And he said, What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground.
When thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth.
Book of Genesis, chapter 4.
Prologue
The village was surrounded with death. This was a village that was splayed out along a mountain stream, encircled with fir tree woods in a way that it resembled a triangle-shaped tip of a harpoon.
Fir trees are similar to Japanese cedar in their beautiful shape, but smaller and stouter. If cedar is shaped with clear and sharp edges as if carved by a fine cutting tool, then fir is fire in shape. An outline of blaze that flares out free and wide on the tip of a wick.
Branches with no bendings adjoining the straight line of a trunk extend far and wide, forming conic-shaped tree crown; leaves are simple needles, they do not grow in a systematic way, but rather in spirals, although these spirals are hardly anything complex. Generally fir is thought of as nothing more than simple timber.
While this is true for most, however, these fir woods, with no other kinds of trees mixed in, were what entrapped the village in 'death'. Inside these woods, covering the mountain ridges that served as boundaries, isolating the village from various directions, there was the other world that did not belong to this side.
The giants, looking down at the village from that other world, could reach as much as 40 meter tall, but their lifespan was short - only 150-200 years. They were trees of destruction. Fir changed vegetation in the region by eradicating other species, thus advancing to and holding the position of the supreme ruler of the area.
These trees of eradication that were cultivated for the deceased occupied the surface of the mountains, surrounding the village. The village made good and constant use of fir timber, making wooden grave tablets and caskets for the deceased out of it. Since its birth, the village had been producing various death-related items and equipment.
Inside the woods were like a kingdom of the dead with fir trees serving as grave markers. Even now the village still buried its dead. Villagers had sectors of the graveyard in the mountains reserved for them, where they buried corpses. There were no tombstones. The only indication that the place was the abode of the dead was wooden pickets, stuck where graves were. But once 33 years after death had passed and prayers for the repose of the soul had been done, the picket was taken out and a fir tree was planted in its place. And then, after it had been planted, it was time to forget. When the dead returned from the mountains, they had nothing in common with humans any longer.
The trees of perish, planted for the dead, they did not allow any other kinds of trees to survive and truly were the kingdom of the dead. That was why the village, surrounded with fir on three sides, was isolated in death.
As a matter of fact, sections, comprising the very village, were also dispersed and isolated from one another. In the beginning a group of lumber dealers set their eyes on fir and migrated here, clearing land and founding the village; they were not blood kin, nor were they from the same place, so no connections were formed between the communities inside the village.
Probably that was the reason why everything was always solved inside the vilage, and the village never resorted to the help of the outside world for living. The outside world passed through the village like the bypass, touching upon it only on its southern outskirts. This pathway led to towns bigger than the village and then to cities even bigger than those towns, connected all them, but once one got off it, it did nothing to stop the fir tree siege, so this mountain village was still trapped in complete isolation.
Strangely enough, however, even in the recent years the mountain village had not faced the issue of declining number of population. Its population neither drastically decreased, nor dramatically increased. Little by little human habitation gew smaller on the hardest to reach outskirts of the village, but at the same time the number of houses rose in the south. It was only natural that there always were a lot of old people, but when the old passed away to find their eternal rest in the fir tree woods, the young came back to the village from somewhere to take their place.
When one looked at this small community with its established balance that might never get disturbed, it seemed like a small sanctuary. The regular life of the village would never get interrupted, like one could never stop believing, and not matter how forgotten one's faith might become, one would still get reminded of it some time or another, even if only for a brief moment.
And when one does, one might turn to the serenity of this quiet mountain village for guidance. There existed a bridge connecting this world to the other side, and the beyond, majestically encircling the village - a piece of this world - in death on the three sides, also isolated it from the mundane.
There, people died, worked and prayed for the dead.
This was the purpose of the village entire existence from the very day it came into being.
***
It was November, 8, a little past 3AM, when the first report about sighting of a suspicious light that seemed like that of a fire in the mountain district Mizobe to the north-west was filed to the branch station of the fire department.
The temperature was 9.6℃, the humidity level - 62.3%, wind velocity - 12.8 meters per second, and it was not unusual for the dry-weather warning that was in effect at the time to turn into fire alarms.
Upon hearing the report, Yoshino promptly threw aside a magazine he was reading and rushed out of the station.
To the north of the station there stretched pitch-black ranges of mountains. If this was the daytime, an onlooker would have seen a scenery of green mountains, stretching out in the view against the backdrop of the clear late-autumn sky. There, on the gentle slopes of mountain ranges, piled up on and against each other, covered with evergreen forests, the vivid colors of autumn were sprinkled in here and there; Yoshino was so used to seeing this scenery that he could recall these mountains in minute details even in the dark.
At the moment, the linen of the starry sky with innumerable light dots of stars, scattered across it, seemed torn off where the jet black silhouettes of mountains loomed. Small lights could be seen here and there, as if a few stars fell off the skydome, but it was unclear whether those lights were always there or not.
"Toku-san, do you see anything?"
The nervous voice of his collegue came from behind him, and Yoshino looked back at him over the shoulder.
"Nope."
Wind, cold enough to send chills down their backs, gushed straight into their faces. The flow descended from the mountains to blow through the town streets. The dry wind got under the uniform through the collar, clinging to the body beneath, and on the instinct Yoshino upturned the collar of his uniform, still gazing at the mountains.
The mountain site that extended as far as the northern part of the Mizobe town district occupied almost 2/3 of the town area. Mostly, the population was concentrated on the remaining 1/3 of the territory, in the urban area of the Mizobe district, but some settlements could be found scattered across the mountains as well. The problem at hand was to determine whether the 'suspicious light that seemed like that of a fire' was indeed a fire in one of such settlements or not.
Or rather, it was not the question whether the fire raged in the settlements. On one hand, each of those settlements was isolated in areas determined by the shape of the mountains, with most of them located in narrow ravines, and houses there were likely old and overcrowded. Nevertheless, each settlement had establshed its own fire crew that imposed a strong caution and the wary attitude regarding the abormal dryness of air. They had the guaranteed water supply and enough helping hands, so extinguishing a fire on their own was entirely possible. What was truly dangerous was the case when the fire went to the mountains.
Yoshino peered intently at the mountain ranges, shivering from the wind all the while. No mountain dominated the view. The mountains with only few ups and downs stretched out across his vision. They all gave off the easy feeling that you could climb them simply by hiking, however, the complexity of intervowen ridges presented quite a challenge, making accessing them surprisingly difficult. The trees, planted in the mountainous region, were evergeen for the most part, such as Japanese cedar, cypress and fir, but the undergrowth had already dried out and died, creaking drily if touched. That was why in case the fire reached the mountains the chances of it starting a large-scale forest fire were high. Yoshino recalled the huge-scaled forest fires that raged in Okayama and Nagasaki that summer.
'Please, let it be a simple fire in some house.'
As if he heard Yoshino's inner prayer, his comrade said in a lowered voice:
"We'll be lucky if this isn't a bushfire."
Yoshino nodded. If flames were to lick at the dried out underbush, the fire would spread at a frighteningly astonishing speed. The fire from one vast slope, enveloped in flames, fanned by a strong wind with velocity of 13 meters per second, would immediately run up and down all the neighboring ridges, reaching the northern mountains in no time and engulfing the settlements located there. To make things even worse, the wind, as if carefully aiming on purpose, blew right in the direction of the urban area of the Mizobe district.
Yoshino pleadingly looked up to the mountains, trembling from full-body shivers, and turned the collar of his uniform even further up.
The expressway, running through the southern extreme of the mountainous area, was set into operation. Previously only rice fields could be found there, but now those parts were undergoing the process of rapid development because of the interchange that was build there, on the verge of the open fields. The residential district, that supplanted the fields, ran out of plains and expanded farther north, going as far as clearing and habitatibg the mountain slope. The mountain and the urban area merged up, forming one continuous expanse of land.
Yoshino silently mouthed the word "Please", praying to no entity in particular, when, all of a sudden, the ringing of the station bell resounded in the air. Startled, he abruptly turned to the station building. At the same time his young fellow fireman came running out of the doors.
"I saw the lights from the tower! It's in Sotoba!"
PART 1: CROWS
Chapter 1
1
Seishin finished writing down the sentence and sighed. The tension loosened, as his mind floated back from the frozen planes of wasteland to the reality of summer night.
It felt as if the temperature around rose substantially in an instance. Seishin put the pencil aside. The varnished hexagon of an old-styled pencil rolled across the ruled writing paper, in which the night in the desolate wilderness was trapped, towards its top, reflecting the light from the lamp on the stand on its polished sides. The paper, spread on the writing desk, was lit with yellow-tinged light from the lamp on the stand, and the night air was pouring into the room through the window next to the desk, carrying the chirping of insects along with it.
It was July, 24, Sunday. The date just changed, and Muroi Seishin's 33rd birthday was close at hand. He was a priest, but also a novelist. He had been sitting at the desk in his study at the temple, his manuscript layed out in front of him, growing and filling out with words, for the past 5 hours that had gone by since he started.
Seishin signed again and collected the lined paper that he himself filled with writing no more than a few minutes ago. His eyes strayed over the hyeroglyphs filling the squares of the ruled paper starting at the very beginning.
The chirping of insects, full of vigor, kept flowing into the room from the window. There was no doubt about loudness of that sound, but oddly enough inside the room was emmersed in silence. In a corner of this old looking room there was a desk, its far edges barely lit with the light from the lamp; that was where Seishin sat, turned away from the desk, looking down intently studying his manscript. Various office accessories were lined up neatly on the steel desk behind him. The living quarters of the temple were peacefully asleep. In the temple, that held these quarters to its bosom, even vestiges of human presence died out, leaving only empty space behind. The temple was surrounded with fir woods. It was perched on a slope of a mountain covered with fir trees. There was no other human habitation nearby. The mountain temple commanded a clear view of a village below - the village that was cut off from the rest of the world with huge mountain ranges and entrapped within the embrace of fir trees. Isolation surrounding the place in circles over and over again became silence that stagnated around the prison in the guise of a temple here and there.
'His younger brother pitied him...'
Seishin put his manuscript back on the countertop and signed lightly once again. He opened a drawer of his desk and retrieved an utility knife, then took his abandoned pencil and applied the blade to it. He sharpened the pencil right on top of the manuscript he just wrote.
Even though his brother became Shiki, it did not mean he turned into a vengeful ghost, much less into a demon. His brother just rose from the grave, and that was all there was to it. Thus, the said brother was full of compassion for him, just like he was when he was alive. However, no criminal would suffer because of the fact that his victim pitied him. And he was anguished with his younger brother's pity...
'So what's next?'
Seishin pondered the question for a short while, trying to think up a continuation to his hazy-looking tale, but before long lost any vague sight of the ending he might have had in a disarray of half-formed thoughts.
While making another try to grope about for an idea, he kept shaving small wood chips off his pencil sharpening its tip to a point. The hardness of the pencil lead was labeled 2H, and he had a habit of writing characters in such a way as if he was encarving them on paper with the hard pencil. That was why, even though he wrote with a pencil, he never used an eraser. Even if he were to use it, the characters would not disappear anyway, so when he needed to erase a character he made a practice of simply crossing out a square of the ruled paper containing the character in question.
'The brother he killed came back from the grave every night.'
That merciful sibling of his realized that his older brother was about to become a murderer the moment he saw the dangerous weapon in his hand. And the younger one felt sorry for the older one, the killer, rather than for himself, the victim.
And so, he turned into Shiki and followed after his older brother. He could not help pursuing his brother who became a sinner and now wandered in the wastelands to see what fate awaited him.
He did it out of affection, not because he cursed his older sibling.
But he, who turned into Shiki, did not know that those actions of his caused his older brother sufferring. The older brother, on the other hand, was well aware of his brother not having a clue about that fact. And-- 'Towards what conclusion is this story going?'
While thinking about this, Seishin finished carefully sharpening the tip of his pencil and moved on to sharpening other pencils he used tonight. Though he hated when his pencils had a dull tip, he did not really had a need to sharpen them constantly, since he always had a dozen of them in the pencil case prepared beforehand, so when the tip became dull he could just take another pencil and leave it at that.
The rainy season had already opened, but the cool flow, pouring into the room and soaking it in night air, did not bring any heat with it. If anything, it made Seishin feel chilly in his short-sleeved shirt. Well, the village sprawled along a mountain stream had never had hot nights to begin with. Which represented a very substantial difference from the town where he lived in his days of being a university student. Back then, in his room in the university dormitory without air conditioning, sweat trickled down his body, even if he did nothing more than just sat at his desk. That was when he stopped writing with a fountain pen, because he felt disgusted at droplets of sweat, falling down and smearing the ink on the paper, when he leaned over it - just like he did now - working late at night. Since then, for a decade now, he had been using only a hard thin pencil.
'You still write on paper, and ruled one at that?' some editor asked him once with surprise, coloring his voice. 'I'm not good with machines', Seishin replied to that. He tried buying a laptop, but ended up handing it over to his father. He had nothing against the precise computer-produced characters, but somehow he was not fond of the fact that they could be reproduced in the exact same form over and over again.
To him, writing a character in a square of the ruled paper was similar to advancing on a path you could never take again. If you happened to go astray and end up in a dead-end, you could always return to the main road. Then, little by little, you would find your way through the maze, by exploring it. That was the way of writing that sat well with him. It was time-consuming, but Seishin was a priest first, and writing novels was no more than a side job to him anyway. Seishin had never once been considered a writer popular enough for publishers to urge him on to finish his manuscripts faster, never before and likely not in the future either. That was how things had been for the past decade, and there was no reason for them to change in the future.
He finished sharpening his last pencil, gathered all the shavings in the middle of a sheet of the ruled paper, rolled the sheet up and folded it. Then he neatly folded inwards the edges of the sheet so that the shavings inside would not fall out of it and threw it into the waste basket. It was his habit to deal with every matter in a similar manner, which prompted his mother to point out with a laugh that it was as if he did not know whether to throw something away or just put it aside.
Seishin took a new sheet of the ruled paper and rose. He shivered slightly, goosebumps rising on his skin. He made his way to the window intending to close it, and insects abruptly stopped chirping, scared of Seishin's shadow perhaps. Because of that he was able to hear the ringing of a faraway bell, unreliably transient and almost fading. That sound, restless and sometimes doleful, was the sound of a portable bell, that had driving away crop-eating insects as its purpose.
A faint smile grazed Seishin's face as he strained his ears listening to the ringing of the bell. The village night was still young. It was the night of a festival, brisk noise never subsiding for a second, because many people were out on the streets instead of being fast asleep like they would have been on any other night. In his young days, on such nights Seishin felt as if the night held amazing secrets. And if he only ran after men parading in masks he would be able to reach and unfold these secrets.
Unfortunatelly though, now that Seishin crossed over into his thirties, he was very well aware of the true colors of the secrets the night held. But even now a lot of children followed the procession searching for something, rubbing their sleepy eyes all the while, like he did long time ago. And yet, he did not notice that last year or possibly even a little earlier this year it was he, who believed that there surely was something out there, he, whose heart jolted at the sound of the bell.
The casual village seen from the window sank in darkness. Street lights and dots of lights in windows could not chase the darkness away. Instead, because of the lonely sparse lights here and there the village seemed even gloomier. The ridges of the mountains covered with fir trees towered high above as if wrapped in blackveil. The whole dome of the sky above them was littered with brilliant stars, causing the summer night sky to look brighter than the village below.
The village was encircled with death.
Fir trees were firmly associated with death. The villagers here buried their dead, even now. The dead who had regrets or bore a grudge rose from their graves and started wandering around, bringing about a calamity to the village. The villagers called them 'demons'. Everything the demons touched became infected with death. People and animals died, crops withered. Both in the old days and now parents would say 'A demon will come for you if you don't stop' to discipline their crying children.
The risen were the undead that wondered around spreading death everywhere. They came to in the middle of fir woods, descended down the dark slopes and visited humans, who gathered in spots of scarce light, clinging uselessly to their futile dreams.
'The darkness...'
"Look at this darkness. Look at the stars above. How do you like this darkness in comparison with the radiace of the stars?" A sage pointed at the wasteland from the hill.
"This is darkness of ignorance, impure and cursed", the sage said and pushed him in the back. He stumbled a couple of steps forward, small golden gates closing after him, and went staggering down into the wasteland.
Seishin shook his head and reached for the window.
He still had no idea how to end his tale, and it had been puzzling him since the very beginning why he even started writing it in the first place. Bits and pieces piled up, covering the small bones of the story, that were its core, with flesh, hiding them further and further away.
Seishin smiled wryly to himself and closed the window, the only dot of light in this barely broken land. Seishin knew from the long experience that the road that could be seen from his high window was a divergence of the national highway runnning along the mountain river. There were lights moving on it, that, most likely, were cars.
He glanced at his wristwatch and frowned slightly. Somehow it turned already 3AM without him noticing. The village sparse lights and the ringing of the bell were still present, but the best part of the festival was already over and the celebration was moving towards its final stage. But the villagers were not allowed to participate in that. The final part was a ritual of driving harmful insects and plagues out and away from the village, so the only thing left to the villagers was bid their farewell, since they could not be present for the final act. The only ones allowed to witness it were those who hid their faces behind masks, the so-called 'Non-humans'.
'At this hour...'
The lights from the national highway headed straight into the pocket where the village sat. Even from the distance he knew they were headlights of 3 cars.
He watched them intently, maybe because cars rarely happened to drive in or out of the village at this hour of night.
The lights of the 3 cars...
... crawled across the land, limning arcs, as if floating in the dark. The dead, risen from their graves, called him, beckoned him sending will-o'-the-wisps his way.
Seishin shook his head at the strange phrase, that suddenly popped up in his head, and shook the odd feeling off.
It seemed to him that in the short while since he casually closed the window the lights had stopped moving.