Under the dim light, two shadows were cast on the wall, even though there was clearly only one person in the room.
Wen Yu's hair was spread out, and the sheets on both sides of her body were caved in, giving the impression that something was pressing down on her.
"Qiumei, Qiumei… Qiumei!"
Wen Yu jolted awake from her dream, gasping for air, and stared blankly around her.
The faint glow of the bedside lamp illuminated the rented room, carrying a strange warmth about it.
Most of the furniture in the room was arranged normally, and no one had broken in.
"The only thing more annoying than having a nightmare is waking up from one only to realize you just fell asleep, and the night is still a long way from over."
Wen Yu picked up the documents on the bed and looked around. "Where did my pen fall?"
She got up and walked to the other side of the bed to retrieve the pen, then stuffed both the pen and the documents she had organized into a compartment in her backpack.
"Sleep. Once it's light, I'll go check out that school."
Back in bed, Wen Yu switched off the bedside lamp. In the exact moment the room plunged into total darkness, the camera captured a woman in red standing in front of the bathroom mirror.
The instant the light went out, she stepped out of the bathroom once more.
She was still in that room — only now the room had been swallowed completely by darkness, and no one could see her.
"The way this film presents its ghost is quite creative. I might be able to borrow the idea for my haunted house — using contrast to give visitors an entirely fresh experience." Chen Ge was growing increasingly eager to track down the film's director. He felt that if the director teamed up with him, the haunted house's set design could reach a whole new level, ascend to an entirely new height.
The film cut to near-black. Nothing was visible on screen, but it left the audience with a vast canvas for imagination, because everyone knew that in that pitch-black room, besides a sleeping woman, there was also a ghost in red.
The entire sequence played out in a single unbroken take, with no cuts, giving the viewer a profoundly real sensation.
A few seconds later, the shot ended, and dawn broke.
Everything in the room was in its proper place, and the heroine hadn't noticed a thing — as if what the audience had seen last night really was just a nightmare.
"I was sweating on the heroine's behalf." Old Zhou patted his own chest lightly.
"You can even sweat?" Duan Yue, sitting beside him, shot him a glare.
"Don't believe me? Reach out and feel my palm." Old Zhou extended his hand toward Duan Yue, but the other seemed to see through his clumsy ruse and slapped his hand away.
The haunted house employees were all watching with rapt attention. Only Chen Ge was thinking about something beyond the plot.
He had seen the film Deskmate before, and now, connecting Deskmate with The Name, he noticed a number of issues.
"Both films feature a heroine named Wen Yu, and both revolve around her left eye. The difference is that the heroine of Deskmate is still a minor, while the heroine of The Name has already entered the workforce — two different stages of the same person's life."
"According to the left-eye lore in Deskmate, Wen Yu's body should have already played host to several different girls' souls. But many details in The Name don't line up with Deskmate."
"At the beginning of the film, the heroine's notebook has Qiumei's name written in it. When the female ghost appeared just now, she climbed on top of the heroine and called out Qiumei's name."
"It seems the soul imprisoned inside Wen Yu's body right now is still Qiumei."