Suicide Forest (23 page)

What could we do?

I concentrated on the mystery of the missing
phones. I tried putting myself in Ben’s frame of mind. Seeing the
body, in the stage of decomposition it had been in, had obviously
flipped a switch inside him. I know how easily that can occur while
you’re on magic mushrooms. It happened to me once during college.
After eating a chocolate brownie laced with three grams of
mushrooms, I was having one of the best times of my life,
experiencing enlightenment after enlightenment, or what I’d thought
were enlightenments.

Then the bad trip kicked in.

While floating around my dorm room, I called
a girl named Amy I had met at a pub-crawl the day before. She lived
off-campus at her parents’ home. When her mother told me Amy was
out, I asked if she had already gone to the party I was planning on
attending later, some toga thing at a frat house. Her mother said
no, she was at a friend’s, and what was this party anyway? Although
it was an innocuous question, I freaked, believing I’d gotten Amy
in trouble. I hung up on her mother and soon found myself pacing up
and down my residence’s corridors. In my warped thinking I was
convinced Amy must have lied to her mother about the party, told
her she was going to her friend’s for the evening, and I had blown
the whole subterfuge wide open. Amy would come home tomorrow to her
screaming parents, and she would blame it all on me. The more I
thought about this, the more I convinced myself of the severity of
the problem. Soon it was a full-scale disaster in my mind. Amy
would be grounded for weeks. She’d tell me to go to hell, then
blabber to everyone what I’d done. People would think I was an
asshole and begin avoiding me. My freshman year would be
ruined.

This was all nonsensical, of course, but you
don’t think or act rationally on mushrooms. Less than an hour into
my trip I was so fucked up I couldn’t speak with anybody and ended
up outside, wandering the perimeter of the woods that lined the
campus. I was wired, unable to sleep, and wanted nothing more than
to be sober again. The anxiety and paranoia got so bad I began
brainstorming nonlethal ways to knock myself out. And it all
started from something as simple as a phone call (which, I learned
the following day from Amy herself, was no big deal at all; Amy’s
mother had simply been making conversation).

So was this what happened to Ben, only on a
more devastating scale? Had the mushrooms turned against him, his
trip compounding so much he decided the only way to end it was to
hang himself? After all, who knew the potency of the mushrooms out
here, or how much he’d eaten. They wouldn’t have been dried and
sliced into slivers and placed in a baggie. He could have
unknowingly taken a self-destructive dose.

Anger at John Scott’s stupidity rose in me
again, but I forced it aside.

The phones.

Why would Ben take them? Was he so
delusional he’d thought we were his enemy? Had he convinced himself
we’d killed the man with the pen in his front pocket? Had he hidden
the string and the phones so we would be doomed to perish in
Aokigahara with him?

This didn’t sit right with me. I felt as if
I were forcing an explanation to fit the conclusion I’d already
drawn.

I approached the enigma from a dozen
different angles, but after another thirty minutes of no progress I
began to reexamine what I had seen in Nina’s eyes and had summarily
dismissed earlier: the paranormal.

I’ve never believed in ghosts and the like
because the idea of spirits trapped between this world and the next
seemed too hokey pokey to me, religious propaganda, more the stuff
of Hollywood and TV programs than real life.

But what if there was a more scientific
explanation?

I thought back to something I’d read in an
old dog-eared
Popular Science
magazine I’d thumbed through
at a Barcelona hostel a few days before my foolish attempt to cross
the Camino del Ray. The article in question was titled: “The
Science Behind Unseen Phenomena.” Citing string theory and quantum
physics and other stuff I was unable to recall in detail now, the
author argued that there existed not one but billions of universes,
forming a kind of cosmic foam in which there were an infinite
number of dimensions and timelines. When one of those timelines or
dimensions overlapped ours, it was possible for us to catch an
electromagnetic glimpse of someone or something existing on a
different plane.

I suppose I preferred this to trapped
spirits because it was based on science and not blind faith. The
problem, of course, was that said science was unproven. Not to
mention the whole concept, although neat in a metaphysical way,
still sounded iffy, almost like a cheap magic trick, something that
would go over great at a party when everyone was drunk, but which
would undoubtedly be derided and deconstructed on closer reflection
the next morning.

Then I recalled what a Chinese girl named
Bingbing Wong who lived in my guesthouse had once told me. One
evening we had gotten onto the topic of ghosts, and she admitted
that as a child she’d often heard footsteps outside her room in the
middle of the night. She had always been too scared to check if
anyone was there, but her dog would sit by the door and growl until
the footsteps stopped. Years later she learned from her parents
that the original owner had built the home for his fiancée as a
wedding gift, but she died before the wedding, and he later hanged
himself from the attic fan.

Bings was one of the smartest and most
rational people I knew, so I wasn’t surprised when she justified
this story by saying that certain rocks and minerals within the
earth, or even large bodies of water above- or belowground, were
conductive to storing the residual energy left behind when someone
died, and this energy could play back for years, decades, or even
centuries. This was why most ghosts didn’t seem to possess an
intelligence, personality, or mass, and why their actions were
always the same; they were the three-dimensional equivalent of old
TV programs playing over the air long after the actors in them had
died.

Thinking over Bings’ argument now, I began
to get carried away as I wondered whether the iron deposits in the
solidified magma underlying Aokigahara Jukai could constitute a
geological formation conductive to storing and replaying the images
of the dead who had killed themselves here—until I realized what I
was overlooking.

If ghosts were mere recordings imprinted
upon the environment, without intelligence and mass, and thus had
no way to interact with our world, how did you explain the swinging
crucifixes or the missing phones?

I sat there, frowning, as I tried to
envision other possibilities that would explain the existence of
ghosts. This had become a game for me, a way to pass the time. But
I could come up with nothing more. I had played devil’s advocate
with myself and lost. Ghosts didn’t exist, and I couldn’t convince
myself otherwise. I had been right all along. Ghost sightings were
nothing but psychological phenomena or, as I’d told Nina,
projections: you see what you want or expect to see. The grieving
widow sees her dead husband because she needs the comfort of
knowing he is all right and happy in the afterlife. Her mind allows
her to hallucinate to help her cope with the stress of the
loss.

I guess if you wanted to get crazy—and this
whole train of thought had been crazy, so why the hell not—you
could take this idea of projecting farther and argue that sightings
were not just hallucinations but real physical manifestations,
created either by your subconscious or someone else’s.
Psychokinetic energy or whatever it’s called. And why not? Science
has yet to fully understand the powers of the human mind. How much
of it did the common person use? Ten percent? Fifteen? There was so
much about it that we didn’t know that it was certainly possible it
was capable of producing manifestations and noises.

Which brought me back to the beginning of my
ruminations and the only possible culprit for the missing phones:
Ben. He’d been delusional, paranoid, and for reasons we may never
know he took them, hid them, then killed himself.

I shook my head slightly, not liking the
uncertain, cheating feeling that persisted in my gut—then I became
aware of the forest around me once again. It had darkened as the
day faded to dusk, swelling with hidden malevolence and dread.

I got up and joined the others, eager to
call the police back.

Nina
and Mel sat
next to one another, holding hands, staring mutely at the ground
before them. John Scott had taken off his leather jacket and was
doing pushups. I’d like to think he was being a pompous meathead,
but exercise was likely his way of dispelling nervous energy. I
knew I could have done with a good jog had a track been handy. Tomo
was twenty feet away from everyone, crouched next to Neil, looking
helpless as Neil lay curled in a fetal position, arms clamped
around his stomach, rocking back and forth, moaning.

My stomach had been growling for the past
couple hours, and I considered divvying up Ben’s uneaten breakfast
ration, but I decided to save it—just in case.

“Are you ready to call the police again,
Tomo?” I asked him.

“Hell, yeah,” he said, coming over.

Suddenly he was the center of attention,
everyone crowding around him. He pressed the phone’s power button.
The DoCoMo logo appeared with a cute musical jig.

Although the tension among us was palpable,
no one produced a celebratory reaction. Eyes remained fixed on the
display. We were far from home free yet.

Tomo dialed the police and stuck the phone
to his ear. A voice answered. It sounded small and mechanical. Tomo
spoke quickly. He began nodding, giving us the thumbs-up.

Then he jerked the phone away from his ear,
as if it had bitten him.

The display was black.

“Oh shit!” he said.

Everyone was speaking:

“It’s dead!”

“It can’t be dead.”

“Try again!”

Tomo attempted to power it up to no
avail.

I turned away, kicking at pine needles.

“I told you, Ethos,” John Scott said. “I
told you we shouldn’t turn it off. Now we’re as fucked as a soup
sandwich.”

I whirled on him. ‘The hell you did!”

“This is your fault—”

I lunged at him, but he ducked behind Tomo,
out of my reach.

Suddenly Mel was in front of me, yelling at
me to stop.

“No more!” she said. “Not again! Cool it you
two!”

I made a last-ditch attempt to grab John
Scott, then gave up.

The fucker had a smirk on his face.

“Lying prick,” I said.

“Go suck balls—”

“Enough!” It was Mel again, her voice like a
knife. “Will you two grow up and stop bickering. We have more
serious matters to deal with here, don’t you think?”

She was right, of course. I stepped away
from her, considered a feint-dash to reach John Scott, but decided
he wasn’t worth it.

“We have to get out of here,” she said more
softly. “We have to figure out a way out of here.”

“I think that way,” Tomo said, pointing past
me.

“It’s that way,” John Scott said, jutting
his chin in a different direction.

I had no idea anymore and didn’t
speculate.

Nina said, “Maybe the police were able to
trace the call?”

“After five seconds?” I said.

“Maybe.”

“I doubt it.”

“How do you know?”

“I don’t.”

“So we wait?” Tomo asked.

Nina nodded. “Yes. That is what we should
do.”

I agreed. “Even if they weren’t able to
trace the call,” I said, “they know we’re here. They’ll organize a
search party.”

“But Aokigahara too big,” Tomo said. “How
they find us?”

“They have the video of us entering the
forest,” I said. “They’ll know we at least went up that path.
They’ll suspect we followed the arrows left or right. It can’t be
that hard for them to track us down.”

“What about Neil?” Mel said.

We all glanced at him. His eyes were closed.
I thought he might have been sleeping until I saw the tight lines
around his eyes and mouth.

Not sleeping. In pain.

“He can’t walk anyway,” John Scott said.
“Best let him rest.”

“So when will they come?” Nina asked. “The
search party? Tonight?”

I shook my head. “There’s only a couple
hours of light left. By the time they got anything organized it
would be dark. I’m guessing they start the search first thing
tomorrow morning.”

“I can’t spend another night in this
forest,” Mel said, folding her arms across her chest. “No way.
There’s… I think there’s…”

“What?” John Scott said.

“There’s something out there.”

“Something?” I said.

“I don’t know,” she said, clearly
uncomfortable.

“Ghosts,” Nina stated.

“You gotta be fucking kidding?” John Scott
said.

“Then what happened to our phones?”

“Ben—” I began.

“That is not true,” Nina said sharply. “And
you know it.”

John Scott guffawed. “Have you girls lost
it?”

“This isn’t funny, John,” Mel said.

“You’ve watched too many horror movies.”

“Our phones are gone. The red ribbon is
gone—”

“We don’t know it’s gone.”

“Why would Ben take everything?” she plowed
on. “It doesn’t make sense.”

“Why would a
ghost
?”

“Because it doesn’t want us to leave.”

“Right,” John Scott said, grinning. “Hey,
maybe Ben didn’t kill himself. Maybe the ghost possessed him and
made him to do.”

The silence that followed was charged with
thoughtful consideration. I could almost see Mel and Nina nodding
mentally.

“For fuck’s sake,” John Scott said. “Tomo,
are you buying this?”