by Jeremy Bates
So, yes, I told myself now. We’d made the right decision. Staying put had been the smart move. Mel might be mad with me, but she would see. She would thank me tomorrow.
I noticed the paper cups in their hands for the first time. Confusedly I wondered where John Scott and Tomo had found water, and why they were drinking it when a quick glance at Neil told me he had none. Then I saw the Suntory whiskey bottle propped against a tree root.
“What the fuck are you two doing?” I said.
John Scott knocked back whatever was left in his cup. “Didn’t think Neil would mind if we raided his bottle, given his condition.”
“Have you thought about your conditions tomorrow?”
“I can hold my own, dude.”
“It’s a diuretic,” I said.
“Die what?” Tomo asked.
“It makes you piss,” John Scott said.
“Ah,” Tomo said.
“Yeah, ah, Tomo,” I said. “We’re in the middle of a forest with no water.”
“Police go here tomorrow.”
“We hope. But what if they can’t find us?”
“Don’t get melodramatic on us,” John Scott said.
“It’s possible.”
He shrugged. “If they can’t find us, and it doesn’t rain, we die in a few days anyway.” As if to prove he subscribed to this brand of fatalism—or, perhaps more likely, to rub his defiance in my face—he grabbed the bottle and filled his cup. He sipped from it this time, returning his attention to the comic.
“You want some?” Tomo asked me.
“No, Tomo. And I think you should stop drinking.”
“Yeah, okay, no more. This last one. You want manga?”
“No.”
“Big titties.”
“No.”
“They there. In my bag.”
I watched the two of them for a few moments, reading and drinking, as if they were at a lazy slumber party. One word came to mind: idiots.
Since I had nowhere else to go, and felt foolish standing there lording over them, I sat down and flexed my right hand. The blisters had indeed ruptured, though the rawness of the pain had diminished and wasn’t very noticeable anymore. Aside from the crackle and pop of the fire the night was unsurprisingly quiet. Even Neil remained silent. It seemed his cramps had finally subsided and he had fallen asleep.
Smoke billowed from the burning wood, the musky smell tempting my hunger. I imagined myself cooking a sausage over the flames, blackening the skin, sizzling the fat. The image was so powerful I began to salivate. My eyes flicked hungrily to the bottle of whiskey, which was half full. A cup of rye might not be food, but it would suppress my appetite. It would also take the edge off my nerves, let me forget about Ben for a little, the ordeal awaiting us tomorrow. A cup, maybe even two. It wouldn’t hurt. Probably let me fall asleep a little easier as well…
“How are we going to organize this watch?” I asked, to distract myself.
“You’re not serious, are you, dude?” John Scott said.
“It can’t hurt.”
“Don’t be a tool.” He lowered his voice. “There are no fucking ghosts out there.”
“Maybe not. But someone’s got to keep an eye on Neil—and Ben.”
“Ben?”
“Make sure no animals come around or whatever.”
“Oh shit,” Tomo said, pulling his eyes from his comic.
“All right then.” John Scott shrugged. “I’ll take the first watch.”
“Which begins when?”
“Now.”
“Screw that.”
“What?”
It was a little past eight o’clock. If John Scott took the first watch, and began it now, he’d be done around eleven—or about the time he’d likely choose to go to sleep regardless.
“The first shift will start at ten,” I said. “Each will last two hours. That will take us to four, which isn’t that long before the sun rises.”
“So what?” John Scott said. “You want the first shift?”
“We’ll draw sticks. Longest gets first choice.”
I scavenged a small branch from the woodpile and broke it into three unequal segments. I turned away while I aligned the tops of the pieces so they were even with one another. John Scott might be an adult, but I didn’t trust the guy not to cop a look. I turned back and held forth my hand.
Tomo chose first, then John Scott. We compared our selections. Tomo had the longest. I had the shortest.
“I want first,” Tomo said.
“First shift?” I said.
“Yeah.”
“I’ll take balls to two,” John Scott said.
I nodded. “All right, Tomo, you wake John Scott up at midnight then.”
“You know it.”
He finished the whiskey in his cup, then tossed it in the fire.
“Hey!” I said. “We only have a few cups, Tomo. We might need them to catch rain.”
“Dude,” John Scott said reproachfully.
“What?”
“Stop being such a drama queen. We’re fine, okay? We’re not on a deserted island.”
“Do you know how big this forest is?”
“So what? Worst comes to worst we’ll climb a tree, locate Fuji, and follow the yellow brick road all the way home.”
“Hope you’re good at climbing.”
He harrumphed and went back to his comic.
“You guys, you know you remind me?” Tomo said. “Married guys. Fight, fight, fight. And me, I’m kid, right? I gotta listen. You scar me forever.”
“They teach you that in psych school?” I said.
“You know it.”
“Is this some new catch phrase?”
“You know it.”
Tomo had taken his hat off. His hair was sticking up all over the place, his elfish sideburns daggered in front of his ears. Bags had formed beneath his eyes while stubble had started to sprout on his upper lip and chin. Looking at him now, I thought of a suspect in an interrogation room. An outward face of calm but inside scared shitless. Like John Scott, he seemed confident we would be found tomorrow, so he wasn’t worried about dying out here. I imagined his fear was born more from what he believed would happen after the police arrived. He was supposed to start a residency at some hospital in Shibuya-ku soon. What would happen to him if it was revealed he had been camping in Aokigahara with a bunch of foreigners, one of whom committed suicide? This was not the sound judgment you expected a psychiatrist to uphold. If our expedition made the papers, his entire career could be in jeopardy before it even took off.
“Hey, man,” Tomo said to John Scott. “You have ciggy?”
“You smoke?”
“Like after sex only. But now I want.”
John Scott took a butt from the pack, tossed it to Tomo, then knocked another out for himself. He lit Tomo’s with his bolt-action lighter, then his own. He shifted so he was on his back, his head on his rucksack, looking up at the canopy, blowing smoke from his mouth in a blue swirl. He had been panicky immediately after we’d discovered Ben’s body, when he’d realized how badly the fallout could affect him, but ever since he had kept his cool together. Right now he could have been chilling in a bar with not a care in the world. He either had a very good poker face or a total lack of empathy. The latter made me wonder if he had ever killed anybody.
If he’d participated in the invasion of Iraq, the possibility was fairly high. He might have killed a good number of people. Surely he would have experienced death in one form or another.
“You been to Iraq?” I asked him.
“For vacation?”
Yeah, for fucking vacation. Why did I bother?
“One tour,” he said a few moments later.
“How was it?”
“Paradise.” He ashed out his cigarette, immediately lit another. “And, yeah, I’ve killed people.”
I looked at him.
“That’s what you wanted to know, isn’t it? It’s what everyone wants to know.”
Tomo asked, “How many?”
“Two.”
“You shoot?”
“My unit was on patrol. A roadside bomb took out the lead Humvee. It was an ambush. We came under a shitload of gunfire. I shot back.”
“You kill every fucker?”
“There were too many. We called in backup. A Blackhawk arrived five hundred yards away. We ran for it, shooting at anything that moved.”
“Were you scared?” I asked. I wasn’t pushing buttons; I was genuinely interested.
“You don’t have time to be scared,” he said simply.
“When was this?”
“Few months ago.” He patted his left leg. “Took a round above the knee. It’s why I’m sitting on my ass in Japan now.” Then he sat up straight and looked at both Tomo and me. He appeared simultaneously pensive and grave. “If I get fingered for giving Ben the mushrooms,” he said in a low, serious voice to match his expression, “I’ll probably end up in prison here.”
The conversation’s abrupt change of direction threw me off guard.
“It was stupid, I know that,” he went on. “I wish I could take it back. But I can’t. And Ben’s gone. Don’t fuck me over here.”
“What we say doesn’t matter,” I said. “Nina’s the one you have to talk to.”
“I will. Tomorrow. But she’ll be easier to convince if you guys are already on board. Tomo? What do you say, buddy?”
Tomo hesitated. “Yeah, okay…I don’t know nothing.”
John Scott looked at me.
He was right: giving Ben mushrooms out here was stupid. But it was a temporary lack of judgment. Did he deserve to spend the next seven or eight years in a Japanese prison for that?
“Dude?”
I shrugged noncommittally.
John Scott nodded. Apparently that was good enough for him.
I didn’t turn around, but I knew they were following me, the way you know things in dreams. I was back in grade five. The guys behind me were in junior high. The ringleader’s name was Hubert Kelly. He lived one street over from mine, which meant more often than not we saw each other on the way home from our respective schools. Aside from this all I knew about him was that he supposedly carried around a pair of brass knuckles—and he liked to pick on younger kids.
For more than a year I had dreaded walking home, never knowing if I was going to get ambushed or not. It came down to a matter of who was walking in front of whom. If Douchebag Kelly was ahead of me, I kept my distance and was relatively safe. Sometimes he would glance back, see me, and stop. I would stop too, never taking my eyes off him, until he grew bored and continued on. If I was ahead of him, however, it was a different story. I got pretty good in those days at checking over my shoulder. Yet I was a kid still, I was prone to daydreaming, and I often wouldn’t know Kelly was coming until I heard his shoes slapping the pavement behind me. He might have been a lot older than me, but he was fat and slow. If I had a good enough head start, I could outrun him. And even when he got lucky and caught me, I would often escape the encounter with only a few bruises because he had nobody else to prove anything to. It was when he came after me with his two friends which I dreaded most. They were both slim and fast and when I had my head in the clouds they caught me eight out of ten times. And they were vicious. They’d sit on me and slap my face and rip my clothes. A few times when I talked back they would wallop me hard enough to draw blood.
In the dream I finally turned around and my heart pole-vaulted up my throat when I found them right behind me. I didn’t know how they got so close without me hearing them—another dream anomaly—but they did. I yelped and tried to take off, but Kelly grabbed my hair and shoved me to the ground. Then the three of them pinned me down and began shoving snow in my mouth and down my jacket.
I squirmed and yelled but couldn’t buck them off me.
“One of these nights we’re gonna come for your parents too, Childs,” Kelly spat in my ear. “We’re gonna come in the night and tie them up and hack them to pieces. Then we’re gonna do the same to you, snotnose, cut you up—”
Kelly was suddenly yanked off me. I looked up to see Gary looming above us. Forget that it was three against one. Forget that they were all roughly Gary’s height. Forget that Hubert Kelly had been carrying a branch the size of a golf club with which he could use effectively as a weapon. Forget all of that because Gary certainly didn’t care about any of it. He challenged each of them to take a swing at him, telling them whoever did would be going home with a lot less teeth. Kelly and his cronies started away, cussing and promising future pummelings, the way bullies do to save face. Gary was having none of that either. He chased after them. The two quick ones got away, but Gary caught fatso Hubert Kelly easily enough. He threw him onto the ground, stepped on his head with one booted foot, and slipped a noose around his neck.
“Don’t!” Kelly screamed. “I’ll tell my parents!”
Gary tossed the other end of the rope up and over a tree branch and tugged it, lurching Kelly to his feet, then off his feet, so they kicked frantically at air.
“Gare! Stop!” I shouted.
But it wasn’t Gary anymore. It was John Scott.
“Shut up, Ethos!” he said. “You agreed to this. You said you wouldn’t talk. So shut up or we’re both going to prison, you hear me?”
Kelly’s pig-eyes were bulging now. Red blood vessels webbed the whites. He opened his fat mouth and let out a glassy, terrifying wail—
I came awake, disorientated, wondering for a moment why I was so cold and stiff. Then I smelled the crisp, brittle air. Camping? Camping with Gary? We’d done that several times, just the two of us, up in the Porcupine Mountains. But no—Gary was dead. I had been dreaming about him again. Something about the bullies who used to chase me. Gary had beat them up in the dream, just like he had in real life that afternoon in November—
“What the fuck was that?” I heard someone say.
I sat up and saw John Scott crouched next to the dying fire.
Everything came back with a sickening punch of dread.
Suicide Forest. Ben. Dead.
“What was what?” I asked, my head foggy.
The zipper to Nina’s tent whipped downward. She stuck her head through the door flaps. “Did you hear that?” she demanded. Her eyes were wide, her face pale, almost luminescent in the darkness.
I sat straighter. What had I missed? What was going on?
“Hear what?” I asked.
“Shhh,” John Scott hissed.
Mel appeared beside me, making me jump. “Someone screamed,” she whispered.
I thought immediately of my dream, of Hubert Kelly opening his mouth and letting loose that spine-chilling wail.
“Who?” I said, getting worked up.
“A woman,” Mel said. “I think it was a woman—”
“Quiet!” John Scott hissed again.
We waited and listened. Tomo remained fast asleep.
After a minute I said, “Are you sure—”
A banshee scream rose from the forest, high-pitched and savage, cutting me off midsentence. It climbed higher and higher, thinning to a bloodcurdling moan. Then it ended as abruptly as it began.
“Holy fucking shit,” I said, looking wildly at the others.
“It is them,” Nina whispered. “It is them.”
“Shut the fuck up, Nina,” John Scott snapped.
“Then what is it? What is it?”
“It’s a bird,” I said without thinking.
“That was not a bird, Ethan.”
“Maybe a wildcat,” John Scott said. “Maybe in heat.”
Mel was as stiff as a corpse beside me. Her hand gripped mine painfully. “What do we do?” she said so softly I barely heard her.
“Nothing,” John Scott said. “We stay here, by the fire—”
The scream ripped through the night once again, a short, feminine burst of mindless agony and terror. It shattered into what might have been mad laughter. The hair on the b
ack of my neck stood up in hackles. I felt a crazy urge to run, to get the hell out of there. But we were in the middle of nowhere. Stranded. Helpless.
Mel began tugging her hand. I realized I was crushing it in mine. I released my grip and found my palm slick with something—blood. Her nails had dug into my flesh.
“Oh my God,” she said. “Oh my God. Ohmigod.”
Nina ducked back inside her tent.
“Calm down everyone,” John Scott stated, authority in his voice. “It’s probably…it’s just someone who came here to kill themselves.”
“Why’s she screaming?” Mel asked hoarsely. “What’s happening to her?”
“Maybe she screwed up,” John Scott said.
“Screwed up?” I said.
“Killing herself.”
“If you have a noose around your neck, you’re not screaming like that.”
“Maybe she didn’t hang herself. Maybe, like you said earlier, she blew half her face off.”
“Did you hear a gunshot?”
“Something then!” John Scott barked. “You get the point.”
Nina emerged from her tent. She had her backpack on. We stared at her.
“We have to leave,” she told us in a hollow, monotonous voice.
“We can’t leave, Nina,” I said. “There’s nowhere to go.”
“They are out there!”
“No, they aren’t, Nina,” I said. “John Scott is right. It’s just some woman who botched her suicide. Maybe she took pills, or poison, and she’s reacting badly, causing her pain—”
Nina yelled something in Hebrew at us, then marched off into the trees.
“Nina!” I sprang to my feet and ran after her. I caught her quickly and positioned myself in front of her. She tried to push past me. I grabbed her by the shoulders. “Nina, stop! You can’t leave.”
“I am not staying here!”
“It’s just a woman.”
“You know that is not true.”
“It’s just a woman.”
“Let go of me!”
“You’ll get lost.”
She tried to shake my hands from her shoulders. I held her firm.