Swimming In the Sea of Trees (Novella #8)

by Adam Millard

  To keep me from leaving.

  “Kelly!” I had resorted to yelling her name as loud as I possibly could, hopeful that she might hear me. If she did, she didn’t call back. I prayed she was at the car, out of harm’s reach, away from all this madness, but I knew with some certainty that she wouldn’t be. We had entered the forest as a couple, and we would either leave as one, or never leave at all.

  I called her name again. My voice came back to me as a whisper and in a tone I didn’t much like the sound of. I was being taunted by this…this place…this Hell on earth. The forest was alive with the souls it had consumed; they were everywhere! Crawling over boughs and branches, dancing along the shadowy glades, whirling in and out of treetops, nothing but an illusory, milky smoke, and yet wholly terrifying.

  I could see them. I could feel them. I could hear them whispering amongst themselves. They were happy we had come here, Kelly and I. They looked forward to getting to know us better, but first we had to succumb to the forest, to allow it to envelop us entirely, the way hundreds of others had yielded to it.

  While there was an ounce of fight left in me, I wouldn’t allow it to happen. I could feel it clawing at me, trying to soften me up with awful memories. It revealed to me things that Kelly had done with her fancy-man, things I could never have known about. They hadn’t simply slept together once or twice; it had gone on for many months, and as it played back to me in hi-definition clarity, it was all I could do not to scream and hate. She had fucked him in our bed—in our bed—and our shower while I had been away at a conference. He had cooked her a meal using my wok—my fucking wok—and she had enjoyed it so much that she had dragged him toward the bedroom shortly after, only they had both been too excited to make it that far, and so she had ended up sucking his cock on the stairs.

  “No, no, no!” I cried, trying to force the dreadful images from my head. My eyes were streaming with both sweat and tears. I had slowed almost to a stop; it was a struggle to put one foot in front of the other.

  She had lied to me on so many occasions that, if I had known, I would never have taken her back. I would never have forgiven her.

  “That’s what the forest wants you to believe!” I told myself. I tried to convince myself that it was all an illusion—a horrific composition the forest had put together to make my decision that much easier—and yet it all made sense. Had I ever truly believed her when she told me it was just a one-off? That he meant nothing to her, and that she had made a terrible mistake? Things had been so different before it happened, before Samuel died, before we started bickering over the most inane things. These last few years had been a farce, a sham, a waste of both of our lives.

  I should have left her the day Samuel died!

  “No, that’s not true!” I clenched my eyes shut tight. Grasping at my aching belly, I tried to silence the voices swirling around me, swooping down from the trees and up from the ground, urging me to believe them, believe what I was being shown. “Fuck OFF!” I screamed. “Leave us alone!”

  Us?

  I was alone. I had let my wife go so easily, and although it had been less than an hour since we parted ways, it felt like years since I last saw her face.

  It had wanted us apart, I thought. The forest, it had maliciously separated us so that it could set to work on our psyches while we were alone and vulnerable.

  I slowly opened my eyes, thought about what Kelly had said earlier, about Samuel. It had come from seemingly nowhere and I had thought nothing of it, but now it made perfect sense. Even then Aokigahara had been working on her, tenderizing her, filling her mind with negativity and dread.

  “Samuel,” I muttered. My lip quivered even though I was boiling up inside.

  That was how it would get to Kelly. It knew what buttons to press, what memories to invoke, what scents and sights to petition to push a human soul over the edge. Aokigahara wasn’t haunted by the ghosts of the people who had died here; it was the ghost.

  If it wasn’t too late, I had to find her, had to push away the grotesque images the forest had tried to tattoo onto my mind. I knew now what this place was, what it was capable of, what it wanted from me.

  I had to fight it.

  I couldn’t let it win.

  Even though my feet were blistered and my legs felt as if they had been dipped in concrete, I broke into a run. Go back for the knife, a susurrating voice said.

  “Go fuck yourself,” I said.

  * * *

  Samuel…

  With the raincoat clenched in her sweaty hand, Kelly rushed through the trees calling out his name. It wasn’t possible, though, was it? And yet she had proof—the same yellow raincoat he had been wearing on that day, the day he had jumped from the tree—and that was all she needed. If she didn’t find the car, she would find Dan, and she would show Dan the coat and they could look for their son together.

  But he’s dead! a voice—Dan’s?—told her, and while she knew that the voice was telling the truth, she couldn’t…wouldn’t listen to it.

  As she moved through the forest, crying out for the son she had lost so many years ago, the forest whispered back to her in its own voice.

  You can be with him again…

  You can be with your son…

  You know what you must do…

  “I don’t know what I have to do!” she whimpered. All she knew was that she would do whatever she could for just one moment with Samuel, to smell the cookies on his breath once again, to run her hands through his fine, blond hair and tell him how much she loved him.

  You will know…

  You will see…

  “I don’t see!” she cried, breathlessly. “I don’t know what you fucking want me to do!”

  Follow the child…

  You will see…

  Kelly was about to argue with the whispering forest, to tell it that she had never felt so lost in her whole life, when movement in the trees to her left caught her eye. She spun, heart rapidly beating, and watched as the boy leapt over a felled tree as agile as a monkey. Without the hood of the coat covering it, the boy’s blond hair flapped up from his scalp as he ran. Kelly couldn’t remember Samuel being able to race so swiftly; he had never been terribly athletic. He was, had been, more of a climber—an aficionado of the slow game—and so the way he ran now surprised her.

  “Samuel!” she said, gasping for air. “Samuel, stop running! Mommy can’t keep up!”

  But she didn’t have to keep up, for every time she thought she had lost him, he appeared again up ahead, or to her left, or right. He giggled as he ran, the way he used to when Kelly chased him across the field by their old house. When she caught him, she would playfully wrestle him to the ground and tickle him until he begged her to stop.

  He liked that.

  Kelly liked that.

  But first she had to catch him.

  Bile rose in her throat as she pursued her dead son through the forest, its bitterness burning her gullet. Sweat stung her eyes and compromised her vision. The trees became nothing but green and russet blurs on either side of her; her focus, fuzzy though it was, remained fixed on Samuel as he negotiated the forest as if he had lived there for many years.

  “Sa…Sammy!” she panted. It was a hypocorism she loathed to use, but it would indicate to her son that she was not angry with him for running away, that there would be no punishment when she caught up with him, that this was just a game, but enough was enough…

  He giggled again, disappearing beneath a blanket of leaves and branches so dark that he seemed to fall into it—a vertical hole which had no place in Aokigahara.

  When she arrived at it, though, Kelly saw that it wasn’t as pitch as it had looked at a distance. The dark shadows lasted only a meter or so into the shelter before a gloominess took over. As she stooped, still calling out her son’s name, she saw that the roof of the fissure was not made of trees but of plastic. A tarpaulin, the kind that truck-drivers used to cover their loads, stretched from one tree to another, creating a wide
and long grotto.

  “Samuel?” She took long, deep breaths which felt good in her lungs. The stitch in her side abated, and she was grateful for this temporary respite. “Samuel, Mommy’s tired of this game.” She moved into the murk, her stomach fluttering as if she had swallowed a bucket of living pests.

  Despite the manufactured look of the place, Kelly was almost certain no-one was camped there. There was an empty feel to it; it was like wandering into an old house, one which had sat abandoned for years.

  “Samuel, Mommy doesn’t want to play any more games,” she said, scanning the gloom for any hint of movement. Tree trunks stretched from the dead earth to the synthetic sheeting above. “And Mommy doesn’t want to get dirty knees,” she laughed, stooping farther still as the grotto became squatter, “so why don’t you come out and we can go find Daddy, huh?”

  A giggle somewhere to her left caused her to gasp and turn. She thought she saw something move a few feet away, but when her eyes adjusted to the semi-dark she saw nothing there.

  Another excited snicker—this one to her right—made her wish she had a torch. She had always hated playing hide-and-seek, with Samuel and as a child. “Samuel, you come out here right now otherwise there is going to be trouble.” She had tried the softly-softly approach and that had gotten her nowhere. It was time to be firm; to be brusque. “Now, you don’t want to make Mommy angry, do you? I just want to see you, that’s all. Don’t you want to see Mommy?”

  She listened, but there was nothing to suggest there had been anyone there to begin with; all she could hear was her own labored breathing. Her heart dropped into her stomach and a tremendous sensation of sadness washed over her, so powerful that tears were streaming down her face before she had time to realize it.

  “I don’t know what to do!” she cried, grasping onto the yellow raincoat for dear life. “Samuel, Mommy is lost!” She dropped to her knees and something crunched beneath her. She looked down and shuffled slowly backwards. There, on the dead ground in front of her, lay a carpet of bones.

  Kelly tried to scream but it caught in her throat.

  “Come find me, Mommy,” Samuel’s voice said from somewhere outside. Kelly sighed with relief and backed out of the charnel grotto.

  You know what you have to do…

  Be with your son again…

  Be with Samuel…

  Out in the open once again, Kelly straightened up and wiped the tears from her filthy cheeks. “I know!” she told the forest. “I know what I have to do.”

  A powerful breeze slammed into Kelly and the forest hissed in anticipation.

  “I know exactly what I have to do.”

  9

  Orange tape! I saw it from afar, through the sea of trees, and knew I was back on the trail, the right path back to the car. My head ached and spun, my calves burned as if I was on the final mile of a marathon, and my throat was afire, but in less than half an hour I would be reunited with my wife and we could drive away from this infernal place and never return again.

  She’s already dead, the trees whispered to me as I ducked beneath the orange tape and stepped onto the track.

  I knew not to listen to the voices, and yet it was so difficult. What if they were telling the truth? What if Aokigahara had got to Kelly before I could? It would be all my fault for bringing her here, for exposing her to this accursed place.

  “She is not dead,” I grunted at no-one in particular, for the forest would hear me; I had a feeling it even knew what I was thinking. That was how it had got into my mind, probed at my memories, and discovered my worst fears. That was what it did. I knew that now, but was I too late…

  The closer I got to the car, the more the forest began to taunt me. It tried to convince me that Kelly and Samuel had been reunited and that she had never been happier. That she had hated me in the years since our son had died, and that she had only stayed with me out of pity and ingrained devotion. That she blamed me for not saving our son, as if there was something more I could have done.

  Each time the forest lied to me, a little piece of it stuck, latched onto my psyche. It was weighing me down with despair, burdening me with callous untruths.

  It was doing everything in its power to prevent me from leaving.

  By the time I reached the not-so-happy camper’s tent, saw his clothes moving slowly back and forth in the gentle breeze, I accepted there was a chance It would succeed.

  * * *

  Kelly stumbled through the scrub, thick nettles stinging at her knees and shins and thorns tearing at her flesh like so many scorpions. The pain…it didn’t matter. All that mattered was Samuel. All that had ever mattered was Samuel, but no matter how quickly she moved, her son was always one step ahead—she was a donkey with a carrot dangling just a few inches in front of her face.

  Up ahead he stumbled, and she thought she might catch up to him as he sat in the undergrowth nursing his sore knee, but it wasn’t to be.

  Not yet.

  * * *

  “My wife!” I said to the man. The confusion etched upon his face brought back memories of the first time we’d met the happy camper. No speekee English…the forest hissed; I chose to ignore it.

  “I…I don’ know…” He took a step back, his hands held out, placatory, begging me not to hurt him. I wasn’t going to.

  At least, not if I didn’t have to.

  More calmly, I said, “We came through here a few hours ago. You remember?”

  The happy camper nodded, though I wasn’t sure he understood what I was saying.

  “My wife…she come back this way?”

  For a split-second I thought I saw something in his eyes, something other than fear and confusion, but then it was gone again, and I knew he hadn’t a clue what I was asking him. I was wasting valuable time, and yet while I was talking to (yelling at) the happy camper, I couldn’t hear the forest’s taunts. It was as if I was slowly recovering, gathering much-needed energy, energy I would need to make it off the trail and out of Aokigahara once and for all. But then the forest spoke to me, and that changed everything.

  She’s in the tent! the forest whispered. He killed her and put her in the tent…

  Something caught in my throat and I thought, for a moment, I would die right there, choking on my own tongue or whatever the hell it was that was preventing me from breathing. I glowered at the man, then at the tent, at the man again, and I could see that he was nervous by the way he stepped uneasily from one foot to the other.

  “You motherfucker,” I muttered, rushing toward the tent, my heart beating so fast and hard I thought it might suddenly explode and spill my guts out all over the forest floor. I saw the happy camper moving toward me in my peripheral vision, but he wasn’t going to stop me. I was already at the door of the tent, clawing at the canvas, tearing the flaps open with both hands.

  “Noh!” the panicked camper said, but it was too late. I was on my knees staring into the tent. I saw the feet, the legs, and the thighs protruding from the dirt-dappled sheet covering the rest of the body. I saw the stone weighing the sheet down, and I grabbed it just as a pair of scrawny arms wrapped around my neck and pulled me back, away from the tent.

  Immediately I flipped over and brought the smooth stone around in a wide arc. Those flimsy arms left my neck just as the stone smashed into the happy camper’s face. There was an audible crunch and then teeth flew across the glade. The life faded from the man’s eyes so quickly, he was dead before his head hit the ground.

  I sat there for a while, clinging to the stone, staring down at the unmoving body of the happy camper, the way his jaw hung listlessly to one side and his tongue lolled from his bloody mouth. It was only when the forest spoke that I remembered why I had killed the man in the first place.

  See for yourself…

  Go…see for yourself…

  I clambered to my feet, which gave way beneath me immediately, and so I crawled the short distance to the tent’s ripped flaps and dragged myself inside. The smell was awful; a trio o
f flies hovered near the body, occasionally alighting upon the sheet before rising into the air again.

  I cried as I wearily pulled the sheet from the corpse.

  But not nearly as much as I cried when I saw that the corpse wasn’t Kelly’s.

  * * *

  “Samuel, please!” She had taken to begging the last few hundred yards, pleading with her son to stop running. Her legs were cut to ribbons; thick dried spittle caked the corners of her lips; she had never felt so miserable in all her life. She fell to the ground with a meaty thump, too tired to continue. As she rolled over onto her back, the sun struck her sweat-stinging eyes and she shut them, just for a moment.

  She lay there, thinking about how different it could have been, how things would have been if she had only caught up to her son. She would have hugged him so tight, made him realize that not a day went by when she didn’t think of him. She would have—

  “Mommy, it’s time…”

  Kelly slowly opened her eyes, expecting to see the sun hanging high in the sky beyond the trees, but a shadowy outline, limned by the sun, was all she could discern. She knew immediately who it belonged to, and a thin smile crept across her face.

  “To your right, Mommy. By your hand.”

  Without sitting up or taking her eyes from Samuel’s shadowy face, she clawed around in the dirt to her right, felt something small and hard. Something plastic and light.

  Samuel smiled.

  “Come with me,” he said.

  Kelly smiled and nodded. “I’ll never leave you again.”

  * * *

  You killed a man, the forest sighed.

  “You fucking tricked me!” I yelled back, staggering through the trees now as if I was only just learning to walk. I felt drunk and so, so tired, but I knew that if I stopped moving, even for a moment, I would lose.

  Your wife sucked the camper’s cock, hissed the forest.

  “Shut the fuck up!” I screamed, but the image was planted in my mind, and once it was there I couldn’t shake it.