Fiction: Group 5
From the Gobi to the Delta
Korean International Springboard Programme, Longid, Katana - 13, Fiction: Group 5
ts 3:00 in the morning and the first thing I hear is “WOOF, WOOF, WOOF!”
I knew there was trouble in the back porch. There’s this figure that’s been haunting where I lived since
I lived in the Gobi desert. I moved to Beijing for half a year, then, I moved here. It followed me all the
way through. I now live in a medium-sized detached house in Hong Kong.
Suddenly, I heard it talk: “Haru. Haru Carrier.”
It knows my name. It always did. Since I first saw it walking towards my old house in the Gobi Desert it
did. It does extraordinary things. Only yesterday I was going to the bathroom to find water shooting out of
the toilet in slow motion for 20 seconds. Also, I have this painting on the wall of a white pigeon and he
makes it move. It is perched on a power line, but sometimes, I see it twist, bend and sometimes fly. A while
ago, in the storage room it played about 30 seconds of
Fast Car
on the electric guitar that was plugged into
an amp. I went inside and I smelt smoke (luckily, I keep the windows in the store room a little bit open
24/7). The amp was on, but it wasn’t plugged in to the wall! When I turned it off, I felt static electricity.
The figure seems to be able to generate its own electricity. When I walked out I noticed that the ceiling fan
was moving at a constant slow speed (about 1 RPM). The wall regulator was off so I thought it was simply
spinning down but when I came back there a minute later, it was still going- this time, in reverse direction,
like how people set them when they want some circulation, but not a draft. To tell you now, my ceiling
fans don’t have that little switch that does that.
It was 4:00pm and the boys would come at 7, so I had three whole hours to myself. There were
shops across the road being remodeled, and I couldn’t bear the noise, so the balcony doors were shut tight.
Instead, the bedroom windows were open at a full 90 degrees and the ceiling fan in the bedroom was on
and it stayed on, thankfully. The house was so quiet that you could hear the clocks ticking and the
refrigerators turning on and off, the silent whirr of the fans and the occasional stir of garbage in the kitchen
bin, recycling bins and the compost machine. The “Grey figure” loves doing that, for whatever reason. Not
to mention the silent remodeling noise that managed to make its way through the doors.
“RING RING!” The home phone rang. This phone is really old and has acoustic bells. It is quite
loud, but I’m used to it. It’s been passed on from my grandparents to my parents, but they found it just too
loud, and it often acts up. Whether it has anything to do with the Figure, I don’t know. I answered it.
It turned out to be Martin, who once helped me find out whether the figure that was creepily
following me around wherever I move, was man-eating or not. I’ve been on the news
three times
because
of the darn ghost and Martin just told me that there was a bit of chaos in the jewelry and precious items
shop that was behind my house. They say that a couple of items have been moved and found in all sorts of
places. Martin turned out to be at the store and I could hear the store owner saying “
HOW
, in the name of
God, has
THIS
ended up
HERE
?!?” and stuff like that, and the sounds of people constantly walking by and
jewelry being tossed carelessly in all directions. Martin, sounding restless and tired sighed, “Please come
down here, before the whole of Hong Kong starts to blame you…”
“OK, I’m coming,” I replied. I also noticed that the sound of rustling garbage has stopped.
When I arrived at the store, it was a
mess
. Necklaces and rings were all over the floor and the store
owner was on the verge of calling 999. The storeowner, with hands full of jewelry and various items,
including a hammer approached me with a half-angry, half-scared face and told me how it started. “The
lights started flickering and I went out to find things in different places. This necklace that is around my
wrist right now was hanging from the ceiling fan blade.”
I looked towards the center of the room and saw a large brass
CEILING FAN
with four flower lights and
four blades with cane insert. Not at all was I surprised. I have no idea why, but this mysterious figure seems
to be fixated with these beautiful, often necessary air-moving overhead fixtures. First, it was the new
kindergarten down the road, where the fans all turned off at once, and then it was an old Chinese medicine
store, where they turned from off to high, and now this? This was outrageous. The Grey Figure was
interrupting everyday life, and then it all goes down to me, the main victim. If there were no ceiling fans,
the tables would tip or the doors would slam. I
had
to fix this.
I
