Yuki-no-Kura Village, Nagano, Japan
The snow fell early this year. Thick snow covered the trail leading to Yuki-no-Kura, a small village that didn't even have phone signals. I came not as a tourist, but at the request of Imamura-sensei, my old colleague who was now the only medical professional in the area.
"There's a girl," he said over the phone. "She doesn't speak, but she starts singing in her sleep. A song in an unknown language. Then all the villagers began dreaming the same thing."
Her name was Ayaka. She was twelve years old, her eyes sharp like ice, and she had never spoken a word. But every night, she sang through sleep. Not a children's song. The notes lingered in an odd, inconsistent, atonal pattern, as if a foreign instrument was playing a harmony never created by humans.
I recorded her singing. When I played it back at the clinic, I felt something crawl beneath my skin. Foreign words appeared in my mind, Zan'kai il'tah... Nar'Kath... Nyarlathotep...
By the third night, I began to dream. A well in the middle of a forest. Snow never touched it. Inside, yellow eyes stared from the darkness, and a whisper told me that "the voice must be taken back to its source."
Imamura was found dead the next morning, his body entangled in tree roots, mouth open, full of snow. Ayaka stood nearby, her eyes vacant, but her fingers still moved as if conducting an orchestra.
Among Imamura's belongings, I found an old page containing symbols identical to those I had seen in the notes of an American diver... the name of the town—New Innsmouth—was clearly written beneath the same symbol: The Open Eye.
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