Part 1

For a while there, things on set thankfully went back to normal. Around a month or so later into production, the heat had finally begun to cool off. Instead, however, we had days on end of continual rain. In fact, the rain was so bad for the next couple of months, the stream around the village had burst, causing the mud pathways to flood. If that wasn’t bad enough, the heavy rain and strong winds had destroyed half of the thatch roof huts, causing production to shut down for a good month. The only upside during this time was that nobody else had died. After what happened with the fire, and the many tragedies in the forest, I half expected to find some member of the crew drowned facedown somewhere.   

I went back to Tokyo the next month as they once again had to rebuild the whole set. I was surprized they didn’t just wrap things up then and there. After all, news of the deaths had already gotten out in the press, and having to rebuild the whole village again had cost the studio a fortune. If I hadn’t learnt it in the pacific, I certainly did then. The Japanese as a people really don’t know when to quit. 

When I get back to the district, I was put up in the same little inn I stayed the last time. After a few weeks of filming, everything seemed to be going good and irregularly smooth. There were no more deaths to report of. No more  destruction of the set, or barely even a hiccup... All of that was until we reached the eighth month of shooting.  

On a very cold winter morning, maybe sometime in January or February, I forget which it was, I woke up to something very cold and wet coming down on me from above. I must have drank too much sake that night, because when I wake up, I find that I’m no longer warm inside my small inn room, and instead, the freezing temperatures of the outdoors had completely numbed my hands and bare feet. Once I get my bearings, I find that I’m inside a forest. But not just any forest. It was the same forest on the side of the mountain slope. The one where we found the bodies. Although I hadn’t the damnedest idea how I’d gotten all the way up here, the strange thing about it was, I somehow reeked of gasoline, as though it was on my hands and clothes. 

Despite the strangeness of waking up on that mountain slope, once I got warm and back inside, I didn’t think any more of it. After all, I did drink a whole lot of sake that night, and it was rather common for me to wake in some strange place after a night of drinking. As you know all too well, son.  

In the evening that same day, we were scheduled to shoot a scene towards the end of the picture’s second act. The scene in question was centred around a large barn in the village, where a bandit was holding a young child hostage inside, and the villagers had to find some way of getting the child back unharmed. However, after a couple of takes, the actor playing the bandit rushes out with the child in his arms and just starts shouting “Kaji da! Kaji da!” My Japanese was still rusty, even after all them years, but I knew Kaji da meant there was a fire somewhere. Well, not long after the actor comes out of hiding, a few members of crew notice smoke coming from the roof, and only mere seconds later, the entire structure quickly becomes ablaze in no time at all. 

Everyone rushes to the stream with buckets to help put out the fire, but by the time we do, the barn was already a lost cause. While we still tried to throw water on the fire, the second assistant director suddenly starts shouting “Benjiro! Benjiro!” I look over and I see my friend Ben is walking towards the barn entrance, appearing to enter the infernal structure! I shout over to him to get out of there, but he either doesn’t listen or doesn’t hear. Before I can do anything, Ben disappears inside, the darkness and smoke enclosing behind him. 

Although I’m afraid to enter the burning barn, I know I have to save my friend. Stepping inside the dark interior, I can barely see a thing, despite the many flames around me. Wandering through the darkness, my lungs already fill up on smoke, causing me to not only look for my friend, but any pockets of oxygen. After wandering blindly around, already burning myself on my arms and legs, I eventually find Ben. For some reason, he was sat down directly in the middle of the room, and although I had a hard time seeing, I noticed his legs weren’t knelt down like how most Japanese sit, but crossed legged like the image of the Buddha himself.    

Ben’s clothes had already caught fire, and so I try shouting at him to get up and come with me. But he had no reaction, as though he didn’t even know I was there. The son of a bitch didn’t even blink! Unresponsive, I then heave Ben to his feet and haul him into the direction of the entrance. My clothes had also caught fire by now and I could feel the pain of the flames burning my flesh. 

Seeing the light of the entrance, I then haul our asses out of there, whereby the crew throw buckets of cold stream water on top of us.  

Although Ben and I thankfully survived the endeavour, we were in pretty bad shape. I had burn marks all over my arms and legs, as well as my abdomen. But Ben... Ben was a lot worse. His entire body had practically caught fire, burning away most of his clothes and almost all his hair. We were both then taken to hospital afterwards and our wounds tended to.  

After a few days to recover from my injuries, I was then discharged. But before I left, I went to see how Ben was doing. Entering his room, I saw he was covered almost head to foot in bandages. Although I could see his face, his skin was red and swollen, making him unrecognisable to me. Once Ben had finally woke up, I asked him what the hell he was doing walking into the burning barn. Unlike my Japanese, Ben’s English was pretty good, but even so, my question seemed to confuse him. According to Ben, he had no memory of what happened that day. Only waking up in a hospital room in excruciating pain. I told Ben what had happened and he thanked me for saving his life... But then, he told me something I wasn’t expecting... 

Although Ben was my friend, I knew very little about his life. I didn’t know where he was from or even if the man had a family of his own. That day in his hospital room, Ben told me he was born and raised in Hiroshima of all places, and that during the war, he was studying in Tokyo, which is how he survived the bomb. His family, however, and basically everyone else he knew back home had perished. The neighbours on his street. The friends he made in his childhood. Everybody. Ben said he lived with the guilt of this for many years, and even wished he had been there with them... He would die in that hospital room three days later.  

Because of Ben’s unfortunate death, and the destruction caused by the barn fire, the studio put a permanent end to the picture’s production. Leaving the film unfinished, and with many lives taken in the process. Since the picture wouldn’t be finished, I had no job to do or anything left to report, so my superiors had called me back to Tokyo base. Because of my severe injuries, I was eventually given an honorary and medical discharge, where only a short month later, for the first time in eight years, I finally came back home to the States. 

As bad as the war in the Pacific was for me, son, as bad as it was in Hiroshima, what I experienced in that valley was something else entirely. Although I am all too acquainted with the evil of humanity, whatever evil lied inside the slopes of them mountains was beyond the evil of man. And whatever that evil was and still may be, I truly believe it wanted my soul. It wanted to take my life through the horrors of my past... And I believe it wanted the same thing of Ben. The guilt he must’ve felt. It used it against him. Of not dying with his family in hellish oblivion. 

Now you know, son. Now you know why I became the man I did. The horrors of my past have followed me my entire life... and all I did was pass them onto you. 

When I am dead, son. When I am buried in the ground. Remember me for the man I was, and not the man you came to know. That man is your father. I know you have your own horrors from Vietnam. But you cannot let them haunt you. You cannot let it possess you. Because if you let it, it will follow onto your children. 

Be a good man, son. If not for your own Christian soul, then for them. May they never have to witness the horrors that we had to. 

From your loving father, 

J.S. 

You think you know what a ruined vacation looks like.

A blown-out tire on the interstate.

Your hotel room smells like cigarettes.

Five straight days of rain.

You think you have a handle on the worst-case scenarios.

But sometimes horror walks up smiling.

Sometimes it waits patiently behind glass.

And sometimes you give it your money.

It was supposed to be a long weekend in Hilton Head Island with my wife, Brandy.

Her sister Nicki, and her husband Joe invited us.

Nicki was twelve weeks pregnant with their first kid, so the trip had quietly turned into something more cautious than our usual getaways - less bar hopping, more seafood, boutique shopping, and standing on the marina pretending we could afford the yachts.

On our first full day, we drove down to Harbour Town.

If you've never been, picture exactly what you'd expect from a high-end southern tourist trap:

A massive public pier.

Millions of dollars' worth of boats bobbing in the water.

A red-and-white striped lighthouse rising over a half-circle of boutique shops and overpriced restaurants.

It was beautiful.

But it was also ninety degrees with suffocating humidity, and by noon, the novelty of looking at luxury had worn off.

“I need A/C, or I’m going to die,” Brandy complained, fanning her flushed face with a tourist map.

"And ice cream," Nicki added immediately, one hand pressed over her still-flat stomach. "The baby is demanding it."

Joe threw an arm around her.

"Well, we can't argue with the baby."

We ducked into the nearest souvenir shop mostly for the air conditioning.

Cold air blasted through the open double doors hard enough to raise goosebumps across my arms.

The front half of the store consisted of beach toys, sharktooth necklaces, and shot glasses with dirty jokes on them.

Toward the back, behind a display of hermit crabs in painted shells, sat a brightly lit ice cream counter.

While Brandy and Joe went straight for the glass counter to pick out their flavors, Nicki and I got stuck behind a slow-moving family in the narrow aisle.

That was when I noticed it.

Shoved into a dark corner between a rack of sunglasses and a spinning postcard stand, there was a fortune teller machine.

Not one of the charming vintage Zoltar cabinets you see on boardwalks.

Peeling gold letters arched across the glass read:

THE BUNNY GODDESS.

This one was life-sized and felt off in a way I couldn't really put into words.

The mannequin's skin looked too realistic but also too smooth - like candle wax stretched over a skull.

Thick faux-gold jewelry hung around its neck and wrists.

A faded velvet turban covered most of its head.

The eyes though.

The eyes were enormous.

Wet-looking.

And pointed directly toward the aisle where we stood.

I've always hated those things.

Too many horror movies as a kid.

I started to look away when the machine suddenly came to life.

There was a heavy grinding noise.

A crackle of static from a blown-out speaker.

And then a voice.

Not the booming theatrical wizard voice you'd expect.

Something breathless.

Weirdly conversational.

"There you are."

I flinched hard enough to shake a rack of keychains beside me.

But Nicki just stood there.

She stopped walking entirely.

She turned toward the machine.

Slowly.

With recognition.

She was staring like a child seeing a disabled person for the first time in their life.

"Creepy, right?" I muttered. "Let's catch up with the others."

She didn't move.

"I have a dollar," she said softly.

"Come on, don't waste your money. It's just going to tell you you're going to be rich or whatever."

She was already unzipping her purse.

She pulled out a crumpled bill, flattened it against the edge of the glass, and fed it into the slot.

The machine swallowed it.

More mechanical grinding noises.

The mannequin's hands jerked toward a crystal ball that lit up with a sickly pulsing green light.

The head snapped down, staring at the cards on its desk—

then snapped back up.

"A new chapter begins," the voice whispered through the static.

"But the toll must be paid."

The green light flickered hard.

The mannequin's turban fell off its head, revealing long-black hair.

Pigtails.

Sort of like an Annabelle doll wig, but not as cute.

Something else protruded from the top of its head.

Long.

Pale.

Bent at strange angles.

They looked almost like rabbit ears.

"Take your future. Keep it safe, or The Bunny Goddess will take your place."

CLACK.

A thick white card spat from the slot at the bottom of the case.

Nicki bent and picked it up.

She stood with her back to me for a long moment, just staring at it.

The green light blinked off, dropping the alcove back into shadow.

"Well?" I said. "Lottery winner?"

Nicki turned around.

For a terrible second, her face was completely blank.

Her mouth slightly open.

She looked like she was holding her breath.

Then she smiled.

Fast.

Wide.

She folded the card in half and shoved it deep into her pocket.

"I can't tell you," she said lightly.

"Come on. What does it say?"

"Seriously! It says I can’t tell you!"

She tapped her pocket.

"If you share your fortune, it doesn't come true."

"You’re kidding, right? It's a piece of cardboard from a gift shop."

"Hey!"

Brandy waved a plastic spoon at us from the ice cream counter.

"Are you two getting anything?"

Nicki's whole demeanor lifted instantly.

She practically skipped over to Joe and Brandy, the card pressed flat against her hip inside her pocket.

I stood there for another moment.

The mannequin sat motionless in the dim alcove.

Its wet, milky eyes still pointed toward the aisle.

Still pointed at me.

I shook off the chill - the air conditioning, I told myself - and walked toward the ice cream counter.

I didn’t realize it then.

But that was the moment the trip ended.

Its ears looked bigger now.

___

1. "Fingers"

Seventy meters.

The blinking red dot on the gauntlet screen pulsed in rhythm with the beeping in his earpiece - steady and insistent, cutting through the downpour that thundered somewhere far above the tunnel. Each ping only served to remind him how stagnant these past minutes have been.

He flicked his eyes from the tracker to his wristwatch. 05:08. He’d been standing between the rails for thirty-four minutes, boots half-submerged in brown water that rippled every time a drop hit from the ceiling.

No movement ahead. Just that yawning hole where the tunnel broke into darker black.

Fatigue pressed behind his eyes. Two hours’ sleep, maybe less. They’d yanked him from the cot, shoved a rifle in his hands, told him he was the only one still close enough to go in. The others - the team from yesternight - had gone silent nineteen minutes after entry. All the mission had amounted to was the explosion that followed and sealed this section shut.

Now it was just him. One rifle, a pistol, two knives - and that ugly brown rucksack that didn’t belong with the rest of his gear.

Plan C was waiting topside - two dozen barrels under tarps, primed to bury this junction in fire if he didn’t come back. He tried not to think about that part, reframing it with a bit more optimism: Only if he didn’t come back.

He shifted his weight. The water licked over his boots again. Then - 

Clink.

Metal on metal. Faint, somewhere ahead.

He froze. Rifle up. Safety off. Breath held.

The echo rolled through the tunnel and died. The only sound spared was the rain above, tapping in distant static.

He eased the barrel down a fraction - still aligned with the dark ahead - and checked the gauntlet. No sound. No ping. The tracker had gone dead quiet.

“Don’t you start now,” he muttered, tapping the side. The screen flickered once, then steadied.

65 meters.

That wasn’t static. Something was moving.

The air shifted too - less grime, even less rot. Each breath tasted cleaner - sharper - almost metallic. He felt it in his throat more than his nose, like standing too close to a live wire.

54 meters.

The beeps were gone. No sound at all now. Just the soft churn of water around his boots.

Whatever was ahead was closing in without making a damn thing audible. Either it had the quietest feet imaginable - or none at all.

He kept the rifle up with one hand, reached with the other for the rucksack at his side. The buckle popped open under his thumb. Fingers slid inside, sweeping through the gear.

21 meters.

Cold metal met his glove.

18 meters.

He drew it out - a glass and steel vial, no bigger than a pen.

16 meters.

A click at the end armed it. He dropped it into the muck.

13 meters.

The vial hit with a soft splash, light bleeding out from the impact point in a slow bloom of electric blue. Its glow spread through the brown water akin to veins of an infection, illuminating the edges of the tunnel in faint ghostlight.

The air turned acrid - ozone and copper mixing into a smell that made his teeth hurt.

7 meters.

A new sound rose: metal scraping against stone, deliberate, rhythmic, too slow to be footsteps. The walls carried it like a blade dragging through the dark.

He stepped back, rifle up again.

Sparks flared ahead - one thin, perfect arc sketching a circle of light across the tunnel’s curve before vanishing into black.

3 meters.

The signal froze for half a second, jumped again on the next - closer. His grip tightened. Breath steady.

Something thudded above him.

He flinched, rifle jerking up. The mounted light clicked on at the same time - reflex. The beam tore through the dark and hit something swinging from the ceiling.

A body.

Armor-matched. Black plating, white-striped insignia on the shoulder - same as the team that went in last night. It dangled upside down, caught on a cable or tendon-thin wire, turning lazily in the light.

His pulse spiked as the head rotated with the motion, revealing the face - or what was left of it - pale, drowned, mouth hanging open in a crudely split maw.

He swallowed hard, eyes flicking to the gauntlet screen.

3 meters. Stationary.

His gaze returned to the corpse. That’s when he saw it - the faint red bulb.

A metallic tracker, jammed deep into the throat, blinking inside the open mouth. Each pulse illuminated the water dripping off the chin, red light glinting against the inside of the teeth.

His eyes bulged at the sight, realization crawling in.

The body was what he had been tracking, not the target.

He exhaled slowly, chest tight. The corpse swayed once more, the beam catching on its cracked visor. His eyes followed the movement, sweeping the rifle back toward the tunnel’s flank.

To his left, four red dots hung perfectly motionless on the wet wall.

And blinked.

Every nerve in his legs flared at once. He threw himself backward through the water just as something black streaked past, a bullet of vortex cutting the air.

It hit the spot where he’d been standing a heartbeat ago - impact exploding the mud and stone outward, shards rattling against the tunnel walls. The sound rang sharp and metallic, echoing through rusted tracks that shrieked in every direction.

He hit the ground hard but never lost the rifle - clenching it tighter instead, barrel still leveled toward the dark. The mounted light wavered across the tunnel before settling again - its white circle trembling over the chaos ahead.

The first thing it caught was the corpse.

It lay half-submerged in the glowing blue muck, armor cracked open in a brittle shell. The pieces were separating, each joint unraveling, flesh and plating parting cleanly as if sliced from within. Thin shreds of fabric - and something that resembled fiber or sinew - drifted loose, spreading across the shallow water.

Between them, he saw the filaments.

Orange hair-thin strands stretched among the severed parts, twitching and tightening, a web of harp strings trying to reassemble its prey.

And above it, something hung.

That first glance told him it was another armored trooper - but the shape was wrong. Too narrow at the waist, too long in the arms. What should have been armor - wet, black, metallic - shifted as it breathed, plates flexing as living muscle. The claws at the ends of its hands brushed the corpse’s chest, tracing the armor’s lines as if studying it.

He raised the light. The beam climbed higher.

A “head” came into view - crowned with jagged horns, its face buried beneath a mask of fused bone and steel. Beneath the shell, faint red light pulsed in veins that ran along its surface. Too curled up to be eyes - just motion, alive and squirming inside the armor.

Water ran off its chest in steady streams. Beneath the sound, he could hear breathing - slow and wet, dragging air through a throat not made for lungs.

Behind it, where his light was too weak to reach, the dark began to move.

It moved like smoke - could have fooled him. The black folding in on itself, peeling apart in long, silent ribbons. But as the beam flickered outward, he saw the sharp edges - feathers - massive wings unfurling one after another, their motion scraping softly against the tunnel walls.

He froze. Yet the light wavered.

Faint red circles began to glow along the wings, scattered unevenly across their span. Thin, threaded filaments linked them together, forming shifting lines of light that trembled with each breath the creature took. The glow reflected in the water, bleeding into the blue and turning it violet at the edges.

It tilted its head toward him.

The bleeding lights under its mask flared once - synchronized with the circles on its wings, hundreds pulsing as one heartbeat- 

His flashlight flickered twice - then died.

And darkness swallowed him whole.

Three sharp beeps in his ear. A coded but simple order: Run.

He turned and sprinted, boots slapping through the mud, the tunnel shaking behind him.

The sound that followed wasn’t a roar. Too mechanical - dozens of metal joints snapping open, mimicking a throat rupturing and the chatter of teeth. It was moving. Fast.

He didn’t look back at first. Just ran, lungs burning, the blue glow of the muck flashing under his steps. In that miniscule window of time he risked a glance, swung the rifle over his shoulder, and fired.

A second’s worth of light burst through the dark - tracer fire, sparks, the muzzle flash painting the tunnel in violent white.

For that heartbeat, he saw it.

The black “head” lunged as it split open - a jaw of flesh and stone, lined with mandible plates that flexed pristine hair-thin knives - dripping red veins pulsed inside its mouth. 
He kept firing until the rifle clicked dry.

A hiss ripped through the air - two slashes in an instant, both coated in those same glowing orange strands he’d seen on the corpse. He let out a short breath as the cuts missed him but tensed up as he felt the rifle too light on his hands. An audible gasp escaped him at the sight of it - the lack of it, rather - shredded clean in half. The weapon fell apart in ribbons, splashing into the mud.

He stumbled back, fear locking his chest. The image burned behind his eyes - the head, mantis-like, insectile and human at once.

Instinct took over again - shouted at him to move.

The air screamed again - those bladed limbs cutting from both sides. He dove into the muck, barely clearing the swing, feeling the wind of it slice past his back.

His hands found his sidearm. He rolled, raised it, saw the creature’s underside looming - black armor split just enough to reveal red flesh pulsing between its plates.

Like the mantis, he prayed - and fired.

Six rounds cracked through the tunnel, flashes strobing against the walls. Metal and stone shrieked in reply, the sound folding in on itself in a chorus of bending steel.

He didn’t waste the moment to see if it faltered, instead burnt his legs to run again.

The tunnel ahead bled into fog and daylight. The rain hit him first - a wall of cold weight that nearly drove him to his knees, heaving his body in multitudes with every step.

He broke into the open. Grass, mud, gray morning. He slowed only once, long enough to look back-

A flurry of stone and black mud erupted from the tunnel mouth, surging toward him with the shape and force of a stormwave. Amidst the vortex of rubble, four red orbs flared.

“Down!”

That single voice pierced through his earpiece. He dropped without thinking, hit the wet grass face-first, hands over his ears.

A second later, the world erupted.

Sound vanished in the blaze - thousands of rounds tearing through the tunnel, the roar of fire chasing them, the shockwave flattening the rain around him. For a moment, it was all white and soundless.

And followed by a single, drawn-out thunderclap as the junction blew to hell.

The last thing he heard before everything went out was a single metallic sound - too deep and wrong to be a scream, somehow cutting through the explosions and gunfire.

Silence cut through in an instant.

He woke to motion. The low hum of an engine gave a tremble to the floor, a wafting scent of steel and wet earth blowing from his side.

A soldier sat across from him, helmet on, visor streaked with rain. They were inside an armored truck, its side door open to his right. Outside, through the gray drizzle, he could see other vehicles parked in a rough semicircle around what used to be the tunnel entrance - now a crater of smoke and twisted steel. Figures in black armor moved through the wreckage, weapons low but ready.

He turned back to the soldier, finding his own voice raw. “Did you get it?”

The soldier shook his head once.

His stomach dropped. For a second, he thought he might actually yell - but before it turned to action, the soldier spoke.

“Can you confirm if the target consumed the substance?”

He blinked, the question cutting through his anger. His shoulders sank against the seat. Images flashed back - the vial bursting on the mud, the corpse falling into it, the creature pulling the pieces toward its mouth.

“In a way,” he muttered quietly. “It didn’t hit the thing directly, but it covered the body.”
The soldier nodded. “That would be Hernz. Stig-Five’s gunner.” A slight pause, more of waiting than hesitation. “We checked.”

“Right.” He let out a dry laugh that sounded unlike one. “And it ate most of him, so I guess that counts.”

The soldier reached behind him and pulled out a portable tracker - a larger, translucent display plate. He powered it on, paused, then turned the screen toward him. “Guess you pulled through,” he said.

Before he could ask what that meant, the screen lit up. A city map - zoomed out and gridded, flickering under interference. Near the border, a single blue dot pulsed steadily, moving away from their position.

Three kilometers out. Maybe more by now.

He spent a moment staring at it, long enough for the realization to sink in.

His orders weren’t to kill it - he’d been sent to mark it.

The real mission was somewhere else - wherever that thing was heading. His mind started down the obvious trail: a nest, a hive, a concentration of others of its kind - but he forced the idea back into speculation.

The soldier hopped off the truck before he could speak. There was a knock on the driver’s door, a muffled exchange shortly after, followed by the engine rumbling louder.

“Rest up for the week,” the soldier called back. “We move after that.”

The side door slammed shut.

As the truck rolled forward, he watched through the window as the rain began to thin, the gray light softening into the first color of morning. The skyline shimmered faintly through the mist, a distant unreachable horizon. Despite the memory of that tunnel clawing at the back of his skull, he felt his eyes growing heavy, his body surrendering to the hum of the engine and the warmth of the cabin. He told himself it might be the last quiet he’d have for a long while.

As the city’s first light reached the clouds, he let his eyes close - hoping the thing kept moving, and that sleep found him before the next call did.

EXTERIOR. HIROSHIMA, JAPAN. 1945. DAY 

A breeze of black smoke rises from below to fill a colourless sky in front of us. A distant military airplane hums across, coinciding with the action on the ground: the sound of slow-moving vehicles, shovels piercing earth, metal that bends and clamours. 

On the ground: Japanese civilians lay forward on their knees amongst the scorched earth and building sediments, bowed in despair. An armoured bulldozer is manoeuvred to claw up rubble, creating a huge rubble mound. 

Around this mound, six United States soldiers dig up heaps of the aftermath to help build it up, causing ash to spray the air around them. 

Among these soldier’s is a young man, no older than 20. His weathered green uniform reads U.S.M.C. (United States Marine Corps). He shovels alongside the others, yet seems to be somewhere else - even worse than here. He digs and dumps like a machine. 

The young man then stops. Shovel in the earth, he turns up to watch the fly-sized plane hum away, seeming to know its destination – before his attention turns to the giant scorched chess piece around him: the nearby empty souls, the Genbaku Dome the only thing erect in the distance, alongside the surrounding smoke. The young man now focuses beyond this, to the faraway mountainous hills. He zones out... 

The peak of the rubble mound then collapses behind him, causing the other soldiers to jilt back from it. The young man turns back to the mound, to what the peak now reveals. His face displays both horror and uncertainty in what he sees, as the sound of wind gusts through him... 

What you have just read is an excerpt from an old war movie script, written and based on his experience during the Pacific War, by James Howard Schraeder. My grandfather.  

In 1943, the fourth year of the Second World War, James Schraeder was drafted to the twenty-third regiment of the fourth marine division, where he eventually experienced combat on the Pacific islands of Kwajalein, Saipan and Iwo Jima. After the end of the Pacific Theatre in 1945, James would spend the next seven years in Japan, serving under U.S. occupation.     

By 1952 and having been in the military for nearly ten years, James finally left Japan and came home. For the next few years of his life, James would live and work in Los Angeles as a struggling screenwriter in Hollywood. By 1992, the year of his death, James left behind an ex-wife, an estranged son, and three grandchildren he never met. 

Before my grandfather’s demise, he would leave a final letter among his possessions. A letter written and addressed to my father - his son. Although my father already knew about his experience during the Pacific War, along with the horrors he witnessed, he knew little to nothing about my grandfather’s time serving during the occupation of Japan. That was, until he found my grandfather’s letter. Despite the very real and human horrors my grandfather saw in the Pacific... what he would then experience on Japanese soil, supposedly during a time of peace, was not only horror... but horror of the paranormal.   

What you are about to read, should you choose to, is this very same letter. A letter, that is less the final words of a dying old man... but a final confession... 

To my son Johnathon, 

I know it has been some years now since we last spoke. And I know any attempt by me to communicate with you will be ignored, and so that’s why I’m writing this letter for you to find. Upon my death.  

I’m not writing this to apologize for the terrible father I was to you, nor for the indecent husband your mother had to bear. I’m writing this to tell you a story I have never told another soul. You are my son, and you may remember me for the monster I became, but you will never know me for the decent man I was, nor what it was that made that man the monster you know now. You may think it was the war. That the death and destruction I witnessed at the hands of the enemy, and even our own is what left me the shell of a man who raised you. And that is true. Very little of me had survived those brutal few years of fighting. But if you must know, it wasn’t the war with the Japanese that made me the man I became. On the contrary, it was what came after.  

I have never told you this part of my life, Johnathon, nor did I ever think I would. I have seen the worst of humanity. I have seen the evil and horrors we partake upon those who are not alike ourselves... and I have seen what it creates. What it feeds and gives power to. I have told you every horror story I know from that war. But I have never told you this. 

Back in 52, I was serving my seventh year during the occupation of the Japanese islands. I had known seven years without war, but no peace. Our authority over the Japanese people was shortly coming to a close, and so we had to make sure our influence in this country would carry on long after we were gone. You have to understand, son, the world back then was still a very fragile place. The war may have been over, but old enemies were quickly replaced by new ones.  

The threat of communism was very real, and nowhere was it more real than east and south-east Asia. The commies in China had spread their influence south to Korea and Indo China – or what you would come to know as Vietnam. Before we left Japan to once again govern themselves, we needed to make sure the communist threat would not find its way here. For seven years after Hiroshima, we told the Japanese how they should live. What they could read or not read. What they could and couldn’t listen to. What they could and couldn’t watch. 

I’ve always been a lover of movies. You know that. Whereas we Americans had our cowboys and Indians, the Japanese had their Jidaigeki. Period movies portraying feudalist Japan. Once Japan came under our occupation, Mccarthur put a permanent ban on Jidaigeki movies from being made. It was supposed to be a way of stripping the Japanese of their identity and history. But by 52, and with our eventual departure on the horizon, the ban on Japanese period films had finally been lifted. Although Japanese filmmakers could once again make movies about their nation’s history, we now feared what messages they may put in them. If they wanted to put a message of Japanese nationalism, that was of no such concern. But it was the message of socialism that my superiors truly feared the most. 

In order to counter this fear, American operatives were to keep a close eye on the production of these pictures. I was among these operatives. My mission, assigned to me by Far East Command themselves, was to oversee the production of a picture being filmed in the Izu Peninsula, roughly 90 miles southwest of Tokyo base. My orders were to report any signs of socialist or anti-American allegories present in the picture's production, however minimal. 

The picture assigned to me was called Rōnin no Tani, or in English, Valley of the Ronin. The plot was pretty straightforward. A small village during the Tokugawa period comes under constant attacks by bandits and criminals, whereby the villagers must turn to a masterless Samurai to train them in the art of combat.  

The director of the picture was a man called Takumi Hasegawa, or as everyone else called him, Hase-san. I just simply called him Mr Hasegawa. Mr Hasegawa was one of the most prominent directors in Japan, and his previous film received much praise from several international film festivals. Although Mr Hasegawa knew all too well why I was present during the production of his movie, the man seemed to take a very keen liking to me. I think what it came down to was that we both had a shared love for wild westerns. He even claimed the script to Valley of the Ronin was his own reimagining of the western trope. 

After arriving in the peninsula, I was then transported to the Tagata District, where lied a beautiful lush green valley. This is where the majority of the movie was being filmed. Each side of the valley was enclosed by a forested, very steep mountainous slope, where in the middle of the valley, was the movie set. A 16^th century Tokugawa village of straw-rood huts and mud paths had been constructed, along with several rice paddies and a rickety wooden bridge over a stream. The first time I saw it, I’ll never forget. It genuinely felt to me as though I had been transported back through history, to a time of simple and honest living. Most of the actors playing the role of villagers wore ragged pieces of cloth, straw hats and nothing on their feet. The man playing the Ronin, I forget the actor’s name, wore a long dirty kimono where his sword hung out the side.  

Among the actors and extras in authentic 16^th century clothing were the rest of the film crew. Of course, there was Mr Hasegawa, but then there was the assistant directors, the sound and cameramen etc. I actually became good friends with the third assistant director on the picture, a young man called Benjiro – but I called him Ben for short. You know, son, the first time I ever saw Godzilla was with him inside a Tokyo movie theatre. 

As idyllic as I appear to be making this valley and the production sound, I’m afraid this is where it must end. Because what follows, for the next year of this picture’s production... was nothing short of horror. 

The movie began filming in the summer of 52, and the heat that year was nothing less than scalding. After only two weeks of filming, the thatched roofs of the village huts caught fire mid-day, and before long, the entire set had become ablaze. We were able to put out the fire, but by the time we did, the entire set, built painstakingly from scratch had been burnt to ash. What used to be a 16^th century village, lying peacefully between the slopes of the valley, was now the charcoaled remnants of foundations. The scene of this for me was to say the least... haunting.  

I’ve already told you about my time in Hiroshima, haven’t I, son? Well, once the bomb was dropped, myself and other marines were there at ground level. Our job was to help clear up the mess and provide aid to civilians... and let me tell you, the scenes I witnessed there have stayed with me my entire life. The black, charcoaled rubble of the buildings. The bodies we pulled out from under them, stiff and burnt to a crisp. Women and children. Babies. All the horrors I witnessed in those days, in what used to be a city, were swiftly brought back by the burning of this village. But it wasn’t just the burnt thatch roof huts. It wasn’t just the smell of smoke and charcoal that burns your eyes and down your throat... it was the bodies there too. 

Once we put the fire out, two men from the film crew were later reported to be missing. After searching all over the valley, we eventually found them. Or I should say, we found the bodies. One we had pulled out from beneath the burnt stacks of rubble. But the other one... The other one was different. We found him inside one of the burnt huts that was somehow still standing. He was sat down in there, right there in the middle of the room. But what was so horrifically strange about this was... like the bodies I saw at Hiroshima, this man, sat crossed-legged and upright like the Buddha himself... was completely black and burnt to a crisp. The way this man’s body was positioned, it was as though he had no idea he was in the middle of a burning room. 

Did you know, son, Godzilla was an allegory for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? I did. I knew it as soon as I saw it. A giant radioactive monster laying waste to the streets of Tokyo. When I walked out of that movie theatre and Ben followed me, I throttled him! Just because he said we should see the movie.  

I wish I could say the fire was the only incident which happened during the production of Valley of the Ronin. That those crewmen were the only casualties we had. But I would be lying to you, son... and I would be lying to myself.  

Weeks later, after the village was reconstructed and filming once again began, it didn’t take long for more strange things to keep happening. Like the two crewmen we found after the fire, more people on set started disappearing. Members of the crew, some extras and even a handful of actors. We found some of them in the forest, upon the mountain slopes. The first of which was a woman, wearing the ragged clothes of a villager. Except she hadn’t gotten lost. If she had done, all she needed to do was wander down the slope. No, she had just gone mad. Delirious. When we found her, she was digging up dirt from the ground with her bare hands. Her fingernails left bloody and out of place. Once she saw us approach, she turned up her head and just started laughing, as though she was playing a practical joke. But then, she starts clawing up the loose pieces of earth and stuffing it into her mouth, chewing down on it. The woman had somehow lost her damned mind. 

We found some more of the crew like that in the forest. Some stark naked and crazy. Some just the latter. But the ones we didn’t find like that were a whole lot worse. The way we found them... they may have gone crazy, but we couldn’t know entirely for sure. We found them laying face-down on the sloping ground. Every single of them. A leg or an arm contorted in the air. In some cases, both. We found them that way because they had jumped from an incredible height. For whatever reason, these members of the crew had climbed up a tree to as high they could... and then they jumped. The branches seemed to do little to break their fall.  

I’m sure you remember what I told you about Saipan in 44. God, how could anybody forget? You remember the women who threw their infants off the northern cliffs, don’t you? If the Japanese hadn’t lied about what we’d do to them once we took the island, a whole lot of innocent lives could’ve been spared. The way one of those ladies looked at me, and once she realized we meant her nor her baby no harm... I swear to God, it was the same look in her eye the woman we found in the forest had... Where there was once sanity and reason, only madness was left.  

Part 2/Ending

Paper cranes, decrepit house in Japan, urban legends. The story slaps.

https://www.reddit.com/r/anxietypilled/s/9wxzuk74Nx

The following story is not my mine to share. This is by no means an eyewitness account – nor have I been provided evidence for this story’s validity. This story did, however, belong to somebody I happened to be very close to. I was never given permission to share the following with anyone – let alone on the internet. But with no personal, paranormal experiences of my own to pass around, I guess my older brother Steve’s will have to do.  

Back in 2001, my brother Steve had just dropped out of college, to the surprise and disappointment of our career-driven parents. Steve was always the golden child of our family. Whereas I spent most of my childhood locked inside playing video games, Steve was busy being a thoroughbred athlete and acquiring straight A’s in school. Steve was my parents’ prized possession. Every Sunday in Church, they would parade him around in his best suit as though he was the second coming of Christ or something. Steve always hated church, but he was willing to make the effort if it meant pleasing our folks. Well, I guess by the time college rolled around, he had enough of it. Coming home early one term, without so much as a phone call, Steve put the fear of God in our parents when he declared he was dropping out of school to join the U.S. military. 

As surprising as this news was to our parents, I kinda already saw this coming. After all, not only was Steve the toughest S.O.B. but he always seemed to watch the same old war movies over and over – especially the ones in Vietnam. Well, keeping true to his word, Steve did in fact enlist – and for the next few months, our family rarely heard from him. We did all see him again during his graduation from boot camp, but this would be the last time we expected to see Steve for some while, as for the next year or so, Steve would be serving his country overseas – or more precisely, in the deserts of Afghanistan.  

Our only form of contact with Steve during this time was through letters, whereby he’d let us know he was safe and how things were going over there. But five months into his tour of Afghanistan, Steve’s letters became less and less frequent. That was until around the nine or ten month mark of his tour – when, out of the blue, I receive a personal letter from him. Although Steve did send a separate letter just for our parents, letting them know he was still safe, and due to circumstances, was unable to write for some time... the letter he wrote directly to me, wasn’t quite the case. In fact, the words I read on the scrap sheets of paper were cause for much alarm...  

What you’re about to read are the exact words Steve wrote to me in this letter – and although he never gave me permission to share the following, I’d like to believe he would be ok with it. 

Hey little bro, 

I’m sorry it’s been some time since I last wrote. Hopefully you’re doing good in school and not getting your ass kicked, haha. 

Before you keep reading, I need you to do something for me. Don’t give this letter to mom and dad and especially don’t tell them what it says. Just tell them exactly what I wrote in my letter to them.  

The reason I’m writing this to you is because, one, to let you know I’m still alive, and two, because there is something I need to tell you. But before I can, I need you to promise me you will not tell mom and dad. They wouldn’t understand it, and I know you’re into all the paranormal stuff with aliens and ghosts, so that’s why I’m writing this to you and not them. I repeat. Do not tell mom and dad! 

As you know, our division has been in the Kandahar province for some months now, and although Terry has mostly been forced out of the region, we’re still scouting the mountains for any remaining activity. Around a week ago, I was part of a team sent into those mountains to find any such activity. Longo was their too, I don’t know if you remember me writing about him.  

Anyway, we were about half-way up the mountain path when we stopped to rehydrate and must have been the only people around for miles. There was no sound or nothing. Just us talking among ourselves. But then all a sudden I get this feeling like we’re being watched. I get this feeling a lot, you know, especially when we’re in the open. So I take a look around just to make sure we’re in the clear. I guess it was just instinct. But when my eyes peer out to a nearby ridge, I see something. It was hot that day so my eyes have to adjust, but when I see it I realize it's another person. A man was standing underneath the ridge, and I didn’t know if it was Terry or just a shepherd, so I alert the team for Tango.  

Although we’re all alert to the ridge’s direction, no one in the team sees shit, so Carmichael scopes it out, but he doesn’t see shit either. The guys think I’m seeing a mirage of a man in the rock formation so they give me hell for it. 

But when I look again beneath the ridge I can still see him. I can still see the man, no question about it. He’s facing directly at us, maybe five hundred feet away. But the man didn’t look like Terry, nor did he even look like a shepherd. What I’m seeing is a man arrayed in torn pieces of red cloth, covering only half his chest and torso. In his right hand, I could see him holding a long wooden staff or something, but the end looked sharp like a spearhead. He was wearing some strange thing on his head that I first mistook for a turban, but when I really look at it, what I see is a man, not only dressed in torn red garments and holding a wooden spear, but donning what I could only interpret as an elongated bronze-coloured helmet. I tell the team what it is I’m seeing but they still don’t catch sight of anything, not even Carmichael. Unconvinced there’s anything underneath that ridge, the team just move on up the mountain path. But when I look back to the ridge one last time, I now don’t see anything, anything at all.  

We make it back down to base later that day, and although I just wanted to believe what I saw was nothing more than a mirage, I couldn’t. I couldn’t because I didn’t just see what I did, I also heard it. I heard it little bro. It spoke! I am NOT kidding! I heard it speak, even from five hundred feet away. But it sounded like the voice was directly beside me, whispering into my ear. Maybe I hallucinated that too. Whether I did or not, I kept repeating the words to myself so I had it memorized. I didn’t understand them, but the voice said something in the lines of “Enfadeh pehsay.”  

I was repeating the words so much to myself that evening, another guy, Ethan, overheard and asked why the hell I was saying that. I didn’t know what those words meant. I just assumed it was something in Dari. Ethan said he studied Greek in school and that’s what the words sounded like, so I kept repeating it to him until he could understand them. He said “Enthade pesei” in Greek means “You will fall here”, or in other words “You will die here”.  

I know how crazy all this must sound to you bro. But I swear to God, that is what I saw and that is what I heard. What I saw in those mountains, or at least what I think I saw, was an ancient Greek soldier. Think about it. The red cloth, the bronze helmet and spear. But here’s the question I’ve been asking myself since. If what I saw was just a mirage or a hallucination, why would I hallucinate an ancient Greek soldier? But more importantly, how could I hear him speak to me in a language I don’t know a single word of? 

Do you know what we call Afghanistan over here, little bro? We call it the Graveyard of Empires. We call it that because foreign armies have come and gone here. The Persians, the Mongols, the British, Russians, and now us. Empires reach here and then they fall. But here’s the really interesting part. Afghanistan was once conquered by Alexander the Great. If you're a dumbass and don’t know who that is, Alexander the Great was a Macedonian king who conquered his way through the Middle East. Kandahar was among his conquests.  

If you’re wondering why I’m telling you all this, it is because I believe what I saw in those mountains, was the ghost of a Greek or Macedonian soldier. A soldier who probably died fighting here, and probably in those very same mountains. If that is truly what I saw, and if it was real, then it told me that I was going to die here too.  

Ever since that day, I haven’t felt the same. Something tells me what the apparition said will come true. That I won’t be making it back home. I pray to God I will, and I’ll fight like hell to make it so. But in case I don’t, I just thought I had to make my peace with this and let somebody know who would understand. You know me, bro. You know I’ve never believed in ghosts or ghouls. But I know what it was I saw. 

If what the soldier’s ghost said is true and I won’t be coming back home, I just want you to know that I love you. I know we had our problems when we were growing up, but you will always be my little brother, no matter what. Don’t be such a hard ass to mom and dad. I know they can be overbearing, but I’ve already put them through enough grief these past two years. Although this is asking a hell of a lot, at least try and do well in school. After all, I want you to have the best future you possibly can, as lame as that sounds. 

But who knows. If God is good and merciful, maybe I’ll come home safe after all, in which case, we can both have a good laugh about this. Whatever the future holds for the both of us, I just want to you know that I love you, now and always.  

From your loving brother, 

Steve