Chapter 351: The Fountain of Youth (8)
Throughout her growth, Everly had read quite a few diaries written by people who seemed determined to speak in riddles. There was the diary of Frankenstein Mark from the One-Day Loop Incident, for instance, as well as the druid’s diary from the Cabin in the Woods Incident.
Based on the experience she had accumulated from years of reading such diaries, the note in the monster’s hand probably meant: “Leave! Don’t go any farther. If you stay here too long, you’ll turn into a monster.”
But Everly couldn’t possibly turn back just because of a simple note. The poem had explicitly stated that she needed to keep moving forward along the straight passage to clear this stage.
The witch’s poem was a precious treasure she had left for future generations. There was no way she would joke about the lives of her descendants.
On the contrary, the appearance of this note was extremely abrupt. Everly suspected that it was part of the stage itself, intended to scare people into retreating.
If her guess was correct, then the further she went, the more terrifying and bizarre scenes she was bound to encounter. She had to hold her ground. She absolutely could not turn back.
Everly wiped the blood off the note, stuffed it into her pocket, then used her hiking pole to poke at the monster’s clothes, making sure there was nothing else hidden or overlooked.
After finishing her search, she left the area beside the sofa and continued forward with unwavering determination.
Things indeed turned out exactly as Everly had expected. Not long after encountering the TV-sofa monster, she came across a corridor packed with human mannequins.
There were male and female mannequins. Some were missing arms, some had a leg broken off, and some had cracked-open heads. Almost none of them were intact. Completely naked, they stood in twisted, grotesque poses, blocking the corridor so thoroughly that there was no way through.
The moment the light shone on them, the mannequins suddenly began wildly flailing their limbs. Their joints twisted with a series of “click, click, click” sounds. They looked just like wind-up dolls, and they charged madly toward Everly.
Everly was startled and instinctively turned around to run.
But the moment the light moved away from them, the mannequins instantly became motionless again, reverting to lifeless objects.
This behavior reminded Everly of the nurses in the classic horror film Silent Hill.
In that movie, the monsters commonly known as “nurses” would be startled by bright lights and sound, attacking the source of the light or noise. In dark, quiet environments, however, they moved slowly, almost like puppets, allowing people to sneak past them.
Could this place have borrowed that idea?
Everly stopped and aimed her flashlight at a bare section of the corridor wall. Using the faint light reflected off the wall, she conducted an experiment with a mirror and her hiking pole.
The results showed that the puppets reacted only to light shining directly on them. They were not particularly sensitive to sound or physical contact.
There was another strange property: anything that touched the puppets would turn into wood. For example, when Everly merely tapped one of the puppets with her alloy hiking pole, the tip of the pole instantly turned into brownish-yellow wood.
The petrification spread upward from the tip at a speed visible to the naked eye, rapidly overtaking the entire hiking pole. Fortunately, Everly reacted in time and threw the pole away before it could spread any farther. Otherwise, there was no telling whether she might have turned to wood herself.
The only thing that seemed immune was the corridor itself.
Everly suspected that these wooden puppets might actually have once been human.
After quickly studying the properties of the wooden mannequins, she moved farther away and used the beam of her flashlight as bait. Carefully, she lured the mannequins on the left side of the corridor toward her, making them charge in her direction. Once they drew close enough, she moved the beam away, causing the mannequins to stop.
Each time, she shifted the mannequins a little farther to the side.
By taking advantage of the wooden mannequins’ attraction to light, Everly successfully cleared out half of the crowded corridor, creating a safe passage free of mannequin obstacles. Keeping close to the wall, she carefully made her way through the dangerous, crisis-ridden area.
After the wooden mannequins, Everly encountered nothing for a long stretch of time.
As she continued through the monotonous walk, she found herself thinking about many things.
Even though she couldn’t tell the time, Everly knew that she had walked far more than five kilometers. By all rights, she should have left the passage long ago.
Yet the reality was that she was still in this empty, silent, bizarre corridor. Darkness stretched out before her, and darkness lay behind her as well.
How much longer did she have to keep walking like this…? Was there really an end up ahead? And where had Grant and the others gone, since they had entered the cave before her?
With a faint sense of unease, Everly continued forward mechanically until she reached the next stage—a gigantic clown’s head.
Its eyes, painted with greasepaint, drooped listlessly. There was no light in the pupils; they were cold and glassy, like marbles. Beneath the thick makeup, its heavy eye bags were still impossible to conceal, making the upper half of the clown’s face look utterly sad and dejected.
Yet below its bright red nose, the clown’s mouth was smiling.
Its red-painted upper and lower lips were stretched into an exaggerated grin, a dazzling smile that extended all the way to its ears and revealed a pitch-black mouth.
Strangely, there were no teeth or tongue inside. Instead, a wooden door had been installed there.
The tiny door was only about the size of a ventilation duct opening, and its brass-colored metal handle reflected the light with a dull gleam.
At first, Everly tried to find a gap between the head and the walls so she could squeeze through.
She soon realized that was impossible.
The head was simply too large—so large that it couldn’t possibly fit inside the corridor.
Like a piece of fruit forcibly stuffed into a can, the head was wedged squarely in the middle of the passage. The flesh around its cheeks and chin had been severely distorted by the pressure, and the bones inside had probably been crushed as well. The resulting face looked remarkably like a clay bust from an art class that had accidentally been knocked onto the floor.
The excess flesh squeezed out by the pressure had nowhere else to go, piling up in huge lumps in the four corners of the corridor and filling them completely.
Unless Everly destroyed the head, there was simply no way for her to squeeze through the gaps.
The only good news was that the clown’s head could be touched. Touching it wouldn’t turn anyone into a puppet or a clown. It was simply an inconvenient head blocking the way, and nothing more.
Everly had a knife with her. She wanted to try cutting away some of the clown’s facial flesh and removing the excess flesh blocking the gaps. However, the moment her blade pierced it, she realized she wasn’t cutting into a corpse, but living flesh.
The head was actually alive!
As she cut into it, she could clearly feel the muscles inside tensing from the pain, creating resistance against the blade. The spasms of its nerves traveled through the knife and handle, all the way into her palm.
Everly instinctively pulled the knife out.
Bright red liquid spurted from the wound, staining her gloves and sleeve. Before she could even wipe it away, the corner of her eye caught a glimmer of something flowing.
She raised her head in surprise and found herself staring straight into the clown’s lifeless eyes.
There was no sound, no movement. Even that characteristic smile on its face remained completely unchanged.
And yet, in a corner that no one would have noticed, a line of transparent tears was silently welling up from the clown’s hollow left eye socket. They streamed down its greasepaint-covered cheek, washing a distinct trail through the red painted grin.
Shock, disbelief, disgust, a prickling sensation across her scalp…
Even if the head before her had been a monster capable of attacking her, Everly would never have felt as cold and nauseated as she did now.
Because it was crying…
Just like an ordinary person who had been attacked, that head was crying!
The sudden appearance of human emotions in something that was not human delivered an almost unprecedented psychological shock.
The moment the knife was pulled free, the wound healed on its own, disappearing without a trace.
At that rate of regeneration, Everly figured that even if she actually cut away the clown’s facial flesh, she still wouldn’t be able to squeeze through the gap before it grew back.
Her gaze shifted to the little door inside the clown’s mouth.
Could that be the way out…?
After thinking for a moment, she cautiously approached. Bending down, she reached out, grabbed the brass handle, and gently turned it.
With a soft click, the door opened, revealing a narrow passageway behind it.
The entire passage was made of flesh. Its inner walls were damp and slick, constantly contracting and writhing. Given where the passage was located, it was hard not to think of an esophagus.
The passage was long, stretching straight ahead. Even the beam of her flashlight couldn’t reach the far end.
Everly thought for a moment, then put on the raincoat she had used earlier, bent down, and crawled inside.
The passage was extremely narrow. As she crawled through it, the flesh on the walls would occasionally contract around her. It was wet and sticky, clamping down in a thick layer and obstructing her vision, making it difficult to move. She couldn’t help but feel as though she were being swallowed by some monster.
Everly could only speed up. Using both her hands and feet, she practically squeezed her way through the passage, charging blindly forward.
After crawling for about three minutes, just as she was on the verge of suffocating, Everly suddenly felt the pressure around her release.
Her heart leaped with joy. She braced both hands against the opening, forced it apart, and rolled forward, successfully crawling out of the limp, fleshy esophageal tube.
Wrapped around the outside of the tube was a long neck, nearly 1.5 meters in diameter. Its severed end was jagged, revealing densely packed blood vessels and stark white vertebrae within. Blood was still seeping from the wound where the neck had been severed, making for a truly horrifying sight.
After crawling out through the neck, Everly found herself facing the same yellow carpet, yellow wallpaper, and seemingly endless corridor as before.
She took off the filthy raincoat she was wearing and roughly wiped her gloves with a wet wipe before stepping away from the horrifyingly long neck.
This time, she hadn’t gone far before Everly spotted a shoulder bag with its strap torn off and a thick, leather-bound diary lying on the floor.
There were a few splatters of blood on the canvas bag, along with a conspicuous claw mark across its center. The claws that had left the mark were large and sharp, easily tearing through the thick outer canvas and exposing the textbooks inside.
Everly rummaged through the bag.
Its owner was probably a university student. The textbooks were the standard general-education books commonly used at universities. Besides the textbooks, there were various odds and ends inside, such as earphones, a wallet, keys, and a phone.
The phone was dead. After searching through the backpack and finding nothing useful, Everly turned her attention to the diary that had fallen out of it.
The diary belonged to a young man named Emil.
It began in late August of 2X12. That year, Emil had successfully been admitted to a university in Dalifer State, and he had specifically bought the diary to record his college life.
Skipping past the long and useless entries about ordinary university life, Everly, drawing on her considerable experience, flipped toward the back of the diary and began reading from the entry where the handwriting started becoming increasingly erratic.
[May 19, 2X13, Rainy]
Today should have been an ordinary day. I went out to class in the morning, worked a part-time shift at the school library in the afternoon, and was supposed to attend Susan’s party in the evening.
But everything was ruined by that fall.
Even now, I’m still completely bewildered. I don’t understand how any of this happened. One second, I was standing on the rolling ladder attached to the bookshelf, carefully putting books on the top shelf. The next, my foot slipped, I lost my balance, fell to the floor, and somehow glitched through reality, landing in this endless corridor.
Yellow carpet, yellow wallpaper, and dim yellow fluorescent lights buzzing overhead. I’ve been walking through this strange corridor for a long time and encountered all sorts of bizarre things. They haven’t attacked me, but they still scare me terribly…
If I keep walking forward in one direction, will I be able to get out of here?
…]