“The little brother’s skull is not here.” Xu Deyi moved behind Gao Ming. He didn’t dare to enter the room. “If we can’t find his head, we can’t complete the corpse.”
“The nightmare owner’s corpse is in the basement. The mother’s room is the owner’s obsession. So this room…” Gao Ming studied the pictures, “Should contain the owner’s memories. The pictures are arranged based on the five senses. The owner’s past has been shredded.”
The others couldn’t understand Gao Ming or resonate with the nightmare owner. However, Gao Ming was different. He seemed to have experienced something similar to the nightmare owner. He touched the scratch marks on the wall. Heart-wrenching pain entered his body. He looked at the pictures again. The thin boy was tied in the firewood storage room. His was drenched in cold water. The icy ropes cut into his flesh. The ropes that bound him became parts of his body. If the ropes were undone, his skin would be removed. The boy underwent more torture than the testers anticipated. Each picture was a long torture for the boy. The crying entered his ears. The child in the pictures started to move. All the pain and sadness weaved in his soul to form an air of resentment. This was the true target of the thing behind the door. He wanted the boy to turn into a ghost, a ghost that he hated and feared.
Xu Deyi screamed even though he only touched the wall slightly. Bai Feng only walked around the room, and her frostbite worsened again.
“Let me.” Gao Ming touched the marks on the wall and felt the pain course through his veins. “This is the feeling. It is very close. It is stronger than the pain at Shanghai Mental Hospital. However, it is not enough. I need pain that can send me close to death. I remember dying again and again…”
The other testers retreated to the door and let Gao Ming take on all the painful memories. He looked like a sadist, desperate for a more intense experience of death.
“What a madman,” Yao Yao was scared. She had taunted Gao Ming many times. Bai Feng hugged her chest. She had more confidence that Gao Ming had entered the deeper nightmares. She became curious about Gao Ming. This was her first time becoming interested in others since her children disappeared.
“This is not enough. Not enough pain.” Gao Ming followed the cries. The boy’s memory melted into his heart like snow. The snow of pain slowly overwhelmed Gao Ming. In the silent and dark winter, he saw the truth.
His real sister went missing, his mother became a monster, and his father turned himself into bait to save the family. He kept making sacrifices to the door in exchange for the family’s safety. However, that pushed him deeper and deeper into the abyss. In the end, only the boy remained in the family. He was the origin of the tragedy. The mountainous guilt tortured him. The dirty thing behind the door kept an eye on him. Every scenario in the picture was something the boy had experienced.
The cunning ghost behind the door didn’t think that the boy, whom it viewed as helpless, had been calculating against him from the start.
Gao Ming stopped in the middle of the room and looked up. There was a wrinkled family portrait among all the pictures. Different from the picture in Room 3003, this picture didn’t feature the manor owner. There were only the parents and their two children. Four of them had smiles on their faces. The background was the manor in the summer. It was bright and sunny.
Gao Ming removed the picture. The radio stopped, and the stench faded away. The other pictures fluttered down. Gao Ming stood in the room. The pain in his body was relieved. He was closer to remembering his memories. Gao Ming turned the family portrait around. Different from the front, there was a twisting black vessel on the back. It was sticky with blood.
“I brought fish here yesterday night. It had a great appetite,” Bai Feng revealed casually.
After reading the boy’s memory, Gao Ming knew what the ‘fish’ was. It was something behind the door. Contact with it would bring one misfortune. To save his family, the boy’s father kept feeding his wife fish. In the end, the father disappeared inside the door. The boy hated these things. However, to deal with the thing behind the door, he also walked the same path as his father and grandfather did.
In other words, the thing behind the door successfully transformed the boy into something like it through pain, hatred, resentment and sadness.
Sensing the pulse of the vessel, Gao Ming thought he saw a twisted lifeform crawling towards him.
“It’s time to head to the last room.” Bai Feng snatched the family portrait away. “Give me the picture, and I’ll owe you.” Without waiting for an answer, she ran to the manor.
“She’s not acting right.” Xu Deyi was anxious, “Chase after her!”
“You can go first. There’s a friend waiting for me.” In the morning, Gao Ming had Xu Deyi bring the medkit out of Room 3009. He fixed the doll’s body. Now that the nightmare was ending, it was time for the girl to come home.
Gao Ming threw the key to Xu Deyi. As the others called after him, Gao Ming braved the snow and headed to the east lake.
“What is he doing now?” Zhi Ge was annoyed. Yao Yao might have been swapped. Bai Feng was acting suspiciously. Xu Deyi was useless. Silly was a retard. “What kind of team is this?”
The oil lamp was running out. Zhi Ge had no choice but to bring everyone back to the manor.
They opened the wooden door again. The manor was pitch black. Zhi Ge noticed Bai Feng move up to the third floor alone.
“It looks like the bitch is dropping something on the fourth floor.”