(Some descriptions in this chapter may be unsettling. Reader discretion advised.)
“What’s going on? What happened?”
“I heard someone died again at the Mayflower Apartments.”
“Again? How many is that now… That place must be cursed!”
“This makes the eighth one, I think. This time it was really terrifying. The guy was just walking down the street when he suddenly collapsed and stopped moving. I was right behind him—my God, it nearly scared me into a heart attack. The doctors were still trying to resuscitate him, but it’s been so long… he’s probably long dead by now…”
The buzzing chatter of the onlookers seeped through the car window and into the ears of Shelly and Everly.
Shelly’s face looked terrible.
He had always been a timid man to begin with. After several incidents in a row, Shelly had instinctively developed a fear of the Mayflower Apartments.
“So… earlier you told me that the Mayflower Apartments eat people. What exactly do you mean by that?” After hesitating for a moment, he asked the taxi driver.
“Sir, you see, we’ve already arrived at your destination, and I still need to hurry off to pick up another fare…” The driver put on a troubled expression.
“I’ll pay extra.” Shelly immediately understood the hint. Not bothering to worry about the cost, he pulled out his wallet and handed over a ten-dollar bill. The driver accepted it with a broad smile and, without holding anything back, shared everything he knew.
“It all started with that couple in 304 who offered themselves up as a sacrifice to Koukou. You’ve probably heard about that. After their bodies were discovered, a wave of foul stench spread through the Mayflower Apartments. A lot of people fled the building and slept out on the streets. It wasn’t until the next day—after the landlord had someone clean up the scene and then sealed 304 with a big padlock—that the residents gradually moved back in.”
“And that’s when the nightmare began… after they returned to the apartment.”
The taxi driver clearly loved telling stories. He lowered his voice and punctuated it with startled exclamations, skillfully building an eerie atmosphere.
According to him, the first to meet with trouble was the resident of 303, right next door to 304. She was a restaurant server who had always been diligent at her job—never late or leaving early for over ten years—yet one day she failed to show up for work without any warning. Her boss grew uneasy and went to check on her after closing time, only to find her naked, kneeling beside the bathtub, her head submerged in a tub filled with water. She had long since stopped breathing.
The cause of death was drowning, but the manner of death was extremely strange. No alcohol or drugs were found in the waitress’s system, and there were no signs of a struggle at the scene. The police investigated but turned up nothing useful. In the end, they could only speculate that she had been too exhausted, fallen asleep before stepping into the tub, and accidentally drowned with her head in the water.
Naturally, this conclusion was obviously unreliable. But there was nothing to be done—she had been all alone. Her husband and children had died long ago, and she had no close relatives or friends willing to stand up for her or question the police’s findings.
And so, the first death case was hastily closed.
The next to die was an elderly man from 204. He was advanced in age and had a habit of heavy drinking, so when people found him dead one morning on the staircase leading to the second floor, his neck broken, no one thought much of it. They simply assumed it was an accidental fall.
The third victim lived in 305. He was a construction worker who suddenly collapsed on the job and fell onto exposed rebar, which pierced straight through him.
“…Actually, by this point, some people had already started to sense that something was wrong,” the driver said. “Because the rooms where these victims lived—303, 204, 305—have you noticed? They all surround 304! But then the fourth death broke this pattern…”
By this point, Shelly was already drenched in cold sweat.
—What breaking the pattern? He lived in 404! The reason he hadn’t died wasn’t because the pattern was wrong, but because… because he hadn’t been back to the apartment at all during this period!
Did the rumor that the apartment ate people actually turn out to be true?!
The taxi driver failed to notice Shelly’s terror. Counting on his fingers, he continued listing the remaining victims from the Mayflower Apartments and their causes of death. Shelly, however, had completely lost interest in the story. He lowered the car window a bit more, leaned over, and took several deep breaths at the window, trying to calm his panicked nerves.
At that moment, a wave of stench rode in on the wind and invaded the noses of both him and Everly.
It was that familiar summer smell of rotten fish left in a refrigerator—but several times stronger than the afternoon when they fled the apartment. It was practically a concentrated, ultra-concentrated biochemical bomb. Everly felt like her nose was about to be ruined. The stench made tears stream from her eyes, and a violent nausea surged up from her stomach, rushing straight for her throat.
“Ugh—so disgusting, it stinks! Close the window, hurry, close it!” Shelly was just as overwhelmed. With a sharp bang, he shut the window, then leaned forward in a panic, urgently urging the driver to close the front windows as well.
“Smells bad? Why don’t I smell anything at all…” the driver muttered to himself, though he obediently rolled the windows up.
Once the outside odor was shut out, the air inside the car finally stopped feeling quite so hellish.
Shelly and Everly opened their mouths at the same time, greedily gulping in fresh air like two fish stranded on a beach.
Human joys and sorrows are not shared. Seeing this through the rearview mirror, the taxi driver felt no sympathy—only amusement. “What bad smell? Maybe you two are imagining it… But speaking of smells, I have heard an inside story about the Mayflower Apartments. I can guarantee most people don’t know this one.”
“What kind of news?”
“Just the day before yesterday, I happened to pass by the police station and picked up a forensic doctor who was heading home late. I overheard part of his phone call—oh God, it was unbelievable. Do you know what he said? He said that the bodies of the Mayflower Apartments residents stored in the morgue were decomposing at an abnormally fast rate. In less than two days, they had turned into a pool of foul-smelling fluid inside the cold storage. There wasn’t even any bone left!”
“What?! Th-this…”
Shelly’s voice grew even more frightened.
Because at the very moment the taxi driver was sharing this inside information, a sudden commotion erupted outside the Mayflower Apartments. The surrounding onlookers were pushed aside by the police, and a cart used for transporting bodies was wheeled through the gap, stopping at the edge of the cordon.
The taxi was parked on an upward slope, and from Shelly’s angle, he could see past the cart—straight to the puddle on the ground within the police line.
That puddle of… decomposed flesh.
Yes—decomposed flesh.
Although it was still wearing clothes, and the vague outlines of a head and limbs could barely be made out, there was no doubt that it was something that had undergone extreme decay.
The mass looked as though it had collapsed from the inside out. Around the neck and shoulders, patches of outer skin that hadn’t fully broken down yet hung loosely, while the face, chest, and abdomen had completely deteriorated, leaving deep hollows. Inside those depressions was a chaotic mixture of substances—dark and pale, solid and liquid—blended together into something deeply unsettling. Discolored patches mottled the surface, forming a scene that felt straight out of a nightmare.
Two medical workers withdrew their hands from the sunken area in the chest, quickly fastening the buttons they had undone during the attempted rescue. They stood up and shook their heads regretfully at the police officer approaching with the cart. Understanding immediately, the officer gestured, and others lifted what remained of the body’s “limbs,” placing it onto the cart and covering it with a white sheet.
The entire process was steeped in a chilling sense of absurdity and horror.
If it were truly just a formless mass, would anyone really perform emergency treatment on it so solemnly—and even dress it properly?
“He was walking along just fine when he suddenly collapsed and stopped moving,” “The decomposition of the Mayflower Apartments residents’ bodies was abnormally fast,” “A pool of foul-smelling bodily fluid” … all the fragments of information he had gathered rushed into Shelly’s mind at once. His eyes flew wide open as he trembled, reaching out with a shaking finger to poke the driver in the front seat.
“In… in your eyes, what did that body look like?”
“What did it look like? Pretty normal,” the driver replied. “Looked like he was only in his early thirties. Such a shame—dying so young…”
Shelly’s expression grew even more frantic. His chest heaved violently, and cold sweat seeped from his forehead, dripping down onto Everly’s face. But Everly no longer had the presence of mind to feel disgusted. Her eyes were just as wide as she turned to stare at the driver in horror, unable to believe what she was hearing.
The driver said the body looked normal?
But what she had seen was clearly something grotesque beyond words…
“You’re sure,” she heard Shelly ask, “that what you saw wasn’t… a completely decomposed mess?”
It seemed that she and her useless father had seen exactly the same thing.
The driver’s face immediately hardened. He snapped angrily, “What nonsense are you talking about? That kind of joke is unacceptable, have some respect for the dead!”
“Ugh—ugh…!” An unprecedented wave of terror seized Shelly. Nausea surged up before he could even grab his cane. He shoved the car door open, tumbled out onto the roadside, and began vomiting violently.
Everly felt like throwing up too.
To free up a hand for his cane, Shelly had strapped her swaddled body tightly against his chest. Once they were out of the taxi, the stench outside drifted over in waves with the wind, mixing with the sour smell from Shelly’s retching above her head and the awful, echoing sounds of gagging and heaving right by her ears.
It was unbearable.
She was just a baby—she really had been through far too much already. She was… she was about to vomit.
“Hey, man, are you okay? It was just a dead body—do you really need to react this strongly?”
The sound of a car door opening and closing came from behind. The taxi driver walked over, steadying Shelly’s body as he wobbled on one leg, still shaking, and thoughtfully tucked the cane Shelly had forgotten in the car under his arm. “You live in the Mayflower Apartments, right? Must be hard, taking care of a baby on your own. Want me to help you inside?”
“N-no need…” Shelly stared at the Mayflower Apartments not far away, his wide eyes filled with fear.
Within his line of sight, the old wooden building stood quietly amid the noisy street. Six stories tall, it had once been one of the most fashionable buildings on the block when it was first built. Now, however, its traditional wooden structure had long since made it synonymous with “outdated” and “old-fashioned.” The massive sign bearing the name “Mayflower” hung crookedly, and the white-painted exterior walls, weather-beaten by years of sun and wind, had begun to peel, revealing dark red undercoats beneath. At a glance, they looked like jagged, blood-soaked wounds.
Each “wound” made him think of the horrifying mass he had just seen.
The Mayflower Apartments squatted there in silence and patience, its enormous bulk shrouded in an ominous gloom. The wide-open entrance was pitch-black, like a giant mouth leading straight into the abyss, waiting for its sacrifices to walk in of their own accord.
So strange. So ominous. How could Shelly possibly allow himself to fall into such an obvious death trap?
And yet—
“Rachel.” Everly heard Shelly croak hoarsely, suddenly speaking the name of his deceased wife, his voice heavy with longing and sorrow.
“Rachel’s photograph… it’s still inside…”
“Yes,” he murmured, “Rachel.”
Like clear water slowly stained by ink, Everly watched Shelly’s eyes shift—from clarity to confusion, until at last a strange, murky shadow settled over them as he stared at the apartment. What echoed by her ears was Shelly’s mechanical, hollow murmur:
“I must… I have to… take it out…”