From a stranger’s perspective, Wang Qi might have appeared to be too insistent in chasing the newcomer away. Therefore, Chen Ge did not promise the man anything; if anything, after listening to Wang Qi’s story, he had a sneaking suspicion that the man was hiding something.
“I’ve told you everything I know, and there’s still time to leave. When the clock strikes twelve, the apartment will turn into something else.” After saying that, Wang Qi brushed the dust away from his clothes and turned to leave.
It was not until Wang Qi’s shadow disappeared among the darkness of the night that Chen Ge came to. His original intention was to obtain more information from the tenants about the building, but now, he ended up with more question than answers.
As Chen Ge went back to his room, he paused when he passed the woman’s room on the first floor. He hesitated before knocking on the room.
“Hey, fresh blood!” The woman’s room door remained unmoved, but to Chen Ge’s surprise, the door to the room directly opposite from hers fell open. A lanky man was leaning against the open door. He looked to be in his thirties, and the man’s appearance was very unkempt. His beard was almost joined to his hair, and the back of his hand had a tattoo of a peony.
“And you are?” Chen Ge turned around with alarm.
“The man who was spreading the missing person notice around is not even a tenant of this building; there’s something wrong about him up here.” The thin man pointed at his temple. “Don’t believe a word out that comes out of his mouth, and try not to get too close to him.”
It was the first time Chen Ge had seen this man, and even though the man’s appearance left much to be desired, the man’s mannerisms were the most normal of all the characters he had met at the apartment. “The man’s actions sure are weird, but perhaps that is because he was too devastated from the loss of his fiancé.”
“Did he tell you his fiancé disappeared around this apartment?”
“Yes.”
“Did he tell you he receive that information from the police and that’s why he has been searching for her here?”
“Yes.”
The man chuckled mirthlessly before saying, “I’ve lived here for nine months already, and I’ve seen no trace of the police coming here. The mad man is lying to you; I’m sure you don’t believe his talk of ghosts, right?”
He pulled out a cigarette to dangle on his lips. “There are no ghosts in this world! At most, it’s someone pretending to be a ghost. In any case, it’s getting late, so you’d better return to your room.”
Lost in his thoughts, Chen Ge did not realize he had walked up to the third floor. The faded number was printed on the corner of the wall, and the voice-activated light above his head flickered on and off. Chen Ge looked down the long corridor and realized this whole floor was in a state of complete disrepair. The floor was thick with grime, and there were signs of burning everywhere. The coating of the wall was peeling off like skin, and underneath it were lines that looked like thick cuts.
The voice-activated light soon went off, and Chen Ge was submerged in a world of darkness. Due to his work at the Haunted House, Chen Ge was used to working in the darkness. The sudden blindness did not unhinge him. He pulled out his phone and was about to turn the flashlight on when he spotted a shadow dash past the darkened corridor.
“Who’s there‽” The flashlight on the phone lit up the third floor, but the shadow was nowhere to be seen. Chen Ge was about to investigate further when he heard footsteps coming up from further down the stairs.
When he turned the corner on the stairwell, Chen Ge saw a rotund and short man coming out of a room on the second floor, holding a basin. The man was humming a happy tune, but when he saw Chen Ge, his face fell, and he immediately ran away from the scene.
Chen Ge pulled out his phone. His conversation with Wang Qi was not for nothing. He now had the important information that before it was called Ping An Apartments, this place was called Fu An Apartments.
He keyed in Jiujiang Fu An Apartments in the search box, and several pages later, numerous spine-chilling headlines jumped out at him.
“A family of four brutally murdered! The murderer has disappeared into thin air‽”
“Accident or homicide? The truth of the fire that razed Fu An Apartments.”
“Case within a case, bodies hidden inside the building unearthed!”
Reading through the information on Fu An Apartments, Chen Ge felt his skin chilled. This was not fiction; they happened in real life, and he was currently living at the crime scene.
Five years ago, a neighbor saw the smog rising from Fu An Apartments, so he called the fire brigade. The firefighters soon put out the fire and started to investigate the source of the fire as well as gauge the extent of damage.
Initially, they thought this was going to be another accidental fire case, but as the investigation continued, more curious evidence started to surface.
The cement walls were cracked, the surface of cracked window was small, and the smog blackened the ceiling; these were all signs that the temperature of the fire was high, and it spread very fast.
There were several possible initial locations found at the building, and they were all far apart from each other, quintessential of an arson case.
Therefore, the nature of the investigation changed. After the police stepped in, they soon discovered four burnt bodies among the ruin of the fire. They believed these were the bodies of the family of four who operated the rental apartment.
This case created quite a buzz at the time. The police tried their best to solve the case, but the fire had destroyed most of the evidence. They combed the place but could not locate the evidence of a fifth person much, less catch the culprit.
The apartment was sealed for a whole year, after which ownership of the estate was passed on to the owner’s father, and it was then that Fu An Apartments changed to Ping An Apartments.
