Chapter 350: The Fountain of Youth (7)
Escorted by a vast multitude of aquatic creatures, Everly successfully crossed the lake.
One hour and forty-three minutes after setting foot on the island, Everly left the water and stepped into the cave on Pudding Mountain.
Unlike the pure rock cavern she had imagined, only the entrance was made of stone. The farther Everly went, the dimmer the outside light became, until the cave floor suddenly changed.
A beige carpet abruptly appeared over the hard stone floor. Perhaps because they were so close to the lake, the carpet felt damp to the touch and gave off a musty smell of age and mildew.
She continued forward. Soon, the light from outside disappeared completely, and Everly was gradually swallowed by pitch-black darkness.
She walked through the darkness for a while, yet Grant and the others’ lights never appeared ahead, nor could she hear their footsteps.
That was extremely strange.
They had left only five minutes before her. In such darkness, with the terrain ahead unknown, no one could walk very quickly. At most, they should have covered four or five hundred meters.
The passage ran straight ahead. At such a short distance, Everly should have been able to see the group in front of her.
But she couldn’t.
There was nothing—not the slightest trace of light, nor the faintest sound.
Aside from the sound of her own footsteps, it was as if nothing else existed in this world.
It was easy to stray off course when walking in darkness. After realizing that she couldn’t catch up with Grant and the others no matter how hard she tried, Everly simply turned on her flashlight.
The beam pierced through the darkness, pushing the thick blackness back. Everly discovered that the round cave had somehow transformed into a perfectly straight, square corridor stretching so far ahead that she couldn’t see its end.
A long beige carpet covered the floor. The other three walls were covered in cheap wallpaper of the same color, decorated with monotonous vertical stripes. The wallpaper felt damp and slippery to the touch, and in some places, a thin layer of mold had begun to grow.
The carpet and wallpaper stretched from where Everly stood, disappearing into the seemingly endless darkness ahead.
It was a corridor overflowing with incongruity.
It could have existed in a city. It could have existed in an old mansion.
But it absolutely should not have existed on this ancient island, a place steeped in the legend of the Fountain of Youth.
[Proceed along a flat and dark straight road,
Where there are no highs or lows,
At the foot of the mountains that encircle the world,
Aurelbis has laid His trial]
According to the second stanza of the poem, Everly’s next task was to cross this dark passage and reach the “mountains encircled by the world.”
From the outside, Pudding Mountain, where the cave was located, was approximately four to five kilometers in diameter. The passage ran straight ahead without any turns, inclines, or declines. In theory, even if the cave bored straight through the entire mountain, it should take no more than a little over an hour to walk through.
Yet the journey proved extraordinarily difficult and long for Everly.
At first, it was simply a tedious repetition of putting one foot in front of the other.
Throughout the entire journey, nothing changed—not the straight, level corridor, not the damp carpet, not even the monotonous pattern of the wallpaper. Everly trudged forward mechanically. The beam of her flashlight could illuminate only a radius of about two and a half meters around her. Beyond that was darkness as black as ink. The only sounds she could hear were her own footsteps and the steady rhythm of her breathing.
After spending too long in such an environment, it was easy to lose all sense of time.
She had no idea how long she had been walking through the corridor when her footsteps suddenly ground to a halt.
There was something strange in the corridor.
Before noticing it, Everly had become somewhat numb from the endlessly repetitive surroundings, and her pace had gradually quickened. She held her flashlight straight ahead. Despite remaining highly alert, her reactions had begun to lag behind slightly.
It wasn’t until most of the object’s outline had been caught in the flashlight’s beam that she suddenly realized something was wrong, breaking out in a cold sweat.
Fortunately, it was only a telephone booth.
Everly tightened her grip on her weapon and cautiously observed it from a few steps away.
This was an old telephone booth. The dark red, square metal booth was covered in rust, and the glass in its door had long since shattered. Through the half-open metal door, Everly could see that the interior had been covered in colorful graffiti. The telephone receiver had fallen from its mount, the phone cord was severed, and the phone was completely unusable.
When the flashlight beam passed over it, the remaining half of the telephone cord dangling from the receiver was still swaying slowly, as though someone had been standing inside not long ago and had tugged on it.
But Everly had seen nothing and heard nothing.
A telephone booth was something perfectly ordinary, something that could be found anywhere in everyday life. Yet when one suddenly appeared in a completely unfamiliar environment where it clearly did not belong, it inspired an intense sense of unease.
It made her feel as though everything she understood about reality had been shattered. From this point onward, everything here was out of control, off-kilter, unpredictable…
Infected by the images her own imagination conjured up, Everly couldn’t help shivering.
Her legs seemed glued to the floor. She stood there for a long while before finally forcing herself to move again. She walked around the strange and eerie telephone booth and continued down the corridor.
Even as she walked, she remained on edge, frequently looking back over her shoulder, afraid that the telephone booth might suddenly transform into some kind of monster and come after her.
But the telephone booth seemed to be nothing more than a telephone booth. It didn’t turn into a monster, nor did it make any strange noises. Once Everly had gone far enough, she left it—and the long stretch of corridor behind it—in the past.
The telephone booth was only the beginning.
As she continued forward, Everly encountered several more things that had no business being there—
She came across an old-fashioned floor lamp. It stood silently in the middle of the corridor, like a quiet, harmless shadow.
Yet as Everly passed it, the light bulb beneath its lampshade suddenly shattered with a sharp pop, exploding into countless tiny shards of glass that nearly sprayed all over her.
Not long after the floor lamp, a vintage piano appeared in the very center of the corridor.
Several of its keys were missing, and specks of blood that had not yet fully dried stained the panel. Thick cobwebs stretched between the raised lid and the body of the piano.
Before seeing the piano, Everly heard a drawn-out, distorted note.
But when she approached, the music stopped. The piano keys were covered in dust and blood, without the slightest sign that they had been played.
The eerie piano left Everly deeply unsettled.
After passing the piano and walking a long way farther, Everly encountered a dark green trash can lying crookedly on its side.
It was filled with pristine white baseballs. They had spilled out through the opening and rolled all over the corridor.
Whenever she accidentally touched one while walking past—even if it was only the breeze from her movement that caused it to wobble slightly—the balls would react like water balloons pushed past their breaking point. Their red stitching would burst apart one strand at a time, and the balls would explode from the inside out, transforming into enormous eyeballs threaded with blood vessels that silently stared at Everly…
Sometimes a long time would pass before another one of these strange objects appeared. Other times, they would show up one after another.
They were both terrifying and profoundly out of place. Even when they caused no physical harm, they still exerted enormous psychological pressure.
At first, Everly would spend quite a while observing them, trying to infer from the slightest clues why they had appeared and whether there was some connection between them.
However, she soon realized that there was no point in doing so.
Their appearances were completely random. There was no discernible pattern.
Moreover, these objects often followed no rules of reality whatsoever. Every attempt to interpret them only left Everly with an even deeper and more intense sense that something was wrong, shaking the stability of her mental world and making her more susceptible to their influence.
Keep going…
Aside from the psychological terror they inflicted, these things could hardly cause her any physical harm. All she had to do was walk around them, never stopping, and keep moving toward the end of the corridor, one step after another, one step after another…
After passing an unknown number of bizarre objects, Everly noticed that things had escalated when yet another strange object appeared ahead.
This time, a sofa chair was waiting for her in the corridor.
It had been placed on its side, with the back pressed directly against the wall on the right. A massive shadow was sitting slumped in the chair.
Opposite the sofa, pressed against the wall on the left, stood a wooden TV cabinet with an old-fashioned box television sitting on top.
There was nowhere in the corridor for it to be plugged in, yet the television screen was emitting an eerie snowy static. The unpleasant zzzzzt, zzzzt of interference echoed throughout the entire corridor.
In all the time Everly had been walking, this was the first time she had seen any light in the corridor.
Even though the pale glow was incredibly dim, too weak to illuminate the figure sitting across from it, she still felt an intense sense of unease. She stopped well before reaching it and stood there watching for a long time.
During that time, neither her danger-warning ability nor the canine-fang necklace around her wrist gave any indication of danger.
That meant the situation might not be as bad as she feared.
After spending even longer observing the scene than she had the previous objects, Everly finally decided to move.
Time was precious. She couldn’t afford to waste it.
The watch on her wrist showed that it was now one hour and forty-three minutes since she had arrived on the island.
But that time was definitely wrong, because it had shown the exact same time when Everly entered the cave.
She suspected that there might be some strange magnetic field inside the cave that was interfering with electronic devices and causing her watch to malfunction.
The problem was that the long journey through the corridor had also distorted Everly’s sense of time. As a result, she had no idea how long she had actually been walking.
To avoid missing her window to leave the island, Everly steeled herself, raised her flashlight, and cautiously walked a little farther forward.
The bright yellow beam of the flashlight struggled to push back the darkness, illuminating the figure on the sofa.
The tension slowly left Everly’s body when she realized that the figure was a corpse—or perhaps calling it a “human” would be a stretch. “Monster” was far more appropriate.
Although it was dressed in human clothes, complete with pants, shoes, and socks, its body had completely broken free of the boundaries of humanity.
The man’s skin was covered in dark gray, lumpy bumps like a toad’s. His eyes bulged outward, hanging limply from his face like two protruding snail feelers. His nostrils had become two black holes, while the mouth beneath them was even more horrifying—a circular, lamprey-like maw lined with sharp teeth.
Below the deformed head was an enormously bloated body. It was so grotesquely obese that the creature had become wedged into the sofa, reduced to a massive ball of flesh seemingly growing out of it. Its human clothes were utterly incapable of containing such a body and had split into strips hanging from its frame. Beneath the torn fabric was a soft, flabby body covered in black-and-white spots, resembling a slug.
The monster had committed s**cide.
A black fountain pen was embedded in its chest. Most of the pen had disappeared into the monster’s body, leaving only its smooth end protruding. The creature’s short, toad-like hand, complete with webbing and fleshy bumps, still gripped the pen tightly.
A steady stream of blue-green blood flowed from the wound, soaking the monster’s body.
The corpse was disturbingly fresh. Its blood had not even coagulated, as though the monster had killed itself on the sofa only a minute ago.
That intense sense of wrongness surged through Everly once more.
She took a deep breath, remaining alert as she approached the corpse. Using the hiking pole hanging from her waist, she nudged the note onto the floor and picked it up.
The note was stained with some of the monster’s blood.
The blue-green blood had smeared the fountain-pen ink, making the already crooked handwriting even harder to decipher. Everly carried the note far away before finally lowering her head to examine its contents:
[…Run! Don’t go any farther… time… becoming… monster…]
Everly’s brow furrowed.