The sense of calm stayed with Akiko as she made her way home, only to suddenly vanish as she turned a corner. Her stomach was churning, her heart pounding, and her breath coming in gasps, as if she had just run up a hill. She put one had on a wall for support, and just stood there, looking around, while she calmed down a bit.

There was nothing obvious to cause such a reaction; just houses, some cars, and a building site. She looked around again, but it still seemed to be an absolutely typical Kawasaki scene. Despite the absence of anything frightening, her body refused to calm down completely. She tried taking a few deep breaths, and nearly retched. There was a scent of rot on the air, decaying meat and sour milk mixed with faeces. She searched for a source, and found her eyes drawn to the building site.

The sign said “Wakabayashi Constructionâ€, which meant more to her now than it had that morning, and the workmen seemed to be clearing the land ready for building. Men with chain-saws and a digger were in the process of cutting down a bamboo grove, the tall stems falling to earth with a crash to be dragged away as the digger pulled up the roots.

The odour still nagged at her, and at the edge of hearing Akiko thought she could hear someone screaming. It seemed to be coming from the building site, but even as she drew closer she realised that that wasn’t possible; quite apart from the fact that the workmen would have heard it, the screaming was from too far away.

Still, something about the work held her attention, and she had been examining the scene carefully for some time before she realised what she was doing. With no idea of what she was looking for, she couldn’t say why she had to keep looking, but she couldn’t look away.

There was a flicker of motion at the edge of her vision, but when she turned to look it was just an area of bamboo stumps, waiting for the digger to root them up. Another bit of motion, this time at the base of a falling stem of bamboo, but, again, she couldn’t see anything definite when she looked again. The stench of rot was getting stronger, although she had become somewhat used to it, and the screaming continued, an almost-inaudible accompaniment to the scene.

The shape of the bamboo became intensely clear to her, each stem stretching up to the sky, deep green and ringed, proudly proclaiming its life and its place in the world, until the chain-saw bit into the base, bringing it tumbling down to earth. The fall of each stem started to affect her like a physical blow, a poke in the stomach that got stronger with every death. She found herself holding on to the chain-link fence for support, desperate to look away, but unable to.

And then she saw something else in the rapidly-disappearing grove, something moving between the dying stumps, jumping eagerly from one fallen stem to the next, as if feeding on them. The workmen were oblivious to its presence, but Akiko could see it getting bigger.

It was black, the black of mould on a wall that hadn’t been cleaned for years, the black of mildew on an old bath, of rotten clothes left in a gutter for months. Every time it jumped, there was a stronger wave of the rotting stench, and every time it crouched over a stump the sound of screaming got thinner, as if one voice among many had been silenced.

She couldn’t make out a shape for it at first; it seemed to have too many legs, and then too few, and she wasn’t sure whether it had a head at all. It never stopped moving, and although it was darker than the gathering gloom it was still half-lost in the shadows. She felt her heart and breathing speeding up again as her fear built up.

What <em>was</em> it?

It stopped, then, in the middle of the devastated grove, and somehow she knew that it had turned towards her. She saw light within it, the light of smoky fires, and there was a chemical reek as two points of light, eyes, she realised, fixed on her.

Her whole body shivered, as if a dozen cold, slimy hands caressed her skin at once, probing at her body, touching her everywhere. Nausea rose within her, as she felt dirtier than she ever had, and the eyes got bigger as the thing left the grove to approach her, the stench getting stronger with every step it took. Akiko couldn’t move. It was as if she was in mud up to her knees, mud through which worms were crawling, brushing against her skin, stinging her if she tried to take a single step.

“It’s a tragedy, isn’t it?â€

The sensations all vanished at the sound of the voice, and Akiko turned to see an old woman standing next to her, looking at the grove, where the workmen continued to fell it.

“Yes.â€ Akiko couldn’t manage any more. She still felt filthy, contaminated, but there was nothing holding her legs any more.

“I remember when there were groves like that all round here, you know. That was one of the few that were left, and now it’s gone, too.â€

“It’s a real shame. I’m sorry, please excuse me.â€ The woman nodded, as Akiko turned and walked away from the building site, picking up the pace as she remembered the thing within the grove, getting faster as her fear returned, until she was running home as fast as she could.

As soon as she got back to her flat, grabbing the note the landlord had left on the door and dropping it in the hallway, she started the bath, pulling her clothes off as quickly as she could and dropping them straight into the washing machine before washing herself in the shower.

She had been soaking in the bath for half an hour before she began to feel clean again.