……Would you care to hear it?
This is not something I witnessed myself. It is a story that has drifted to me, again and again, from the lips of those who come to this shrine. There is no way to verify it, and yet — it returns each time wearing precisely the same shape. And so I thought I ought to pass it along, quietly, to you.
The Astram Line, which runs through the city of Hiroshima. Those white cars gliding smoothly along the elevated tracks.
It was during the construction, or so I have been told. Before the rails or the stations had taken their final form. One day, while workers were up on the elevated structure — a girder fell.
What must the sound have been like. Iron and concrete and human voices, all folding into one another in an instant. Someone who was there spoke of it afterward, and said that it was not the moment of the fall that frightened them most — it was the silence that came after. As though something had been erased from the world. As though the very air had ceased to exist.
And the number of workers who perished, they say, was fourteen.
Had it ended there, it would have been mourned as a tragic accident and nothing more. But the story, I am told, does not end there.
The accident occurred on the fourteenth day of a certain month. And the location was said to be directly beside the fourteenth station, counting from the first.
……A coincidence, perhaps. And yet — fourteen, fourteen, fourteen, the same number gathering upon itself. Does that not stir something uneasy in you?
But there is more.
During construction, a cemetery that stood in that area had to be relocated. The land had to be cleared, and there was no other way. And the number of souls resting in that cemetery — yes. Fourteen.
That alone ought to be enough to chill the chest. And yet what I find most quietly terrifying is what comes after.
The ages at which those fourteen souls in the relocated graves had died — they matched, without a single discrepancy, the ages of the fourteen workers killed in the accident.
……The first, twenty-three years old. The second, thirty-one. The third……
When laid out one beside the other, fourteen numbers, fourteen lives, facing each other like a reflection in a mirror.
Someone who had heard this story boarded the Astram Line one night. There was no particular reason — they simply found themselves alone in a nearly empty car on the last train of the evening. Outside the windows was the nighttime city, and the lights of Hiroshima spread out below the elevated tracks, and it was, they said afterward, a rather beautiful sight.
As the train passed one station, then another, the story drifted back into their mind. It was just after leaving the thirteenth station, counting from the first.
The next would be the fourteenth.
There was no one else in the car. And yet, somewhere in the dark stretch of elevated track between stations, something touched their shoulder from behind — suddenly, without warning.
It was not a human hand. It was something with no weight to speak of, and yet strangely, faintly warm — as though it had been set there, gently.
When they turned around, there was no one.
But when this person spoke to me, it was not the sensation they dwelt upon. It was something else. They lowered their voice slightly, and told me about what they had noticed in that moment — a smell that hung in the air of the car.
Incense, they said.
Not fresh incense — but old incense. The kind that has gone damp from long neglect, from having gone untended by anyone for a very long time.
……That person is still alive and well. Only, I understand they have not ridden the Astram Line since.
What the number fourteen signifies, I cannot say. This shrine holds no answer to that. I only find myself wondering, just a little, whether those fourteen souls in the relocated graves still wish to return somewhere.
Tonight, too, in one of those white cars running along the elevated tracks, something may be touching someone's shoulder.
And whatever that weight is — it is surely counting, in silence, the number fourteen.
