Apartment 14F: An Oriental Ghost Story (Uncut)

by Saunders, C. M.

  The girl reached out a thin, slender arm in reciprocation.

  Their hands met, transcending time, the eternal boundary between the living and the dead, and everything in between.

  Jerry started shuddering uncontrollably, his whole arm twitching and spasming as if receiving a mild electric shock. The girl's hand was cold and damp with tears, but it was solid. Real. It felt like solidified wax. Even so, her touch was exquisite.

  Jerry had always believed in fate. That everything must happen for a purpose. Everything had a reason to exist, or else why would it? Why else did man roam this earth? Mother Nature didn't play games and mess around. There were no coincidences, no accidents, but a pre-ordained plan for everyone.

  For too long, he had trodden life's path alone, carrying the loneliness like a load on his shoulders. Yet this was where he belonged, where he should be. He knew it.

  As he held the girl's hand, for the first time he could remember he felt connected to something bigger. His entire life, all the things he had done, everywhere he had gone, had been leading him to this time, this place.

  This here, This now.

  He felt complete.

  But then, as solid as she had first appeared, Huopo began to flicker like an image on an old news reel. She was disappearing, fading into the air right before his very eyes.

  No!

  Jerry somehow knew that if he let go of her hand now, she would be gone forever. But if he kept holding on, just a few seconds more, they could be together.

  This was the tipping point he'd thought about earlier that night. He knew that now. Fate, life, the universe, had given him this chance, this one shot at true happiness. It was now or never.

  “Jelly! Let go!” screamed Yin Tao from some far away place.

  Jerry ignored him. Instead, he held Huopo's gaze, and held her hand, even as the blackness began to swallow him.

  The last sound he heard was the clatter of the torch as it slipped out of his hand and landed on the wooden floor next to the forgotten alcove under the bed. Then he was floating away, turning around and around, weightless, spiralling into oblivion.

  It was intoxicating.

  For the briefest moment, he felt a touch of panic. But then he noticed that he was not alone in this strange other-worldly place. There were others there, wherever he was. They swirled around and around in the blackness with him, occasionally coming into focus and then abruptly fading away.

  Was that granddad?

  Jerry wanted to shout out, 'Hey! Over here!'

  But before he could, another face swam into view. This one he recognized from a picture, it had once been wearing a graduation cap and gown and smiling at him from his computer screen. But the face wasn't smiling anymore. Now it looked sallow and empty, drained of emotion.

  Chris Rowe?

  There you are! People have been looking for you, silly!

  To Jerry it felt as if he had just bumped into an old friend. They had so much to talk about. He tried to raise a hand in greeting, but Huopo held his hand too tightly. And now she was laughing. It was strange sound. Delightful and terrifying in equal parts.

  It was then that Jerry finally understood. He'd been wrong. Huopo wanted much more than mere recognition, more than acknowledgement.

  The dead girl wanted company.

  Forever.

  A world away, Yin Tao picked up the torch from the floor and, with a shaking hand, shone it into the gloom. The space under the bed was now empty, save for the tangled nest of black hair. There was no apparition, and no Jerry. Even the strange disembodied sounds of scratching and sobbing had now ceased.

  “Teacher?” said the young Chinaman, perplexed. His voice sounded like it didn't belong in the empty apartment. He shone the torch around the tiny bedroom, “You in there, Jelly?”

  There was no answer.

  Yin Tao looked at Lin Xiao, who was wearily getting to her feet. With a solemn shake of her head she turned and walked slowly out of the apartment, still clutching her white plastic bag. Yin Tao wondered what had made the old lift lady so upset. Maybe she was angry because she couldn't prevent the ghost girl from claiming another victim. Or perhaps it had more to do with an apartment that needed to be emptied and cleaned. Again.

  Yin Tao knew that he would never see Jerry again.

  Nobody would.

  It was a pity. He'd liked Jerry very much. He wondered what the next teacher to move into apartment 14F would be like.

  His last thought as he stepped out into a corridor now illuminated by dim emergency lights, was that he hoped Lin Xiao would remember to clean up the hair from under the bed this time.

  Inside Apartment 14F

  As the title suggests, this is a partially revised and re-written version of an earlier release. The original Apartment 14F: An Oriental Ghost Story came out on Damnation Books in September 2009, and truth be told I was never really happy with it. By the time the publisher was absorbed by another company and consequently vanished off the face of the earth a few years later, our contract had expired and all rights reverted back to me. That meant, the story was free for me to do what I wanted with, and I felt a remix was in order.

  So here we are.

  I wrote the original version in January/February 2009, when I was living in the industrial city of Tianjin, northern China. Tianjin is like a Chinese Middlesbrough, only with much harsher winters. Yep, it really is that bad. I'd spent the previous year in Beijing, where the story is set, and only moved to Tianjin to be closer to my then-girlfriend. Obviously, the moment I arrived she dumped me for another dude, leaving me alone and heartbroken doing a job I hated (teaching English at a primary school) in a freezing cold foreign country far too close to Russia with no friends.

  Like most foreign teachers in China, during the Spring Festival period I had a long holiday. It's one of the few perks. It was too cold to go out for any other reason than stocking up on supplies, and Chinese TV is truly awful, so I decided to do something constructive with my time. Though I'd had some short stories published in the small press when that was 'a thing' years earlier and made a few appearances in various anthologies, I'd taken a long sabbatical from writing fiction to focus on feature writing for magazines (the money is better) and was just beginning to get back into the fiction side of things. To me it's always been more of a labour of love. I consider any money I make from it a bonus, but it's so time-consuming and energy-sapping that I feel I have to justify it somehow.

  There's a completely different skill-set involved when writing fiction. Non-fiction is more of an exact science. You have your brief, you do your research, then you write the article according to the house style of whatever publication you are writing for.

  Simples.

  Writing fiction is a bit like opening a door into your mind, and I'm not always entirely sure I like what I see in there. I'm even less convinced that I want to showcase it to the world. Subconsciously or otherwise, you write about some pretty personal shit. There's a lot of my early-China experience in Apartment 14F. The sense of isolation, feeling like an imposter, or an alien, being strangely detached as lots of bewildering shit goes on around you. It all added to the loneliness and simmering resentment.

  Apartment 14F: An Oriental Ghost Story started life as a short story called When Eyes Lie (Did I mention how bitter I was about the girlfriend thing?). I submitted it to Damnation Books, who were then a new start-up and had just put out a submission call. They loved it, but said it was too short and could do with being bulked up because as it stood, they couldn't do much with it.

  It was good advice. There was a lot more I wanted to say, and I'd kinda rushed through the short story, trying to impart too much information in too short a time. Classic rookie error. At over 17,000 words, the second version was almost twice as long as the original, and was until that point the longest single thing I'd ever written. I found I liked the novella form a lot. It allows much more room for character development. In this case,
it was important to try to convey a strong idea of who Jerry was and what his motivations were, as well as instilling in the reader a sense of what it's like t be a foreigner in China.

  I'd hate to bite the hand that used to feed (they didn't feed me much, but a little) but over time Damnation Books developed something of a bad reputation. I heard no end of horror stories from other writers, and not the good kind of horror story. There were contract disputes, creative differences, legal actions. The whole thing got really ugly. It's not my place to air other people's dirty washing. If you're interested, you can Google it, but the range and sheer scale of the complaints was pretty damning.

  But all the negativity came later. At the time, like most writers, I was just happy that someone liked my work enough to publish it.

  In the case of Apartment 14F, there were a few things DB wanted me to change in the story. It's not that I'm precious. I'm always open to suggestions from editors. It's their job. But I don't like making wholescale changes on the whim of someone who's probably spent barely a few minutes skimming my manuscript, whereas I'd been working on it for months.

  I could have argued my case. But if you argue too much you get a reputation for being difficult and the publisher is liable to pull the plug on your book. I learned a long time ago to choose my battles. Some things are worth fighting for, and some things just aren't.

  Consequently, I had to make a few compromises in order to get the book into the hands of readers. The original version I submitted started with Jerry going to see the blind fortune teller, with the bulk of the story, including what he was dong there, being told in exposition. The editor at DB wanted a more linear storyline, believing it would be easier to read. I always thought my way worked best, it made the story just a little bit more original. I personally didn't think it was hard to follow. It might make the reader think a little bit, but I think the majority of readers actually like doing a bit of work rather than being spoon-fed everything.

  The first version was also slightly more upbeat. It was meant to be a love story that transcends death. But the more I thought about it, the darker it got. It didn't seem feasible for Jerry to fall in love with Fang Liu, unless she put him under some kind of spell. It made even less sense to have her fall in love with Jerry. Sorry guys, she just isn't that kind of girl. In any case, I was told that 'Nobody likes a happy ending,' and urged to amend it. Given my disastrous love life, that was something I could relate to and was more than happy to oblige.

  Like a lot of writers, sometimes I bury little messages or tributes in my work. I don't expect anyone to pick up on them. It's just fun. In the original version of Apartment 14F, the boarding pass Jerry finds in his apartment had Mr. K. ROE, GNV FLA – PEK printed on it. This was a nod to two of my favourite bands. Kris Roe is singer/songwriter of an emo/punk outfit called the Ataris, while GNV FLA is the name of the then-current album by Less Than Jake. Music has always been important to me, and I remember listening to the Ataris while I wrote that particular section. They were never huge chart-botherers so flew under the radar for the most part, but their music spoke to me. When I did the re-write I kept the name phonetically similar, but changed the spelling to something a bit more common.

  Two key scenes came from different dreams I had. I had a lot of weird dreams when I was in China. Still do. It's a fucking trippy place. The first dream I worked into the story is the hair in the bed scene. If you've read it, you'll know the part I mean. The second was the fortune teller with the inventive way of telling your fortune. That was one creepy nocturnal escapade, and luckily for me, the creepiness translated well to the page. I just described it as best as I could remember. The feelings, the sensations, the thoughts running through my head. That one scene has probably provoked more discussion than anything else I've ever written. Discounting the time I did an assignment for the sadly-departed Nuts magazine and had the pleasure of telling the world what Lucy Pinder's tits thought of the Southampton FC back four, that is. But that was a different kind of writing in a different world.

  Apart from being forced into making changes to the story, the other sticking points I had with Damnation Books were the amount of promotion they did for it (none) and the price they set. Both the paperback and the ebook were on sale for over $7, that's a lot for a novella-length work by someone you've never heard of.

  Surprisingly, despite being overpriced, on it's initial release Apartment 14F: An Oriental Ghost Story did extremely well. When Damnation Books imploded a couple of years later, it was still second in their all-time bestseller list. Okay, I know it's not like being on the New York Times Bestseller list, but it means something to me. DB released A LOT of books.

  But like I said, I never really felt comfortable with it. I turned a corner with my writing not long afterwards. Must have been the 10,000-hour rule in effect. I went from being a part time writer to a full-time writer, and started doing a lot more fiction as a sort of release from the day job.

  Whenever I went back and read the original version of Apartment 14F, some parts made me cringe. I think I have much more insight now. I lived in china another four years after I wrote the original story. I also like to think I've improved a lot as a writer since then, and maybe now I can finally do the idea I had back in '09 justice. This is what the story should have been the first time around.

  As an extra little sweetener, I'm also including a bonus short story, Little Dead Girl, which was first published in a short-lived publication called Unspoken Water (2011) and later in X2: Another Collection of Horror (2015). It's a story written in a similar vein, ironically based on another deeply disturbing dream I had whilst living in the Middle Kingdom, and also featuring a teacher on the verge of a nervous breakdown as the lead character. You could probably say they are set in the same spooky-ass far eastern universe. The two stories kinda compliment each other well, I think.

  Little Dead Girl

  He'd only been in China for two months when he saw the ghost for the first time. It wasn't at all the way he imagined it would be. It wasn't a windswept cemetery in the dead of night, or even a spooky old deserted mansion. She was standing at the top of the stairs in his apartment block in broad daylight. A little Chinese girl of six or seven, wearing a little blue and white dress with a red neckerchief - the kind the local kids wore to school. Her black shoulder-length hair was tied in pigtails and held in place with little white ribbons.

  He didn't even know she was a ghost at first. That realization came later. His first inclination was to scan the stairwell for an absent parent, but as he was doing so the little girl simply shimmered and vanished right in front of his eyes. Just melted away into nothing. That was how he knew she was a ghost.

  Aside from the spontaneous disappearance, it was the frown on the little girl's face, and above all her huge black eyes that made a lasting impression. They stared straight at him accusingly and seemed to be asking the question... why?

  Why did you do this to me you horrible man?

  This shocked Jeff, and quite frankly pissed him off a little. Until that afternoon he'd never seen this little girl before. Of course, there was no way to be certain, but he was quite sure of it.

  So what the hell could she be accusing him of?

  There was no mistaking the look she gave him before she vanished. It was full of contempt, even hatred. Bizarrely, this unwarranted animosity disturbed him more than the fact that apparently he had started seeing ghosts.

  After that day, Jeff began seeing the little girl everywhere; outside the school where he taught, in the foyer of the restaurant where he ate lunch, in the doorway of the little corner shop where he purchased his daily supply of cigarettes.

  Once, he even saw her in a crowded supermarket. He had been rooting through the cellophane-wrapped silk worms, marvelling at the uniquely Chinese practice of wrapping things when they were still alive. The silk worms looked dead until you picked up the package and shook it, that would wake them up and start crawling all over each insid
e their little plastic prison when she suddenly appeared next to him.

  It frightened the life out of him. So much so that the pack of silk worms he had been holding fell from his grip and hit the floor with a soft thud where it split open. The silk worms, suddenly given a new lease of life by this unexpected glimpse of freedom, began crawling out, sluggishly at first but then with admirable fervour. A few shoppers turned around to scowl at him whilst treading carefully around the spreading mass of fat black worms, but none of them seemed to notice the little dead girl with the wide staring eyes.

  Strangely, the multitude of shoppers pushed, shoved and bumped into each other, yet no one entered the space now occupied by the little dead girl. They went out of their way to walk around her, leaving a gap next to him, a tiny patch of sacred supermarket aisle. Jeff wondered if the shoppers were even aware that they were doing it. He thought not. They seemed to be doing it subconsciously, and not a single other person so much as glanced at the girl. They looked past and through her, but never directly at her.

  By now Jeff was quite sure the little girl was dead. Apart from the way she appeared and disappeared before his very eyes, he never saw her with anyone else and she far too young to be walking the streets alone, even in China. Also, her complexion was all wrong. Her eyes were ringed with black and face was far too pale, though her skinny arms were still darkened by the sun. And that horrible, damning expression.

  What the hell did she want?

  Jeff wanted to ask her why she was haunting him, what she thought he had done to her, but he knew that no one else saw her except him. If people saw him talking to people that weren't there, especially little dead girls, they would surely lock him up in a mental institution and lock away the key. Besides, his Mandarin wasn't good enough to enable him to solve mysteries just yet. He had only just learned how to ask for a beer.