Apartment 14F: An Oriental Ghost Story (Uncut)

by Saunders, C. M.

  Public image was everything. Sure, the company probably couldn't have prevented the young girl dying. But maybe if the landlord had been more conscientious he would have noticed something was wrong sooner. Or if one of those people that complained about the crying and screaming took the time to reach out to the girl instead of turning the other cheek, then maybe things would have turned out differently.

  It was the famous 'courtyard mentality' in full effect. Unless something directly threatened their family, living space, or job, their own personal 'courtyard' in which they exist, then they couldn't care less.

  A story often told to foreigners to help them understand the intricacies of having a 'courtyard mentality' is the story of the Chinese man with an apple. After he finishes eating the apple he doesn't want to leave the core in his own courtyard, as it will look untidy and then start to rot, attracting insects and vermin. So he throws it over the wall into the next courtyard where he doesn't have to look at it. The person who owns this courtyard finds the discarded apple core and in turn throws it over their wall, into the next courtyard. And so on and so on; the apple core is perpetually thrown around, from courtyard to courtyard, with no one taking on the responsibility of actually putting it in the bin, no matter how simple the task might be.

  Out of sight, out of mind.

  “What did they do with the girl's body?” asked Jerry, more in hope than expectation of a satisfactory answer. Suddenly, it seemed very important.

  Yin Tao shrugged his shoulders. He didn't know. How could he?

  Maybe that was the root of all the problems in this damned apartment, Jerry surmised. Not the fact that a girl actually died here, or even that her festering corpse lay undiscovered for weeks. Perhaps the crucial thing was that her body had simply been thrown away, dumped in a remote lake or left in a filthy dumpster somewhere.

  Like a rotting apple core ejected from the courtyard.

  Fang Liu probably wasn't even afforded a simple funeral service. It wouldn't be surprising if her family and friends, whoever and wherever they may be, didn't even know what had happened to her. As far as the parents were concerned, their little girl had hit the big time and moved to the city to set up home with a well-to-do foreigner. They probably thought she was too busy to visit them, too busy to call.

  Or perhaps they'd come looking for her, but didn't know where to look. Beijing was a big place, and people went missing all the time. Just like in any other big city.

  Jerry was turning all this over in his mind, trying to make sense of it all, when suddenly and without warning, the lights flickered and went out.

  Chapter 6

  Yin Tao audibly gasped as the room was plunged into darkness.

  “Don't worry,” said Jerry, more calmly than he felt. “It's just a power-cut. Happens all the damn time.”

  “This not good.” replied Yin Tao, his voice little more than an weak croak. He sounded like a frightened child. “This not good at all.”

  It lives under your bed.

  Dead, afraid and alone.

  Under your bed...

  The words floated around Jerry's head like a mantra as he rose from the sofa, stumbled through the darkness into the kitchen, and felt around for the drawer where he kept his torch and candles.

  Finally, his hand clasped the drawer handle. With a sigh of relief he pulled it open and frantically rummaged around inside. He half-expected his ghostly roommate to have chosen that night of all nights to hide it. But thankfully the torch was there, right where he'd left it. He turned it on and a silver ray of light slewed through the darkness like an ethereal blade. In the next room he heard Yin Tao mumble something.

  Even after he had pieced together the tragic tale of the broken-hearted girl, Jerry couldn't see any solution to his troubles. There seemed to be no quick fix. Or any fix at all. If the ghost of the girl who had died her haunted the apartment, how the hell could Jerry put her to rest? Or even communicate with her? And he still had no clue as to what had happened to Chris Rowe. Like a spider's web in its complexity, there was no end to this mystery. Every time he made a breakthrough it led to yet more twists and turns, and more questions.

  Jerry hurriedly retrieved a fist full of candles from the drawer and took them back into the sitting room where Yin Tao waited. There, he lit two and strategically placed them on the coffee table where the flames danced and flickered, casting leaping shadows on the walls. It was in no way an adequate substitute for an electric light, but better than nothing. Then he and his classroom assistant sat in silence for a while, cradling their beers.

  Jerry could sense Yin Tao's fear. It was almost palpable. And he silently admired the intrepid young Chinese man more then ever for standing by him. Sitting in the dark, in a haunted apartment, waiting for a ghost to appear, really was taking the role of 'teaching assistant' to the extreme.

  Jerry was thankful for the company, but couldn't help wondering what they were going to do if the dead girl did decide to manifest herself. It wasn't like they could capture her and keep her in a beer bottle like a modern-day genie. Maybe Yin Tao could reason with her in Chinese. Persuade her to leave. Cross over to the other side, or wherever it is you go when you die.

  The bottom line was that Jerry just felt better having someone else around. Someone else to share the experience.

  He had a habit of sitting in the living room with a cold beer most evenings. It was the perfect way to unwind after a long day in the class room. Back in England he would waste his time watching TV, but Chinese TV was truly awful so instead he used the time to sit and reflect on the day.

  That was when most of the unexplained occurrences took place.

  It could be because there, sitting alone, he was more attuned to his surroundings than he was when engaged in some other activity. Who was to say weird things didn't happen constantly, but when he was out there was nobody to recognize the fact. What was the saying? If a tree falls in a forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it still make a sound?

  However, given what Lin Xiao the lift lady had told them, he couldn't shake the feeling that the ghost girl saved her energy for the evening, when Jerry was home. If that were the case, the question became, was she lonely and doing it to try to get attention? Or was she trying to drive him away?

  Even knowing what to expect, this night felt somehow different.

  Maybe it was the sequence of revelations that had preceded this point. The blind old fortune teller, the lift lady's macabre story. Whatever the reason, tonight the atmosphere in the apartment seemed to be charged, pregnant with anticipation. Jerry knew that somehow or other, this night was going to be a tipping point. For better or for worse, something life-changing was going to happen.

  Strangely, he wasn't afraid anymore. He was nervous for Yin Tao, but not afraid. His reserves of fear had been tapped into so often in the past few weeks that the emotion had been practically drained from him, if such a thing was possible. What filled him now was considerably duller than fear. It was more a mixture of resigned helplessness and frustration. This was the situation he was in, like it or not, and he had to deal with it.

  He would rather be afraid. Fear is sharp, it keeps you on edge. You can harness it the same way you can harness anger and use it as a tool. Fear is one of self-preservation's most powerful allies.

  But this awful feeling of uselessness was much worse. He could feel it burrowing inside him like a cancer. And it worried him more than fear ever had. It felt like being a witness to a murder, and knowing that when the murderer finished what he was doing, he was coming for you.

  Just then, there was a soft knock at the front door.

  At first Jerry ignored it, thinking it was merely a signal to herald the start of the evening's ghoulish activity. The place was so full of weird bumps and knocks that he'd given up trying to distinguish one from another. Besides, he never had visitors.

  Cursing under his breath, he raised his beer bottle to his lips. Here it comes.<
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  There was a second knock, this one harder than the last. Not for the first time, it occurred to him that if he drank enough alcohol, he could get so inebriated that he would be oblivious to his uninvited guest. She could spontaneously materialize in front of him and dance around the room like a ballerina, climb the walls or trash the whole place, and he would be too drunk to care.

  Yin Tao, however, wasn't buying it and got up to answer the door.

  To Jerry's surprise, he heard voices. Actual, physical, human voices, speaking Mandarin. Speaking in tongues. Either Yin Tao had got the ghost talking, or a real live visitor had just entered the fray.

  He craned his neck to see his assistant engaged in conversation with Lin Xiao, the old lift lady who doubled as a cleaner. She was jabbering away and pointing emphatically at a white plastic bag she held in her scrawny hands. This was the first time Jerry had ever seen her outside her domain, and it only added to the surreal atmosphere. It was like walking down a familiar street in Europe and suddenly catching sight of an elephant.

  He wanted to ask what was going on.

  He probably should do just that.

  But Jerry found that he didn't care anymore. He was still trying to process all the information he had uncovered thus far, there was simply no room in his head for any more.

  He didn't even care when the old lift lady stepped into his darkened apartment, retrieved what appeared to be a joss stick of some kind from her white plastic bag, lit it with a match, and started walking around waving it like a magic wand and muttering under her breath.

  He already had the company of Yin Tao and the ghost, what would one more guest matter? The more the merrier. Hell, let's have a party. Tonight, it was an open house.

  But whatever the lift lady was burning smelled funny.

  What was that? Some kind of Chinese herb? What was she saying? And how the hell did she get out of the lift in the middle of a power cut?

  As attentive as ever, Yin Tao seemed to read his mind, “She trying to fix it, Jelly. She come help you. Now the lift no work due to power cut off, she have time. She say sorry to dead girl and ask her leave you alone and go where she belong now please.”

  Yeah, that'll work.

  Uninvited, Lin Xiao entered the bedroom, Jerry's inner sanctum. Curiosity got the better of him and he took his torch to investigate, quickly followed by his faithful assistant. By torchlight he could see the lift lady standing over his bed, still muttering softly and waving her smelly joss stick thing around the place.

  Then she abruptly stopped talking and sucked in a deep, rasping breath. Jerry heard a whimper, some faint scratching that sounded like nails on wood, and felt Yin Tao grab his upper arm and squeeze hard.

  She was here.

  The guest of honour had arrived.

  All three of them now stood over the luxurious bed where Jerry had lain his head for the past couple of months, blissfully unaware of the horrors that had occurred in apartment 14F before his arrival.

  The room suddenly became very cold. So cold that wispy plumes of exhaled breath rose from their mouths and noses like smoke. And was that another sickly sweet smell, hidden beneath the burning joss stick?

  Flowers.

  Then, Jerry heard the heart-wrenching sound of muffled sobbing. It seemed to be coming from a very long way away. He cocked his head. “Does anyone else hear that?”

  Yin Tao paused and looked about him warily. “What is it, Jelly?”

  “I can hear someone crying.”

  The young Chinaman swallowed hard, his throat making an audible click. “I hear it, too.”

  The volume of the sobbing rose and fell, as if it were a signal coming through on an old transistor radio. Yin Tao and the lift lady looked around the room warily and Jerry swept the torch around for their benefit, revealing what he already knew. There was no one else in the room except them.

  As terrible as the situation was becoming, at that point Jerry couldn't help but feel a twinge of satisfaction. Now he had witnesses. Other people were here experiencing the same ghostly phenomena as he had been silently suffering for months. Finally, he had validation. Irrefutable proof that he wasn't going insane. Oh, the relief!

  Of course, the flip side of suddenly having proof of the supernatural was that he now had to process the new information, and deal with it.

  “Where is she? I don't see her,” It was Yin Tao, his voice quivering and his eyes darting feverishly around the chilly bedroom. He still held Jerry's upper arm, and his grip tightened in fear. Jerry had to prise his fingers away before he could bend down. He knew exactly where she was. The only place he had never thought to check before.

  It lives under your bed.

  Dead, afraid and alone.

  Under your bed...

  Holding the torch in one hand Jerry knelt, and was dimly aware of Yin Tao and the old lift lady doing the same on either side of him. His heart thudded in his chest as he cautiously lifted the bedsheets and shone the torch light into the gloomy cavity under the bed.

  Someone let out a grunt, an almost primal exhalation of fear, and Yin Tao tried to scramble away on his haunches. Jerry, however, was transfixed.

  There she was.

  The girl.

  The cause of everything.

  Where she had been hiding all along.

  She lay on her side, curled up in the fetal position, pale knees drawn up to her gently heaving chest. She looked more like a child than a woman and couldn't have been more than eighteen or nineteen years old, even taking into account how much younger the average oriental girl appears in comparison to their western contemporaries. She was wearing what looked like a white gown or nightdress, and long black unkempt hair spilled over her slender shoulders. At first her face was turned away into the darkness of the alcove, but as they watched, she slowly turned towards them.

  She was beautiful, her flawless features and snow-white complexion filling Jerry with longing. She looked so delicate, like a little china doll. Only the deep sadness contained in her large, dark, oval eyes and the wetness on her reddened cheeks compromised her beauty.

  Jerry was suddenly overcome with tenderness. Far from wanting to escape, he found himself wanting to take this precious little thing in his arms to look after her, protect her, even though he knew it was far too late for that.

  Next to him, Lin Xiao moaned and swayed. For a moment, Jerry thought the old life lady was going to faint dead away. Then, she said a name, her voice croaking and weak with emotion, “Fang Liu?”

  The girl seemed solid, as real as any of them, not like an apparition at all. She fixed Jerry with her huge almond eyes, and he could see the torchlight dancing inside them like tiny flames. She wanted to communicate, he knew this, but she was unable to speak. Her tiny mouth opened and closed, but no sound came out. Jerry sensed that she was lost, misplaced, and so very scared.

  He cleared his throat and repeated the name the old lift lady had used, hoping to get the pronunciation right, “Fang Liu?”

  Still, she peered at him with those huge black eyes. Jerry felt a tear well up in his own eye and drop to his cheek. His heart ached. Not like the way so often described in romantic novels, but actually, physically ached. It was agony. There was so much sadness, so much pain, and such a beautiful, innocent young girl. She didn't deserve this.

  In that moment, as he stared into her eyes, everything else seemed to melt away. The apartment, his job, his family back home. His life. All that mattered now was this poor victimised creature.

  More than anything, Jerry wanted to fix it. Make it better somehow. He didn't know why she stayed here, hidden under the bed in apartment 14F like a dirty secret. Maybe after her lover left and she slowly lost her grip on reality, it was the only place in the world where she felt safe. In her final days she retreated here to await her fate, and then death had claimed her for its own. Perhaps now all the poor girl wanted was acknowledgement, recognition.

  He didn't kno
w why she felt such an attachment to him, but suspected there was more to it than him simply staying in the same place she had once occupied when alive. Maybe she felt a bond with Jerry because he was also misplaced. A stranger in a strange land.

  She wanted, or perhaps needed, someone to see her. That was why she had been leaving him signs and trying so hard to communicate.

  At least Jerry could give her that. There was nothing else he could do.

  Or was there?

  Even if he died here tonight, he would know that his life had not been without meaning. Until now, he'd been unable to shake the feeling that he was searching for something elusive. But he didn't know what. Thrills? Adventure? Love? All of the above?

  He'd carried that feeling around with him since his teenage years, let it guide him and dictate his life decisions. Like coming to China. Now, finally, he thought he may have found the answer to the eternal unasked question. Had he finally found what he had been searching for all these years? What if it was all here, hidden under his bed in a little corner of Beijing.

  He knew he had to help this girl. Yet she still didn't trust him. He doubted she trusted anyone anymore. Then he thought of something.

  “Huopo?” he said tentatively.

  Happy, lively person.

  Instantly, something changed. He was aware of Lin Xiao gasping, and covering her mouth with a withered hand as if in surprise.

  Under the bed, a faint smile tugged at the girl's lips and she no longer looked so lost or scared. The smile made Jerry's heart leap with unbridled joy, and he instinctively reached out a hand.

  How bad could it be? He'd already had his hand licked and suckled by a grizzled old woman that day, surely the touch of a ghost couldn't be any worse.

  Maybe it was the alcohol he had consumed putting crazy thoughts into his head, but Jerry had the absurd idea that maybe they could co-exist together in apartment 14F. Granted, it would be the strangest living arrangement in history, but they could make it work somehow. He was sure of it. It suddenly dawned on him that she didn't actually pose any physical threat. In fact, it would be quiet around the place without her. He didn't want her to go away and leave him. The apartment would be so empty if she wasn't here.