Mayu, who got there first, tried to open the door, but at that moment, she sensed someone nearby. She looked and saw a large crowd of elderly people in the shadow of one of the houses.
“Aaaah!”
“Mayu!”
The rest of the family made it to the car, too.
Masafumi opened the door and immediately got into the driver’s seat.
“Everyone, get in the car! Hurry!”
“Got it!”
After Masafumi made sure the entire family was safely inside, he tried to drive off.
Thump…thump…thump!
Before they could get away, the elderly mob started pounding on the car’s doors.
“Stop!”
“Dang it!”
The group had started to bang on the windows and hood of the car, too.
“Dad, hurry!”
“I know! Outta the way!”
Masafumi honked the horn over and over as he plowed through the attackers surrounding the car and peeled out of there.
“Wh-what was that…?”
While they sped away, Mayu started to tear up from how scared she was.
If they’d stayed in the village, she was sure the old people would have captured them, too, and if they were caught, they would have been killed.
Mayu shivered, then she suddenly looked out at a building.
Her eyes settled on something she hadn’t noticed when they’d first arrived.
“Wait, is that…?”
She saw lots of dolls nailed into one of the house’s walls.
Some of them were headless, while others were charred black, and she even saw some that were bright red among the many, many dolls along the wall. Plus, she also saw the words cursed and lock away scrawled all over the walls and fences around the houses in something that looked a lot like red paint.
“What’s wrong with this place…?”
When Mayu and her family realized how strange the village was, they all couldn’t help but shudder.
They didn’t slow as they fled, and once they reached the slope, they went back up it and onto the side road they’d come from.
They’d traveled down the side road for about ten minutes.
The area around them had become dark before they knew it.
Mayu and the others were finally feeling settled again, but they noticed something odd. No matter how far they drove, they never found the tunnel.
“It only took two or three minutes to get to the slope after we left the tunnel, right?”
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure.”
They’d panicked when their navigation system and phones had stopped working, but the slope hadn’t been very far from the tunnel.
“Why haven’t we seen it yet, then…?”
Right at that moment, Mayu remembered what the old lady had said.
“Don’t you go around speeding. Not unless you want to head off onto another road…”
“Wait a sec!” Mayu yelled, which seemed to jog Masafumi’s memory, too. He appeared startled.
“So we’re on a different road, then? How could that be…?”
They were racing down a long, narrow road that continued straight ahead.
“How would we take the wrong road?”
“I can’t understand how we could, either…,” Minako added after Kazuya.
However, no matter how far they went, they never reached the tunnel.
“Dad, what do we do?!”
Mayu was becoming more and more frightened. They’d gotten away from the forbidden village, but now they couldn’t find their way back to the mountain road.
At that moment, Masafumi shouted, “Hey, look at that!”
They saw a village ahead of them. Unlike the last one, this village contained several newer buildings, and they saw people outside. It wasn’t the town at the base of the mountain, but at least it wasn’t creepy.
“Whew! We made it to a nearby village!”
“Yeah, this place looks like it’s fine!”
They drove into the village and saw that all the buildings and people seemed perfectly ordinary.
Mayu’s entire family felt relieved as they looked around.
“Okay, let’s try asking someone how we can get back to the mountain road we came from,” Masafumi said, and he parked the car in front of a store. He started up a conversation with the owner.
“Oh-ho, looks like you almost got yourselves in hot water.” The friendly fiftysomething shop owner commiserated with them. “I’m scared to think we have a village like that so close to home… I’ll need to warn the others around town. Could you point out the location to me later?”
“S-sure… But it’s really close by, so I thought you’d already know about it,” Mayu gingerly said, which made the shop owner laugh.
“Well, we never, ever leave town.”
“Huh…?”
“Anyway, I’ll go fetch a policeman, so why don’t you tell him all about it,” the shop owner said while beckoning Mayu’s family in. She told them to wait and headed off.
“Haah… I can’t believe what we’ve been through.”
Once Mayu was inside the air-conditioned store, she relaxed slightly.
“Looks like that kid was telling the truth,” Kazuya said, and Mayu nodded in agreement.
“That’s why I said we should’ve gone down the first road.”
“Sorry, really. Well, we’re fine now, so it all worked out.”
“It so didn’t work out!”
Mayu and Minako glared at Masafumi—who didn’t seem regretful in the slightest—as they took seats in the shop.
“But what did the shop owner mean earlier when she said they don’t leave this village?”
“I guess they’ve got everything they need here and don’t need to go anywhere else?”
“Huh, you think so? But it looks so empty here.”
“Well, now that you mention it…,” Minako said as she tilted her head quizzically.
Right then, Mayu noticed a notebook lying by a pay phone installed at the entrance of the shop.
“What’s this doing here?”
The notebook seemed to be hidden between the phone and its base.
Mayu picked it up without thinking much of it.
It seemed pretty beat-up and old.
“What’s it say?”
“Dunno.”
Mayu headed back to her family, and they all looked at the notebook together.
X X X X X
There is a cursed village no one knows about. It's dangerous, so you must never go near it, but even the most cautious person has no way of knowing the name of the village or where it's located. That's because not a single person who has entered the village gets out alive. All the friends I came with are gone. I'm the only one left now. If you see this journal, run right now. The village's name is
X X X X X
“What is this?!”
The writing seemed to continue.
Mayu cocked her head as she turned the page.
And there, on that page, were the words:
Sugisawa Village!!!
The words were eerie, as though the person who had written them had been filled with fear.
As he looked at the writing, Kazuya blurted out, “Do you think this is about that village from earlier?”
They hadn’t been able to read it properly because of the trees blocking it, but the sign at the other village’s entrance had said Sugi on it.
“Then someone who went through something scary while at that village must have written this?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“But what’s it doing here?”
Mayu started to wonder why the notebook had been hidden at the pay phone.
“Well, I hadn’t realized someone wrote something like that.”
Suddenly, they heard a voice.
Mayu’s entire family turned toward it and saw the shop owner standing nearby.
“Really now, they shouldn’t have,” she said as she glared at the family.
Behind her was an entire group of villagers. Half of them carried lit torches, and the other half held something very different—sickles, which were a grisly red from blood.
“Huh…?”
The sight of them filled Mayu with terror.
At the same time, she saw the sign behind the villagers. Lit by the torches, it said, WELCOME TO SUGISAWA!
“Wait, Sugisawa…?” Mayu murmured to herself, and the shop owner grinned.
“That’s the name of our village, of course.”
“““Welcome to Sugisawa.”””
The shop owner and the sickle-carrying mob gave this sinister greeting as they raised their weapons and closed in on Mayu and her family.
It was morning. A single car raced down a mountain road.
A middle-aged man sat in the driver’s seat, along with his wife, who sat on the passenger side.
In the back was a boy wearing a red hood. It was Fushigi.
The couple had picked him up in their car while he’d been walking along the mountain road.
“Wow, a forbidden village, huh?”
The woman suddenly turned to Fushigi and asked, “But why are there two of them?”
“Well…” Fushigi began to explain. “One attacks anyone who wanders in, and the other one warns people not to enter that village. The village that attacks people is called Sugisawa Village, and the one that warns people is called Sugimoto Village. After Sugisawa Village attacks outsiders, they take them away somewhere.”
“You can’t be serious…”