A Guest in a Ghost House

Chapter 2

Chapter 002 Trying to Get Away
I don’t know how long it took me to recover. I put the three photos back in the envelope, slowly walked to the table facing the bed, and carefully put the envelope in a box that was already filled with countless white envelopes. All of my actions reflected the care of a surgeon in an operation room, as if afraid of waking a sleeping demon.

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I looked at the box, slowly backing away towards the bed. For the past three months, I have been receiving a letter from that deliveryman or a colleague of his every three days.

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There was always only a recipient’s address with no sender and a picture of an eye that looked like a child’s drawing.

In addition, each letter would contain three photos. No matter how I threw them, the three photos would always be stacked neatly: a photo of life, a photo of death, as well as a very strange photo. The only difference was the person in each set of photos; some were young or old, male or female.

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I took a long breath and looked at the box. In the beginning, I had thought it was just a prank done by one of my friends. However, when I had once showed it to the owner of the printing shop across the street from me, he told me that these were just overexposed waste photos. That he couldn’t make anything out on them at all. That’s when I started getting a little scared. See, the photos appeared very clear to me.

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I decided to get a second opinion, hoping the owner of the shop was messing with me. I had asked a lot of people - my friends and my neighbors - but everyone said the exact same thing same as the printing shop owner’s.

Was everyone lying to me? Was I living my very own Truman Show?

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Obviously, I knew that it was impossible for so many people to be in on something like this. Yet I couldn’t help but wish I was in Truman's world. At least then I’d know everything was fake.

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Whatever it was that I was facing, it was real. At the very least, my fear was real.

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It was dark outside and the alarm clock went off at 7:30, right on time.

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I slowly picked up the TV remote at the head of the bed and turned on the TV. The local news channel, which had been the channel on the TV for months, hadn’t changed.

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I quietly watched the reports that seemed meaningless, until a news report appeared stating that a crowd of joggers found a body near the river this morning. Police rushed to the scene, and after a forensic medical examination, the victim was determined to be an 18-year-old female and the time of her death was about 1:00. The possibility of suicide had been ruled out. At the present moment, the identity and cause of death of the victim was still being confirmed...

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After watching the news, I turned off the TV. The people in those photos might not all appear in the daily news, but a large portion of them did. Those who didn’t appear in the news might not have been found yet. From the moment I received that day’s photos, I knew that person in the photos was not likely to be alive. The whole thing was becoming routine.

I turned on all the lights in the room, even the desk lamp and a flashlight. I had fixed the flashlight in place with a few thick books, shining its beam at the foot of the bed.