Chapter 352: Separated by a Door
The fluorescent light flickered, and the moment the fluorescent light dimmed darkness enveloped the wooden door of unit 601. Then, in the blink of an eye, the light returned, the darkness ebbed, and the mahogany-colored wooden door once again appeared. From a closer look, a thick layer of dust had collected on the surface of the door, accentuating the moth-eaten door.
The corridor was quiet. So quiet that Lin Sanjiu could hear her blood flowing through her body.
Her muscles screamed. Ever since she came, she had not relaxed for even a single second. The consequence of that was that her muscles were extremely sore.
Quietly, as if to conceal her movements from herself, she slowly inched toward the stairway.
The building continued its slumber, and her actions did not wake it up.
Four minutes passed, but the door to the room where Livia resided remained tightly shut.
"Why does she need so much time to get dressed?"
After Livia closed the door, the building plunged into death-like silence. It gave Lin Sanjiu the impression that the dim corridor and the door in front of her were the only things left in the world.
Hearing her hurried breathing, despair slowly began to loom over her as the minutes ticked away.
There were several times she lifted her hand, wanting to knock on the door, but she forewent her attempts every time. She was scared and too afraid to confront the unknown lurking behind the door.
She had knocked on the door of unit 601 once, so regardless of who was telling the truth, be it Geran or Livia, she refused to risk herself again. As she did not want to knock on the door, she waited. Betting on the flimsy prospect that everything would turn out better, she decided to wait for Livia for some more time. As she waited, she felt something growing cold in her chest. It chilled her, and panic filled every cell in her body.
Step by step, slowly and steadily, she approached the stairway. As her hand almost reached the wooden handrails of the stairway, a distant voice rang in her mind, "Livia is not right."
Without a doubt, Livia had entered this attraction. As Lin Sanjiu mulled over her conversation with Livia, the notion that Livia was baiting her to knock the door for the second time grew stronger.
Perhaps like the girl in unit 320, Livia was trapped in the building as well.
As Lin Sanjiu took another step back, her skeletal wings hit the handrail of the stairway before her hand did. A clank that sounded like a rap on the door reverberated and traveled fast and far through the silent corridor. Then, under the sinister pulse of the fluorescent light, the brass handle of unit 601 rattled. Lin Sanjiu's frayed nerves crumbled. Without wasting any time, she turned and fled down the stair.
"Garan is right about everything here."
Lin Sanjiu's hurried footsteps pounding on the flight of staircases broke the silence that prevailed in the apartment building. Within the moment of a few breaths, she had reached the first floor.
She looked back and nothing was behind her.
The conversation she had with Geran before surfaced in her mind, and she replayed the sentence in her head, "Every occupant can only move on their floor."
"So even if Livia has turned into one of those things, there is no way she can leave her floor and chase after me now."
Relieved, Lin Sanjiu's breathing pace become normal again. Then, somewhere inside her, an ember grew into a small flame as she thought about Geran.
Even though Geran was a prudent and sagacious man, and he found many traps in the building, he was too unreliable! How could he leave her alone facing the unknown in unit 601? He was such a wimp. It was why he had been trapped there for twenty days!
"Hey!" She rushed to unit 101 in two steps and rapped on the door twice. Her voice filled with rage, "Geran, I know you're in there. Open the door now!"
Much to her chagrin, nobody answered her call. After she waited two seconds, she grabbed the brass handle and attempted to open the door. However, the brass handle wouldn't budge. It seemed to have been locked from inside.
It was Geran who opened the door for her when she entered unit 101 before, so she did not know if the door was locked at that time or not.
Lin Sanjiu lifted her hand again, and when her knuckle almost hit the wooden door, she stopped.
The gold number plate with 101 carved on it flashed with a faint reflection. Silence filled the air.
"If I knock on the door again, will that count as the second time?"
Lin Sanjiu was halted by the thought. She wobbled on her feet as she walked two steps backward. Soon after, she felt that she was being too sensitive as if a tree or a bush looked like an enemy to her now. After all, Geran had said that this room was the only room in the building that protected the players. She found no reason to doubt Geran's words.
She then recalled how she met Garan on the third floor and how they spent the next three hours together. If he had turned into one of those things, then there were two issues she had to consider: first was that he could not appear on another floor, and the second was that he had plenty of opportunities to attack her, so why now?
The thought comforted Lin Sanjiu some, but she still could not bring herself to knock on the door again.
Taking a safety measure, she silently bolted to the stairway that led to the second floor. Without looking at the first floor, Lin Sanjiu called Geran again while standing on the staircase, "Geran?"
Nobody replied, and the air around her seemed to have stopped moving. It was heavy, and it was suffocating.
"Geran, are you there?" She called again after a few seconds.
As the silence continued to reign over the first floor, her heart sank. It was as if Geran had disappeared into the ether. He did not respond even after she waited for a couple of minutes.
"Where would he be if he's not in unit 101?"
Unbeknownst to her, cold sweat began to form and ooze from her pores, soaking her back as she anxiously positioned herself on the staircase. She did not know whether should she go down the stairs or go up.
Seeing that seeking a solution with her jumbled mind was not going to get her anywhere, Lin Sanjiu took a deep breath to calm down her raging, wild thoughts. Maybe the deep breath she took was helpful since her mind did seem clearer now. Then, with her now-clearer mind, Lin Sanjiu realized the situation might not be as bad as it appeared if she looked at it from another angle. When she met Livia on the sixth floor, she did not turn her head, so she didn't know if Geran had gone down the stairway. What if Geran acted in a diametrically opposite way and went up to the seventh floor instead?
There were no rooms on the seventh floor, and it was nearest to the sixth floor. The chances that Geran had escaped to the washroom in a rush was high!
Once she got to this point, Lin Sanjiu jumped to her feet, tilted her head, and glanced up to the stairs that hovered overhead.
She had staked out the third floor earlier with Geran, so she was sure that there was no one in that corridor. She bolted toward the fifth floor with a whack and stopped at the last staircase. The sixth floor was just one step away from her.
When Lin Sanjiu surveyed the floor with Geran, he used his buckle to check the surrounding. After he retrieved the buckle, he did not wear it; instead, he held it in his hand. Lin Sanjiu regretted that she had not taken it from him when she had the chance.
After Lin Sanjiu prepared herself both physically and mentally, she made her first tentative steps onto the hushed sixth floor.
As usual, the first thing that welcomed her once she emerged from the stairway was unit 601. The door remained the same: shabby and time-worn. The dry flower wreath that was once hung on the door was on the edge of falling off, hanging askew on the door. It seemed that somebody had knocked it over.
However, none of that bothered Lin Sanjiu. She had a more important task at hand. As she walked through the passage to the seventh floor, despite it being a rather short distance, she wished she had the power of invisibility so that nobody would notice her presence. After she turned down a corner, unit 601 vanished from her sight.
Never once had she felt that the washroom was such a warm and lovely place.
Gasping, Lin Sanjiu charged head-on into the men's washroom on her left. Without minding the puddle of water accumulating on the white-tiled floor, she quickly closed the door.
She couldn't fathom her actions or what she was running from. There were no other people in the apartment building whatsoever.
"Anybody here?" When the words escaped her mouth she realized that her voice was trembling. She asked again, "Geran, are you in here?"
Aside from the mirror's direction, the structure of the men's washroom was similar to that of the women's washroom. There were a long basin and a large mirror on the right side and a few dirty urinals on the left side of the wall. One of the urinals was filled to the brim with yellow liquid, garnished with a few cigarette ends on the surface of it. Further away was a row of cubicles that extended into the dark end of the washroom where the light did not reach.
Her voice bounced off the tiled wall and echoed in the empty washroom.
"Geran?"
The pipe dripped constantly, and Lin Sanjiu's shoes were soaked after she took two steps forward.
The grey door of the first cubicle was unlatched, allowing the darkness inside to seep from the small gap between the door and the frame. Lin Sanjiu did not push the door open. Instead, she bowed down and looked into the cubicle from the space under the door.
What met her gaze first was an old toilet rooted silently on the tiled floor. It was dim inside, and there was no sign of a person in the cubicle.
Lin Sanjiu went forward to check the next four cubicles. She found nothing. As she stopped, a blank expression graced her face.
Geran wasn't here. If it wasn't for her memories replaying the episode from a few minutes prior, she might have begun to believe that she was the only person in the apartment building.
"This is weird."
Perhaps the unending, death-like, and eerie silence had been too unbearable. It made Lin Sanjiu's stomach flip-flop as she mumbled under her breath, "Where could he have gone?"
"Could it be that he was too anxious and had mistakenly run into the women's washroom?"
Lin Sanjiu could not think of other ideas as to where he could have gone aside from the women's washroom.
After taking a step forward, a vague idea suddenly manifested in her mind, "Something… Somewhere is not right here. What could it be?"
As she was immersed in her thoughts, she slowly turned around.
The woman in the mirror followed suit. She had pale skin, the skeletal wings on her back still had a menacing look. Inside of the mirror was a similar and quiet washroom, albeit the only part of it was visible because the other half was hidden in the shadows.
Her shoes hit the puddle of water on the floor with a splash as she moved toward the inner part of the washroom.
Geran once told her that the painting behind the window of the men's washroom on the seventh floor was of a bustling city center.
The fake window was just beside the last cubicle, It was hidden in the dark, so it was hard for people to notice it. Lin Sanjiu walked closer to it. She crouched down and picked up a pair of gold-rimmed glasses from the corner of the wall right under the window.
The lenses reflected under the pale light.
The first reaction Lin Sanjiu had was Geran had met his end. However, once she thought for a moment, she couldn't remember what color Geran's glasses were. When she converted the glasses into a card, the description on the card only told her that it was [a pair of ordinary glasses for astigmatism] and did not tell her who owned the glasses.
Feeling helpless, Lin Sanjiu just stored the card in her body. After that, she left the men's washroom and went to the women's washroom.
She knew that Geran was probably not in the women's washroom judging from the commotion she had caused. If Geran were really in the women's washroom, he would have come out to meet her already when he heard her voice.
She entered the women's washroom and just as she expected, there was no one in there.
A deep sense of fatigue rose in Lin Sanjiu's heart. Ever since she entered this attraction, everything she encountered was way off the scale. She was out of her league, and it exhausted her.
She did not wish to face the apartment units at downstairs anymore. Hence, she found herself a cubicle, closed the toilet's lid, and sat on it. She rested her wings on top of the water tank. It was less comfortable, but she was too lazy to mind this small matter.
Staring at the door with a vacant expression while it closed, Lin Sanjiu was at lost of what should she do next. The predicament she was in this time could neither be solved through force nor wit. It made her remember her day at Kisaragi Station.
"How can I get out from here?"
If it were not for her belief that there had to be a way to clear this attraction, she would have long been tormented to death by her anxiety. Just as she rubbed her neck with her hand and stood up, the door to the washroom was shoved open.
At this moment, the air froze, and her throat went dry.
The footsteps belonged to human and were accompanied by the splashing of water that was conspicuously loud in the silent washroom. The invader spoke as she moved toward Lin Sanjiu's cubicle.
"Miss Lin, are you in there?"
Lin Sanjiu eyes bulged in shock as a pair of black sneakers stopped outside her cubicle. The owner had stepped on the shoes previously. Lin Sanjiu could see the crease on the shoes.
"Livia?"
"Why didn't you wait for me? Didn't I tell you to wait for me while I got dressed?" It seemed to Lin Sanjiu that Livia knew she was here all along. Then, she called her "Miss Lin" twice.
"Since Livia could get to the seventh floor, does that means that she is all right?"
"Maybe she is the kind of person who is slow at getting dressed?"
Lin Sanjiu then probed, her voice was shivering, "How-- how did you get up here?"
"I came here to find you, obviously," Livia's answer had no flaw, "Besides, I needed to use the toilet. I don't understand why all the rooms in this apartment have no washrooms aside from the seventh floor."
Heaving a sigh, Lin Sanjiu's heart slowly regained its healthy pace.
Putting aside the fact that Livia could not move to another floor if she had been turned, Lin Sanjiu did not knock on unit 601 the second time, nor did she call Livia by her name, so no matter how she looked at it, she did not meet the requirement of "knocking the door for the second time."
"I've met a player here, but he's gone missing too," as Lin Sanjiu talked, she stood up. She did not know why she used the word "too" in her sentence, "It's a he. I'm not sure if you met—"
The last letter stuck in her throat. She could not spit it out.
Lin Sanjiu, who stood at 180 cm now looked over the top edge of the door and saw a head of black hair.
"Livia is not that tall."
"What are you doing in there? Come on out now," the voice, which Lin Sanjiu believed belong to a woman, said. She was smiling.