4. 臼声

The helicopter descended through the shredded fog like a mechanical locust, its rotors whipping the snow into blinding spirals. Sakuma stood with his arms raised, his body trembling from cold and exhaustion, while Tanaka remained motionless beside him, his bloody face turned toward the buried village. Two figures in orange rescue suits jumped from the skids and ran toward them, their boots sinking into the fresh powder.

"Are you injured? Can you walk?" One of the rescuers, a woman with a clipped professional voice, grabbed Sakuma's arm and steadied him. "We received a distress signal from an avalanche beacon. There was no GPS, but we triangulated the impact area."

Sakuma nodded, his throat too dry to speak. He pointed at the white expanse where the village had been. "There are people. Buried. At least a dozen."

The rescue team exchanged glances. The woman shook her head. "We flew over the valley. No structures, no smoke, no signs of life. Are you sure you're not confused from exposure?"

Sakuma looked at Tanaka, who had not moved. The doctor's eyes were fixed on the snow, his lips moving in a silent recitation. Sakuma pulled the rescue woman close and whispered, "The village was there. I lodged there for three days. There are bodies. I need to speak to the prefectural police immediately."

The woman studied his face, then nodded. "We'll get you both to Matsumoto General. You can make a full statement there."

They were lifted into the helicopter, strapped to stretchers, and flown out of the valley. As the craft rose above the ridge, Sakuma looked down and saw the mountain as he had never seen it before—a vast white shroud, seamless and absolute, hiding every trace of the shrine, the clinic, the well, and the hundred-year-old rule that had governed a community of ghosts. The fog rolled back in, swallowing the peaks, and then there was nothing but cloud.

At the hospital, Sakuma was treated for mild hypothermia and frostbite on his fingertips. He refused sedatives and demanded a phone. He called his supervisor in Matsumoto, then the prefectural police, then the Metropolitan Police Department's Cold Case Unit. He dictated a preliminary report, describing the village, the missing investigator Miki, the suspicious death of Oba, and the underground chamber where he had found the old man—Tanaka Haruki, the original boy who had survived the sulfur vents.

Three hours later, a detective from the Nagano Prefectural Police arrived at his room—a stocky man with a shaved head and weary eyes. He introduced himself as Inspector Ueda and sat on the edge of the bed, flipping open a notebook.

"Your report is... unusual, Prosecutor Sakuma. You claim that an entire village conspired to execute an investigator for asking questions, and that this same village has been practicing a form of extrajudicial exile since the Showa era. You also claim that the current village doctor is the nephew of a boy who killed his father in 1983 and was sent to die in a sulfur mine."

"That's correct."

"And you say this boy—the original—survived and lived in a mine shaft for forty years, and that he detonated explosives to trigger the avalanche that buried the village?"

Sakuma hesitated. "I don't know if he detonated them intentionally. But the explosion came from inside the mountain, and he was the only person down there."

Ueda closed his notebook and sighed. "We sent a ground team to the valley. They found no village. They found no roads, no structures, no debris. Only snow and rock and a few scattered pine trees. The avalanche was massive—it covered the entire basin to a depth of at least fifteen meters. It will take months to excavate, if we ever do."

"No village? That's impossible. I walked through it every day. I have photographs."

Sakuma reached for his camera, which had been placed on the bedside table, and turned it on. The screen was black. He pressed buttons, removed the battery, tried again. Nothing. The memory card was corrupted, the files unreadable. His notebook was still in his coat, but when he opened it, the pages were soaked and blurred, the ink running into illegible smears.

Sakuma's blood turned cold. "Someone tampered with my equipment. At the hospital, or on the helicopter—someone erased my evidence."

Ueda's expression was unreadable. "Prosecutor, you've had a traumatic experience. Avalanche survivors often experience memory distortion. The cold, the lack of oxygen, the psychological shock—they can create vivid false memories."

"I didn't imagine a village of twelve houses, a shrine with a stone platform, and a doctor who wrote me a map."

"We found no doctor in the registry. Tanaka Kohei—we ran the name. No medical license, no graduation record, no birth certificate. He doesn't exist in any database."

Sakuma stared at him. "Then you found my body at the bottom of the well. Where is Tanaka? He was on the helicopter with me. He was treated in the same emergency room."

Ueda shook his head. "We only brought one civilian out of that valley. You. The rescue team reported no other survivors. They saw no second person standing beside you."

Sakuma's heart hammered. He had spoken to Tanaka on the ridge. He had grabbed his arm, pulled him behind the rocks. He had seen the blood on his forehead, the exhaustion in his eyes. But the rescue team—they had run straight to him, strapped him to a stretcher, and flown away. They had not even glanced at the spot where Tanaka had stood.

He closed his eyes and forced himself to breathe. The old man's lullaby echoed in his mind, wordless and haunting. He had not escaped. He had been carried out, but the village had come with him—not in his camera, not in his notebook, but in his memory, which was now the only surviving record.

"I need to go back," he said. "I need to see the site."

Ueda stood. "That's not possible. The area is designated a high-risk avalanche zone. No one enters without special clearance. And frankly, Prosecutor, I'm not convinced you're fit for field work. You need rest. You need evaluation."

"Then evaluate me. But don't close this case. I am not insane."

Ueda studied him for a long moment, then nodded slowly. "I'll keep the file open. But I'm going to be honest with you—without physical evidence, without witnesses, without any record of this village existing, there is nothing we can investigate. You are asking us to dig through fifteen meters of snow based on a story that sounds like a folk tale."

"It's not a tale. It's a crime scene."

"Prove it."

Ueda left the room, and Sakuma was alone with the hum of the hospital lights and the distant clatter of nurses. He lay back on the pillow, his mind racing. His evidence was gone, his witness was gone, and the village was gone. But he still had the silk fragment—it had been in his inner pocket, pressed against his chest, protected by his body heat.

He reached inside his hospital gown and pulled out the oilcloth bundle. It was still there, still dry, still folded. He unwrapped it and looked at the faded pink fabric, the embroidered name "Tanaka Haruki," the jagged red thread. This was the only physical proof he had. But without a context, without a location, it was just a scrap of cloth—a relic of a story that no one would believe.

He hid it under his pillow and stared at the ceiling. The lullaby came back to him, louder this time, as if the mountain were singing directly into his ear. He covered his ears, but the melody persisted, rising and falling, wordless and eternal.

Two days later, Sakuma checked himself out of the hospital against medical advice. He rented a car and drove to the nearest town at the foot of the mountain range. The roads were plowed, the shops open, the world normal. He stopped at a local history museum and asked about the village of Egonoki.

The curator, an elderly man with thick glasses, squinted at him. "Egonoki? That name hasn't been used in fifty years. It was a mining settlement, abandoned after the sulfur mine closed in the 1970s. The families moved out, the structures were demolished. There's nothing there but forest."

"There was a village there until three days ago."

The curator laughed. "Young man, I've lived in this region my entire life. I've hiked those ridges for forty years. There's no village. There's a few old foundation stones, maybe a collapsed shrine, but no houses, no clinic, no well. You must have confused it with somewhere else."

Sakuma thanked him and left, his mind churning. The village had been erased—not by the avalanche alone, but by a concerted effort that spanned decades. The official records had been purged. The maps had been redrawn. The history had been rewritten. And now, the only living memory of Egonoki was locked inside a prosecutor who had walked through its streets and spoken to its ghosts.

He drove to the trailhead where he had left his rental car three days earlier. The tarpaulin was still there, the car untouched. He opened the trunk and retrieved his backup equipment—a second camera, a spare notebook, a satellite phone. He powered on the satellite phone and found a single voicemail, left three hours ago.

"Sakuma-san, this is Inspector Ueda. We found something at the avalanche site. A body, partially exposed by the melt. The snow is receding faster than expected. You might want to come see it."

Sakuma's heart raced. He called back, but Ueda's line was busy. He tried again, left a message, and then made a decision. He would drive to the valley perimeter, find the rescue base, and demand access. He had the silk fragment. He had the memory. And somewhere under that snow, the truth was still buried—waiting to be unearthed.

He started the engine and turned onto the mountain road. As the wheels bit into the frozen asphalt, he glanced at the rearview mirror. A figure stood at the edge of the road, wrapped in a white coat, its face obscured by the falling snow. Sakuma slammed the brakes, but when he turned around, the figure was gone.

He pressed his forehead against the steering wheel and listened. The lullaby had stopped. In its place was silence—a silence so profound that he could hear his own heartbeat, slow and steady, like a drum counting down to something inevitable.

He drove on, into the fog, toward the buried village and whatever lay beneath.

And in his pocket, the silk fragment grew warm against his chest, as if the dead were stirring, reaching up through the frozen earth to claim the only witness who had refused to forget.