X2: Another Collection of Horror

  Contents

  Little Dead Girl

  Curiosities

  Intruder

  The Night Visitor

  Hero of the Day

  Embracing Solitude

  Treat Night

  Handsome Jack

  Tiny Little Vampires (Flash Version)

  Roadkill

  Afterword

  Little Dead Girl

  Jeff had 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 didn't happen in 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 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 cute white ribbons.

  He didn't know she was a ghost at first. That realization came later. His first inclination upon meeting her 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 bored into him, as if asking...

  Why?

  This shocked Jeff, and quite frankly pissed him off a little. Until that afternoon, he had never seen this little girl before. Of course, there was no way to be absolutely 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 dead people.

  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 shrink-wrapping things when they were still alive, when she suddenly appeared next to him. It frightened the life out of him, so much so that the pack of silk worms fell from his grip and hit the floor with a soft thud where it split open. The black 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, wriggling worms. But none of them seemed to notice the little dead girl with the wide staring eyes. Stranger still, even as the multitude of shoppers pushed, shoved and bumped each other, no one entered the space she now occupied. They appeared to subconsciously go 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. They seemed to be acting on instinct, and not a single other person so much as glanced at the girl. They looked past, through, and beyond, 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. She was far too pale, though her skinny arms were still darkened by the sun. And those eyes, that horrible, damning expression.

  What the hell did she want?

  Jeff wanted to ask her that very question. What did she think he was guilty of?

  But he knew that no one else saw her except him. If the locals saw him talking to people that weren't there word would surely soon get back to his school. They would cancel his work visa, and then the authorities would deport him. His Mandarin wasn't good enough to enable him to solve mysteries just yet. He had only just learned how to ask for a cold beer.

  He didn't drive here. The roads were just too chaotic. So there was no way he could have accidentally knocked the girl off her bicycle or something, and she was far too young to have been a pupil at his school. 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 think the culture shock had driven him crazy. He had heard tales before of perfectly normal people coming out here and losing their minds. The culture was so alien to what most westerners were used to that sometimes, the brain just couldn't cope and fried itself.

  After a while, Jeff 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 putting his feet up after six periods of teaching. And suddenly there she was, at the top of the stairs fixing him with that awful dead gaze of hers.

  He was certain she heard him coming. Assuming little dead girls could hear. He could imagine her lurking out of sight in the shadows, hiding, 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. Being this close, he could sense a change in the atmosphere. It almost seemed to crackle and buzz, as if an electrical charge was passing through the air.

  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 in. The apartment 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 different height to the rest of the steps and often caught him off guard, then looked back at the space she had occupied.

  It was empty.

  The little dead girl 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 hideously 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 scene took his terror to new heights. Before, the girl had been dead yet somehow alive, watching, scrutinizing him. Now she was wholly and completely dea
d. He could see her little body, he could watch as the life drained out of it. This was infinitely more shocking, more visceral and altogether more disturbing.

  Pushing a fist into his mouth to stifle a scream, he ran across the landing to his apartment. Fumbling in his pocket for his keys, he 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 on the door to start 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 wrong. And there he would burn, forever oblivious to the sins he was adjudged to have committed.

  But the dreaded 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, seeking him out 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 a happy place. He wanted to forget all about the dead girl that haunted him, if only for a little while. So 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. Today, he wanted privacy. This was going to get ugly.

  And so he sat and drank. Tsing Tao 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. After that he stuck to the vodka.

  The vodka was nasty. Obviously counterfeit. But he didn't care. At one point he staggered to the hole in the floor that passed as a toilet and vomited, then returned unsteadily to his booth and resumed his private drinking session.

  Some time later, he didn't know how long, he decided he should try to make it home, or there was a high likelihood he would be spending the entire night in this damned booth. He stood and swayed on his feet, rooting through his pockets for enough money to pay the 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 broad daylight and the huge oriental sun blazed down from above. He guessed it was late afternoon, around the time he should be returning home from school. Shit, better hurry. 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 and break his neck. 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 suddenly, there she was. Standing at the top of the staircase.

  That damn little dead girl.

  His nemesis.

  Right on cue.

  Jeff stopped, and squinted at her. She was wearing the same blue and white dress she always wore, with the red neckerchief tied around her throat, and her hair was tied neatly in pigtails held in place with those little white ribbons. 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. She looked directly at him and scowled, the animosity coming off her in waves.

  Jeff started to edge his way around her. But then a sudden, ruthless rage came out of nowhere and swept him up in its red tide.

  It was the injustice of it all that finally 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 the fuck alone?

  He grunted and lashed out blindly, fully expecting his flailing arm to pass clean through the ghost as he stormed past 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 backwards down the concrete staircase.

  She didn't scream. Instead, her almond eyes widened in terror. She hit the concrete with a sickening thud, and Jeff heard the air whoosh out of her. Her dying breath.

  Then she was, laying in a crumpled heap at the bottom of the staircase, one leg twisted hideously 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 with his head in his hands. Somewhere nearby, an apartment door opened and a woman began to scream.

  Afterwards, he saw the little dead girl all the time. She became his constant companion. Asleep or awake, it didn't even 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 to anyone who would listen that for an age he was haunted by the ghost of a girl he hadn't even killed yet, and now she was just an ordinary ghost. To him, that scenario was marginally easier to comprehend than that of being haunted by the ghost of a ghost.

  But it mattered not. No one believed him, anyway.

  The crazy foreigner, they called him. The crazy, child-killing foreigner.

  Nobody else could see her.

  His little persecutor.

  The little dead girl.

  Curiosities

  Curiosities was the rather appropriate name given to a tiny, nondescript junk shop situated in a little winding side street a stone's throw away from Plymouth's once-glorious sea front. It was a family run business and always had been, having been in existence for almost eighty years. It was originally established by a very charming and eccentric character by the name of Arthur Needham. And the current proprietor was his grandson and only living relative, Neil.

  The shop had never made a huge profit, but was never in serious financial difficulty either. It just seemed to amble along at a steady pace in no particular direction. It was uncanny the way that whenever the spectre of bankruptcy reared its ugly head and became anything more than a distant possibility, which was often over the years, something always turned up. Some obscure, yet highly sought after and valuable item never failed to materialise. It was almost as if by magic.

  Neil Needham was a distinguished middle-aged bachelor. Or at least, he liked to think so. He had never married, and all his family were dead, including both of his parents who had died right here in the shop - his father from a massive stroke suffered whilst serving behind the counter one morning, and his mother passing peacefully in her sleep in the flat above the shop where she lived. Alone, Neil led an uneventful, simplistic lifestyle that evolved around the daily running of Curiosities.

  Contrary to common practice, the shop was open eight hours a day, three-hundred and sixty-four days a year. Christmas Day was the only exception. What else was there to do?

  Spring and summer were by far the busiest times. The town was alive with tourists and day-trippers, all buzzing around looking for bargains and souvenirs, some of whom always found their way into the shop. Neil liked to think Curiosities oozed a unique kind of rustic charm, enchanting and enticing potential customers through the door.

  The winter, however, was an entirely different matter. The deserted rainswept streets were a stark contrast to the uplifting, sun-kissed days of summer, and trade suffered accordingly. There were no tourists or day trippers. The student fraternity and various types of sailors were still around but they rarely had the time or money to browse. They simply stormed past on their way somewhere else, bowing their preoccupied heads against the biting sea wind, in too
much of a hurry to to even notice the dilapidated junk shop.

  It was now the beginning of February. The bleakest depths of winter. Christmas and New Year had passed leaving many disheartened, disillusioned, and in fear of what the next calendar year may hold. Not to mention flat broke. The silly season had lost all its sparkle and allure in recent years. All Neil saw on the faces of passers-by now were increasing amounts of stress and worry. All this meant slim pickings for small businesses. Nobody had money for anything but life's essentials, which they invariably bought in one of those huge, soulless supermarkets.

  Over the years, Neil's grandfather, as well as building up the business, had also managed to build up something of a bad reputation. The talk was rife amongst the locals. He was an unscrupulous business-man, a liar, a philanderer, a thief and a drunkard. Even worse, depending on who you listened to, he was an opium addict, a pervert, a murderer and a Satanist. Sections of the community eventually decided that he was in league with the devil and shunned him, refusing to enter his shop and even crossing the road to avoid getting too close to where he lived.

  But just what did they know?

  The business only flourished which, like a vicious circle, only led to yet more allegations and ammunition for the gossip-mongers. It became a constant source of wonder as to why, with mounting debts and practically no income, Curiosities always had its doors open for business.

  Neil, and his father before him, had been tarred with the same brush to a certain extent. But thankfully, as the wheels of time trundled relentlessly onward, people became more tolerant, open-minded and willing to accept the odd eccentric. The cultural and social barriers once so prevalent in times gone by were slowly corroding as people became more introspective, preferring to alienate themselves in order to dwell on their own trivialities rather than analysing those of others. Society as a whole was crumbling, while the individual wallowed in self-inflicted sorrow. It was a sad state of affairs.