Chapter 155

Chapter 155

I spent the whole afternoon watching comedies, and only decided to find myself a little excitement at night: Final Destination.

I absolutely love that movie series. Every installment is great. I’ve watched them over and over again ever since I was little.

Usually, when I want to watch horror movies or read horror novels, I don’t go back to my rental apartment. I stay in the dorm Niufen prepared for us instead. As long as I have roommates around me, I’m not scared.

When I’m alone in my rental, I don’t dare watch Dead Silence, The Conjuring, or Annabelle, but I do dare watch Final Destination. Because it’s thrilling, not terrifying, and totally within my tolerance.

But after April 7, I never dared entertain the thought of watching those movies again.

That night, I played them one after another, from the first movie all the way to the third. At the same time, I was multitasking like crazy: tapping away at Honor of Kings on my phone while chatting intermittently with 925.

Around eleven-thirty, I heard a strange cry from downstairs.

The living room of my rental apartment connects to the balcony, with a sliding glass door in between. At the time, every window, every curtain, including that glass door, was wide open – I like airing the place out.

So that strange cry slipped in from outside completely unobstructed and entered my ears.

I thought it was a feral cat in heat, so I didn’t pay much attention and lowered my head to keep fighting my team battle.

But right after that, a second strange cry came from outside the window.

Only then did I make it out. It sounded like a woman downstairs was sobbing in a low voice, and also like she was letting out a long, mournful sigh.

I’ve mentioned before that this residential compound has every kind of person, from elderly people to college students. I often hear couples arguing downstairs or children screaming.

I still didn’t think much of it. I assumed some woman had gotten into a fight with her man and was crying in the middle of the road.

Then another wail rang out – this time, it was a man’s voice.

Immediately after that, the source of the sounds went from two people to three, then from three people to a whole crowd… One after another, rising and falling in waves, this group of people began wailing loudly in the thick darkness outside my window.

As they cried out, they were also muttering things in a dialect I couldn’t understand. I could feel that they were slowly walking forward. They were getting closer and closer to my window, and the wailing I heard grew louder and louder.

My scalp went numb with a whoosh. I sat frozen on the sofa, not daring to move.

I once read a theory that humans possess an ability beyond their own understanding – we can recognize the stench of a corpse the very first time we smell it. Supposedly, it’s an instinct written into our genes.

This was the same. Even though I had never heard that kind of uniform wailing in my life, in that instant, I realized what it was.

They were mourning the dead.

Someone’s family member must have passed away. At that very moment, this group of people was holding a funeral procession inside the compound – and they were right below my building.

I sat on the sofa without moving an inch, and I didn’t dare stand up to close the windows and curtains. If I walked toward the balcony, the sound would only get louder.

My eyes were fixed on the snow-white wall, but my mind had already started filling in the scene downstairs: maybe the area below was already packed with bright funeral wreaths, each one bearing the character for “mourning” written in black ink on white paper.

It was almost funny. I was scared out of my wits, but the ingrained motions of my hands still hadn’t stopped. I was still locked in a fierce team battle on the screen…

It was just that, with my attention split, I played horribly. My teammates all started flaming me one after another.

The crying downstairs was still going. It was as if they had stopped outside my window and refused to move on.

I wanted to be responsible to my teammates, so I could only grit my teeth and keep playing.

Finally, the sounds of the funeral procession slowly faded into the distance. The game, meanwhile, ended in a crushing defeat, and I immediately received a notification that I’d been reported.

Only then did I finally muster the courage to close all the windows and curtains, locking myself inside a sealed-off space. Then I opened WeChat.

925: “Where’d you go, Huahua?”

Me: “Sigh. I got seriously creeped out just now. There was a funeral procession downstairs, people mourning and everything.”

925: “Why would anyone do that in the middle of the night…”

Me: “I don’t know. Maybe it’s a local custom around here.”

925: “No one in the residents’ group chat said anything? That’s way too creepy.”

Me: “I’m not in the compound group. The agent said it was full and didn’t let me join.”

925: “Go rest early. Don’t sit there alone overthinking things.”

Me: “Okay. I’m going to wash up.”

After washing up and lying down in bed, I felt that strange smell I’d noticed earlier had grown stronger.

What was this smell? I wondered as I breathed slowly.

It was a little like disinfectant, and a little like alcohol – the kind of medicinal smell you get when you go to a hospital.

I hopped out of bed and rummaged through the small cabinet where I kept medicine. Everything inside was neat and tidy. No bottles had been knocked over, and nothing was leaking.

So I climbed back into bed and lay down again.

Speaking of which, someone had abruptly come to mind just now – Niufen.

Every time Niufen came over to “inspect” my workstation, I would smell that same scent.

I had guessed before that he must be a very clean person. Maybe he used alcohol wipes to disinfect his phone and keyboard nonstop every day, which was why that smell lingered on him.

Now that I thought about it, I felt like that faint scent existed throughout my entire workplace. It was just that whenever Niufen came over, the smell became stronger.

Because of work, I’d visited a few companies before. One company’s boss loved coffee so much he practically drank it like water – and as a result, the entire company had a faint coffee smell. Another company’s boss liked eating oranges, and that company had a lot of orange trees placed around the office. Wherever you went, there was a citrus scent…

A boss’s preferences affecting the atmosphere and smell of an entire company was perfectly normal.

My thoughts drifted farther and farther like that, bit by bit, and I started to feel sleepy.

The funeral procession downstairs had dampened my mood a little tonight, and I wasn’t really in the mood to keep playing on my phone. So I turned off the light and got ready to sleep.

I thought about even more random, jumbled things.
I decided that once my lease was up, I would move to a residential complex with stricter property management. The kind where the residents all had a little money and sky-high standards, and the second anything went wrong, they would tag management in the group chat.

Living in a place like that would mean watching what I said and did even more carefully, but in that kind of atmosphere, the environment would be more civilized. Safer, too…

I thought maybe the only reason I had run into a funeral procession in the middle of the night was because I had spent the whole evening watching Final Destination. I definitely wasn’t touching that series again anytime soon…

I thought, Tomorrow I have to go to work again. Which means I can sit at my desk and write my novel again. What should I write next?

Dazed and groggy, I fell asleep.

I don’t know if you guys dream much. The characters in my novels dream all the time, but I basically never do. As far as I can remember, I only had a few dreams about flying when I was little-adults said that meant a child was growing taller – plus one nightmare.

I had that nightmare when I was about four or five, but even now, I still remember it vividly.

I dreamed that my family was driving me down an empty road. The sky was dark and gray, and ours was the only car on the road.

But for some reason, they left me by the roadside and drove on without me.

I stood there alone beneath that dim sky, waiting for them. I didn’t have a phone, and there wasn’t a single person around I could ask for directions.

Then some people in mourning clothes slowly came walking along the roadside. They were dressed all in white, with white cloths covering their heads.

They set up a few white flags by the road, and the flags fluttered faintly in the wind…

Only after I grew up did I learn that the flags in my dream were called soul-summoning banners.

And so I stood there in the middle of a nightmare, waiting for my family all alone.

On the night of April 7, I had another nightmare.

I dreamed I was sleeping in a daze when suddenly, with a ding-dong, the WeChat notification beside my pillow woke me up.

I irritably groped for my phone and saw that 925 had sent me a message.

925: “Are you asleep?”

I glanced at it once and put my phone back down. I planned to reply to him the next day. Right now, I just wanted to keep sleeping.

Then another ding-dong sounded.

925 sent the exact same message again: “Are you asleep?”

Oh my God. I wanted to curse him out.

Just as I was about to pick up my phone, I suddenly felt like those two messages were oddly familiar.

Weren’t they the two messages “Liang He” sent Zhang Qiong in Chapter 33 of Volume One?

What the hell was this guy doing? Copying someone from my novel and sending me messages like this in the middle of the night… Was this some kind of creative cosplay?

Zhang Qiong might not reply, but I would. I was not exactly known for my good temper.

Annoyed, I said, “It’s the middle of the night. What do you want?”

925 didn’t answer my question directly.

Ding-dong.

925 went on as if talking to himself: “I remembered something.”

Me: “What?”

Ding-dong.

925: “It’s not convenient to leave a written record. I want to call and tell you. If you don’t want to talk, you don’t have to. I’ll talk, you listen. Is that okay?”

I frowned. We were pretty close now, sure, but at the end of the day, we were still online friends who had never met. We weren’t friends in real life.

What could be so important that he couldn’t leave a trace of it, but absolutely had to tell me?

After thinking about it, I agreed anyway. “Then call me.”

He started a WeChat voice call, and I picked up.

A young man’s voice came through the speaker. “Huahua?”

I typed: “I’m listening.”

925: “What happened tonight with the funeral procession scared you, didn’t it?”

I typed: “A little, I guess. It’s fine.”

925 sighed, then hesitated for several seconds.

“But do you know… whose funeral procession it was tonight?”

I was a little stunned.

I typed: “No. I don’t know anyone in this complex.”

The moment I finished typing that line, it was as if something had stabbed me in the heart. His question was too abrupt. Too unreasonable.

925 suddenly started crying. His voice sounded as strange as the mourners downstairs.

The room was pitch-black. In the stillness of the deep night, I held my phone stiffly and listened to his terrifying sobs.

After crying for a while, 925 shrieked, “It was for me!”

Immediately after, funeral music blared from the receiver, so loud that I flung my phone away in fright. It hit the floor with a loud smack.

I jolted awake from the dream and sat up, looking down at the floor – my little bedside night-light had been thrown to the ground and smashed apart.

A false alarm. I collapsed back onto my pillow and went back to sleep.

Just as I was about to drift off, I vaguely heard the rustling sound of fabric dragging across the floor.

That sound was common in my apartment. My cat liked to bite the floor mat at night and drag it around.

I didn’t pay it any mind and kept sleeping.

The next morning, when my alarm woke me up, I was so irritated I wanted to tear the roof off. Because of that nightmare last night, I hadn’t slept nearly enough.

I crawled out of bed naked and miserable – personal habit, I like sleeping nude – took a clean pair of underwear off the clothes rack and put it on, then quickly pulled on the blue-and-white work uniform Niufen had prepared for us – ugly as sin – and staggered to the bathroom to brush my teeth.

In the mirror, my hair was sticking up in every direction, and I had two enormous dark circles under my eyes. I looked unbearable.

Only after I got to my workstation did I open WeChat and take a look. The moment I did, I froze.

In the middle of the night yesterday, 925 had recalled a bunch of messages.

I had no idea what exactly he had sent. There were probably seven or eight messages, and later, he had withdrawn them one by one.

Only then did I realize that the ding-dongs I heard last night hadn’t been made up at all. They had quietly crawled out of the real world and into my nightmare.