Chinese people always make sure that their dear departed have a proper burial. Dead people who are unhappy with their last resting place become ghosts. Their soul, called the PO, refuses to leave the world. It turns into an evil spirit.
Some people, especially those who are buried far from their place of birth, become HOPPING GHOSTS. They dig their way out of the grave and try to make it home. Only, the corpse becomes stiffer and stiffer with each passing day. The legs refuse to bend, so the ghost is forced to hop.
Hopping ghosts are truly horrible to look at. Some have eyes that keep slipping out of their sockets. Others have swollen tongues that hang down to their chests, attracting hungry flies and other insects. The nails keep on growing long after death, so the ghosts sharpen them on flat stones until they're like knives. So it should be easy to spot a Hopping Ghost come your way, right? Perhaps...in the world of the supernatual, nothing is ever what it seems....
The children in the junior ward in Shanghai’s main hospital were waiting for their tea, which was late as usual. Yi was sitting closest to the heater. She was getting better after an operation on her toe and it was only a matter of days now before the doctor signed the papers so she could go home. On the bed next to her Chan, a girl who'd injured her arm doing gymnastics at school, was playing with beads. She too was getting better quickly and seemed in the mood for talking.
Yi shivered, despited being so close to the old radiator. It was raining outside and the trees around the hospital were being whipped around by a sharp wind.
‘They say this hospital is haunted,’ said Chan. 'It's always cold on the wards. No matter how high they turn up the heating, the patients are always shivering.'
‘Haunted?’ Two girls lying on cots near the door looked around them in alarm. They were twins and both had a broken leg, one the left and one the right. ‘Haunted by what?’
‘A hopping ghost,’ said Chan. ‘The orderly told me.’
A boy in the far corner of the ward coughed. ‘The orderly doesn’t know anything about ghosts,’
‘Pardon?’ said Yi politely.
‘The orderly,’ repeated the boy with some difficulty, ‘he doesn’t know anything about ghosts, hopping or otherwise.’
Chan noticed he had bandages around his face. He was wrapped up like a mummy, with only a slit around the eyes and another one over the mouth. The nurses must have moved him in to our ward while we were having dinner, she thought. No one, not even the twins who were always looking out of the window, had seen him arrive. Perhaps he’d been in intensive care, or in one of the wards where they put the adults. The nurses often put children there when they were short of beds in the junior ward.
‘Do YOU now anything about ghosts?’ asked Yi.
‘Only what I heard in our village,’ replied the boy. He moved around on the narrow bed, trying to get comfortable.
‘Well, I do,’ said Chan. ‘The orderly told me there is a ghost here, and judging by how cold it is in here, I believe him.’
The twins both gawped. ‘Is it a horrible ghost?’
‘Quite horrible apparently,’ said Chan. ‘It’s the ghost of a thief. He broke in here one night, wanting to steal food from the kitchens. Cook heard him rustling around the rice sacks, like a mouse. She called the police, of course. And the orderly! That’s how he knows.’
‘Well….’ Began Yi.
‘No,’ said the boy in the bandages.
‘Anyway,’ continued Chan, not giving either of the two to interrupt her flow. ‘Cook managed to lock the thief in the kitchen. The wretch banged on the doors with his fists, keeping most of the patients in the hospital awake. Cook said he swore like a trooper too. Obviously he’d been leading a life of crime.’
‘Please,’ insisted the boy in the bandages.
Chan took no notice of him. She could tell that the twins were under her storytelling spell. Their eyes were as big as saucers.
‘The police got here at last,’ she continued. ‘They wanted to take the thief down to the station. But he gave them the slip. He ran all around the wards, frightening the patients to within inches of their lives. One of the officers shouted at him, ordering him to stop, but it’s useless shouting at thieves. They just don’t listen. This one overturned some of the bedside cabinets trying to escape. He kicked over the chamber pots under the beds. There was wee all over the floor.’
‘Cook said the thief even managed to snatch a patient’s purse from under her pillow. He hadn’t managed to get away with food but he’d got some cash. Apparently he waved the purse around so the police could see it.’
‘Cheeky,’ said one of the twins.
‘No respect for the law,’ added Yi.
‘No respect,’ echoed the boy in the bandages, managing to sit up on one elbow.
‘Of course, the hoodlum never got away,’ Chan went on. ‘The police cornered him in the waiting room. So what do you think he did? He jumped out of a window. He must have thought there was soft grass under it, or a fish pond. There was only a hard floor. The orderly said he was as limp as a puppet with broken strings when they brought him on a stretcher. He died in the night, and became a hopping ghost. I guess it’s the stolen money that keeps him here. You see, he let go of the purse before he jumped out of the window. Coins rolled around everywhere. He still wanders around at night, looking for them under the beds.’
‘That’s not what happened,’ spluttered the boy in the bandages, almost falling out of his narrow bunk in his eagerness to speak. ‘I know that story and it’s not like that. The guy wasn’t a thief. He was a monk, from a remote village in the mountains. He and his mum had come to the city to find his grandfather with whom they’d lost touch. But the monk’s mum got ill on the way. She’d never travelled such a long distance before and the air of the city made her sick. So when they passed the hospital, the monk suggested they come in to see if there was anything the doctors could do for her. Someone in the waiting room thought the monk worked here, on account of his white shirt. They sent him to fetch some rice from the stores, and he was too shy to say no. The cook made a mistake, and so did the orderly. They called the police to arrest and innocent man.’
‘But what about the money he stole?’ asked Yi.
‘It wasn’t a purse he was waving around. It was a letter from the priest in his temple, saying he was studying to become a monk. Only the police never gave him the chance to show it to them. And then he slipped on some pee. He fell out of the window. It was tragic.’
‘That’s not what the orderly said,’ argued Chan, who was miffed that the boy in the bandages had impressed the twins more than her.
‘You shouldn’t believe everything you’re told,’ said the boy.
‘But how do you know your version of the story is the true one?’ asked Yi.
The boy managed to shuffle to his feet. You could tell there was something wrong with his bones. He was all stiff.
‘I knew the monk very well,’ he replied. ‘He didn’t come back for money, you know. He came back for the letter that said he was a respected student at the temple. That letter was very important to him.’
Slowly, painfully, the boy bent down and retrieved something from under the bed. ‘There, got you at last’ he grunted.
The others watched him hop across the room to the window, a white enevelope with a blood-red seal fluttering in his hands.
‘Goodbye,’ he said, and a moment later he was gone, leaving a pile of soiled bandages on the floor for the orderly to clean up.
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