It was the summer of my second year in university. I had been taken by my master in the occult arts to a certain shrine. It was located deep in the mountains in K City, to the west. As we slowly drove up the mountain road in Master’s little kei car, a stone wall came into view. He parked on a wide patch by the road, and we stepped onto the shrine grounds. We advanced, trampling through weeds, until the beam of Master’s flashlight illuminated the guardian dogs. It was covered in moss, and its partner was missing. The main body had vanished from the left pedestal as you faced it. Just then, a raindrop hit my cheek. No sooner had I thought that than the rain began to fall in earnest. Master and I hurried into the shrine's main hall. The door was closed, but there was a porch where we could take shelter from the rain.
"Do you have an umbrella?" "There's only one in the car."
I looked around. Right in front of us were the stone steps, the guardian dog, and the mountain road beyond them. All around, the inky dark of the brush obscured our view. Behind the grounds lay a pitch-black mountain. Suddenly, the flashlight went out. Complete darkness enveloped us.
"Is the battery dead?" I asked, feeling a bit panicked. "No," came the single reply.
*Pitter-patter, pitter-patter...* The sound of rain beating against the shrine eaves grew steadily louder.
"Let's wait a bit," Master said quietly.
This was a place Master had once been taught about by his own master. Naturally, it had to be a shrine with some sort of history. Knowing nothing, I stared straight ahead, a mixture of anxiety, fear, and a tiny spark of anticipation swelling in my chest, looking into the deep, multi-layered darkness of the rainy night mountain.
"Shall we chat or something?" Master brought it up in a casual tone. However, I could only vaguely make out his dark outline. "About what?" I replied to that dark shape. "Well, since we're at a shrine, how about a ghost story related to an exorcism? Do you know any?" "An exorcism..."
I thought for a moment before saying, "I do." I was pretty sure I had never told Master this one before. Having had a fair amount of spiritual sensitivity since childhood, I had a rich repertoire of such stories. But in the time I'd spent with Master, I had almost no stories left that I hadn't shared. *I've still got a good one left,* I thought, carefully recalling the events of five years ago as I began to speak.
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It happened when I was in the third year of junior high. During summer vacation, some close friends and I decided to go camping in the mountains. Five guys in all. After getting off the train and walking a few kilometers, we arrived at a deserted campsite that, despite being peak season, had only a few other groups besides us. We pitched our tents in the daytime, played in a nearby river, and by evening, we made curry with ingredients we had bought in advance. One guy who claimed to have been in the Boy Scouts confidently took charge of cooking rice in a camp kettle, which ended up failing spectacularly—it looked more like curry-flavored risotto than actual curry—but we still enjoyed our dinner together as a group. As the night grew late, we slipped away from the campsite as planned. We were heading to a spot for a test of courage we had researched beforehand.
The destination was a small shrine hall deep in the nearby mountain. The legend went that the spirit of a traveler who had perished there in the mountains was still wandering about the place. We had scouted it out once during the day: it was an old, rotting hall not even as tall as a man. There was probably hardly anyone looking after it. There was a cylinder-like stand for offering flowers nearby, but the water had dried up, and there were no flowers to be seen. We lined up five fist-sized stones, picked up from the river, in front of the hall. According to a story I heard from a senior at school, the spirit haunting this hall would possess one of the stones and follow the person who carried it back.
The mountain road we had walked in the daytime felt completely different at night. Lighting our footing with the flashlights we each held, we reached our destination. It was an Inari shrine located about a five-minute walk down from where the hall stood. This, too, was a lonely little shrine with only a modest *torii* gate and a hall of worship. We exchanged anxious looks, waiting for someone to open their mouth. What's camping without a test of courage? Though we had started with that lighthearted attitude, the warnings from the upperclassmen—that *that place* was seriously haunted—came rushing back to me now.
"Alright, let's get this over with quickly," Miyamoto, the one who had suggested it in the first place, said, clapping his hands together to finally break the ice. Miyamoto took a flashlight, stepped outside the *torii* gate, and started climbing the mountain road extending to the left. Up ahead was the hall where we had placed the stones during the day. The four of us left behind watched him go. The stones had to be brought back one by one. I checked my watch. Five minutes, ten minutes. Miyamoto still hadn't returned. Walking a mountain road at night bound to take time. We waited in silence. After about fifteen minutes, the light of a flashlight finally drew close. I heard a voice.
"Are you cold? Just a little longer now. It's going to be okay. We've got food too."
It was Miyamoto's voice. He sounded like he was talking to something, but there was only one shadow. That was the rule, too. When luring the hall's spirit into a stone and bringing it down to the shrine, you had to keep talking to it the whole way. If you didn't, the spirit would slip out of the stone halfway. Trick the spirit into coming along, no matter what. That was the whole point of this test of courage. Miyamoto walked cautiously through the *torii* gate. The moment his body was fully inside the grounds, he shouted, "Whoa!" and threw the stone to the ground. "That was creepy. That was so creepy," he repeated over and over, shaking my shoulder. "Hey, hey," I said, swatting his hand away, and Miyamoto, perhaps out of relief, spoke with an unnaturally high-pitched tension. "Something really got in. Seriously. Inside the stone. That thing is dangerous. Dangerous."
Hearing that, we stared down at the stone rolling on the ground with expressions of disgust. According to the rules we'd been told beforehand, crossing the *torii* gate meant success, and the spirit would detach from the stone. By that time, the person was already inside the shrine grounds, so they were safe. And the spirit, having nothing to attach to, would return to the hall. That was how the script went. We looked at each other's faces. "Who's next?" At those words, I raised my hand first. Everyone looked reluctant, and it seemed like we'd end up having to play rock-paper-scissors. But I figured I ought to go ahead of the others. "Well, we should decide the rest of the order too, I guess," the others seemed to realize as they spoke. They stared at me with stiff faces. "Alright, I'm going."
I took a flashlight and stepped outside the *torii* gate. I immediately hit the mountain road and turned left. The atmosphere was completely different from when I'd walked it during the day. Every time the pile of weeds by the side of the road rustled—*rustle, rustle*—I instinctively shined my flashlight toward it. Was it the wind, or an animal of some sort? The road was a slight slope upward. Walking with my heart pounding, the shape of the small hall, lower than my height, appeared in the beam of my flashlight. The hall had a stone pedestal, and resting on a protruding part in front were four fist-sized stones. I let out a small breath and chanted the words I had been told beforehand. "Follow me. Please follow me."
That was it. Because it wasn't a clever phrasing, it felt inescapable, which made it deeply unsettling. A chill ran down my spine. I gently picked up the stone on the far right. "Ride on this stone and follow me."
I repeated those words twice, and suddenly the stone felt heavy. *I have to hurry.* Thinking that, I immediately turned back the way I'd come. For some reason, I felt a chill. I couldn't afford to have whatever was inside the stone leave me now. I felt that strongly. Miyamoto, the first wave, had called it here, but the moment he crossed the *torii* gate, he had cast it aside. He had tricked it. I felt as though that grudge was making the stone even heavier. "You must have been cold. You must have been lonely. Please, follow me." I spoke out loud. *What if it gets out of the stone...?* Just thinking about it made me intensely scared. Taking a test of courage like this so seriously... I felt no embarrassment about it whatsoever. I was just desperate. Perhaps because I was so focused, my field of vision had narrowed. Only the narrow gravel path illuminated by the flashlight existed before my eyes. Beyond that was an empty void. "It's almost time. We'll be somewhere warm soon." As I said that, I passed through the old *torii* gate that had materialized out of the dark.
*Ooh,* voices rose around me. I dropped the stone in my hand. Around me were the faces of my friends. *We made it.* Letting out a sigh of relief, I rubbed my empty palms together. It had been there. Up until just now, something had definitely been inside that stone. It felt as though it was still clinging to my hands, and I rubbed them frantically.
After me was a guy named Numagawa. Numagawa set off looking terrified, but he too returned after about fifteen minutes. "Are you hungry? Are you okay? We'll be there soon." Numagawa, too, was desperately talking to the stone in his hand. Then, the moment he crossed the *torii* gate, he yelled, "Whoa!" and dropped the stone. "It was heavy, so heavy." "Right? Right?" Miyamoto immediately patted him on the shoulder. I couldn't bear to look, imagining that the spirit, unable to cross the *torii* gate, was floating in the air as a murky, shapeless mass.
Next was Izawa, the class clown. He left the shrine with an unusually solemn expression and returned in less than ten minutes. It was the fastest yet. "Must have been tough. We'll be where everyone is soon. Stay a bit longer, won't you? Are you cold?" Saying things like that, he jogged back. Then, practically sprinting at the end, he crossed the *torii* gate. Izawa immediately threw the stone outside the *torii* gate and kept repeating, "That's bad, that's bad." "There was *something* in there. Definitely. Inside my hand, it was all murky like this..." He threatened the last remaining member with exaggerated gestures. Otsuki, who was left last, was trembling with a disgusted look on his face. The guys who were already done had it easy. I joined in and threatened Otsuki too, saying the last guy always got the worst of it. Eventually, Otsuki started digging in his heels and saying, "I'm not going," so we coaxed and wheedled him until we finally sent him off.
Waiting twenty minutes in the dark shrine grounds. He was taking so long that we started to get a little worried and discussed going to check on him, when at last the flicker of a flashlight came into view. We heard a voice. "Forgive me. Please forgive me." He kept repeating it over and over. Something was wrong. He seemed to be holding the stone. But he was extending his clenched right hand as far away from his body as possible, holding it stiffly out. As he approached the shrine, Otsuki broke into a jog and rushed into the *torii* gate, crying, "Hyaaaa!" The moment he crossed the gate, he hurled the stone toward the weeds by the mountain path. *Ah,* I thought, but there was no time to stop him. "Hey, hey, what do you think you're doing?" Miyamoto, the mastermind, tried to question him, but Otsuki was shaking so violently that he was in no state to answer. "Did something happen?" I asked, but he just shook his head and said, "Nothing."
Just then, a creepy sound echoed from the sky: *boooom*. A dull sound, like a giant balloon inflating and being struck. It was a sound that made you instinctively feel that this place wasn't safe anymore. Who started running first? Anyway, spurred by that, all of us took off. We ran all the way up the night mountain path back to the campsite, and the whole time, I had the sensation that the darkness was clinging to us. When we finally reached the tents, we had fallen over a few times, our clothes were caked in mud, and we were in a terrible state. We spent that night huddled together inside the tent, terrified even by the sound of the wind, until morning.
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"And after that, I asked our upperclassman about it. Apparently, someone else had done a test of courage there before and gone crazy, so they had to get an exorcism," I told the presence in the dark that seemed to be Master. The presence gave a vague nod and said, "Huh." "So we talked about how maybe we should do one too, and through Miyamoto's dad's connections or something, we had a priest from a pretty big shrine perform an exorcism on us." "All of you?" "All of us. But..." "But?"
I swallowed hard before continuing. "Right after that, one of us got seriously injured—he broke a bone in his leg." "Oh?" "Yeah, I thought, *We really were cursed after all,* and I was so scared. I resented that senior for teaching us about a place like that."
The sound of the rain grew heavier, turning into a roar. Master muttered something. "Huh? What was that?" When I leaned in closer, the shape of Master turned toward me. "Shall I guess who got hurt?" "Huh?" Would Master be able to tell from this story? Taking a provocative attitude, I said, "Go ahead and guess." Master let out a displeased-sounding snort, then said, "What was his name again? That guy, him." *He'll probably guess wrong,* I thought. However... "Izawa, was it?" "Not the last guy, Otsuki?" I asked for confirmation in surprise, but Master replied through the rain, "The second-to-last guy."
A chill went straight down my spine. He was right. But why? Alongside my confusion, I was struck by an inexplicable, creepy sensation. "The story was that the spirit of a traveler who perished in the mountains was wandering around the hall, right?" "Yes." "That was all the information you had on the spirit, wasn't it?" "Yeah." "While you were luring it to the shrine by making it possess a stone, the things you were saying to it were pretty much all the same, weren't they?" "Well, I suppose so." "Cold, lonely, hungry. Among those three keywords you spoke to the spirit, one of them doesn't fit." "Huh?" I didn't get it. "Given the image of someone perishing out in the open, 'lonely' and 'hungry' make sense. But where did 'cold' come from?"
It hit me. Come to think of it, he was right. "It was a summer campsite. Why would such a cold image pop up? You guys were talking to the stones as if you'd coordinated beforehand, speaking to one specific personality. Why was that?"
I felt as though that sensation of the stone growing heavy in my hand was reviving. I instinctively shook my palm, as if trying to shake something off. "B-but the guy whose behavior was weird was the last one, Otsuki," I stammered. "Right. He was probably a coward to begin with. You guys scared him too much." "...Why Izawa, then?" "Otsuki kept shouting over and over, *Please forgive me,* right?" "Yes." "Those three keywords didn't pop up for Otsuki. Which means he wasn't there. Inside the stone he was holding."
Master's words made me shudder. "It wasn't residing in it. Inside the stone Otsuki carried. It had already failed the time before that—with Izawa. Even after crossing the *torii* gate, it hadn't returned. That's why it stayed attached to Izawa all this time. Besides, you can imagine just from the fact that even though a shrine was right nearby, a spirit with a legend like that wasn't enshrined anywhere. Originally, it was a spirit that the shrine's power couldn't quite reach. That much is clear from the fact that even the exorcism didn't work."
It was a ghost story I had brought up, but instead of being scared, Master had succeeded in terrifying *me*. *If I looked now, could I see it?* The form of that spirit, clinging to Izawa. I instinctively looked around. Splattering raindrops grazed my face. Beyond them, fine sounds and the darkness lay flat and motionless.
"Well, now it's my turn. Since we're on the subject, let's talk about an exorcism." After a brief silence, Master let out a sigh and began to speak.
*Continues to Exorcism - Part 2, "The Fire Cistern"*
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