The Diary Writer

The sound of chopping came from the kitchen, the knife striking the cutting board with rhythmic thuds.

Shao Lan and Jiang Mingran hid in the bedroom.

This was where Jiang Mingran's loop began. Once they closed the door, a living room stood between them and the kitchen, muffling some of the noise.

Even so, Shao Lan cautiously took a ballpoint pen and a kraft-paper notebook from the living room table. They tried to communicate through gestures and writing, making as little noise as possible.

Shao Lan noticed that the little goldfish in Jiang Mingran's bedroom now numbered three as well.

"What exactly just happened?" Jiang Mingran felt dazed. "We'd already made it to the stairs. Why are we back here...?"

Shao Lan lowered his eyes. "Because we died."

"Died?" Jiang Mingran jolted.

Shao Lan pointed at the objects arranged around the room. He had already had a vague suspicion about what they indicated, but only now was he certain.

"Every object here serves a purpose."

"The Owl Clock gives us two clues. The first is the time."

Every loop began at 03:58. Two minutes later, at four in the morning on the dot, the owl popped out to announce the hour.

"The second is that this is a game. We're its players, and we only have a chance of surviving if we follow the rules."

Shao Lan searched the bedroom and found an inscription on the floor by the wall, identical to the one beneath the sofa.

"Rule: those who have not ventured deep into the fog cannot leave it."

"We broke the rules," Shao Lan said. "The playing area is probably limited to this floor. When we took the stairs down to the next floor, we effectively left the playing area, so the game automatically counted us as dead."

Jiang Mingran clenched his fists. "What kind of lousy game is this? Is trying to escape wrong too?"

"It's like an escape room. Players have to solve the puzzles to get out," Shao Lan reasoned. "We tried to leave without unraveling any of the mysteries. The game doesn't allow that."

Without entering the fog, they could not leave it.

So in that last loop, they had failed. Everyone had died.

Shao Lan looked at the three little goldfish swimming in the tank.

"The fish tank keeps count. We have four chances to loop in total, and now we have three left."

Jiang Mingran fell silent for a moment, then looked toward the little mourning altar. "Then this..."

"This mourning altar is for us." Shao Lan sighed. "If I'm right, once we die in all four attempts, the fish tank will disappear, and our memorial portraits will take its place."

Jiang Mingran shuddered.

"Then what should we do now?"

"Gather clues first," Shao Lan said. "Move carefully, and try not to make any noise."

The bedroom was small, presumably intended as a spare bedroom, though in practice it seemed to serve more as a study. It contained only a simple camp bed, a desk, and a chair.

A thick stack of newspapers and a kraft-paper notebook filled the desk drawer.

Shao Lan had Jiang Mingran read the newspapers while he opened the notebook himself.

It was filled with mundane household accounts, written in meticulous blue-black fountain-pen ink:

"Dried noodles: 2 yuan. Chinese cabbage: 0.8 yuan. Tomatoes: 1 yuan. Apples: 2 yuan."

"Sleeping mat: 4 yuan. Basin: 2 yuan. Bowls: 2.4 yuan. Soap: 0.9 yuan."

"March wages: 286 yuan."

Jiang Mingran leaned over to look at the figures in the ledger.

"How many years ago was this?" Jiang Mingran scratched his head. "Prices and wages were so much lower than they are now."

Shao Lan stared at the notebook, narrowing his eyes and leaning closer, apparently studying something intently.

"What are you looking at?" Jiang Mingran was puzzled. "Is there some code hidden in those tiny amounts that can get us out?"

Shao Lan shook his head. After squinting at it for a while, he reached out to feel the notebook's stitching.

It was hard to see in the darkness, but his fingers could feel it immediately-

"The thread is loose. It looks like it's been tugged."

Jiang Mingran looked bewildered. "What does that tell us?"

"That some pages have been torn out."

Jiang Mingran froze.

That was true. Notebooks like this were made by stacking sheets of paper and sewing them together along the spine.

If someone carelessly tore out pages they had messed up, they could easily damage the stitching too.

He just hadn't expected Shao Lan to be so observant.

While Jiang Mingran stood there in a daze, Shao Lan had already crawled under the desk and found a wastebasket.

It contained discarded fruit peels and cores, their sticky juices giving off the alcoholic smell of impending rot. Shao Lan picked them out and tossed them aside, exposing what lay beneath.

There were several crumpled balls of paper.

Judging by their ruled lines, they had been torn from the ledger.

Shao Lan unfolded them one by one. Both he and Jiang Mingran were startled when they saw the writing.

Completely unlike the meticulous accounts, the large letters in red ink were sloppy and chaotic, scrawled violently across each page.

"I'm so scared. What should I do?"

"The music woke me again tonight. It was coming from the radio. She was playing music while cutting pork on the chopping board. I knew it wasn't pork. She smiled at me and asked if I wanted to try some."

"Brother Wang across the hall said he could help me. He knows a Spirit Medium who can drive out evil spirits. I asked Brother Wang whether she might get hurt during the exorcism. He said no one could say for sure. I hesitated. I don't want to hurt her."

"The music is playing again in the middle of the night... I've decided. I'll go see Brother Wang tomorrow."

"When I came home from work, I saw that the door across the hall was open. Brother Wang wasn't home. I went into my apartment and opened the fridge. I saw Brother Wang. Brother Wang was in my fridge."

There was nothing more.

Those were not all the crumpled pages. There were others, but juice from the fruit cores had stained them, smearing the blue-black writing into illegible blotches.

Jiang Mingran stared blankly at the sheets and shuddered.

After a moment of silence, Shao Lan turned to Jiang Mingran.

"Bring me the newspapers."

Jiang Mingran snapped out of his daze and hurriedly brought the newspapers over. "Look at these. All of this might have been [her] doing..."

Every newspaper carried reports on the same type of case.

Unidentified remains had been found in secluded parks and waterways around the city. Only portions of the victims' skeletons remained, making identification impossible for now, but the victims included both men and women. There were many of them, and the cases had caused grave concern.

The city police had formed a Special Investigation Team to investigate. Anyone with information was urged to call the team immediately.

A string of numbers followed. The reader had circled it in red pen and written "Police tip line" beside it.

Shao Lan looked at those words, then at the torn pages from the ledger.

"It's the same person's handwriting..."

Jiang Mingran was trembling slightly. "What does all this mean? Where is the person who wrote it now?"

"I don't know." Shao Lan shook his head. "All we know is that [the diary writer] lived with [her], the woman in the kitchen. They must once have been very close. Most likely, they were married."

"While [she] kept killing people, [the diary writer] considered stopping her, but failed."

"This study was probably where [the diary writer] lived on his own. He collected reports about [her] crimes as a serial killer here, along with the Special Investigation Team's phone number."

"But for some reason, judging by the situation now, [the diary writer] never made that call."

"Maybe he couldn't bring himself to do it because he had feelings for the killer. Or maybe he was killed before he had the chance to call... Either way, the killer is still free, and the Special Investigation Team hasn't obtained any information about her."

Shao Lan gently traced the phone number circled in red. "It looks like we need to make that call to the Special Investigation Team in [the diary writer]'s place."

"But we can't leave this floor, and we don't have cell phones," Jiang Mingran said anxiously. "There's no way for us to call..."

"There is." Shao Lan looked toward the living room.

On the coffee table beside the sofa sat that old-fashioned red landline telephone.