My House of Horrors

“Screams coming out from the hospital? But the iron gate is locked, and the surrounding windows are all installed with anti-theft webbing. People from the outside would not have been able to gain entry.” The doctor was afraid that Chen Ge might commit to some crazy decision, so he stepped forth to say, “Yin energy is often gathered in locations like hospitals. After all, it is the location where death is an everyday thing. I suggest we stay away from it.”

“You have a point.” Seeing the hospital, Chen Ge was reminded of the four-star hospital-themed scenario in Eastern Jiujiang, and from his previous experience, hospitals were indeed not lively places. “Then, we’ll come back later. We’ll go to other places first. Actually, I’m quite interested in that smiling dog.”

“That doesn’t mean that we should go there! Did you hear what I said earlier? Do you think I was joking? You have no idea what I’ve been through!” The drunkard struggled and, in the process, pushed Chen Ge away. “Please listen to me. Do not go there. When you come across that human-faced dog, it’ll be too late for regrets!”

“Is the human-faced dog a dog or a human? Can you give me a more detailed description about his appearance?”

It was obvious that Chen Ge was not grasping the message that the drunkard was trying to impart, and this caused the drunkard to stomp the ground angrily. “Let’s just return to the bus. It’s not safe here. Every building here is hiding a ghost. I’m not lying to you!”

“I know you’re not lying.” Chen Ge was about to say something else when there was a crisp sound interrupting his words. It sounded like someone had dropped something onto the ground next to them.

“The people inside the hospital have discovered us!” The drunkard jumped up from the ground immediately, and his chest rose violently—his reaction was perfectly that of a frightened house cat. “We need to leave this place immediately!”

“Calm down, the closer we are to danger, the more we need to stave off the panic.” Chen Ge walked toward the origin of the sound. The doctor followed closely behind him. The drunkard did not have the courage to stay there alone, so he could only follow with an unwilling expression on his face. Walking through the fog, Chen Ge ended up at the other side of the hospital, and he saw a pair of bloodied scissors lying on the ground.

“Isn’t this that crazed man’s weapon? Why’s it here?” Chen Ge looked up the building with Yin Yang Vision. The wooden boards for one of the windows on the third floor were shaking. “Is he hiding inside the hospital? But why would he toss out the scissors? Isn’t this his weapon? Even if it’s to ask for help, wouldn’t it make more sense to toss out something else?”

Chen Ge was confused by Scissors’ action. He kept the scissors for himself and returned to the front door of the hospital.

“Let’s go before it is too late. I don’t want to get stuck here.” The drunkard squeezed next to the door. “Earlier, I forgot to tell you about another ghost that I saw. Even the streets here aren’t safe. When you cross a junction, there will be a ghost waving at you. He’ll keep on following you, as he adopts your facial feature. When he appears, you’ll see how you look like when you’re dead.”

The drunkard tried his best to persuade Chen Ge to change his mind, but it did not affect the latter at all as he tried to wiggle the iron gate of the hospital alone.

“What is he doing?” The drunkard touched the doctor’s arm.

“Perhaps he’s if to see whether the iron gate is sturdy enough to hold the ghost inside the hospital in,” the doctor guessed with a bitter smile. He also had trouble understanding what Chen Ge was doing.

“Wait, do you guys still think I’m rambling in a drunken haze? Do you think what I saw earlier was part of my drunken imagination?” The drunkard grabbed the doctor’s shoulders with both hands. “I’m not lying to you, I swear! Please trust me! I’m trying to save you here! Every building here is home to at least one ghost!”

His emotion was running wild. He turned toward Chen Ge and tried to forcibly lead the man away. “Stay away from that door! You’ll get pulled in if you get too close!”

The drunkard had just finished when he saw the sunny looking young man take out a scary-looking large hammer from his backpack. The four eyes met, and the drunkard’s eyelids twitched.

“You can tell me the rest after we get into this place.” Chen Ge raised the hammer high and slammed it down on the lock.

Bang!

Due to the oppressive presence of the blood fog, the sound did not echo far into the distance. Knocking at the same spot three times, Chen Ge finally got the lock to break. “Stick close to me. If you wander too far, I might not be able to guarantee your safety.”

When the doctor heard Chen Ge say that, he started to follow without much hesitation.

“Hey! What’s going on? Why are you carrying a hammer with you when you’re just going to ride on a bus?” The drunkard held the doctor back by his shoulders. “Have you two been to this place in the past?”

“He used to make props for a theme park, so isn’t it perfectly normal for him to carry a hammer on him?” The doctor rattled off the same excuse that Chen Ge had given him earlier to the drunkard.

“A prop maker?” When the drunkard was trying to tie up the relationship between a hammer and a theme park, Chen Ge and the doctor had already entered the hospital. “Hey, wait for me!”

Standing on the first floor, Chen Ge activated the recorder, held both bags in one hand, and carried Doctor Skull Cracker’s hammer in the other. The sharp edge of the hammer elicited a creepy sound as it ground against the hospital floor. Chen Ge narrowed his eyes to take a better look as he stared down the corridor on the left.

“Did you discover anything?” The doctor seemed to know it was very dangerous there and stuck close to Chen Ge.

“A few visitors have recently been to this hospital.” Chen Ge pointed at the footprints on the ground. “Due to the heavy rain from earlier, most of the passengers on our bus were drenched. So, these footprints must have been left behind by them. Then, you take a closer look at the size and shape of these footprints. Four large ones and one small one. So, they should belong to the family of three and the madman who called himself Scissors.”

Chen Ge’s observation was precise and accurate. “All the footprints pointed to the left side, so they must have entered the left corridor.”

“Jesus Christ! You sure have amazing eyesight! How can you see these things so clearly even though it’s practically pitch black in here?” The drunkard had a renewed admiration toward Chen Ge.

“Follow me.” Chen Ge entered the left corridor. He placed the white cat on his shoulder and took out his mobile to activate the flashlight function. “There are sickrooms lining both sides of the corridor. The doors are left ajar, so I suspect that something might come out from them at any moment. Be cautious of everything.”

“Big brother, please don’t scare me.”

“I’m not trying to scare you; I’m just telling you the truth.” Chen Ge stooped lower. “Come and take a look at these footprints. At the start of the corridor, they were evenly spaced, but after crossing the third and fourth sickroom, the footsteps started to overlap and randomize. This means that something unexpected happened to them when they were passing the third and fourth sickroom. They probably stopped here for a while.”

“In other words, you’re trying to say that there might be something inside the third or fourth sickroom?” The doctor grasped Chen Ge’s intention instantly.

“There’s a great possibility of that, but that does not preclude other possibilities. Just be more careful when you’re crossing these two sickrooms.” Chen Ge looked at the two doors that had been left half-ajar. Through the dark gap, it felt like some scary monsters would poke their head out at any time.

“Try to keep up and make sure you don’t get left behind.” Chen Ge dragged the hammer and walked down the corridor. This place was eerily quiet. When they passed the first and second room, Chen Ge did not notice anything out of place. However, when he got near the third sickroom, the white cat on his shoulder meowed and curled behind his neck.

At almost the exact moment when the white cat gave him the warning, Chen Ge raised the hammer in his hand and slammed into the half-open door of the third sickroom without any hesitation. The door swung heavily from the force and slammed into the wall.

Bang!

It exposed the shadow who was originally hiding behind the door. He was wearing a patient’s garb. He had ashen skin, and underneath his pair of messy bangs was a pair of stunned eyes. He froze where he was, holding someone’s medical history in his hands. The uneven handwriting on it read ‘Come and find me.’

“Why are you hiding here? Are trying to play a game with me?” Chen Ge revealed an interested smile. He needed to come up with more games to increase the playability of his Haunted House to attract more visitors.

The patient behind the door seemed to have noticed something. He wanted to drop the medical history in his hand, but Chen Ge was not going to give him the chance. He burst into the room, and to prevent the doctor and the drunkard from seeing what he was up to, he even closed the door after he charged past it.

The doctor and the drunkard were frozen solid on the corridor and had no idea what happened. Their attention had been too enraptured by the loud bang when the hammer slammed against the door.

“Where did he go?”

“I don’t know, I think he was dragged into that sickroom‽”

“Are you sure? How come it appears like he charged into it willingly?”

Static noises came out from the sickroom, and ten seconds later, Chen Ge walked out from the room with a satisfied smile, holding a comic in his hands.

“This hospital is quite dangerous, so you have to be careful.” Chen Ge put the comic away and continued to walk deeper into the corridor alone, grumbling about something that neither the doctor nor the drunkard understood. “So, a game of hide-and-seek? This is quite interesting. Fine, I accept your challenge! I’ll definitely find all of you!”

The group stopped moving when they came to the second floor. The area before the first room right after they turned out of the staircase was splattered with fresh flood. Even a crime scene would not have looked this bloody.

The doctor frowned. He was a professional, and he was feeling uncomfortable by the sight. The drunkard, on the other hand, had his hand over his mouth because he had started to dry heave.

“The ghosts in this hospital only like to play games, and they normally wouldn’t injure people, so why is there so much blood in the corridor?” Chen Ge bent down to study the blood pattern. He looked exactly like an experienced forensic doctor. “The blood splatter has no uniformity to it at all, and there is too much. No matter which part of the body was injured, there is no way for one to create a crime scene like this.”

Chen Ge brushed the blood with his pinkie, and he put it under his nostrils after rubbing it on his fingers. “This does not smell like human blood.”

When he said that, the doctor and the drunkard behind him reeled from fear. How familiar did one have to be with human blood to be able to make an identification on the spot like that?

Dragging the hammer, Chen Ge very naturally walked through the pool of blood. “Don’t be afraid, this was probably set up by someone. I would often do something like this inside the Haunted House.”

Seeing his back, the drunkard and the doctor started to have hesitation of following him.

“There footprints mixed into the blood pool, and they look similar to one of the footprints at the entrance of the hospital. This means that one of the passengers from the bus has been here before.” Chen Ge looked at the bloody footprints on the staircase, and his expression was curious. “It feels like he left these behind on purpose, waiting for us to follow the trail to find him. Will there be a trap waiting for us considering how obvious this trail is, or could it be that someone has taken his shoes to lay down this trap for us?”

Chen Ge was very calm. After giving it some thought, he decided to follow the footsteps up to the third floor. After the footprints got to the third floor, they ran directly into the toilet. The footprints went only one way—there was entry and no exit. In other words, an idiot would be able to tell that the owner of the footprints should still be hiding inside the toilet.

“This is too obvious; I suspect this is really a trap. The two of you should wait out here.” Chen Ge gripped the hammer and entered the third-floor toilet alone. He slammed the doors of the front few cubicles open, but there was nothing inside them.

“The footprints disappeared into the last cubicle, and the scissors fell from the third-floor toilet.” Chen Ge was on high alert. He did not break the door of the last cubicle directly but crawled on the wall of the cubicle next door and peered inside.

Scissors, who was covered in blood, gripped the old bag tightly. He was collapsed inside the last cubicle with his hands tightly squeezed over his mouth and nose, afraid to make even the smallest voice. The man before Chen Ge was so different from the Scissors that he had met on the bus.

“This man’s courage is small to an unimaginable level, but he dared to come to Li Wan City for the sake of his older brother. With enough training, he will be incredibly useful.” A trace of admiration flashed through Chen Ge’s eyes. He slowly retreated from the wall and out of the cubicle. He did not expose Scissors but knocked lightly on the door of the last cubicle. “Is someone in there? I’m a passenger from the bus earlier, and I saw a pair of scissors drop down from the window earlier, so I came to see if there’s anyone here.”

When the familiar voice entered the cubicle, to Scissors, who thought it was already over, the voice was like the first ray of a new spring. It pushed back the fog and melted the frozen river.

Strange noises came from inside the cubicle, and Chen Ge recognized that as Scissors smoothing down his clothes and putting on his ‘appearance’. He did not disturb the man. “Whether you are a fellow passenger or not, I’m sorry to have interrupted you at this sensitive moment.”

Chen Ge walked backward, purposely letting Scissors hear that he was retreating. Moments later, the door was pushed open, and an insidious voice came from within. “You managed to find me?”

The bloodied Scissors walked out from the cubicle. He carried a maddened smile on his otherwise expressionless face. He kept up the habit of licking the wound on his cheek even though he could barely suppress the grimace of pain that came from it. “We’d better leave this place. There are many strange things inside this hospital. You should have seen the blood splatter on the second floor, right? That was my doing when I cut a bloody path through the crowd of ghosts that surrounded me.”

His eyes were rolling with anger, his expression scary. Chen Ge looked at the Scissors before him, and he had a hard time reconciling this man with the weak and helpless little soul that he had seen inside the cubicle earlier.

“Stop staring into my eyes, it’s very dangerous.” Scissors grabbed the bag with one hand and issued a cruel laugh. Perhaps because he had been squatting too long inside the cubicle, his legs were wobbly like noodles, and it gave him a limping gait while he walked.

“I understand. We’d better leave this place then.” Chen Ge did not move forward to help Scissors. ‘Murderers’ were often lone wolf, and lone wolves did not need help. “Here. Your scissors. I found them outside the hospital.”

Taking back his weapon, Scissors’ gaze sharpened even more. “Very good. If not for the fact that the cunning ghosts caused me to lose my scissors during the last struggle, they definitely would have regretted running into me.”

“Understood, I believe you.” Chen Ge dragged the hammer and walked out the toilet. It grated against the floor and made a spine-chilling noise. “Actually, we are not so different. We both have a past that we do not wish to bring up, and I’m also here to find the two most important individuals in my life.”