Min Khan Soe San - Short Stories of World-Class Ghost Stories

The summer rain was falling lightly. In the raindrops, Travin walked past the statue of the hero Achilles. The streetlights had just begun to come on. Cars lined the road leading to the White Marble Arch. He could see the alert faces, ready to absorb everything he saw on his journey.

Krazin pulled the collar of his raincoat tighter and walked on, feeling bitter inside. Today had been a terrible day for him.

As he walked along the park path, I felt naive. If you want love, you have to have money, right? For this guy, to win the love of a person with a strong heart, you need a nice suit. You need a car. You need a room somewhere or a nice hotel. You also need milk wrapped in cellophane.

He was always aware of the rope-like thing under his raincoat. And the torn sleeves.

He had to carry his body and ego like a huge object he hated.

(It had been a pleasant stay in the British Museum reading room, but this body had brought him home.) His only feeling was boredom.

I'm tired of remembering the ugly and beautiful things that happened on the park benches. People are talking about how the body died too soon, but for Craven, that's not a problem to worry about. Not at all.

His body still held life. He walked through the golden raindrops to the podium in the park. He passed a thin man in black carrying a banner.

"The dead will rise again." He recalled a dream. It was a dream from which he had to wake up three times. In that dream, he was alone in a vast, dark pit beneath the earth's surface. The earth was filled with graves, one after another. From the perspective of the dead, the entire earth was a beehive for them.

In every dream, one terrifying fact is revealed. It is that the body is not rotting. There are no worms. There is no disintegration and destruction.

Beneath the earth, the world was like a huge garbage dump, a pile of corpses, bloodied, swollen, and swollen, waiting to be resurrected. When he woke up, he lay in bed, his entire body destroyed, and then he remembered hearing great news.

He slowly walked down the street. Two pairs of yellow-haired people had already come out onto the street.

They were very weak, long, slender creatures. Their bodies, dressed in tight trousers, looked like ants. He hated them. And he hated himself for that hatred. Because he knew that it was only his jealousy.

Everyone among them had a better body than him. He was... His stomach was churning with indigestion, and his mouth was full of rotten food. But that, he... Who should he tell what to?

Sometimes, he would look around and hide, doubting his body. It was one of his worst secrets.

Don't ask me if I have any real faith in the resurrection of this body that I wanted to forget... Sometimes I prayed at night.

(A tiny bit of religious belief seems to be hiding in his chest like a worm in a hard fruit.)

His prayer

"May the body of your disciple never be resurrected, O God."

He knew all the little streets along the Edgware Road very well. When he felt like it, he would walk along them aimlessly, squinting at his reflection in the windows until he was tired.

So he immediately noticed posters hanging outside the disused and abandoned theatre on Coolfield Road. This was not a routine thing, but every now and then the old theatre would be rented out for an evening by the Takle Bank Theatre Company. Or they would rent it out to show old, battered films.

The theater was built in 1920. It was located about a mile outside the crowded theater area, so it was not a good place to entertain a large audience, so it was probably built by someone who thought that the space was cheap and that it would be worth the cost. However, no play was ever successful. Later, the entire theater was left with rat holes and spider webs. It was no longer a theater for amateur musicians to watch and for the entertainment of the audience.

Craven stopped and read the poster. Oh, and even in 1939, there are still optimists. It would be a very stupid optimist to think that a film like 'Silent Cinema' would make money. What a "first time for old-time movie lovers." Oh, there's no "second time."

Well, the seats were cheap. He was tired from walking, and he wanted to get some shelter from the rain. So—it was worth a shilling, so he bought his ticket and entered the dark theater.

In the lifeless darkness, the sound of the piano was dull and mournful. He sat down on a bench by the road. Suddenly, he noticed that there was no one around him.

Yes, it is... There can be no second presentation. On the screen, an old woman dressed in royal robes is wringing her hands over a matter that is weighing on her heart. She walks over to the next room and sits down. There, like a sheepdog, she sits, staring into the distance through her tangled black hair. One by one, the figure disappears due to the flickering spots on the film. Since it is a silent film, the subtitles start playing.

“A Montpellier woman, betrayed by her lover Auguste, thinks of ending her suffering.”

As he got used to the darkness, Craven's eyes began to see the benches. The audience, not even twenty, was filled with couples, some of whom were leaning their heads against each other, chatting. There were also some who were alone. Like him, they were wearing only a cheap raincoat.

Those people, leaning on their chairs, looked like corpses. Craven's mental image returned. A fear that ached like a toothache, he thought uneasily.

I'm going crazy. Other people don't feel like that... The abandoned theater's setting reminded me more of the endless, dark tunnels where corpses lie waiting to be resurrected.

"Augustus had the servant yell at him to bring more wine."

A middle-aged Chinese movie star suddenly appeared, hugging an old woman, and the sound of the spring graduation song came out in a nonsensical way. The scene at the end of the movie became a blur of indigestible images.

In the darkness, he felt someone approaching the bench where he was sitting. The person brushed his knee.

A small, thin person.

As I watched the thick beard brushing against the man's mouth, I felt a sudden sense of unease. The stranger sat down in the adjacent seat and let out a long sigh. The events on the screen were

They are moving rapidly. Pompeia has already committed suicide by writing a note. (Craven thinks she committed suicide.) Even as Pompeia lies still, the small and large sobs she makes look so beautiful. Her servants are weeping around her.

A breathless, low voice came close to Kraven's ear.

"What happened? Is that woman sleeping?" "No, Thane Taw."

"Did he get killed?" the voice asked, with keen interest.

"I don't think he was murdered, he just stabbed himself."

No one was there to interrupt them, saying, "Shut up, shut up." Because no one was interested in the movie. There were people sitting in the empty seats, their heads hanging in frustration.

The film is not over yet. The story will probably continue for generations to come, he thought. The bearded man sitting next to him seemed to be interested only in the scene of Pompeii's death in the film. For him, it was the scene he saw as soon as he entered, so it must have captivated him.

"Coincidence," he was heard repeating the same word twice. The man continued to speak in a low voice, barely audible to himself.

"Think about it, it's absurd" and then... he continued.

"Without a drop of blood," Craven didn't listen to him. He was watching the events unfold on the screen, his hands clasped between his knees. He was watching them with the look of someone who had seen many such incidents before. He felt that his own danger was driving him crazy. He would have to take a day off and go see a doctor.

(God only knows what kind of germs are circulating in his veins.)