The Great Haunted Woods of the North - The Film Student #28

Kyoko was outside the car fiddling with something. She opened the engine then went to the back trunk. She went back and forth a couple of times, then she came back inside the car. She pulled her balled-up panties out of Josh’s mouth, being as rough as possible, and then she forced a pill down Josh’s throat.

Josh felt disoriented and looked around the car in all directions. It was dark. Darker than before. Darker than cannibalistic serial killer Tsutomo Miyazaki’s cold, dead eyes.

It was so dark that Josh could barely see deeper than a couple of feet into the dense and treacherous forest. The forest looked alive. It was coming closer and closer to the car. Branches, which hadn’t been there, were reaching out and touching the sides of the car window. A thorny vine stuck to the windshield. A mist was coming off the ground underneath and all around the car.

Josh turned around and looked back, but he couldn’t even see the road they had come up on. It was like the road had vanished.

The only thing he could see was the blurred light of the lanterns on either side of the cabin. The lanterns? They had not been lit when Josh and Kyoko had arrived there. Or were they? Josh wasn’t sure of anything anymore. He couldn’t tell up from down, north from south.

Kyoko slapped him in the face.

“Stop looking for an escape! You aren’t going to find one. You are only getting out of here if you listen to me and obey me perfectly. And only if I let you.”

“Wh— wh— where are we?”

Kyoko slapped Josh again.

“And don’t you utter a word unless I ask you something directly! Do you understand?”

Josh nodded.

“We are in the Great Northern Woods. Nothing in these woods is what it seems. Everybody who comes here gets lost or traumatized. Many decades ago, a commercial airline crashed into a military plane above the mountain. Most people died on impact. Their dead bodies came raining down, spilling blood on the trees.

“The army sent units to search for survivors. No one ever made it out. But a log book was discovered at the foot of the mountain six weeks after they set out. In the first pages, it showed coordinates as the soldiers were scouting the mountain. But the soldiers kept walking in circles. Then after a couple of days, the coordinates listed started to make no sense at all. It listed latitudes in the Southern Hemisphere and longitudes in Europe and Africa. Then it stopped even listing numbers. It had markings that looked like alien hieroglyphs.”

Josh felt a chill run over his skin. Kyoko had turned the air conditioning on.

“You will die if you venture into those woods. Even whole units of professional soldiers couldn’t survive there. Even those who know the terrain of their home country can’t survive. Only I am protected from the demons that haunt this forest because my sister sacrificed herself here. After she was kidnapped, tortured, and raped by the Americans, she walked into these woods and hung herself. She left me a note telling me to take revenge on the perverted yankees. To take revenge for her and for all Japanese women.”

Kyoko threw Josh out of the passenger seat and onto the floor of the forest. The sticks and stones cut into Josh’s skin. A slug crawled onto his hand. Kyoko untied the ropes and stood over him.

“We enact justice when we can. When the first yankee soldier came and raped a woman in Ryukyu in 1853, the locals chased him into the sea and threw rocks at him until they knocked him out and left him to drown. I’ll be generous and give you a head start. I won’t start throwing rocks until you get halfway. Now run to the cabin! Go!”