Suicide Forest (26 page)

“Maybe not. But someone’s got to keep an eye
on Neil—and Ben.”

“Ben?”

“Make sure no animals come around or
whatever.”

“Oh shit,” Tomo said, pulling his eyes from
his comic.

“All right then.” John Scott shrugged. “I’ll
take the first watch.”

“Which begins when?”

“Now.”

“Screw that.”

“What?”

It was a little past eight o’clock. If John
Scott took the first watch, and began it now, he’d be done around
eleven—or about the time he’d likely choose to go to sleep
regardless.

“The first shift will start at ten,” I said.
“Each will last two hours. That will take us to four, which isn’t
that long before the sun rises.”

“So what?” John Scott said. “You want the
first shift?”

“We’ll draw sticks. Longest gets first
choice.”

I scavenged a small branch from the woodpile
and broke it into three unequal segments. I turned away while I
aligned the tops of the pieces so they were even with one another.
John Scott might be an adult, but I didn’t trust the guy not to cop
a look. I turned back and held forth my hand.

Tomo chose first, then John Scott. We
compared our selections. Tomo had the longest. I had the
shortest.

“I want first,” Tomo said.

“First shift?” I said.

“Yeah.”

“I’ll take balls to two,” John Scott
said.

I nodded. “All right, Tomo, you wake John
Scott up at midnight then.”

“You know it.”

He finished the whiskey in his cup, then
tossed it in the fire.

“Hey!” I said. “We only have a few cups,
Tomo. We might need them to catch rain.”

“Dude,” John Scott said reproachfully.

“What?”

“Stop being such a drama queen. We’re fine,
okay? We’re not on a deserted island.”

“Do you know how big this forest is?”

“So what? Worst comes to worst we’ll climb a
tree, locate Fuji, and follow the yellow brick road all the way
home.”

“Hope you’re good at climbing.”

He harrumphed and went back to his
comic.

“You guys, you know you remind me?” Tomo
said. “Married guys. Fight, fight, fight. And me, I’m kid, right? I
gotta listen. You scar me forever.”

“They teach you that in psych school?” I
said.

“You know it.”

“Is this some new catch phrase?”

“You know it.”

Tomo had taken his hat off. His hair was
sticking up all over the place, his elfish sideburns daggered in
front of his ears. Bags had formed beneath his eyes while stubble
had started to sprout on his upper lip and chin. Looking at him
now, I thought of a suspect in an interrogation room. An outward
face of calm but inside scared shitless. Like John Scott, he seemed
confident we would be found tomorrow, so he wasn’t worried about
dying out here. I imagined his fear was born more from what he
believed would happen after the police arrived. He was supposed to
start a residency at some hospital in Shibuya-ku soon. What would
happen to him if it was revealed he had been camping in Aokigahara
with a bunch of foreigners, one of whom committed suicide? This was
not the sound judgment you expected a psychiatrist to uphold. If
our expedition made the papers, his entire career could be in
jeopardy before it even took off.

“Hey, man,” Tomo said to John Scott. “You
have ciggy?”

“You smoke?”

“Like after sex only. But now I want.”

John Scott took a butt from the pack, tossed
it to Tomo, then knocked another out for himself. He lit Tomo’s
with his bolt-action lighter, then his own. He shifted so he was on
his back, his head on his rucksack, looking up at the canopy,
blowing smoke from his mouth in a blue swirl. He had been panicky
immediately after we’d discovered Ben’s body, when he’d realized
how badly the fallout could affect him, but ever since he had kept
his cool together. Right now he could have been chilling in a bar
with not a care in the world. He either had a very good poker face
or a total lack of empathy. The latter made me wonder if he had
ever killed anybody.

If he’d participated in the invasion of
Iraq, the possibility was fairly high. He might have killed a good
number of people. Surely he would have experienced death in one
form or another.

“You been to Iraq?” I asked him.

“For vacation?”

Yeah, for fucking vacation. Why did I
bother?

“One tour,” he said a few moments later.

“How was it?”

“Paradise.” He ashed out his cigarette,
immediately lit another. “And, yeah, I’ve killed people.”

I looked at him.

“That’s what you wanted to know, isn’t it?
It’s what everyone wants to know.”

Tomo asked, “How many?”

“Two.”

“You shoot?”

“My unit was on patrol. A roadside bomb took
out the lead Humvee. It was an ambush. We came under a shitload of
gunfire. I shot back.”

“You kill every fucker?”

“There were too many. We called in backup. A
Blackhawk arrived five hundred yards away. We ran for it, shooting
at anything that moved.”

“Were you scared?” I asked. I wasn’t pushing
buttons; I was genuinely interested.

“You don’t have time to be scared,” he said
simply.

“When was this?”

“Few months ago.” He patted his left leg.
“Took a round above the knee. It’s why I’m sitting on my ass in
Japan now.” Then he sat up straight and looked at both Tomo and me.
He appeared simultaneously pensive and grave. “If I get fingered
for giving Ben the mushrooms,” he said in a low, serious voice to
match his expression, “I’ll probably end up in prison here.”

The conversation’s abrupt change of
direction threw me off guard.

“It was stupid, I know that,” he went on. “I
wish I could take it back. But I can’t. And Ben’s
gone
.
Don’t fuck me over here.”

“What we say doesn’t matter,” I said.
“Nina’s the one you have to talk to.”

“I will. Tomorrow. But she’ll be easier to
convince if you guys are already on board. Tomo? What do you say,
buddy?”

Tomo hesitated. “Yeah, okay…I don’t know
nothing.”

John Scott looked at me.

He was right: giving Ben mushrooms out here
was stupid. But it was a temporary lack of judgment. Did he deserve
to spend the next seven or eight years in a Japanese prison for
that?

“Dude?”

I shrugged noncommittally.

John Scott nodded. Apparently that was good
enough for him.

I
didn’t turn
around, but I knew they were following me, the way you know things
in dreams. I was back in grade five. The guys behind me were in
junior high. The ringleader’s name was Hubert Kelly. He lived one
street over from mine, which meant more often than not we saw each
other on the way home from our respective schools. Aside from this
all I knew about him was that he supposedly carried around a pair
of brass knuckles—and he liked to pick on younger kids.

For more than a year I had dreaded walking
home, never knowing if I was going to get ambushed or not. It came
down to a matter of who was walking in front of whom. If Douchebag
Kelly was ahead of me, I kept my distance and was relatively safe.
Sometimes he would glance back, see me, and stop. I would stop too,
never taking my eyes off him, until he grew bored and continued on.
If I was ahead of him, however, it was a different story. I got
pretty good in those days at checking over my shoulder. Yet I was a
kid still, I was prone to daydreaming, and I often wouldn’t know
Kelly was coming until I heard his shoes slapping the pavement
behind me. He might have been a lot older than me, but he was fat
and slow. If I had a good enough head start, I could outrun him.
And even when he got lucky and caught me, I would often escape the
encounter with only a few bruises because he had nobody else to
prove anything to. It was when he came after me with his two
friends which I dreaded most. They were both slim and fast and when
I had my head in the clouds they caught me eight out of ten times.
And they were vicious. They’d sit on me and slap my face and rip my
clothes. A few times when I talked back they would wallop me hard
enough to draw blood.

In the dream I finally turned around and my
heart pole-vaulted up my throat when I found them right behind me.
I didn’t know how they got so close without me hearing them—another
dream anomaly—but they did. I yelped and tried to take off, but
Kelly grabbed my hair and shoved me to the ground. Then the three
of them pinned me down and began shoving snow in my mouth and down
my jacket.

I squirmed and yelled but couldn’t buck them
off me.

“One of these nights we’re gonna come for
your parents too, Childs,” Kelly spat in my ear. “We’re gonna come
in the night and tie them up and hack them to pieces. Then we’re
gonna do the same to you, snotnose, cut you up—”

Kelly was suddenly yanked off me. I looked
up to see Gary looming above us. Forget that it was three against
one. Forget that they were all roughly Gary’s height. Forget that
Hubert Kelly had been carrying a branch the size of a golf club
with which he could use effectively as a weapon. Forget all of that
because Gary certainly didn’t care about any of it. He challenged
each of them to take a swing at him, telling them whoever did would
be going home with a lot less teeth. Kelly and his cronies started
away, cussing and promising future pummelings, the way bullies do
to save face. Gary was having none of that either. He chased after
them. The two quick ones got away, but Gary caught fatso Hubert
Kelly easily enough. He threw him onto the ground, stepped on his
head with one booted foot, and slipped a noose around his neck.

“Don’t!” Kelly screamed. “I’ll tell my
parents!”

Gary tossed the other end of the rope up and
over a tree branch and tugged it, lurching Kelly to his feet, then
off his feet, so they kicked frantically at air.

“Gare! Stop!” I shouted.

But it wasn’t Gary anymore. It was John
Scott.

“Shut up, Ethos!” he said. “You agreed to
this. You said you wouldn’t talk. So shut up or we’re both going to
prison, you hear me?”

Kelly’s pig-eyes were bulging now. Red blood
vessels webbed the whites. He opened his fat mouth and let out a
glassy, terrifying wail—

I came awake, disorientated, wondering for a
moment why I was so cold and stiff. Then I smelled the crisp,
brittle air. Camping? Camping with Gary? We’d done that several
times, just the two of us, up in the Porcupine Mountains. But
no—Gary was dead. I had been dreaming about him again. Something
about the bullies who used to chase me. Gary had beat them up in
the dream, just like he had in real life that afternoon in
November—

“What the fuck was that?” I heard someone
say.

I sat up and saw John Scott crouched next to
the dying fire.

Everything came back with a sickening punch
of dread.

Suicide Forest
.
Ben
.
Dead
.

“What was what?” I asked, my head foggy.

The zipper to Nina’s tent whipped downward.
She stuck her head through the door flaps. “Did you hear that?” she
demanded. Her eyes were wide, her face pale, almost luminescent in
the darkness.

I sat straighter. What had I missed? What
was going on?

“Hear what?” I asked.

“
Shhh
,” John Scott hissed.

Mel appeared beside me, making me jump.
“Someone screamed,” she whispered.

I thought immediately of my dream, of Hubert
Kelly opening his mouth and letting loose that spine-chilling
wail.

“Who?” I said, getting worked up.

“A woman,” Mel said. “I think it was a
woman—”

“
Quiet!
” John Scott hissed again.

We waited and listened. Tomo remained fast
asleep.

After a minute I said, “Are you sure—”

A banshee scream rose from the forest,
high-pitched and savage, cutting me off midsentence. It climbed
higher and higher, thinning to a bloodcurdling moan. Then it ended
as abruptly as it began.

“Holy fucking shit,” I said, looking wildly
at the others.

“It is them,” Nina whispered. “It is
them
.”

“Shut the fuck up, Nina,” John Scott
snapped.

“Then what is it?
What is it?
”

“It’s a bird,” I said without thinking.

“That was
not
a bird, Ethan.”

“Maybe a wildcat,” John Scott said. “Maybe
in heat.”

Mel was as stiff as a corpse beside me. Her
hand gripped mine painfully. “What do we do?” she said so softly I
barely heard her.

“Nothing,” John Scott said. “We stay here,
by the fire—”

The scream ripped through the night once
again, a short, feminine burst of mindless agony and terror. It
shattered into what might have been mad laughter. The hair on the
back of my neck stood up in hackles. I felt a crazy urge to run, to
get the hell out of there. But we were in the middle of nowhere.
Stranded. Helpless.

Mel began tugging her hand. I realized I was
crushing it in mine. I released my grip and found my palm slick
with something—blood. Her nails had dug into my flesh.

“Oh my God,” she said. “Oh my God.
Ohmigod
.”

Nina ducked back inside her tent.

“Calm down everyone,” John Scott stated,
authority in his voice. “It’s probably…it’s just someone who came
here to kill themselves.”

“Why’s she screaming?” Mel asked hoarsely.
“What’s
happening
to her?”

“Maybe she screwed up,” John Scott said.

“Screwed up?” I said.

“Killing herself.”

“If you have a noose around your neck,
you’re not screaming like that.”

“Maybe she didn’t hang herself. Maybe, like
you said earlier, she blew half her face off.”

“Did you hear a gunshot?”

“Something then!” John Scott barked. “You
get the point.”