Chapter 10

十

The accidents continued. Perhaps the torso didn’t have enough souls. Or more was going on.

Yesterday, a truck driving by the school had its cargo load escape. A bunch of loose barrels rolled out and struck a cleaner on the side of the road, bowling over, crushing and killing the elderly woman instantly. Rooster had been hopping by on his pogo stick when he saw her mangled corpse, the crowd circled around her, snapping cell phone pics.

“She survived the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, only for this...” Rooster said to me, standing on the front steps of our building.

He was visibly shaken, his eyes glassy and red from crying.

“It was someone’s mother, someone’s grandma. She’s not a statistic!” shouted Rooster, at the rubbernecking gaggle of students walking by. The students glanced at him curiously, then hurried their pace to a gallop...

Another unfortunate campus occurrence: the elevators in a teaching building froze, trapping a teacher, a Chinese teacher inside for over 4 hours.

The school claimed it’d be fixed, but then the next week, in the same elevator, the elevator cable snapped, dropped like an anchor and two security guards inside the elevator died. The classes on the upper floor of the building were then moved to a lower floor.

A couple days later, an escalator at the nearby subway station malfunctioned, sucking a school administrator down into the escalator’s mechanical teeth inside, eating her alive...

Marco was wearing ever more eccentric clothing, beads, would whisper chants, spells. I thought the school might say something to him about it. But maybe they just figured, since he was Cuban, it was his heritage and respected it. He wasn’t involving any of the students in it or discussing it in his lectures. The school also liked taking photos of him in his brightly colored garb, his robes, and dashikis. The school was using his pictures on its website and in their brochures...

Marco said he understood the ghosts. He knew. He swore the accidents were attributable to hungry and angry ghosts. That the ghosts were like the cockroaches in Rooster’s apartment, that they’d been here before us, will be here after us. Marco said he’d been sleeping well and safe, though, since his Santeria skills and spells were improving by the day.

He’d had a few scorpions in his apartment, which was worrying, but he had managed to kill them with a bug zapper, used them in a spell.

“Lemons into lemonade, dog,” he’d growled.

Man-bun Matty, the 9-year China vet, had a different opinion, wasn’t convinced at all. He attributed the accidents, incidents to China’s notoriously poor safety standards. Bribes of safety inspectors being rife. Half-assed work, construction done daily.

But, for me, after having read several Stephen King novels, watched countless horror films, I thought to the part of the movie where the protagonist goes to the library or online to research the history of the area. With the school being built on the grounds of a former prison, it couldn’t be a coincidence, it couldn’t be mere negligence.

I believed Marco, I believed in the ghosts, I believed in eschatology, and I had to know more...