Suicide Forest Read Online Free PDF Page B

that made up my mind too. Ben, grinning broadly, stepped over
the line, then helped Nina. As she stepped over it her shorts rode
up her legs. John Scott went next, scissor-style, then Tomo, then
Neil, who caught a foot and almost tripped. I lifted the line, and
Mel and I ducked beneath.
    Leaving the main trail behind, we ventured
into the unknown.

 
4
     
    We walked in
silence. The time for chatting and gaiety was over. What had begun
as a novel idea, something to pass the time, had become serious
business. We might not be technically trespassing, but we were
definitely somewhere we were not supposed to be. Aokigahara was a
place where people came to die. It was home to the dead, not the
living. I think the reality of this was beginning to sink in for
all of us as we proceeded down the stick-tunnel, which was both
claustrophobic and menacing.
    Nevertheless, nobody made any mention of
turning back. We were drawn forward, I suppose, by morbid
curiosity. It was human nature to want to know what was around the
next corner, regardless of what might await you.
    My heart was beating faster than normal, my
senses heightened, as if I had just downed a large energy drink. My
eyes scanned the snarl of forest that bordered us on both sides,
though I wasn’t sure what I was expecting to find. A dangling
noose? A body? A white-faced ghost flitting through the trees
toward us? I couldn’t hear anything besides the crackle of our
footsteps and my excited breathing. I wondered again about the
peculiar silence of the forest and said, “Hey, Tomo. Where are all
the animals?”
    He glanced back over his shoulder. “What you
mean?”
    “There’re no animals. No birds or
anything.”
    “It fucking haunted forest, man. Birds
scared shitless. They go other forest.”
    “What about the wind?” Ben said. “There is
no wind either.”
    “I reckon that’s because of the trees,” Neil
replied. “They grow too thick for any wind to blow through.”
    “If this trail is off limits, Tomo,” Mel
said, “then why is it here? Who made it?”
    “The police. They use to find body.”
    “How many do they usually find each
year?”
    “One hundred. Two hundred.”
    Mel stopped. “What?”
    We all stopped too.
    Tomo shrugged. “Sometime more, sometime
less.”
    “I had no idea the number was so large.” Mel
had blanched. “I figured—I don’t know—like a handful of people
every year.”
    That was closer to the dozen or two I’d
estimated the number to be.
    “Japan has the highest suicide rate in the
developed world,” Neil said matter of factly.
    “Are we really going to see a body?” Mel
asked.
    “It’s a big forest,” I told her
noncommittally.
    “And probably if you do,” Ben said, “it will
only be an old skeleton or something.”
    “Much better,” she said.
    “Do you want to go back?” I asked her.
    She looked at me. “Do you?”
    “Don’t be a cheesedick, dude,” John Scott
said. “We’ve decided. We’re here.”
    “Do you want to go back?” I asked her
again.
    “Pussssieeee,” John Scott said.
    “Stay out of this,” I told him.
    “I’m just saying—”
    “It’s not your business.”
    “It’s okay, guys,” Mel said. “I’m fine.”
    Snorting like he’d just won some bucking
challenge, John Scott took the lead with Ben, and we continued on.
I glanced ahead at the guy a few times, continuing different
conversations in my head. Some scenarios had me telling him nobody
wanted him here. Others deteriorated into a fistfight in which I
handily defeated him.
    Gradually my irritation diminished, and my
attention returned to the forest. It was getting creepier the
farther we went. The saplings seemed to be pressing ever closer
together, their trunks lining up as tight as prison bars, while
some of the lower branches reached toward us, like skeletal
hands.
    Suddenly Ben cried out. Then everyone was
crowding over something on the ground, just off the path. I leaned
over Mel and saw a pile of relatively