Lonelytree

  Millman97

  Li Wan Private Hospital’s main color palette was white. It was the most eye-catching and the most unique building in the small town. As they pulled open the rusted iron door, they saw a darkened corridor, littered with yellowed patient’s list. If they picked up any single one, they would see that the patients had mostly died from untreatable diseases and infections from the epidemic.

  The glass windows creaked in the wind even though there should not have been a draft blowing underground. The doors of the rooms were all left open like the dead patients had all returned to this place and would come out at any moment.

  There were striations that looked like nail marks left on the doors, and an unknown plant climbed all over the walls. The ceiling was peeling at places, which exposed patterns on the cement that looked suspiciously like human faces.

  This hospital was one of the scariest locales at the small town, and it was using its own unique charm to welcome the new batch of visitors. The floor was cracked, and walking on it would create this screeching sound. In the complete silence, any sound could make people jump.

  “Where is that guy, Lee Jiu? He came in here at most ten seconds earlier than we did. How did he manage to disappear in the blink of an eye?” Wang Dan looked around with a severe look in his eyes. He stood in the lobby and stared down the two corridors that led down his left and right sides. He wished to discern the direction that they had gone in based on the pattern of the broken tiles on the ground. However, much to his consternation, both corridors had signs of travel, and he could already pick out around eight footprints in the dark.

  “There are some other people in this building other than us.” Wang Dan studied the foot prints on the ground, and he hesitated. He knew full well how good at scaring people the actors at this Haunted House were. Running into anyone of them could push an unsuspecting visitor over the brink, and this building might be hiding more than a handful of those scary actors.

  “Which path should we take?” Wang Dan’s girlfriend asked. She was wearing quite thin clothing as was the fashion. Her body was shaking involuntarily, but it was unclear whether it was due to fear or merely the cold.

  “I remember that both Lee Jue and the male streamer are wearing sneakers. From the footprints on the ground, they should have headed down the left corridor, but……” Wang Dan lowered his head to think.

  “But what? Can’t you just finish the sentence instead of letting it hang like that?” Zhang Feng complained with annoyance. When a person was placed in a completely new environment, they would often feel agitated and unsettled.

  “Why don’t you come and see for yourself?” Wang Dan aimed his phone on the ground. The corridor on the left had two pairs of footprints that were arranged parallel to each other.

  “The footprints in front looks like they were left behind by sneakers, but the footprints at the back doesn’t have any pattern to them. Therefore, we can assume that it was one of the visitors who walked ahead, and it was not a second visitor but something else that was following behind him.” Wang Dan was not trying to scare anyone—he was merely telling the truth. “There is about thirty centimeters between these two footprints. Do you really not see the problem here?”


  Seeing the confusion on Zhang Feng’s face, Wang Dan decided to make the demonstration himself. He walked to stand behind his girlfriend and moved to about thirty centimeters behind her. “The visitor is walking ahead, and there is something unknown trailing behind him like this. The two walked down the whole corridor in this manner. Look at the footprints left on the ground; the patterns are very uniform. In other words, this means that, even at the end, the one who was walking in front did not realize that there was something following behind him at a constant thirty-centimeter distance.”


  “The actors here sure are something else.” This was Zhang Feng’s first time visiting a Haunted House. Just hearing Wang Dan’s description, he was feeling quite unsettled.

  “Lee Jiu and the streamer should have gone down the left corridor, and the actors at the Haunted House made to follow them, so the path should be safe now.” Wang Dan walked down the left corridor alone.

  After Wang Dan left, the hospital lobby became scarier. The paper on the ground lifted up, and it rustled noisily as it scratched the floor. This was nothing short of torture for the visitors who visited the Haunted House for the first time.

  “Wait for me.” Wang Dan’s girlfriend and Zhang Feng hurried to catch up to Wang Dan. There was no one touching them, but the doors on the sides of the wall creaked on their own. It gave the impression that there were some monsters hiding inside the dark rooms. With absolute caution, the group of three moved slowly down the corridor. They were almost squeezed together.

  “This looks like a normal sickroom, albeit a little old and abandoned. It looks like no one has stayed here for a long time.” The decoration inside the sickrooms was very real, so real that one could easily forget that they were inside a Haunted House.

  “Be careful. The actors here have undergone the best training—they are able to follow behind you without making any noise, and they have many different methods to scare you. You are never going to see it coming.”


  The danger could come from any direction. Wang Dan’s group not only had to be cautious of the doors that were left half-ajar, they were also watching the cracked walls and floor cautiously. They did not forget about the ceiling either.

  With how tense they were, if anyone screamed, their souls probably would have escaped from their bodies. They took a whole minute to walk down the corridor that was only ten meters long. When they reached the corner of the staircase, the group realized that their backs were already wet with sweat.

  “What? That’s all? I thought that there would at least be actors playing the ghosts coming out of the rooms to scare us.” Zhang Feng sighed in relief. “Actually, it is not that scary. If anything, I think that your analysis at the start was scarier. I suspect that you did it on purpose to make this whole experience feel more horrifying than it should be so that you can scare us.”


  The male student was more courageous than a normal person, but the crucial reason he was putting on such a brave front was because he did not want to appear weaker than Wang Dan.

  Actually, he looked down on Wang Dan even though he did not let it show that openly. Wang Dan was a medical student who only knew how to deal with dead bodies; he was boring, had normal looks, was not even that tall, and did not come from a good family. Zhang Feng failed to find any hint of a positive point when it came to the young man.

  Just the thought of that dispersed the fear slightly in Zhang Feng’s heart. He stole a glance at Wang Dan’s girlfriend. As mentioned earlier, Wang Dan’s girlfriend was his high-school classmate. However, back then, he would not have predicted that how beautiful his friend would become once she learned how to take care of her appearance. After he came across her profile on the internet, Zhang Feng had a hard time believing it was her that he was looking at.

  Wang Dan was slighted by Zhang Feng’s words. He was being kind to provide the analysis, but all he got in return was suspicion. This kind of person really did not deserve his help. He worked hard to suppress the annoyance in his heart. Even though Wang Dan had possessed a temper in the past, visiting Chen Ge’s Haunted House had smoothed down his edges a lot.

  He could not tell for sure what had initiated this change. Perhaps because he had seen real demons, in comparison, everyone else appeared more kind-hearted and approachable. Or perhaps when he had fainted and been revived repeatedly in the underground morgue, the teachings of the old professors at Jiujiang Medical University had really made an impact on this young man. In any case, Wang Dan was no longer the man he had been in the past; he had witnessed plenty of growth.

  Facing the multiple challenges from Zhang Feng, Wang Dan did not rise to the bait and get into an argument. He understood how meaningless an argument was—the main reason he had come to the Haunted House this time was to share the ‘joy’ with Zhang Feng, and to achieve that goal, he could stomach any number of complaints and grievances.

  “Why aren’t you defending yourself? It’s because I’m right, aren’t I?” Zhang Feng assumed that he had seen through Wang Dan’s ploy. “Coming to a place like a Haunted House to prove who has a bigger heart, don’t you think that is a very childish thing to do?”


  After nodding, Wang Dan walked silently away.

  The atmosphere in the hospital turned stranger. Lee Jiu and the male host had walked in before him, but they did not hear anything to signify their presence. There was not even the sound of footsteps. It felt like the two had disappeared into thin air.

  All the buildings in the small town led underground, and Li Wan Private Hospital was no exception. Wang Dan looked at the stairs that led underground, and a strange thought appeared in Wang Dan’s mind. The only reason that they had not come across any actors so far was most likely because they wanted to wait for the visitors to head underground before showing themselves. This way, the visitors would not escape from the building so easily when they were scared.

  The light dimmed, and the three became more cautious.

  On the stairs between the first and second floor basement, Wang Dan’s girlfriend suddenly yelped in shock, “There’s someone down there!”


  “Where?” Both Wang Dan and Zhang Feng turned to the stairs in unison.

  “It was just around the banister going down to the second floor! I saw it! It was a pair of gray legs!” Wang Dan and Zhang Feng looked in the direction that Wang Dan’s girlfriend was pointing, but they did not see anything.

  “I swear they were there earlier, but they disappeared soon after!” Wang Dan’s girlfriend claimed nervously as she nudged backward, moving from the middle to the back of the ground.

  “Probably the actors heard our footsteps and were hiding there, but you saw them on accident,” Zhang Feng said to console the girl.

  “Okay…… But wait!” Wang Dan’s girlfriend suddenly pointed at Wang Dan’s back. “There is something stuck on your shoulders!”


  “Me?” Wang Dan reached out to touch his back, and he noticed that there was a patient’s record stuck on his back. The front of the record was printed with the black and white picture of the supposed patient, and on the back of the paper was written in unkempt handwriting “Come and find me.”


  “Who stuck this on me?” Wang Dan felt like he had been targeted all of a sudden. He knew that it would not have been Zhang Feng or his girlfriend. Neither of them carried a pen on them, and it was quite clear that the words on the paper had been written a long time ago.

  “Do you think I’d do something this boring, like you?” Zhang Feng was the first to shrug. Wang Dan’s girlfriend thought that it was quite weird. They had been walking together in a group, and they did not see anyone pass.

  “Is there anything on your back?” Wang Dan looked at Zhang Feng and his girlfriend in a panic, and he realized that only he had the paper pasted on his back. “Was it because I was the one who walked at the front of the group?”


  Looking at the paper that he was holding, the man in the black and white picture seemed to be smiling at him. Cold sweat poured out of Wang Dan’s forehead; he knew that the real horror of this scenario was going to begin soon.

  “What are you doing, grumbling to yourself?” Zhang Feng could not hide the grin on his face, seeing how scared Wang Dan was. “The same trick is not going to work on me twice.”


  Like he had uncovered a great secret, he leaned close to Wang Dan’s girlfriend and said, “Old friend, your boyfriend sure is an interesting fellow. We have been moving together, and along the way, we did not run into anyone else. Since neither of us stuck the paper on his back, who do you think the culprit could have been?”


  Wang Dan’s girlfriend was slowly led to his conclusion. “He did this himself? That’s impossible, Wang Dan, he……”


  “If it was not him, are you telling me that it was a ghost who did this? He wanted to use this to scare us and then act like he is not afraid. I would be angry if I didn’t see how sad this is.”


  “No way, he wouldn’t do something like that…… right?” With the persuasion from Zhang Feng, Wang Dan’s girlfriend started to doubt herself.

  Holding the patient’s record in his hand, Wang Dan’s pupils darted about as he observed his surroundings cautiously. He understood that danger was imminent—this patient’s record was, in actuality, a death notice!

  “Since we’re already targeted, tossing this away will not change anything.” Wang Dan heard the two’s conversation clearly. He took a deep breath, bit on his lips, and turned around. Seeing the trace of suspicion and disappointment in his girlfriend’s eyes, Wang Dan’s tensed expression slowly relaxed. With some unwillingness, he relaxed his tightened hands and then turned to Zhang Feng and stated rather openly, “Fine, I admit it was me who pasted this on my back.”


  “But why would you do something like that? You aren’t someone like this when I first met you.” Wang Dan’s girlfriend’s voice was rising.

  “I just want to prove that I still have some positive qualities about me.” Wang Dan’s pupils were quivering, and goosebumps were crawling on the back of his neck, but he forced himself to maintain his composure. “There is a legend at this Haunted House. Once you put down something like ‘come and find me’ on a piece of paper, there is a chance that you might run into a real ghost. I just want to prove that I might have more courage than you.”


  “That’s so childish. If you want to hear urban legends, I can share about one hundred of them with you.” The condescension that Zhang Feng had toward Wang Dan surfaced, and it grew.

  “I admit that I am envious of you. I am not as handsome as you, I do not dress as well as you, my family is not as rich as yours, and I cannot even beat you at basketball. Compared to you, I could not appear more mediocre, so I desperately wanted to prove that there is something that I am better than you at.” Wang Dan’s voice started to shake. In the corridor that they came from, he saw a pair of gray legs walking out from one of the rooms.

  “So, you use this kind of method?” Zhang Feng’s sense of conceit was satisfied, and it was made much better since it was in the presence of Wang Dan’s girlfriend. “I cannot believe that a medical student like yourself believes urban legend like that. Don’t you know that it’s merely bullsh*t created by people who have nothing else to do?”


  “Then, would you dare to give it a try?” Wang Dan had been waiting for Zhang Feng to say that. He interrupted quickly, so fast that Zhang Feng could barely react.

  “What?” Zhang Feng was still submerged in his joy, so he did not expect Wang Dan to suggest something like this.

  “Since you believe these urban legends are all bullsh*t, then I’m sure you wouldn’t object to giving it a try,” Wang Dan said as he moved to place the patient’s record on Zhang Feng’s back. “Actually, I realize now that there are people who are better than me in the word. I just have to keep running, and even then, I might not be able to catch up to someone as perfect as you.”


  Wang Dan’s words confused Zhang Feng. His pride was satisfied, but at the same time, he felt like something was out of place.

  “Now that I have voiced the words in my heart, I feel much better. Thank you for everything, I swear to live my life more honestly in the future.” Wang Dan patted Zhang Feng’s back to make sure that the paper was stuck securely and would not shake loose. “Come on, we should continue exploring, and I will stop with the boring ghost stories.”


  Wang Dan pushed Zhang Feng to the front of the group, and he said in an apologetic tone, “Actually, this Haunted House is not as scary as they say. We told other people that because we merely wanted to hide how easily-scared we are.”


  Zhang Feng was still quite confused, but once Wang Dan said that, he actually did not feel that afraid anymore. “It’s really not that scary?”


  “Indeed, this Haunted House is not that scary at all. When I visited this place last time, it was so boring that I almost fell asleep.”


  It appeared like this lad had been taking acting lessons from a certain Haunted House’s boss because there was no flaw to the sincerity on his face as he pushed Zhang Feng to head down the stairs.