"Is this a human abusing animals, or animals abusing humans?"
The drunk man stared at the photos, the cruel scenes depicted in them making him deeply uncomfortable.
Before he'd looked through all of them, he shoved the photos back into the drawer. As he withdrew his hands, he suddenly noticed his palms felt sticky.
Using his phone's flashlight, the drunk man's eyelids twitched violently. The hand he'd been using to flip through the photos was covered in dark red blood.
"I didn't touch anything but the photos! Could this blood be seeping out of them?"
Standing alone in the eerie, deserted building, it seemed like something was running back and forth in the hallway. A wind chime tinkled softly, and out in the courtyard beyond there was a mop-headed monster with a human face.
Under these circumstances, the drunk man didn't dare leave the room so much as a step.
"The monster that sprinkled dog fur on the windowsill was on the second floor. This room is the farthest from the staircase — the safest room in the building, relatively speaking."
He didn't dare leave, afraid that the moment he opened the door, the monster would be standing right outside.
But staying in the room made his heart race with panic: "How could blood seep out of photos? It must have been my hand accidentally brushing against something inside the drawer. Maybe there's a hidden compartment in there."
Steel himself, the drunk man pulled out the bottom drawer of the desk and set it on the floor.
This time he could see clearly. There was nothing in the drawer but photos.
"The blood really did come from the photos?" The reality he knew was being turned upside down. Every hair on his body stood on end, and a desperate urge to flee the room surged through him.
His gaze fell back on those photos, and the drunk man noticed something strange.
In every photo of a human being tortured, the person's face was never captured. But in every photo of an animal being tortured, just as the creature lay on the verge of death, there would always be a hand gripping it by the neck — as if displaying a trophy — making sure the animal's face was visible.
"What a psychopath." Whether it was from staring at them too long or for some other reason, the drunk man noticed that all the animals in the photos seemed to be smiling.
"This is the first time I've seen that kind of expression on a dog's face. They're smiling, aren't they? Dogs that can smile?" The drunk man shuddered. He didn't dare go any closer to the photos on the floor. He scanned the room — the longer he stayed, the more terrifying it seemed: "I keep feeling like this building is even scarier than the last one."
He pressed his hand against the bedsheets, trying to wipe the blood from his palm, but when his fingers pushed down, they seemed to touch something.
After a long moment of hesitation, he pulled back the sheet. A thick, nauseating stench hit him in the face.
On the wooden bed's mattress, there was a large, long-congealed pool of blood in the shape of a human body.
From the shape alone on the mattress, you could tell the victim had died in agony. The blood had sprayed outward from the stomach, as though the person had been tackled by some wild beast and then had their throat and abdomen torn through.
The drunk man was just a traveling salesman. He'd never seen anything like this.
His body went rigid as if turned to stone, his brain completely unable to control his limbs.
His scalp went numb, a pressure built in his lungs pushing outward, and in the last instant he bit down on his own hand to keep from screaming.
"Someone died in this room! Right on this bed!"
Those two thoughts flashed through his mind in an instant. He couldn't stay here any longer. For someone who had lived his entire life in peacetime, this was the closest the drunk man had ever come to words like death and murder.
His pupils trembled. It took him a long while to recover his senses, and he flung the bedsheets aside.
His gaze dropped to the floor, and the faces of the animals in the photos burned into his mind: "That dog was smiling — that dog was really smiling! I wasn't imagining it!"
The drunk man had been scared to the point of near hysteria, but it really wasn't his fault. He'd passed out drunk and woken up on a ghost bus, and now the whole world seemed to have changed.
Everything here was something he'd never encountered before — things he'd never even seen in his worst nightmares.
"I have to get out. I absolutely cannot stay here a second longer!"