by Jeremy Bates
I was in the lead, on edge and jumpy, with Nina behind me and Ben bringing up the rear. We were following the string in what I thought was a westerly direction, passing through undiscovered territory. We had each brought backpacks to fill with deadfall—I was using Mel’s—and so far I had collected several sticks and a large branch I had broken into thirds with my foot.
The ground began to angle upward. I lowered myself to all fours as I climbed, careful not to trip or cut my hands on the volcanic rock. At the top I shone the light down on Nina and Ben so they could see better.
Then, off in the trees, I heard something. I snapped the light left.
“What is it?” Nina whispered, moving close to me.
I played the beam back and forth, but saw nothing but ghostly tree trunks. “I thought I heard something.”
Ben joined us. “Was it an animal?”
“I don’t know.”
“What kind of animal?” Nina asked.
I shook my head. “A fox?”
“Should we go back?”
“We have not found enough wood yet,” Ben said.
“It was probably just a rodent or something,” I said. “And Ben’s right. We need more wood.”
We began walking again, only now I kept up conversation. It was reassuring, normalizing, to hear our voices. Also, I wanted to scare off whatever had been out there.
Ben seemed happy to talk. He told me he was born in Haifa to French-Algerian Jewish parents and moved to Tel Aviv when he was eight. He was the third of five children, graduated from university with a degree in economics, and spent the last few years in the Israeli Defense Forces. Somehow we got onto World War II, and he explained that his grandfather was killed in a concentration camp while his grandmother survived by hiding in a convent in Czechoslovakia.
“What are you going to do when your time’s done in the military?” I asked.
“I will move to New York City,” he said.
“He wants to be an actor,” Nina said.
“Is that true?” I asked him.
He nodded. “Many Israelis, you know, are Hollywood actors. But they always change their nationality to American. I will remain an Israeli.”
“Maybe you should move to Los Angeles then, not New York.”
“You think that would be better?”
“New York is more Broadway acting. Stage stuff. If you want to be in the movies, you should be in Los Angeles.”
“Thank you, Ethan. I mean, for not saying ‘Why do you want to be an actor?’ or ‘You cannot be an actor.’ That is what everyone tells me.”
He seemed upset by this and went silent.
“Tell him why you want to be an actor,” Nina said.
“For the fame, of course,” Ben said, “and the money. I could move my parents to Los Angeles with me. Away from the rockets, the fighting.”
“He wants to marry a beautiful American wife,” Nina said. “He told me that once.”
“I did not!”
“He did. He says he will keep his Israeli citizenship, but he wants to marry an American. I do not know what to make of him. He is a madman, I think.”
“I will marry you,” he said.
Nina huffed.
“How about you, Ethan?” Ben asked. “You are a teacher, yes?”
“How did you know?”
“John Scott told me.”
I frowned. “What else did he say?”
“Nothing else. Only that you teach kids.”
“Kids?”
“You do not?”
“I teach adults.” Then, for whatever reason, I added: “A lot of business executives, in fact.”
Kids, I thought. What the fuck? Why would John Scott say that? He had no idea.
“Sometimes,” I continued, feeling I had something to prove, “I give seminars to large groups at their corporate headquarters. Sony. Rakuten. Roche.”
“I see,” Ben said.
I stopped talking. I was making a fool of myself.
“How long will you live in Japan?” Nina asked me.
“This is probably my last year.”
“Where will you go?”
“Maybe back to the US.”
“Will you continue to teach there?”
“I think so. I like teaching.”
“Your family is there?”
“My parents.”
“You do not have any brothers or sisters?”
I hesitated. “No.”
“An only child. How is that?”
“You get used to it.”
I picked up another stick, snapped it in half, and stuck it in my bag.
Ben said, “John Scott, I like him. How long have you been friends?”
“We’re not friends,” I said. “I just met him today.”
“I thought you were friends. I think he said you were.”
“We’re not.”
Nina said, “But Melissa? She is your girlfriend?”
“Melinda, yeah—”
“Stop!” Ben hissed.
“What?” I said, freezing mid step.
Nina bumped into the back of me.
“Did you hear that?” His eyes were wide and white in the darkness. “It sounded like…I do not know. Another animal?”
We stood perfectly still for ten long seconds, but we heard nothing more.
“Are you sure you heard something?” I asked.
“Maybe it was just the wind.”
The wind? I thought. There was no wind.
The forest was a friggin’ vacuum.
Tense with adrenaline, I continued forward. No one spoke for a little, and I began to wonder what was wrong with Ben. There was something about the way he was speaking. It was different than before. More intense yet…spacy. Like he was asking questions for the sake of asking them, not really listening to my answers.
Because he was scared?
Nina, at least, was still being Nina.
Still being Nina? I could have laughed at that. I’d met her all of five or six hours ago, and this was the first time we’d conversed. Suddenly I realized how little I knew about the Israelis. They were strangers. And here I was walking in a dark, sprawling forest with them, alone. What if they were psychotic? What if they jumped me, bashed my head in with a rock, and left me here to die?
Ben, I’d noticed back at the hill, hadn’t picked up any firewood except a four-foot stick, which he was using to bat vegetation out of the way or slap against tree trunks.
“How did you guys meet?” I asked them.
“We met in Thailand,” Ben said. “At a full-moon party last month. I was with my friends. We met on the beach one night.”
“But we lost each other,” Nina added.
“That is right. I did not see her for a week. Then I was looking for a restaurant one morning and I heard my name called. She is there.”
“He left his friends and stayed with me,” Nina said.
“We got a hut. We surfed, we ate food, and we watched movies.”
“So how long have you been in Japan?” I asked.
“Just a couple days,” Ben said.
“I have a world ticket,” Nina explained. “Japan was my next stop after Thailand. You have to keep going in the same direction around the world, yes? Ben wanted to join me.”
“How long have you been traveling?”
“Four months or so now,” she said.
“Isn’t that getting expensive?”
“I couch surf. Do you know what that is?”
“You stay at people’s homes?”
“Yes, you sign up for an account on the website, say when you will be in a town or city, and people usually respond and invite you to stay. It is very easy to get a host when you are a female by yourself. But when you are with someone, it is much more difficult.”
“So far in Japan we have stayed in hostels,” Ben said. “It is okay.”
“Isn’t it dangerous for a girl to couch surf?” I asked.
“Ninety-nine percent of peop
le are wonderful,” Nina said.
“You had a bad experience?”
“Yes, one.”
Something in her voice made me glance over my shoulder at her. I couldn’t read her expression in the dark. I wanted to ask what happened, but didn’t feel it was my place.
“Four months,” I said instead. “Aren’t you tired of traveling yet?”
“Sometimes. But I meditate. I can sit for hours on my own. It is very relaxing. I would like to find some special place to stay for my final month. No TV. No tourists. Just meditate. I have not found it yet.”
“Have you guys noticed the trees?” Ben said, his voice taking on a strange timbre. He skipped his flashlight back and forth among them. “See how close they are?”
It was true. They had become smaller, thinner, denser.
“I think it is time to go back,” Nina said.
I checked my wristwatch and was surprised to note we had only been gone from camp for fifteen minutes. If we returned after half an hour without enough firewood to last through the night, I’d never hear the end of it from John Scott, even though he hadn’t volunteered to help gather any. I said, “Another five minutes.”
We pressed on. I batted branches from my face. There was a lot of deadfall here, which I gathered greedily. I was just standing up, having collected yet another stick, when I spotted the blood. It was splashed on the trunk of a tree cater-corner to me, at chest level.
I froze. My skin tightened with a ticklish fever.
Had someone stuck a pistol in their mouth and blown their brains out against the tree?
But where was the body?
I saw my hand reach out and touch the blood, even though a voice inside my head was shouting at me to get the hell out of there. A flake broke off from the bark. I rubbed it between my index finger and thumb, grinding it down to a powder. I smelled it.
“Paint,” I said torpidly. “It’s paint.”
Who had splashed the tree with red paint? And why?
Operating in some sort of bubble, aware of little happening around me, I turned in a circle, the flashlight beam crisscrossing the trees. Nothing. Just trees and more trees and—what the hell?
Twenty feet ahead, hanging from a branch by red suicide ribbon, was a crucifix made with two small sticks and string. Then I spotted another. Then another beyond that. They were everywhere. At least a dozen.
Each of them was swinging slightly in the wind—
There is no wind.
I closed my eyes, waited a beat, and opened them again.
The crucifixes were still swinging.
I tried to turn and flee, but my legs weren’t working correctly, and I stumbled backward, pin-wheeling my arms for balance.
Something smacked me from behind.
With the exception of insects, fish, and perhaps small birds, the sight of a rotting carcass will almost always give you a jolt. We don’t see death every day, we’re not programmed to take it in stride. Only a week ago I was walking along a backstreet in Tokyo, trying to find a ramen shop Tomo had recommended. You could find ramen shops on pretty much any corner in the city, but the best ones aren’t advertised. Lacking signs, and located in rundown, nondescript buildings, the only way to identify such establishments is the long line of businessmen waiting out front between 11 a.m. and 2 p.m.
The particular ramen shop I was looking for was somewhere in the maze of streets behind Omatchi Station, just off the Yamanote Line. Tomo had said it had a really good cheese curry ramen. I’d been walking for twenty minutes, fearing I was getting hopelessly lost, when I spotted out of the corner of my eye a dead dog on the side of the road. It was a jet-black baby Labrador retriever. The lips were curled back, revealing pink gums and bone-white canines. It was less than two feet away from me.
The sight of it made me jump. I wasn’t scared—just startled to see something dead. The startle quickly left me, and I studied it more closely.
It appeared as though it had been run over because the middle section was split open, spilling forth a tangle of guts. The hind legs were almost completely flat. Flies buzzed around it, eager to lay their eggs in the spoiled meat.
Death, I’d thought at the time. It stirs within you so many different emotions.
Fascination.
Disgust.
Sadness.
Relief—at least, relief in the sense that what you’re seeing isn’t you.
I felt none of this, however, only mind-numbing fright, when I turned around and saw the body dangling from a rope behind me.
I noticed the hair first. It was black, thin, combed over from the left side of the tan skull to the right. From the brow down, the face was unrecognizable. It almost appeared as if it had melted away. The eyeballs were gone, likely eaten by animals, leaving behind empty black holes, the left one larger than the right. Encircling the orbits was a clumping gray matter that had once been skin. Where the nose had been was a small gaping triangle. The mouth and jawbone appeared to be missing, though it was difficult to tell for certain because that gray matter stretched down from the cheekbones in long strands, masking the mouth and chin and neck, collecting at the top of the chest.
The man had chosen to wear a golf shirt on the day he killed himself, a light color, with horizontal stripes. This, along with his degree of dissolution, suggested he had probably hanged himself several months ago during spring or summer. Clipped inside the shirt’s front pocket was a ballpoint pen. The arms poking out from the short sleeves were little more than skin over bones. Somehow the beige pants remained in place, not slipping off the shrunken waist.
Time seemed to have slowed down while I took this all in, though in reality only a couple seconds had passed. I spun away from the ghastly sight and vomited what was in my stomach. It required three goes to get everything out.
While I was doubled over, my hands on my thighs, my throat stinging, my eyes watering, I became aware of the commotion around me.
“Ben!” Nina cried. “Stop!” She grabbed my arm. “Ethan, come!”
“Where’s he—?”
“Come!”
She took off.
I didn’t move. I was confused. What was happening? Why were they running? Then I remembered the crucifixes—they were swinging—and I began floundering back the way we’d come.
Ben and Nina were far ahead. I could see Ben’s flashlight beam jerking wildly as he ran. I was charging through the dense thicket of spindly trees. An errant branch got past my upraised arms and sliced my cheek. The pain was hot, quick, then forgotten as I plowed forward. I tripped, scrambled on my knees, got back to my feet, kept going.
I heard my pants and grunts of exertion. I saw my feet appearing below me, the left then the right, one after the other. Eventually, as the trees began to open up, I slowed to a jog. The Israelis were too far ahead to catch. I glanced behind me, knowing nothing would be there, but doing it all the same.
My heart was beating rabbit-fast, and I took deep breaths to slow it down.
The bloody crucifixes had been blowing in a non-existent wind.
Was I sure there was no wind?
There hasn’t been any wind all day.
Was I sure?
Pretty damn sure.
Then what had caused the crucifixes to blow? Ghosts? Yūrei? There had to be a wind. I was just freaked out. I let my imagination run wild. Had to be a wind.
I looked over my shoulder again.
“Had to be a wind,” I mumbled to myself.
Light ahead. It blinked in and out between the trees.
“Hey!” I called.
“Ethan?” Mel.
“Yeah, it’s me.”
When we found each other, I discovered she was with Tomo. She wrapped me in a tight hug. I thought she would ask me about the body, but she only said, “We have to get back to the camp. Quickly.”
“Why? What happened?”
“It’s Ben. He’s tripping out big time.”
CHAPTER 11
I had expected the
camp to be in turmoil. Maybe Ben kicking stuff around, or shouting gibberish, or howling at the moon. But all was calm when we emerged from the trees. Neil and John Scott were standing by the dying fire. Farther away, in the trees, I made out the silhouettes of Ben and Nina. Their heads were close together, indicating they were likely speaking to one another.
On the way back Mel had given me a brief rundown of what had happened. When Ben and Nina had returned, Nina was okay, but Ben started pacing and saying stuff in Hebrew no one understood. When Tomo tried to get him to calm down, he shoved Tomo backward, knocking him over. Nina told them I was fine, I was coming. Still, Mel enlisted Tomo’s help and came looking for me.
“What the hell did you guys see?” John Scott demanded when I approached the fire.
“A body,” I said.
“That’s it?”
“What do you mean ‘that’s it?’” I quipped, annoyed at his apathy. He’d been sitting here on his ass the entire time. He had no idea how terrifying discovering a body in Aokigahara at night could be.
“Ben’s having a bloody meltdown,” Neil said.
“Yeah, Mel told me.” I paused, trying to figure out how to word what I was going to add. “There were these...these little crucifixes hanging from the trees.”
“Crucifixes?” Mel said.
“Made from sticks.”
“So is that what set Ben off?” Neil said. “These crucifixes?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know what happened. We saw this paint on the tree—”
“An arrow?” John Scott asked.
“No, just…red paint. Then I saw the crucifixes. The guy who killed himself must have made them.”
“How big?” Tomo asked.
“The crucifixes? I don’t know. A few inches tall. Then Ben was shouting, and he took off. I mean, it was scary. But his reaction was over the top. He was also acting a little strange before that…”
“What do you mean?” Mel asked.
“The way he was talking. I don’t know. He just didn’t seem like himself.”
“Because the guy eat mushrooms,” Tomo said.
John Scott elbowed Tomo in the side.
