Bloody Blood

Somebody was murdered in my room.
No, don't worry. It wasn't yesterday or the day before. But it did happen. Two years ago. Before Sustainable Cambodia bought the property.
I was spared the gory details (as much as I wanted to hear them), but I do know that, in the middle of the night, a man and his girlfriend killed the occupant in cold blood.
This story is not an urban myth. It's true. Talk to anyone in Pursat, especially the police, and you will hear the disturbing news.

Besides the murder, my room is not unique. There's a bathroom with a toilet and bath, and a room with a bed, a television, and a desk. The window has bars on it to keep intruders out, and the fence outside the window has barbed wire curled along the top. The door has a lock (I locked myself in this morning), and there are security guards who open and close the gates at the campus.

In other words, there's no shortage of protection.

I used to think that a room carried it's past, like a car carries the stench of its former owner. My father's bedroom, for example, gave me the creeps, and I was convinced that something bad had happened there. Everytime I took a shower in his bathroom, I ran through his bedroom just so that I could avoid the monster that was creeping up behind me, or the glowing face I swore I saw in the closet. This fear wasn't a product of my childhood imagination, either. My mother felt the presence. My sister felt the presence. Even my brother felt the presence. My father, though, was quite content with this room, a room reminiscent of an ugly cathedral built in the 1970s. Sleeping in that room was like taking part in a re-make of "The Exorcist." The only thing lacking was the devil-girl and organ music.

But I have never felt such a presence in my room at Sustainable Cambodia. There is no monster lurking behind the door, or cadaver beneath the sheets. The only creepy thing is the sound of a gecko at night (first it gurgles, and then it lets out four consecutive "NUH-UHS," as if it were a parent scolding a child). I have to stretch my imgaination to believe that, just two years ago where I currently sleep, a corpse lay in a pile of blood awaiting the cleaning-woman the next day.
Despite hearing the news of this murder, I continued my nightly routine of reading Stephen King's Desperation before going to bed. It's almost comical: here I am, in a room where someone was hacked to bits (and it was hacking, not shooting), and I'm reading a book that's supposed to make me scared. Nevermind reading a horror story before bed, I'm doing it in a murder-room. But that's just a testament to how the space feels: normal.
There's a silver-lining to everything, and I'd say that this whole situation is building my character.
At least when I go back home in a year, I can rejoice in not sleeping in a place where someone was murdered.
But then again, one shouldn't assume anything........