Hey — are you listening?
This is about Mount Kurama. They say it's still happening, quietly, deep in the mountains north of Kyoto. I can't be certain of any of it, but… I needed to tell someone.
A friend of a friend went there last autumn. Alone. She set out past noon on a weekday, thinking she'd be back before dark — no cable car, just walking up on her own.
The path starts out ordinary enough, but the further in you go, the more the air seems to change color, she said. The quality of the light shifts. The trees are tall and dense, dim even at midday, and a cold, damp wind keeps finding the back of your neck, following you the whole way up.
She eventually reached the place just before Soujougadani — the root path. You know it? Where the cedar roots have all pushed up through the ground, writhing like something underneath is trying to force its way out. There's an explanation, something about the rock being too hard for the roots to sink into, but… standing there in person, she said, the explanation doesn't quite reach. The roots are black and slick, and when you step on them they give in a way that feels wrong. Cold, but somehow alive.
She crouched down to rest for a moment.
And then she noticed.
It was too quiet.
There's always some kind of sound in the mountains, isn't there — birds, wind, the rustle of leaves. But in that instant, everything stopped. As if the mountain had drawn a breath and held it.
She looked up, and there, among the trees a little way ahead, someone was standing.
A boy. Around ten years old, dressed in a kimono.
Her first thought was cosplay, or a film shoot — it was the middle of the day, after all. But then the boy tilted his head and fixed his eyes on her, and just as she was about to call out to him, she looked down at his feet.
He was standing on the root path, and the roots were moving beneath him.
Slowly, slowly, they were curling toward him — wrapping themselves around his ankles, as if drawing close.
She said her voice left her. She tried to scream and nothing came out. Her feet were fixed to the roots as though she'd been nailed there. All she could do was hold his gaze and watch as he smiled — a faint, thin smile.
The smile was beautiful, she said. That was the worst part. A child's face, but ancient — as though it had been smiling for hundreds of years.
The next moment, the boy was gone. The roots lay still again. The sounds of the mountain returned, as if nothing had happened.
She ran back down the way she'd come, and it wasn't until she got home that she noticed.
A single thin scratch, circling her ankle. One clean ring.
She had no idea where it had come from.
Even now, people say they sometimes sense a child's presence deep in those mountains. You know the old story — a young boy brought to that mountain long ago, who would slip away alone in the night, deeper and deeper into the dark. To be taught by the tengu.
…Do you think he ever really left?
