"Gone—as in, dead?"
"No, no, gone. The front door at his place was open, and his dog was gone. His dog couldn't open doors. He went looking afterward, too, but couldn't find it. Everyone in the complex said they hadn't seen it. That was it... That was it... He also started to feel... feel that something was wrong... so he called the police. The police came, but they couldn't find anything either. That exorcist, the one he'd hired to perform a ritual before, I don't know if he was a fraud or what, but he said there was nothing wrong. He... he wanted to move... I didn't dare let him keep living in his own place. He wasn't comfortable there, either. He rented a place next to a temple... just a little temple in Guangxin, on Wannan Road. He rented a place beside it. The temple opened every morning, and some of the elderly people nearby would go burn incense. He started going along and praying every day. It didn't help, even after a few days... He... he started seeing things at home... in the new apartment, he saw things... When he was washing his face and brushing his teeth in the morning, there was something on the mirror, right at the top. It was hair, a clump of hair, a lot of it, as if it had been cut off... And inside the kitchen cupboard, he felt around and pulled out dead mice, dead cockroaches... Things like that..."
"Couldn't they have been left behind by the previous tenant?"
"No, definitely not. They were all fresh... The one that had died was fresh... As for the hair, later... later he realized his own hair had been cut. Every morning when he woke up, some of his hair had been cut