Chapter 27: Gradually
Asuka led him through the park at a pace he refused to match. Past the dense crowds, over a small arched bridge spanning a reed-fringed lake, along a mossy stone path that wound through a belt of dense trees, across wide lawns dotted with benches, through the sandbox-and-swings zone where children shrieked and tumbled — and then up a flight of stairs, over two hundred steps in all, until at the summit an artificial stream trickled through a miniature garden and the parasols of a rest area came into view beyond it, visitors clustered beneath them.
Ma En kept his stride deliberately slow. Asuka, several meters ahead, kept having to stop and wait.
"Too slow. Are you a grandpa?" she complained — not once, not twice.
Ma En paid her no attention. He'd never been much of a park person. There were several reasons for this, but the one he acknowledged was simply a lack of interest. People's parks in the homeland all looked the same to him; he'd grown numb to them. Today he wanted to see how Japan's version differed. Honestly, walking through it, the differences were hard to pin down — aside from the atmosphere, which he suspected had less to do with the park itself and more to do with the just-graduated high school girl beside him.
Not a romantic atmosphere, of course. To passersby they probably looked like siblings on an outing.
Ma En leaned on his black umbrella, using it occasionally as a walking stick. Sunlight fell warm across his shoulders — the genuine warmth of late spring. Every place they'd passed so far brimmed with life, the simple and grounded kind. It made a person feel: This is what normal life is supposed to look like. The bizarre reputation Sanchoumoku Park carried in the rumors — not a trace of it could be found here, and nothing suggested that nightfall could conjure it from these same spaces.
The real points of interest, according to every source, lay deeper in. But the ground he'd already covered kept prompting a thought: How much deeper can it possibly go? Ma En had patience to spare, and he savored the question. The phrase "thinking in reverse" had always appealed to him. Thinking in reverse: this park's warmth, its lushness, its satisfying fullness — what if all of that existed not to enrich the visitor's experience, but to protect it? Not for the sake of enriching people's lives, but for the sake of shielding their ordinary days — cultivating a beauty so sufficient, so complete, that no one would feel the urge to venture further.
Thinking in reverse was always interesting, even if, in Ma En's twenty-some years of doing it, the answers usually turned out to be superfluous.
"Want something to eat?" he said to Asuka. "I imagine there won't be many people past this point."
"Mm... I want ice cream." She thought about it briefly before answering.
Ma En paid, naturally. They looked for an empty table beneath the parasols but discovered immediately that they'd been too optimistic. There were more visitors resting here than expected; many had resorted to sitting on the surrounding lawns and stones. The two of them took their ice cream and kept walking. Past the rest area, a four-person-wide gravel path stretched onward, still carrying a few strollers and families. But here Asuka led him off the path and into the trees, the gravel receding behind them, the voices of other visitors fading with it.
The forest had its own sounds, of course — footsteps crunching through leaf litter, the knock of a shoe against a stone, the sawing of insects, the rustle of leaves in the wind. But perhaps because these sounds closed in so quickly, burying the human voices beneath them, the silence felt sudden. Not an absence of noise but an absence of people.
At first, the quiet was ordinary. It arrived abruptly but didn't shed the warmth of late spring — it had its own natural beauty. But the farther they walked, the heavier the chill grew against exposed skin, and the air thickened with dampness. Sunlight still filtered through the canopy with full brightness, yet somehow carried no warmth. The trees were equally lush in every direction, visually consistent, giving no indication that the canopy was blocking anything. The wrongness wasn't visible. It was only felt.
"This is it. This is the feeling." Asuka's voice carried a note of excitement that didn't belong in a place like this. Most people would have recoiled from what they were walking through, but this girl seemed to have shed a set of invisible shackles — a joy she didn't usually show was surfacing now. Ma En could see it was genuine. She looked like a pirate who'd confirmed the route on a treasure map, certain she was closing in.
He didn't find her excitement difficult to understand. There were always people like this — people drawn not to what everyone else loved but to corners everyone else avoided. In the human imagination, the grotesque had always taken root in unwelcome places. The more a location repelled on a physical level, the more it bred the indescribable. That was human fear and human madness both. Human loneliness and human singularity. The places where individuality declared itself most forcefully, where the secrets buried deepest could finally breathe. All of it explicable through psychology.
In every common imagining, across every era, evil carried universal features, and its settings did too. Those features were what resonated most. In Ma En's eyes, Asuka — the girl who wanted to draw brilliant ghost story manga — was resonating with this forest's depths.
It wasn't the damp chill that excited her. It was the resonance. Somewhere behind her eyes, he suspected, fantasies were already forming — images of the places within Sanchoumoku Park that hadn't yet been confirmed. Ma En himself observed her and their surroundings from a rational remove, cataloging every detail the forest offered that the body instinctively rejected: the faintly fishy smell of the soil; air that had grown heavy enough to taste; tree trunks sheathed in moss; root systems exposed above the dirt, gnarled and extravagant; thorny shrubs; grass with edges sharp enough to slice skin; insects that no amount of care could avoid.
At a glance, the scenery was still reassuring enough. But the closer he looked, the more his scalp prickled. He could imagine this place at night — almost no light, and even under the brightest moon, every silhouette, every faint rustle would breed enormous fear. Enough to carry the mind from "the terror of nature" to "the terror of non-human things" — though those non-human terrors were, most of the time, nothing more than human fears reshaped.
Even with Asuka's current excitement, he doubted she'd come to a place like this alone at night. Not even if it were perfectly safe.
And past records had established that this part of Sanchoumoku Park was not perfectly safe.
Ma En quickened his steps, caught up to Asuka, and took her hand. Her body stiffened for a moment. Something in her mood seemed to cool, but she didn't pull away. She turned her face aside — as if admiring the scenery. For a long time, neither of them spoke. They just walked. Ma En couldn't feel any resistance in her grip. The girl who was supposed to be leading had let herself be led.
Every direction looked the same. Wet, green, dense. No two patches of vegetation were identical, but from any angle they produced the same impression. If he kept his eyes forward and walked, after a while he'd realize he couldn't recall what lay behind him. If he turned to look, he couldn't recognize anything he'd passed through. This was the kind of place where people got lost. No cleared paths, no markers. The ground was too soft, the fallen leaves too thick, the low vegetation too eager — whatever traces previous visitors had left had been swallowed.
Every feature of this area satisfied the human imagination's requirements for terrible things. No wonder it had become a place where factual records and ghost stories tangled into one.
"Which way from here?" Ma En decided he'd better ask.
Asuka seemed to snap awake. Her head swiveled left and right, and — as if she'd genuinely come prepared — she pointed without much hesitation.
"That way. We've already passed some of it."
"You can still find the right route? How?"
"Come enough times and you just know. I have a good sense of direction — if I feel it's that way, it's that way." She said it as if it were obvious.
Entirely by feel?
He couldn't say whether she was reliable or not. People with that kind of instinct did exist. If the two of them got lost, well — bad luck. Ma En glanced through the treetops at the sun's position. The light had no trouble piercing the gaps in the canopy. Plenty of brightness. And still, somehow, almost no warmth.
"I heard people used to bury bodies here," Asuka said suddenly. "Corpses that changed afterward. I was going to draw that story, but it was too ordinary."
"Oh." Ma En offered nothing more. He could understand, and because he understood, the remark didn't feel worth pursuing.
"Feels like it's just the two of us out here... Weren't there supposed to be TV crews filming?" Asuka had barely been quiet a moment before starting up again. She seemed to need to talk — not out of fear, but out of simple discomfort with the silence.
"They might be at the shrine." Ma En kept his voice deliberately steady, pitched to settle nerves. "The supernatural site in this park — does it refer to this whole area in general? Not just the section that's rumored to have been a cemetery?"
"It's basically the cemetery area. But the outskirts are honestly just as creepy as the inside. Not many people would actually go messing around in the cemetery, right? Things are more likely to happen in a forest like this." Asuka warmed to the topic. "I always hear about people coming here for courage tests, but most of them just wander this area and head back. Very few actually make it to the cemetery. This is already remote enough — the cemetery's even deeper. When I've come before, always in daylight, I wasn't scared in the forest itself. But the closer I got to that area, the worse it felt."
Her expression tightened as she said it. Ma En didn't think she was lying.
"Right now, as we're getting closer — you're still scared?"
"Mm —" Her fingers tightened around his.
Then Ma En stopped.
Asuka, jerked to a halt beside him, looked in the direction of his gaze and saw nothing remarkable. Vegetation in every direction, each patch indistinguishable from the last. Before she could ask, he'd already let go of her hand and was walking toward something she couldn't identify. She hurried after him, catching hold of his sleeve.
He pushed through a stand of low shrubs and parted the grass. Thick roots coiled over a slab of bluish rock. He could see several clear marks scored into the surface — but those weren't what had drawn his attention from meters away. His eyes weren't sharp enough to have spotted scratches through layers of vegetation at that distance. What had caught him were the broken branches and wood chips scattered on the ground. Even at a glance, they were obviously not natural.
Someone had sawed through sections of root, stripped bark, severed branches with deliberate cuts. The gaps were tool-made, and their placement felt systematic — not random damage but purposeful action. One person, Ma En judged. One person had come here with a specific objective and done this.
He ran his fingertips along the cuts, gauging their freshness, scanning the surrounding ground for additional traces.
"Is someone illegally logging here?" He didn't think so, but he asked Asuka anyway.
"Never heard of it." She peered at the marks without comprehension. "What is it?"
"Someone's been here." He left it vague. Too much was still uncertain — he might simply be reading too much into it.
But from what the traces showed, a certain picture assembled itself through logic and inference: this person had been using these cuts to search for something, to observe something. As for what — if the answer was supposed to be in the wood itself, in the bark and grain and root fibers, then the picture broke down. Everything beneath the cuts looked natural. Unremarkable.
Ma En picked up one of the discarded branches. In his mind, a scene formed: this person cutting a branch, cleaning the cross-section, studying it closely — then tossing it to the ground.
He wasn't sure whether the scene in his head was correct.