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There’s nothing wrong with living alone, really. After all, Nene has been living alone practically all her life with how busy her parents had been, and if no lights on or home-cooked meals to welcome her through the door hadn’t bothered her then, it definitely doesn’t now. Nene is a fully grown woman, after all. She’s more than capable of taking care of herself.
Still, sometimes Nene craves something to fill the space, someone to listen to while she commutes or cleans or chops vegetables, and music and frequent phone calls can’t fill that gap all the time. And so, ever since she moved away for work, Nene has taken zealously to podcasts.
Tonight, Nene finishes the last episode of the last season of her most recent love. She sighs, opening the store page to look for another — and pauses.
There, pasted proudly across the front page under the new and popular banner, is a podcast that Nene doesn’t recognize: “Tales from Kamome Forest”. The text is plain in a way that Nene doesn’t usually seek out, but something about it just speaks to her, and before she’s even consciously aware of it, before she’s even read the description, she’s clicking on the first episode.
The episode starts with a sound that Nene can’t quite place, but that sends so much nostalgia through her that she stills completely to listen to it. “Hello, new listener,” a man’s voice begins, low and smooth in her headphones; and for reasons she doesn’t understand, Nene shivers. “Welcome, and thank you for starting from the beginning. My name is Hanako, and I’ll be your guide through the forest today. Come walk with me, won’t you?”
It’s an understatement to say that this podcast is different from what Nene usually listens to, but she enjoys it regardless. Hanako is a gracious, engaging host, and he speaks as if to an old friend. The theme seems to be a sort of magical nature walk, folklore lesson, and campfire story wrapped in one as Hanako takes the listener through his imaginary forest, pointing out supernatural flora and fauna as they go. Each episode’s goal seems to be detailing one creature in particular: what it is, how to find it, where it came from, where it lives in the forest. Nene can hear the faint rustling of leaves and snapping of twigs in the background of his voice — not enough to detract from the audio quality, but just enough to add ambiance. And even as she lies in bed, alone in her apartment, she feels like she’s really there.
This episode, Hanako tells her about a fox spirit. “She fancies herself human out of love for one,” he tells the listener in a conspiratorial whisper, as if the fox will appear somewhere and overhear. “But he’s long-gone, and still she remains here, in human form, waiting for the return of her beloved.”
Nene’s eyes water. She’s always been a sucker for these kinds of stories.
Hanako’s low laugh echoes in her ears. “Oh, don’t cry, dear listener,” he says, nearly fond, and Nene wonders distantly if the script writer had expected most people to tear up at this part. “It’s quite alright; it’s the rule of the forest. I should know, as its caretaker.”
The background noise muffles somewhat, and Hanako murmurs, “We’re approaching her stairs. Stay close to me, alright?”
Once they’re done, Hanako continues chatting with the listener as he leads the way back. This time, he speaks of rules. The forest is full of rules, Hanako’s voice explains, and it’s important to follow them, even as a visitor, lest you find yourself unable to return. It's only a part of the podcast's fiction, and they’re all things that would be impossible for Nene to do anyway: don’t stray from the path; don’t go into the dark; don’t eat anything; and don’t kill anything, not even a bug or trodden flower. But he sounds so serious about it, voice intense in a way it hasn’t been at all throughout the episode, that Nene finds herself hanging onto every word.
The sounds of steps die out. “Here we are: the forest’s edge. Now, if you enjoyed yourself, which I certainly hope you did,” and Nene imagines there’s a smile on his face, tries to imagine what his face might look like, “I hope you’ll come to walk with me again soon.”
That night Nene dreams in sounds and smells and feelings: the dripping of water, a sweetness to the air, and damp wood beneath her bare feet. There’s water clinging to her, she realizes, sliding down her ankles to the ground only to immediately jump back up, like a heartbeat — but in her dream, she can’t be bothered. She keeps walking up and up and up.
Her alarm is blaring when she’s jerked into consciousness, legs sore like she’d been walking uphill for hours — but she pushes off thinking about anything until she’s on the train to work, and by then, any memories of her dream have long-since faded away.
—
A week passes where Nene doesn’t really think of Hanako or his bizarre forest at all. It’s been hectic at work, and when Nene finally comes home on Friday night, she puts off making dinner or answering emails or even getting in comfier clothes to just lie down on the little loveseat in her living room and stare at the ceiling.
Instinctively, her fingers reach for her phone, popping her headphones on and scrolling aimlessly for something to fill the space between her ears. For no reason in particular, she settles into episode two of “Tales from Kamome Forest”.
That same familiar chime, and then Hanako is in her ear. “Hello, dear listener,” he says, and Nene relaxes into his voice like he’s an old friend. “It’s been a long week, hasn’t it? Why don’t we walk, and I’ll take your mind off of it while we look for a very different tenant of the forest. This time, we are not looking for a single entity so much as many small creatures. They adore just about anything sweet — oh, but don’t worry, listener. I won’t let them eat you.”
Nene flushes like Hanako is a real man sitting beside her, speaking to her and her alone, and not a fictional persona put on by some bored voice actor. Immediately, she feels pathetic, and then angry at herself for feeling pathetic. Real life Nene may be sitting in her empty apartment, burnt out and still in her work clothes — but a girl can dream, can’t she? Is there anything so wrong about letting herself run away with this fantasy?
“Are you ready to head out now?” Hanako’s voice asks gently in her ears, as if though he’d really been waiting for her. Nene wonders how they got their timing down so well. She hopes whoever was in charge of that knows how good of a job they did; maybe she should leave a review.
True to his word, today’s episode is a little bit different. The woods — or, whatever they have looping to simulate the woods, anyway — are quieter today. This, Hanako explains, will help them track down the creatures they’re looking for: mischievous, animal-like creatures, who like stealing small items from travelers and hiding them around the forest, in babbling brooks or hollow logs. “Some say they’re doing this to trick visitors off the path,” Hanako tells her, and Nene imagines herself there next to him, next to that brook, peaking into that log, “to eat them, or otherwise trade to another forest dweller, so that they can eat them.”
In that moment, Nene wishes so strongly that this was a conversation and not a story wrapped in a podcast, so that she could ask him what he thinks. As if reading her mind, Hanako continues. “In my opinion, I think they just steal because it’s fun and because they like the items. They have no particular aggression toward non-tenants, after all.”
To non-tenants?, Nene thinks. Does that mean they are hostile to other residents of the forest?
“You may be wondering if that means that they’re hostile to other residents of the forest,” Hanako says, “and the answer to that is — oh, watch your step here, there’s a root, there you go — ”
Tonight, even through the phone, even through the fiction, Nene can almost see herself walking with him, arm in arm, maybe leaning her head on his shoulder, maybe taking his hand to step over puddles and gnarled roots. Lost in dreamy fantasies, Nene wonders what he looks like, Hanako — maybe there’s concept art of him? Or maybe she could track down a picture of his voice actor?
Hanako’s voice feels so close in her ear suddenly that it’s nearly suffocating. “Don’t look now, but here they come. I knew the candy trap would work.”
There’s a tinkling of small items — hard candy, she assumes — in a glass jar, and a comical roaring of tiny feet. Hanako laughs — not the low, conversational chuckle he’s done before, but a genuine-sounding laugh. She wonders if that was on script, too; it sounds genuine but unreal, not quite human, more like the rustling of the forest’s leaves than the laugh of a normal man. For maybe the first time, she finds herself wondering what the character of Hanako is — he groups himself in with the tenants of the woods, doesn’t he? What kind of not-human is he?
“I wish you could see them,” Hanako tells the microphone, exasperated fondness in his voice; and he sounds human, certainly. It makes him sound human. “I think you would get along. Maybe one day, dear listener.”
On the way back today, Hanako reiterates the rules, and lists new ones. Don’t stop in the middle of their walk. Listen in private. And to fall asleep before they reach the forest’s edge is an invitation — to what, he doesn’t say. Nene is fussing with her nails while listening, sleepy and absent; she swears she hears him say, deathly serious, “Remember that, Nene,” but when she goes back to check, there’s no mention of her name; of course there isn’t. She feels ridiculous just for thinking there could have been.
Hanako cheerfully informs her that they’ve reached the exit and bids her goodbye until next time, and Nene is already drifting to sleep.
The next morning is slow — she wakes alarm-less with her usual weekend haze and lazes around in her pajamas drinking coffee for hours. She wonders if she’d put more sugar in than she’d intended; there’s been a sweet taste in the inside of her mouth since she woke up.
Nene wonders if summer is coming early this year; she has dozens of little bites on her feet and ankles and calves that she thinks must be spiders. They look more like the teeth of a small animal than a bug, but — well, it isn’t like Nene has any pets. It must just be strangely-placed spider bites, she thinks.
Turning onto her belly, Nene unlocks her phone to look up if spider bites ever turn out looking more like mammal teeth — and finds the podcast information for “Tales from Kamome Forest” pulled up. Had she been about to comment last night? She can’t remember.
There are no hosts or staff mentioned, to her disappointment. In fact, all that’s present is a black icon and a few quick lines: Hello, dear listener, and thank you for walking with me. Watch your step, keep your ears open, and remember: the forest is waiting.
—
Hanako and his bizarre forest become a fast friend and constant companion for Nene, now. It’s no substitute for human interaction, but it’s closer than any other podcast she’s found, and Nene doesn’t even let herself feel pathetic for leaning into it anymore. It’s a sort of roleplay, right? Isn’t it intentional? She’s only following along with the author’s intent, and really, what’s so wrong with that?
The only thing is that every time Nene listens to an episode, she sleeps so deeply that she wakes confused and past her alarm. The first time she does so on a weeknight, she ends up at work two hours late, having missed a meeting and a half, hanging her head with not a single excuse to offer. “Sorry, I was on a moonlit walk with a fictional character last night” is not a valid cause for absence, after all.
That entire day is like floating through a dream, distant and far away; it’s hard to focus, to think about work, or about anything at all. She chalks it up to exhaustion and burn out, but even when she gets home, it persists. That night, she draws herself a bath — and then, before she’s realized it, the bath is overflowing and she is still standing there, fully clothed and spaced out, hot water in a great puddle under her feet.
There are other changes, too, other things that make Nene wonder for the first time in a long time if maybe her friends were right and she shouldn’t have moved here alone to chase this job: items missing or not quite where she placed them, tiny injuries to her person and possessions that she can’t imagine being absent-minded or forgetful enough to have caused. And things that just don’t make a lot of sense: mud on the floor even though Nene lives in a city and her shoes are clean, and leaves in her hair, and her skin feeling suddenly freezing, like she’s just been plunged into water. Waking up to the sound of a laugh, or the bluster of bird’s wings on her window, that’s always gone as soon as she’s fully conscious.
“Maybe you should go to the doctor,” Aoi advises her when Nene finally remembers to call her again. How long has it been — a week? Three? “That doesn’t sound normal. Something might be wrong.”
But Nene is too busy — with work, approaching deadlines, the hole in her productivity her absentmindedness has created. She’ll go to a doctor soon, she tells herself. Once things calm down with work. Once she has more time. She’ll go, definitely.
In the meantime, Hanako and his forest offer refuge from her real life. He tells her about a spider-warlock who has a lifeless copy of everyone’s soul (“a friend of mine, though I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell him I said that”), a raven king with a court under the lake who will kidnap you if you meet his eye (“after he slighted me, I moved the paths away from the lake — so he doesn’t get much business anymore”), and a duo of old spirits who like to trick mortals into deals (“terrible morals, even by our standards, but their faded powers make them pleasant-enough tenants”). Every story is so ripe with detail and description and a casual sort of familiarity that Nene almost convinces herself that it’s real, every time.
Tonight, Hanako tells her of a witch in a tower that always stays on the horizon, no matter how far you walk. “It’s impossible to enter without her invitation, and she hasn’t left in very a long time,” he muses. “We had a — disagreement, I suppose, a thousand or so years ago, and I suspect she’s been avoiding me for fear of her life ever since."
Nene nearly laughs aloud at the fiction of it, until Hanako continues speaking. “It’s a valid fear,” he tells her, low and casual. “I would have killed her then, if I could. Perhaps I still would.”
The persona of Hanako is more vengeful than she’d expected. It might be frightening, if he were real — but as he is now, a voice in a fiction, it just makes her cheeks flush and a warmth twist in her gut. She pictures him dreamily — a tall man, maybe, dressed all in black, cheeky grin on his face, dangerous glint in his eye.
She closes her eyes to that mental image as Hanako talks through walking back to the edge of the woods; but she slips into unconsciousness before they ever get there, lured asleep by the low, almost coaxing tone of his voice.
And when she awakens, that voice is still clinging to the inside of her head, even as someone else chimes, “And here I was thinking you were free. You’ve really done it this time, haven’t you?”
Nene moves to sit up quickly, but something feels decidedly off — her limbs move as slowly as through water, and there’s something strange about her hearing: everything is muffled, far away, echoing. She doesn’t know where she is: the room around her kaleidoscopes into colors and light, not an inch of it familiar.
“It isn’t all your fault,” the voice continues, and — that’s a young woman’s voice, isn’t it? Where is she? “It isn’t like you asked to be in this situation, and there was little you could do once he’d set his plan in motion. But still — things will be much more difficult for you from here on out. He did warn you, didn’t he? To not fall asleep before exiting the wood? I imagine he must have; it’s in the rules, after all. There’s no breaking the rules of the forest, not even for him.”
The voice sounds kind, concerned, and a little put out, maybe. Nene furrows her brow and opens her mouth to reply — but nothing comes out. With growing alarm, Nene realizes that she can’t make a single noise.
“Still,” the voice tells her, “I did promise to support you, didn’t I? Though I lost almost all of my power after last time, so all I can do for you now is warn you. Remember: follow the rules. Don’t stray from the path, don’t go into the dark, don’t eat anything, and don’t kill anything — not even a bug, or a trodden flower. He can’t take you if you just follow the rules. It’s vital that you remember that.”
The room rumbles, shaking and creaking like it’s about to collapse in on them. The voice sighs. “It seems we’re out of time. A shame; I’d been looking forward to speaking to you again.”
Finally, with concentrated effort, Nene wills her head to turn — and finds herself staring into a familiar face. Her own face, sort of, illustrated and superimposed on a beautiful woman stretched pale on canvas. It’s a bust portrait of her, Nene realizes distantly, or her but different: longer hair, inhumanly large eyes, an unnaturally blue tinge to her skin. The woman in the portrait is as terrifying as she is gorgeous; and in spite of that, were it not for the visible brush strokes, Nene feels as if though she could be looking into a mirror.
The shakes rocking the room increase in intensity. Just when they’re becoming too loud and jolting to bear, a hand reaches out from the space behind the easel, covered in paint. It strokes Nene’s cheek gently. “It was a pleasure to meet you, Miss Yashiro Nene. For your sake, I hope this to be our last meeting. Remember what I told you.”
There’s a terrible crunching sound, and then —
And then Nene is forced into consciousness, coughing and choking and gasping for air. She’s absolutely freezing, shivers wracking her entire body — and it takes another few moments of forcing air into her lungs to realize that both her and her bed are positively drenched, dripping water onto her floors, the taste of brine in her mouth.
—
Nene doesn’t listen to “Tales from Kamome Forest” for weeks, but even still, after that night, she’s haunted with nightmares. Always it’s impossibly dark and the woods stretch for unspeakable ages around her, their rustling leaves sounding just like whispering, just like a voice she recognizes saying, “Listener, dear listener, won’t you walk with me?”
Sometimes, the dreams are bright enough for her to see a path stretched in front of her, and she walks and walks and walks toward waking. Often, it isn’t, and Nene just sinks to her knees with her hands over her ears and weeps until morning. She never sees Hanako, or much of anyone, really, but she swears she can hear them sometimes — muffled voices behind the bushes, or footsteps from far away, or distant lights always leading deeper, deeper, deeper into the dark.
She keeps trying to convince herself that it isn’t real; none of it could be real. It’s a podcast. Maybe it could give her some scary dreams, but everything else — the missing items, the salt water in her mouth, the dirt under her fingernails — that must be from something else, right?
She keeps trying to convince herself to tell someone, anyone: a doctor, her friends back home, anyone — she even considered for one small moment calling her mom. But every time she picks up the phone, she hesitates.
What would she even say? “I think this podcast might be haunting me”? “I searched the potentially haunted podcast online and I’m not certain it even exists for other people”? “I wake up every morning feeling like someone’s been trying to drown me all night”? There’s no way that could end well, regardless of who she confides in.
Sleep-deprived and running out of options, Nene does one of the only things she can think to do in pursuit of answers. She unlocks her phone, puts her headphones on, and plays the next episode.
That familiar chime plays again — and it hits Nene suddenly. It’s the song that played at the end of the day at her old school, the one that ushered all of the kids out the door, go on home, they don’t belong there anymore. She feels sick and confused and frozen stiff at the realization.
And then, a voice. “Hello, dear listener. It’s been a while, hasn’t it?”
Lying in bed and staring at the ceiling, Nene can feel her skin crawling, teeth chattering, from the very moment Hanako begins speaking. “I have a very special episode for you today,” he says, smooth and upbeat, but it isn’t charming anymore, she can’t remember ever thinking it was charming. “You see, today, we’re chasing a ghost!”
If she closes her eyes, she swears she can see him exactly as she’d imagined him to be: tall and dark and handsome, a dangerous glint in his eye as he speaks. “And not the specter kind of ghost, either. No, tonight is less about meeting a tenant and more about looking at the hole that tenant has left behind in their absence.” The wood is especially loud tonight; it whistles louder and louder as Hanako leads the way farther inside. “It’s rare for tenants to ever leave, after all. It’s barely ever allowed in the rules, and as I believe someone may have told you recently, listener, the rules here are very, very important.”
The rules — everyone seems very intent on reminding her of those rules. Nene knows them front and back by now: stay on the path, don’t go into the dark. Don’t eat anything. Don’t kill anything.
Hanako makes his way through the wood, telling the story of an old god and a mermaid. “He wasn’t a very nice god,” he says with a humorless laugh. “He was cruel, and vindictive, and angry for all that had happened to him and to his home. Between you and me, listener, I don’t think he wanted to be a god at all, but these woods tied him to them so surely that to leave or even fade away would be impossible.”
Nene doesn’t ask for clarification, even though she is fairly certain at this point that if she did, Hanako would have answered her. The buzzing between her ears is too great for her to think straight.
Even without prompting, Hanako continues, thin and reedy with longing. “But the old, cruel god did have one thing that he loved, that made him feel a little less old and a little less cruel. Can you guess what that thing is, listener?”
The mermaid, Nene thinks. It must be the mermaid.
“If you’re thinking that it must be the mermaid, then you would be correct,” he continues. “She was beautiful and kind and tragic, and he wanted to keep her the way he did all his other tenants, held in place like a pinned butterfly.” Nene shivers at the imagery, the taste of brine in her mouth. “He built her a beautiful lagoon with all her favorite things, and gave her gifts and friends and, of course, himself. Everything he could give her, he did, and for a time they were happy. Even if he never had her heart, it was enough.”
For weeks, through six long episodes, Nene has been listening to Hanako tell stories: the fox spirit, the little thieves, the spider-warlock and raven king and old spirits. The witch, alone and powerless, locked in her tower. Each story has been told with a sort of detached ease, and Nene, perhaps reasonably or perhaps naively, had always taken it to be a part of the fiction: Hanako, the eccentric magical groundskeeper, and his wacky, morally ambiguous tenants. At most, he would be fond or amused or irritated, but for the most part the stories had really just felt like that: stories.
This walk through the woods throws each of those episodes into sharp contrast. Nene is hearing more emotions in a single sentence than she has in all the rest of the time she’s spent listening to him speak. There is so much loathing and bitterness and regret — and, perhaps most blindingly, love. A sort of desperate, fervent, inhuman love.
“But the mermaid had a nasty habit, you see,” Hanako continues, and his voice dips into something too alien for Nene to identify other than the way it makes her blood freeze in her veins like prey under a wolf. “She couldn’t leave, but still she loved the world. She loved humans — ” Disgust drips like blood from mouth. “ — and so when a human godhunter came to the wood, she fancied herself in love with him, and they conspired to leave together. And, with the help of the tenants of the wood, she stabbed her dearest friend, the old god of the forest, in the heart, and succeeded. She was given human form, and was free to leave — provided that she could reach the exit.”
Nene’s breath catches in her throat. She wonders if “stabbed in the heart” is literal or figurative in this instance, but can’t bring herself to ask — and for once, Hanako doesn’t answer her question, unspoken though it may be.
There is a stretch of silence where Hanako says nothing, and only the forest fills the air. It’s quiet tonight, she thinks: no leaves rustling, no distant voices, no twigs underfoot. And yet she can still hear it, somehow — like it’s calling for her. Like it’s reaching for her.
“But for all that he fancied himself a changed and gentle man,” Hanako rasps finally, “he was still a cruel, vindictive, and angry god. And so the mermaid did not reach the exit of the wood. Not alive.”
A twig cracks underfoot. Nene can nearly feel her hands, cold and shaking, looped into his arm. “We’re here,” he murmurs. “The mermaid’s lagoon.”
If Nene listens closely, she can just barely hear the lapping of the water at the shore. For the first time in weeks, she allows herself to picture it: a place that someone had loved, once. A place built in love. A beautiful, loving cage that someone had wanted to escape so terribly that they had died for it.
Hanako is quiet. “I don’t want to hurt you, Nene,” he breathes, and the pain in his voice is almost enough to make her want him, almost, “not this time.”
And Nene knows the rules; everyone has been very intent on her knowing them. But in spite of that, Hanako speaks, and the lagoon laps at the shore — and in her mind she can almost see it, pitch black and beautiful, stretching infinite into the horizon, holding the moon and stars in its reflection.
And in spite of herself, in spite of the warnings, in spite of being the deepest in the wood that she’s ever been and nowhere near the exit, Nene falls asleep.
—
Nene wakes in the dark. The woods stretch for unspeakable ages around her, their rustling leaves sounding just like whispering, just like a voice she recognizes — and she is aware, distantly, of someone lurking just out of her field of vision.
It should feel sudden, she thinks. She should be shocked and afraid, frantic to escape —
but really, doesn’t it feel like it’s been building to this?
“Hello, listener,” says a low voice, familiar but for all the ways it isn’t — like, had it always echoed so much? Had it always nearly hurt to listen to?
Even with her blood frozen and her rabbit heart pattering in her chest, Nene feels strangely calm. “Hello, Hanako.”
A pause, a rustle of leaves, and something begins its slow descent into the clearing. From her place on her back, Nene can’t see it without lifting her head; but something about the air shifts, like his very presence has scared off all breathable atmosphere, and Nene, lying prone and short of breath, has the animal instinct not to look.
The something that is Hanako pauses just to her side. She could see him, if she turned her head. She doesn’t.
It’s strange — looking straight up from where she is, Nene can see how the clearing parts just around the full moon, giving it a wide, respectful berth. She’d never noticed in her previous dreams; she supposes she’d spent most of those near hysterics, with her eyes screwed shut. It’s beautiful now that she’s abandoned her good instincts enough to really look at it.
Then her view is blocked partially. “Open,” Hanako tells her gently. His voice, if one could call it that, hurts her head; she has trouble remembering how she’d ever found it comforting. How she’d ever mistaken him for a man at all, even in fantasy.
Obediently and in somewhat of a daze, Nene opens her mouth. Something pops into her mouth, round and smooth, sweet when she bites down — a berry, she thinks, if not one that she recognizes. She remembers distantly someone telling her to never eat anything from the forest — but it’s hard to remember why. Her head is fuzzy, and Hanako is humming something nostalgic, something distantly familiar that she just can’t quite place.
The moon gleams high above her. Nene imagines for a moment that if she could pluck it out of the sky and choke it down, it might taste just like this: heavy and rich, bursting sugar-sweet on her tongue.
Her eyes water, and she swallows thickly. At her side, Hanako makes a sound that is nearly a coo — and to her alarm, the noise doesn’t send a shock of pain through her head.
“Don’t cry, Nene,” he says, fond. “It’s alright; it’s just the rule of the forest. I would know, as its caretaker.”
Something that Nene can closest approximate as a hand reaches to stroke her hair. Nene can feel a scream building in her throat — but no matter how long she waits, no sound comes.
Her eyes feel heavy. She thinks she must tell Hanako this. She can’t quite tell.
“That’s fine,” he replies, low like he’s telling her a secret. She can almost imagine he sounds human, for a moment. “I’ll be here when you wake up. We both will.”
The wood stretches infinite around her. Lying there, if Nene listens closely, she can just barely hear the lapping of the water at the shore; and if she thinks really, really hard, she can just barely picture a pinned butterfly in a glass case, the moon and stars held tight in its reflection.
Nene closes her eyes — and for the first time in weeks, she rests easy.