"Mr. Shao, please go on."
"Huh? Oh... I just saw... I don't know. When I saw it, I couldn't tell whether I'd really seen something or just imagined it. It was inside a block of ice—a huge block. It was about a meter high, and there were several blocks stacked together. That one was in the middle, about a meter off the ground, so roughly two meters up. At that height, it couldn't have been a person... Well, not completely impossible. There were forklifts driving around the site the whole time..."
"What did you see?"
"A face. A person... wearing black, I think, or some other dark clothes. Just a face showing. No hands or feet, just the face, all pale... I don't know if it looked pale because of the ice and snow, or if the face itself was... That person seemed to be sealed inside the block of ice, but I couldn't make out anything clearly. You understand? It was like looking through a thick layer of ice. The first time I saw it, I really thought I'd imagined it. If not for what happened before... I definitely wouldn't have thought anything of it. Those two things just made me feel uneasy. I felt awful. I was cold all day long. Even indoors, I felt freezing. My wife kept telling me to go to the hospital, so I went once. I took the day off. When I got to the hospital... I... I don't know..."
"What happened to you there?"
"In the hospital corridor, it seemed like the ceiling was leaking. I don't know if it really was, or if... Some water dripped onto my neck and slid right down inside my clothes. It was freezing cold. Ice-cold water. I looked up, but couldn't see anywhere it might