Chapter 51#
The Storyteller (Part 3)#
“Something in the fridge?” The boy put down the kitchen knife, frightened himself, but braced himself to open the door. However, when he opened the fridge, apart from yellow rust stains, it was empty.
The girl’s legs went weak and she sat on the floor, her eyes red: “No, I clearly saw something in the fridge, I saw… I saw a big black bag.”
The boy said: “Could it be that you didn’t sleep well last night and are hallucinating?”
The girl shook her head with tears in her eyes.
Su Wanluo walked in after hearing the noise, bent down to help the girl up, her voice gentle: “You go outside and rest, leave this to me.”
“Thank you.” The girl sobbed, supporting herself against the wall to stand up.
Su Wanluo picked up the vegetables on the floor.
The boy’s tone was irritable: “If you don’t have the guts, why participate in paranormal activities? Just causing trouble for others.”
Su Wanluo took the vegetables to the sink, turned on the tap, and asked: “Were you two in the same room yesterday?”
The boy nodded and picked up the kitchen knife again, looking impatient: “Yes, same room. I hope in the future, the officials won’t let streamers from the entertainment section join just for clout. Telling a story and scaring herself to tears. I wasn’t scared by the haunted house, but I was scared by her scream first.”
Su Wanluo washed the vegetables without speaking. The water flowed for a long time before she spoke: “What story did she tell?” The boy glanced at Su Wanluo, and seeing she didn’t have that jumpy attitude he disliked, his attitude improved a bit: “She told a story about a homeless man finding body parts in a trash can.”
“I really saw a black plastic bag there, containing meat, I wasn’t mistaken.” The girl sat on the sofa, tightly holding Liang Qingqing’s wrist, eyes teary.
Liang Qingqing comforted her in a low voice: “It’s okay, it’s okay now.”
There was a very long table in the living room, seating twenty people on each side. Someone had even gone to the garden to pick some fresh flowers and put them in a vase for decoration. When preparing something collectively, relationships are easily brought closer, and groups of two or three soon started chatting.
There were many bathrooms in the villa. People with mysophobia take two showers a day in summer, let alone those cooking over an open fire. After bringing the dishes out, the boy told his companion and left to take a shower in the bathroom.
The bathroom was opposite the kitchen, at the end of the corridor.
The boy walked into the bathroom, took off his clothes casually, and stood under the shower head.
Bone-chilling cold water poured down from his head, washing away the summer heat. After water got into his eyes, the boy closed them to wash his hair. As he washed, he felt the water getting a bit hot, so he hurriedly reached for the switch to change it to cold water.
But no matter if he turned it left or right, the water was uncontrollable, getting hotter and hotter. White mist soon filled the bathroom. The boy sensed something was wrong and opened his eyes, but they were covered by hair. He reached out to brush away the hair blocking his vision, but the moment his fingers touched that hair—a mass of long hair belonging to a woman hung down from above, drifting lightly before his eyes.
This wasn’t his hair at all!
“Ahhh—!” A heart-rending scream came from the bathroom.
“What happened? What happened?”
People in the living room rushed over. When they entered, the room only contained the shower head still spraying cold water and the boy fainted on the floor.
His companion went over to support him, and after confirming he was fine, breathed a sigh of relief, but his hands were still trembling: “This haunted house is too damn weird.”
If it was once or twice, it could be classified as hallucination, but the third time, everyone could no longer play dumb.
Dishes filled the long table, yet no one was in the mood to eat.
After waking up, the boy’s face was still full of fear, but he forced himself to calm down and spoke as coherently as possible about what happened in the bathroom.
“When I was showering, the water got hotter and hotter. I wanted to change the temperature but the switch seemed broken. I felt something was wrong and wanted to open my eyes… but my eyes were covered by hair. I reached out and found… that it wasn’t my hair.”
After the boy finished speaking, the faces of many present changed, especially those who shared a room with him.
His companion said: “I remember the story you told yesterday was about a bathroom, right?”
The boy breathed rapidly, gripping the table tightly, and nodded: “Yes, I told a story about a university girls’ dormitory yesterday, where a girl washed hair that wasn’t her own while showering.”
Stories. It was stories again. No matter how dull, everyone realized it.
Xia Wenshi suddenly looked up, his voice trembling: “I remember now, the person who fell down the stairs yesterday told a story about a girl in a red dress on the stairs. Is it that whatever story we told on the first night, we will encounter in this haunted house!”
The words landed like a thunderclap.
“Ah!”
Many people screamed in fright. One boy’s eyes were red with fear, teeth chattering: “No, I don’t want to, I told a story about a skinning ghost.”
Amidst the panic and chaos, Su Wanluo pursed her lips and spoke to comfort everyone: “Everyone, please calm down. I think even if we encounter ghosts from the stories, they should be fake.” She took a deep breath: “Like the boy’s story last night, seeing the girl in red meant never finishing the stairs, but he saw her and still survived. These are all hallucinations, perhaps just to provoke our fear.”
Her comfort didn’t make anyone feel better.
“Ugh!” A short-haired girl at the end of the long table suddenly spat out the food in her mouth. She reached out and kept digging at her throat, vomiting a pile of bright red meat and clear fluid. The girl covered her mouth, tears of fear in her eyes, looked up and trembled: “I’m sorry, I, I told a story about a human meat banquet yesterday, where the meat served on the table was actually scraped from living dead… I feel like the food I just ate had a rotting smell.”
Hearing this, the girl sitting next to her immediately turned pale, put down her knife and fork, ran to the trash can in the kitchen, and bent over to vomit.
Fear, malice, and panic had long made her mind go blank. Her stomach churned, and after vomiting violently, she opened her teary eyes, only to see a large black bag in the trash can, exactly like the one she saw in the fridge. Now this bag was washed open by her vomit, and she saw it seemed to contain a… head.
A man’s head, rotting and foul, with bulging eyes staring dead at her!
“Ahhh!”
At this moment, the girl lost her voice in terror, stumbled back, and hit the fridge. Snap, a book fell from where the fridge was pressed against the wall. The magazine was soaked in blood, but the name on it was still legible, “Night Voyage”.
At this time, the host’s voice rang out in the hall on the first floor.
[Good evening everyone. I wonder if anyone has made any new discoveries in Luohu Mansion during the free activities on the first day.]
The distorted voice was like the last straw, shattering everyone’s sanity.
A boy shouted at the ceiling in a breakdown: “We’re not playing anymore! Let us out! Let us go!”
However, the communication between the host and them was destined to be one-way.
The host said: “It’s almost eight o’clock. Please return to your rooms according to the arrangement on the first day, and let us begin a new round of the game.”
“Fuck you, I’m not playing anymore, can’t you understand human language!” The boy kicked the table heavily, eyes splitting with rage, breathing heavily, and walked towards the door without looking back. He didn’t want to stay in this ghostly place for a second longer, just wanted to leave quickly.
But suddenly someone shouted from behind: “Watch out!”
The boy stopped in his tracks.
The next second, a vase placed on a cabinet by the door fell, smashing directly in front of him.
Bang, the glass shattered into pieces.
—If he hadn’t stopped, the vase would have smashed his head just now.
Under the light, the boy’s face was pale as paper, standing stiffly on the spot.
“Look at the ceiling!” Liang Qingqing suddenly spoke up. Everyone looked up and found that the huge, magnificent chandelier was teetering, its shadow swinging back and forth, as if it would fall in the next second.
“Go back!” Su Wanluo immediately spoke up, “Go back as the host said, into the rooms!”
That chandelier was like the Sword of Damocles hanging over their heads. Not daring to gamble with their lives, everyone could only walk back to their original rooms step by step, faces full of panic.
Ye Sheng knew nothing of what happened in the front hall. He was by the lake, waiting for nightfall.
The vegetation in the garden grew wildly, weeds were lush. Ye Sheng went around to the back and found a table in the garden. The tall flower stand was now covered with green vines, thousands of green threads hanging down, concealing the original traces.
Ning Weichen bent down and picked up a plastic rose from the ground.
“There should have been a date here before.”
Ye Sheng moved all the dirt off the table and found some red wax traces on the stone table, dripping like mottled blood. Associating it with the messy cosmetics in Duan Shi’s bedroom, Ye Sheng felt that perhaps that night Duan Shi was preparing for this candlelight dinner.
“For the weak, the simplest and easiest way to kill someone much stronger than themselves is poisoning.”
Ye Sheng turned his head: “Let’s go check the kitchen.”
Ning Weichen smiled lazily and nodded.
Although he participated in this activity, he seemed completely like an outsider, leaving all decision-making actions to Ye Sheng.
When Ye Sheng arrived at the front hall, the lights were out, and everyone should have returned to their respective rooms.
He could hear the host’s voice from outside too.
However, he didn’t come here to act according to the rules.
Ye Sheng came to the kitchen. The moonlight quietly shone on the fridge that could never be closed. After turning on the light, he squatted down, wanting to search the bottom to see if Duan Shi left any small bottles when using poison, but his gaze was attracted by a book sandwiched between the fridge and the wall.
Ye Sheng picked up the book and could vaguely make out the text on it, “Night Voyage” Issue 48.
The book she held when she first met Song Zhang.
This book should have been placed on top of the fridge originally, then fell down and got stuck in the wall for decades, the whole book soaked in blood. Duan Shi only mentioned in her diary that her great-grandfather opened a magazine agency but never mentioned the name, and at the very top of this book, Ye Sheng finally knew the name of the magazine agency.
Story.
—Story Magazine Agency.
Ye Sheng’s pupils constricted violently.
He opened the book, and a photo fell out first. The photo was taken by a bystander classmate when Song Zhang jumped off the bridge on Girls’ Day back then. The red teaching building, the white Yanzhen Bridge, the emerald Lover’s Lake. The boy’s shirt was soaked, entering the water to hold her up. The girl broke into a smile through tears, hugging his neck tightly, the corners of her eyes filled with lake water and tears.
Turning over the photo, on the back were vows written by the hero and heroine with a blue ballpoint pen, lying at a desk, exchanging words.
“I promise to love Ms. Duan Shi for a lifetime, respect her, accompany her, and tell her bedtime stories for a lifetime. Share all my dreams, blueprints, adventures, and everything with her. Thank you, Ms. Duan Shi, for being willing to accompany a boy to grow up. I am honored and grateful for your deep love.”
“Is everything you said true?”
“Absolutely true, guaranteed with my life.”
“What if you lie?”
“If I lie, do as you please.”
“Okay, if you lie, I won’t let you go even if you flee to the ends of the earth! Hmph!”
“Hahaha, I won’t run.”
[I won’t let you go even if you flee to the ends of the earth] Ye Sheng stared at this sentence, suddenly having an absurd conjecture. Is there a possibility that the King of Stories trapped Duan Shi in this story and granted her the ability to “track”, actually self-righteously satisfying her wish in a disguised way?
Ning Weichen walked behind him. While Ye Sheng was looking at the photo, his gaze fell on the magazine page marking the photo, and he chuckled carelessly.
“Interesting, Salomé can actually be a bedtime story?”
Ye Sheng looked down and found that the page where the photo served as a bookmark was the first page of the “Bedtime Stories” column at the end of “Night Voyage”. Thick bloodstains had long blurred the main text, only the title of the story could be read—Salomé.
Ye Sheng frowned.
He grew up in Yinshan, rarely having extracurricular reading materials besides textbooks. Running around for survival and work-study since childhood, he didn’t have time to read books either.
Ning Weichen was very understanding, explaining to him with a smile on his lips: “The story of Salomé first came from the Gospel of Matthew. At her mother’s instigation, Salomé danced for the king and asked for the head of a prophet as a reward. Later, it was adapted by Oscar Wilde into a love story. In the story, Salomé’s courtship of the prophet was rejected, turning love into hate, and she implored the king to kill the prophet. She cut off the prophet’s head, placed it on a platter, and kissed it deeply, obtaining eternal love.”
This absurd, bloody story filled with love and hate might be the truest portrayal of Duan Shi’s mad heart that night.
She was truly crazy that night, even crazier than what Ye Sheng saw in front of the dormitory building.
Ning Weichen blinked his peach blossom eyes: “Do you want to hear the details? I can tell you more specifically.”
Ye Sheng shook his head: “No need, knowing this is enough.”
He wasn’t interested in the love and hate happening in this haunted house.
The only things he noted down were actually two terms. Story Magazine Agency and “Night Voyage”.
“Let’s go back.” Ye Sheng opened the fridge and put the book inside.
While going upstairs, he suddenly remembered standing by the lake looking at this haunted house. The lights flickered, and from a distance, the villa looked like a head growing on the ground. The first night the host asked them to tell stories, Ye Sheng’s first reaction was that the King of Stories might be on the scene.
But later he realized that the King of Stories likes creating stories and telling them to others, not listening to stories.
…What was Song Zhang doing? The messy dressing table, the separately pulled out book, the date in the front yard, and the story of Salomé. Ye Sheng slowly sorted out a thread.
Song Zhang might be taking revenge, collecting fear.
He was replicating his own death method… on everyone trapped in the haunted house.
The romantic candlelight dinner, the wife with bright makeup, seemed to bring them back to the honeymoon period. He took the book from their first meeting handed by his wife, perhaps truly following the promise of his youth, telling her bedtime stories, until “death”.