Chapter 5: This is the Quietest Forest

"Aokigahara is known as the Suicide Forest," Aaron said. He had a Japanese book open in front of him, and was reading intently from it.

We were seated in a café near one of the entrances to the forest, near the Saiko bat caves. The café was relatively empty for ten a.m. on a Sunday morning, with three Asian tourists in trackpants and a light shirt chatting animatedly by the café counter, gesturing and laughing. Outside the café, another gaggle of tourists were loudly chatting and doing a check on their hiking equipment.

Aaron and I had spoken over the phone last night, where I told him how I was interested to take a look at some, more off-beaten tourist attractions in Japan. I didn’t tell him the purpose for the visit, nothing about my situation, or my morbid bucket list. All I had told him was my fascination with horror movies and culture (true), my desire to see some exotic parts of Asia (also true) and how I was planning to pitch an article about it to my freelance writing agent back in San Francisco (not so true).

Aaron had heard much about Aokigahara, though like all stories and accounts of The Suicide Forest, its infamy preceded it. He didn’t know if it was beautiful, how to get there, if it was actually haunted, or if there were any peripheral attractions near the forest.

So I had bought an authentic Japanese guidebook to Aokigahara early this morning, and now we sat in this heavily air-conditioned café, trying to figure out what the guidebook was advising us to do.

"The first page of this guidebook is a disclaimer to please think carefully before you kill yourself," Aaron continued. He looked up at me. "Promising."

"There’s a sign out there that says the same thing," I pointed out.

"Even better." Aaron turned the page. "Aokigahara is the most popular place in the world for committing suicides. Every year, hundreds of people come to Aokigahara to end their lives, but only - " He pauses.

I waited.

" - a handful of bodies are found every year," he looks up from the book. "How do they know hundreds of people come here to die then?"

I had read about this. "Abandoned cars in the parking lot."

"Oh. Sensible statistic," he said, and I wasn’t sure if he was being sarcastic or not. He returned to the book. "Occasionally, some Japanese even bring their parents here, bring them deep into the woods, leave them to be lost, and die of... starvation, I think. I think this word is starvation."

He pauses for a while. "Yeah, starvation. This practice is called..."

He paused for another, longer while. "U... you-ba... ubasute."

"There’s a term for leaving your parents to die in a secluded forest?" I asked.

"There are a ton of terms for the most random things," Aaron said. "Suicide by disembowelment is called harikiri."

Wow. I couldn’t believe it.

"This place is so freaky," Aaron said. "Did anyone tell you that you have strange fascinations?"

"Yes," I said, and all of a sudden I felt uncomfortable, out-of-place, like I was out of my comfort zone, in a new place (technically, I was) and I didn’t want to discuss my interests and hobbies with this guy I had just met last night anymore. "Let’s get going. We should head into the forest."

***

We left the café and the gaggle of tourists behind, and continued up to the trail leading directly into the first band of trees. I could hear a bird sweetly chirping in the air, its song hopping gently on the breeze running through the air.

Right by the trail entrance, there was a large wooden sign erected, with a string of Japanese characters stretched out across its front.

"Please reconsider," Aaron translated immediately, before I could even open my mouth to ask. "Your life is precious."

"Well," I murmured. "Optimistic."

We stepped onto the trail, which was lined with a short wooden railing. It was easy at first - the ground was well-worn, with few pebbles, and we were able to make quick work. As we ventured deeper, all of a sudden, I noticed: the sounds from the outside were gone. There were no more birds chirping. The chattering of the tourist groups had vanished. The wind had died and left behind a still, calm, eerie silence.

I could hear only the sound of my own heartbeat and footsteps - and a strange, omnipresent buzz. It was light, barely noticeable, like the electronic hum of a muted television in a quiet living room - but less artificial and more natural, if that made sense. It wasn’t the wind, the trees, or any other living thing in this forest - it was the forest itself, I thought, announcing its lifeblood to us.

"Wow," Aaron broke the silence. "This is new."

"Yeah," I said, immediately knowing what he was referring to. "Complete peace."

"I guess," Aaron said. "Peace, if you don’t consider the fact that we could be standing five feet away from a dead body."

I sighed, and he shrugged.

We continued down the trail for about another thirty minutes, the path carefully and clearly marked out. There truly was no other sound in the interim, just our own heavy breathing and our boots crunching on the light shrubbery and pebbles.

We came to a clearing, one of the marked spots on our guidebook, and we had to stop. It was a beautiful spot - the trees opened up almost symmetrically, letting a perfect circle of sunlight land through and onto the ground. A little stump claimed the majority of the otherwise-empty circle, with another small sign (probably hoping to discourage would-be suicidal thoughts) erected a few feet from it.

"Dude," Aaron said. "Gorgeous."

I ran my fingers across the stump - smooth and polished, unlike a stump derived from natural means.

"This is breathtaking," I agreed.

Aaron stepped up in front of me. He watched the stump for a second - then turned around and plopped his butt onto it.

"Hey!" I cried.

"Just to see what it feels like," he replied. He looked around. Besides our breathing, there was completely no other sound. No animals. No leaves rustling. Not even the wind.

"This is the quietest forest I’ve ever been in," he remarked.

Beautiful, I thought.

He got up and we continued walking.

The clearing tapered into the trail again, which continued nondescript down into the distance, beyond what we could see.

As we kept walking, I felt the air get colder, chillier.

"You feel that?" Aaron asked.

"Yeah," I said. "Temperature’s dropping."

Aaron let out a nervous chuckle. "You sure you’re not some ghost hunter?"

I said nothing.

The natural light began to fade, despite it being just after noon. The trees were getting more clustered, more dense, packing together tighter than the trees near the entrance. The trail itself was getting less paved, with the well-worn gravel merging with soil and undergrowth.

At some point, I noticed the crunch of the gravel had completely disappeared altogether. I was stepping on soft loam. I looked down at the ground.

The trail was completely gone.

"Hey," I said. "We’ve gone off-trail."

There was no response. I looked up again.

Aaron was gone.

I turned around, left and right in circles. No one. The forest was dark and the undergrowth thick and the silence deafening.

"Aaron?" I shouted. My voice travelled a few feet before dying somewhere amongst the trees. It was like yelling in a soundproof studio, when I had gone in there to record some jingles for the magazine’s YouTube channel.

"Aaron!" I yelled again, louder, but the trees swallowed up my voice again.

It was impossible. The trees were absorbing my voice so thoroughly that it felt like I was actually in a soundproof room.

I had to find the way out. I turned around - trees, trees, so many trees, I couldn’t believe how many trees were around me okay fine I guess it is a forest but how did the path I was walking on vanish and how could it have vanished -

- Something moved to my right.

I turned. "Aaron"?

Nothing. It was just trees.

"Aaron, this isn’t funny. Come out!" I yelled.

No one. Nothing.

I stepped off whatever trail that was left - there was none - in the direction where I saw something move.

Between two trees, there was what looked like a gap. It was dark, but then again, so was the entire forest now. It was a little after noon, but it looked as though dusk had fallen. The dim light was closer to evening time than it was twelve p.m.

Something cracked behind me.

I spun around. Nothing. No one.

A chill ran up my spine.

It had sounded like boots, or shoes, something decently weighted, crunching down on the same dead leaves we had trekked in on.

My eyes searched the undergrowth. There was nothing. No one, animal or human, had made that sound.

I turned back to the gap in the trees.

Poking out between two thin trunks was the face of an old woman.

I screamed.

The trees swallowed my scream.

"Fuck! Oh my God, fuck!" I shrieked, but that just all got swallowed and it was just me, screaming to myself because nobody could hear me and the head of the old woman, wrapped in some kind of shawl, bobbed and I realized I couldn’t see her body because it was behind in the shadows of the trees and she opened her mouth.

I backed away, and I was distinctly aware my boots made its own crunching sound how ironic but I stopped moving because it seemed like the face of this old woman, body tucked away, looked like she was saying something really long.

I yelled in her direction, "Are you alive?"

But her eyes weren’t even looking in my direction - they were looking to the ground, and her mouth kept forming these shapes as though she was speaking but I couldn’t hear or read what she was saying.

Was it English? Was it Japanese?

Her mouth stopped moving.

I approached. It was a dead body, caught up in the tendrils and vines. It wasn’t moving. That could only have been the wind, shifting the body back and forth while it was held in place.

I exhaled. Just a dead body.

And her eyeballs swiveled up to look at me.

I could not move this time. I was transfixed on her face. Then the bottom of her mouth dropped, her chin opening downward in a huge gaping hole that gave the impression she had two mouths.

Both mouths started to move again, talking, simultaneously melting and shifting and forming these strange shapes and that’s when I turned to run -

- slamming hard into a body.

I didn’t scream this time, just stumbled backward, but before I could fall, I felt a hand grip my wrist and pull me up.

"Hey, yo, woah!" A familiar voice said.

I looked into Aaron’s face and though I was not the crying sort usually, I felt tears well up in my eyes.

"Oh, my God, where did you go?" I yelled.

He looked at me, puzzled. "I was right behind you."

I shook my head. "NO! You weren’t! You left me alone, and the forest changed, and we’re in some weird place now -"

Aaron stepped back and did a half-flourish with his hands.

I looked around. We were in the same place we had been just a few minutes ago. The trail, well-worn and lit. The noon sun shining down through the foliage.

Aaron looked back behind him, and I followed his gaze to see, very far in the distance, the tree stump in the middle of the clearing.

"The old woman -" I remembered, and turned back around.

There was no dark, thick undergrowth, no gap between the trees, no face within the gap.

I felt the world shimmer a little, swaying and shifting as though there was a wind moving the trees themselves. But my skin remained dry, if a little chilled.

"I think we should go," Aaron said. His eyes bore into me, cutting into my skull and I could almost see the wheels turning.

Probably, how much do I know this girl?

"What did you see?" I asked him. "You were behind me. What did you see?"

"You just... kept walking," Aaron said. He looked confused. "You didn’t say a word, so I thought you were just tired or something."

"No," I insisted. I wasn’t wrong. I knew what I had seen. "Come."

I stepped off the trail into the undergrowth for a moment.

"Hey!" Aaron protested.

I pushed through the branches. "I swear, I swear we were in some weird part of the forest, there was no light, and there were these two trees..."

I pushed a thick, thorny vine away and saw the flash of color first.

It was a shawl. Wrapped around something round and heavy, leaning against a trunk.

A skull. Decaying - but oddly enough, without the vermin and flies they said came with death. But there was a smell. Musky, sour, lingering in the air.

A frail body was attached to the skull, dressed in a brown sweater and thin cotton pants. Decaying too, shreds and strips of meat hanging from the bones.

Most notable of all was a red shawl, like something an old-timey Grandma would have knitted and given to her dears. It was enormous, engulfing her neck and shoulders like a red boa constrictor made of cheap cotton.

This was the body. The body I had seen, but there was no way it could have moved, there were no eyeballs in its sockets - they had decayed by now - and it had lost all its muscles.

I couldn’t move.

Then Aaron screamed.

High-pitched, shrill, a rather odd sort of scream for a man that looked as good as he did.

***

As we emerged from the forest, my heart was beating and my body, despite my best efforts, was still shaking.

Aaron told me to wait, as he dashed forward to the rangers’ station. I obeyed him and didn’t move, not because I wanted to stay still, but because I could only think of one thing.

I just had my first supernatural experience.

And a smile crept across my face.

Next Chapter: You Are Fucking Crazy