Liu Xianxian had once caught Liu Zhe in this room talking to the detached head in the glass jar.
Chen Ge placed the white cat in his backpack and walked out from the room. There was a ten-meter-long corridor, and the doors on both sides were locked. There were a few doors that even had the yellow police tape. He looked in through the windows on the doors, and rows of lab tables were placed in the rooms. His pupils narrowing, Chen Ge saw something that looked like water stain left on the experiment slab that was at the front of the room. It felt like something had just crawled up from that slab.
The reason Director Luo had taken down the surrounding attractions was to prepare for the Haunted House’s expansion. To build a terror theme park, an underground parking lot was not enough.
As the door swung open, the stench of formalin hit Chen Ge. Chen Ge did not hurry to get into the room as that he knew whenever he could smell formalin, those things were nearby. Chen Ge placed the white cat on the table and touched its head. “Can you tell where this smell is coming from?”
Chen Ge tried to use his gestures to make the cat understand his meaning. The multi-colored eyes looked at Chen Ge, and after a while, the cat suddenly jumped down from the table and walked toward a single room at the back of the autopsy room.
“Found it?” There was another wooden door inside the room, and the cat snarled at the door. The formalin drifted out from behind the door. Chen Ge tried to push it and realized that it was locked.
“Move back a bit.” Chen Ge raised the hammer, and the cat jumped back.
BANG!
The hammer aimed at the lock, and the key cylinder cracked. Chen Ge had gotten far more familiar with how to break down a locked door. He only needed to focus on the lock—compared to knocking down the whole door, that would create a smaller commotion.
There was a dark corridor behind the wooden door. Based on the map provided by Zhang Li, this was one of the entrances that led to the underground morgue. The corridor would lead Chen Ge to the outer perimeter of the morgue. Placing the cat back in his backpack, Chen Ge raised his flashlight into the darkness. He only glanced inward when he frowned. There was broken glass on the stairs and some indeterminate objects like someone had broken glass jars with organ samples there.
There were so many nail marks that Chen Ge could not tell whether they came from one thing or multiple. Chen Ge snapped a few pictures on his phone and went down the steps, being careful not to step on any of the detritus.
Soon, he reached the underground level, and there was a split in the road. The corridor on the left was unpainted, and the one on the right was painted white. When he walked closer, Chen Ge saw some words painted on the wall—they were squiggly like worms, barely readable. The left corridor was called a human walkway, and the one on the right was called the cadaver walkway.
If he wanted to get to the underground morgue, he had to take the white corridor. For the sake of the mission, Chen Ge walked down the cadaver walkway. Perhaps it was his imagination, but once he entered the corridor, it felt like someone was moving in front of him. He tried to pick up the speed, and the person did as well; he slowed down, and so did the person.
He walked for half a minute when there were red letters surfacing on the white walls.
“You’re on the wrong path. This is a road for dead people only.”
“I’m warning you—turn back now.”
“Why are you so stubborn?”
“I know, you also want to be a cadaver, don’t you?”
Chen Ge did not care what they said. He was more curious about the words’ location. Some of them were on the wall, and some were on the ceiling. Chen Ge looked at them for a long time, and he realized that to create this effect, the person had to be crawling on the surfaces.
He stopped, and the person before him stopped.
The corridor became so quiet.
