Chapter 140: I’m in the Fourth Stall
Her hair was disheveled, her delicate features twisted with fear, her face pale and bloodless. One of her shoes was missing. The sensuality and allure she’d exuded when entering the haunted house were long gone.
“Dou Menglu?”
As Chen Ge spotted Dou Menglu, the woman clutching her phone and sprinting also caught sight of him.
But unlike Chen Ge’s composed demeanor, she let out a piercing scream, as if she’d seen a ghost, and turned to flee back the way she came.
Standing still, Chen Ge touched his face. “Is it because of the mask?”
Startled twice in a row, Dou Menglu tapped into unprecedented reserves of adrenaline. Her long legs pumped furiously, and in the blink of an eye, she vanished from Chen Ge’s sight.
“Is it really that bad?” Chen Ge took off his mask and walked deeper into the scene. “Why is she alone? Did the five visitors split up?”
Reaching the first fork in the path, Chen Ge still couldn’t spot Dou Menglu. “Forget it, I’ll check on the Ouija board first. Hopefully, I haven’t scared anyone into throwing up.”
Just as he was about to move forward, a phone in his pocket suddenly rang. The ringtone echoed far through the quiet haunted house.
…
In the fourth stall of the restroom, Dou Menglu, utterly disregarding her appearance, lay on the ground, her beautiful eyes peering through the gap beneath the stall door.
“Didn’t follow me. Good, good.” Her chest heaved violently as she leaned against the stall wall, tears still lingering in her eyes.
Fragments of the Ouija board game she’d just played flashed disjointedly through her mind. The game had started smoothly, but when she asked who Wang Hailong’s future wife would be, a nightmare-like scene unfolded.
“What was that girl hanging from the ceiling? She couldn’t have been a haunted house actor, and she didn’t look like a projection either.” The more Dou Menglu thought about it, the more terrified she became. Hiding alone in the cramped toilet stall, fear clawed at her like invisible hands.
“I need to contact the others. We’ll regroup and rescue Long Ge first.” Wiping away her tears, Dou Menglu pulled out her phone and dialed Wang Wenlong’s number, but it rang over a dozen times with no answer. “What’s going on? Did something happen to him and Pei Hu too?”
Hanging up, she tried Xia Meili next.
Still no answer. Dou Menglu grew even more helpless, fear and panic driving her to curl up in the corner. “Could they all be in trouble? There are five of us!”
Her fingers trembling, Dou Menglu refused to give up. With a last shred of hope, she called Pei Hu.
“Please! Pick up the phone, you fat bastard! Didn’t you used to have a crush on me? How can you leave me to die?” In her extreme tension, blue veins stood out against her pale arm, making her look somewhat fierce.
Three seconds passed. Dou Menglu’s heart sank. “What are you all doing?”
Five seconds passed. Clinging to her final hope, she clenched her fists.
Ten seconds passed. Her expression stiffened, and she felt like crying from frustration.
But just as despair set in at the thirteenth second, the call was suddenly answered!
“Damn it! Fatso, why did you take so long to pick up!” Dou Menglu nearly burst into tears, like a drowning person finally grabbing a lifeline, meeting the “most beautiful surprise” in the deepest despair.
“Why aren’t you saying anything? Long Ge got scared unconscious. I’m hiding in the fourth stall of the restroom. Come save me!” Her voice choked with sobs. “I just saw a monster covered in blood outside. Be careful when you come!”
Emotionally overwhelmed, she blurted everything out in one breath, but waited a long time with no response from the other end.
“Pei Hu? Are you there?” Dou Menglu held the phone to her ear with both hands. “I’m scared if you don’t talk. If you can hear me, just say something.”
After a few seconds, there was finally a reply from the other end.
But it wasn’t Pei Hu’s voice. Instead, it was a hoarse, low, completely unfamiliar tone: “Alright, I’ll come find you right now!”
The phone slipped through her fingers. At the sound of that voice, Dou Menglu froze, feeling as if her heart had skipped a beat.
“Who am I calling?”
“Who answered?”
“Who’s coming for me?”
She stared at the phone on the floor, too afraid to pick it up, as if a man-eating monster lived inside it.
“I need to get out before he comes in!” Dou Menglu shoved open the wooden door, abandoning her phone, and dashed out of the stall.
As she stumbled out, she ran straight into Chen Ge, clad in a bloodstained shirt, just entering the restroom.
“Ah!”
Dou Menglu slid to the floor, scrambling backward into the restroom. “Don’t come near me! Stay away!”
“Don’t be afraid, I’m—” Before Chen Ge could finish, Dou Menglu had retreated deep into the restroom. Without hesitation, she dove into one of the stalls, bracing the door with her body.
Unable to stop her, Chen Ge watched as she rushed into the fifth stall. Seeing this, he sprinted over. “Hey! You can’t go in there!”
Already on the verge of collapse, Dou Menglu hadn’t even caught her breath when she opened her eyes to see countless eyes staring at her from the stall’s partition. The overwhelming shock made every hair on her body stand on end, and she couldn’t utter a word.
“It wasn’t like this before…”
Her body slammed against the door, and she toppled backward. Chen Ge caught her by the shoulders and quickly shut the fifth stall’s door.
“Are you okay? How many times do I have to warn you not to use your phone in the haunted house?”
Chen Ge stuffed the fallen phone into Dou Menglu’s pocket, but she mustered her last bit of strength to toss it away again. “Keep it. If you give me that phone, I’ll never dare use it again.”
“Don’t be silly. Go wait by the entrance. I’ll bring your friends out.” Chen Ge dragged Dou Menglu to the restroom door. “Honestly, you guys are pretty bold, going off on your own like that.”
After settling Dou Menglu, Chen Ge ran into the girls’ dormitory. Wang Hailong was slumped over a chair, tears in his eyes, looking like he was about to keel over.
“The Ouija board’s main skill is prediction; it’s weak in other areas. Looks like this big guy’s all bark and no bite.” Chen Ge picked up the pen, checked that it wasn’t damaged, and then dragged Wang Hailong out.
“This is the first opening of the new scene. I’ve got to give the visitors a real shock.” After dumping Wang Hailong and Dou Menglu together, Chen Ge entered another corridor, checking every room along the way.
He carried Xia Meili out of the 304 restroom, making sure to put the prop female corpse back in its hiding spot on the partition. Then he dragged Pei Hu out from under the bed in the 303 bedroom.
Surprisingly, the timidest of the bunch, the fat guy, was the most lucid of all. When Chen Ge arrived, he was staring down a fake human head by the door. According to him, by the time Chen Ge showed up, he’d been locked in a staring contest with that head for ten minutes.
With Pei Hu leading the way, Chen Ge reached the final scare point. He and Pei Hu stood by the dry well and peered inside.