Chapter 5
Chapter 5
9:28 p.m.
The woman opened the Notes app on her phone.
She created a new blank note.
After pausing for a few seconds, she began typing, character by character:
Today’s steps: 8,627.
Route:
Juyuan Community… Eastern Suburbs Woods… North City Secondhand Market… Building Materials Lane… Juyuan Community… phone repair shop… Juyuan Community.
Recycled items:
One soundproof rug, one voice recorder, one old suitcase, one old bone cleaver, several wooden sticks, half a sheet of heavy-duty waterproof tarp, one bottle of industrial-strength deodorizer, three pairs of old rubber gloves, one pack of absorbent moisture-proof cotton pads, one pointed gardening shovel, several bags of high-density activated charcoal, one strip of blood detection test paper…
When she got to this point, she suddenly deleted the last line and rewrote it:
Nighttime noise log:
9:01 p.m.: rustling beneath the sofa.
9:17 p.m.: dripping sound in the bathroom.
9:20 p.m.: creaking from the shoe cabinet.
9:25 p.m.: footsteps outside the door.
Countermeasures:
Lock the door, fasten the security chain, set surveillance to loop recording.
…
As I stared at those words, a chill inexplicably tightened across my back.
Eastern Suburbs Woods, North City Secondhand Market, Building Materials Lane, those were all remote, chaotic places.
And the things she had gone there to collect didn’t seem like anything an ordinary girl would do.
Then there was the rustling beneath the sofa, the creaking from the shoe cabinet…
A terrifying thought suddenly rose in my mind.
Could it be… that she’d discovered something?
9:30 p.m.
The woman exited the Notes app.
Her finger swiped down to open the Control Center.
Then she turned on the flashlight.
The screen froze in place after that. The woman made no further moves.
I guessed she was probably holding up her phone, shining the light into some dark corner of her home.
About ten seconds later, the flashlight switched off, and the screen returned to normal.
9:33 p.m.
A recording icon quietly appeared in the corner of the woman’s phone screen.
She had turned on the recording function.
She set the volume to maximum and named the file:
“9:33 p.m., indoor ambient audio”
The recording timer began ticking up second by second.
She swiped across the screen a few times, then let it go dark.
Only the recording continued running in the background.
9:36 p.m.
The screen lit up again. The woman opened her photo album.
She wasn’t scrolling through selfies. Instead, she swiped through a series of eerie photos.
There was a close-up of the narrow gap between tightly shut wardrobe doors.
There were dark stains in the corner of a wall.
There was also a blank wall out in the corridor.
Every photo had been taken from an extremely low angle.
As if she had been crouching on the floor when she took them.
She selected a photo of the shoe cabinet.
After zooming in, she used the brush tool to draw a tiny red circle around the gap between the cabinet doors.
9:38 p.m.
The woman’s phone screen suddenly lit up.
After she unlocked it, the interface jumped to her WeChat chat with Ah Zhe.
She quickly typed a line:
[Are you here? Was that you knocking just now?]
Less than five seconds after the message was sent, Ah Zhe’s reply popped up:
[I’m not off work yet. Someone knocked just now?]
The woman paused, then typed:
[Yeah. I thought it was you. I didn’t see anyone through the peephole.]
Ah Zhe’s next message appeared immediately:
[It wasn’t me. Don’t open the door!]
The woman didn’t reply again.
Her phone screen quickly switched to the surveillance feed at the front door.
The corridor outside was completely empty. There wasn’t a soul in sight.
Immediately after that, she opened the surveillance playback and dragged the progress bar bit by bit.
One minute ago…
Three minutes ago…
Ten minutes ago…
The corridor remained quiet as usual the entire time, without even half a human shadow passing through.
Then, suddenly, she pressed pause.
The image froze on a shadowy spot in the corridor.
There seemed to be an extremely faint shadow there, flashing by for an instant. If you didn’t look closely, you wouldn’t notice it at all.
She took a screenshot and saved it to an encrypted folder in her photo album.
The folder name was only one word:
[Dead].