Please, let me tell you something.
This is a story from Sendai. I can't say I've verified it myself — I heard it from an acquaintance who used to live out that way.
Yagiyama Bridge — does anyone know it? It spans a ravine on the western edge of Sendai, and apparently the drop is close to fifty metres. If you stand on the bridge and look down, the treetops are far, far below you. Some people say that when the wind picks up, you can feel the air being pushed up from the bottom of the gorge, and for just a moment your body feels like it's being pulled.
It seems many people have died on that bridge over the years. At some point the railing was raised — or so the story goes. One look at how high that railing is, and anyone can guess why.
But that's just the background. Here is the real story.
It was early autumn, last year. A young man attending university in Sendai was cycling across Yagiyama Bridge alone, past two in the morning. He was on his way to stay at a friend's place, or something like that — nothing particularly significant. He simply found himself crossing that bridge, by himself, in the middle of the night.
The bridge has streetlamps, but they're spaced far apart, and between each pool of light there are stretches of peculiar darkness. As he pedalled through those stretches, the wind rising from the gorge would catch the back of his neck, cold and sudden.
He was about halfway across when he noticed it.
There were hands on the fence.
At first he thought someone must be standing on the outside of the bridge. Hands gripping the fence from the inside, someone clinging to it — that would make a kind of sense. But it wasn't like that. The hands were hooked from the outside, fingers curled inward, as though something had clawed its way up from the bottom of the ravine.
And there wasn't just one.
Within the reach of a single streetlamp alone, he counted five, six — perhaps more. Pale, thin fingers, caught in the gaps of the fence, swaying. Whether they moved with the wind or moved on their own, he couldn't tell.
He stopped his bicycle and stared. He must have been terrified, and yet for some reason he couldn't make himself leave.
He stepped forward and drew close to one of the hands. And then, quietly, it was gone. Not dissolving, not vanishing — simply gone, as though it had never been there. The others, too, had disappeared before he'd even noticed.
Only him on the bridge. Only the sound of wind from the gorge below.
He was frightened now, and he pedalled hard until he reached the other side. The moment he crossed off the bridge, he felt his body go light. It's over, he thought.
Then, from behind him, a voice.
A whisper, right beside his ear.
"…Next time, it's you."
He turned. No one was there. No shadow on the bridge. Only the streetlamps, quietly lighting the empty span.
He went on to his friend's house and stayed the night, but come morning his head was splitting, and he spent three days in bed. No fever. The doctor found nothing wrong. Only when he closed his eyes, he said, he could see those pale fingers hooked into the fence.
He recovered after a while. But after that, he couldn't bring himself to go outside at night.
Someone asked him why the dark frightened him so. And this is what he said.
"Because the voice might not have made up its mind yet."
…The railing on that bridge, I'm told, is still just as high as it ever was.
