No sign of the chef could be seen in the pitch-black corridor.
"A surveillance camera is installed above and to the left of the screening room exit, and there's another one at the corridor corner. How much money does the Virtual Future Amusement Park have? Willing to install two cameras in a single hallway?"
Chen Ge wanted to summon
"I need the right timing. The best approach would be to deliberately provoke whatever obsessions might exist in the haunted house, and when they appear, have Xu Yin or another Red-clothed ghost substitute in."
A haunted house could genuinely be haunted, but the ghost had to have absolutely no connection to Chen Ge himself.
The static hiss of the tape recorder drifted into his ears, and Chen Ge's emotions gradually settled. The woman's crying and the little girl's laughter could no longer stir any reaction in him.
"Come back! What are you doing?!" The police officer and the other visitors were huddled around the doorway, just in time to see Chen Ge bend down and pick up the cloth doll from the corner of the wall. "What are you doing?"
His fingers traced the doll's scorched face. Chen Ge gazed into its glossy black eyes. "Did any of you see a little girl earlier? She was carrying this doll."
"I think so — she was the last one to come out of the screening room, if I remember correctly." The officer thought for a moment. "Why are you suddenly asking about that?"
"When I peered through the crack in the door, the chef had already vanished. At that time, the little girl was walking this way, hugging the doll. But when I opened the door and came out, the hallway was completely empty. Only this doll with the scorched face had been left in the corner." Chen Ge hugged the doll to his chest, paused for a moment, then added, "No — that's not right. It wasn't tossed into the corner. It had been deliberately placed in that position, as if someone wanted this doll to keep watch over us."
He turned to look at the remaining visitors. "Do you think the haunted house would hire a little girl as an actress?"
"Keep that thing away from me first." The officer stared at the doll in Chen Ge's arms, as though it were some inauspicious object. "I don't know whether the park would hire little girls or not. Last time I came, I didn't see any little girls, and I didn't hear any girl's laughter. That includes the crying we heard at the very beginning — last time I visited, that didn't appear until near the end of the tour either."
"So that girl isn't a park actress, and she isn't a visitor. Then what is she?" Chen Ge was deliberately guiding everyone's thinking down a one-way road.
"Maybe it's some kind of projection," the bespectacled man said quietly.
"Have you ever seen a projection that can run around hugging a doll? This thing is a lot heavier than you'd expect." Chen Ge tossed the doll toward the man. When the visitors saw it coming, every last one of them dodged out of the way. They seemed extremely wary of the doll — Chen Ge noticed this and filed it away.
"Why did nobody catch it?"
The doll hit the ground, its limbs twisted at odd angles, its scorched face staring up at the surrounding visitors, those glossy black eyes fixed on every one of them.
Not a single visitor reached out to touch the thing. After a long moment, the youngest man backed away by several steps. "In horror movies, kids and dolls are a classic combo. Running into both of those in a haunted house — you'd better keep your distance. And there's something else you should pay attention to. Didn't we hear the park staff say when we came in? To create the right atmosphere, the haunted house is filled with old objects of unknown origin."
"Then how do you know this doll is one of those 'old objects'?" Chen Ge picked up the poor little doll again and shoved it straight into his backpack.
"Hey! That belongs to the park. You can't just take it!" a female visitor protested.
"This is an important clue. I have to keep it on me. If you don't believe me, I can hand it over to you for safekeeping." One sentence shut her right up.
"You've really got nerve. Aren't you afraid something dirty might be hiding inside it?" the officer muttered under his breath, clearly unwilling to get any closer to Chen Ge.
"People with guilty consciences see dirty things everywhere they look, never realizing that what's truly dirty are their own eyes." Chen Ge gripped his now-bulging backpack with one hand and headed toward the screening room. He wanted to confirm exactly how the girl had appeared.
Rounding the corner, Chen Ge tried pushing the screening room door. Something heavy seemed to be blocking it from the other side — it wouldn't budge.
He activated Ghost Ear and pressed his ear against the door panel. Inside the screening room, there wasn't a sound.
"The first scenario involves seven students watching a movie with their ghost teacher on Spirit Reincarnation Night — the reincarnation of souls. The second scenario has the house's owner waking from a nightmare and killing himself over and over again — the reincarnation of the flesh. Between the two scenarios is a corridor plastered with dismembered limbs, and on that corridor there's a 'Hell Chef.' Are these three scenarios randomized, or is there some deeper connection between them?"
The camera was right above his head, so Chen Ge certainly couldn't start smashing down the door. "Something's off about the little girl. As long as she's not a Red-clothed ghost, she can never leave the object she's attached to for good. I just need to keep watch over the doll, and she's bound to come back. The real problem is that there are probably more than one ghost in this haunted house. When I first entered the scenario, I felt waves of bone-deep chill. I thought it was some high-tech trick at first, but now that I think about it, that kind of cold that cuts straight to the soul — aside from obsessions and vengeful ghosts, there doesn't seem to be any other explanation."
Chen Ge knew full well that the eastern suburbs were nothing like the western ones. Even his own parents hadn't had the courage to build a haunted house out east. What they hadn't dared to do, the Virtual Future Amusement Park had done.
Haunted houses already radiated heavy yin energy, making them magnets for lost obsessions. And the Virtual Future Amusement Park had gone out of its way to collect all manner of old objects and place them inside. That wasn't just raising the difficulty — it was playing with fire in an oil depot.
The eastern suburbs were no auspicious ground — Chen Ge was well aware of that. The issue of the Underworld Fetus remained unresolved, and who knew how many more doors were hidden in the east. When he really thought about it, the Virtual Future Amusement Park was situated right between Liwan Town and Jiangyuan Residential Complex. The three locations formed a straight line across the eastern suburbs.
"The amusement park's location itself is problematic. Things might improve once the Hengjiang Bridge is completed, but can they hold out until then?"
The park was sandwiched between two doors, and the haunted house attraction sat at the very rear of the park — the spot where yin energy sank lowest. You could call it the deepest yin within yin. Not only did visitors love coming here, but obsessions and ghosts were drawn to it as well.
"They really do have a business sense. Of all the places, they managed to find one this devious."
Chen Ge didn't understand feng shui, but he knew his own family had moved away from the eastern suburbs for a reason.
"The park is thriving. During the day, the surge of human presence can suppress the worst of it. But at night, when vengeful ghosts are at their most active, what does the park do then? Even if I don't come here, something is bound to go wrong eventually."
Chen Ge felt the weight of responsibility settle onto his shoulders. He had found yet another reason to protect New Century Amusement Park — he couldn't let the Virtual Future Amusement Park harm any more people.