The chubby shopkeeper seemed to have become a signal relay.
After that eerie whispering vanished, I heard a panicked scream.
The young man holding the fountain pen had gone deathly pale. His eyes bulged, his skin sagged, and he looked as if his muscles had disappeared. His whole body had grown gaunt, and his clothes hung empty.
Red liquid seeped through the cap of the fountain pen in his hand.
It seeped faster and faster, until the cap split open. The next second, it shattered, and blood sprayed out. Good.
Blood spattered the shelves and the chubby shopkeeper.
The shopkeeper seemed like a slow-witted child. He looked down at the blood on himself, then jumped up.
"Help..." The young man fell to the ground, unable to finish his sentence.
The parts of his face and hands exposed outside his clothes had become nothing but skin and bones, with not a single vein in sight.
Blood was still flowing from the fountain pen. A bead of blood clung to its nib, then fell to the ground, and finally the bleeding stopped.
The young man let go, allowing the pen to fall to the floor. It rolled twice, then came to a complete stop.
With a clatter, his companion in the gray down jacket stumbled backward in a panic and crashed into the shelf.
I saw a necklace resembling a hemp rope hanging from the shelf sway twice and smack against the gray-jacketed man's ear.
He screamed in fright, flailing wildly as he jumped, trying to get away.
His fingers caught on the necklace, yanking it right off the shelf.
The hemp rope snapped. It traced an arc through the air, then suddenly sped up and lashed across the gray-jacketed man's face.
The rope didn't fall away or keep swinging. Instead, it