…This is a story I heard from someone. I cannot vouch for its truth. Only that such a story exists, and has been passed down.
It concerns Sannomiya, in Kobe — Higashimon Street, to be precise.
You may know the street. After dark, the lights run on and on in a long glittering chain, and the voices and laughter of people never quite fade away. A lively place. But they say that lively places are precisely where other things find it easy to take up residence — hidden within all that noise.
According to what I was told, long ago there was a racetrack somewhere in that district. Horses ran, crowds gathered, fortunes rose and fell on the outcome. The longing of people who staked something and lost it — that, they say, seeps into the ground and stays there. Whether that has any bearing on what followed, I honestly cannot say.
But this is the story that has been passed down.
It happened a few years ago, or so I understand. A man who had business in Sannomiya found himself spending a night at a hotel on Higashimon Street. He had booked the room without looking into it particularly — third floor, or perhaps the fourth, I cannot be certain of that detail.
He checked in sometime after ten in the evening. Tired from work, he went to bed almost immediately. He turned off all the lights, drew the curtains. The noise of Higashimon Street reached him only as a muffled murmur through the walls, and the room itself was quiet, he said.
Whether he had already drifted off or was still lying in that shallow place between sleep and waking, he could not quite remember — but at some point, he became aware of a presence.
Something approaching from the corner of the room.
He opened his eyes, but of course there was only darkness. Yet within that darkness, he said, there seemed to be a darkness still deeper — a density to it, a weight. He wondered afterward if he had simply been half-asleep.
He was about to close his eyes again. That was when it happened.
…Someone took hold of his ankle. Through the blanket.
With a bare hand. He could feel each finger, distinctly, one by one — a firm, deliberate grip.
He could not make a sound, he said. He tried to cry out, but his throat had turned to stone, and only breath came. The sensation of those fingers was absolutely real. They were not cold. That was the thing — they were not cold at all. There was warmth there, he said. The warmth of a living hand, slowly wrapping itself around his ankle.
And that, he said, was what frightened him most.
If it had been cold, he might have told himself it was a ghost and resigned himself to it. But because it was warm, he never knew, not until the very end, what that hand was.
How long it lasted, he could not say. When he came back to himself, it was morning. The sensation was gone. There was nothing on his ankle, no mark of any kind. Only the hem of the blanket, at the foot of the bed, folded back neatly.
Whether it had been folded that way from the start, or whether someone had folded it during the night — that, he said, he never knew.
There are other stories from the same place, apparently. A television switching itself on and off without anyone touching it. The sound of water splashing in the bathroom when no one was there. A shape, roughly human, standing in the corner of the room. But such things are reported everywhere; there is nothing especially remarkable about them.
What is particular to the stories from Higashimon Street — what people consistently say, every one of them — is this.
…It was not cold.
What dwells there, I cannot tell you. Perhaps it is some remnant of the racetrack, some memory the ground has held onto. Perhaps it is the accumulated weight of all the longing that has passed through that place over the years. Perhaps it is something else entirely.
Only — if you happen to walk that street at night, you might do well to pay a little attention to your feet.
…Or so I have been told.
