I slept in a room where someone had died, then married the landlord’s sister
“This place had someone die in it. I’ll rent it to you cheap,” the landlord said with a grin, showing smoke-yellowed teeth.
I wasn’t afraid. To a materialist, all that mattered was saving 800 yuan a month.
Until I started hearing marbles rolling late at night, even though nobody lived upstairs.
In my dream, she leaned by the window in a qipao. “Don’t open the wardrobe.”
As if possessed, I opened it
Inside lay a corpse that looked exactly like me.
When Old Chen, the landlord, handed me the key, he deliberately lowered his voice. His breath, thick with cheap tobacco and the smell of stale garlic, hit my face. “Young man, I should tell you upfront: someone died in this place.” He grinned, exposing teeth stained brown by smoke. His eyes gleamed with an indescribable light, as though he were waiting to see me back away in embarrassment. “So it’s cheap: 800 a month, one month’s rent as the deposit. Where else are you going to find a place in this neighborhood?”
I held the old-fashioned brass key, cold to the touch and still damp from his palm. A broke student fresh out of college, with less money in his bank account than he had on his face, I held firm to my materialist beliefs in the face of the very real 800 yuan I’d save each month. Someone had died here? What old building in this city didn’t have a past? I couldn’t even be bothered to ask for details. I just nodded. “I’ll take it.”
The apartment was in an old public housing block from the 1990s, on the sixth floor, with no elevator. The stairwell was dim, and the motion-activated lights were sluggish. I often had to stomp loudly before one reluctantly flickered on, casting a sickly yellow glow over the stains showing through the peeling walls and the jumble of flyers and ads. The paint on the door to 601 was chipped. When I opened it, the hinges
