Forest of Rope

Chapter 27

"あなたの人生はあなたの両親からの貴重な贈り物です。あなたが死ぬことを決定する前に警察に相談してください。"

A familiar signpost. They'd come to it at last. Two minutes into the trail and already they'd reached the first landmark of Alexis's nightmare world. Of course, this was the place.

'Wonder what it says,' Riley murmured, squinting up at the hieroglyphic kanji on the sign.

'No idea,' she said disinterestedly while kicking aside an empty Coke can. 'Probably an anti-littering campaign.'

Unfazed, Alexis stepped away to take in the rest of her surroundings. It surprised her how surreally familiar everything appeared. Each blade of grass, the scattered shards of discarded trash, even the placements of the trees... New details mixed forcibly with half-remembered mental images, confabulating to form an identical parallelism between dream and reality.

As she wandered through the clearing, her mind wandered too, skimming over memories like stones across a pond. Before her very eyes the beaten path ahead opened up to a dimly lit suburban street, warped by thousands of years of overgrowth. Stacked in-between two wooden pillars materialised the entrance of the dowdy little house. The forest replicated it perfectly. The stairs and porch were moss-covered and the door, a door scarcely ever opened, was blanketed with ferns and ivy. Alexis could only imagine what horrors dwelled inside, what awful apparitions haunted beyond the soiled oak panelling. She stopped dead at the thought of it.

'Something wrong?'

Riley allowed himself to bump against her backpack which rattled noisily at the collision. He brought his head down tenderly to her shoulder and his chin grazed gently into her neck. Her quick pulse throbbed steadily against the stubble of his cheek, like the pulse of a hare caught helplessly between the jaws of a fox, writhing in silent agony.

'You're not getting tired already are you?' he murmured slyly, hoping that this would provoke her into a state of liveliness as she'd been deathly quiet all morning.

'It's nothing.' She shrugged him off. 'How about you, you sure you're up for this? It's a long hike. We might not come back,' she teased. She was facing him now, giving him a long, evaluative look.

'I'm aware,' he said while chewing on a nail. 'Don't worry, I'll be fine.'

Alexis continued to stare, refusing to be taken in.

'I've got my meds,' Riley improvised quickly, eying her backpack. 'Well you've got them anyway. I'm in your hands.' With this he raised his hands above his head, surrendering to her. He watched her nod slowly. She seemed so energised and tender, he half-expected her to kiss him, he almost wished that she had.

Instead she turned back to the clearing. The house had vanished.

She took a final cursory glance toward the sign that she had taken for an anti-littering disclaimer, or so she pretended. With a small, hidden conspiratorial smirk, she led the way along the path. Alexis's Japanese could've been considered elementary at best but she knew the translation word for word.

"Your life is a precious gift from your parents. Please consult the police before you decide to die."

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So, it's been an entire year since I've done any kind of creative writing. I guess I've been too preoccupied with personal affairs to keep up a project I started when I was 16 and let's face it, I was a different person back then and a shittier writer. But after studying literature in all that time I've begun to realise how writing can function like an exorcism. This story, the characters in it and the fictionalised events that take place exist in a world that I created when I was very lonely and uncertain about my future. But now that's changed and I feel like if I finish this project I can finally move on from the dark period that fueled this story's premise. So if you did read this you have my sincerest gratitude. Maybe I'll actually carry on and allow this thing to die already. It'd be too cruel to leave things hanging in suspense anyway. I'd like to thank Daniela for encouraging me to write despite our differences. Thank you.