The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, 2013 Edition

by Paula Guran [editor]

  The girl’s watching eyes are bright like Sayomi’s, but tearless.

  “One night, the scholar’s worried neighbor looks through the window,” I continue. “He sees the scholar in bed with a skeleton. He tells the scholar what he saw, and that night, when the ghost arrives, the scholar knows what she is. But he doesn’t see a pile of bones. When he looks at her, he sees a woman.”

  “What happened to the scholar?”

  “He died.”

  Silence. Then, “What does your onryo look like?”

  I shrug again.

  “Did you know her? When she was alive?”

  That’s enough. I don’t listen to whatever she asks next.

  A girl may love a girl, but eventually both become women.

  One goes to university in America. The other studies in Fukuoka. Each misses the other, but one is distracted by learning English and sunbathing by Lake Michigan and eating cafeteria lunches. For the other, Fukuoka is what Fukuoka has always been, but drained of joy. Joy that will never return for girls who’ve grown into women.

  Even across the boundary of life and death, flesh may yearn for flesh. But when the dead pleasure the living, they pull them to their side, as the ghost woman pulled her scholar.

  As a ghost, Sayomi doesn’t talk, but just before she died, she sent an e-mail. I didn’t receive it until after she was gone. Sometimes it feels as if it were written by her ghost.

  Come to Aokigahara, she wrote. We’ll finish things there.

  I wake before the girl does.

  Three yurei gather around the hanged man. Clawed hands emerge from hair-veils to peck at the corpse. Spectral fingers leave no marks, but the man’s body swings back and forth despite the lack of wind. Slowly at first and then faster and faster. The branch creaks as if caught in a hurricane. The yurei make noises I’ve never heard. Part shriek and part scratch, simultaneously the sounds of predators and of terrified things.

  I pull the girl out of the tent. Gesturing for silence, I point to the raven-like yurei. The girl’s not stupid; she follows my lead, packing without a word. We back away, careful not to make noise with our feet.

  When we’re a distance removed, she asks, “What was that?”

  I feign nonchalance. “Don’t know.”

  Hope she’ll think I’m saying Don’t know and it doesn’t matter instead of Don’t know and I thought I knew everything about yurei.

  Not sure she buys my dismissive shrug. She keeps her own counsel for once.

  When she does talk again, it’s about something else. She pulls a photo from her pack. “This is my father.”

  I expect a generic, smiling face, but the photo shows a corpse. Dried flesh on bones. A tidy button-down drapes over shoulders that look like a coat hanger. Hair clumps on remnants of scalp. Part of the nose and cheek remain, but not enough to make a face.

  She points to the background. “See those rocks? I thought maybe you’d recognize them.”

  Tourists.

  “It’s a big forest,” I answer.

  “Not that big.”

  “Big enough.”

  She should know what I mean without my having to tell her: with all the ghosts here, the sea of trees is as big as it wants to be.

  The girl looks like she wants to stomp her feet. “Then how are you going to find him!”

  “Wander. Watch the trees.” She still looks pissed. I add, “If we keep going deeper, he’ll find you.”

  If he wants to find her.

  If someone else doesn’t find us first.

  She bites her lips. Gazes abstractly at distant trees. “Do you think he’ll talk to me?”

  “Yurei like to talk.”

  I shouldn’t say more since her optimism is what’s paying me, but I can’t stop myself.

  I add, “No telling what he’ll say.”

  We’re still in familiar forest. I can navigate. Would be better to follow tape trails, but I don’t want the strange yurei to find us too easily.

  Once we’re moving steadily, the girl starts talking.

  “My mother met my father while she was backpacking the summer after college. He was older than she was. They didn’t stay in touch, but she had his name. Last year when I turned sixteen, she said I was old enough to figure out for myself what to do with it. So I tracked down his family. They told me he’d died, but they wouldn’t say anything else.”

  “He committed suicide,” I assume.

  “The suicide watch found him here.” Melon’s voice is thick. She tugs the strap of her backpack so she has an excuse to hesitate. “They sent me photos.”

  “What makes you think he became a yurei?”

  “I read online that the first night after they bring the bodies back, someone from the suicide watch sleeps next to them. In the morgue or wherever they take them. To make sure their souls can rest.”

  “No one slept next to him?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t ask. But in the photo of him, of his body . . . you can see that he’s been . . . that’s he’s already . . . ”

  “Rotted.”

  She stiffens. Doesn’t protest. “No one slept with him then. On the real first night.”

  Quiet, there, in the sea of trees. Just me and her. Me and her and her sadness.

  I ask, “Did he know about you?”

  “Mom told him. Before I was born.” Her tone changes. Last night’s hard look returns to her face. “I know what you’re asking. No. He never tried to get in touch with me. It doesn’t matter. I care even if he didn’t. I have to know where I came from.”

  I don’t think much of Melon’s reasons, but I like her conviction. I also like the fact that even though I can see she’s tired and sore, she hasn’t complained.

  “Why do you speak English?” she asks.

  “I went to college in America.”

  “Where?”

  “Northwestern.”

  “Oh!” she says. Then, quietly, “I’ve read a lot about Chicago.”

  Something mournful there. Something unsaid. Maybe something to do with why she’s seventeen and hiking alone half a world from where she grew up, searching for a father she never knew.

  I’m so grateful that she’s keeping something to herself for once that I leave it alone.

  We’re past where most suicides go, but we find footprints so I stop. Gives the girl a chance to rest. Gives me a chance to keep my profits up.

  Result: a bag half buried between roots. I shake off loose soil. Dig through canned food and hygiene products.

  The girl asks, “Why’d they bring all that in?”

  “Some people stay a long time before they do anything.”

  “Saying goodbye to the world?”

  “Or making up their minds.”

  At the bottom of the bag, a mokume-gane wedding band. Dirty. Sized for a small man or a large woman.

  The girl watches the light pick a glint from beneath the grime. “How sad.”

  I push the ring into my pocket.

  Melon continues, “It makes sense to want to say goodbye to the world before you leave it.”

  Mist drifts through motionless leaves. Trees creep slowly, invisibly, toward the masked sun.

  “This place is like a graveyard,” she says.

  “Whole world is. At least here, it looks like what it is.”

  We go on. Evening draws closer. Silent and navy instead of silent and white.

  I almost lead the girl toward a cave I know when I feel sudden trepidation. I stop abruptly. “Shh!” I hiss to forestall the girl’s question.

  A yurei, crouched between trees. He hovers midair, hair parting over his nose and sweeping down in two dark curtains. His exposed jaw stretches all the way to the ground: a gaping maw the size of a door. Black, open, waiting to swallow us into hungry dark.

  I pull the girl backward for several meters before I dare turn. We move swiftly through the trees. Takes a while. Navy turns darker. Still doesn’t feel safe.

  The girl gets sick of following. Demand
s, “Where are we going?”

  I look back through the dark, toward where the mouth gapes. Yurei like ravens. Yurei waiting to swallow us down.

  I’ve lost my nerve.

  “We should get out,” I say.

  “Why?”

  “Something’s wrong. Something’s bringing out the darkest.”

  In the last light, she looks lost and lonely. Her voice is all breath. “Maybe it’s me.”

  Melon’s stupid and young and American. Annoying as she is, I can’t imagine what about her would draw darkness from ghosts.

  Chill on my nape, though. Says maybe I’m wrong.

  Melon asks, “Can you get us out this late?”

  It’s almost black. Moonlight casts faint silhouettes across nearby trunks.

  We’re far away from electrical tape and signs entreating us not to end our lives.

  I could get us out. I think. But I don’t want to be wrong.

  “We’ll talk in the morning,” I say.

  Moonlight reveals her guileless grin.

  Two a.m.

  The sound of wind without wind.

  Sayomi.

  Me on the ground in my sleeping bag. Crisp, night smells. The girl nearby.

  Doesn’t matter who’s watching. Nothing stops Sayomi’s devouring kisses. Hair embraces me. Meat-lump tongue laps at my lips. She wants to pull me out through my mouth. Fill her ribcage with my heart. Fill her bones with my marrow.

  I want her too.

  Legs scissoring. Pelvises matched. Lips to lips. Pleasure fluttering. Hovering. Rising. I should go with her. I should let her make me come. I should come; I should go; at least then I’d be somewhere.

  No. Not now. Not tonight, with the girl watching. There will always be another night to let Sayomi suck me down.

  I shove Sayomi away. She screams. Hair lashes my face, leaves stinging marks that will last till morning.

  “No.” I shove again.

  Hair winds around my throat. Pulls tight. An ethereal glow lights the whiteness of her skin. Her teeth are bared, her weeping eyes bloodshot. She strains as her hair cinches tighter.

  Throat hot. Lungs searing. I’m suddenly hyper-aware of air on my face, on my thighs—air I can’t breathe.

  Sayomi’s never gone this far before.

  Even as her hair strangles me, strands of it separate to move beneath my waist. The burning cinch. The gentle stroke. Each sensation sharpens the other.

  My vision sparks. Blue. White. Fading. Can’t even struggle.

  A rock streaks past Sayomi’s cheek, clatters on the ground behind her. She can’t be hurt like that anymore, but she recoils with surprise. Her hair withdraws from me, moving reflexively to protect her like a shield. I can just make out Sayomi’s eyes behind the veil. Angry. Betrayed.

  Air chokes my throat. I grasp my neck. Pain all the worse now that I have oxygen to feel it.

  Hands on my back, checking to see if I’m all right. Melon’s hands. “Nao!” she exclaims.

  Sayomi looks down at us and screams again, that hair-to-heel scream that scatters her into the night.

  “I tried not to watch,” Melon says.

  I clutch my burning throat.

  “Her bones are white. I thought you had to be dead a long time for your bones to bleach like that.”

  Her voice trembles. Her eyes are afraid. Maybe she’s realizing the danger now. These aren’t American ghosts you can banish with water and chanting. They’re yurei. They take what they want.

  I knew Sayomi was dead as soon as I read her e-mail. She was long gone by the time I arrived in Aokigahara.

  I’ve spent years reconsidering all the times we’d spent together after I left for school. The phone calls made when one or the other of us should have been sleeping. The e-mails complaining about classwork. The summer after my second year when I came home and we went hiking but we got too tired to climb and so we laid down near the mountain’s base instead, holding each other’s hands and watching the sky.

  I should have heard the plaintive tone in her voice on the train heading back. “You’ll always come back for me, won’t you?” She was staring out the window, not even able to look at me. I hadn’t understood what that meant.

  I didn’t give her what she needed then so I give her what I can now. Not much: a few kisses, a nightly embrace.

  Until I can muster more.

  The girl and I are both awake by dawn.

  She’s angry that I still want to go back. “I need to find my father! You deal with ghosts all the time. I thought you were an expert!”

  “That’s why I know when to leave.”

  “You can’t just stop! I’m paying you!”

  I laugh.

  Angry surprise lights her face. American girl, used to money buying power. She doesn’t expect dismissal.

  “This is my only chance! I have to fly back to Nebraska on Tuesday. Who knows if I’ll ever get back? I have to find my father! Please! You owe me. You wouldn’t even be here if I hadn’t rescued you last night!”

  I wait for her to run out of shouting.

  “I’m heading back,” I say. “Come with me or go alone.”

  Her face goes blank, caught between pride and fear.

  I throw her a bone.

  “Maybe we’ll find your father on the way out.”

  When we glimpse sunlight, the trees thicken.

  Down past the rocks, the trees thicken.

  Along every path, the trees thicken.

  Each time, I turn heel and try another way. My heartbeat goes faster. My mouth dries. I tell myself I’m only lost. I’ll find the way.

  But I already know. There is no way.

  The trees have claimed us.

  I don’t tell Melon. It would only scare her. She’ll eventually work it out.

  Maybe by then I’ll know what to do.

  The girl’s frightened inhalation warns me to halt.

  I’m about to step out from underneath the canopy’s shadow. In front of us, a lightning-struck tree has fallen across its sisters, creating a small clearing.

  Encroaching on its boundaries, dozens of yurei. Flocking. Screeching.

  It’s daytime, but shadows swarm around the ghosts, creating temporary dark. Some hold torches aloft in locks of their hair. Firelight picks out undertones of blue and green in their white kimonos. They swoop and dart like carrion-eaters, all suddenness with no grace.

  Leaders emerge into the clearing. Pass through. There are many, many more behind.

  The girl trembles. Goosebumps prick my skin.

  Any moment, they could smell us. They may already be watching behind their hair. Clawed hands could part their veils at any instant.

  Hundreds stream by until, at last, the grimacing legion is gone, shadows and firelight with them, leaving behind mist and silent trees.

  The girl starts forward into the clearing. No! I throw my arm out to stop her. She cringes as she glimpses what I’ve seen.

  One last yurei sitting on the lightning-charred stump.

  The air is so cold. My exhalations are ice.

  The yurei’s scent drifts toward us.

  Mandarin oranges.

  Relief instantly warms me. “Don’t worry,” I tell the girl. “I know this one.”

  The yurei’s head rotates toward our approach. Her body remains motionless. If she had a living neck, it would snap.

  “Thanks for your advice the other day,” I say acidly in Japanese.

  “A moment, please!” she replies in English. “Consult the police before you decide to die.”

  The girl gasps. Her expression shows fear.

  “Don’t worry,” I repeat. “This one always quotes the signs. She thinks it’s a joke.”

  Melon trembles. She braces her hands protectively across her stomach. I think but don’t say, You’re the one who wanted to meet a ghost.

  “We can’t get out,” I tell the yurei.

  She switches to Japanese. “All roads lead to Aokigahara.”

  Melon brea
thes raggedly. I can’t tell how much she understands.

  “Hardly anything leads to Aokigahara.”

  “All roads lead to death. Aokigahara is death. All roads lead to Aokigahara.”

  “You are not being helpful!” I reply angrily in Japanese.

  “The forest wants you.”

  “I’ve been here a hundred times! Why does it want me now?”

  I glare at the yurei. I know her pricks and pranks. She’s keeping something to herself.

  The girl breaks in, using halting Japanese. “Please! I need to find my father. Can you help me?”

  The yurei turns again, that neck-snapping turn. “Your name is Melon.”

  Her English is very bad.

  “Yes,” Melon says. She’s afraid, but it doesn’t silence her.

  The yurei calls back to me, “You come a hundred times alone and once with this one. What do you think is different?”

  Melon looks between us, confused. The Japanese is too fast for her. “Please,” she repeats. “My father’s name is Manabu. He died here.”

  “Why should I help you?” the yurei grumbles. She adds in Japanese, “She doesn’t have anything I want.”

  “She has the same thing you get from me,” I say. “She has skin that wants to live—”

  The words aren’t entirely out of my mouth before I realize what the yurei is implying.

  I gape at Melon. “What did you really come here to do?”

  Melon hasn’t understood our words, but she knows how to read my shocked eyes. She tenses. I move forward to catch her, but I’m too late. She flees.

  The yurei rises to watch her go. Her hovering form casts a sharp shadow across the lightning-struck log.

  For a moment, I’m too confused to pursue. Everything is going wrong. The trees closing in. Sayomi refusing to let go.

  “One girl wants to die,” the yurei says. “One girl is marked by a ghost. Both belong to us.”

  “What do I do? How do I get out?”

  “The trees have been waiting to claim you. They won’t let you out while they’re feeding on her.”

  “Then I’ll chop them down! Damn it! What do I do?”

  The yurei says nothing. She won’t help. She got what she wanted yesterday and now she’s watching her prank play out.