Swimming In the Sea of Trees (Novella #8) Read online

  I knew to whom she was referring, which was exactly why it took me so long to utter a response. When I did, my voice was broken and not quite my own. “Of course I do,” I said, riffling through the rucksack for my own water bottle. God I was thirsty. My throat was lined with what felt like needles, as if I had scooped up the fallen pines from the forest floor and forced them into my gullet. When I located the water, I immediately relaxed. “I think about him every single day.” I sipped at my water, and though it was warm and tasteless, it hit the spot.

  “I haven’t thought about him for a while,” Kelly said. “Does that make me a bad person? That I would forget my own son like that?”

  “Of course it doesn’t,” I said, “so you can knock that silliness on the head right now.” I screwed the cap onto my bottle and dropped it into the rucksack. I had to go to her, to comfort her. That was what she wanted. “You’re obviously thinking about him today.”

  “Bullshit,” she said, digging at the undergrowth with the toe of her shoe. “He popped into my head just now, and do you know what I thought? I thought: you don’t belong there. You shouldn’t be there.” Only then did I notice she was clenching her hands into fists so tight that her knuckles were white. “Why would I be thinking about him now?” Something like a snigger escaped her lips.

  I closed the gap between us and pulled her into my arms. “Remember when we went camping with him?” I said.

  “That was the last time we camped anywhere,” Kelly said.

  “Exactly,” I replied. “It was just the three of us, and that horrible family with the dogs who decided, for whatever reason, to pitch up right next to us, even though there were three acres of empty field on either side.”

  “God, I hated those pricks,” Kelly said, her words slightly muffled by my shoulder. “And their kids! Little bastards needed a bit of discipline, they were so naughty, not like…” She trailed off, though my brain effortlessly finished her sentence.

  Samuel.

  Not like Samuel.

  Samuel who was four when he died, when the meningitis left him a vomiting, fever-wracked mess. Samuel who had been looking forward to starting school in the summer, who used to color outside of the lines on purpose because “everybody else does it neat, and I don’t want to be like everybody else.” Samuel who liked carrots but hated peas. Samuel who couldn’t quite ride his bike without the training wheels, but that was okay because he liked the sound they made.

  “It wasn’t anyone’s fault,” I said, pushing Kelly back a little so that I could gaze into her eyes; eyes which were now filled with tears. “These things…”

  “Happen? Is that what you were going to say?”

  It was, but now I could see it was a bad choice of word. “We can spend the rest of our lives wondering why…why Samuel? Why our boy and not some other? Why not that little bastard from the campsite that liked to remove our guide-ropes in the middle of the night and then run around the field, laughing about it?” I was getting angry, but not at Kelly; I was angry at the conversation, that it should come now, and not tomorrow at the Golden Pavilion. I was angry that I didn’t have the right words for my wife, that I was awful when it came to comforting her, reassuring her, when it should have been easy. I was angry that this was the first time she had mentioned our son in months…

  “Why now?” I said, releasing her arms.

  She shook her head and stared at my chest. “I don’t know.” It was barely a whisper. If it hadn’t been for the silence of the forest around us, I might not have heard her. “I…I just…” She wiped her eyes, ashamed of the tears which threatened but never quite made it. “I can’t explain it,” she said. “You would think it got easier, but it doesn’t, does it? It never does.”

  “It’s always going to be there,” I told her. “Of course it is. There’s no cure for it, but you have to believe me when I say that we’ll get through it.” What was I talking about? As far as I was concerned, the worst of it was behind us. Samuel had been dead for almost two years, and while I would never forget his smile, the annoying noise he made following some terrible joke he’d made up on the spot, I was looking toward the future. There comes a time when you have to let go, admit that the past can’t be changed and move on. I thought Kelly was with me until now.

  Apparently not.

  “I’m just being silly,” she said, breathing deeply through her nose and exhaling through her mouth. Her lips curled into something akin to a smile. “I’m sorry.”

  “What for?” I was genuinely at a loss.

  “For putting a dampener on your day.” She motioned to the trees. “How can anyone be so miserable with all this beauty around them, huh?”

  It was a question I’d been asking myself since reading about the place in some old edition of National Geographic.

  “You haven’t put a dampener on anything,” I assured her. “Let’s just enjoy this.” I pointed to the sky, or what little of it that could be discerned beyond the treetops. “It’s a nice day, we’ve got all this to ourselves. It’s just you and me.” I reached for her hand; she met me halfway.

  I scooped the rucksack up and slung it across my shoulder. We were moving again, all thoughts of our dead son left behind, for now at least.

  3

  The farther into the trees we ventured, the less orange tape we saw. I didn’t know whether that was because people were less likely to die this far in, or simply that the wardens refused to brave the woods any deeper than they had to. The litter speckling the ground also diminished, and for a moment I panicked, for what if we had gone off track? What if we had taken a wrong turn somewhere? How would I explain that one to Kelly, who was already emotional as hell? “Sorry, love, but I think we’re fucked. Oh, your compass? Yeah, they don’t work too well in Aokigahara. It’s the iron in the volcanic soil. We might as well just keep walking, you know? See where we end up.”

  Luckily, a string of orange tape stretching between two trees allayed my fears. We were still on the trail. It would, however, take a while for my heart to stop pounding.

  “What the hell is that?” Kelly said, pointing to something between the trees. My eyesight is not as good as my wife’s, and so I had to squint to see what she was referring to. When I did, my heart rate increased ten-fold.

  “Oh, my God, is that a fucking baby!?” Kelly slapped a hand across her mouth. “Dan—”

  “Wait here,” I said. I dropped the rucksack and moved toward the edge of the trail so that I could better see the tiny human shape nailed to the bark of a maple. As I neared, and saw that we had overreacted somewhat, I relaxed, but only a little. The thing was still macabre, though not nearly as gruesome as it would have been to discover an actual baby pinned there. “It’s okay,” I called back over my shoulder. Kelly hadn’t moved from the spot I’d left her in; her hand continued to cover her mouth as she anticipated the worst. “It’s just a doll.”

  It wasn’t just a doll, of course. It was one of the ugliest things I had ever seen. Faux singed hair jutted out from its partially melted head. Where there should have been eyes there were two hollow sockets; the fact that it was naked only served to unsettle me further. But the real icing on the cake was in the way it had been nailed to the tree. Upside down, its arms and legs akimbo.

  Like an inverted cross.

  “A doll?” Kelly said. She was a few feet behind me. “What kind of sick bastard would do that? I thought that was a real fucking baby, for crying out loud.” Her voice was tremulous, high-pitched.

  “Probably kids messing around,” I said, examining the doll. “Hey, pass me the camera.”

  “Oh, you’re going to take a picture of it,” she said, not quite a question. “Of course you are. And there was me thinking we were going to be getting shots of flora and fauna.”

  “It’s nailed to a tree,” I said, accepting the Nikon from her. “That counts as flora.”

  “It’s an upside down doll,” she said. The unease had left her voice; now she was just angry. At me, seeming
ly, for wanting to document our findings.

  “Yeah, but think how great it’ll look on the blog, huh?” I was determined to write a masterpiece, and this picture, this terrifying inverse child’s plaything—melted in places, filthy in others—would be the perfect image to accompany the piece. By that time, Kelly would know that I had misinformed her, or had at least concealed the truth about Aokigahara. I would cross that bridge when I came to it.

  “I think it’s disgusting,” Kelly said. “Why haven’t the wardens taken it down? This is supposed to be a beauty spot, isn’t it? Not Dahmer’s living room.”

  That made me laugh. “The wardens don’t work here all year round,” I said. “And this thing might be relatively new.” It didn’t look new; it looked ancient, the kind of doll your grandmother would perch on her mantelpiece so that it could stare down at you in perpetuity with its angry glass eyes. My own grandmother had a doll fixation, collected them religiously. Porcelain monstrosities that she acquired from auctions. Her friends, upon death, bequeathed their own dolls to her, and she used to swear blind that the souls of those who had passed were contained within the lifelike playthings. I hadn’t thought about that for the longest time, but now, with the upturned doll pinned to the tree in front of me, it all came surging back.

  “Have you finished taking pictures?” Kelly asked, backing away from the trees. Her voice told me that she wasn’t willing to stay for any longer than was necessary, and so I took two more shots before joining her on the trail.

  “Are you okay?” I knew I was setting myself up for a barrage of complaints, and yet the question seemed mandatory.

  “I’m fine,” she said through gritted teeth. “Do you feel that?”

  I had no idea what she was talking about, and so asked her to elaborate.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s really strange. Like a vibration in the pit of my stomach.” As if to demonstrate, she placed a hand across her midriff.

  “That, my dear, is hunger,” I said, for I was feeling nothing of the sort. “I’ve got some protein bars in the bag. You didn’t eat anything for breakfast.”

  “It’s not hunger, Dan,” she said, a little too sharply for my liking. “It’s something else. I’ve had it ever since we left the car, and I thought it was nerves, but it’s getting worse.”

  I sighed, and hid it well. “What? Are you saying that it’s something to do with the woods?” I snorted; I don’t think Kelly appreciated it. “Could be food poisoning,” I said. “That fish we ate last night might not have been cooked enough. I thought that when I saw it.”

  “That was sushi, you silly bugger,” she said, smiling once again. God, I loved that smile, didn’t see enough of it.

  “Do you feel sick?” I dropped the rucksack to the ground. “I know I packed some Cyclizine in here. Might help.”

  “No, I think I’m all right.” She breathed deeply. “It’s not a sick-y feeling. Just…a really weird thrum.”

  “I’m intrigued,” I said, “but I don’t think it’s anything to worry about. Just let me know if it gets any worse and we’ll head back.” I silently chastised myself for even suggesting it. That was the last thing I wanted, to cut short the trek for the sake of some ‘weird thrum,’whatever the hell that meant. Luckily, Kelly shook her head and told me not to be silly. Did she think I would resent her if we went back now? I hoped not, even though it wasn’t far from the truth. I would have kept it to myself, but deep down I would have been seething, plotting to pull the same stunt with her at the Golden Pavilion tomorrow. If that makes me a bad person, then so be it. I’m a fucker.

  “So do you have any idea where this trail leads?” she said, her ‘weird thrum’ forgotten for now. “Or are we just walking and hoping we come across something?”

  Yes! That was exactly what we were doing. I wanted to come across something, to see a dead body nestled amongst the shrubs. I wouldn’t draw attention to it, and subtly I would take pictures. Of course, that was the best case scenario. There was a good chance that Kelly would see it first, the way she had with the nailed doll, and if that happened, I knew that things would go south extremely quickly. The doll had frightened the life out of her; a partially-decayed corpse would send her screaming along the trail. I would have no choice but to chase her down and explain everything. End of the road for this trip, and perhaps for us.

  “I don’t think the trail leads anywhere in particular,” I said, stopping to light a cigarette. “It’s just a guideline to make sure we don’t go any deeper into the forest than we should. People get lost out here all the time. I read somewhere that even the wardens don’t know what lies in the heart of Aokigahara.” That wasn’t true, but I had an inborn flair for the dramatic. Sometimes I didn’t even know I was doing it. Kelly liked to tell our friends that I was full of shit. I tended to agree with her.

  “I quite like it out here,” she said, which caught me off guard. A minute ago she was clutching at her stomach, alleging that her guts were full of spiders, or something like that. I wondered, as I had before on several occasions, if I was dealing with a schizophrenic.

  “You like it?” I said.

  She laughed a little. “Well, yeah I mean, it’s peaceful. There’s nobody around to wind me up. It’s creepy, don’t get me wrong, but it’s…nice.”

  I would have agreed with her if, in that moment, I hadn’t felt the strange pangs of something crawling through my own innards. I flinched, but not so much that Kelly noticed, and as she continued to talk, wax lyrical about the joys of surrounding oneself with trees, I could only concentrate on the odd sensation coursing through my body.

  Was this the same thing Kelly was feeling? If so, I now knew why she opted to bring it to my attention. It was a terrible feeling. Intrusive, as if, for just a moment, my body didn’t belong to me. Or, more specifically, didn’t belong exclusively to me.

  Fucking sushi, I thought, and made a mental note never to touch the stuff again, which was easier said than done when you were vacationing in Japan.

  “Dan?” Kelly said. At least, I thought she did, but when I looked at her she was still talking, hadn’t even noticed the concern etched upon my face. Never before had I felt so disconnected from reality, and all because of some infernal food poisoning. It was so terrible that when I did finally comprehend my surroundings once again, Kelly was standing amongst the trees, off the trail, pointing toward something I couldn’t quite make out. How long had passed? Seconds? Minutes? I had no concept of time. For all I knew, those pricks over in Switzerland had done something with that wretched collider of theirs; it’s funny what runs through your mind when your mind suddenly double-crosses you.

  “What is it?” I mustered breathily. Even speech, something I had always been relatively good at, seemed beyond me in that moment. Kelly pressed a quavering finger to her lips to silence me. Her other hand continued to point out into the trees, and it was then that I saw it.

  A campsite, though that might have been overstating it. Roughly fifty feet off the trail, between a scattering of trees and sitting at the center of some sort of glade, was a juniper green tent. Despite its obvious attempt at camouflage, it stuck out like a sore thumb against the surrounding oaks.

  “I didn’t think visitors were allowed to camp here,” Kelly whispered. Her eyes were wide, beseeching.

  “They’re not,” I said. “The wardens would have moved them on if they had caught so much of a sniff of them.” I used the pronoun them, even though in all likelihood there was only one person in that tent. Maybe dead, maybe working through a few things, deciding on their next move, vacillating over whether to pack up and go home or see it through to the bitter end.

  “Pushing their luck, aren’t they? Won’t they get into trouble if they’re caught?” She kept her voice low, as if fearful of disturbing the tent’s inhabitants. My stomach had once again settled, though it felt hollow, emptier than it had before. I toyed with the idea of a protein bar before talking myself out of it. We had no idea how long we wo
uld be staying; it was best to conserve what little food we had for later.

  I moved up alongside Kelly and draped an arm across her shoulder. She was shaking, warm, and clammy. “Can’t see anyone, can you?” I stared through the trees, and though I could distinctly make out the tent, everything else was a blur of greens and browns. Maybe I did need glasses, though now was not the time to admit it. Kelly had been pestering me for months over my vision; to cede now would be humiliating.

  “Not a sausage,” Kelly said, shaking her head. “Do you think it’s the same people who did that shit back there with the doll?”

  “Nah.” I didn’t know for certain, but I had a strong suspicion that whoever was, or had been, in that tent had only just arrived. “Like I said, you get all kinds of people coming out here. Thousands every year. The doll people are probably back home, sawing the legs off Barbie or giving Action Man an enema.”

  Kelly sighed and folded her arms across her chest. “Do you think we should check on them?”

  My heart began to race. “On the tent people?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  I arched my eyebrows. “I guess it wouldn’t hurt to make sure they’re okay,” I said. I eased the rucksack to the ground and unzipped the side pocket on the right. Inside was a small knife—three-inch blade, nothing fancy, the kind of thing you’d use to gut a fish if you were lucky enough to catch one—and I ran a finger carefully across its blade, making sure it was sharp enough to protect us if need be.

  “What the hell did you bring that thing for?” Hands on hips, Kelly looked as if she might kick me while I was down on my knees.

  “What?” I said. “You’d rather we came into the spooky forest with nothing?” I folded the blade down and tucked the knife into the back pocket of my khakis. “Besides, we don’t know what we’re going to find in that tent.” Careful, I reproached myself. There was no need to put the shivers up Kelly, and I’d come too far now to admit I’d known about the place and its macabre history all along. Part of me believed I could get away with playing dumb, if necessary. Another part of me knew that Kelly wasn’t a stupid woman. In many ways she was smarter than me, and it wouldn’t take her long to figure out that I’d brought her into a—no, the—suicide forest for my own bizarre pleasure.