Our internet cables were all plugged into the ports by the door. The cables for Lao Chu and his upper bunk—which was where I slept—were pulled from under the bed, cutting right across that octagram. Now, the cables had been snapped by some strange, violent force. Even more terrifying were the four claw marks behind them. They were incredibly long and deep, not only gouging out a corner of the chalk octagram but even leaving gashes in the concrete of the wall itself. Ren Xing finally lost his composure. He pulled a tape measure from his pocket and measured them; the claw marks spanning the octagram were nearly forty centimeters long. He immediately placed a call, summoning his colleagues from the forensics department. After snapping a few more photos, he turned to me. "Was this here before?"
"What do you think?" I countered.
Our expressions must have been grim.
To my surprise, he pressed further. "Do you think Lao Chu left these?"
"Are you serious?"
Seeing Ren Xing choked up by my retort gave me a small, dark sense of satisfaction. He likely felt the awkwardness too, coughing twice before explaining, "Generally, with claw marks like these, we’d find traces of wall chalk under the victim's fingernails. But since Lao Chu was flayed and his nails were meticulously removed, we can't confirm from the body if these marks were his. That leaves one other way to check if they belong to Lao Chu or the killer: blood or skin tissue left on the wall. If forensics can extract any, we can test it."
I pressed my own hand against the marks. They were far too large; Lao Chu’s hands were narrower than mine, with the long, slender fingers of a pianist. Moreover, the arrangement of the four-fingered marks was bizarre. I traced the point where the marks began. Three of them were spaced relatively evenly, but one was peculiar—it was curled slightly below and to the left of the middle mark, making the entire set asymmetrical. Logically, with four marks, either the thumb or the pinky wasn't being used. But when I compared my hand to the positions, nothing lined up.
Both Ren Xing and I knew the truth in our hearts: these didn't look like marks left by a human.
If I had to guess, I’d say they belonged to some kind of four-toed animal—three toes pointing forward and one curled back toward the palm. I knew how absurd it sounded, but Ren Xing didn't laugh. I imagined something in the darkness that night, grabbing our internet cables, snapping them, and then clawing at our wall like a madman.
Was it trying to destroy the octagram?
It didn't seem so. Aside from the deepest set of marks, there were other shallower ones scattered about, as if the thing had been scratching wildly. Based on my own intuition, I formed a single hypothesis: something was dragging the creature that left those marks downward.
The direction was also bizarre. The claw marks looked as though they had been made from the bottom up, yet the bed frame was only a meter off the ground. If it were being pulled down, it would have hit the floor—or the level below.
I realized this wasn't the kind of thing one should overthink. Once you started, it was over; it meant there was more than one monster. The forensics team arrived just then. Ren Xing patted my shoulder, thanked me with genuine sincerity, and pointed to the chaotic room. "Your things are still in here, right? Just take whatever you can find. Minimize your losses."
In the end, I salvaged my laptop, half a bottle of Head & Shoulders, and a pair of shoes from the wreckage.
My senior from the archaeology department invited me to dinner that same day. His name was Lu Daoshi. He spent most of the year digging up graves, so he had a very sturdy build. When I arrived at the restaurant, he was already sitting there drinking beer. His collar was open, revealing solid pectoral muscles. He was handsome in a sharp, rugged way—wild and uninhibited, with a hint of something predatory about him. He wore glasses out of necessity, perhaps to keep his overbearing aura in check.
He wasn't a man of many words. Knowing he wouldn't treat me to a meal for no reason, I asked what he wanted before I even sat down. Lu Daoshi drank and smoked simultaneously, mentioning he’d heard about Lao Chu’s case and found it peculiar.
"Was your place the crime scene?"
"How should I know? Why are you asking?"
He chuckled. "Skinning a human being perfectly is no easy feat. It requires immense skill. Even a professional would need at least half an hour. An amateur could struggle all night and still not get it right. Besides, the police listed the time of death between eight and ten in the evening. That’s when the dorms are at their liveliest, right? It strikes me as strange—it’s not like your floor was empty that night. Someone was in there peeling a man like a grape, and not a single person noticed? There had to be some kind of noise."
"Don't ask me. Plenty of weird things have been happening. The police interrogated everyone on our floor, and nobody noticed any unusual sounds. They were probably all wearing headsets and playing games."
Lu Daoshi cursed us, calling us "living corpses." *Gaming, gaming—one day someone will skin you alive and you won't even notice.*
He paused, then asked if anyone had checked with the people on the floor below to see if they felt anything, since everyone on our floor was apparently soulless.
That reminded me of something.
Ren Xing had been in charge of the statements for our area. That night, the room directly below Lao Chu’s was empty, but the two adjacent rooms both reported feeling a strong vibration around 8:30 PM. One guy sleeping in an upper bunk woke up to find his face covered in white dust shaken down from the ceiling. They thought it was a minor earthquake, but there hadn't been any seismic activity in our area that night, not even the slightest tremor. Similarly, they hadn't heard a sound.
Lu Daoshi cracked open another beer and suggested that perhaps the crime scene wasn't our room after all.
I didn't agree. I told him about the gruesome state of the dorm and described the claw marks. Lu Daoshi was intrigued; he said he wanted to go see the room for himself.
However, the yellow police tape was still up, and the dorm matron had been keeping a very close watch lately. With Lu Daoshi’s "wild and dangerous" look, he didn't exactly scream "law-abiding citizen," so she likely wouldn't let him in.
Lu Daoshi said there was nothing to fear; he’d just climb the wall. He checked his watch. It was eight o'clock. He made a plan to meet me five hours later, at one in the morning. By then, things would have settled down, and the matron would be asleep. He would climb onto the second-floor balcony, and I would assist him by opening the corridor door.
He was a man of action and didn't give me a chance to say no. We finished a crate of beer while shooting the breeze, and around ten, we headed back to our respective dorms.
The stench in my room had mostly dissipated. I returned the electric fan and played a few rounds of League of Legends. Around 12:30 AM, Lu Daoshi called to tell me to get ready; he’d be leaving his dorm in fifteen minutes. Seeing I still had time, I shut down my computer and decided to head to the 24-hour mini-mart downstairs for some late-night snacks. The lights in the dorms went out at eleven, so most people were already asleep. I shuffled out of the building in my flip-flops. I didn't run into many people along the way; those I did see were disheveled and exhausted, clearly heading for a wash before bed. Outside, the lights were dim, with only a few stray pedestrians.
A couple was kissing by the entrance, and a heavy-set guy was parking his bike by the curb. Including me, there were only four of us under the streetlights. When I walked into the convenience store, the cashier was slumped over the counter, sleeping.
So, at first, I didn't notice anything wrong. I grabbed two Snickers bars from the counter and picked out a bucket of instant noodles and two packs of Little Raccoon snack noodles from the shelves. I was about to check out when I realized we were out of water in the dorm. I walked to the back shelf to grab a four-liter jug of Nongfu Spring. It was then that I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, that the guy behind me hadn't moved an inch.
I turned around to look at him. He was standing in front of the towel rack, eyes downcast. One hand held a bottle of Head & Shoulders, while the other was poised over the towels in a gripping motion. But he was frozen, as if someone had hit the pause button on his entire existence.
I waved a hand in front of his eyes. No reaction. I checked for a pulse at his nose. No breath. Yet he remained standing there, his complexion healthy, not looking at all like someone who had suddenly fainted or suffered a seizure. His eyes were wide open.
I rushed back to the counter and shoved the cashier. "Something’s wrong with the guy in the back! Call 120! Call an ambulance!"
The cashier remained slumped. I couldn't shake him awake; instead, I pushed him right off his stool. I ran behind the counter, and he just hung limply over the chair. Panic surged through me. This was too eerie. I dropped my things and lunged forward to check his pulse. There was none. No breath. But just like the student in the back, he didn't look like he’d died of an illness.
Suddenly, I caught sight of the clock on the wall. It had stopped.
I had a faint inkling of what was happening, but I didn't dare believe it. The disposable watches under the glass counter—the ones that cost twenty-seven yuan—had all stopped. I pulled out my phone and opened the stopwatch. I hit start. The digits, which should have begun racing immediately, didn't jump. The timer... the digits "05:00" remained etched on the screen, motionless.
The time at the top of the screen was frozen at 12:43.
I fled the store as if I’d seen a ghost.
Our university was surrounded by a business district. Usually, even late at night, the streets were busy with traffic, and occasionally you’d hear the roar of a modified car racing through the streets. Now, there wasn't a single sound. The couple remained locked in their kiss near the gate. The heavy-set man had his key halfway out of the lock, his silhouette frozen in the moment of turning his head.
The entire world had stopped. There were no flickering lights; even the night clouds were motionless. The entire city was as silent as a graveyard. The only sound was the noise of my own swallowing as I stood beneath my dorm building.
Is anyone else still awake?
Does anyone else see that time has stopped?
Why did it stop? What is it trying to tell me?
Why me?
Just as I was on the verge of a breakdown, I saw a shadow flash quickly across the top-floor water room. The lights in our water room never went out.
I bolted up the stairs.
***
