Approximately 2AM, Wednesday, 18th October, 1978

  Thrum.

  鳥居が私を呼びました.

  It called out to me.

  Not with a voice, or an emotion, not in my ears or in my head, but a heavy resonance, deep within my chest. It was familiar, like a question I had heard before, but not in this existence. Far before. Before Japan. Before this life.

  I got out of bed. Out the window I could see the mist on the sea in the moonlight. I thought about how far I was away from the Mystic, now I’m looking out at Suruga Bay.

  Thrum.

  I felt it again. I knew it was cold out, so I got out of bed and got a light coat from my closet, quietly as I could. I opened my door carefully, went down the hall, past my sister’s room, away from my parents’ room, down the stairs. I put my shoes on at the door and listened for any stirring upstairs just for a moment, then I went out the door.

  No one locks the doors here, maybe not in this decade. I headed out the garden and into the street.

  Thrum.

  Left, up the hill. I know where to go. I counted the streets and muttered their names to myself. I read every sign and noted every alley. All in their place, I thought. Right where they should be.

  I was told stories in this life, fantastic traditional folklore, tales to put me to sleep, the call of the itako, the shamans of old who speak to the dead. I thought, in this second life, I would have an easy go of it. That who I was before, or, I guess, who I will be, wasn’t good enough for the Noosphere. Instead of remaining or transitioning into whatever plane, here I am, a 30 year old in a 6 year old’s body, living the life of Ono Yumatori in 1970’s Japan.

  I died in 2020 in Casablanca, so how the hell did I get here?

  The road. That damn road.

  One minute I’m on assignment, writing an article for the Globe, next I’m a Japanese baby.

  6 years so far, keep thinking I’m going to wake up. I am now Ono Yumatori. I live in Numazu, Shizuoka. I have grandparents and parents and a sister. I go to an elementary school. It’s helpful, I guess, mostly for learning Japanese. Wait until they get a load of my eigo, I’ll mess them up with my wicked sweet Southie accent. I haven’t had to use it, don’t want to shock anyone. Maybe in high school. For now, play the part. Enjoy a second go at being a kid, a second go at being someone else. Then figure all this out. How I got reincarnated in the past. In Japan, of all places.

  After a long walk up the hill, I made it. Yanagihara.

  Thrum.

  I held my chest. The wind was biting. It had not started to snow, but I felt it wanting the chance to exist. My skin goosebumped at the chill in the air, greeted by a lone torii gate and the grounds of a Shinto praying shrine. I looked around, not out of any fear of anything or anyone. I’m technically 36 years old, I can handle myself, even in a 6 year old’s body, but just to take in anything in case it could be pertinent or helpful. It was about 2AM, streetlights dotted the walkways and streets in the distance around me, but this was a sacred space. There was no lights, not even candles for prayer. Well, I guess that’s more Christian or Antemortemism than Shinto, best I could have used were the embers on an incense stick if there were any. It was dark, save for the moonlight. I focused on frequency changes, anything out of the ordinary beyond the sound of trees rustling in the wind, leaves fallen scraping against the stone, the creak of wood. No bending of sounds. No warble or wail.

  Nothing. Yet.

  Thrum.

  It wasn’t a sound, it was a calling. A pull from beyond anything. Was the road coming to greet me again? Is this something different? I instinctively turned to where the call came from, some 5 meters away from me.

  The torii. The gate.

  I paid mindful attention to my periphery. It was hard to look ahead while focusing on the edges of my vision, especially in the dark. They live in the corners of your eyes, just out of sight.

  I took a step. It was heavier than it should be.

  Thrum.

  I took another.

  Thrum.

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  I couldn’t move. I could feel the ache of tense muscles pulling at ligaments and sinew across my body. I said I wasn’t afraid, but my body was betraying me.

  THRUM.

  My chest hurt, the border of my vision darkened, the moon dimmed for a moment.

  And there they were.

  Like something you aren’t sure about just at the edge of your vision, you look, and they’d be gone, but for me, they remained. Hard to discern in the waning moonlight, second-guessing my child eyes, and as I looked at one headlong it blurred, yet the ones that appeared just at the limits of my vision were so much clearer. One. Two. Four. Seven. Twelve. I was losing count. I was losing ground. I was surrounded.

  You cannot appeal to echoes. Some you merely observe, watch the pathetic show of a life once lived play out like a broken, hazy play, a translucent masquerade of lost existence. Some go bump in the night, stirring the living to be reminded of the dead. Others hunt, jealous and petty, envious of the loss they had wrought in life. Some crawl into your dreams, slither into memories that are wholly not theirs and can invade, alter, destroy. Some haunt things, objects cursed to remember stories that should be forgotten. Some haunt places, the crack in the mirror, the creak in the floorboards, the moan through static on the radio.

  Some haunt people, and that’s what the living fears the most.

  I watched them. They didn’t move, they didn’t advance. They were there, in the low hum in my chest and the precipice of my sight.

  THRUM.

  My chest ached. My hands trembled. My legs were weak. The torii called me.

  I took a single step forward, in absolute spite of myself, in spite of everything in me telling me to leave, to run, in spite of the night and the shadows and the call, I took a step to spite it all.

  THRUM.

  I fell to my hands and knees. I couldn’t stop shaking. I could see them, just on the edge, staring back at me with darkened eyes. All I could manage was to pull my head up.

  The torii stood a meter away. The shadows in front of it parted, clearing space between me and the gate. I stared into it, like a veil of black silk draped in water leading to nowhere and darkness, I felt it resonate and break through my chest once more.

  THRUM.

  Like water, the veil rippled in the torii, and the small, hollow, tumbling of something came skittering to a stop a few centimeters from me, out from the gate. I tried to focus on it, but as I did, it was as if the darkness became too much. The echoes saw their opportunity. The moon gave up on me. And the world fell away.

  “Yuma! Yuma!”

  I felt hands on me and a shaking. I struggled up and, bleary eyed, tried to make sense of my surroundings. Right, the shrine.

  “Ah shit,” I said, in English, holding my head.

  “Envy?” I heard a familiar voice ask in Japanese. Envy? Oh, “shit,” or I guess “shitto” is envy in Japanese. Numazu. Right. I was Yuma. I rubbed my eyes and concentrated on focusing.

  Emiko. Ah shit. It was my sister. I spoke to her in Japanese.

  “Hey, big sis. Guess you found me, hide and seek! At…2 in the morning,” I said sheepishly, obviously knowing she wouldn’t believe me.

  “It’s 4 in the morning, you moron! Yuma, you’re an idiot! Idiot, idiot, idiot! Do you know how worried I was? I heard the door shut and thought we had a vandal, but when I checked, no one was there, so I thought, maybe just a wayward yokai, I took out my mirror, but no, and I checked on your room, and you were gone! Mom and dad are out looking for you too!”

  “Oh fuck, you told them too?” I said the oh fuck in English.

  “Yes, and they’re really mad. Come on! Get up! What are you doing at the shrine?”

  “I…I don’t know,” I lied.

  “Well come on! Let’s go!”

  I went to counter her pulling me up by one arm with my other hand to press off up from the ground, but my fist was clenched around something. She pulled me up and looked at me, and then at my hand.

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  I opened my fist.

  I held in my hand a bone. It looked like a finger bone.

  “Where did you get that?” I wasn’t sure how to answer. It must have been the thing that skittered through the torii. I must have grabbed it.

  I stared at it.

  Familiar.

  The weight in my chest. The call. Not a sound, not an emotion. A resonance in my chest. A memory.

  The road. Casablanca. 42 years from now, Gerald Reyes, an immigrant’s son from South Boston will die. He’ll be between two worlds, where the mysteries of death, the noosphere, and echoes will culminate in his obliteration. A road will groan and stretch, like a titan of old, it’ll cast off the dawn, the sunset, and the night and disappear into the void of belief, recollection, and forget, taking with it anyone who was foolish enough to be curious. Gerald Reyes will watch as he waits, foolishly, at the border to nothing, as every particle of his being slowly subsumes into the dark, while a road that wasn’t a road but was a road, shakes off the mortal world. He’ll watch as the darkness consumes a finger, then his hand, then up his arm, and his chest, and as it will crawl along his face and his vision will go black, he will know the infinitesimal cry of his soul in the cacophony of the dead. And then…

  Nothing. Until light. Until warmth. Until memory latching on to a breath first taken, the cold air stinging against fluid filled lungs, and swaddle, and arms, ears filled with noises both familiar and foreign. A pair of friendly smiles. A second chance.

  “It’s mine,” I finally said to Emiko.

  I tucked it away, a relic of a future-past life, the first thing taken by the road. The bone of what used to be a finger. I took my sister’s hand and let her lead me home. Back to my parents, back to my life. Back to another chance.

  As we walked, I muttered to myself as I looked from street to street and my sister stopped me.

  “What did you say?”

  “Nova Road.”

  She looked at me confused, but we kept on walking.

  “It’s never where it should be.”