The Man From Taured: A thrilling suspense novel by the new master of horror (World's Scariest Legends Book 3)

by Jeremy Bates

  ∆∆∆

  When I opened my eyes, the autumnal smell of peaty soil and decaying leaves filled my nostrils. It took me a moment to realize I was lying facedown on the ground on a bed of leaf litter, and a few more moments after that to remember I’d hanged myself.

  Or, as it turned out, attempted to hang myself.

  I rolled over onto my back. My mouth was cotton dry, making it nearly impossible to swallow.

  Leafy branches weaved a web above me, blotting out the sky. The air was warm on my face, windless. I sat up with effort. The noose remained tight around my neck, but I couldn’t be bothered removing it. A short hank of rope was attached to it. The rest dangled from the nearby tree branch, terminating in a frayed end where it had snapped under my weight.

  I croaked a laugh—your luck’s so bad lately you can’t even kill yourself, what do you think about that?—and worked some saliva to lubricate my parched throat.

  I lumbered to my feet, knowing there would be another suicide around somewhere, another rope to appropriate.

  With heavy legs and flat-footed steps, I shuffled through the occluding forest. Even in the daytime it was shrouded in darkness, a contradiction of audaciously green vegetation and indistinct shapes. Because the trees had a tendency to grow tightly together, I was constantly swatting branches and hanging creepers out of my path. I also had to lurch through the obstacle course of fallen branches and rotten logs, often slipping on the feathery moss that covered it all. Several times I caught my toes on sharp, dried magma and stumbled. This same layer of magma prevented tree roots from burrowing deep, prompting them to slither across the rocky surface like tangles of woody varicose veins, adding more obstacles to navigate.

  When I became trapped in a tangle of wild grape vines, I released my frustration with an angry bellow. This seared my throat and brought tears to my eyes. I barreled recklessly forward, banging my forearms and shins, until I burst free.

  Breathing heavily, throbbing everywhere, I pressed resolutely on, shouldering past trees and splashing through murky puddles of water. Every so often I glimpsed evidence that others had been this way before: a discarded tent, a torn jacket, a single shoe, a bottle of bleach. I came across more ribbons too, some tied between trees, others meandering along the ground. Unfortunately, they were all made of flimsy plastic and wouldn’t work as nooses.

  After what might have been thirty minutes of this torturous trek, I was more than ready to give up the search for a suitable noose. Instead, I was thinking about crawling into one of the numerous hollows in the volcanic rock I had passed, curling up, closing my eyes, and simply allowing myself to waste away—

  I noticed pavement beneath my feet.

  Frowning, I looked up.

  I was on the margin of a two-way road. For the first time since regaining consciousness I could see sky, blue with rafters of white clouds.

  I looked back at the thicket of forest from which I had emerged, and then to where it continued just as thick across the road.

  Too exhausted to deal with any more bushwhacking, I took the path of least resistance along the road, down the center of one of the lanes as there was no shoulder. When I heard a car approaching from behind me, I didn’t yield. The car slowed as it overtook me. Then it was speeding up again and soon disappeared around a bend ahead of me.

  Another car approached from behind. This one matched my speed and pulled up beside me. Someone was speaking, a woman. I ignored her.

  She pulled ahead and stopped. By the time I reached the vehicle she had the passenger door open. She was speaking to me again.

  English, I realized.

  I stopped and looked at her. In her seventies, gray permed hair, round and wrinkled face. Worried brown eyes peered at me over the top of her bifocals.

  “Will you come with me?” she asked. “I can offer you a place to rest.”

  She must have seen something in my eyes, because she boldly took my arm and guided me to the car.

  I stood before the door for a long moment, undecided, before climbing inside.

  Chapter 55

  While she drove, she told me she was on her way back from Fujinomiya to the south. She’d gone there to visit her sister the day before. She described where they went for dinner and some of the lighthearted events of the evening. I listened but didn’t say anything and eventually she stopped talking, aside from an occasional comment about the weather.

  The woman, it turned out, lived in Kawaguchiko, in a beige two-story house that backed onto a parking lot. She parked in her driveway next to a garden filled with dainty blue hydrangeas and pinkish-purple lavender.

  I opened the car door and stepped into the bright afternoon sunlight, thinking I should never have left the anonymous depths of Suicide Forest. Then the woman was at my side, taking my hand in hers, leading me inside her home. She sat me down in a chair in the kitchen and asked if she could remove the noose from around my neck. She interpreted my lack of a reply as affirmation and removed the rope, disposing of it in another room. When she returned to the kitchen, she boiled water in a kettle and placed a small plate of butter cookies on the table before me. The sight of them made me nauseous. When the water boiled, she set a mug of green tea next to the cookies and settled into a seat with her own mug of tea.

  “Are you okay?” she asked me softly.

  “No,” I replied.

  “Do you have family in Japan?”

  “No.”

  “Is there anyone I can contact for you?”

  I shook my head.

  “Yamanashi Red Cross Hospital is nearby,” she said. “I used to work there as a nurse. Would you like me to take you there now?”

  “No.”

  “You have many injuries. May I look at them?”

  “I should leave,” I said, and started to stand.

  The woman rested a wrinkled hand atop my forearm. “Please stay.”

  I hesitated, then sat back in the chair.

  “You can stay as long as you wish,” she told me. “It is only me here. My husband is no longer with me.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  Smiling, the woman patted my forearm in a grandmotherly way. She rose and turned on the small television sitting on the kitchen counter.

  “Drink the tea,” she told me. “It will make you feel better. I will be outside in the garden if you need anything.”

  I watched the news for lack of anything better to do. A local marathon. Japanese volunteers helping to construct houses in Myanmar. World politics. I remained disassociated from it all, thinking only that I could not impose on the kind woman for any longer. I would tell her—

  A graphic appeared showing the Olympic medal tally by country.

  The tickertape read: TOKYO 2020

  Tokyo? I thought, bewildered, and this was promptly followed by Okubo’s chiding voice: Have you been living under a rock, Gaston? The Olympics are in Turkey this year. Tokyo was the runner up—

  I jumped to my feet so quickly the chair crashed to the floor behind me.

  ∆∆∆

  The old woman gaped at me when I burst through the front door of her house into her garden.

  “I am okay, everything is okay,” I told her giddily as I blew past her. “Thank you so much. Thank you.”

  At the sidewalk I skidded to a stop, ran back, and gave her a hug.

  “Uwa…?” she said, laughing. “Doshitano?”

  “Thank you,” I repeated and took off running down the street.

  ∆∆∆

  At Kawaguchiko station’s ticket booth, I exchanged one Blessica’s one-thousand-yen notes for one-hundred-yen coins. I dumped the coins into the same payphone I’d used to call Okubo the night before and dialed the Philippines.

  My heart seemed to be stuttering almost loud enough to hear.

  What if I’m wrong? What if I’m not really back?

  These thoughts repeated until Blessica answered the call with a preoccupied, “Yes?”

  “Bless,” I said. “
It is me, Gaston.”

  Her voice became accusatory: “Where the hell have you been, Gaston? You had Damien this weekend. Did you forget that?”

  Damien.

  My trembling legs gave out. I slid down the wall until I sat on the floor, the receiver still clasped to my ear.

  “Gaston?” she said. “Gaston? Are you there?”

  “I am here.”

  “Well? What’s your excuse? I know you have one.”

  “There was a problem at work.”

  “A problem. Right. What was the problem, Gaston? What did you do?”

  Her automatic assumption the make-believe problem was my fault would have previously boiled my blood, but right then nothing in the world—in the universe—could have dampened my mood.

  I’m home again, I’m where I belong, and my boy is alive!

  “I am sorry I am not there, Bless,” I said. “I promise you I will make it up to Damien when I get back.”

  A pause. “What’s going on, Gaston? You sound…strange.”

  “Is Damien there? Can I speak to him for a moment?”

  “I’m upstairs,” she said dismissively.

  “Please, Bless, just for a moment.”

  “Seriously, Gaston, what’s going on?”

  “I want to get him a souvenir. I want to know if he likes…Hello Kitty.”

  “Hello Kitty? Isn’t that for girls? Just get him something Star Wars related. He loves all that stuff.”

  “Bless…?”

  A huff. “Damo!” she called. “Damo! Come up here! Your father’s on the phone.” At regular volume and directed at me: “What day are you getting back?”

  “Soon,” I said, though in truth I had no idea.

  “Can you be any vaguer?”

  “Tuesday.”

  “Morning or night?”

  “Morning.”

  “Can you take Damien then? Make up for the weekend you missed? I could use the break.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “He really wants to go to the new Lego store that’s opened in the mall—here he is.”

  “Daddy?” Damien said a moment later in his small four-year-old voice.

  I squeezed my eyes shut against a surge of dizziness. “How are you, mon coeur?”

  “Okay.”

  “You were downstairs playing?”

  “I was outside. I caught some ants. I put them in a jar with dirt. It’s going to be their new home.”

  “How fantastic! An ant farm!”

  “I want to show you it.”

  “I am far away in a different country right now. But you can show me as soon as I get home. I am going to bring you back something special. Do you know Godzilla?”

  “The big monster?”

  “That is right. What if I brought you a toy Godzilla? How does that sound?”

  “Yes, please! Godzilla! Daddy…? I think Mommy wants her phone back.”

  “I will see you soon, mon coeur.”

  “Okay.”

  “Hey, Damo—I love you. I love you so much.”

  “Wuv you too.”

  I heard the phone change hands.

  “Get your work problem sorted, Gaston,” Blessica said to me. “We’ll see you Tuesday morning.”

  Chapter 56

  In the train station’s souvenir shop I bought a tee-shirt with the image of Mt. Fuji emblazoned across the front from a saleswoman who did her best not to react to my pummeled appearance. A block away I stopped in a pharmacy and picked up all the first-aid supplies I’d purchased the day before, along with three additional rolls of crepe bandages. I checked into a cozy hotel with photographs of famous movie stars adorning the walls (using the tried I-live-in-Osaka lie to avoid producing a passport). The Western-style room had large windows offering an unobstructed view of Mt. Fuji. In the bathroom, I cringed at my reflection in the mirror. Although my black eye was no longer so black, it was still lumpy and swollen. My tee-shirt was a bloodied, shredded mess from the superficial knife wound across the top of my chest. My left arm stood out the most, as the incisions there were deeper and had bled freely, covering my forearm in flaky, brown blood.

  After taking a hot shower and carefully patting myself dry, I spent the next half hour sterilizing and bandaging my wounds, including reapplying a fresh dressing to my pinky stump. I reluctantly put back on my dirty undershorts, jeans, and socks, though the clean Mt. Fuji shirt considerably improved my appearance. Certainly, I no longer looked as though I had just gone two rounds with a cranky grizzly bear. In fact, if you overlooked the pinky stump, I was just an ordinary guy with a slightly bruised eye and a bandaged forearm.

  At the train station, I discovered the next coach didn’t depart for Tokyo for another hour. Too antsy to sit around for that long, I negotiated a flat rate with the taxi driver for the hour-and-a-half trip. While he didn’t budge much on his price, I had plenty of money to cover the fare.

  The ride passed in silence, and it wasn’t long before Tokyo’s skyline materialized, the buildings resembling ramparts of a distant fortress. Once we reached Chuo Dori, Ginza’s main thoroughfare, I told the driver to pull over and stepped out into a world of frenetic activity and noise.

  Like Shinjuku and Shibuya, Ginza was one of Tokyo’s main shopping districts, only more upmarket than any other. Luxury boutiques and expensive restaurants lined the street. The majority of the cars parked along the curbs were Mercedes, Audis, BMWs, or other high-end makes, each scintillating with reflected neon light.

  I joined the flow of well-dressed people moving hastily along the sidewalk for half a block until I came to a ritzy shopping center. I ascended through several glowing floors of cosmetics to the men’s department, where I purchased an off-the-rack black wool suit, a blue broadcloth shirt, socks, boxer-briefs, a leather belt, and matching leather shoes. I changed in a restroom, tossing all the old clothes into the bin.

  Looking at myself in the mirror, I shot my cuffs and buttoned my jacket closed. Transmogrification complete, I thought with satisfaction, feeling like my old self for the first time since I had landed in the Tokyo Detention House.

  Outside on the sidewalk once more, I crossed the traffic-clogged street and walked two blocks to Matsuoka. The Michelin-star sushi restaurant was on the fourth floor of an anonymous building. A CLOSED sign hung in the window, but the door was unlocked. I entered. The elegant interior featured a minimalist dining area and several private dining rooms. Stopping before an eight-seat wooden counter, I called, “Konichiwa?”

  A smartly dressed woman emerged from a door behind the counter. “I’m sorry, we are closed right now. If you’d like to come back—”

  “My name is Gaston Green,” I said. “I am here to see Toru Matsuoka.”

  “Mr. Green!” she said, her apologetic smile changing to one of uncertainty. “We’ve tried contacting you all week. Unfortunately, we had to cancel the event on Thursday…”

  “That is why I would like to speak with Toru. Is he around?”

  “He is in his office. Please wait here.” She gestured to one of the counter seats. “Can I get you something to drink?”

  “I am fine, thank you.”

  The woman disappeared and Toru Matsuoka emerged from the same door. He was as bald as a turtle with thick eyebrows and puffy lips that conspired to give his face a scrunched-up mien. He was fifty-two, though he could easily have passed as a man fifteen years younger.

  “Gaston!” he said full of bonhomie as he rounded the counter. “Where the hell have you been? Ah—I bet it has something to do with that eye. What happened to you?”

  I stood and embraced him, keeping my pinky-less hand in my pocket and patting him heartily on the back with the other. I’d held four previous events with him over the years, two here, and two at his nearby kaiseki restaurant.

  “I must apologize, mon ami,” I said with utmost sincerity. “I am so sorry for the lack of communication.”

  “Nobody knew where you were. Nobody could get a hold of you. We were worried.
Did you have an accident? Sit, sit.”

  We both sat.

  “I have spent the last week in prison,” I told him, going with the story I’d worked out in the taxi.

  “Prison!” His thick eyebrows slanted upward. “Whatever for?”

  “Have you heard of the Tokyo Detention House?”

  “In Katsushika City?” He nodded. “That’s where they held one of the members responsible for the Tokyo sarin subway attacks. He was hanged two years ago.”

  “Hanged? In the Tokyo Detention House? Merde! I am glad I did not know the place housed an execution chamber! It had been horrible enough as it was.”

  “Whatever were you doing there?”

  As with Okubo, I hated lying to someone I liked and respected, but I wasn’t about to tell Toru I’d checked out to a different dimension for a week. “When I landed at Narita,” I said, “I excited a sniffer dog. Immigration officers found marijuana in my luggage.”

  “Oh no, Gaston…”

  “I had been at a party the night before in Manila,” I continued. “Someone gave me some pot. I stuffed the baggie in my pocket and forgot all about it—and packed those same pants the next morning! In the detention center they did not let me speak to an attorney, did not let me call anyone. Your prison system here is a real bitch, I have to say.”

  The chef exhaled weightily. “You’re lucky they didn’t hold you for even longer. In 1980, Paul McCartney was arrested at Narita Airport for having marijuana in his suitcase. He spent nine days in jail. His tour was cancelled. I remember there being talk he could have received seven years for drug smuggling... Yes, you are very lucky.” He indicated my black eye. “Did another prisoner give you that?”

  I shook my head. “I got on the bad side of a guard.”

  “Now I know why you were so hard to get in touch with! Prison! Damn, Gaston. You’re always saying a dram of whisky goes best with a good story. I suspect you’ll be telling this story at your events for a long time to come!”

  “It might be a little too personal to share with strangers, but who knows? Speaking of whisky, the woman I spoke to a short time ago…”