I ran.

  I messed up, messed up really bad. I let myself dream waywardly and I somnambulated, like an idiot child. They teach you basic oneironology when you’re 4, and I just made the worst fucking mistake.

  I had no light, whatever was out here knew me, probably walked my head while I walked in my sleep, figured me out, and now it was messing with me. If I knew what it was or how it behaved, I could figure it out, catch it off guard. I just needed to leave, to run, to go where it wasn’t and hope it wasn’t omnipresent, hope that it was semicorporeal and liked the chase. I heard it, melodic and far, but not far enough for my liking, whistling a tune I came up with.

  That was my signal call. My whistle. I only use that call with other itako. I haven’t used it in 3 years. Since Aokigahara. I was the last call, the last one to whistle through the forest. Now whatever was after me, wherever the hell I was, it was whistling, distant, periodic calls through the trees. I had to be near Quantico, probably just off base. The fact that no one was here with me, no one saw me leave. My window? No, they seemed pretty firmly placed, I didn’t see a latch, so I couldn’t have gotten out like that. Was I transported? Can it do that? Maybe something I can do but haven’t realized? No time, think about it later, maybe there’s cameras on base watching. Just go. Later. Think about it later.

  The whistle pierced the cold, night air. My run wasn’t held back by much; the trees here weren’t dense and stood out in the moonlight. The level ground started declining and the tree density was getting thicker with narrower, smaller trees. The decline got steeper, and the ground became soft with leaves. I was leeward to a natural valley; wind blew down this way. The Potomac River was east then, I was facing west. I stopped on the hill, I thought about going back up, but then I saw the lights of a car heading southbound on a road I hadn’t noticed yet. I let the natural incline of the hill take my momentum and I slid/ran down the hill. I could cut it off and get in front of it, wave it down. The moonlight caught the road as I got closer and I let myself slide the rest of the way, hitting flatter ground and getting into the road. Thankfully this car had their high beams on, so they’d see me, and as I edged up on the road and held up my hands, the truck came to a stop. A wiry man, well into his 60’s, dressed in flannel and a trucker hat stuck his elbow out the window at me.

  “Can’t be out here, pal, woods ain’t safe.”

  “Yeah, I fucking know, can you drive me to Quantico?”

  “The base? Hell no, what this look like, a tank? This here’s a Chevy S10, they’d look at me funny if’n I took you to the gate. I’ll take you to town, pal. You can call the base from there.”

  “I don’t have a number to call.”

  “Pal, it’s the Commonwealth, if’n you want into Quantico and got reason to be, they’ll know where to route the call. Yer dirty. Get in the truck, Gon’ get you fed and cleaned up, figure out your way back to mama after that.”

  I got in the truck. I didn’t really have a choice, I’d rather this guy than whatever was on that hill. As I shut the door, I clipped the safety belt on, the clear pierce of a whistle, sharp and distinct, rang out in the cold night, shaking the trees, cutting through the truck engine’s hum. I froze, my head turning to the wiry man. He gave me a side eye, looked in his rear view mirror, adjusted it, and then looked me head on.

  “You haunted, pal?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Well, better we go then in case the trees get keen on us. Stare forward, don’t look to the sides.”

  “Where we going?”

  “Boswell, quaint little place. Protected from whatever’s ailing ya.” He looked back again in the mirror. I wanted to turn around but as I turned my head, he caught my eye and shook his head.

  “Eyes forward, pal. Best you do or this night will get too interesting.”

  I obliged. He drove intently, not too fast, nothing over 40 miles per hour, not a single street light in sight, just the splay of a two-lane road and trees at either side. This was oddly reminiscent of another road I’ve been on, and I wondered.

  “What’s this street we’re on?”

  “This? State Route 1, or the Richmond Highway. Parallels I-95 and ends in Richmond, hence the name, goes all the way north to DC if’n you go that way.”

  I took a light sigh. It’d have been an odd circumstance if it was the road. Its rarity was really only known to people who studied it, have seen it. It was a legend, generally speaking, kind of how we still aren’t sure if King Arthur was a real person. Still haven’t found his echo yet. I felt compelled to ask, just to be severely sure.

  “Have you ever heard of Nova Road?”

  “Can’t say I have, pal.”

  “This road kind of reminds me of it.”

  “This is an ‘everywhere’ kind of road, see its sort all over America, probably also Europe or Australia. If’n you was an amnesiac, I could put on a voice, tell you we was in Norway or some shit and you’d believe me.”

  “I guess you’re right.”

  There was a thud on the windshield. I was staring straight ahead, was paying as much attention as I could and didn’t see what we hit. The man slowed, and another thud hit the window. I kept an ear out for whistling or any indicative sounds behind us, even though I knew not to look beside or behind the truck. I kept staring forward.

  “I see you got a sword there, pal.”

  “Yessir.”

  “Wooden?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Know how to use it?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Well, ‘long as we ain’t bothering the locals, think you can stow it, just comforting to know you’re packing.”

  Another thud and I blinked, and then I could see.

  The high beams stretched out, cascading light up and out, a blanket of vision against old oaks and thinner birches, the road, unkempt with cracks and leaves as it disappeared out of view under the truck’s tires. The trees stretched over the road in a lethargic lean from either side, but the light had trouble with what was directly above us, as though we were below the surface of a black river.

  The thud we heard was feet.

  In the shadow of the upside down river, feet, bare feet, human, bare human feet, hundreds as far as I could see, hanged out of the darkness. Once in a while the top of the truck would brush up or hit the low dangling feet of someone hanging from the trees. I could only assume the feet were attached to something, to someone, legs possibly, weird to say, but hopefully attached to legs and a torso after that. I would hate for the river to part and see it was just severed feet.

  “Those aren’t real, like, physical, right?”

  “I wouldn’t be this calm if they wholly were. Nah, Virginia’s history is a bloody one. We’re just being reminded of it. At least it ain’t daylight out.”

  “Is it worse?”

  “In the day? Hell yes, you gotta look them in the face. Why do you think they built the Interstate?”

  The Hanged eventually began to reduce in number as our headlights caught sight of street lights ahead. The trees gave way and the two lane turned three as Richmond became an avenue. It must have been late enough; in the darkened valley of a hill, surrounded by trees, Boswell stood out to be a semi-modern village with nothing more than portable buildings and mobile homes, all lights off, dark to the closing of night, save for the orange glow of a street lamp every 500 or so feet. One thing that did stand out was the cars. Cars were parallel parked all along the main avenue, as though we were in a city, and there was at least ten used dealerships on either side, pocked among the spare pre-fab mobile units converted into a random cultured eatery or tax accountant, redolent with hundreds of cars. The curious thing was the era that these cars were from: every era. There was a Firebird from the 1980’s, a Karman Ghia from 1958, I didn’t even know they sold Citroen in this country, and there was one from the 1930’s, there was a DeLorean, Jeeps from World War II, a vintage Mini Cooper from the 60’s, it just kept going. It was a car museum.

  “Boswell’s known for its car sales, got whatever you want, all well loved and low mileage.”

  “Low mileage?”

  “Don’t know how the dealers do it, but it’s like these cars, at one point ‘er another, were dreams. Well loved dreams of a car that never made it to the person they were meant for. Ended up here.”

  “What do they usually go for?”

  “Depends on the dream, pal.”

  He pulled up to a glued-together hostel with a dollar-store Waffle House rip off attached to it, The Vroom Rooms Inn and Waffle Stop.

  “They got a phone in there, pal, they’ll help.”

  “Thank you for the save, mister…” I trailed off, never caught his name, never gave him mine.

  “You’re fine. Keep the sword close pal, never know.”

  I waved him off and headed in as he pulled away into the night.

  The dull, dim light wasn’t enough to penetrate the doldrum of this 1970’s decor of the lobby. Beatrice sat attendant at the desk among oranges and browns and yellows, a woman heavy set and in her 50’s who looked unmistakably as a Beatrice would, her nametag at a proud spot on her lapel. I could smell the ashtrays that were retired from here even 25 years on.

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  “You lost, soldier?” She had a look like this was usual. I played it overly familiar.

  “Quantico.”

  “Is seven miles that way,” she thumbed in a direction behind her. “They might be looking for you, but you’ll have to wait until morning. It’ll be easier for them.”

  “Can I use your phone?”

  “Sure, soldier, don’t think it’ll do you any good.” She handed me the old rotary.

  I pulled the receiver off and held it up to my ear.

  “Ten. Ten. Ten. Ten ten ten. Eight. Eight. Eight one ten. Five…” in a disjointed, robotic, static-riddled tone, I held the receiver away from my ear as it got louder.

  “Echoes in the line, best you wait for morning.” She said soberly. I replaced the receiver and pushed the phone back towards her.

  “There’s vending machines outside in the hall, only coffee and cigarettes. We don’t have a television, wouldn’t work anyway if we did. You’ve got…” she looked at a watch on her wrist, “...three hours until dawn? You can wait around here or get something at the Waffle Stop. Kevin’s there.”

  “I’ll…I’ll look around.”

  “Sure, soldier.” She gave me a wink. I came to the quick conclusion that anyone who unironically winks well has my best interests in mind.

  I went out. Three hours to kill. I went around to the outdoor “hall” she mentioned, more a breezeway than anything else, with a vintage cigarette machine, the kind that had the pull knobs, and a somewhat more modern coffee machine, the kind that boiled water piped into the back over burnt grounds they only changed out each week. I didn’t want burnt coffee, and I had smoked in my previous life, hadn’t started in this one.

  Three hours, I thought. I looked at the brands of smokes. Marlboro Reds, Camel Turks, and Lucky Strikes. 30 cents? Kept the prices from when this thing was new, couldn’t imagine these packs were fresh. Well, in my past life I got into smoking out of teenage boredom. I checked my pockets for change. A nickel and a quarter later, a pack of Turkish Blend Camels sat in my hand. I packed it down and realized I didn’t have a light. I went back in the lobby, but no Beatrice. There was a seating arrangement towards the front, an ashtray in the center of a coffee table with a book of matches in it. I swiped the matchbook and went back outside.

  I mused to myself that I hadn’t had a smoke in 24 years. Muscle memory never forgot how to pack tap a cigarette up to your mouth. When I realized what I did, I felt like a tool. I lit a match, the sulfurous burn briefly lighting up a logo of an anthropomorphized cartoon car with the bubbled lettering “Vroom Rooms Inn” underneath appeared before being swallowed the darkness and my intake of cancerous breath.

  These lungs were physically not used to the harshness of Camels, but I guess the memory was too strong; I didn’t cough, but the nicotine hit my blood-brain barrier immediately. Damn, can’t let this new body get used to this. I felt high instantly, and after a couple of drags, I flicked the half used cigarette. Break in case of emergency, I thought. I pocketed the matchbook and the smokes for a rainy day, and looked through the window at the diner.

  The Waffle Stop was semi-attached to the hotel, tungsten light filtering through yellowed glass, painting a scene of Americana that was both annoyingly Nighthawkes-esque and sad reminder that diners have always been the destitute man’s bastion of hungering carnality. No, Kevin, as Beatrice had named him, wasn’t sexy, it was the idea that sitting at a bartop diner, being served burnt eggs and bacon with burnt coffee, waiting for the sun to come up plays to the nightcrawler journalist in me like a bad pulp fiction, that notion, that was sexy. Less than three hours. I went in.

  Music played on an overhead, some crooner delight, Frank, Sammy, Dean, couldn’t tell who, and Kevin was wiping down glassware as I sat at the bartop.

  “Oh good, you came,” I heard Beatrice say. I reeled around to see her sitting, smoking at one of the booths. “Want to come and sit, soldier?”

  “Sure,” I sat down and Kevin, a black man in his 40’s, limber, greying slightly, paper hat and apron, came over and handed me a menu.

  “What’ll you have?” he asked.

  “Toast, two eggs, rasher of bacon, thanks,” I said, not looking at the menu, just at Kevin. He nodded, walked back to the kitchen, but left the menu.

  “What’s your name, soldier?”

  “Ono.”

  “Ono, okay. You seem like a sweet boy. How’d you by this way, soldier boy?”

  “I got lost.”

  “Lost, huh?”

  “Slept wrong.”

  She nodded knowingly at this.

  “I took a matchbook from the lobby, hope you don’t mind,” I said.

  “You can thank me for the light later, when you need to use it,” she said, “We’ll mind you, sweetie, just until morning though. Then you’ll head back to the Base on your own.”

  I gave her a confused look. My eyes wandered down to the menu.

  The menu items: Don’t look outside. Don’t wander into the trees. It’s waiting for you. It knows you. Ono Yumatori, you’re in danger. Keep your sword close.

  My eyes shot up to Beatrice. She, unbothered, pointed her index and middle finger to her eyes and said calmly, “Eyes here, sugar.”

  I did not break eye contact. In the corner of my eye, just to the right, something pale, visceral, and derelict pawed at the window silently.

  “Beatrice,” I started.

  “Shut the fuck up Ono, if you know what’s good for you, just talk to me. Talk to me, honey, like you would anybody else. Don’t pay it no mind, don’t look at it. Just here. Look at me.”

  “What is it?”

  “The dead that hide behind the wood.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I think you do, sugar.” She looked away from me and down my person, eyeing the sword. “You’ve hunted. It can smell that, and it don’t like that one bit. The Forests of Quantico were made from bones. If you slept wrong into this place, you’re best kept by good company who’ll mind you.”

  It began to whistle. It whistled an unearthly resonance through the glass, the flattened tonality of my sing-songy warble that I created to signal I was there, alive, and well called out through a single pane of yellow glass, slow and low, eventually trailing off before whatever it was, crawled up the window and onto the roof. I wanted to look to make sure it had left but the slight micromovement of my chin wanting to turn caused Beatrice to violently shake her head no at me.

  “You’re better than that, c’mon now.”

  I shut my eyes and took a deep breath and opened them, focusing just on Beatrice.

  Kevin came to our table, Beatrice scooted over and he sat down, sliding a plate of my order to me and some utensils.

  “Thanks.”

  “You can look down at it. Just don’t look out the windows,” Kevin said.

  The eggs were done sunny side up next to each other, toast beneath them with the bacon on top of the toast, making a face. I appreciated the gesture.

  “Eat, Ono, it’ll keep you safe,” Beatrice ordered.

  I listened and I ate. The food wasn’t bad, in fact, it was great. As I ate she lit a cigarette and looked out the windows. Kevin got comfortable and leaned back.

  “We’ll pass the time with you. I’m sorry you’re here,” Kevin said, seeming genuine in his remorse for my presence.

  “Does this happen often?” I asked.

  “Not often, but it has been a while since Jacob has caught a live one and brought them here,” she replied.

  “Jacob’s the guy with the truck?”

  “Yeah, he drives around at night. Patrolling. A kind enough gesture.”

  I ate in silence with the sound of my whistle cutting through the night occasionally. At times close, at times nearby, the sound of embers burning from a cigarette, Kevin and Beatrice sitting vigil with me in a yellow booth in an old diner at the edge of the echoing woods. An echo against an echo.

  “This’ll all be gone in the morning? As will you and Kevin?”

  “Afraid so, sugar.”

  “Why help me?”

  “We don’t ask for much, Ono. Just that on occasions, when the nights are long and no one dares to be awake, that someone, anyone just gives us the acknowledgement that we were here once.”

  “And that I cooked good,” Kevin added.

  “This is absolutely delicious, Kevin, thank you,” I said enthusiastically. I finished the meal.

  “Much obliged, Ono, was it? On the House! Come by and see us anytime!” He got up and took the plate back.

  When Kevin returned, I asked them how they died. Beatrice was a war widow. Her husband trained at Quantico before the IERF came, when it was still part of the Marines. He didn’t come back from Korea, and one day, working at the hotel, alone, in the dead of night, she keeled over at the desk. Pulmonary embolism. Kevin was in a car accident not too far away, on his way back home after a shift at the diner. They told me Jacob used to be a car dealer himself but died old and alone in town due to an aortic aneurysm. He drove a different car every night, said he liked that he could drive any car he wanted now. They asked me about me, and I told them about being from Japan and being conscripted by the IERF. I figured I could ask since I’ve never tried asking an echo before.

  “What if I told you I died, what would you say?”

  They looked at each other. Then to me.

  “Like, actually died?” Beatrice asked.

  “Like, I think I’m reincarnated.”

  Kevin looked up, as though to reflect on it. Beatrice looked at me heavily, dragged from her cigarette, and blew the smoke sideways.

  “I’d say you’re lucky, but then again, what does that make us?” she asked, more than likely rhetorically.

  “Chopped liver, god damned noosphere,” Kevin scoffed.

  I looked down at my hands.

  “Either of you ever heard of Nova Road?”

  I looked up at them. No notable reactions from either of them.

  “Guess not.”

  We sat in an awkward silence for a bit before Kevin spoke up.

  “Well, even if you’re flesh and bone, if you did die, makes you one of us, I say.”

  Kevin got up and walked back to the kitchen.

  “If you did die, you must have been brought back for a reason. Any idea on that?” Beatrice asked between puffs.

  “Figuring it out, I guess.”

  “When you do, let me know. I guess Kevin, Jacob, and I are doomed to save people like you on nights like this. When the woods are hungry.”

  “I am honestly in you’re debt, Beatrice.”

  “Call me Trixy, if you please. Or baby, I like that. My late husband used to call me that.”

  In my head we were about the same age, in our 50’s, and though I wanted to, I only replied back, “Trixy,” and she smiled at it.

  Kevin returned with apple pie a la mode, three plates, and we talked and ate.

  As morning began to crease the night away, I watched the diner flicker around me like a bad motion picture reel skipping. The smoke from Trixy’s cigarette began to fade in scent and Kevin at the kitchen bar, polishing glasses from 40 years ago came in and out of existence in the morning sunlight. I was about to turn my head east to catch the sun before a hand caught my chin. Trixy’s hand.

  “Sweetie, don’t look that way. Ain’t time yet. Still ain’t safe. Watch us fade, then you’ll be good.”

  I listened. I watched the living memory of a somber woman, smoking her cares away as her eyes betrayed the calm she exuded, a sadness of a lost soldier, eyes clinging to a notion of love lost to war, began to dissipate like a shadow. I glanced at Kevin, a skilled cook who had the unlucky chance of heading home one night, turned to me with a smile, then turned away, and was gone. I watched the diner fade from its yellow tinted shell into an abandoned, dirty, husk, windows shattered, dirt and nature crawling in as time reclaimed the land, the hotel dilapidated and unkept, and I hoisted myself out of the booth which had turn green with moss and algae. I stepped out of the old building, no door to speak of, and looked out into a town of empty lots and an empty street, not a car in sight.

  I walked out into the sun, birds chirping in the distance. As true life returned to the town, I could hear, like a faint cry, my song, my whistle, fading into the retreating shadows of the trees.

  I took out the matchbook from my pocket, the cartoon car looking back at me from it.

  “Thank you for the light,” I said to no one in particular. I walked towards the sun, down the road, east.