Embedded Files
My Friend Who Vanished
This is the second part of the series, “My Friend who Vanished”. Please read the first part before moving on to the following section if you haven’t done so. You can visit Part 1 of the story in the previous Issue.
Tip: Read the following slowly at midnight for the ultimate horror to strike.
More than a year has passed since the incident and I have still not fully recovered.
It was the winter of 2020. Constantly haunted by the vivid memories of Nicholas, I was advised to spend more time working on other things to distract myself from the experience. Yet the constraints of the new pandemic said otherwise, for the faces popping up from within the video cameras once again reminded me of my friend who vanished.
So I decided to give literature a go. In the beginning I tried fiction. Harry Potter, The Famous Five, Sherlock Holmes—those didn’t help. Then I switched to non-fiction, history books, to be specific. Those seemed to work, as I have always been fascinated by the individual figures who took part in the important moments of history, and I ended up diving into their respective biographies. I would become so indulged in their interesting affairs that everything about Nicholas would be tossed to the back of my head.
Until I decided to explore the history of our school.
That evening in December, I searched for our school website out of curiosity. I clicked on the ‘College History’ section.
“Founded in 1851, the College is the oldest secondary school in Hong Kong. It was established…” I scrolled downwards. “In 1849, the English archbishop…” Down. “In 1907, Bishop Gerald Heath Lander became Warden and sixth Principal.” As I was about to click on a new tab, this line caught my attention.
Wasn’t this the name of an Olympic Gold Medalist?
I did a quick search and sure it was. Mr John Gerald Heath Lander, representing Great Britain at the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics - he won a gold medal in rowing. That’s when I began to be intrigued by his and his family’s history, which led me to all the horrifying memories, and unexpectedly resumed my journey towards insanity.
His story began in 1905, England, long before Mr Lander became our Principal. He was appointed Vicar, and held incumbencies in St Philip, Litherland, a small town near Liverpool. As luck would have it, a close friend of his came working in Liverpool that summer. His name was Clover Tennison. The English Vicar was aware of his friend’s arrival in the nearby city, but he couldn’t find any spare time to visit him before the incident occurred.
It was November 20th when Clover Tennison checked into the Adelphi Hotel on Ranelagh Street. Established in 1826, the hotel had a grand history of 79 years by then, and was renowned throughout Britain and Europe.
After an hour or two of rest in the lobby, Clover walked up to the desk and asked the concierge for his room key. The receptionist gave him the key but, strangely, warned him from trying to find Room 139, the room which was supposed to be two floors below his, on the 6th floor. He pondered her cryptic advice, but didn’t bother to ask, for he was too occupied with tidying up his luggage to care.
But after he finished unpacking in his room that night he began to get curious. Why would the concierge warn him of such things? So he stepped out of his room to look at the number on each of the doors he passed.
He descended the stairs. Two levels. Right next to the foot of the dark staircase, there it was—Room 139.
The corridor was empty. He tried the door but it was locked, so instead he knelt and peeked through the keyhole. The room he was looking into was smaller than his. His eyes scanned the entirety of the place before stopping at a woman, standing face against a wall, in the very corner. He noticed her pale skin and long red hair before stepping back, feeling that he was behaving inappropriately for invading someone else’s privacy.
But the following day his curiosity got the better of him again. He thought about the woman all day, and eventually went back, this time straight away getting onto his knees, peeking through the keyhole once again.
What he saw was all red. RED. Only red.
Bewildered, Clover went down to the concierge again to ask her some questions. Peculiarly, the receptionist listened to him in utter disbelief, with a worried look on her face. At the end, she didn’t dare speak a word. Instead she led him directly up to the 6th floor again to the foot of the staircase.
There wasn’t a room next to the foot of the staircase.
Room 139 didn’t exist.
At this point Clover was so disoriented and startled he became petrified.
The receptionist, too, was about to collapse. Breathless and gasping, she told him the whole story. She told him that a couple used to live in their hotel a long time ago, but the husband had gone insane and murdered his wife - in Room 139.
They both had pale skin, red hair and red eyes.
The hotelier had demolished Room 139 to safeguard the hotel’s reputation.
A piercingly high-pitched scream was heard from within the walls of the establishment. For Clover, everything turned pitch black. A red, ghostly apparition hovered before him as it stripped through the fibers of reality. Within seconds it zapped past him once more. His surroundings seemed to vanish right before his eyes as he fell into a state of eternal trance.
In a few days, our sixth principal would be informed of his friend’s sudden and inexplicable death in the nearby city, and the diary from which the above passages have been extracted would be retrieved from Clover’s hotel room by the local authorities. As Clover had no living relatives at the time, the belongings he left behind, including his diary, would fall into the hands of our principal.
Two years later, Bishop Lander embarked on his journey across the seas, bringing most of his belongings with him. He reached Hong Kong in November 1907, where he was assigned the position of the school Warden and the sixth principal in an Anglican day School named St Paul’s College.
Yet, his occupation in the College was short-lived. A little more than a year later, in 1909, the campus was taken over by the Church Missionary Society of Hong Kong for religious purposes, and the seventh principal, Reverend Arthur Dudley Stewart was appointed. Planning to assist the future generations of the College, Bishop Lander left a number of scientific and literary publications behind in the school before returning to England.
The diary camouflaged itself into the surroundings of the school library and went unnoticed for almost four decades, until the Japanese invasion of Hong Kong in 1941. During that period the school was shut down, and along with many other books, the diary was retrieved by the school librarian in an attempt to safeguard the valuables of the College. In 1950, when the school reopened on Bonham Road, the secrets of the diary entered the College once more as one of the few remaining books from the previous school location.
People wondered where the leather-bound book was from and the information it contained. But when they opened it, all they saw was red stains, covering the words on every page. Considering it didn’t provide any educational value for students, the librarian at the time disposed of the diary at the school’s dump site—which turned out to be the exact location the new South Wing would be erected in 2003.
53 years later, when the School Improvement Project commenced with the construction of the South Wing, the detritus from the dumpster site was buried under the soil of the building. The South Wing opened in 2006 and it was not until 2019 that the site had its second major renovation project to strengthen its foundations.
I turned off my computer. All the connections I had made throughout the past month came to an unsettling revelation.
The phantom of Room 139 was within the diary all along. She had broken free last year amidst the underground reconstruction of the South Wing to reclaim another soul.
The red-haired ghost had taken Nicholas away.
At that instant I felt compelled to reveal the truth to the school, to tell everyone that I wasn’t making things up. Nicholas Lin was a real person who did exist and he was taken away by a spirit. I regathered and organized all the evidence I had: the tiny A5 sketchbook Nick and I used to draw on, the ticket to the orchestra performance that Nick and I watched together, the photocopies of Bishop Lander’s memoir that I borrowed from a public library.
I was just about to visit the school office when-
Things started to disappear one after another. At first it was the ticket. I could not remember when but one day it just wasn’t there. I knew it was impossible since I kept it in my room and I was certain there weren’t any intruders, and even if there were, certainly my family would have known about it.
Shockingly, on the next day, when I returned to school to retrieve some textbooks for the online lessons at home, I saw the ticket sitting on my desk in the classroom. It was uncanny. I had not returned to school since the pandemic had begun. Then I looked at the whiteboard to see four gigantic words:
“Can’t you see it?”
I knew something was not right. I took the ticket away and left immediately.
Things got eerier still when it happened the second time, three days later. This time it was the sketchbook. Again, I could swear I had never taken it away from my room. Thinking it might mysteriously appear at school again, I nervously went back to my empty classroom to check and sure it was, waiting for me silently on my desk like last time. I looked up at the whiteboard once more. There were five words.
“Can’t you see it now?”
I sprinted away immediately with my sketchbook, my heart pounding faster and faster. Who did this? Who wrote that? What was happening?
On my way home I bought a locker and a lock from the stationery shop nearby. I reached my flat within minutes and locked myself in my room. I opened the locker and stuffed every piece of evidence related to Nick’s existence inside. I made up a random four-digit passcode and locked the locker tight. I was gasping for breath. I fainted.
That evening, I opened the locker again to find it empty.
At that point I felt like I had completely lost my sanity. I was numb with fear but also incandescent with exasperation. It was clear that someone, or something, wanted the truth to be lost forever. That is why I decided to return to the school for the third and last time on that fateful night.
Everything around me was either dark or dimly lit. I strode across the long and winding road with caution. I arrived at the College and opened the door of my classroom, turning on the lights.
Unlike the previous encounters, none of the evidence I lost was present on my desk. Instead I saw an old, leather-bound book with red stains all over it.
It was the diary of Clover Tennison.
Immediately I looked up again.
“CAN’T YOU SEE IT NOW??”
The lights went off, and I froze. The classroom was pitch black and in the darkness I became blind. I navigated my way using the tables and chairs to the power supply.
I reached for the light switch but - another hand was already there!
The hand turned the switch on and all of a sudden everything became visible once more. Looking at his face, I was left with yet another surprise.
It was the school’s social worker.
“I have been following you for a while. Look, I was planning to tell you all about this,” he looked at me and took out his device, gesturing me towards a chair.
I was still in disbelief as he sighed and scrolled through his device. He paused after around half a minute.
“Please get ready for this.”
He gave me a minute to catch my breath before handing his phone to me. On the screen was the CCTV camera footage of the classroom a few days prior, which showed me bringing my missing belongings to school one after another, writing the same words I had read on the whiteboard each time before leaving.
I was bewildered. I hadn’t done any of this.
He looked into my eyes and all I saw in his dark pupils was my own reflection.
“You have Dissociative Identity Disorder.”
It was then I realized that from the very beginning, it had always been my other personality who messed around. He was the one who brought the evidence to school without me knowing. He was the one who opened the locker. He was the one who wrote the words on the whiteboard to get my attention, to make me aware of his existence.
And above all, Nicholas Lin, my friend who vanished, could very well have just been one of my personalities all along.
I was unwilling to believe any of that. Wasn’t Nicholas a real person? What about the red-haired ghost? Everything turned upside down. Those five words from the social worker shattered all my expectations. If everything was because of the other personality, why had he done all of this?
And wouldn’t everything contradict the ghost theory?
But over time I became less adamant. Eventually I came back to my senses and accepted that the tales of Room 139 might not even be real; and that the ghost might never have existed in the first place; that the diary I had seen that night at school was simply in my own imagination; that Nicholas was only another one of my personalities; that I was the boy who lost his mind, and the one who was making everything up from the very beginning.
It was the autumn of 2021 and I had almost fully recovered from my illness.
Until one day the teacher introduced a new student to class-
And Nicholas Lin walked in.
-End of Part 2-
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