My House of Horrors

Four?

When the strange man in the patient’s garb showed him four fingers, Yellow Wolf felt like the blood in his body rushed to his heart, attempting to overload it. Pain radiated from his chest, and his head was going light. If he was not in the middle of a livestream, he would have tossed the phone away, turned the other way, and run for his life.

Calm down! You are inside a haunted house! These are all human actors! Everything will be fine; everything will be fine! Yellow Wolf tried his best to convince himself, but his body had started to spiral out of control. His legs could not stop shaking.

The man who was normally so good with words was rendered speechless. The cold air caressed his petrified body, and he sensed that the four characters gathered before him were incredibly unique.

Even for people who were born with deformities, they would not have grown up to these strange states. Their limbs were contorted into weird binds. Their bones were not structured like a normal human’s. Some of them had their eyes gouged out, and only two dark holes remained in their skull. Another had pupil-less eyes that would occasionally roll around in their sockets. The four patients were arranged in a straight line. The dim lights showered down on them, and Yellow Wolf only then realized that all four of them did not possess a shadow!

“Don’t come any closer!” A scream escaped from his lips. At that moment, Yellow Wolf had lost the cool that he had shown inside the room. He finally understood that he had not been interacting with Lee Jiu but the actors inside the Haunted House. After that point registered in his mind, another question surfaced the next second.

Where has Lee Jiu disappeared to then?

He remembered that when he was on the phone with Lee Jiu earlier, the man had sounded different from usual, like he was in serious trouble.

Lee Jiu has worked at a Haunted House for so many years. He is an experienced prop designer within the industry. To be able to make him say things like that, it can only mean that this place is really haunted!

Cold sweat kept sliding down his face. Before Yellow Wolf had gone there, he had done a lot of research regarding the ghost stories that surrounded Chen Ge’s Haunted House, and at that moment, all the ghost stories surged into his mind, enveloping him in endless fear.

I should have left when I had the chance!

Alas, regret was already too late. The four characters started to move. Their distorted bodies teetered unevenly as their expressions slowly changed until they hissed dangerously and charged at Yellow Wolf with a roar!

These are not human beings! This Haunted House is really haunted!

Yellow Wolf’s lips fell open, but words failed to escape from them. Fear flowed out of his eyes, and he felt like he was about to faint from a lack of oxygen.

“Big Wolf, why have you run out on your own? From the beginning, you have been talking to yourself. This is different from the script that we have rehearsed!”

The sickroom door that about several meters away from Yellow Wolf was pushed open at that moment, and following Yellow Wolf’s requirement, Lee Jiu walked out after painting his face scarily.

Hearing Lee Jiu’s voice, Yellow Wolf’s frozen heart seemed to have welcomed a warm ray of light, and his brain recharged and reassumed control of his body. He turned back around and saw Lee Jiu. He sucked in a deep breath and was about to scream for help when the phone in his hand vibrated noisily.

He lowered his head out of habit to look, and Yellow Wolf saw the name that showed on the caller ID—Lee Jiu.

Lee Jiu is calling me? Then who is this Lee Jiu standing before me?

He touched the accept button with shaking hands. Yellow Wolf used the dregs of strength that he had left and raised the phone to his ear.

“Big Wolf? I can’t contact Jinyuan and Cold Guy anymore! I am currently hiding near the entrance. You have to come to me immediately! There is something seriously wrong with this Haunted House!” Lee Jiu’s voice came out from the phone—it was filled with nervousness and anxiety. “I am not kidding with you! You have to leave! Now!”

“I know you are not kidding with me…” Yellow Wolf looked at his phone dumbly and then lifted his eyes to inspect the Lee Jiu who was walking toward him. “But the problem is… now there are two of you!”

An indescribable fear crawled into his body through his pours, and this was way beyond Yellow Wolf’s threshold. He screamed and launched himself at Lee Jiu, who was in front of him, like his life depended on it. There were four monsters behind him, and there was only one in front of him. At that moment, Yellow Wolf’s biological instinct compelled him to make this choice.

“Have you lost your mind? I am Lee…” Before he finished, the mentally-collapsed Yellow Wolf had already reached his side. He gripped his backpack and swung it heavily at Lee Jiu. Lee Jiu had been busy putting on his make-up earlier, so he had no idea what had happened. In that state of innocence and ignorance, he was smacked in the face by Yellow Wolf’s backpack.

“I am Lee Jiu! F*ck! You’re going to ruin my make-up!” Lee Jiu reached out to grab Yellow Wolf, but the latter resisted like crazy. After all, in his mind, he was being attacked by a ghost, so of course, Yellow Wolf was going to struggle like crazy to escape. In the struggle, Yellow Wolf abandoned his backpack and the phone, which was still livestreaming. He barreled down the corridor, screaming all the way.

“Yellow Wolf!” Lee Jiu held his injured nose. His voice became more nasally from the attack. He was quite worried about Yellow Wolf, so he quickly chased after the man. The two visitors, one running in front, the other chasing at the back, disappeared from the third-floor basement.

The four employees in the patient’s garbs gradually slowed down. They shared a look with each other, and they felt like they were being excluded from some kind of fun.

The white eyes turned slightly around, and the ‘patient’ in the middle had his black hair lifted up from his scalp. The anger in his heart could not be suppressed anymore. When he first appeared, the visitor had shown him three fingers. After he finally gathered three employees, the visitors had shown him four fingers instead.

Now that he had gathered four employees, after fulfilling the man’s unreasonable request, the man had left without even a word of thanks for him. This was such a waste of the employee’s time!

This was too much! Such disrespect! He should not be forgiven!

Dangerous and scary wounds surfaced on the pale faces. The four angry employees shed their disguise out of fury, and they showed their true faces. The corners of their lips cracked out, and they groaned darkly. Then, the whole building seemed to come alive, and behind the half-open sickrooms, a few more dark-gray arms reached out into the dark.

….

The chains scraped against the floor, creating a bone-chilling noise. A shadow that was pulled long by the light stood alone in front of the Li Wan Private Hospital’s entrance.

“They have split up?” Wearing Doctor Skull-cracker’s apparel, Chen Ge held the hammer in one hand and stopped before the hospital door. He lowered his head to look at the message sent to him by Tong Tong.

“Someone is conducting a livestream at the third-floor basement of the hospital!”

“I have allowed taking pictures, I have allowed recording videos, and now you people have started livestreaming inside my Haunted House, have you? Have I been too kind with the degree of freedom that I’ve given them? Have they forgotten who the boss of this place is?” Chen Ge was a good-natured person, and it was rare for him to get angered unless they stepped over his bottom line.

The spikes on the hammer dragged against the ground, and Chen Ge in the skin mask moved to the third-floor basement of the hospital.

“Where have they gone?” The corridor was dark, and there was no one around. However, the temperature was curiously low. Taking out his phone, Chen Ge was about to contact Tong Tong when he noticed a black-colored backpack and a phone abandoned outside Sickroom No. 4.

“A black backpack? I remember a visitor carrying this with him. He should have entered with that creep.” Chen Ge did not go to pick the items up immediately. “If the backpack and the phone have been left here but the people has gone missing, it can only mean that they abandoned them out of fear. I wrote in the worker’s rulebook that they do not need to hold back once they encounter people who are using their phones to take picture and record videos inside the Haunted House. Could the owner of this backpack be the hidden host? Is it possible that the phone left there is still in the middle of livestreaming?”

After clearing so many Trial Missions, Chen Ge’s power of observation was much better than most. Standing away from the phone camera’s view, he removed Doctor Skull-Cracker’s apparel and then walked to stand beside the black backpack.

“Who is so careless to have left their stuff unattended here? Thankfully, we have surveillance cameras to ensure one hundred percent safety of our visitors.” After saying that, Chen Ge turned to the phone lying at the side. “Whose phone is this?”

He picked up the phone, and the chatroom was lagging. Following Yellow Wolf’s disappearance, the popularity of his stream did not decrease. If anything, it only continued to rise, and he was only a few steps away from reaching the top.

“A livestream?” Chen Ge had done livestreaming before. When he conducted his mission at the Third Sick Hall, he had even been taught a few tricks on livestreaming. “Good afternoon, everyone. I am Chen Ge, the boss of the Haunted House at Western Jiujiang’s New Century Park. Can anyone tell me what happened here earlier?”

Whenever he introduced his Haunted House in public, Chen Ge desperately wished to include the whole address of his Haunted House so that there would be no mistake. The website was lagging, and after a few refreshes, Chen Ge got a brief idea of the whole process.

The host who was responsible for this livestream was Yellow Wolf, nicknamed Big Brother Wolf. He had claimed that he was a descendant of a long line of powerful diviners, and he seemed to have encountered an actual ghost during the livestream. Then, he was so scared that he abandoned his phone and absconded on his own.

When Chen Ge saw that many messages claiming that his Haunted House was really haunted, he felt weirdly exposed, but when he noticed the viewership of the livestream, a glint appeared in his eyes like he had come upon a valuable treasure.

“Actually, all of you have been tricked by Yellow Wolf. How can there be real ghosts in this world? I believe that he was behind everything that you saw earlier.” Once Chen Ge said that, he garnered the dissatisfaction from Yellow Wolf’s loyal fans.

Chen Ge was not angered. He picked up Yellow Wolf’s backpack and soon discovered some problems. “Earlier, someone said that there was a family heirloom, a jade pendant worn by Yellow Wolf, and it would crack on its own when he ran into evil spirits. The pendant had nine cracks once he arrived at my Haunted House, but take a look at these…”

Chen Ge pulled out a bunch of similar-looking jade pendants from the backpack, and there were plenty that were already cracked. “These are jades with horrible quality. This whole bunch here is not even worth much.”

Chen Ge conducted the indictment in front of so many viewers, but that was just how open and clear Chen Ge was.

He placed the jade pendants back inside the backpack and opened another pocket. It was filled to the brim with paper talismans with a red background and black characters. Some of them even had the price tag still attached to them. “These are the talismans that his ancestors have left for him, are they? And supposedly, there are only a few of them in the world. Look here, the purchase price is five cents each. How much is he selling one for on his Taobao shop?”

With the truth placed before everyone’s eyes, there was no need for argument. Chen Ge replaced Yellow Wolf’s stuff and turned to address the camera. “Running into a real ghost inside a Haunted House? That is all a show directed by Yellow Wolf himself. If you would like to see a real ghost and supernatural livestream, I would recommend that you follow me instead.”

Chen Ge did not feel that shameless for using this opportunity for advertisement. “My account name is Western Jiujiang Haunted House, and the profile picture is the gates of my Haunted House. I livestreamed for some time in the past, but it kinda fell to the wayside after things got a bit too busy. If there’s a chance in the future, I will bring everyone a real supernatural livestream to search for the real ghost stories that are hidden in the shadows of this city!”

Chen Ge took out his phone and logged into the streaming account that he had not been using for a long time already, and he advertised himself shamelessly in Yellow Wolf’s stream. After he did all that, the follower number for his account experienced a drastic increase, and in fact, some of the viewers in Yellow Wolf’s room managed to recognize him.

“After this round, the viewership should shoot over 250,000.” The other company had invested a lot in Yellow Wolf to help him gain traffic, and the platform itself had been promoting Yellow Wolf since the start of the week, so of course, Chen Ge was not going to let that go to waste.

After he was done promoting his own personal account, it was time to advertise his own Haunted House. Perhaps because the platform that Chen Ge used was different from Yellow Wolf’s, this kind of open advertisement attracted the platform’s ire, and it did not take long for the official party to temporarily ban Yellow Wolf’s livestream room.

Looking at the darkened screen, Chen Ge felt quite saddened and empty. “As I should have known, opportunities are given to those who are readied and prepared. I should have spoken faster in case this happened.”

Deactivating Yellow Wolf’s phone, Chen Ge looked at his account’s follower number, which was still rising, and he revealed a smile. “This brother has gifted me a very big present. I should personally thank him myself.”

Putting his backpack and phone away, Chen Ge put on Doctor Skull-cracker’s apparel, the human skin mask, and lifted the hefty hammer.

To thank Yellow Wolf, Chen Ge decided to track the man down himself, to show his appreciation in person.