Apartment 14F: An Oriental Ghost Story (Uncut)

by Saunders, C. M.

  Chapter 2

  What led Jerry to believe his apartment was haunted?

  No single incident. There was a whole catalogue of events. A cumulative effect.

  At first, everything had been fine. He started his new job just two days after arriving in the country, which barely gave him time to unpack his bags and get over the jet lag. He much preferred things that way. No time to mope around questioning his decisions and inviting clouds of doubt. Make your choice and stick to it, see it through. That's what his dear old granddad always used to say, and it was bloody good advice.

  He slipped into his new role as oral English teacher and 'foreign expert,' whatever that meant, with aplomb. His students, mostly teenagers, were already schooled to a conversational standard in the English language. All Jerry had to do was keep things interesting in the classroom, stimulate their interest a little, and answer their daily barrage of questions. He was given a textbook and a syllabus to follow, and told that it didn't matter too much what he talked about provided he steered well clear of potentially volatile subjects like democracy, religion, the Tiananmen Square Massacre and the Tibet issue, none of which he had any great desire to talk about anyway.

  The important thing wasn't what they talked about, just as long as his students exercised their English. If he could get them animated by discussing subjects they were passionate about, usually in the form of sport, video games, celebrity culture or American TV shows and movies, then all the better.

  Although challenging, as jobs go it wasn't the most difficult one in the world, and he thought the majority of his students liked him. For them, his lively, borderline chaotic teaching style, borne out of necessity as he had no idea how else to get his ideas across, probably made a nice change. Traditional authoritarian Chinese teaching methods relied heavily on making students memorize word for word huge chunks of approved textbooks and then being able to recite them on demand. The main problem with this being that if something wasn't in the book they were learning, they didn't know about it.

  This was in direct contrast to the Western education model which encouraged students to think laterally and gather different viewpoints on any given subject to give themselves a better understanding of it. Also, in the West, if a student didn't want to do something, no one forced them. They just weren't graded. Whereby the Chinese method widely implemented the punishment and reward system.

  It was just what Jerry needed. A complete change, a bit of adventure, and a break from all the doom and gloom. Things weren't going so well for him in Britain. His latest relationship had self-destructed, much like the two before it, the recession meant that he had found himself pushing pieces of paper around various offices for a temping agency at minimum wage, and the threat of terrorism hung over everything like a bad smell. When he saw the opportunity to escape, if only for a year or so, he grasped it with both hands.

  The apartment allocated to him was in a nondescript, grey Soviet-style tower block on the eastern side of the city. But what it lacked in aesthetics, it more than made up for in other areas. To begin with it was in a good location, and it was also clean and newly decorated. It was only a fifteen minute walk from the school where he worked, and the road directly outside was peppered with shops, supermarkets, bars, clubs and endless restaurants. If he wanted to, he could sample a different cuisine every evening for a month and not eat at the same place twice. Thai, Japanese, Indian, Vietnamese, Russian, Korean, Italian, French, not to mention the countless different Chinese places. Peking duck, barbecue, hot pot, Sichuan, it was all here. There were even KFC's, McDonald's and Starbuck's everywhere, representing America's questionable contribution to world cuisine. Globalization in full effect.

  Perhaps as a legacy of the Great Famine, there was a special place in modern Chinese culture for food. Jerry was constantly surprised at their inventiveness and ingenuity. They had perfected countless ways to cook even the blandest things such as rice or eggs.

  The apartment building was equipped with a lift, which came complete with an affable old lady who stood in the metal box pushing buttons for at least ten or twelve hours a day, even on weekends. It was probably the most unnecessary occupation in the world, and couldn't possibly hold much hope of career advancement. What could she aspire to? Pushing buttons in a bigger building? Her position was the result of the Chinese 'a job for everybody' system. The same system which ensured that every shop, restaurant and business had at least twice as many personnel working there than was necessary, some doing the most futile and unnecessary tasks imaginable. Like pushing buttons in a lift.

  Jerry couldn't help feeling sorry for the old lift lady. She always looked so sad and bored. At first she seemed very wary and stand-offish, even more wary and stand-offish than the average Chinese person was in the company of laowai. It was obvious that her distrust ran deep. Jerry didn't know exactly why that was, but he made it a priority to change at least one person's opinion during his stay in China. He wanted to show the wary and distrustful that foreigners meant them no harm, and could even have a positive impact on their lives.

  The root of the problem seemed to be that the Chinese government had them all thinking that the entire world was against them, that no one wanted China to progress because everyone was scared of how powerful they could become.

  What utter bullshit.

  Polite conversation with the old lift lady was out of the question as Jerry spoke practically no Chinese, and she spoke no English. But he did his best to charm her, smiling and nodding every time they met, and she soon thawed. Sometimes she even looked pleased to see him. This, he took as a compliment. Despite the communication barrier they soon built up a kind of rapport, founded mainly on smiles and exaggerated hand gestures. He would feign a yawn to indicate he was tired after a long day teaching, or rub his belly and lick his lips when he was going out for dinner to convey his hunger. Not very subtle, but effective.

  Using this convoluted method, over a period of time Jerry managed to explain that he was a teacher from England, and the old lift lady told him that she was sixty-five, and had worked in the same lift for twenty-odd years. At least that was what he thought she was telling him. He even found out her name. Lin Xiao.

  The first unpleasant experience Jerry had in Beijing was the week he arrived, when he discovered that the building was prone to power-cuts. He's been sitting in the tiny living room of his apartment one evening watching a move he'd downloaded onto his laptop when suddenly everything around him was plunged into darkness, the only light being the dull glow emanating from the screen. His heart leaped into his chest as he instinctively went to the window and looked outside. There were twinkling lights as far as he could see, the Beijing skyline uninterrupted.

  Confused, Jerry had opened his door. Was the power cut confined to his apartment? A blown breaker or fuse? Or was it something afflicting the entire building?

  His question was answered when the automatic light in the corridor, activated by the sounds of the heavy metal apartment doors opening, failed to fire. After that, he went back inside, locked the door behind him, and watched the rest of the movie in the dark as the battery percentage slowly counted down to zero. When it did, Jerry went to bed, and when he woke up the next morning everything was back to normal. Or as normal as anything could be in Beijing.

  As unavoidable as it was, Jerry found the power cut not only inconvenient but disconcerting, and knowing it could happen at any time prompted him to stock up on candles, matches and a torch, all of which he kept in a spare drawer in the kitchen. It was just as well, because there were at least one or two outages a week. And that was just the ones he knew about. They could be happening every day when he was at work for all he knew.

  He suspected that the power-cuts were caused by the ongoing construction work that blighted the city on its march of progress. A pretty common occurrence if the ex-pat Internet message boards were to be believed. There could have been notifications, he often came home to find leaflets an
d pamphlets stuck to the notice board in the lobby of the building or to the door of his apartment. But they were all in Chinese characters, not even pin yin, the Anglicized version of Chinese he could look up in a phrasebook, so they made absolutely no sense to him.

  He was quite sure, however, that at least some of the power-cuts were unannounced and unexpected. On these occasions his thoughts often turned to Lin Xiao, the old lift lady, and what she did when she was trapped in that metal box with no lights and no means of escape. It must feel like being buried alive.

  Apart from the semi-regular power-cuts, another problem he had in those first few weeks was that he couldn't sleep. Not a wink. It was autumn and still very warm, so all-too often he found himself just laying awake in the dark, sweating profusely in his hard double-bed and listening to the sounds of the teeming city outside. The traffic on the road, the rumble of heavy machinery somewhere in the distance, the faint thumping of a dozen different strains of disco music, the footsteps and chatter of people walking on the street, the muffled murmurings of other residents in the apartment block. It was often said that in Shanghai people shopped, in Guangzhou they ate food, and in Beijing they talked. It was easy to see where that saying had come from.

  Sometimes, through the paper-thin walls, he heard his neighbours having sex and one night, somebody in a far-off place screamed. At least Jerry hoped it was a far-off place, it was hard to be sure just how far away it really was. He didn't know if the screamer was being tortured, murdered, surrendering to involuntary exclamations of elation, or if someone's television was just turned up too loud. It only lasted a couple of seconds then the scream faded and melted in with the cacophony of other sounds, but it still unnerved him beyond reason. If he had been at home in London he wouldn't have given the scream a second thought, he would have just put it down to teenagers messing around. But here, in this strange new environment, every negative was magnified tenfold and seemed altogether more ominous and threatening.

  And then there were other noises. Scrapes and dull thuds coming from above, and sounds of movement that sounded for all the world like they were coming from inside the apartment.

  At first, he thought it must be the people in the apartment upstairs. Only after a month or so did he realize that his apartment was number 14F. The fourteenth tier was the top floor of the building. There was nobody living above him.

  After that, he assumed the noises from above must be caused by rats or other vermin living in the walls. Although recently renovated, the building must be at least half a century old and probably played host to a multitude of hidden pests. In communal areas like the staircase you had to use during the power-cuts when the lift was out of service, the dirty concrete floors showed gaping cracks and flaky old plaster hung off the walls like peeling skin. Nobody ever cleaned those places. Image was everything in the new, forward-thinking PRC, and as long as no one visiting the building saw the cracks or the imperfections, they didn't matter. Out of sight, out of mind.

  The more Jerry lay in bed listening to the noises from above, the more he thought they were actually coming from the ceiling, not some place beyond the ceiling. If he closed his eyes and listened hard, it was almost as if somebody or something unseen was scurrying across the plaster directly above the bed.

  Sometimes they walked. His ears could distinguish actual footsteps. Other times, it sounded more like someone laboriously dragging themselves or crawling across the ceiling inch by painful inch. He even could pick out distinct scratches, like nails being drawn agonizingly across wood.

  He knew what he heard, but also knew that it couldn't be true. Nobody was crawling across the ceiling. He trusted all of his five senses, but trusted his eyes most of all. He believed in what he could see, what was put in front of him. And he saw nothing. Therefore, there was nothing to see. Eyes did not, could not, lie.

  Somewhat embarrassingly, mainly because of the weird noises he kept hearing after dark and his general anxiety, Jerry soon took to sleeping with the bedroom light on, like a frightened child. As each endless night wore on, eventually his body succumbed to sheer exhaustion and he drifted off to sleep, if only for two or three fitful hours.

  But even then, the sleep he snatched was not at all restful but plagued by nightmares. They weren't dreams as such, as they often had no coherent direction or thread, and they didn't feel like dreams. Instead, they were more like deluges of powerful raw sensations and emotions assaulting his senses. He could feel, hear, touch, taste, smell and see.

  First, he saw a woman's hair. Long, luxurious, black oriental hair. The kind of hair you could get lost in. The dreams usually started sensually, he felt the lush hair brush against his cheek or bare shoulder followed by the first stirrings of lust in his loins. The desire slowly welled up inside him, and he began to think he was in bed with a lover. In his detached, sleeping state, he reached out for an arm or a naked breast, but found none. All his floundering hand would find were cool, empty bed sheets.

  But confusingly, even though he had now confirmed that he was alone in the bed, the hair was still there. It gradually increased in mass and volume until there was nothing but the hair. Soon it covered the bed so he would be lying on it, lying in it. Long, spidery strands crawling over his naked chest to wrap themselves around his limbs like soft, yet unbreakable chains, holding him down. It tightened around his throat and then snaked over his lips into his mouth and up his nose, coarse and damp, choking and suffocating him.

  He opened his mouth to scream, but when he did so it opened the floodgates and masses of the stuff slid down his throat until he could feel it inside him, squirming and writhing like worms in his stomach.

  At that point, he invariably woke up. Rubbing his face, coughing, spluttering, gagging and sometimes screaming.

  In his heart of hearts he knew it was impossible, but a few times he awoke convinced that someone or something was sharing his bed with him. He could feel the depression in the mattress where the intruder lay softly breathing next to him, sense someone else's body heat, could even smell the scent of their skin.

  On those occasions, Jerry lay in the semi-darkness listening to his own thumping heart, too terrified to turn around or even move, until his mind finally managed to distinguish dream from reality. Then, upon realising he was actually wide awake, he would jump out of bed and throw back the covers, just to be sure.

  Of course, there was never anyone else in the bed with him.

  He was always alone.

  The rational part of his mind put the whole thing down to nerves, the pressure of expectation, and the stress caused by the myriad problems that go along with relocating to a new job not just in a different city, or even a different country, but a different continent. A wildly exotic continent with a different language and a different culture, so far removed from the one he was used to that sometimes it seemed like being in an entirely different world. Some kind of weird alternate universe.

  Then, he saw her for the first time.

  At least he thought it was a 'her.'

  It could just as easily have been an 'it.'

  Despite his occupation, he wasn't sure how to correctly address a supernatural entity. It hadn't come up in the classroom yet.

  He'd been taking a hot shower in the tiny bathroom, soaping the grime of the city off his skin. Clouds of steam billowed all around him, clinging to the mirror and the frosted glass of the bathroom door. He closed his eyes to wash his face and when he opened them again, through the steam-coated frosted glass, he caught a flash of a dark figure pass by the bathroom door outside.

  His first, thought was that somebody had somehow gained entry into the apartment. A burglar or a robber, even though he knew he had double-locked the front door when he came in and with him being fourteen floors up, the front door represented the only way in or out of the apartment. However, in terrifying situations like that, logic and reason leave you, and instinct takes over.

  Heart thumping in his chest, Jerry a
rmed himself with a can of shaving foam, realizing at once that it would be a woefully inadequate weapon to use against an intruder (but as he was beginning to discover, a frightened mind is seldom a rational one), wrapped a towel around the lower half of his dripping body to protect his modesty, and tentatively ventured out of the bathroom, leaving the shower running.

  First, he looked around the tiny living room. Then the even tinier kitchen. And finally, the bedroom. The search took mere seconds before he concluded that there was no one else in apartment 14F. Nothing was out of place. He was completely alone and the front door was still double-locked from the inside.

  But still he remained convinced that he had saw someone. Or something.

  Eyes didn't lie.

  Puzzled and confused, after searching the empty apartment for a second time, he went back into the bathroom to dry himself off. Frowning at his reflection in the mirror, he happened to glance down into the washbasin. There, he saw something that stopped him in his tracks.

  A hair. A single strand of long, black hair, stuck to the side of the white porcelain washbasin.

  Not that remarkable in itself. Hair is commonplace in bathrooms. The unusual thing was that it didn't belong to him. His hair was short and blond, while this hair was long and black. As far as he knew, no one else had set foot in the apartment since the day he'd moved in, let alone used the bathroom. He didn't hire a cleaner, had no need for an ayi, and the landlord who owned the building, the only other person who, to his knowledge, possessed a key, sported a fine head of silver hair. Jerry guessed that it hadn't been black for decades, and had probably never been this long.

  What was even more disturbing was the fact that the hair hadn't been there before. If it had been, he would surely have noticed it. He'd used that washbasin several times a day since he'd moved in. The hair had appeared, or been put there, in those few short seconds he was out of the shower searching for the intruder that wasn't there.