The rain fell, hard and fast, after a whole day of sun. The road under my feet felt wet and warm even through the rubber of my shoes, and steam seemed to hide the sides of the street in a fine mist. We were walking next to the jungle, almost, but the rain seemed to have quietened even the cicadas, and silence hung around us like a net.

I asked him where the place was. "I've only been here once or twice when I was younger," I explained, "so I don't really remember how the road goes."

"Neither do I," he said. He flicked his phone on and shook it lightly, clicking his lips in disappointment. "It's an old road, so I wouldn't expect Google to be entirely updated."

He walked on a little faster now, running his hands along the side of the road. There were new corrugated metal panels here, clean and white, with the occasional DANGER - KEEP OUT stencil hung at intervals. Behind that, the only sounds were the buzzing of cicadas.

Seeing my concern, he rapped on a panel reassuringly. "There's an abandoned village around here. You see these boards up all the time around potential exploration sites -- there's no work to be done yet, but the government doesn't want people getting hurt."

He talked about his adventures a lot, even when we were alone. He still dreamed of finding the next Syonan Shrine, or at least something that no one else had documented before, though this seemed entirely different. There was no camera to be brought today, and his shorts indicated to me that he did not expect us to go in very far. This somehow seemed a testament to faith than to ambition; I was there to prove a point.

"So when did you first see this?" I asked.

"I can't remember," he admitted. "I didn't take photos then, either. But I think it must have been three or four months back -- these panels definitely weren't there."

Soon we reached a place where the road wound, almost implausibly, into a series of hairpin turns, lined with old concrete posts. They were painted white, and must have been formidable enough, once, to guard against the trail's ravines. Now they stood but halfway up my thigh. He reached an area where the pillars were toppled, and beckoned me to come in.

"Must've been one heck of a race car," I muttered. He looked to me, eyes wide. When he said nothing I explained: "In my mother's time, this used to be a race course. The winding turns are good for drifts, and this was always an out-of-the-way road."

"For sure," he said. He smoothed a hand across his shirt, for luck perhaps, and began waving it forward, as if feeling for something in front of him. "Ah, here."

He closed his hand around what I thought was a liana, or some hanging leaf; presently he brushed his hand across it, and from everywhere in the jungle there came a vast metallic scraping, as if the metal panels around us were rearranging themselves, closing in, sealing off the forest from unsafe explorers. Gray, flakes of it, the colour of the sea, drifted onto the forest floor. I opened my mouth to say something, but then he lifted his hand and stepped through the gap, and the forest was silent once more.