I overheard a fiction-writing contest on NPR, the other day, and something made me sit down and write a story in response to the contest.
The problem: I can’t enter the contest, because it’s only for residents of the US, which I’m not, currently. Whatever. It was just a moment of weird inspiration – I’ve been thinking a lot about ghosts, lately.
The parameters: the story must be 600 words, and, “The Story must: (i) Start with the first line: ‘Some people swore that the house was haunted.’ and (ii) End with the last line: ‘Nothing was ever the same again after that.’” So here’s my three-minute ghost story.
Some people swore that the house was haunted.
The new house was probably haunted from the start. From the day it was built, on the edge of the forest, there was a moodiness that would settle upon anyone who spent more than a few minutes near the modest, blue-tile-roofed farmhouse that squatted at the edge of the forest.
Perhaps it could be blamed on the man who built it. Mr Choi was a taciturn man. He would sit on the stoop in the evenings, smoking cigarettes and scratching himself. People said one could overhear him talking, frequently. But he lived alone.
He’d inherited the land from his parents, who had died in a bus accident on the new expressway, ten years ago. He’d come back from the city, bitter and scandalously divorced at forty. The storekeeper said that he thought that if he built a new house, he could attract a second wife.
Sturdily constructed, it was unxpectedly made to look traditional. Mr Choi was the type of man one would expect to go for a fancy, Western-style house: a flat roof, concrete walls, topiary bushes in a row in front and a satelite dish. Perhaps it was an homage to his deceased father, who’d been a skilled craftsman and builder. The house had a curving roof with rough-hewn eaves of raw wood, and sliding doors, almost like a temple building, but simpler.
People said the man had chosen the spot for his house badly. There were some graves, in among the trees on the hillside. There are graves everywhere, in Korea. Ancestors are thick on the ground.
These graves were Mr Choi’s ancestors – including his parents. Perhaps he’d forgotten about his grandmother. She had been a terrible, frightening woman. Rumor said that during the war, decades ago, she’d collaborated, and had been responsible for the deaths of several dozen villagers. Because of her, no one completely trusted the Choi family, even now. The Chois didn’t go to church, either. They really weren’t good, modern Koreans.
It was the pastor’s wife, Ms Sung, who swore that the new house was haunted. She would point out that the Choi family had been shamans, generations ago, before the Japanese, and that Mr Choi probably still practiced secret, pagan rituals. He had placed some wooden jang-seung – the traditional, carved, protective totem poles – at the turning to the driveway to the house. Probably, his father had made them. “Superstitious,” the woman spat.
All anyone saw him doing, though, was working his fields. And talking to himself, sometimes. e made a peculiar farmer – some noted that he was supposedly well-educated, with a university degree. Supposedly, he had led a student strike, at the end of the dictatorship.
People dismissed the gossip, for the most part. They just left Mr Choi alone.
Then, one spring evening, several of the older women were walking along the road by the house. The sun was already behind the hills, making the sky orange and pink. The air was full of smoke from burning the stubble, after cutting the spring barley. The earth was muddy and red-black, dotted with flecks of gold.
The women had paused their conversation. Suddenly they heard shouting, very clearly. The women turned and stared at the house, across a field of freshly planted hot peppers.
Mr Choi came running out of his handsome house, his hair flying. He ran off among the trees, waving an axe. The women saw him strike at one of the burial mounds repeatly with the axe, weeping.
Nothing was ever the same again after that.