This is something I heard directly from someone — how much of it is true, I honestly couldn't say. But when I looked at their face as they told it, I couldn't bring myself to think it was made up.
Are you familiar with Tenjin Central Park? It's right in the heart of Fukuoka — smack in the middle of that lively Tenjin district. During the day, people sit on the benches, children run around. A perfectly ordinary, bright sort of place.
But what that ground used to be… apparently, it was an execution site for the Fukuoka domain. Where condemned men were cut down. Where heads were taken. Beneath that stretch of lawn, that history is real and certain. Perhaps many of you already knew.
In any case, the story I heard takes place around last autumn.
Let's call the person K. K had finished work late one night and missed the last train. He was walking along a road just off the Tenjin shopping district, looking to hail a taxi. It was well past one in the morning.
As he came alongside the road that runs by the park, he found himself drawn to look inside. There were only a few scattered streetlamps; beyond them, darkness. No benches visible. No sign of anyone, naturally.
And then he heard it.
A sound. Voices.
A murmuring — low, indistinct.
At first he thought it was the wind. But that night, despite the season, there was no wind at all. Not a single leaf was moving. And yet something like voices was there. Not one or two — a great many of them, low and muffled, coming from somewhere deep within the park.
He couldn't make out any words. Only the presence of it — the sense that a crowd of people were speaking.
K stopped and looked into the park over the railing.
No one there.
Of course not — it was the middle of the night. But the sound continued. He followed it with his eyes, and in the far end of the park, beyond where the streetlamps reached, he could make out several dark trees standing in the blackness. The voices seemed to be rising from somewhere near their roots.
He thought he'd walk around to the entrance for a closer look.
And then.
Something touched his ankle.
He was standing outside the railing, and yet — on the inside of his ankle, there was a sensation like fingers. Something thin and ice-cold, coiling around the bone.
K looked down instinctively.
Nothing there.
But the sensation remained. The cold of it, seeping into the very joint of his ankle, lingering.
At that moment, the voices stopped.
The park fell into a silence different from before. Not the absence of sound — more like sound being swallowed. A strange, airless quiet. K ran, he told me. Without looking back.
When he told me the story afterwards, he said this:
"That feeling on my ankle — if those were fingers… I don't think there was only one hand."
He hadn't counted, he said. It was just a feeling — that several thin fingers had been wrapped around him, tangled together.
Tenjin Central Park. Every time I sit on one of those benches in the daylight, I still think of that story.
That somewhere just beneath where I'm sitting, not very deep at all, something is there.
