Apartment 14F: An Oriental Ghost Story (Uncut)

by Saunders, C. M.

  He didn't drive here, the roads were just too chaotic, so there was no way he could have accidentally knocked her off her bicycle or something, and she was far too young to have been a pupil at the school where he taught. He lived alone in his apartment and hadn't made any friends yet, apart from a few fellow foreign teachers whom he only saw sporadically. There was certainly no one around who he trusted enough to confide in. If he mentioned his predicament to any of his colleagues, they would certainly think he was mad.

  After a while he grudgingly accepted the bizarre situation as best he could and tried to console himself with the fact that apparently even the walking dead are fallible and prone to cases of mistaken identity.

  What else could he do?

  The thing that terrified him most was waking up one night and finding her in his apartment. Then they would be alone, just him and his accuser, his persecutor. She had already permeated his nightmares, from which he would wake up screaming and thrashing around in his bed.

  One day he came home from school and found her at the top of the stairs, where she had been the very first time he had encountered her. The staircase was fashioned from cold, unforgiving concrete and the acoustics of the old building made his footsteps echo as he climbed the stairs wearily, looking forward to making a cup of coffee and checking his email.

  And suddenly there she was, at the top of the stairs fixing him with that awful dead gaze of hers.

  He was sure she heard him coming. Assuming little dead girls could hear. He could imagine her lurking out of sight in the shadows, stepping out into the light only when she knew it was him.

  Sunlight streamed in through an open window, and a light breeze gently lifted a few loose hairs sticking out of her pigtails and ruffled her neckerchief. Jeff stopped and gazed back, determined not to lose a staring contest to a ghost, then cautiously edged his way around her. His apartment door was only yards away, if he could hold it together until he got there he could lock the door behind him and leave this creature outside. For some reason, she never followed him inside his apartment. That seemed to be his only sanctuary.

  Nearly there.

  Almost reluctantly, Jeff broke their gaze just long enough to configure the last step, which seemed to be placed at a slightly different height to the rest of the steps and had often caught him off guard, then looked back at the space she had occupied. She was gone. An almost palpable sense of relief swept through him, as it always did when she... stopped being there.

  Then he happened to glance behind him, towards the foot of the staircase, and there she was again. Only this time, it was different. She wasn't standing up anymore, she wasn't challenging him, she didn't look capable of challenging anybody. She was lying in a crumpled heap at the bottom of the concrete staircase, one leg twisted horrendously underneath her, and a spreading pool of blood radiating out from her shattered skull. Her eyes were still open, but even from this distance Jeff could tell that those eyes were not seeing anything.

  The awful sight was more than Jeff could take and took his terror to new heights. Before the girl had been dead yet somehow alive, watching, scrutinizing him. Now she was wholly and completely dead. He could see her little body, he could watch as the life drained out of it. This was infinitely more shocking, more up close and personal.

  He pushed a fist into his mouth to stifle a scream with and ran the last few meters to his apartment, fumbled for his keys, unlocked the door and hurried inside. There he stood with his back up against the door, panting and trying desperately to stop the last threads of his sanity from unravelling. He stayed that way for a long time.

  He expected the knocking to start at the door any second; the weak, tentative knocks of a dying little girl. Then, as he listened and wished he wasn't, the little knocks would morph into the wood-splintering blows of a vengeance-seeking demon. In the final act of his twisted mental production, the monster eventually succeeded in breaking through the door and carrying Jeff off to the fiery pits of hell as he kicked, screamed and begged forgiveness for whatever it was he was supposed to have done. And there he would burn, forever oblivious to the sins he was adjudged to have committed.

  But the dreaded tentative knocks never came. In many ways, that was even worse because Jeff knew that the dead little girl was still out there somewhere, waiting for him. He felt she would always be there, staring accusingly at him with those huge black dead eyes. He would never find any peace.

  The next day, he called his school and told them he was ill. He just couldn't face the pupils. He wanted to get drunk instead, drink himself into oblivion, in fact. He wanted to forget all about the little dead girl that haunted him, if only for a little while. He found a western-styled bar near his apartment block and took a booth near the back, just in case anyone from the school should look in as they were passing and see him through the window. The booth also afforded him a degree of privacy, which he appreciated. This was going to get ugly.

  And so he sat and drank. Beer with vodka shot chasers. Definitely not the kind of behaviour a teacher should partake on a school day. After a while the beer bloated his stomach so much that he couldn't drink it any more, so he stuck to the vodka shots. At one point he staggered to the hole in the floor that passed as a toilet and vomited, then returned to his booth and resumed his private drinking session.

  Some time later, he didn't know how long, he decided he should try and make it home if he didn't want to spend the night in that damned booth. He stood and swayed unsteadily on his feet, fumbling in his pockets for enough money to pay his bar bill.

  He couldn't remember much about the walk home, only that he felt it should have been night but it wasn't. It was still day and the huge oriental sun blazed down. He guessed it was late afternoon, around the time he should be returning home from school. Excessive alcohol consumption had evidently short-circuited his internal clock.

  His concrete apartment block was blessedly cool, and Jeff took his time going up the stairs. He didn't want to fall, that would indeed be a tragic end to his time in China, so he clung to the peeling walls to aid his stability as he drunkenly climbed the steps.

  And there she was at the top of the staircase, just like clockwork. That damn little dead girl. His nemesis. Jeff stopped and squinted his eyes at her. She was wearing the same little blue and white dress with a red neckerchief, and her hair was tied in pigtails and held in place with little white ribbons the way it always was. Sunlight streamed in through an open window and a light breeze gently lifted a few loose hairs sticking out of her pigtails and ruffled her neckerchief.

  He started to edge his way around her, but then the rage came from out of nowhere, and he was powerless to stop it. It was the injustice that pushed him over the edge. He was sick of being a victim. Why was this little zombie-thing haunting him, why won't she just leave him alone?

  He grunted and lashed out blindly, fully expecting his flailing arm to pass clean through the ghost as he stormed by on his way to the sanctuary of his apartment. But to his horror, his arm connected with solid flesh with such force that the little girl was lifted right off her feet and sent sprawling head-first down the concrete staircase.

  The little girl lay in a crumpled heap at the bottom of the staircase, one leg twisted horrendously underneath her, and a spreading pool of blood radiating out from her shattered skull. Her eyes were still open, but even from this distance Jeff could tell that those eyes were not seeing anything. More confused than ever, he sank to his knees just as he heard an apartment door slam and a woman scream.

  Afterwards he saw the little dead girl all the time, she became his constant companion. Asleep or awake, it didn't matter anymore. At the police station, at the embassy, at the court, and now in this place they called a hospital. He tried explaining a million times that before he was being haunted by the ghost of a girl he hadn't even killed yet, and now she was just an ordinary ghost. To him that was marginally easier to understand than being haunted by the ghost of a ghost
.

  But it didn't matter, no one believed him anyway. And still nobody else could see her, his little persecutor, the little dead girl.

  About the Author

  Christian Saunders, who writes fiction as C.M. Saunders, is a London-based freelance writer and editor. His journalism has appeared in numerous publications, most notably Loaded, Record Collector, Fortean Times and Forever Sports, while his fiction has appeared in over fifty magazines, ezines and anthologies, including Raw Nerve, Fantastic Horror, Trigger Warning, Liquid imagination, and the Literary Hatchet. He is a hybrid author, meaning his books have been both traditionally and independently published, the most recent being No Man's Land: Horror in the Trenches and X SAMPLE, both of which are available now via Deviant Dolls Publications. He is represented by Media Bitch literary agency.

  Also by C.M. Saunders

  Novels/Novellas

  Devil's Island (Rainstorm Press)

  Out of Time (DeadPixel Publications)

  Sker House (DeadPixel Publications)

  No Man's Land: Horror in the Trenches (Deviant Dolls Publications)

  Collections

  X: A Collection of Horror (DeadPixel Publications)

  X2: Another Collection of Horror (DeadPixel Publications)

  X SAMPLE (Deviant Dolls Publications)

  Feel free to connect on Twitter:

  @CMSaunders01

  Or visit my website:

  https://cmsaunders.wordpress.com/

  Don't be afraid to stop by and say hello. Or you can just tell me to fuck off it it makes you happy. If you enjoyed this book, please consider leaving a review on Amazon.

  Thank you for reading.

  Peace out.

  X SAMPLE

  Contains a trio of deliciously dark tales ripe for sinking your teeth into and as the title suggests, is designed to give new readers a little taste of my work, as well as giving my existing readers something ‘to be going on with.’

  Table of Contents:

  The Devil & Jim Rosenthal: A new parent gets much more than he bargained for.

  Date Night: A man’s wife visits the bathroom in a fancy restaurant, and doesn’t come back out.

  The Delectable Hearts: A jaded music journalist goes in search of The Next Big Thing. Unfortunately for him, he just might have found it.

  Bonus Content:

  Afterword

  Extract from No Man’s Land: Horror in the Trenches

  Out now at a special price on Deviant Dolls Publications:

  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01N63XUE6

  No Man's Land: Horror in the Trenches

  “NO MAN'S LAND is a literate and vivid narrative of an ugly war, a war which for Harry Doyle and his fellow soldiers extends beyond the boundaries of consensus reality.”

  - The Haunted Reading Room

  The Somme Offensive, 1916. Harry Doyle is a young, overawed British infantryman struggling to come to terms with the insanity of war. His main objective is staying alive, and getting back home to his family in one piece. But his hopes begin to diminish when he realises the full extent of the misery and destruction around him. And the German war machine isn't the only thing he has to worry about. Something else is preying on his friends and comrades in the trenches, picking them off one by one. Something no amount of military training can prepare him for.

  This book contains descriptions of graphic violence and is not suitable for minors.

  Out now on Deviant Dolls Publications:

  https://www.amazon.com/No-Mans-Land-Horror-Trenches-ebook/dp/B01FL42XA4

  Sker House

  "Sker House is a good, old fashioned ghost story that you'll enjoy from beginning to end."

  - The Horror Cabin

  Dale and Lucy are two students with a fascination in the supernatural. One weekend, they travel to Sker House, South Wales, a private residence with a macabre history which has recently been converted into a seaside inn. They plan to write an article for their university magazine about a supposed haunting, but when they arrive, they meet a landlord who seems to have a lot to hide. Soon, it becomes apparent that all is not well at Sker House. An air of oppression hangs over it, while misery, tragedy and ill-fortune are commonplace. Gradually, it becomes clear that the true depth of the mystery goes far beyond a mere historical haunting. This is a place where bad things happen, and evil lurks.

  Little by little Dale and Lucy fall under Sker's dark spell, and as they begin to unravel the mysteries of the past, they realize that nothing stays buried forever.

  Welcome to Sker House, a place where past and present collide.

  Out now:

  https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01C1NBFG6

  Created with Writer2ePub

  by Luca Calcinai