Signs for Lost Children by Sarah Moss (top ten ebook reader TXT) 📕

the door’s weight between his fingers as he can lest it squeak or rumble, Tom closes it and finds himself at last alone.

The sun has risen behind the hill, but the forest around the house is still in deep shade, and the grass heavy with dew. Nothing is awake, he thinks, hearing only trees breathing in the wind, and behind them, the slow heartbeat of the Japan Sea, but as he moves away from the house, as the woods close around him, a bird calls above his head, and then another answers. Although he means to walk, even to swim, he stands still as a spy while the forest resumes its conversation: more bird-talk, high in the canopy and at his own height in the undergrowth, something small rustling near at hand and something bigger further away. There is a drift of spice in the morning air, like cinnamon or nutmeg, and the suggestion of heavy flowers. Lilies or orchids, funeral flowers that don’t grow outside in England. The forest floor is blanketed with last year’s half-composted leaves, a lattice of fallen branches interwoven with shrubs. Tom picks his way over to a pathway leading inland, uphill.

Threading the trees, the path is barely wide enough for one person and it winds so he can’t see more than a few tree trunks ahead. He wanted a vista, somewhere to stand back and take a wider view, but this is like pushing through hundreds of the half-curtains, his gaze repeatedly veiled. Still, someone has made a path so it must lead to something. There may be a summit, an achievement. He speeds up, feels a flush of sweat across his back and tightening in his thighs. Good. The bamboo leans over the path, meets above his head, and dark fronds reach down to brush his face. If it gets much narrower, he thinks, he will have to turn back, but he knows he won’t. And then over the drumming of blood in his ears and the hiss of bamboo leaves, he hears a more purposeful sound. There is someone else, or something else, moving on the hillside, something that pushes through vegetation. He stops. He had forgotten that there are bears. We always carry a bell, Makoto said, because bears prefer to avoid humans unless they are starving or the human is near a cub, but they will attack if they are surprised. The creature is getting nearer. He should shout, he supposes, or sing, but the instinct to hide is too strong. Tom freezes, barely breathing, willing his heart itself to beat more softly. The bamboo beside the path ahead bows and waves wildly, and then the bear (or boar, or wolf, or maybe person) stops also. Perhaps it can hear his respiration, his circulation, the seep of sweat in his pores and the shedding of dust from his skin. Perhaps it can smell him. They wait, Tom and the other. They breathe, listen. And then the bamboo flattens and he catches—maybe—a glimpse of a dark flank as the thing lumbers away. He leans on the green canes, breathing loud now and fast, black blood bounding behind his eyes. His vision blurs, but perhaps it was just a monkey, a Japanese macaque, or a badger (are there badgers in Japan?). He is unhurt, anyway, well and strong and alone on a hillside in Japan. After a moment, hearing the birdsong again and the bamboo sighing in the breeze, he continues, as if the creature’s turning away were a kind of acceptance, as if it is all right for him to be here now.

The bamboo ends, and now he can see down through the trees, and up through more trees. He crosses the curve of the hill, the sun warm on his shoulders. Steps lead up through the wood, stone steps so high that sometimes he has to brace his hands on his knee to pull himself up. They go on, up out of sight, and he follows although it is really time, high time, he was turning back to the house and Makoto and the day’s work. There, at least, there will be achievement, measurable change; the building is almost complete and the lenses sent from England ahead of his coming wait in their boxes. Some things are the same, gravity and light. Some things do here exactly what they do at home. He is not obliged to creep through the woods in search of something to understand. He chooses it.

There are a hundred and five, or maybe four, steps, and over the last few stand wooden arches like the letter pi. He comes panting, red faced, into a clearing, and is on top of the hill, looking down over the treetops towards the house, whose shutters are now open, and the beach where turquoise waves spread themselves on white sand, and the headland where the waves are darker and bounce glistening against the cliff and from the rocks that now, at low tide, are plain to see, at least by daylight and on a clear day. Stone figures stand around Tom, and in the centre of the clearing is a wooden building with an open veranda. He approaches the sculptures. The further ones are no more than slabs of rock set on end, rounded and smoothed by years of wind and rain, but in this company their curves suggest shoulders, waists. The nearer figures have stone draperies, or perhaps a form of armour, head-dresses shaped like bishops’ mitres and snarling, caricature expressions on their stone faces. Someone has tied cloths around the necks of several, apparently at intervals over many months because the some are wisps and rags where others are only tattered and faded. It was a considerable act of faith, he thinks, to carry such stones through the forest and up a hundred stairs. He imagines women climbing up here to give scarves and bibs to these idols, priests struggling through winter weather to conduct ceremonies here where