeked, willow-bodied, bloodlessly pale. Eyes shining with t
ears a decade old.
A long skirt flows to her ankles, Western-style but cut from white-flowered silk. Low-cut lace shows the apple-tops of her breasts. Lipstick stains her mouth; she opens to moan; blood-color smears her teeth.
She dressed up to die, my Sayomi.
Ashen tongue in my mouth like a cold lump of meat. Hair busy undoing the zip of my jeans, her obi-style waistband. Night air breathes cold on flesh usually hidden.
She pushes me to the ground, roots sharp in my back. Sayomi on top of me. Her hair parting my lips. Her fingers inside me.
I moan.
She always makes me moan.
The creeping horror of her hair. The unchanging beauty of her face.
My body tightens. That moment, near arriving. Her unfinished business with me nearly resolved.
It takes a great deal of will to shove her away before it comes.
She screams. Her hair ties itself in angry knots. I squirm out from underneath. Her fingernails claw the dirt where I’ve been.
Someday, I won’t get away.
Someday I won’t want to.
I gain my feet. Her hair stretches for my wrists and ankles. Her eyes are wide and guileless even as she tries to drag me down.
It would be so easy to give in.
Clouds shift. Across her moonlit face, a shadow swings.
I look up. The hanged man. Socks on his dangling feet, robbed of their expensive trainers.
The red tent. The American girl. I’d forgotten where I was.
Desire vanishes.
Sayomi pounds her fists on the air. She screams again. This time, the sound dissolves her. It becomes a windless whistle as she blows away.
Back in the silence of the sea of trees, all I can hear is my ragged breath.
I pull up my jeans. The girl’s face peeps through the tent flap. I politely look away, but she won’t give me the courtesy of silence.
She asks, “Was that the onryo?”
I shrug. She knows it was.
“Why is she a pile of bones?”
I sigh. “There’s an old ghost story. A lonely scholar lives in his house, pining away, until one day a beautiful woman visits at night. He lets her in. They make love. In the morning, she leaves, and the scholar gets sick. Every night after that, she comes to him. They make love, she gives him pleasure, and he gets weaker.”
The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, 2013 Edition Page 19
