…This is a story I heard from someone who lives in Beppu. I thought about trying to verify it — but honestly, I couldn't bring myself to go and look. That's the kind of story it is.
There's a residential development on a hill in Beppu City. It's called Lumière Hill. Quite a refined name, isn't it. I'm told it means something like "Hill of Light" in French. But the gap between that name and what happens there… well, just listen.
The area is said to have once been the site of the Battle of Ishigakibara — a major engagement that took place in Kyushu at roughly the same time as the Battle of Sekigahara, on land where a considerable number of men lost their lives. Now it's been neatly graded and developed into a tidy neighborhood. But the memory of a place doesn't vanish so easily, I've come to think, ever since I heard this story.
A woman lived in that development until a few years ago. I can't give her name, but I understand she was in her thirties. She'd moved there because of her husband's job transfer, with a young child still small, and she came knowing nothing at all.
She noticed on the very first night.
Around two in the morning, the child's crying woke her. She was soothing the baby when she happened to glance out the window — and there, at the edge of the road where the streetlights didn't reach, something was standing in the dark. At first she took it for a person. It would be strange for someone to be standing there in the middle of the night, but she wanted it to be a person. Yet as her eyes adjusted, it appeared to be wearing a helmet. The shoulders were strangely angular, shaped like the pauldrons of armor. The figure was indistinct and yet its outline was oddly sharp. She couldn't make a sound. She simply stood there holding the child, watching. After a while it moved slowly, smoothly, away into the darkness beyond the reach of the streetlamp, and was gone.
When she told her husband the next morning, he laughed. You were half asleep, he said. She tried to leave it at that — but the following week, she heard something again. This time it was a sound. Around three in the morning: a rhythmic knock, knock against the asphalt. Regular, but not light. A sound with weight behind it. She said it resembled the sound of hooves, the way a horse walks. But there are no horses in that neighborhood. The sound moved slowly through the development, grew distant, and faded.
Frightened, the woman mentioned it to a neighbor. The neighbor's face showed no surprise at all. "Oh yes, you hear it, don't you," she said — as though it were the most ordinary thing in the world. "We were startled at first too, but you get used to it." The word used to it, she said, was somehow more frightening than anything else.
After that there were other things. She approached what looked like a small dog walking along the edge of the road, and it simply vanished. At dusk she saw a child playing in the shade of a tree and thought it must be hers, only to find her child inside the house. These were daytime occurrences, mind you. Not the middle of the night. In that ambiguous half-light of late afternoon, they were visible.
But the thing that frightened her most, I was told, was something else entirely.
One morning, after her husband had left for work, she was washing dishes and glancing out the kitchen window when she saw a man's face in the window of the house across the street. A heavyset, middle-aged face, looking out at her from inside. The house across the way was occupied by a couple who both worked, and there should have been no one home during the day. She couldn't move for a long moment. The man stared steadily back at her. She couldn't read his expression — whether it was anger or grief, she couldn't tell. Only his mouth, she said, was slightly open.
As though he were trying to say something. Or as though he were releasing some sound that would never become words.
The woman moved away before the year was out. I understand she was never quite able to explain her reasons to her husband.
The Hill of Light, it's called. But what has accumulated in that place is something utterly removed from light, said the person who told me this story.
…Someone is living there still, even now.
