Chapter 3
The sound of food being chopped came from the kitchen, a knife striking the cutting board in steady thuds.
Shao Lan and Jiang Mingran were hiding in the bedroom.
This was where Jiang Mingran began each loop. With the door shut, the living room stood between them and the kitchen, muffling some of the sound.
Even so, Shao Lan had cautiously fetched a ballpoint pen and a kraft-paper-covered notebook from the living room table. They communicated with gestures and writing whenever possible, making as little noise as they could.
Shao Lan noticed that there were now only three small goldfish in Jiang Mingran’s bedroom, too.
“What the hell just happened?” Jiang Mingran felt dazed. “We’d already made it to the stairs. Why are we back here…?”
Shao Lan lowered his eyes. “Because we died.”
“Died?” Jiang Mingran jolted.
Shao Lan pointed at the objects arranged around them. He’d had a vague idea of what they meant before, but only now was he certain.
“Every item here has a purpose.”
“The owl clock gives us two clues. First, it tells us the time.”
Each loop began at 3:58 a.m. Two minutes later, at four on the dot, the owl popped out to announce the hour.
“Second, it tells us this is a game. We’re the players. We only have a chance of surviving if we follow the rules.”
Shao Lan searched the bedroom. On the floor beside the wall, he found the same carving as beneath the sofa.
“Rules: Those who have not ventured deep into the fog cannot leave it.”
“We broke the rules,” Shao Lan said. “The game area must be limited to this floor. When we went down the stairs to the next floor, we effectively left the playing field. That automatically counted as dying.”
Jiang Mingran clenched his fists. “What kind of bullshit game is this? What’s wrong with trying to escape?”
“Think of an escape room. You have to solve the puzzles to get out,” Shao Lan reasoned. “We tried to leave without clearing up any of the mystery. The game doesn’t allow that.”
Unless they entered the fog, they couldn’t leave it.
So in that last loop, they’d failed. All of them had died.
Shao Lan looked at the three small goldfish swimming in the tank.
“The tank keeps count. We have four attempts in total. Now we have three left.”
Jiang Mingran was silent for a while, then looked at the little funeral altar. “Then this…”
“It’s our funeral altar.” Shao Lan sighed. “If I’m right, once we die on all four attempts, the fish tank will disappear. Our memorial portraits will take its place.”
Jiang Mingran shuddered.
“Okay, man. What do we do now?”
“Let’s start by looking for clues,” Shao Lan said. “Be careful. Try not to make any noise.”
The bedroom was small, probably intended as a spare room, though it seemed to be used more as a study. It contained only a simple camp bed, a desk, and a chair.
In a desk drawer lay a thick stack of newspapers and a kraft-paper-covered notebook.
Shao Lan asked Jiang Mingran to read the newspapers while he opened the notebook.
It was filled with records of everyday expenses. The blue-black fountain-pen handwriting was meticulous.
“Dried noodles: 2 yuan. Cabbage: 0.8 yuan. Tomatoes: 1 yuan. Apples: 2 yuan.”
“Sleeping mat: 4 yuan. Basin: 2 yuan. Bowls: 2.4 yuan. Soap: 0.9 yuan.”
“March salary: 286 yuan.”
Jiang Mingran leaned over to look at the figures in the ledger.
“How many years ago was this?” He scratched his head. “Prices and wages were way lower than they are now.”
Shao Lan stared at the notebook, narrowing his eyes and leaning closer, apparently studying something intently.
“What are you looking at?” Jiang Mingran couldn’t make sense of it. “Don’t tell me there’s a code hidden in all those yuan and cents that’ll get us out.”
Shao Lan shook his head. He examined it with narrowed eyes for a while longer, then reached for the stitching in the binding.
It was hard to see in the dark, but his fingers could feel it immediately.
“The thread’s loose. Looks like it’s been pulled.”
Jiang Mingran looked blank. “What does that mean?”
“It means some pages have been torn out.”
Jiang Mingran paused.
That was true. Notebooks like this were made by stacking sheets of paper and stitching them together along the spine.
If you carelessly tore out pages you’d messed up, it was easy to damage the thread as well.
He just hadn’t expected Shao Lan to be that observant.
While Jiang Mingran was still staring, Shao Lan had already crawled beneath the desk and found a wastebasket.
Inside were leftover fruit peels and cores. Their sticky juice gave off a sour, alcoholic smell as they began to rot. Shao Lan picked them out and tossed them aside, exposing what lay beneath.
Crumpled balls of paper.
Judging by the ruled lines, they’d been torn from this ledger.
Shao Lan unfolded them one by one. When they saw the writing, both he and Jiang Mingran started.
Nothing like the painstaking entries in the ledger, the large words in red ink were a scrawled mess, slashed roughly across each sheet.
“I’m so scared. What should I do?”
“The music woke me again tonight. It was coming from the radio. She had it playing while she chopped pork on the cutting board. I know it wasn’t pork. She smiled at me and asked if I wanted a taste.”
“Wang from across the hall said he could help. He knows a spirit medium who can drive out evil spirits. I asked Wang if she’d get hurt during the exorcism. He said nobody could say for sure. I hesitated. I don’t want to hurt her.”
“The music is playing again in the middle of the night… I’ve made up my mind. I’ll go see Wang tomorrow.”
“When I got home from work, I saw the door across the hall was open. Wang wasn’t home. I went into my apartment and opened the fridge. I saw Wang. Wang was in my fridge.”
…
There was nothing more.
These weren’t all the crumpled pages. There were others, but juice from the fruit cores had stained them. The blue-black writing had run into an illegible blur.
Jiang Mingran stared blankly at the papers and shivered.
After a moment’s silence, Shao Lan turned to him.
“Bring me the newspapers.”
Jiang Mingran snapped out of it and hurriedly brought them over. “Look at these, man. She might’ve done all of this…”
The newspapers all carried reports of the same sort of crime.
Unidentified bodies had been discovered in out-of-the-way parks and waterways around the city. Only partial skeletal remains had been found, and the victims couldn’t yet be identified. There were many of them, both men and women, and the cases had caused widespread alarm.
The municipal police had formed a special task force. Anyone with information was asked to call its number immediately.
There followed a string of digits. Whoever had read the paper had circled it in red pen and written “Police number” beside it.
Shao Lan looked at those words, then at the torn pages from the ledger.
“It’s the same person’s handwriting…”
“Hey.” Jiang Mingran was trembling a little. “What does all this mean? Where’s the person who wrote this now?”
“I don’t know.” Shao Lan shook his head. “All we know is that the person who wrote the diary lived with the woman in the kitchen. They must have had a very close relationship at one point. Most likely, they were married.”
“While she kept killing people, the diarist thought about stopping her but didn’t manage it.”
“This study was probably the diarist’s room. They collected reports of her murders here, including the task force’s phone number.”
“But for some reason, from what we can tell, the diarist never made that call.”
“Maybe they couldn’t bring themselves to do it because they cared about the killer. Or maybe they were killed before they had the chance… Either way, the killer is still free, and the task force doesn’t know who she is.”
Shao Lan lightly ran a finger over the number circled in red. “Looks like our job is to make that call to the task force in the diarist’s place.”
“But we can’t leave this floor, and we don’t have our phones,” Jiang Mingran said anxiously. “We have no way to make a call…”
“We do.” Shao Lan looked toward the living room.
On the coffee table beside the sofa sat that old red landline.