Suicide Forest (24 page)

“Killer ghost?”

“Yeah.”

“No way, man.”

“Ethos?”

“I’m not ruling anything out,” I said,
mainly because I didn’t want John Scott to think I was on his
side.

“But you want to stay here overnight?”

“It’s better than wandering aimlessly. We
need to conserve our energy.” I shrugged, getting impatient with
all this talk of the supernatural. “Look, it’s only one more night.
If you’re worried something is out there, Mel, then John Scott,
Tomo, and I will take turns keeping watch. There are six of us.
We’ll be fine.”

I could see in Mel’s eyes what she was
thinking but what she undoubtedly felt silly speaking out loud: six
people, or six hundred people, it made no difference against a
ghost.

“There’s still light,” she said. “You keep
saying we might go the wrong way. But if we go the
right
way, then we could be out of here before nightfall.”

“What do you want to do?” I asked her. “Vote
on this?”

She bit her lower lip in frustration. She
knew she was outnumbered.

John Scott stuck up his hand. “I say we
should stay put.”

Tomo raised his hand. Then, after a moment,
Nina raised hers as well.

Mel looked at me, angry and pleading at the
same time.

“It doesn’t matter how I vote,” I told her.
“It’s already three to one.”

“What about Neil?”

“He can’t vote.”

“Why not?” she demanded.

“He can barely walk.”

“He’ll want to leave. I know he will. He
needs help.”

“Whoa, hold on,” John Scott said. “Ethos,
just vote.”

“I’m sorry, Mel,” I said. “I think we should
stay.”

She glared at me, tears glistening in her
eyes, then turned away.

Shadows
emerged
from their daytime sanctuaries, perverting the trees more than they
already were, turning them into looming monsters out of a sadistic
fairytale. Grays became charcoals, and charcoals, blacks. Then
night was upon us like a thief, swiftly and silently. If anyone
tells you they’re not afraid of the dark, that’s because they have
never spent a night in Aokigahara Jukai. It doesn’t matter how
brave you think you are, there is something so deranged and wrong
about this forest that it worms its way into the deepest closets of
your mind and awakens your most primitive fears.

Not wanting to get caught out again without
the reassurance of a fire, we’d spent the last of the daylight
erecting our tents and collecting more than enough firewood to last
us until morning. Now we sat in a circle around three-foot-tall
flames, everything the same as the evening before—except for the
fact we didn’t have any food or water, and one of us was dead.

The group mentality was bad. Nobody spoke.
Nobody did much of anything. We sat and waited, either for the
police to miraculously show, or for sleep to whisk us to morning. I
wanted to say something, to break the suffocating silence, but
there was nothing to say.

My stomach was sour with an unpleasant mix
of anxiety and hunger. My mouth was dry, my head and body ached,
and I was growing lightheaded as well.

I glanced at Neil. He remained a good
fifteen feet away from the rest of us at his stubborn insistence.
When he wasn’t curled in a fetal position rocking back and forth,
he was either vomiting or shitting. He could barely muster the
strength to lug himself to his feet, and he never got farther than
a dozen yards or so from camp before performing these bodily
functions. His constant moaning and toilet trips began to grate on
my nerves. I knew he couldn’t help himself, but I was irritable and
in a somber frame of mind, and it seemed almost disrespectful to
Ben’s memory that Neil would go and get food poisoning now out of
all times and places.

It wasn’t just me who was irrationally
unsympathetic. In the flickering firelight I caught everyone shoot
Neil a vexed look at one point or another.

Feeling guilty for harboring these thoughts,
I went over to check on him again. He was on his side, turned away
from me. His face was sheathed in perspiration. His shirt was
likely drenched as well, though I couldn’t see it. His sleeping bag
covered his body, cinched tightly around his neck. He looked like a
caterpillar wrapped in a cocoon, with only its head poking
free.

“Hey, Neil,” I said, crouching beside him.
“It’s Ethan.”

He didn’t respond, let alone acknowledge my
voice. I touched his forehead gently with the back of my hand. He
was burning up.

“How you doing over here?” It was a stupid
question. But what else was there to say?
Is your will up to
date, old buddy?
Any last words you want me to pass on to
Kaori?

I didn’t think Neil was in mortal danger.
He’d been sick for close to a day already. The symptoms should
lessen overnight. If not, the police would be here tomorrow. They
would get him to a hospital.

And if the symptoms don’t lessen?
I
asked myself.
And if the police don’t come? What then? I’ll tell
ya. Neil really will be in mortal danger. He’ll die right here, in
this forest, wasted and putrid, probably from organ failure, but,
hey, anything is possible, maybe he’ll suffer a stroke…or decide he
was a goner anyway and take his own life. This was sure the place
to do something like that.

He mumbled something.

“What’s that, Neil?” I asked, bending close
to him.

“Wadda.” The word was dry, papery.

“We don’t have any. We finished it this
morning.”

His response was to squeeze his eyes shut
tighter.

I stared at him helplessly. How long could
you last without water? Three days? That sounded about right. Three
days under normal circumstances, though after two you would be
pretty wretched. So how about when you had a raging fever and were
sweating and pissing and shitting every last drop of liquid out of
you? Half that time? Less?

If only it would rain, I thought wistfully,
we could string up the tents between the trees to act as large
nylon buckets. We would have enough water to bath in. But the
tantalizingly low and pregnant storm clouds remained impossibly
distant. Who knew how long they would retain their precious load
for, or if they would blow over completely.

I tried to recall movies I’d seen in which
the main characters were stranded somewhere without water. A couple
vague images materialized in my mind’s eye. One was of a guy
wrapping his shins in old rags, then stomping through tall grass to
catch dew. Another guy—or maybe it was the same one—made a
belowground sill. The mechanics of this took me a few seconds to
puzzle out, but I thought I got it. You dig a bowl-shaped hole
about three feet across and two feet deep. You make a sump and
place a container in it. You cover the hole with plastic and set a
rock in the center so it hangs about a foot or so directly over the
container to form an inverted cone. The moisture from the ground
reacts with heat from the sun to produce condensation on the
plastic, which runs down the sill and drips into the container.

It was a good concept in theory, but would
it work? Unfortunately, we wouldn’t be able to test it out until
morning. And even then we would need a clear day and an open glade
where the sunlight could penetrate the overstory to the forest
floor.

Urine? I wondered desperately. Could he
drink urine?

Although it was mostly water, it was also
laced with all the toxic electrolytes your body expelled. These
would contribute to dehydration, which meant you couldn’t sustain
yourself on it for long. But would it serve as a quick fix?

I simply didn’t know.

“Help me,” Neil rasped.

“What do you need?” I asked quickly.

“Bathroom.”

I slipped my arms beneath his armpits and
hiked him to his feet. I was right; his shirt was saturated with
salty sweat stains. He wobbled unsteadily, teetering back and
forth. I heard John Scott calling to me, asking if I needed help.
But the offer came too late as Neil and I were already lumbering
into the trees. For one awful moment Neil lurched over,
dry-retching, while I waited expectantly for him to puke all over
my trainers. Nothing came out thankfully, and we continued onward.
When we reached a thick tree he let go of me and fumbled with the
button on his pants. I moved away several paces, facing camp. I
could see the glow of the fire, but that was all.

Neil shat. The sound was like a faucet fully
throttled. I pulled my T-shirt up over my nose.

“Neil?” I said, after a break in activity on
his part. “You okay?”

“Wait.”

Ten seconds later there was a gaseous noise,
then another, then nothing.

“Neil?”

“What?”

“You ready?”

“No.”

I waited another two minutes. The thin
cotton stretched over my nose was hardly a gas mask, and I could
taste the foul stench in the back of my throat. This almost made me
lose my breakfast, but I bit back the gag reflex.

Then I heard something, or I thought I did,
a rustle of vegetation, somewhere ahead of me. I strained my
ears—and heard a crack.

A twig snapping?

I stared into the darkness, but there were
no other noises.

I glanced over my shoulder. Neil was
crouching, his pants around his ankles, his head resting on his
forearms, which were folded across his fish-belly white knees. His
penis dangled below him like a pale slug.

Was he sleeping?

“Neil?”

“Gimme a sec.”

Thirty seconds or so later I heard him
rising, pulling his pants up. I turned around just in time to see
him keel over and vomit stringy, watery black gunk. He wiped his
mouth with the back of his hand, then shuffled toward me. I led him
back to where he’d been resting. He collapsed on the spot, the last
of his strength used up.

I draped his sleeping bag over his body, up
to his chin, and hoped to hell the worst of his sickness had
passed.

I
glimpsed Mel
through the door flap of our tent. She was lying on her side,
reading a book with one of the flashlights. I was about to tell her
to turn it off, tell her we needed to save the batteries, but I was
too exhausted for another confrontation.

“How’s Neil?” John Scott asked me. He was
sitting cross-legged, smoking a Marlboro. I had an almost
irresistible desire to bum one from him right then.

“Bad,” I said, eyeing the cigarette.

“He want anything?”

“Water.”

“We shouldn’t have drank it all.”

I waited for him to blame me for whatever
reason. Instead he tossed a chunk of dirt at the fire.

Tomo’s eyes were closed. I didn’t know if he
was sleeping or thinking. I remained standing. If I sat, I would
likely have to keep speaking to John Scott.

I scanned the trees and saw Nina some
distance away, sitting at the base of a fir, at the periphery of
the glow cast by the fire. She raised a hand in a half wave. I took
this as an invitation to join her even if it wasn’t and went
over.

“He is very sick,” she stated. She was
staring past me, toward Neil. “Will he be okay during the
night?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted.

“What can we do?”

“Nothing.”

She made a grim face.

I sat beside her. “You don’t have another
joint, do you?”

She shook her head.

Probably for the best, I thought. I would
have liked a few tokes to relax and to dose my cigarette craving,
but I didn’t know how introspective or philosophical I wanted to
get right then.

“How are you doing?” I asked her.

She shrugged.

“Ben—he was a good guy.” I winced inwardly
at how lame that sounded.

“It is okay,” Nina said.

“What is?”

“You do not have to say anything.”

I nodded, relieved I didn’t have to wax
bullshit. If I’d known Ben better, I would have told Nina a story
about him, a heartfelt memory we could both smile at. But I didn’t
even know his last name, let alone something nostalgic, and I was
content to leave it at “He was a good guy.”

“He wanted to be an actor,” Nina said. “Can
you believe that? An actor?”

I didn’t say anything.

“He was smart,” she went on. “There were so
many things he could be, yes? A doctor. A lawyer. An entrepreneur.
But he wanted to be an actor—a famous actor.” She wiped a tear that
had crept into her eye. “And you know what? He might have made it.
That is the thing. Everyone told him it was an impossible dream.
But how is it impossible if other people achieve that same dream?
Because they do. You see them on the TV, in the movies. So some
people reach those dreams. Ben, he might have been one of those
people. He was so likeable. He had so much passion. He could do
many impersonations. Woody Allen. He could do him. Many
others.”

“Had he acted in anything?” I asked.

“No, nothing.”

“A commercial? A school production?”

“Not that he told me. He was scared of
performing in front of people.”

I raised my eyebrows. “But he wanted to be
an actor!”

“What a stupid guy, yes?”

After an uncertain pause, I chuckled
self-consciously. It felt good. For a brief moment I saw Ben full
of his boyish optimism. This was how I would like to remember him.
Not blue and bloated and hanging from a rope.

I heard John Scott and Tomo talking and
glanced over at them. Tomo was passing John Scott one of his manga
comics. Nina picked up a small stick beside her and drove it into
the ground. This wasn’t anything dramatic. Just a quick, hard jab,
which she repeated three times.

“He did not kill himself,” she said
suddenly.

“Nina, we’ve talked about—”

“You saw the photograph.”

I thought about it again: the ghostly shape
superimposed over the fire, the hard edges that outlined it. The
vague formation of a face.