My House of Horrors

“Qiu Mei, come out and play!” The girl downstairs waved happily. The smile on her face was bright and excited like something great had just happened to her. The main character did not reply. The screen fixated on the same image for a whole second, expressing a hollowness and even chilliness, before the main character moved to close the window.

The somber feeling did not dissipate after the windows were closed. Instead, it crawled around the main character. It was hard to tell how the director managed to capture this feeling. Just this feeling of claustrophobia and being trapped alone already made this short movie yards better than the offerings on the market.

The small room was like a cage, and after the windows were closed, it felt as if a cold sea poured into the room to submerge the main character. The camera tittered aimlessly around the room before the girl’s voice came from behind again.

“Qiu Mei! Qiu Mei!” The camera slowly turned around. The girl’s face was squeezed right up to the glass. She was pushing so hard that her facial features were squished beyond recognition—it felt as if she was trying to use her face to squeeze through the glass.

“Qiu Mei, come out and play!” The redness of the jacket was eye-catching, and it formed a strange contrast and compliment to the gray sky in the background. The main character lived on the fourth floor. When she looked out earlier, the girl had clearly been standing on the ground.

However, with this strange occurrence, the main character did not seem shocked. It felt as if she had gotten used to this already. The camera very calmly moved to another direction. Since this was shot in first person view, the camera represented the main character’s scope of sight. Scanning past the cluttered table and the dirty clothes that piled on the floor, it landed on the bedroom door.

“Qiu Mei, come out and play!” The girl’s face stuck close to the glass on the window. The red jacket smothered the glass until the light that filtered through it turned red as well. Her breathing became ragged, and the main character suddenly picked up the scissors on the table and raised them high.

Since this was shot from the first-person angle, it gave the impression to the audience that the main character was going to use the scissors to stab herself. Everything happened so fast that the transition was very hard to grasp.

Pa!

The bedroom door was slammed open, and a middle-aged man rushed in. He grabbed the main character’s wrist and snatched the scissors away.

“What are you doing‽” The camera titled to the side and spun. The main character was pushed down the side of the table.

“Life is already not easy for your mother and me. Can you please stop torturing us‽”

The audience was unable to see the expression on the main character’s face, but they could discern the main character’s current status from the middle-aged man’s demeanor and expression. Human beings were special, and this kind of connection seemed to be inherited in every member of the species.

“What happened?” Footsteps hurried to arrive, and a middle-aged lady jogged into the room. She looked haggard, and once her eyes landed on the main character, they reddened almost instantly. Without saying anything else, the lady squeezed past her husband to squeeze the main character in a hug.

“You saw her again?” The woman was facing the camera, but the audience knew that she was talking to the main character. From this angle, the audience could clearly see the micro-expression on the mother’s face. There was pain, anxiety, agitation… but more than that, there was heartache.

Without getting a response from the main character, the mother already knew the answer, and she hugged the main character harder.

“Why are you the one that’s punished? What can we do to cure this illness?” The camera moved away from the mother and returned to the sky outside the window. The dark clouds hung low in the sky like they were about to fall to smother the world. The eye slowly closed, and the theater returned to darkness.

The man appeared very nervous. His legs were squeezed together, and he asked Chen Ge softly, “Why isn’t there any sound now? Is the machine broken?”

Before waiting for Chen Ge to answer, strange music circled the room. The eye flickered before it opened again. The camera moved, and the main character was lying in her bedroom. Next to her stood her parents and a man, one the audience had not seen before.

This man had his back stooped, and he stood facing away from the main character. Since the movie was shot from the main character’s perspective, like the main character, the audience was not granted a view of the man’s face.

“Doctor, what kind of illness is Wenyu suffering from? How come she keeps saying that she can see these strange things?” The main character’s mother had worried lines crawling all over her face.

“Yes, doctor, what’s wrong with my daughter?”

“I am not a doctor, merely someone who has done quite a bit of research on this. Do not worry for now; I’ve had a basic grasp of the situation.” The man who was referred to as the doctor had a voice that was familiar to Chen Ge. This was a very strange feeling because Chen Ge did not think any of his acquaintances had acted in a movie before.

The doctor signaled for the parents to sit down. “Her situation is very unique, and I will share my preliminary thoughts with you.”

The doctor took out a black note from his bag. “You should know that human beings live in the third dimension, right?”

The parents shook their heads. They had no idea where the doctor was going with this.

The doctor flipped through the note and found the page that he had torn out from another book. “To put it simply, the third dimension is this world that we humans occupy; there is the concept of length, width and height. The fourth dimension adds the concept of time onto the basis of the third dimension. Actually, the condition that forbids us from entering the fourth dimension is ‘time’. Due to the presence of time, human beings in the third dimension are doomed to make a singular choice at a certain point in time, and this choice will be a completely isolated choice. In other words, every human experience is an isolated three-dimensional world, and if you place all the three-dimensional worlds on the axis of time, then you’ll have created a four-dimensional world.”

Not only were the main character’s parents confused by the doctor’s words, even Chen Ge in the audience was led in circles. However, the blind man next to him suddenly became silent and settled down.

“What does that have to do with my daughter’s illness?” The mother was not really paying much attention to the doctor’s theory. She just wanted to cure her daughter.

“I will tell you again, your daughter is not sick. There are many accidents happening in the world daily from as small as subatomic collision to as big as space expansion. There are many things that we temporarily cannot explain…”

“Doctor, why don’t you just tell us straight, can our daughter’s situation be improved or not? What kind of medicine is available? Our family’s condition might not be that good not, but for our daughter, we are willing to do anything.” The girl’s father cut him off directly. Their acting was so real that it did not feel like a movie but some kind of documentary.

“Your daughter is not sick; her eyes are merely an accident.” The doctor was still facing away from the character. “The three-dimensional worlds that are arranged on the axis of time might occasionally overlap, and your daughter, Chang Wenyu, is the point where the two worlds overlap. Thus, she is unable to see things that you can’t!”

The movie was still playing. Chen Ge was there for a mission, but he was drawn in by the plot of the movie.

Why would the doctor and her parents call the main character Chang Wenyu? But the ghost outside the window calls her Qiu Mei? Also, this doctor’s explanation is quite interesting. I think I should memorize it. Even though I don’t quite understand it, it might prove useful in the future.