Death Penalty for a Ghost in 中国 04-14

四

The nightmares fit a pattern. I'd be in my apartment building's corridor, find myself in vivid encounters with angry, confused souls, mostly men, wearing dark blue prison clothes with a bar code like number on the front and back of their shirts.

They were in pain, these men. Physical pain. Psychic pain. Many were riddled full of bullet holes, and they were holding spades, trying to dig into the floor. Their festering, open gashes, flesh wounds were streaming dark red blood as they stabbed their shovels fecklessly at the tile.

In these recurring dreams, my teeth were falling from my mouth and I was spitting my teeth out like bloody white seeds from a fruit, and I'd be crawling down my apartment building's first floor hallway, hearing shrieks and grunts, seeing through doors, seeing angry, wild-eyed men, men with shaven heads, men in dark blue prison jumpsuits banging on the doors, doors that'd been chained, welded shut.

The men just slapping, thrashing, headbutting the doors; a couple kicking at the doors spastically, the men shaking like epileptics.

Then I'd see a headless man, lurching towards me from the end of the hallway. The man was in a navy blue boilersuit, with an open gash in his chest, and he held a pair of blood-dripping eyeballs in one hand and was lifting a butcher knife, wildly slashing at the air with his other hand.

Nearly every night, I had these dreams, if I could sleep. Which I started not wanting to do, because the dreams were so surreal and upsetting. I was also being awoken nearly every morning, sometimes in the small hours of night, by jackhammering, drilling that rattled the whole of my modest apartment like the voice of an angry God.

I reported the noise to the school, but they told me no construction was going on in the building. Other teachers heard it as well, but no one could locate the drilling's source.

I started taking pills, Xanax, so I could finally sleep and stay asleep. I'd read that Xanax intensifies dreams in some people. But for me it was the opposite. Xanax not only allowed me to sleep, but it also stopped the dreams. If ever I didn't take the pills, however, the dreams came back, even more frighteningly...

The dreams, the night terrors, always with me spitting bloody teeth from my mouth, crawling on my belly, sometimes through swarms of cockroaches scurrying about the floor. And those men, their sounds, shrieks, shrill voices, their banging, clanking on the doors. The headless man at the end of the hallway, the man in the hallway sometimes stabbing and slashing and churning the butcher knife inside his open chest wound.

I'd never experienced visions, dreams of the sort. And the visions began to bleed over, enter into my days. Diurnal sightings. I'd see the figures, at the top of stairs, staring down from a window, in the distance trying to dig holes. They'd lock eyes with me and then vanish, go back to hiding in the smog, where I knew they lived.

I don't know why I told my coworkers about the history of the school. Maybe it was me who was evil, and I selfishly wanted to unhook the ghosts' claws from my flesh, pass off and stick the ghosts to others. Maybe it was that misery loves company, and I wanted to share the ghosts. Or maybe on a subconscious level I thought that getting the ghosts into the open would help dispel the visions and rid the ghosts, rid the insomnia.

But talking about the ghosts, sharing them wouldn't rid them. The ghosts would stay. They had jumped from my nightmares into my days. They had stuck themselves to me. They were with me, a part of me now.

Little did I know that soon enough, I'd be talking and lying with one of them.

五

As the term went on, day to day life, work was becoming more difficult- and more bizarre. Classes would often be canceled or moved to other classrooms, much of the time without the school informing me, and I'd have to search the hallways, searching the cavernous, mostly empty teaching building, looking for my class.

While looking about the building, searching for my students, I'd see shadowy rooms with emaciated men in tiger chairs, being lashed with a truncheon by men in dark black uniforms. Or sometimes the rooms were filled with equipment, machinery, workers seated in rows, wearing leg irons, assembling Christmas lights. After doing a doubletake, glancing back at the rooms, they'd be empty, the lecture halls filled with nothing but air...

When I did have class, the students, started to shapeshift. From humans to dragons. Humans to rabbits. Humans to rats. And all the different animals of the Chinese Zodiac. The students, the passive lot, who rarely spoke, would shift into sheep, or dogs, or snakes, and sit staring, watching my every move.

I wondered if they could smell my blood, my trepidation, as I attempted to carry on my lectures, seeing a lecture hall full of horses holding phones, tablets and pencils. They'd switch back to human when the bell rang, though, and I'd need to rush to the bathroom to do deep-breathing exercises just to get my pulse under control...

Breathing was becoming tougher, too. As the leaves turned, the air grew sharper, and I was beginning to notice even more pollution in the skies. The air, my lungs, were stinging like they were filled with acid. The air drier than bone, too. The air sour, like spoiled milk, and I'd have regular nosebleeds, cough up chunks of black, gobs of blood...

The rooms around the school, including classrooms were unexplainably hot or cold, even those with thermostats...

Although the campus was newly built, I was starting to find that some of the buildings looked to be 50 or so years old, moldy, with cracks running down the walls, graying and blackened exteriors, crumbling facades, and on some of the half-built buildings, I'd never see any construction being performed, the buildings standing bare as skeletons.

What's worse, one day after class I found the elevator wasn't working, so I gamboled to the end of the hallway, opened a door that'd been marked "Exit." Expecting stairs, my heart skipped a beat and I abruptly stopped in my tracks when I peered down and discovered that the door led to nothing, only air! Had I stepped a foot further I'd have plummeted from the 7th floor of the building!

I immediately reported the incident to the school. The secretary responded that they'd have a repairman look into it, and then she replied later that day, saying the repairman had found no such door.

"Impossible," I said, but, sure enough, the next day, before class, I went to the same hallway and found that there was no door...

六

The drilling sounds in the morning were becoming louder and louder, waking me up every day, often around 4 a.m., if I could sleep at all.

The insomnia got worse. It'd grown malignant. I'd have to take Xanax, every night, otherwise I couldn't sleep a wink.

It wasn't only me. Marco, the others, they'd been looking rough as well, their complexions sallow...

I was starting to believe the school itself to be a ghost or maybe a vampire that was sucking away our collective life force, cruelly drinking away our vitality and sleep...

Marco told me after breakfast that the lecture stage in his classroom collapsed as he and two of his students stood on it. Luckily, besides a couple bumps and bruises, no one was seriously injured.

"I asked the school, three times, to fix it," Marco seethed, glancing up angrily at the creamy gray sky as we were walking down a tree-lined promenade, on the way to give our classes. Even under the penumbra of sagging clouds, I could see that the lines on Marco's face were growing deeper, especially the crinkles on his forehead. The dude had seemed to age five years in only the short time we'd been there.

Another of our colleagues was with us, Rick, a late middle-aged Clevelander with leathery skin, platinum blond hair and piercing blue eyes.

We called Rick "Rooster" because of the spiky shock of hair he had running along his scalp, which, along with his pointy, chinless face, sort of made him look like a chicken.

As Rooster was walking with us, he lamented that "furniture, equipment was starting to disappear from his classrooms. And chairs, new chairs would snap. A student, a skinny one, cracked one the other day and landed on his ass."

Rooster went on, scowling as he spoke, "There's been buttloads of roaches in my apartment, too. Not to mention the mosquitoes, and the stray dog that ran in once. There's been rats in my kitchen, rats... Ugh, the first-floor sucks... There's a gaping hole in my balcony, too. I keep bugging the school to fix it, but they haven't yet. There was a frigging hornet in there yesterday, a massive one..."

"Hey, Matty, was it you who said that hornets and wasps would fly into his classroom all the time last term?" I asked, then swirled and wiped my tongue at my teeth, checking to see if they were still there.

Man-bun nodded, made a facial expression like he had a stomachache and told us that the roof caved in that classroom, too, and that it was a newly-built room, to boot, but fortunately he didn't have class the day the roof collapsed and thankfully the room was empty at the time.

Man-bun Matty is one of only three foreign teachers remaining from last term.

Matty started telling us that these were the challenges of living in China and that most foreigners couldn't hack it, only survive a year or two.

Either the pollution bothers them too much, like one lady whose face turned into a pepperoni pizza, or they drink so much they can't function, or their demons take hold and they go crazy, literally, spaz out, run naked through campus or start fistfights with other teachers or students or security guards or they pack up, leave in the middle of the night, make a midnight run, or, in the most extreme case, there's a suicide, like the New Zealander who jumped from a building, and there was one Japanese teacher a couple years back who died from leaving his cooking gas canister on, died from breathing the fumes.

"I don't know if that was a... Think what's his name is living in his apartment... Don't tell him..."

Rooster stopped Man-bun there. "I guess I know why they were gruff about answering too many questions in the job interview. I was interviewed by the old fidgety guy from Tasmania. Someone said he's been here since the school opened and doesn't talk to anyone, except one or two Chinese teachers."

Man-bun concurred, chuckled, and said, "That's right. He's invisible. You'll never see him anywhere on campus except the bicycle shop where he pumps his bike tires. He practically runs away from other foreigners. The only time you'll talk to him is during the Skype interview."

"Maybe he's a ghost. He's one of them. There are foreigners in Chinese prisons," Marco said, his eyes lighting up, "But they're not having me. Nah, dog. I'm not ghost food. I'm not their doll. I'm fighting back. I'm starting Santeria. These ghosts might be bandits, bandits on the road, pirates on the rivers... But they'll see. I'll fight their fire with fire. Magic with magic!"

Marco kicked at a pile of litter on the ground and a plastic bottle launched off into the smog. The four of us parted ways, off to our respective classes.

Looking down at the pile of litter that Marco had kicked, instead of an empty Styrofoam box, I saw a pool of blood, with a beating human heart in its center, encircled in ice cubes.

I blinked my eyes twice, and the ice, heart, blood, and Styrofoam box were all gone.

I shook my head and flinched as an old pot-bellied security guard brushed by me, only inches away, riding on a creaky bicycle. The security guard snarled at Rooster and hocked up and launched a gob of spit at the ground.

七

The drilling had stopped, thankfully, but I hadn't slept in three days. After what I saw in my dreams, sleep wasn't what I wanted. Sleep or no sleep, though, I was thinking there'd be more, more ghosts, worse ghosts, and that the ghosts were probably hungry...

Lacking sleep left me both alive and dead. I felt like my head was slurry, wet and sloshy with cytoplasm. I lay in bed, supine, awake to the night, reading my phone in the dark, my room black as marble.

A story popped up on my phone, a local news story of three people drowning to death in a manure pit. A maintenance worker, trying to fix a septic tank, had plunged in, and two others rushed to help him, and they too were swallowed into the pit of shit.

Reading it provided me a guilty bit of schadenfreude. Despite my current woes of ghosts, insomnia, and filthy air, there was really nothing I could imagine worse than drowning, suffocating in a pool of shit. That being how one leaves the Earth. What a horrific fate.

Perhaps a "ghost of shit," a violent, vengeful janitor's ghost sucked them in. What a bilious, malicious spirit that must be...

Then another story popped up. An anonymous news article from tomorrow, written in the future tense, saying there's going to be a dreadful traffic accident. The article didn't mention ghosts, but I knew the spirits would have something to do with it.

The story said that a deliveryman on a motorbike, next to our school, will die in gruesome fashion, be run over by a semitruck.

Aghast, I couldn't read past the opening paragraph and clicked off my phone, popped a handful of pills and drifted off...

Sure enough, the next day, walking back from class, I witnessed the aftermath, the carnage, the young deliveryman's body split in two halves. I'd seen plenty of gore on TV, movies, in video games, but seeing it firsthand would be forever etched into the eyes of my mind.

I'd suspected it'd been ghosts on the roads. The ghosts must have caused the truck driver to swerve suddenly.

I bet the apparitions I'd seen had escaped from my dreams and were appearing on the roads, day and night, frightening drivers, causing accidents...

After witnessing the grisly accident scene, I had to take a walk around campus to get my head right. I passed by the Tasmanian in the small park near the gymnasium, eyed him solemnly. He was seated on a stone bench, under a bamboo tree, practicing calligraphy, Chinese characters. He looked so Zen, so peaceful drawing them.

So, I decided I'd copy his practice. Went to the stationery store, bought a brush and paper and then went back to my apartment, began writing my own characters, stroke after stroke, tracing the particles, the radicals. The calligraphy, it was calming, soothing. It lifted my mind, set it at ease, and I didn't see any ghosts for a couple days.

A few days later, though, after the accident, the drilling started again, waking me whenever I slept, causing me to have anxiety and trembling spells.

Worse yet, a new ghost, a lower torso, the severed waist, legs of the dead deliveryman, started walking around my apartment, walking through doors, on the ceilings and through walls, the legs maybe trying to find their way into or away from God.

To try to ward the torso off, freeze out the drilling noises, I'd draw the Chinese characters for quiet: "安静", drawing the characters again, again, again, and again.

It helped, at first, drawing that, and it scared the torso away every time I wrote it. And along with eating handfuls of Xanax, I started wearing a blindfold and earplugs to bed, and was enjoying the serene, dreamless slumber I was getting.

八

I'd been taking the pills, stronger doses, every night. Had been avoiding dreams. But not avoiding ghosts, since I was seeing the torso again, the severed lower half of the deliveryman's body, in his same bright orange pants. That damn torso, running around my fucking apartment.

I'd been hanging the pieces of paper with 安静 written on them around the apartment, but that was no longer keeping away the walking legs. The ghost had no respect. It accompanied the drilling sounds much of the time.

The torso had been running around my kitchen a lot, too. That's usually where I'd spot it.

One evening, I was chopping vegetables, carrots, and accidentally sliced open the tip of a finger.

Bleeding profusely, I was running to the bathroom to grab my first-aid kit when I found that the torso was standing in the bathroom door's threshold, blocking my entrance.

My hand a bloody mess, I screamed and cursed at the ghost, reached out to swat it away from the door.

Droplets of my blood splattered onto it, and the blood hit the torso like water landing in a skillet full of steaming hot oil, causing a ferocious pop and burst, singeing the ghost's skin, and the torso tore off running from the doorway.

It was like I'd thrown holy water at a vampire. So I knew then what to do. In the bathroom, I held my hand over the sink, collected my blood in the drinking glass I'd used for brushing my teeth.

After I'd rung out, bled out a good bit, I wrapped up my finger with a bandage.

Then, carrying my blood, I rushed to my living room, where I'd been doing calligraphy. Pouting, I stood hunched over a table and dipped my calligraphy brush into the cup and painted 安静 in blood, on five separate sheets of paper.

I collected the papers, stomped about the domicile, taped the new sheets over the previous 安静 sheets.

Then I wrapped up the blood glass in plastic wrap, set it next to my calligraphy brush, saved it for later.

After that, the torso disappeared from my apartment.

But the drilling sounds got even louder, waking me up at around 4 to 6 a.m. every morning, four days in a row.

九

I think the torso had escaped back out to the road. Perhaps was animated by a malevolent spirit, doing its bidding. Maybe I should have kept it in my apartment where it wasn't really hurting anyone, just being mischievous, mostly.

Out on the road, in the same spot where the semitruck had struck the deliveryman, there'd been a series of strange car accidents where cars' breaks failed or their lights would switch off at night, cause collisions with other vehicles, often smashing into motorbikes. 8 people died in just one week...

But I'd not personally seen any ghosts for a few days, and the drilling had cooled down to a barely audible hum. I'd been taking pills, so I wasn't dreaming and was far happier that way.

Marco, who'd gotten heavy into Santeria, had taken to wearing traditional Cuban island clothing and an elaborate charm around his neck made of bird feathers, clamshells, and beads.

Squinting his eyes and frowning, his fingers tapping on the table like oil derricks, he told me over breakfast that "a lot of ghosts want to escape, rest in peace, but they can't because they're stuck in a space between Hell and Earth, so if they sell a soul, or souls, to a demon, the captured souls can take the ghosts' place, and then the ghosts can escape and rest... That deliveryman, he's doing a demon's bidding; he's collected, sold and bartered souls... He's already got 8. My Mom said that'll be enough, likely. Still, don't ride a motorcycle or even a bicycle on the roads for now."

From the window in the cafeteria, we looked outside, saw Rooster, who was barefoot, wearing a Beijing bikini and jorts, despite the cold. He was hopping on a pogo stick, with a mad glint in his eyes, on his way to teach a class.

Rooster really had been losing it. He'd had a bout of explosive diarrhea in one of his classes yesterday. Over the last week, he'd been complaining about the drilling sounds more than anyone, spazzing out about it online, in the teacher WeChat group, posting floods of shitposts, along with random strange, outlandish outbursts, much of it gibberish.

He'd been drinking too much, too, drunk in his classes, yelling and throwing textbooks and chalk at students. There was a running bet amongst us foreigners that he'd be the first teacher this term to be fired.

"Think it's safe to ride a pogo stick?" I asked Marco, who only grimaced, stood up and walked away with a sullen expression, rubbing his rabbit's foot key chain.