A Series of Short Stories

Aokigahara

Disclaimer: This story is not mine, but an old classmate's.

"Hey guys its Devon here and I'm here with JJ, Joey, and Ray. And we're still not ready for this video we are going to film."

"Um..." JJ began, "we are in Japan next to Suicide Forest."

"Yep. We are going to be in the forest from . . ." Devon checked his phone ". . . now which is 9:22 pm to 5:48 am which is exactly when the sun rises."

"We are fully decked out, we have our phones at full energy and multiple battery packs, about three flashlights per person, tons of food."

"Yeah," said Joey as he interrupted Ray, "this little boy insisted on bringing tons of food here." Everyone laughed. A nervous laugh with a bit of eeriness to it, but still a laugh.

Ray started again, "Yeah so we're pretty much decked out and we should not have a problem with equipment or anything. The only thing we'll have a problem with is what we will see.'

"What we may see," said Devon, "there is no guarantee we will see a dead body but we will see stuff that those dead guys used before they ended their life." He took a pause. "We are going into this forest as a campaign to tell people to stop killing themselves. We want you guys to not end your lives, it is a serious thing that is totally wrong. So drop a like on this video and share it with your friends to spread the message."

"Well," began Joey, "let's get this started."

"Ok, so we weren't even inside the forest yet and we saw this little blue Volkswagen Kombi here so we took a look." Devon pointed to metal bars on the top of the car which had a little bit of rust at the bottom of where they came out of the aluminum body of the car. "These bars are rusted which means whoever drove this, is probably inside that forest, dead."

They took a look in the car but saw nothing except the seats, a few pink ribbons, and a few used tissues on the ground.

"We just got past the initial walking trails cuz people use the outsides of the forest for like exercise and that," said Devon. "But we're entering the prohibited area where there is supposedly ghosts or spirits that make you sick to your stomach."

"Guys," said JJ. His face was pale and he did not look happy. "Are you sure you guys want to do this? Like we've done exploring abandoned malls where people have been killed and whatever, but this is totally different. Like . . . ," he paused to try and keep his voice from breaking. He took a deep sigh. " . . . when does it become more than a video? When does it become our lives? What if we lose sight of our tracking ribbons or one of us goes to take a piss and he loses the group?"

Everyone stood shook for a few seconds. "I assure you," began Devon. "we'll take every precaution we can. And if you need to take a leak, we'll even hold your hands to assure you that it's gonna be fine." He chuckled and he sounded rather confident which reassured JJ.

They began to step over the chained linked fence that said "立ち入り禁止". They began walking with their hand held flashlights pointed off in the distance to check and see if anything was off in the trees. There wasn't anything, and they didn't know if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

"Oh my god!" yelled Ray. All of a sudden he stopped walking. He started muttering expletives under his breath. "I nearly walked into that." He pointed to a huge spider web which was nearly ten feet tall and fifteen feet across. There was a huge spider in the middle with a body of about six inches long.

Joey started to talk, "Okay let's look at this logically, that spider web probably took that spider or week or two to build."

"Oh my god you're right" said Devon.