My name is Chen Du. Twenty-four years old. Unemployed. Four thousand three hundred yuan in savings. Last weekend, someone asked me to go to an escape room. Two hundred yuan per person. I actually went.
Looking back, it was one of the most expensive mistakes I've ever made. Not the money. Two hundred yuan for a life. When you do the math, that's dirt cheap.
But let's go back to that day.
July 14th. Saturday. Thirty-nine degrees outside. I was lying on the straw mat in my rented room, fan aimed at my face on max speed. My phone buzzed. Old Zhou.
"Brother Du. Escape room. Need one more. You in?"
"How much per person?"
"Two hundred."
"I'm out."
"My treat."
"Send me the address."
By the time I got there, the other three were already waiting. Old Zhou was leaning against the standing AC unit by the entrance, sucking up cold air. Ah Jie was crouched on the steps, smoking. Xiao Lu was touching up her lipstick using her phone's front camera. All three dressed light—shorts, t-shirts, flip-flops. Same as me. We didn't look like serious escape room people.
The place was called "Abyss Echo." Fourth floor of a half-dead mall on the south side of town. A third of the shops were boarded up. The escalator groaned. The lights buzzed like they were on their last breath. The escape room facade was decent enough, though. Black background wall. Dark red 3D lettering. An LCD screen by the entrance, looping a promo video.
I glanced at the video: dark corridor, flickering lights, a woman in a white dress slowly turning her head toward the camera, her mouth stretched ear to ear.
"That's it?" I pointed at the screen. "The makeup's worse than my middle school talent show."
"It's cheap," Old Zhou clapped my shoulder. "Ninety-nine on weekdays, one ninety-nine on weekends. Bargain price for this part of town."
The receptionist was a girl with glasses, low ponytail, name tag reading "Xiao He." She had us sign waivers, handed each of us a walkie-talkie, then started reading the script.
She paused when she got to the line: "This room features one NPC."
Her lips moved. Like her tongue got stuck. Then she moved on fast. Lost her place, I figured. Who doesn't stumble over a line now and then?
But I noticed she didn't look up after saying it. She stared at the script for a second too long—not reading, just spacing out. Then she shut the binder, pushed her glasses up, and snapped back to that professional smile.
The premise was simple: we were a group of explorers who'd wandered into an abandoned mansion. A wronged female ghost haunted the place. We had to find the keys hidden inside and unlock the front door before she caught us. Thirty minutes total. One actress playing the ghost, appearing randomly to chase us.
"If the NPC taps your shoulder, you're out. Head to the exit," Xiao He adjusted her glasses. "The exit's at the other end. Follow the glow-in-the-dark arrows. If you get scared, use the walkie-talkie to call the control room. We'll send someone in to guide you out."
Ah Jie stubbed out his cigarette. Asked the question everyone was thinking: "What does the NPC actually look like? Can you give us a heads-up so I know what I'm dealing with?"
Xiao He shook her head, smiled a little. "You'll know when you see her."
It was a normal smile. But something underneath it felt off. I've turned that expression over in my head a thousand times since. It was nerves. The smile was forced.
When I signed the waiver, I gave the form a quick scan. Standard boilerplate. "No entry for people with heart conditions or hypertension." "We are not liable for accidents." Name and phone number. The four of us signed one by one. I wrote down my number and got a digit wrong—had to cross it out and rewrite. It wasn't until later that I realized I hadn't made a mistake. The pen slid on its own. Like someone had nudged my wrist.
The door was a fake antique—wood with a rusty iron lock. It shut behind us. The lock clanked, a deep dull sound.
Dark inside. The only light came from small red bulbs mounted on the walls every few meters, dim enough to make the hallway look like a darkroom.
The air smelled of damp mold mixed with cheap fragrance. Under the mold, there was a faint metallic tang. Like old pipes. I could hear water dripping somewhere deep in the corridor.
"Damn," Ah Jie's voice came from behind. "The immersion's not bad."
Old Zhou took point, phone flashlight on. According to the script, the first key was hidden in "the ghost's bedroom." We had to go down this hallway, turn right, find the third door.
The corridor was narrow. Two people side by side was a squeeze. The walls were lined with old photographs, black-and-white, yellowed. Group shots, faces too blurry to make out. I ran my hand along the wall. Cold. Damp.
"The AC's cranked up," I said.
"All horror escape rooms do that," Xiao Lu replied. "Drop the temperature for atmosphere. Old trick."
Right as she finished, a sound came from the end of the corridor.
Not dripping.
Footsteps.
Light ones. Like bare feet on a wooden floor. Coming toward us from the far end. All four of us went silent at the same time. I felt Xiao Lu step back, her shoulder bumping my arm. She didn't say anything, but I felt her trembling. That fine kind of tremble, like standing on a bus with the engine vibrating through you.
The flashlight beam wobbled at the end of the hallway. Nothing there. The red light painted the walls the color of seeping blood.
Then the footsteps stopped.
In their place came a soft laugh. A woman's laugh. Not the exaggerated cackle from a horror movie. Just a quiet, short sound. Like hearing someone chuckle under their breath behind you on the street.
"NPC's clocking in," Old Zhou muttered. "Move. Find the bedroom."
We headed down the corridor. I took the rear. Habit. Being last lets you watch everything ahead and pick your direction when it's time to run. The hallway was about twenty meters long, dead-ending at a T-junction. Left branch, right branch.
We turned right.
As we turned, I caught something in my peripheral vision down the left branch.
At the end of the left corridor stood a white figure.
I couldn't make out the face. Too far. Too dark. But I could see a white human outline, standing in the shadows at the end of the hall. Facing us.
Motionless.
White dress. Had to be the actress playing the ghost.
But why was she standing at the end of the left corridor? According to the script, wasn't she supposed to be chasing us from behind? And her position bothered me. That end of the corridor was a solid wall. No door. No passage. If she wanted to jump out and scare us, she should've come from behind us, not from a dead end.
I didn't have time to think it through, though. Old Zhou had already pushed open the third door.
The ghost's bedroom. A small room. Old wooden bed in the center, dark red sheets. A comb and a round mirror on the nightstand. A wardrobe in the corner, door half open, a few old clothes hanging inside.
"Find the key!" Ah Jie said.
All four of us started tearing the place apart. I opened the nightstand drawer. Empty. Old Zhou lifted the pillow. Underneath was a yellowed slip of paper with four words written in red:
"Behind the mirror."
Xiao Lu moved to check the round mirror. She tried prying it. Fixed to the wall. She knocked on the glass. Hollow sound.
"There's empty space behind this," she said.
Ah Jie didn't bother with finesse. He punched the mirror. Glass shattered, fragments raining down, revealing a recess behind it. Three keys, linked by a rusted iron ring.
"Nice. Brute force puzzle-solving." I gave him a thumbs-up.
First set of keys in hand. Now we had to get to the main hall on the first floor to unlock a chest. According to the map, the hall was at the end of the corridor, left turn. We left the bedroom and headed back toward the T-junction.
This time I was second. Xiao Lu took the rear.
At the junction, I made a point of looking left.
The white figure was gone.
Just an empty hallway and a red light blinking at the far end. But there was something that made me pause for half a second. A photograph on the wall under that light. Yellowed like the others, but the person in it was posed strangely. Someone in white. Standing. Facing the camera. Head tilted slightly. Arms hanging at their sides.
Same position. Same spot. Same posture as the figure I'd just seen.
Before I could point it out to Old Zhou, he'd already turned toward the hall.
"She ran off?" I muttered to myself.
"Who ran off?" Old Zhou looked back.
"That white figure at the end of the left corridor. Probably the NPC."
"I didn't see anything."
"You were in front. Turned too fast. I caught it in my peripheral."
Old Zhou shrugged it off. "Probably getting ready to jump out at us. Saw us go into the room and pulled back."
We kept moving toward the main hall. It was a high-ceilinged space. Long table in the center. A locked wooden chest on top. Wooden floors that creaked underfoot. Oil paintings on the walls. Landscapes mostly. But one was crooked. Tilted about fifteen degrees.
We unlocked the chest. Inside was the second clue: a yellowed sheet of paper with printed text, explaining that the ghost had been locked in the basement and starved to death. Her vengeful spirit could never leave. Find the basement entrance to retrieve the final escape key.
"The basement entrance is behind the kitchen pantry," Xiao Lu read from the clue.
The kitchen was at the other end of the corridor. We had to go back, cross the T-junction, and keep going straight.
At the junction, I heard something.
Different this time. A rustling sound. Fabric dragging across the floor. Soft, like the hem of a dress scraping the ground.
I stopped. Looked left.
And froze.
The white figure was back. Same spot. Same posture.
Motionless.
But closer.
She wasn't at the end of the corridor anymore. She was in the middle. Like in the time it took us to pass through, she'd taken a few steps forward. Then stopped again.
I aimed my flashlight at her. The moment the beam hit, she stepped back. Just one step. Then stopped. The light caught her outline. White dress. Hair hanging down, covering her face. Arms at her sides. Very white fingernails.
The way she stepped back was wrong, too. Normal person gets blinded by a light—they turn away or raise a hand. She didn't. She slid backward one step, perfectly straight. Like someone grabbed her by the collar and yanked.
"Old Zhou." I kept my voice low.
"What?"
"There's someone in the left corridor."
Everyone stopped. Looked left together.
Old Zhou's flashlight was brighter than mine. The white beam lit up that whole stretch.
Empty.
No one. No white dress. Nothing. Just the yellowed photographs on the walls and the blinking red light at the end.
"Where?" Old Zhou said.
I opened my mouth. Said nothing. Because there was nothing to see. The corridor was empty.
"You seeing things?" Ah Jie said. "Red lights mess with your eyes."
"Probably," I said.
But I knew. I had seen her.
We moved on to the kitchen. Small. Narrow. Behind the pantry was indeed a hidden door. It opened onto a staircase leading down. Steep, cramped stairs between damp concrete walls. The mold-and-rust smell got stronger as we descended.
The basement reeked of it. Old Zhou's flashlight swept down. About ten steps. At the bottom, a half-open iron-barred gate.
Darker than upstairs. Old Zhou's flashlight was the only light. The beam passed over junk piled in the corners. Broken chairs. Old crates. A moldy roll of carpet.
In the center of the floor sat an iron box.
"Last key should be in there," Old Zhou said.
That was when we heard the footsteps.
Heavy. Fast.
Coming down the stairs.
Something was charging into the basement.
"NPC incoming!" Ah Jie yelled.
A white blur shot down from the stairway entrance. Moving way too fast for a normal person. The NPC was practically on all fours, hurtling down in a twisted, inhuman scramble.
White dress. Hair covering her face. Very white fingernails.
She came right at us.
Instinct took over. All four of us bolted backward. The basement wasn't big. A wall behind us. Only one passage to the right. We ran down it, footsteps echoing in the narrow space, mixing with our ragged breathing.
After a few seconds, I glanced back.
The NPC was chasing. Not particularly fast, but her posture was wrong. Upper body tilted forward. Arms hanging. Hair swaying in front of her face. It gave the impression that this wasn't a person running.
The passage curved.
At the turn, I saw two things at once.
First: at the end of the passage ahead, a door glowing with an exit sign. Fluorescent. The way out.
Second: to my left, in a recessed alcove, stood a figure.
White dress. Hair covering her face.
Motionless.
Her pose was identical to the chasing NPC. But she was just standing there. In the alcove. Not chasing. Not moving.
Facing us. In the dark.
I caught it in my peripheral. The whole thing lasted less than a second. My body kept moving with the momentum of the turn. My head swiveled. My legs were running. But my brain hit pause.
She was in front of us.
The NPC chasing us was behind us.
I could still hear those footsteps behind me. Still chasing.
But the one in front stood motionless in the alcove.
Then I ran past the turn. The alcove became a blind spot. I couldn't see if anyone was still there. But in that moment, something felt off. The chasing NPC's footsteps, as they passed me—they seemed to slow for half a beat. Like she'd seen the alcove too. Or sensed something.
"Exit!" Old Zhou shouted ahead.
I snapped back. Ran after them. The passage ended at a fire door. We burst through into the reception area. Cold white lights. The girl with glasses at the front desk. The standing AC unit.
I bent over, hands on my knees, gasping. Xiao Lu dropped to the floor. Ah Jie leaned against the wall, face pale, still running his mouth: "Holy shit. That was intense."
But I noticed Ah Jie's fingers were shaking. He was trying to pull a cigarette from the pack. Two slipped out. The third one he finally got between his lips.
A staff member walked over and handed each of us a cup of water. I took it. Didn't drink. I turned to look at the door we'd just burst through.
It was already shut. Silent. It was a fire door with a hydraulic closer. It should've shut with a slow, dampened motion, a solid thud. But when it closed just now, I hadn't heard a thing.
Old Zhou finished his water. Wiped his mouth. Grinned. "That NPC was hardcore. When she charged down the stairs, the hairs on my arms stood up."
"She was fast too," Ah Jie said. "I swear she almost got me." His voice was half a pitch higher than usual.
"Your NPCs really go all out," Old Zhou gave the staff guy a thumbs-up. "Two-person tag team, one chasing, one blocking. Scared the hell out of us."
The staff member was a young guy in a black t-shirt. At those words, his smile froze.
"What?" he said.
"Dual NPCs," Old Zhou said. "One chasing from behind, one blocking up front. Nice coordination."
The guy's expression shifted completely. He set his cup on the table and looked at Old Zhou. Spoke slowly. "This room only has one NPC."
The air went still for two seconds. I noticed the hum of the AC suddenly sounding very loud. And the water in Xiao Lu's cup was trembling. Her hand. She was holding the cup on her lap. Ripples spreading in circles.
"Impossible," Ah Jie said. "I saw it with my own eyes. Someone standing in the alcove at the turn. Another one chasing us. Two people. Same outfit. White dress."
"One NPC," the guy repeated. Dead serious. "Our script specifies one NPC. It's always been one person. The schedule today has one person assigned. Her name's Xiao Chen."
He turned and called out. "Xiao Chen!"
A girl in a white dress came out of the break room. She'd taken off the wig. Hair in a bun. Sweat on her forehead. Holding a thermos. She looked at us. "What's up?"
The guy turned to her. "You're solo today, right?"
Xiao Chen looked confused. "Yeah. I'm the only one on the schedule. You guys only scheduled me, right?"
The guy slowly turned back to face us. He didn't say anything else. Xiao Chen looked at us, then at the guy. Her smile slowly faded too.
I set down my cup. "Then who was the one in front?"
The guy stared at me. Blinked. Opened his mouth. Closed it.
At the front desk, Xiao He lifted her head and adjusted her glasses. She was looking at us over her computer screen. Her expression was wrong.
I walked up to the front desk, elbows on the counter. "Step out here a second. I need to ask you something."
Xiao He hesitated. Then came out.
"Your room. Really only one NPC?"
"Yes. Just one."
"But in the passage, at the turn, we saw two at the same time. One chasing us. Another standing in the alcove. Not moving."
Xiao He's face changed. Hard to describe. Not fear. More like someone had poked at something she didn't want to acknowledge.
She was quiet for a few seconds. Then she said something that still makes my scalp prickle when I think about it.
"That alcove. It was supposed to be an old mechanism slot. No NPC was ever stationed there."
"What do you mean?"
She pointed at the room's floor plan. "During the original design, they planned to put a pop-up mannequin there. The budget got cut. They never installed anything. There shouldn't be anyone standing in that spot."
Old Zhou leaned over the floor plan. "Yeah. That's the spot. The NPC was right there. White dress. Looked exactly like the one chasing us."
The staff guy came over too. Brows furrowed. He glanced at Xiao He. She shook her head. Barely perceptible. But I saw it.
"Your group today," Xiao He spoke up, voice dry. "Which session were you?"
"First one," Ah Jie said. "Doors open at ten. We booked ten-ten. Got here at nine-fifty. Waited outside for twenty minutes."
Xiao He flipped through the sign-in sheet. Three pages. Then she stopped.
"What?" I asked.
She turned the sheet around. Our session was the first line. Right at the top. Date. Time. Headcount. Signatures. All clear.
There was nothing above us.
No sessions before ours today.
"Then the one I saw," I said. "Who was it?"
No one answered.
The lobby went quiet enough to hear the AC humming. The guy stared at the floor plan. Xiao He's fingers pressed into the sign-in sheet. Knuckles white. Xiao Chen was still standing by the break room door, thermos frozen halfway to her mouth. She'd forgotten to drink.
"One of your employees, probably," Xiao Lu said suddenly. Her voice was soft. Every word trembling. "Maybe someone went in to check equipment. Just happened to be standing there."
"I was the one who did the equipment check this morning," the guy said. "I went in alone. Checked everything. Came out. Whole thing took less than five minutes. And I was wearing black. Not a white dress."
From the break room, Xiao Chen added quietly, "When I came in this morning, there was only one white dress in the dressing room. The one I'm wearing. The backup was still hanging there. Untouched."
Silence.
Ah Jie pulled out his cigarette pack. Slipped one between his lips. Didn't light it. He stared at the escape room's closed door like he was working through something.
"I saw a post once," he said. "About this place."
"What post?" I asked.
Ah Jie took the cigarette out of his mouth. Rolled it between his thumb and forefinger. "Said last year, some girl came to play. Got separated from her friends. Staff cleared the room without noticing her. She spent the whole night alone inside. They didn't find her until the next morning."
"What happened to her?" Xiao Lu asked.
"The post got deleted," Ah Jie said. "Vanished. I don't know what happened after that. But one of the comments said—when the girl finally woke up in the hospital, she kept repeating the same thing."
"What?"
"'There was someone else in there.'"
I looked at Xiao He. Head down. Staring at the sign-in sheet. Her bangs hid half her face.
"Is that true?" I asked her.
Xiao He didn't answer. But her fingers, gripping the sign-in sheet, went white at the knuckles. The paper edge crinkled. After a moment, she said something so faint I had to lean in to hear it.
"After that incident, we added a new rule. Room clearance requires two-person confirmation. No solo checks."
She paused.
"But that alcove position. It was there before I started working here."
I understood what she meant. It wasn't "added after last year's incident." It was "there before I came."
"Before what happened to that girl?" I asked.
Xiao He didn't nod. Didn't shake her head. Didn't speak. She set the sign-in sheet back on the counter. Adjusted her glasses. Returned to that professional smile she'd worn at the start.
But I saw it. Her lower lip was trembling. She was biting down hard.
Old Zhou patted my shoulder. "Let's go. Don't spook ourselves. Probably just saw wrong. It was dark in there. Red lighting makes everyone look like a ghost."
I said, "You saw her too."
Old Zhou went quiet for a second. Then forced a smile. "Can't I be wrong?"
No one laughed.
We set the cups down and walked out. The AC's chill followed us into the mall's stuffy corridor. I glanced back at the front desk. Xiao He was still standing there, clutching that sign-in sheet. Watching us.
Watching me, specifically.
Her mouth moved. Like she was saying something. Too far away to hear. But I could read her lips. Four words.
No. Five words.
"Don't look back."
I turned away and followed the others into the elevator. The doors slid shut. Through the narrowing gap, I saw the escape room's fire door slowly open a crack. No one pushing it. It just opened on its own.
The elevator dropped. Floor numbers ticking down. Old Zhou said nothing. Ah Jie said nothing. Xiao Lu said nothing. The fluorescent light in the elevator hummed. Same sound as the AC at the escape room front desk.
No one talked much on the ride back. Ah Jie sat in the passenger seat, window rolled down, smoking one after another. Ash blowing all over the car. No one told him to stop. Old Zhou drove, eyes on the road. But his knuckles stayed white on the steering wheel. In the rearview mirror, you could see the bones straining against the skin. The radio was playing some old Cantonese ballad. Xiao Lu sat next to me, head down, scrolling through her phone. But her thumb wasn't moving on the screen. The lock screen lit up, dimmed, lit up again. She was just staring at the date and time.
I pulled out my own phone. Opened a review app. Searched the escape room.
Four-point-five stars. Over two thousand reviews. I scrolled down. Mostly normal. Realistic sets. Hardworking NPC. Good experience. Some complaints. Too dark. Confusing layout. Got lost inside.
Around the third page, I found one.
Three stars. Posted a year ago.
Short. One line.
"My friend says she saw two NPCs. The staff says there's only one. Don't know who's lying."
No response from the business.
I tapped into the user's profile. Default gray silhouette avatar. No nickname. Just a randomly generated ID. Only one review. Ever.
But one detail stopped me cold. The account's registration date. July 15th, last year.
July 14th was the day that girl had her incident. If the post was right, she'd been found the morning of the 15th.
Which meant the day she was discovered, someone registered this account. Posted one review. And never logged in again.
I turned my screen off. Leaned back against the seat. Closed my eyes.
The white figure in that alcove wouldn't leave my head.
She just stood there. Motionless.
Didn't chase us. Didn't make a sound. Didn't do anything aggressive.
She was just standing there, facing our direction.
Like watching.
Or, more like—pointing. Pointing at that alcove. Telling us something was there.
The sun outside was blistering. The car's AC was blasting. But cold sweat kept running down my back. Because there was one detail I hadn't told anyone. Not even Old Zhou.
At the turn. That split second. When my peripheral vision caught her.
I saw her face.
The light was too dim. I'm not sure if I really saw it. But that face—mostly hidden by hair, barely visible in the dark—had no features.
Not hidden by the hair.
There just weren't any.
Flat. Blank. Like a sheet of white paper.
I told myself I'd imagined it. I hoped I'd imagined it.
But I heard Old Zhou say to the staff: "Two people, same outfit, white dress." He saw her too. Ah Jie saw her. Xiao Lu saw her.
It wasn't just my hallucination.
I thought about that face the whole ride home. What it meant to have no face. Was she born that way? Or was it erased? If the latter—who erased it? Time? Or did she not want anyone to recognize her? Or maybe the face was waiting. Waiting for the right person before it would reappear.
I opened my eyes. Looked out the window. The city was warping in the heat. Pedestrians with umbrellas, walking slow. Everything was so aggressively normal. Like the past few minutes inside that room had happened in another world. But I knew one thing for sure now. That extra thing in the escape room—it had always been there. Before our names went on that sign-in sheet. Before Xiao He picked up the script. Before Old Zhou even called me. It had been waiting. Waiting for the next group to find that alcove. Or waiting for one specific person.
My phone buzzed.
Xiao Lu's shoulders jolted. She didn't check her phone. She looked at me instead. Just a glance. Quick. But there was something in her eyes. Like she already knew what my phone was about to show me.
I looked down. A text message. Unknown number.
No caller ID. Just a string of digits I'd never seen. But I stared at those digits for a few seconds. Half of them I recognized. The first seven. The ones I'd written wrong on the sign-in sheet. Where the pen slipped on its own. At the time I thought my hand twitched. I didn't think that anymore.
Five words.
"She's still inside."
I didn't reply. I blocked the number, flipped my phone face-down on my lap. Xiao Lu took a soft breath beside me. Turned her head toward the window. I heard her say something. Very quiet. To the glass, not to me.
"What does 'she's still inside' mean?"
Red light ahead. Old Zhou hit the brakes. The car eased to a stop. The old song on the radio was hitting its final note, the melody dragging out long.
I heard Ah Jie flick his cigarette butt out the window. Sparks scattered across the asphalt.
"Old Zhou," I said.
"Yeah?"
"That alcove—"
"Don't." Old Zhou cut me off. Flat tone. But the hand on the steering wheel tightened visibly. I watched the bones of his knuckles go white enough to break through skin.
Green light. The car pulled forward, merging into the afternoon traffic.
I never brought it up again.
But I never deleted that text.
It sits quiet in my blocked messages list. Along with that dead number. Like a splinter you can't pull out. Sometimes I wake up at three in the morning. Open the blocked list without thinking. Look at those five words.
She's still inside.
And I'm still outside.
At least for now.
But last month, when I went to renew my lease, my landlord asked me something. "Hey, Chen. A girl moved in next door to you. You seen her?"
I said no.
"Weird," the landlord said, flipping through his records. "She said she's been living next to you for a week now. You two really never ran into each other?"
"What's she look like?"
"Long hair. Pale skin. Doesn't talk much. When I asked her name, she just smiled. Didn't answer."
I put my key in the lock. Turned it twice. The door opened. I stood in the doorway. Didn't move.
The hallway carried a faint smell. Damp mold. Something metallic underneath. Exactly like the escape room.
I turned my head. Looked at the door next to mine.
Closed. But under the gap at the bottom, a thin line of red light was seeping through.
Like that blinking red light that never stops.