Chapter Eight: The Legendary Ghost Story

This old building from the sixties, affectionately known as Shu Ke Residence, was never short of haunting rumors and ghost stories. When she was younger, she’d heard many but never witnessed one herself, so she simply let them pass. There was just one time when she almost saw something—back in her final year before graduation, on a weekend evening. She and Lu Tian were heading from their second-floor classroom up to the sixth floor for the weekly dance. As they passed the fourth-floor stairwell, they saw someone—or something—standing there with long, unkempt hair, so black and thick it hung over the face and nearly touched the ground, concealing all features. Their first instinct was to turn and flee downstairs. Hearts pounding, they recounted the tale to their classmates, and the braver ones went for a look. Some saw it, some didn’t. Maybe it was just a girl who’d finished washing her hair in the water room, and they’d happened to bump into her. But the fourth floor only had locked laboratory doors at either end of the stairwell and no water room. Who would wash their hair and then run upstairs to scare people? Besides, no girl in the entire school had hair that long. But the story faded with time, and only now, recalling it, did fear return.

But that was later. Right now, Dong Yanyan couldn’t afford to dwell on it.

“Our dorm faces the shady side, and behind the building is a river. This is the girls’ dormitory—a place that’s shadow upon shadow. And it’s unnaturally cold here, unless… In such an old building, there must be things lurking. You know the light next to Room 110 in the corridor? It’s always flickering. Think about it, in our school, any teacher could double as an electrician, but that light’s been repaired for years and still doesn’t work. On the second floor, directly above that lamp, a senior said a student once hanged herself there…” Dong Yanyan rattled off every ghost story she knew, making everyone shiver and huddle deeper under their blankets.

“That’s all nonsense. Even if someone did die, they wouldn’t know us. What’s it got to do with us?” scoffed Li Hui, the dorm leader who slept on the upper bunk across from them. She turned over and promptly went to sleep.

“If such a thing really happened, you might draw it out by talking about it at night,” whispered Liu Ying, lying head to head with Dong Yanyan, her eyes wide with terror.

“Exactly!” Dong Yanyan broke out in a cold sweat. She might have been a thirty-year-old woman in her original life, but that didn’t make her brave—quite the opposite, in fact. She was the most timid of all, to the point that she’d begged Leng Yue to go to the bathroom with her every night.

“If someone calls your name in the middle of the night, no matter what, don’t answer, understand?” she added nervously. But thinking about the bathroom now made her need to go herself. What should she do? The water room was the closest, just past a staircase and a large mirror, but it was eerily cold in there, and even during the day she felt uneasy going alone, never mind at night when everything was silent.

The others were equally spooked when suddenly the lights went out, plunging the room into darkness.

Gu Xiaohan, who’d been listening intently to the story from the lower bunk, let out a terrified shriek, startling everyone into screaming as well.

There was a steady knock at the door, and everyone fell silent at once.

“Lights out! Go to sleep! No noise!” came the stern voice of a teacher from the doorway.

The calm male voice reassured Dong Yanyan slightly. Maybe there were still some girls in the water room finishing up. Grasping at this hope, she jumped from her bed, slipped on her slippers, and dashed to the water room. Inside, two older girls were doing laundry and chatting. Hearing their voices, Dong Yanyan finally relaxed, used the bathroom, and, on her way back, passed the large coat mirror facing the main hall. Her nerves were still on edge, so she avoided looking at it as much as possible. Luckily, her dorm room was right ahead. She heaved a sigh of relief, habitually glanced at the lamp above Room 110 at the end of the corridor, and, as if sensing her gaze, the lamp—previously off—suddenly flickered to life. She screamed, squeezed her eyes shut, burst into the dorm, locked the door behind her, and leapt onto her bed, burrowing under the covers with her heart racing wildly.

Down the hall, Mr. Guo, the night inspector, pressed the switch for that same lamp, smiling in satisfaction as it worked again. “Finally fixed!” he thought. The wiring here had been a problem for a long time. Old building—everything was worn out. He shook his head and headed upstairs.

“Dong Yanyan, heaven didn’t send you back just to meet ghosts, don’t worry, really!” Dong Yanyan murmured useless reassurances to herself under the blanket. But then she wondered: What exactly was she now? Was her thirty-year-old soul inhabiting a seventeen-year-old body? Did that make her… something else altogether?

“Fifth Sister… Fifth Sister…” A faint female voice drifted to her ears. Dong Yanyan’s hair stood on end. She buried her head under the quilt, chanting inwardly, “Don’t answer! Whatever you do, don’t answer…”

But then a cold, slippery hand reached under her blanket, its icy touch snapping the last thread of her composure. She shrieked, a blood-curdling scream that jolted everyone awake. The other girls sat up in terror, staring at her. Liu Ying flicked on a flashlight, illuminating a pale face beside Dong Yanyan’s bed. Heart pounding, Dong Yanyan stared for a long time before finally finding her voice.

“Xiaohan?” she asked, still shaken. “What are you doing by my bed?”

“I needed to go to the bathroom but was too scared to go alone. I called you, but you didn’t answer,” Gu Xiaohan replied, patting her chest and looking innocent. “I was afraid to call your name, so I just whispered, ‘Fifth Sister.’”

“Come on, I’ll go with you. Look at how timid she is!” Li Hui jumped down from her bunk to accompany Gu Xiaohan.

After this false alarm, Dong Yanyan lay back in bed, exhausted in both body and soul. The commotion had set the dormitory girls whispering in small groups again. The soft conversation drifted into her ears, and she tossed and turned, unable to sleep. Only then did she remember her nerves—she’d always been sensitive to noise and light at night and could never sleep through any disturbance. She’d quarreled with her roommates about it before, but looking back, she realized how selfish she’d been. Should everyone have to be silent just for her sake?

With that, she fumbled in her bedside box for a pocket radio—a must-have at the start of the school year, back in the nineties before computers were common in dorms and almost every student owned one.

She put on her headphones and switched it on. The gentle, ethereal voice of Mavis He filled her ears: “In the frozen moments, as midnight passes, memories shoot across the heart like falling stars. Forgetting, forgetting, lost in confusion, choosing to be forgotten in memories… You’ve forgotten all the sweet dreams, and after waking, when will you see the warm dawn again? Like a soul lost in the night, wandering with no direction, caring little for what lies ahead, whether eternal or fleeting…”