Suicide Forest (27 page)

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.

She took a deep breath, composing herself.
“Ethan,” she said with a frosty confidence, “move out of my way
right now. You cannot hold me against my will.”

“Where are you going to go?”

“Away from here!”

“Where?” I gestured violently at the dark
trees. “In there? By yourself?” Doubt flickered in her eyes, and I
pressed on. “You’re no safer out there than right here.”

“I cannot stay here.”

“Just until morning. It’s only a few hours
until dawn. You don’t have to go to sleep. You can stay awake by
the fire. We’ll all stay awake. It’s only a few hours.”

“No,” she said, and tried to shake my hands
off her again, though she wasn’t trying very hard this time.

I let her go. “Come back to the fire, Nina.
It’s safe there.”

Although her eyes glistened with terror,
with each passing second I could see the panic that had gripped her
begin to loosen its hold.

Losing some inner debate, she wrapped her
arms around me and mumbled something into my chest. We remained
like that for a good minute until she released me.

We returned to camp. Nina zippered herself
inside her tent without a word to anyone. I sat back down. The next
few minutes seemed slow and blurred and dreamlike, like I was
underwater. I kept expecting to hear the scream again, but it never
came. Amazingly Tomo remained asleep. Neil hadn’t stirred
either.

Sobs from Nina’s tent broke the silence.
They grew louder, more miserable. John Scott stared at her tent,
his face unreadable. Mel rubbed her eyes, and I realized she was
crying as well.

“Go back to sleep,” I told her quietly.

“Was it really just a woman?”

“Yeah.”

“It wasn’t…?”

“Positive. Now go back to sleep.”

“Come in the tent with me.”

“I can’t. It will be my watch soon.”

“I’ll stay up with you.”

“Go back to sleep. The sooner you do, the
sooner it will be morning.”

That apparently was too tempting for her to
pass up. She kissed me on the cheek and returned to the tent,
leaving the door flaps open.

Nina’s sobs became muffled, then stopped
altogether. John Scott shifted his gaze past her tent, to the
forest, in the direction the screams had come from. I wanted to
talk with him, toss some more theories back and forth. But Nina and
Mel would hear us. This wasn’t the time.

I lay back down, my head on Mel’s backpack,
and glanced at my wristwatch. One hour until my shift. I closed my
eyes, hoping for sleep, knowing it would be an impossibility, but
trying nonetheless. I saw a woman flopping around on the ground,
limbs spasming, body convulsing, a pale-faced
yūrei
floating
forlornly through the trees, head thrown back, mouth gaping open in
an obtuse hole, a dozen other scenarios to explain what we’d heard,
and then I shut off and was thinking no more.

Eventually
I gave
in to my discomfort and awoke during the early morning between dark
and dawn. My eyes cracked open, but I didn’t move. The night’s cold
had penetrated deep into my bones. The ground had been like
concrete, and I had tossed and turned constantly. Pressure had
built in my bladder until it was a sharp pain, but I had refused to
get up to relieve myself, knowing if I did I would remain awake
until morning.

The world was an ethereal bruised-gray.
Through the curdling mist I could see the vague outlines of the
craggy branches netted together overheard. I pushed myself up onto
my elbows. The fire had died down to a smokeless bed of red embers.
John Scott lay next to it, snoring, bloated from the clothes he had
layered beneath his leather jacket. Tomo’s spot was empty. I
assumed he had retired inside his tent. Smart guy. I should have
returned to mine. I could have climbed under the emergency blanket
and pressed myself against Mel, sharing our body heat.

For a moment I wondered why I hadn’t done
that, why I was out here, then I remembered we had agreed to take
watch. Tomo, John Scott, then me. But why hadn’t John Scott woken
me? Had he fallen asleep? I looked at him again. Probably.

I got to my feet, hating the cotton taste in
my mouth and the icy feel of my clothes against my skin. God, I
hoped it wasn’t overcast today. I would give anything to see a
bright blue sky and golden sun.

Now that I was up and moving, the pressure
in my bladder intensified tenfold to a kidney-stone level of pain.
I moved toward the trees—and caught sight of Ben. He was exactly
how we’d left him, on the litter, beneath his sleeping bag. His
body was still under the eerie control of rigor, twisted at the
waist, knees bent. I assumed it had another day or two before
decomposition set in and it began to relax.

Thinking about this I felt oddly
indifferent.
Just another dead person
. It was how I’d felt
following Weasel’s death, and Stag’s death. Shock when I first
heard the news, an empty, queasy feeling all day—but then, the next
morning, nothing. Either I was one cold-hearted son of a bitch, or
the human brain had a remarkable ability to cope with death—at
least, the death of little-known acquaintances.

Despite my pincushion bladder I detoured
from my path so I could check on Neil quickly. I knelt beside him,
and for a horrible moment I thought he was dead. He looked like a
corpse. His face was gaunt and white and smudged with dirt. There
were flecks of dried sick on his skin and chin which I wanted to
brush away but couldn’t bring myself to touch. Nevertheless, when I
leaned close—getting a whiff of his sickly, putrid stench—I heard
him breathing. It was faint and phlegmy, as if there was too much
fluid in it.

I let him rest and walked two dozen yards
away into the forest, careful to avoid the patches of vomit or
feces that seemed to be everywhere, as strategically placed as
landmines.

I stopped near a maple tree, unzipped, and
aimed at a helpless shrub. Steam rose from the arc of urine.
Afterward I surveyed the pre-dawn forest. The fog drifted languidly
between the trees, almost like some amorphous, sentient life form,
sniffing out its prey.

No chirruping insects or cheerful morning
birdcall greeted the new day, only that deep and expectant silence
I had become uneasily familiar with.

The mist parted and I saw someone standing
fifteen feet away from me.

I likely would have cried out if my chest
hadn’t abruptly locked up. This knee-jerk reaction passed in a
flash, however, replaced with a magical kind of awe as I realized
what I was staring at was not a person but a deer.

It stood statue-still, staring directly at
me. Its eyes were a liquid black, timeless, and if you didn’t know
better it would have been easy to believe they held some sort of
secret, ancient wisdom. The scuffed ears were alert, like two small
satellite dishes, nestled at the base of a majestic set of velvety
antlers. The licorice-black nose glistened, the nostrils flaring
noiselessly. It was more compact and dainty-legged than a North
American stag and sported white spots along the mahogany pelt. The
fluffy tail twitched once.

We stared at each other for a long time. I
had an almost irresistible urge to move forward, to get closer to
it, though I knew it would bound away if I tried. Instead I raised
my hands slowly, showing I was unarmed. Its nose tested the
air.

“Hey there,” I said. “It’s okay. I’m not
going to hurt you.”

A billow of fog drifted between us, thick
and gray, and when it dispersed the stag was gone. I scanned the
crooked trees, astounded that the deer could depart so silently—as
silent as a ghost, a voice suggested from an ignored corner of my
mind—and I had to convince myself I had really seen it.

For several long minutes I refused to move,
unwilling to let go of the experience. It had been unlike anything
I would have anticipated. During those few seconds our eyes
connected, a transcendent peacefulness had settled over me, fuelled
by an intoxicating sense of freedom, as if I could shed my civility
and do anything I wanted in a world where there were no worries, no
decisions to make, no consequences of actions, no concept of past
or future.

I had been completely in the moment,
blissfully, ignorantly alive.

Back
at camp
everyone was still sleeping, so I sat down quietly, did my best to
ignore my hunger and thirst, and played over the ghastly screams of
the previous night. Now, with darkness marching a hasty retreat,
what we’d heard seemed more perplexing than terrifying, a mystery
to be solved rather than a superstition to be feared.

Had John Scott been right? Had the screams
come from a woman who had botched her suicide? I figured most
people who couldn’t stomach hanging themselves would opt for
washing a handful of Valium down their throat with a bottle of
booze. This, of course, would not elicit the screams we had heard.
But if Woman X didn’t have access to such pills, she might have
tried something more creative and dangerous such as, say, drain
cleaner, or rat poison. If she didn’t consume enough of either to
kill herself quickly, she very well could have suffered a slow,
agonized death as her internal organs were eaten away. I could
almost see her slumped against a tree stump, her gums and nose
bleeding, her body thrashing, the tendons in her neck bunching like
cables as she belted out those horrible wails.

While waiting for the others to wake I kept
myself occupied with a half dozen other gruesome scenarios, one of
which had Woman X slitting her wrists while unknowingly disturbing
a colony of fire ants, just as I had done, only she lacked the
strength to brush them off or move away.

Gradually the eddying mist thinned and
evaporated altogether, revealing the empty, lifeless forest in all
its green glory. My wish did not come true. The sky did not clear
but remained swollen with the dirty clouds keeping at bay direct
sunlight. This meant there was no need to attempt a belowground
sill—which I don’t think I would have dug even had the sun been out
in full force for the same reason I hadn’t bothered to collect dew
on rags tied around my shins or piss in a bottle.

I was cold, thirsty, hungry, and spent. I no
longer had the energy or desire to entertain worst-case scenarios.
I wanted this nightmare trip to be over with; or, more accurately,
I wouldn’t accept that it could go on any longer. The police were
coming. They would be here in a few hours. Noon at the latest. I no
longer gave a damn about the potential statements and
interrogations. All I wanted was to be in a heated room with a hot
plate of food and a coffee before me.

And if for whatever reason the police failed
to show, we would leave here on our own. I didn’t care if I had to
carry Neil on my bloody back all afternoon. One way or another, we
were leaving Aokigahara today.

John
Scott was the
first to wake. He stirred, opened his eyes, but like me earlier, he
didn’t move. He saw me watching him and closed his eyes again.

“You didn’t wake me last night,” I said.

He grunted.

“Why didn’t you wake me for my shift?”

“Fell asleep,” he mumbled.

Mel must have heard us talking because a few
moments later there was a rustling from within our tent and she
emerged. Her hair was a tousled blonde mess, and she appeared
younger, more vulnerable with most of her makeup now smudged off
her face. She glanced at the remnants of the fire and frowned
slightly, as if she had expected to see a kettle seated in the
embers, the water boiling for a cup of morning tea. She shifted her
gaze to me, then John Scott, then me again. “What time is it?” she
asked tiredly.

“Half past six.”

“When will the police be here?”

“Probably not for a few hours.”

She shivered, hugging herself, then turned
back toward the tent, as if she had decided to return to bed.

“Come with me,” I said, standing. “We’ll
find some more wood for the fire. The exercise will warm you
up.”

We spent the next thirty minutes or so
scouring the surrounding area for tinder and deadwood, then built a
fire. I stood so close to the licking flames they scorched my bare
skin, though I didn’t move. The heat rejuvenated my spirit and made
me forget temporarily about Ben’s body and Neil’s sickness and my
empty stomach.

Nina stuck her head through the door flaps
of her tent and surveyed the camp. She reminded me of a prairie dog
peeking out of its burrow, wary of a circling hawk. When we made
eye contact, she looked quickly away. I couldn’t decide whether she
was embarrassed about her attempted escape from the forest the
night before or whether she was mad at me for stopping her.

John Scott poked a stick at the fire. Sparks
exploded. I had to jump backward to avoid getting hit.