But the thunder of my heartbeat kept reminding me that what I’d just seen wasn’t an illusion!
Just as I was about to light a second match,
Knock, knock, knock.
A faint sound came from outside the door.
I didn’t rush to do anything.
“Is anyone in there?”
After a moment, someone spoke in a very soft voice. It was a man.
“Don’t be afraid. I’m a player too.”
My throat was parched. After hesitating for a moment, I asked, “What day is it today?”
This was the code Brother Wang had taught me to verify whether the other person was a player.
Asking what day it was meant asking which day of the week we’d entered the instance.
The other person answered, “Monday.”
I breathed a sigh of relief.
A faint sound came from the doorknob.
The other person was picking the lock.
With a click, the door opened.
Light flooded in from outside, and I squinted, unaccustomed to it.
“It’s you!”
We said in unison.
The man standing outside the door wore glasses. His features were ordinary but refined, and I remembered him.
In my first instance, he was the one who’d led me and another chubby guy through it.
The man with glasses recognized me too. He looked surprised. “What are the odds? We meet again.”
The sharp sound of footsteps suddenly rang out from the nearby staircase.
“But this clearly isn’t the time to catch up,” the man with glasses said, frowning. “They’re coming up!”
“Who are they?”
“There’s no time to explain. Come hide with me.”
He led me into the room across the hall and locked the door. Unlike the room I’d been in before, this one had candles. It was dim, but I could still make everything out.
The man with glasses and I pressed ourselves behind the door, holding our breath as we listened to the approaching footsteps.
“Os, it’s time to come downstairs for dinner, dear. I made your favorite ribs.”
Unlike the monster I’d imagined, the voice was gentle, like a woman’s.
If I didn’t know I was in a horror game, I’d never believe that what was outside could be a monster disguised as a person.
The woman went into the room next to ours.
She came out again soon, her steps growing hurried.
“Such a naughty child. Where have you run off to play this time?”
She went downstairs.
Once he was sure she’d left, the man with glasses let out a sigh of relief.
I asked, “Who was that outside?”
“The owner of this house.”
The man with glasses sighed and said he’d found his way here thanks to a clue on a scrap of paper.
The scrap had directed him to the fourth room on the third floor.
It was the very room we were in.
If the doll hadn’t startled me and made me make a noise, he wouldn’t have realized I was trapped in here.
The man with glasses said, “The other players are hiding in different corners of this house too. We’re like mice in here. We need to find the clues quickly and get out before the owner discovers us.”
I nodded.
Then we carefully searched the whole room.
It was a bedroom, but it didn’t look like a woman’s room. It looked more like a child’s.
But the things inside sent a chill down my spine.
A sparrow with a broken wing, a dismembered mouse, and all kinds of knives and scissors.
The man with glasses picked up two knives and handed one to me. “You can use it to defend yourself.”
I took it, wiped it clean, and put it in the cloth bag I carried with me.
We turned the whole room upside down, but still didn’t find any useful clues.
I looked under the bed. “We haven’t checked there.”
In the movies Cố Mặc Trì made me watch, the main characters often found some kind of clue under the bed.
Of course, whatever was hiding there didn’t necessarily have to be a clue.
It could just as easily be some unforeseen danger.
The man with glasses seemed hesitant.
When he saw me crawl under the bed, he looked surprised and embarrassed.
“You’ve really grown up a lot,” he said, then asked, “How is it down there?”
“There’s nothing.”
He breathed a sigh of relief. “That’s good.”
The bed was large, and the space underneath was pitch-black.
I lit a match.
Suddenly, a head appeared, making the hand holding my match tremble.
I kept a straight face. “Hey, man, could you stop scaring me like that?”
Outside the bed, the man with glasses looked apologetic as he pulled his head back. He was so startled that he even hit his head on the bed frame.
“Sorry, I just wanted to help you check.”
“No need. Just keep an eye on what’s happening outside for me.”
My gaze returned to the bed slats. Sure enough, there was writing underneath.
A strange sense of accomplishment suddenly welled up inside me, as if all that studying back in school had finally come in handy.
But before the pleasure of being right could even fade,
my whole body turned cold as I read the words under the bed.
“This is bad. Run!!”
“What’s wrong?”
Seeing me crawl out from under the bed looking shaken, the man with glasses hurriedly asked.
“There are words under the bed slats.”
I tried to stay calm. “There’s also a long bloody handprint there, as if someone hiding under the bed had been violently dragged out by something from outside. The blood hasn’t dried, which means it happened recently.”
After hearing me out, the man with glasses grew serious. “We can’t stay here any longer. The writing under the bed is definitely a clue. We have to leave this room right now!”
I nodded. As I reached the door, I frowned and looked back.
Maybe it was just my imagination.
I couldn’t shake the feeling that something in the darkness was staring at us.
The feeling made my whole body uncomfortable.
And the source of that feeling was—
the space beneath the bed I’d just crawled under.
But there had clearly been nothing inside.
There was no wind in the room, but a chill began spreading from my limbs.
Only after we closed the door and shut that room off did I begin to feel warm again.
The owner of the house could come upstairs at any moment.
The man with glasses knew the third floor better than I did.
He said the owners of the house were a married couple, but it seemed they had a child too.
While searching for clues to get out of the house, players had to avoid confronting the owners directly.
The man with glasses asked me, “You said you saw writing under the bed. What did it say?”
“Someone, please save me.”
“Someone, please save you?”
The man with glasses frowned. “Could this be a distress signal? Maybe another player came here before us… The house has three floors in all. Before I found you, I did a quick search of the other rooms, but there was no one. The other players are probably on the first and second floors.”
“Oh, right, Giang Tảo. Did you find anything in the room you were just in? Why was the door locked?”
“I don’t know why the door was locked,” I said, pressing my lips together as I thought back. “It was pitch-black inside. There were no lights or windows, and nothing else at all. But it didn’t look like a storage room. There was only a doll in there.”
Thinking of that doll, I felt a strange unease I couldn’t shake.
The man with glasses asked, “A doll?”
This game was called Dollhouse.
The doll probably wasn’t just a decoration. It might be connected to a clue needed to complete the mission.
We went into the room where I’d been locked up earlier.
It was still pitch-black inside. Only the light from outside the door let us make out the room’s general shape.
The room was small, gloomy, and oppressive.
Aside from the coarse, shaggy rug covering the floor, which seemed completely out of place, there was nothing else.
Wait!
Nothing else… So where was the doll?
The man with glasses and I looked at each other, both seeing the alarm in the other’s eyes.
Could the doll move around on its own?
How strange.
Sometimes people are more afraid of dangers they can’t see or touch than of monsters they can see.
I felt around in my crossbody bag, ready to pull out my knife at any moment.
But my hand touched something cold that wasn’t the knife’s handle.
It was also a little soft and smooth.
I froze, nearly throwing it away.
The doll that had disappeared a moment ago had somehow ended up in my crossbody bag.
When had this doll gotten into my bag?!
The man with glasses was so shocked he couldn’t speak.
“This doll… Did it crawl into your bag by itself?”
I told myself to stay calm when things happened.
I stared at the doll in my hand. If it moved—or even blinked once…
I’d stab right through it with my knife.
Cố Mặc Trì had once told me that when facing danger, the more afraid you were, the more important it was not to panic!
Whenever I thought of Cố Mặc Trì, I felt much safer.
But this time, I couldn’t picture his face at all.
The more I tried, the more confused I became. When I met the doll’s pitch-black eyes, I snapped back to my senses a little.
It was staring right at me.
No matter which way I turned it, its jet-black eyes seemed to keep looking at me.
But its eyes really didn’t move at all.
I stared at it for a while, but the doll didn’t change in any way.
It was as though it were nothing more than an utterly ordinary doll.
“It might be a clue, so I’ll hold on to it for now.” I sighed, then put the doll back in my bag.
“You’re pretty brave.”
There was a hint of admiration in the man with glasses’ voice.
Honestly, carrying this thing around was a real test of my nerves.
But once I’d put it in my bag, I wasn’t scared anymore.
My expression calm, I continued examining the entire room.
This time, I noticed something I hadn’t seen before.
There were scratches on the wall.
They were haphazard and stained with blood.
The poor lighting made them hard to see at first.
Could another player really have been locked up here before?
Then had the matchbox I found earlier been left behind by that person?
Coming back to this room hadn’t turned up any clues. Instead, it had only raised more questions.
We’d searched the entire third floor, but found no other clues.
Now all we could do was go downstairs.
The entire house was silent.