by Jeremy Bates
“Hey,” Mel said, poking me in the side to get my attention. “We’re here.”
The string bisected the red ribbon at perhaps a sixty-degree angle, heading southwest, or at least what I believed to be southwest.
“This is where Tomo and I stopped,” Neil said.
“So which way should we go?” Ben asked.
“I say the string,” John Scott said. “Something a little different, you know?”
“That is okay with me.”
John Scott and Tomo stepped forward at the same time, eager to go, and they almost bumped into each other. John Scott waved. “Gentlemen first.”
Tomo said, “More like pimp daddy first.”
“You’ve been watching too much MTV, dude.”
“Fa shizzle dizzle it’s the big Neptizzle with the Snoopy D-O-Double Gizzle!”
Tomo spitting out Snoop Dogg lyrics in his off-kilter English accent was both bizarre and comical, though John Scott was the only person to laugh.
Tomo took the lead, followed by John Scott, Ben, Nina, and Mel.
Neil, it seemed, was finally feeling his age. He waited until everyone passed him by, then fell into step beside me, at the rear.
“Hope you’re keeping track of the way we’ve come,” I said to him.
“I thought you were.”
“We’re getting pretty far in.”
“We just retrace our steps.”
“Easier said than done.”
“We follow the white ribbon to its beginning, make a left. That’s it.”
“If we can find the white ribbon again.”
“How could we not? It’s ten minutes that way.” He gestured the way we’d come.
“More like twenty,” I said. “And if we miss it, even by a little, we might never find it.”
“We won’t miss it.”
I didn’t reply. Not because I agreed or disagreed. There was merely nothing more to add. We either found the white ribbon again or we didn’t. If we did, we were fine. If we didn’t, we’d have to put our heads together and figure out what to do.
“What do you think happened to that girl’s body?” Neil said.
“The police must have taken it out.”
He nodded.
“What?” I said. “You don’t agree?”
“I nodded, didn’t I?”
“But…?” He appeared to be holding something back.
“Why would they leave her stuff behind?”
“Maybe their hands were full.”
“Maybe.”
“Or maybe she changed her mind and left on her own accord.”
“After cutting up her ID and bank cards?”
I shrugged. “She could always get them replaced.”
“Same question then. Why not take her stuff with her? The bag, the umbrella.”
“What are you getting at, Neil? She either walked out of here, or the police carried her body out. What other alternatives are there? You think one of those yūrei came for her?”
“Now there’s something to think about.”
I glanced at him. He was watching the ground, his face expressionless. “You don’t believe in ghosts, do you, Neil?” I asked.
“I never used to,” he said. “It’s not a Western thing, is it? But Kaori does. Her belief has rubbed off on me.”
“She’s seen a ghost?”
“Says she has. One night she woke up and says she saw the face of a little girl at the end of her bed. Earlier that day a little girl—she swears it was the same one she’d seen—was killed crossing the street outside our apartment. Kaori didn’t learn about the girl’s death until the next day.”
My first impulse was to laugh. I didn’t. I’ve met several people who’ve claimed to have seen a ghost, and they took their supernatural encounters quite seriously.
As a teenager I worked as a bellhop at a small family-run hotel in downtown Madison. The owner was a woman named Bella Grayson. She had no siblings and took over the business from her father a decade earlier when he became ill in his old age. She’d started working at the hotel when she was a child and had moved her way up through every position: dishwasher, housekeeper, line cook, office administration, etcetera. She’d seemed proud of this, getting to the top not via a handout from her father but through years of grunt work. She came across as a smart, down-to-earth woman—until halfway through my job interview when she cautioned me that the hotel was haunted, or at least had been in the past.
The story, as I remember it, went like this: six or seven years previously, around midnight, after most of the other staff had gone home, Bella Grayson had been in the office, placing the day’s revenue in the wall safe, when she heard a loud noise from the adjacent saloon. She went to check it out and found a little girl in a red dress and shiny black shoes walking away from her, disappearing down the far hallway. Bella chased after her. She swore she was only a few seconds behind, but when she reached the hallway it was deserted. Back in the saloon she noticed all the ashtrays were aligned along the edges of the tables.
She called to the barmaid, a twenty-three-year-old girl named Grace who’d been in the kitchen changing into street clothes. Grace denied seeing anyone since the last customer left, the man who ran the hardware store across the street, and she was adamant she’d set the ashtrays in the middle of the table, alongside the cardboard coasters, where they belonged.
Nothing else unusual happened until a month later, when a bachelor staying in a room on the second floor complained about a little girl in a red dress running up and down the hallway all night.
A few weeks after this, when Bella arrived at work, she found the safe in her office wide open, though no money was missing.
She told her ailing father about the mysterious happenings, and he confessed that he’d seen the girl himself, and that a girl had died at the hotel in the early 1900s.
I recalled the way Bella had watched me after this revelation, intently, almost as if she were daring me to contradict the claim in some way. I assured her I believed every word and got the job. I ended up working at the hotel for three consecutive summers, often remaining late into the evenings.
I never heard so much as a boo.
Although I don’t believe Bella was having me on, I remain convinced there must be a rational explanation to her tale, even though it eludes me.
Regarding Kaori’s ghost, I can only assume it was nothing but a collection of shadows at the foot of her bed. The fact a girl died the same day was a coincidence. Either that, or Kaori unknowingly heard about the death not long after it happened, perhaps as a passing comment between two mothers in the apartment’s lobby, something her conscious mind missed but her subconscious registered and manifested when she was half asleep and more susceptible to suggestion.
“Did you see it too?” I asked.
“The ghost?” Neil said.
I nodded.
“No, I didn’t.”
“You think Kaori really saw it?”
“I don’t think she would make up something like that.”
“She might have been…confused.”
“It’s possible.”
“But you don’t think so.”
“When she woke me up she was scared white and in a near fit. She wouldn’t go back to sleep and made me stay awake with her until morning.” He shrugged. “You would do well to remember that while no one has been able to prove whether ghosts exist or not, no one has been able to disprove whether they do either.”
“You can say the same thing about the tooth fairy.”
“I don’t want to argue this point, Ethan. I’m not a full-blown believer, but neither am I a skeptic. There are simply some things we cannot understand. Let’s leave it at that.”
And we did.
A couple hundred yards along the string we came to yet another ribbon, this one yellow. Like the original white one, it ran north-south, meandering into the forest. You could only see its length for twenty or thirty yards in either direction before the den
se bracken swallowed it from sight.
“What should we do?” Ben asked. “Continue along the string, or down this new ribbon?”
“I say the ribbon,” John Scott said.
“We did what you wanted, John,” Mel said, and it was almost an accusation. “We came to see the ribbon and the string. If you want to keep going, fine, go ahead. I’m making camp.”
“I’m with you, Mel,” I told her, and she brightened immediately. “But the ground here is warped and rocky. I suggest we continue a bit further along the string until we find a better spot.”
She nodded quickly, apparently happy for any compromise.
“You guys do what you want then,” John Scott said. “Ben, you’re cool?”
“Yes, Nina and I will keep exploring with you. That is why we are here.”
“Since my services are no longer needed,” Neil said, “I’m going to bow out, thanks.”
John Scott said, “Tomo?”
“I’m bush, man.”
“You’re a bushman?”
“I’m tired. So much walking.”
“Whatever.” John Scott shrugged. “You pansies go find a good spot to make camp. We won’t be too long behind. Just don’t leave the string.”
He, Ben, and Nina left without further discussion. The rest of us carried on along the string.
“What’s pansy?” Tomo asked me.
“A flower,” I told him.
“He call us flower?”
“He’s an idiot.”
“Ethan, be nice,” Mel said from behind us.
A dozen paces onward I walked straight into a spider’s web. “Ugh,” I said, wiping the silky strands from my face, spitting them from my mouth.
“What is it?” Mel asked, catching up to me.
“Spider web.”
“Wonder what it’s eating out here,” Neil said. “There’re no bugs.”
“Maybe they come out at night.”
The string didn’t follow a straight line. Instead it weaved left and right, almost as if the person who’d left it had been drunk. I wondered at this and decided it wasn’t unlikely. After all, Yumi had brought a bottle of vodka with her. Wasn’t that how most people killed themselves? A lethal cocktail of booze and sleeping pills?
I pictured the person forging the same path we were on, their shirttail untucked, their hair a mess, a spool of string in one hand, a bottle of vodka or whiskey in the other. Stumbling as they walked toward their death, drifting drunkenly back and forth between the trees, tears streaming down their cheeks, cursing their boss or their spouse or the world in general, knowing they wouldn’t miss it one bit.
We came to a fallen tree. It was decaying and covered in moss and fungi. The string passed over the thick midsection. It was too large to clear in a single step. I had to straddle it and swing my legs over one at a time. As I pushed myself clear my left hand punched through the rotten bark to the hollow cavity beneath. A sharp pain ripped across my wrist and I cried out.
“Ethan!” Mel exclaimed.
Little pill bugs swarmed around the hole I’d made. I jerked my hand free in disgust. There was a bright red line across the inside of my wrist.
Mel appeared beside me. “Gosh, you’re cut.” She examined the thin wound. “We don’t have Neosporin or Band-Aids or anything.”
“Ewwww!” Tomo exclaimed. “Look this one!”
“Gross,” Neil agreed.
They were hunched over the hole. The oval pill bugs were scurrying everywhere. Two centipedes were trying to squirm back beneath the bark. Tomo was poking a fat black millipede with a twig. It had curled its segmented body into a protective spiral.
“Careful,” Neil said. “They spray acid.”
I checked my wrist again. The blood had begun to flow freely.
“Shit, man!” Tomo said to me. “You look like suicide guy.”
“You need to put pressure on it,” Mel said. She shrugged off her backpack and scrambled through the main pocket. She pulled out a white sock and handed it to me.
I pressed it against the wound.
“You have to hold it there until the blood clots,” she instructed. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s not deep.”
“The ground’s a bit better here. We’ll make camp and boil some water to wash it out. You don’t want it getting infected.”
I glanced at the surrounding forest. It was already getting dark, the greenery losing its vibrancy, the shadows gathering and lengthening.
“Sounds good to me,” I said.
I shrugged off my backpack and unbuckled the tent I had brought. Unlike Neil’s traditional tent—a flysheet held up by poles and guy ropes and anchored to the ground with stakes—mine was a small dome design, made for one person, but it would be fine for both Mel and me. I’d suggested everyone bring a tent in case the huts lining the trail up Mt. Fuji were not open. I’d read online that many shut down in September. John Scott, I’d noticed when we’d first met this morning, hadn’t brought a tent. That was his problem though. He could sleep under the stars or, if it started raining, squeeze in with Neil or Tomo or the Israelis. All I knew was that he wasn’t cuddling up next to me—or Mel for that matter.
When I’d finished erecting the tent, Mel was still determined to boil water and rinse my wound thoroughly. Neil, however, brandished a bottle of whiskey he’d brought and poured a tiny bit over the cut. The alcohol didn’t sting as much as I’d thought it might. Mel gave me a fresh sock, which I tied around my wrist.
“Anyone fancy a nip?” Neil asked, holding up the bottle.
“Yeah, man,” Tomo said. “Let’s get drunk.”
“I said a nip,” Neil said. “Get drunk on your own booze.”
“I don’t bring none.”
“Guess you’re not getting drunk.”
Neil retrieved some paper cups from his backpack and poured a finger for both Tomo and me. He offered Mel some, but she declined.
“Kampai,” Tomo said, raising his cup.
“To nature,” Neil said.
I thought about the gravesite, the young woman who had likely perished there, and said, “To life.”
“To life,” Neil repeated thoughtfully.
We sipped.
“Hey,” I said to Neil, “where did you learn to tie two strings together like that?”
“I used to kayak now and then in New Zealand. It’s how we tied grab handles to the boat.”
“You don’t kayak anymore?”
“In Japan? Nah.”
“By the way,” I added offhandedly, “what did John Scott say to you guys when we met up back there?”
“What do you mean?” Neil asked.
“I saw him congratulating you and stuff.”
“He said we did a good job at the hole.”
“Did he tell you that if he were there, he would have saved Mel single-handedly?”
“He never said that, Ethan,” Mel intervened. She was sitting behind me, on a rock.
“It’s what he was thinking. I could tell.”
“You’re just angry he didn’t give you any credit.”
“I couldn’t care less what he thinks. The guy’s a joker.”
“Give him a break, Ethan.”
I turned to look at her. “Why do you keep defending him?”
“He’s my friend.”
“From high school. You know how long ago that was? Did you keep in touch with him afterward?”
“A little bit.”
“Did you see him during college?”
She frowned. “What are you getting at?”
“What was up with him touching you and all that shit?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Checking your hands for wounds and everything.”
“Ethan, stop this.”
“Stop what? You know, I still don’t know why he’s on this trip with us.”
She sighed. “Can we not get into this again?”
“Did you guys us
ed to date or something?”
She stood abruptly and went to our tent.
I turned back around.
Tomo and Neil were trying not to act awkward.
“What?” I said. “Do you guys like him?”
They didn’t say anything. Shaking my head, I leaned against the rock Mel had vacated and sipped the whiskey.
I regretted mentioning John Scott. I should have left things as they were. Mel was already on edge and stressed. The last thing she needed was me accusing her of sleeping with John Scott. And what if she did? It would have been before I met her. She was perfectly within her rights to do that.
But if that was the case, why wouldn’t she simply tell me?
Because it never happened?
Or because something else was going on…?
Neil and Tomo began debating the best science fiction movie of all time, and I was happy to distract myself by listening to them. Neil said 2001: A Space Odyssey, hands down. Tomo said Jaws. This set Neil off because, according to him, Jaws wasn’t science fiction.
“Yeah, it is, man,” Tomo said. “You see shark so big? Never.”
“It’s a horror film,” Neil said. “Thriller at best.”
“Science fiction fake shit, right? Jaws, he fake.”
“Science fiction has to be set in the future.”
“Not necessarily,” I said.
Neil gave me a look. “Don’t tell me you think Jaws is science fiction?”
I didn’t, but I enjoyed seeing Neil get worked up over trivial things. I shook my head. “I’m not getting involved.”
“You’re being a fool, Tomo,” Neil said testily. “Choose another film.”
“I told you. Jaws.”
“I told you, it’s not science fiction.”
“Okay, okay, let me think.”
Neil watched him, his face pinched. Tomo kept thinking.
“Well?” Neil demanded impatiently.
“Okay. I got it. Jaws 2.”
Neil made a disgusted sound and stood. He took a step toward his tent, turned back, and grabbed the bottle of whiskey.
“Wait!” Tomo said. “Wait! Star Wars. Best movie. Star Wars. Come back!”
Neil disappeared inside his tent.
