Doomsday Wonderland c1-855

by N. Heller

  The problem with both their conclusions on the situation was that they would need to interact with the "occupant" behind each door. They both became quiet, momentarily unable to make a decision. After sitting dully for some time and not being able to come to a better solution, Lin Sanjiu stood up first and let out a heavy sigh. "In any case, we should get moving," Lin Sanjiu urged.

  Geran might be a prudent and intelligent person. However, he might be overly cautious, otherwise, he probably wouldn't be trapped for around 20 days.

  On the other hand, whenever Lin Sanjiu couldn't think of any better solutions, she would just rely on her muscles. "Let's go!" she prompted.

  "Where to?" Geran asked, feeling somewhat puzzled.

  "Let's go to the seventh flo—no," Lin Sanjiu suddenly remembered that there was only a male and female washroom there and nothing else, so she changed her mind, "We'll start from the sixth floor and knock on every door. No matter which of us is right, let's look at what is behind those doors first."

  Even though Geran had his misgivings, he finally stood up and followed Lin Sanjiu out.

  More lights in the corridor were now damaged. After the door to unit 101 was closed, the flickering lights in the corridor became even more obvious. The end of the silent corridor had been swallowed by the dark and when they focused on anything in the flickering light, their eyes started to hurt. Lin Sanjiu and Geran tried their best to keep their footsteps as quiet as possible, as they slowly climbed up the stairway.

  After they stopped talking, the whole building fell into a death-like silence. Each time they took a step, the floorboards made loud, distinct creaks. When they were about to reach the third floor, Lin Sanjiu stopped.

  "You mentioned that the occupants can only move on their own floors…" Lin Sanjiu could feel the back of her neck going cold and her skin tingling, "About that… How long will they usually move around the corridor?"

  Geran pursed his lips without saying a word. He took two steps up and turned his ear to listen to the corridor. After that, he took off his belt. The flashy box-frame buckle didn't seem to fit his personality at all.

  "They usually don't stay in the corridor for long. But, just to be safe, we can attach this buckle to your wing. I'll secure the belt like this," Geran secured the belt and pointed at the shiny buckle, "Stretch that bone on your wing out, yes, just like that… Even though we can't see any clear reflections, it is metal so we can at least see shadows if anything moves."

  Standing at the stairway leading to the third floor, Lin Sanjiu stretched one of the spines of the skeletal wing outward with some effort. She held her breath as she stared at the little metallic buckle.

  The metal plate wasn't good enough to reflect any proper image except a blurred shadow of the corridor. After waiting for some time, they did not spot anything in the blurred reflection on the buckle. They carefully walked upstairs and scanned the corridor quickly. Seeing that all the doors were closed, they sprinted up the stairs to the fourth floor.

  When they saw the unit number "601", their expressions turned grim. No matter what happened, they had to grit their teeth and take that risk...

  Lin Sanjiu had never imagined that she would be afraid to knock on a door.

  Lightly and almost accompanied by a bit of trepidation, she knocked on the door with her knuckle. Lin Sanjiu could even sense Geran moving backward. He was standing at the edge of the stairway. After she knocked on the door a few times, there was no response. It was silent.

  "Why… why don't we forget it," Geran said in the same soft voice but more hastily. "Let's go back and discuss this…"

  Lin Sanjiu ignored his suggestion and knocked on the door another two times. However, this time, the sound of her knocks wavered.

  There seemed to be a very soft sound of footsteps from behind the door. Unlike normal distinct footsteps, that was the sound of something dragging their feet. Yet, each step sounded like it was a long stride. Lin Sanjiu gulped. The muscles all over her body tensed up. When the brass handle of the door slowly rotated, Lin Sanjiu's mind became blank.

  The red wooden door opened with a creak and a gap slowly appeared between the door and its frame. As she heard the door opening, Lin Sanjiu heard a creak from the stairway. Lin Sanjiu knew, even without looking, that Geran had run away.

  Before she could even consider if Geran had set her up and decide to move, it was already too late. The "person" behind the door—if it could be considered a person—had already peeked out from the gap.

  Lin Sanjiu locked her eyes on that face without moving an inch. It did not even cross her mind that she would see that person here.

  "Livia?"

  "How can you be here?" Lin Sanjiu was stupefied. "You ran to Swan Route?"

  "You're still alive," Livia also seemed surprised to see Lin Sanjiu. She looked behind Lin Sanjiu and lifted the corner of her lips. "I entered this attraction yesterday afternoon… Up until now, I still can't find the exit."

  "Why are you in this room?" This question was stuck in Lin Sanjiu's throat, she couldn't bring herself to verbalize it.

  Livia supported her face, which always looked tired, with one hand. "All the units in the building are empty. I randomly chose one to rest. Did you just arrive? Do you want to come in and chat? But you have to wait for me, I'm not dressed properly now…"

  Then, she closed the door.

  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 c.h.e.s.t. 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.

  "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 s.e.n.s.i.t.i.v.e 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?"

  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 acc.u.mulating 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 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.