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墨書 Inktalez
Chapter Five
A bone-chilling cold swept over me in an instant as I stared at the bloodied, mangled face before me, my mind blank. My breath felt suspended, and the sound of my heartbeat thundered in my ears. I felt a wave of nausea rise in my stomach, threatening to spill out. That face was so close, its pale features and hollow eyes haunting me, with blood continuously dripping…
Fang Wen's scream shattered the silence of the night, filled with heart-wrenching agony, like a sharp knife piercing my eardrums. "Sister… sister…" Her voice trembled, almost incoherent, her body going limp. If I hadn’t caught her just in time, she would have collapsed to the ground.
But in the next moment, as Old Li's flashlight beam swept over that spot again, the figure had vanished without a trace, as if it had never existed. The air was thick with the stench of blood, assaulting my senses and confirming that everything I had just witnessed was not a hallucination.
"What the hell is going on?" Old Li muttered under his breath, his face pale and his hand trembling slightly around the flashlight. "Could it be… we imagined it?"
I shook my head, unable to explain what I had just seen. "No way! We both saw it!" My voice quivered too, a wave of inexplicable fear rising within me.
"Let’s chase after it!" Old Li charged up the stairs first, the beam of his flashlight flickering in the darkness like a will-o'-the-wisp. I followed closely behind, my heart pounding like a drum; each step felt like walking on cotton, terrified that one misstep would send me plummeting into an endless abyss. Our hurried footsteps echoed in the stairwell, intertwining with the howling winds and torrential rain outside, creating a bizarre symphony that seemed to foreshadow some ominous event about to unfold.
Upon reaching the top floor, a heavy metallic scent assaulted me, nearly choking me. In the dim light of the flashlight, I spotted a trail of dark red footprints on the floor leading deeper into the bell tower, resembling a path to hell. The shape of the footprints was strange; they looked as if someone had walked barefoot through a pool of blood but appeared unnaturally neat, almost as if they had been deliberately arranged—imbued with an eerie sense of ritual.
"There!" Xu Kai suddenly pointed towards the northwest corner of the bell tower, his voice trembling slightly. In that direction stood an inconspicuous wooden door ajar, a faint light seeping through the crack like an eye peering out from the darkness at us. The strange footprints led directly to this door.
I took a deep breath, trying to calm my racing heart as I cautiously pushed open the door. It creaked loudly on its hinges as if warning us not to enter.
The room was small, dominated by an old wooden desk at its center where a single candle flickered weakly. The candlelight cast dancing shadows on the walls like ghostly figures. What caught my attention most were the walls covered with photographs—each one depicting young girls with expressions ranging from joy to sorrow, frozen moments silently narrating their stories. Yet every photograph bore a strange symbol drawn in red ink at its bottom right corner—like a curse or perhaps a mark.
"These are all…" My voice trailed off as an icy chill shot from my feet to my head because I recognized one of the faces in those photos—it was Fang Wen's sister, Fang Qing. In that photograph, she wore a radiant smile full of youthfulness, starkly contrasting with Fang Wen's expression of grief now. The photo had been taken right in front of the bell tower—a place once filled with laughter and joy now shrouded in an atmosphere of dread and terror.
“About that incident in 1999…” Fang Wen's voice trembled, tinged with a hint of sobbing. Her fingers gently traced the photograph of her sister, tears silently streaming down her cheeks, blurring the image as if her sister were crying too.
At that moment, a faint vibrating sound emerged from the desk drawer, breaking the oppressive silence in the room. I pulled open the drawer and discovered an old tape recorder that had begun to play automatically. After a crackling noise, a familiar voice filled the air:
“If you are hearing this recording, it means I am already dead.” It was Zhang Shoucheng’s voice, laced with resignation and despair. “But my death was not an accident; it was an inevitable outcome. The truth from twenty years ago is hidden in the dark chamber of the clock tower…”
The recording abruptly stopped, replaced by a piercing electric hum that sent chills down my spine. Suddenly, the candle extinguished without any wind, plunging the room into complete darkness. In that pitch-blackness, I heard a suppressed sob behind me; it sounded as if it came from someone not present—more like… from another world.
“There’s someone!” Old Li's flashlight swung sharply toward the source of the sound, its beam slicing through the darkness like a sword. In that fleeting moment, I saw a shadow dart into a hidden compartment in the wall with incredible speed, so fast it was hard to believe. The compartment had been obscured by photographs; without this commotion, we would never have noticed its existence.
“There’s another room here!” I rushed forward and pushed open the door to the compartment. A heavy musty odor mixed with an indescribable scent assaulted my senses, making me feel nauseous. The flashlight illuminated a space even smaller than the one outside, where walls were plastered with photographs. However, every figure in these images had been smeared beyond recognition with red ink, resembling terrifying specters.
In the center of the room lay a human skeleton on the ground, its bony fingers clutching a yellowed photograph as if it were a final relic revealing an unknown secret. Trembling, I took out the photograph and found a line scrawled on the back: “I’m sorry; I should have protected you. —1999.11.8.” The handwriting was hasty, as if written in blood, exuding despair and regret.
Suddenly, a deafening chime resonated throughout the clock tower, causing photographs on the walls to fall like snowflakes swirling through the air. In that moment of chaos, I noticed that each photograph bore the same date on its back: November 8, 1999—a mark of death stamped onto every image.
“Look!” Xu Kai's voice quivered with fear as he pointed to the wall beside the skeleton. Underneath the beam of light from our flashlight, we saw a horrifying message written in what appeared to be blood:
“You think finding the truth ends it all? This is just the beginning…”
Before he could finish speaking, the entire clock tower began to tremble violently as if some immense force sought to tear it apart. We stumbled in our attempts to escape but found that the door to the dark chamber had somehow shut tight behind us—a barrier we could not cross, trapping us in this terrifying prison. Even more horrifying was that the skeleton began to rise slowly, its hollow eye sockets fixed on us like a messenger from hell intent on dragging us into an endless abyss…
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