Dark Corridors: The Dark Journeys Trilogy, #2

By Charles Justus Garard

Harper Paget destroyed some of the deadly creatures menacing areas of Atlanta in DARK NEIGHBORHOODS, the dimension-traveling entities known as the Lamiae in ancient Greece and the Kuntilanak in Indonesia. However, he lost some loved ones in the US and China.

In DARK CORRIDORS, Harper travels to Indonesia and then to China where he works, for a short time, for a university connected to his university back home. When he loses that position because a violent attack involving him in a Chinese surgical operating room, he transfers to a Chinese university located iin a somewhat rural area and moves into a campus hotel that, because of him, becomes haunted by the mind-twisting, memory occupying ancient creatures. His French friend, Pierre, offers sage advice and support in the war against the Kunti (as Pierre calls them).

Geraldine, Harper's wily girlfriend, is thrown back through a dimensional vortex, time-tunneling back to Warrick, Harper's hometown in Illinois, in the past at the time when Harper is a high school student. Pierre is visited by a young lady from Warrick who has inadvertently traveled through the same Kunti-generated vortex that swallowed Geraldine by trading places with her.

When Pierre and his girlfriend Christabel and her roommate visit Harper in the haunted hotel, Christabel's mind is manipulated by the Kunti, and she sees a California beach where she encounters an incarnation of Harper's witch ancestor. She also see Warrick in the past when Geraldine is trapped there.

As in DARK NEIGHBORHOODS, Harper and his friends must traverse the multi-dimensional, multi-national terrain in their battle with the deadly Kunti/Lamiae who are intent upon occupying a planet that the humans have not taken care of. The problem for us is that we don't know if all of the characters -- even including Harper -- are who they appear to be at all times.

Nowhere are we  safe . . . not in our pasts . . . not in our dreams . . . and certainly not in the dark corridors of the haunted campus hotel. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Charles Justus Garard
• Release date: Apr 30, 2015
• ISBN: 9780990343554

Book preview

This novel continues with characters from DARK NEIGHBORHOODS

I wish to thank Boris Lopatinsky for his ideas and suggestions regarding parts of the narrative and dialogue for one of the characters. I also wish to thank Minagustina Wigan for her continuing to provide background information based on the beliefs in her country of Indonesia and Zhang Yuhua for her information and childhood memories of China.

Cover photo and design is by Shila Nadar, UK, (from a photo taken by the author in China) who extends her thanks to Befunky.

*

In ancient Greece, they supposedly sucked energy from babies or handsome young men. They’re like female vampires but not resurrected corpses. Those are called revenants or vrykolakas. Three hundred . . . four hundred years ago, female psychics who tried to expose these spirit forms, these shape-shifters, were tried and executed as witches. They’re very crafty, hard to capture because they can travel like shadows through time. Through space.

Dark Neighborhoods

*

Author’s note: In this novel, I have tried to capture the way some Chinese, particularly students, speak English. This is taken from the speech of students I have known. It is in no way meant to belittle or ridicule Chinese people, whom I greatly admire.

~

Chapter One:

~

The shadowy entity that threw Harper Paget down the concrete steps between the third and fourth floors of the residence building was neither human nor non-human.

But she was female.

As she gripped his neck, he breathed in the essence of a spirit that was pure female; he also breathed in unadulterated rage and hatred. Her owl-like eyes blinked.

Whatever she was, her form was created or determined by some unknown, unidentifiable source the way the sun’s position determined the length of any shadow it produced.

Suddenly, he saw the beauty of her face, and his fear abated for an instant, long enough for the fear that she was draining from him, along with his sweat, to be replaced by a strange attraction. But the light source that created this shadowy creature was mutable and unstable, and her face was instantly swallowed by the darkness.

The next feeling he had blocked out all other concerns – the pain that streaked through his right leg and buttocks as he collided with the concrete landing was too excruciating to allow the entry of much speculation. Panting and swearing, praying and gulping air to fight the encroaching nausea, he dragged himself on his uninjured side along the recently mopped floor of the corridor until he reached the closed door of his apartment.

Still breathing frantically through his nose, he freed the keys from the clip on his belt, separated the apartment key from the others on the ring, and reached upward to insert it into the slot just below the handle. God-dddd, he panted. Hhhhhh-uuhhhhh!

He turned the key while simultaneously slamming his shoulder against the door. This, he knew, helped the bolt free itself from the abrasive contact with the door. When he heard the telltale click, he turned the key and pulled outward.

At any moment, he expected to feel the last blow from the shadow presence – the killing blow that would separate his spiritual self from its physical shell and send it hurling toward the next world that was now occupied by his centuries-ago executed ancestor Jacquema Paget, by his murdered wife Pauline, by his murdered pen-pal Mira, and his grandmother who had been deceased for forty-five years.

Instead he fell through the open doorway into his empty apartment and sprawled across the imitation-wood floor . . . .

*

Harper took a drink from the tiny green-and-white carton of milk, which carried the Mengmu trademark—the logo of a moon rising above a planet that was undoubtedly the earth. He detached the small twisted plastic straw that came with these cartons, and, as he often did, he flattened out one of them and used it as a toothpick to dislodge food particles that had become impacted between his teeth. The milk, like other food items, which had been brought to him from his own refrigerator in the kitchen he had not entered since the day of his leg and hip injury, was difficult to drink as he lay on his left, non-injured side.

The tiny milk cartons made him think of Geraldine; she had gone grocery shopping with him so many times here in Qian Shan where he had bought boxes packed with the tiny cartons.

Geraldine was the name she’d selected for her English name because she had liked the sound of it. She had read about it, she had told him, in one of the poems by British poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Most of the students majoring in English here at Qian Shan Institute were required to take on English names, just as Geraldine had done when she had been an undergraduate down in southern China; her first choice had been Carol, but she had never liked the way it sounded rolling around inside her mouth.

I’m not an expert in British literature, Harper had said. But I do know about supernatural creatures. That’s the name of a Lesbian vampiric phantom in Coleridge’s poem ‘Christabel’.

I’m not a Lesbian.

No, he said. I can testify to that.

She had blushed.

She was, however, elegant and gaunt like a hungry vampire creature.

What about your name?

Harper? Don’t know. Ask my mother. I’m hardly an angel who plays a harp. She’ll tell you that.

Geraldine laughed.

Some of the English names that the Chinese students chose were inventive and colorful – names like Ice, Sky, Silence, Ocean, and brand names for American products. He’d asked a few of them to change their names, as he had done here at the Qian Shan Institute, located in the second largest city in the Liaoning Province. I don’t want my students being laughed at when they go to apply for a job or go to America, he had told his classes.

He looked at the screen of the computer that one of his students had balanced on the chair next to his bed, at the nude Japanese girl that formed a background for his icons.

What did he really want to do? Did he really want to work on his book that was to be his sequel to Paranormal Pursuit? Or did he want to continue to work on accumulating the works of Greek and Roman literature for the Advanced Mythology course he would be teaching to post-graduate students at Xin Huang College of Science and Technology in the fall. From what he had been told, that college was located to the west of the city of Xin Huang, and students from the downtown university would be coming to the smaller campus just to take his graduate classes. Of course, he would also be teaching basic classes to juniors from the rural college, but he was still flattered by the arrangement.

However, he was beginning to wonder if his back and leg injury would be healed in time for him to make the journey to the agriculture college up in Jilin Province where he needed to arrive sometime in August.

Lots of luck, he thought.

Regarding what he wanted to work on now: No coin toss required there.

He moved the mouse and clicked on My Documents.

The icons spread across the screen page. He scrolled through them, staring at them.

Is this what Sir Thomas Malory felt like when he wrote Le Morte D’Arthur in a prison cell?

On the screen, he could still see the icons for epics of ancient Greece and Rome that he had been copying and pasting from the web sites, which posted entire texts of public-domain literary works.

Shit.

He decided not to open any of them and searched instead for the icon for the folder where he had stored the conversation during his interview back in 2008.

~

"Interview: March 2008 for Qian Shan newspaper."

Why not?

He left-clicked twice.

Interview: March 2008: Qian Shan Evening News

Reporter interpreter: How long have you been in China?

Harper: I came here two years ago last August.

Interpreter: About two and a half years.

Harper: Right. Not counting the one time I had to fly back to McAbee University. I was on leave—we call it sabbatical—from there, but I had to check with them to do what paperwork I couldn’t do online. Teacher retirement contributions. Reports on what I am doing here working for another university. Self-evaluation forms. Insurance forms.

She repeated this to the newspaper reporter in Chinese. He asked another question in Chinese.

Before you come to China, what did you do?

The same as I am still doing, Harper told her. I was a Professor of Humanities at McAbee. I sometimes worked with the psychology department because my research gets into the paranormal as well as mythology.

Interpreter: Doctor? She read something that had been written in Chinese on the paper in front of her. Hmmm?

Yes. Mythology. Classical Literature. Greeks and Romans. You know.

McAbee?

Yes. The state is Illinois. But I travel a lot to do my research for novels and nonfiction. Before coming to China, I spent a lot of time in Atlanta.

At- ranta . . .

Yes. In Georgia. Georgia and Illinois are states. Like provinces.

I know. I know.  She repeated this to the reporter.

He nodded and asked another question.

Interpreter: Uh, before you come . . . coming here, how much do you know about China?

The room lacked furniture, except for the spare rectangular gray table, so her voice was given a hollow resonance.

Not much. I knew more about Indonesia.

Ah, Indo-re-sia.  She emphasized the last syllable.  Why you not go to In-do-re-sia?

I did. I was in Jakarta to do some research before I came here.

But you not stay.

I was there with my friend Lina. She’s Indonesian. She wanted to be with her Chinese-Indonesian parents who had migrated to California from Bali. When her parents retired, they moved back to Bali. They’re getting on in years. Her father is ninety and her mother is close to that. Lina had gone to the mid-west to study and she remained there. Hadn’t seen her parents in more than fifteen years.

She is still there?

No no no. She’s back at McAbee now.  She was reluctant to fly back to America—afraid she would never see her parents again. But she had to.

But you say you were in Jakarta.

Sharp lady, he thought. So you were paying attention. Yes. I had some quick research to do there. But I couldn’t stay there. McAbee University has this 2+2 program here, so I had to either come here to China or go back to the main campus in Illinois.

So you learn more about China now?

Of course. And about Indonesia.

However, the days before and after Eric’s death in Star-Cross Corners in Atlanta had brought him closer to learning the exact cause of Mira’s death than living those many months in Jakarta. She was a native of Indonesia, but her headless body had been found on the street below the Great International Hotel in Qian Shan. The shape-shifting entities had taken over the appearance of the kuntilanak in her country, but she had died while visiting China on business. Contradictions, he had discovered, were a way of life in Indonesia as well as here in China, but this was something he would never – could never – explain in an interview.

And did you try the traditional things . . . uh . . . see the historical places . . . the historic places?

Yes. Of course.

The interpreter explained what he had told her to the reporter.

He listened, nodded, and fired back another question.

She thought about his question, evidently translating in her head.

The photographer walked behind Harper and stood over the interpreter, aiming his 35 mm SLR at Harper’s face.

What . . . what impressed you deep-ri when you come . . . when you coming here? She paused and again tackled the words that were the most difficult for her. "Impressed you deep-ri . . . after you came here?"

After I came here? Harper echoed.

She nodded.

At first, I was impressed that the students were prepared – that they brought their textbooks to class. At my university in Illinois, the students often didn’t bring textbooks for several weeks.

The interpreter translated.

The reporter digested this, scribbled something in Chinese characters, and created another question for her.

Mnn. She looked again at Harper. Uh, when first you come to China, sure-ri you lived with some difficulty. Mmm, do you remember?

Difficulty? At the university or in town or—

Mnnn. Any . . .

Anywhere. Yes. Not speaking Chinese. I can’t go anywhere like I could in America. In Atlanta and in McAbee, I could get in my VW and drive. Here . . . if I  take a taxi . . . I have to go with friends.

Oh-hh. Someone should accompany you.

Usually. Sometimes I can go certain places now by showing an address written in Chinese. Like when I taught a class at the steel company last summer, I just showed the cab driver the address. But I can communicate better with sign language than with mispronouncing Chinese words. If I want something in a store—

Body language? She laughed.

Right. Gesturing. If I want a mirror, for example, I just . . . He mimicked himself combing his hair in an invisible mirror.

Delighted by this, the interpreter explained this to the stoic reporter.

The reporter scribbled characters but forwarded no further questions.

I’m sure now, said the interpreter, that you can speak a little Chinese. Right?

Not much.

Not much?

A little. I just started taking a Chinese class here.

Here? Who teach you? Who teach the Chinese class? Uh, maybe I know her.

Interesting, Harper thought. I didn’t tell her that our teacher was a female.

Harper scribbled the pinyin name Zhu Yang on a small slip of paper and slid it toward her.

She read it slowly.

She knows you, Harper told her. You come from here, right? You graduated from this institute?

Yeah.

She recognized you.

Real-ri? she asked with some difficulty.

Yeah. You just saw her.

Oh. She looked toward the closed door. The girl . . .

She came in with me.

Oh. That girl standing behind you?

Right.

Oh. I know her. I know her.

Right. She’s my friend. My ladyfriend. Her English name is Geraldine.

She apparently was thinking about this. She’s very beautiful.

Did I put my foot in my mouth? Harper wondered. He knew that many Chinese people frowned on foreigners dating Chinese, particularly the young local women. The usual belief shared among the local gossips was that foreign men were only interested in sex, and that the Chinese ladies were only interested in going to the United States and securing a green card.

None of this exchange was now being translated for the reporter. He had his own line of questioning in mind and directed further inquiries to the interpreter in Chinese.

Uh. Are you satisfied with your present life? Is there something you feel . . . She struggled with a word that never jelled. Uh, unhappy?

Uh, can you be specific. . . like, give me an example?

Mmmm. You are satisfied with the living model . . . the living conditions here?

The living conditions here are pretty good for us . . . for internationals. I don’t like it when the power goes off . . . or the water is shut off . . .

She stared at him for a moment. That happens here. A lot of construction in the city. And near the university, always construction going on. But the Chinese teachers. . . .

We have it better than those teachers, he completed. He tried not to become impatient too easily and complete the sentences of others, but it was a bad habit that he still needed to break. Is that what you mean? Better facilities? Better pay?

Foreign experts are important to schools these days. Parents want their children to learn En-grish.

Yes, he said. The schools like to show parents that they have native speakers of English on their faculty, so they display us like products.

The interpreter squirmed with discomfort but translated nothing for the reporter. Uh, you are the first one I know who is a professor – a doctor – from a foreign country. When I was in this university, most of the foreign teachers who – who – who taught us. . . they come here just because they can speak Engrish.

That’s right. They are being hired for their birth certificate.

*

~

Chapter Two:

~

Harper extended his right leg and pressed his foot against the wooden headboard. His foot tingled from disuse, and the pain in his thigh increased again. He pushed and pushed and pushed.

It sounds like your leg and back are going to be uncomfortable for quite a while, Glenn Cameron, the chairperson of the English Department at McAbee, had written in his email early that morning. I'm sorry to hear that. I'm not surprised that the bruises took a while to develop, especially if the injuries were fairly deep. My wife took a fall last year and sustained a deep-muscle bruise that still bothers her from time to time; apparently those kinds of things can take some time to heal completely. I can't imagine how unpleasant massage treatment would be for something like that!

I can’t either, Harper thought.

But it would sure be nice to be able to take a shower, to shave off the week-old beard stubble.

He again slipped the reading glasses over his nose and looked at the computer screen.

The ring of the telephone catapulted Harper out of his reverie like a cascading of tiny iron peddles being thrown against his brain.

Dr. Paget, he said dully.

Hi. It’s me.

Hi, he said. What’s up?

Hi, Geraldine said again, louder. She knew that it was never necessary to identify herself. Nothing. Nothing is up. Just calling to check. Are you better now?

‘‘Uh, a little bit. Not great, but a little bit. I can’t walk yet, but there’s a big purplish-black bruise on the back of my thigh, according to the teacher that was here today."

A Chinese teacher? Who?

Wei Hanzhen. He’s been coming here bringing me food, cleaning up stuff. That’s why I gave him a lot of good books.

Oh. Really.

It’s hard to get good books in China. You know that. Mythology texts, I mean.  So I—

He must‘ve been very thankful.

He seemed to be.

And he—

But I was thankful too . . . and at the same time embarrassed, you know.

It’s okay.

The phone beeped twice.

Hello?

Harper let his breath out slowly. Yeahhhh. Why do you keep doing that?

Doing what?

Cutting off the phone.

No no no, Geraldine shrilled. I didn’t do anything.

Whenever you call me, I keep hearing beep beep beep. Maybe you keep pressing something.

Noooooo. Something must be wrong.

Okay. Maybe we’re being monitored. Spied upon.

I have to go to a meeting tomorrow. And the day after tomorrow, we have to have an audit.

That’s good. They need to do that there. I’ll bet they‘ll find a lot of deep pockets.

Really. What do you care? You are leaving. You not only left McAbee; you are leaving Qian Shan Institute. That was a big . . . how you say it . . . a big step?

Bigger than you realize. Giving up that security and familiarity – the comfort of the support system . . . how easy do you think that was to do? I not only have to leave you. I am leaving my friends Pierre and Wei Hanzhen.

Silence.

But McAbee was your support . . . something, she said. Support system. Right?

Yes. I was sacked by my own university. I didn’t leave them. I made too many board members angry because I wouldn’t discontinue my research that – they think – interferes with my full-time commitment to the school. We all know what they’re really afraid of: those alumni who complained during the fund-raisers about my paranormal interests. They think I am offending their Christian sensibilities. One even said in an interview that I must have made a deal with the Devil.

Could you fly out of China?

When I have to. Could you?

How could I do that?

You had the chance once. I think it was the diamond ring on your finger – the one that you kept taking off and putting back on.

That’s the past.

Right, Geraldine. Put it in the past where you don’t have to deal with it.

When do you have to leave?

That’s what the Foreign Affairs Office up at the Xin Huang College of Science and Technology wants to know.  But the FAO here cannot arrange my train ticket if they don’t know when I will be able to walk. You gotta be able to walk before you can fly.

Maybe you should keep trying to walk.

Hanzhen and the boy had to help me walk to the toilet, but just sitting there was excruciating because of my injured back. I am so humiliated to be in this position. Cannot stand the way I look or smell . . . my hair, my beard . . . or the way the room smells like a WC because of the bucket where I have to shit.

Harper, you should go back to the hospital. See the doctor again.

Should. Right. A lot of shoulds. I should also be wearing a cross when I walk in dark corridors too.

At that moment, Harper could only see the next residential building from the confines of the sweat-soaked, ink-spotted sheets of his bed where he had been stewing in his own pain and humiliation since the attack. Pierre Montand, one of two French teachers that Harper had met and befriended, said that single female Chinese teachers occupied the sixth floor of the opposite building, on the south end.  Pierre, who lived above Harper, was afforded a clearer view of them during the fall and winter semesters and was able to testify to the various stages of undress of their female neighbors.

Like the tall apartment buildings miles west of the institute where Geraldine lived, these much-shorter buildings on the campus were primarily untenanted during the summer vacation months. Harper had seen only two or three showing evidence of any occupants, and these were just dimly glowing lights late at night.

However, on this night that he exchanged Instant Messages with Geraldine, he saw what he had not noticed before – a female form poised indiscreetly in one of the windows on the top floor, just as he and Geraldine had seen a solitary watcher across from her sixteenth-floor apartment a week before his attack. In fact, it looked almost as if someone had clicked and copied the image on a computer and pasted it here – on the computer-like image in his mind – and projected it live onto a window of the teachers’ residence behind his own building.

*

Instant Messages

Ger: Harper?

Harper: YES.

Ger: I don’t see her tonight. You were right. But how did you know?

Harper: BECAUSE I SEE HER IN THE BUILDING BEHIND ME. SHE’S HERE NOW, WATCHING ME.

Ger: Why are you using all big letters? I thought Americans thought that was shouting.

Harper: NOT IN THIS CASE. I AM TYPING WITH ONE FINGER WHILE LYING ON MY SIDE.

Wei Hanzhen and two students had brought the desktop computer and hard-drive unit from the study into his bedroom, enabling him to type emails amd online messages to students he had taught during the last two semesters.

The students here at Qian Shan Institute weren’t just majoring in English at a Chinese university. They were working toward a degree from McAbee University taught on this campus, which was part of a Sino-US exchange program. They could obtain a four-year degree by remaining here, or, if their parents could afford the tremendous expense, they could spend the last two years of the program on the campus of McAbee University. Such programs were referred to as 2+2 programs, popular cash cow arrangements popping up all over China to help this nation’s educational structure catch up with its burgeoning economic development.

The ability of the parents to pay the significantly higher tuition for the Sino-US program meant that the students didn’t have to