The day I started working at Beicheng Museum, the shift captain pulled me into the surveillance room, pointed at the wall of monitors, and said, "We've got full coverage here. Over three hundred cameras. Can pick up a mouse crawling across the floor. When you're on night patrol, just remember two rules: if you hear something inside a display case, don't shine your flashlight at it. And if you do shine your light at it, don't look at the artifact label."
I asked him why.
He stared at the monitors without speaking. One screen showed a pitch-black exhibition hall. Under the infrared camera, everything was a gray-green murk, rows of display cases standing quiet and orderly. He watched it for a long time before he said, "New guys always ask why. Anyone who's lasted three months stops asking."
————
I figured he was just messing with me. Old-timers scaring the rookies. I knew the routine.
It was June 14th, a Wednesday. My shift ran 8 p.m. to 8 a.m., partnered with Old Zhou — a middle-aged guy who barely talked. Four years on the job, hair almost gone. When I came in for handover, he was sitting in the duty room eating from a styrofoam box. He saw me, snapped the lid shut, and said, "Come on. I'll walk you through."
During the day, the museum was packed. Tour guides waving little flags, shouting "this way, this way," kids pressing their greasy faces against the glass.
Night was different. The exhibition hall lights were all off. Only the knee-level footlights along the baseboards gave off a dim yellow glow, making the pottery figurines and bronze vessels look like shadows crouched in the corners. Our footsteps bounced back and forth down the corridors — leather soles on marble, slap-slap — and after a few steps you'd hear the echo, like someone up ahead was walking too.
Old Zhou took me on the standard route. First floor, Bronze Hall. Second floor, Calligraphy and Painting. Third floor, Ceramics. Fourth floor — storage and offices, closed to the public.
When we reached the Ceramics Hall on the third floor, he stopped at the end of the corridor, flicked his flashlight left, and said, "Han Dynasty pottery figurines. This hall. Remember — don't go in at night."
I said, "Aren't we supposed to patrol in there?"
He said, "Even if you hear something, don't go in."
I'd just started, so I didn't push it. Old-timers always had their weird rules. Same as factory veterans who won't let you step on the machine base. I nodded and followed him back.
At the stairwell, I glanced over my shoulder at the hall. Above the doorframe hung a dark blue sign with white block letters: Ceramics Hall — Han Dynasty Pottery Figurines.
The door was open. Inside, nothing but black.
————
Old Zhou retired three months later. The day he left, he took me out for a meal. Half a jin of baijiu in, he suddenly said, "Xiao Shen, I worked here four years. Never once went into that Ceramics Hall at night."
I said, "Well, you were following regulations."
He shook his head. The glass kept turning on the table, liquor spilling over the rim. He didn't stop it.
"It wasn't regulations," he said. "It was fear."
I didn't say anything. He didn't either.
————
After Old Zhou left, the museum hired a new guy to fill his slot. Liu Xu. Early twenties, fresh out of trade school, bleached yellow hair, hands always shoved in his pockets, shoulders rolling with every step. The captain told me to train him. I did what Old Zhou did — walked him through the route and laid down the two rules.
He laughed when I finished. "Brother Shen, you guys are just trying to scare the rookie, right?"
I said, "Just remember them."
He clapped me on the shoulder. "Relax. I've got guts."
I almost told him something then — I've met plenty of guys with guts. The ones who last are the cowards. But I swallowed it. Some things you have to go through yourself. Words don't work.
Liu Xu made it almost a month without anything happening. Every night he'd blow through his patrol, flashlight swinging everywhere, humming songs. I told him to knock it off a few times. He'd say yeah, yeah, got it, and go right back to doing the same thing. Eventually I stopped trying.
————
It was November 7th, a Thursday. Liu Xu and I were on night shift. A little past eleven, I was nodding off at the duty room desk when I heard footsteps in the corridor, half-asleep.
Slap-slap. Slap-slap.
I figured it was Liu Xu coming back from patrol. Didn't think anything of it. But the footsteps stopped right at the duty room door. Halted there for a few seconds. Then headed the other way.
I opened my eyes. The duty room door was shut. Through the small window in the door, the corridor light seeped in, yellowish. I looked up at the wall of monitors — sixteen small screens cycling through real-time feeds from every hall. Most halls were dark, just the faint glow of the footlights. I scanned the screens. No sign of Liu Xu.
I grabbed the walkie-talkie. "Liu Xu, where are you?"
Static. Then Liu Xu's voice, very low: "Brother Shen, I'm on the third floor."
"Third floor — don't hang around up there. Do your sweep and come back down."
He didn't answer.
I waited maybe two, three minutes, then called again. This time he answered. His voice was strange, like he had his mouth pressed right against the mic, breathing heavy into it. "Brother Shen, come up here."
"What's wrong?"
"Come up here."
I grabbed my flashlight and went up to the third floor. The motion-sensor lights flicked on section by section as I walked. The door to the Ceramics Hall was open, pitch-black inside. The footlights — out, somehow. I stood at the entrance and looked in. My flashlight beam swept across rows of display cases, glass reflecting back, a sheet of white glare.
Liu Xu was at the far end of the hall, back against the wall, flashlight hanging limp at his side, the beam hitting the floor and lighting up his own two feet.
I said, "What are you doing standing here?"
He pointed at the display case in front of him. "This."
I walked over and stood next to him. The case was set against the wall. Inside, under glass, was a pottery figurine — about half a meter tall, gray-brown clay body, traces of painted color still clinging to the surface, mostly flaked off by now.
The figurine was a kneeling human figure, body leaning slightly forward, head tilted, mouth gaping wide — like it was laughing. Or screaming.
At the base of the case, a metal label read: Han Dynasty Storytelling Figurine, Excavated in Luoyang, Grade II Cultural Relic.
Below that, in a much smaller font — so small you couldn't read it in dim light — was another line of text.
I was about to lean in for a closer look when Liu Xu said, "Brother Shen, when I passed this case earlier, I heard something inside."
I stopped moving.
"Tap-tap-tap," he said. His eyes swiveled toward me, the whites of them bright in the near-dark. "Like someone knocking on glass."
"You shined your flashlight at it?" I asked.
He didn't answer. But his silence was an answer.
"And you read the label?"
Still no response.
I took a deep breath, aimed my flashlight at the metal plate, and squinted at that tiny line of text.
"At time of excavation, mouth contained a tongue."
Seven words. Block font, printed on metal. The strokes were sharp, clean — didn't look freshly carved.
I stared at those words for maybe five seconds. Then I slowly raised my eyes to the figurine inside the case.
Its mouth was open. A dark hole. The flashlight beam went in and kept going — deeper than any normal figurine's mouth should go, like a shaft tunneling downward, no bottom in sight.
I shouldn't have looked.
But I did.
I aimed the beam right into its mouth. The light cut down, illuminating the rough clay walls of the oral cavity, uneven and gritty. The beam kept descending, dimmer and dimmer, deeper and deeper — and then, somewhere around where the throat should be, the light hit something that stopped it.
A wet, glistening surface.
I saw an eye.
It was embedded deep inside the figurine's mouth, buried in the darkness, filmed over with a layer of moisture. The pupil was contracted, pinpoint-small, fixed on the flashlight beam — staring at me without moving.
A living eye.
My brain short-circuited. My legs wanted to run, but my feet were nailed to the floor. My hand wanted to kill the flashlight, but my fingers were frozen solid. All I could do was stand there, through the display case glass, locked in a staring match with that eye.
Then it blinked.
The eyelids closed from both sides and parted again — fast, like a bird's nictitating membrane.
My body finally remembered how to move. The flashlight dropped, cracked against the floor, beam rolling wildly across the tiles. I stumbled backward two steps, slammed into another display case, cold seeping through my uniform. I could hear my own breathing — ragged, fast, like a bellows.
Liu Xu had run faster than me. He was already at the hall entrance, one hand braced on the doorframe, face pale as printer paper.
"You saw it too?" His voice was shaking.
I didn't answer. I bent down, picked up the flashlight, switched it off. The hall went black. I stood in the dark for a few seconds, hearing sharpening to inhuman clarity — my own heartbeat, Liu Xu panting at the doorway, the air conditioner vents humming.
Then I heard something else.
Tap-tap-tap.
Behind me. Through glass. Muffled. Three taps at a time. Perfect rhythm.
Tap-tap-tap.
The figurine was knocking on the glass.
————
I don't remember how I got out of that hall. When I came to, I was back in the first-floor duty room, sitting in a chair, both legs shaking uncontrollably. Liu Xu sat across from me, head in his hands, yellow hair a mess like a chicken nest. The walkie-talkie on the desk hissed static.
The wall monitors kept cycling. When the Ceramics Hall feed came up, I glanced at it by reflex. On the infrared camera, the gray-green image showed a quiet hall, cases lined up neat, nothing wrong.
No figurine moving. No eye. Nothing.
"Brother Shen." Liu Xu's voice came muffled through his fingers. "I'm quitting tomorrow."
I didn't say anything. My brain was racing, scrambling for a reasonable explanation. Bad lighting. Eyes playing tricks. Some foreign object in the figurine's mouth catching the flashlight glare. Or maybe that line on the label was just some obscure archaeological term I didn't recognize — not anything sinister.
Yeah. "At time of excavation, mouth contained a tongue" — maybe it meant the figurine's tongue was fired separately and inserted, a description of the craftsmanship.
I even pulled out my phone and searched. The results did mention similar artifact notes — some Han Dynasty figurines had movable tongues, embedded in the oral cavity using some technique, still in place when excavated. Hence: "at time of excavation, mouth contained a tongue."
I convinced myself.
I handed my phone to Liu Xu. He looked at it, was silent for a while. That panicked expression slowly drained from his face, replaced by doubt.
"Really?" he asked.
"Really," I said, calmer than I expected. "Just archaeological terminology. Don't scare yourself."
Liu Xu stared at the screen a bit longer, then let out a breath, leaned back in his chair, and swore.
We both laughed. The tension in the duty room slackened all at once, like a snapped rubber band.
But while I was laughing, one thing kept circling my brain: if it was just terminology, why did that eye blink?
I didn't say that out loud.
————
The rest of the night was quiet. Liu Xu curled up on the folding cot in the duty room and passed out, snoring like a chainsaw. I didn't sleep. I sat in front of the monitors, watching the Ceramics Hall feed for a long, long time. The image never changed. That display case stood silently in the corner, a gray blur under the infrared.
Around five in the morning, I made myself a cup of tea and carried it up to the third floor. The sky was still dark. The motion-sensor lights clicked on section by section as I passed, white glare bouncing off the marble floor. I stood at the entrance of the Ceramics Hall and looked inside.
The display case was still there. Glass intact. The figurine inside, motionless, mouth gaping — a dark hole.
I didn't go in. I stood at the doorway for a moment, tea in hand, then turned and headed back down.
At the top of the stairs, my feet froze.
When I'd been standing at the Ceramics Hall entrance just now, the display case glass had reflected the corridor footlights behind me. The footlights glowed dull yellow, and on the glass they appeared in a neat row.
But at one spot — where one footlight should have been — there was no reflection.
Because something was standing in the way.
I didn't turn around.
Teacup in hand, one steady step after another, I walked back down to the duty room, shut the door, locked it, sat in my chair, and wiped the sweat off my palms onto my pants.
————
Eight a.m. The day shift came in. During handover, I didn't mention anything about the night before. Liu Xu didn't either. But he'd packed up all his stuff into a plastic bag and carried it out with him. I watched him walk through the museum gate. His yellow hair bobbed in the sunlight a few times, then the tide of people across the street swallowed him up.
He never came back to work.
————
The captain gave me a new partner. Another rookie. Another early-twenties face full of skepticism. I walked him through the route, told him the two rules. He nodded and said, "Got it, Brother Shen. I'll remember."
I knew he hadn't. Or he remembered but didn't believe. That's how people are — if you haven't seen it with your own eyes, no matter how many times someone tells you, it's just a story.
Days passed. I kept working my night shifts. I still patrolled the Ceramics Hall like normal — I just never stopped inside. A few times passing the entrance, I heard sounds from within. Tap-tap-tap. I didn't pause. Didn't even break stride. Walked right past. The sound would continue behind me for a little while, then go quiet.
I'd learned my lesson. Don't listen to what you shouldn't hear. Don't look at what you shouldn't see.
A month went by like that. Early December. First snow of the season fell on Beicheng. The museum's heating was weak, freezing cold on night shift. I got an extra blanket from logistics, wrapped myself up, and sat in front of the monitors scrolling my phone.
December 9th, a Monday. Around eleven at night, the motion-sensor lights in the third-floor corridor suddenly turned on.
On the monitor, the third-floor corridor feed showed the lights clicking on one by one, from the stairwell all the way to the Ceramics Hall entrance — like someone was walking down the hall.
But the hall was empty.
I put down my phone and stared at the screen.
The Ceramics Hall door was shut. The infrared camera couldn't see inside — the hall had its own internal cameras. When I switched to that feed, I saw rows of display cases. Quiet. Orderly. Nothing out of place.
But I noticed a detail.
On the glass of the storytelling figurine's case, there was a dark smear — like someone had pressed their face against it.
I zoomed in. Under infrared, the smear was darker than the surrounding glass. The shape was irregular. Near its center were two lighter, round patches, arranged symmetrically, like —
Like when someone presses their eyes against glass to look out, the pupils register slightly warmer on infrared, creating a temperature contrast against the surrounding skin.
My hand froze on the mouse.
The smear was moving. Very slowly, it was sliding downward from the middle of the glass — like someone pressing their face against the glass was slowly crouching down.
I closed the Ceramics Hall feed and switched back to the corridor view. The motion-sensor lights had gone out. Total black.
I pulled the blanket tighter, leaned back in my chair, and shut my eyes.
Go to sleep, I told myself. Before sunrise — no monitors, no third floor, no walkie-talkie. The sky could fall and I wouldn't move.
————
I don't know how long I slept before a sound woke me.
I opened my eyes. The duty room was pitch-black. The wall monitors had gone dead at some point. The computer tower's power light was off too. Power outage? No — the emergency light in the corner was still on, a faint green glow.
The sound came from above.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Not knocking on glass this time. Knocking on the floor.
The fourth floor was storage and offices. Empty at night. The sound came through the ceiling, through the concrete slab — muffled, but the rhythm was identical. Three taps per set. Steady, unhurried.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Then a dragging sound. Like someone hauling a heavy sack across the floor, moving slowly. Step by step, from the left side of the ceiling to the right. Then stopping. Then knocking again.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
I sat in the dark. Sweat had soaked through my thermal undershirt, cold and sticky against my back. I reached for the walkie-talkie on the desk. The moment my fingers touched the casing, it went off by itself.
A blast of static. Then Liu Xu's voice.
"Brother Shen."
The blood in my veins went to ice. Liu Xu had quit over a month ago. He'd turned in his walkie-talkie long since. It was locked in the cabinet behind me.
"Brother Shen. Come up here."
His voice was exactly the same as that night — mouth pressed to the mic, heavy breathing, every word soaked in moist exhalation. But behind his voice, there was another sound. Very close. Like someone right next to his ear, clicking their tongue against the roof of their mouth.
Tap-tap-tap.
I hurled the walkie-talkie to the floor.
The tapping sound surged from every direction. The ceiling above. The wall behind. The floor beneath. Every surface, knocking in unison — three taps per set, rhythm precise as a metronome. I covered my ears. The sound still came through. Not traveling by air — resonating directly inside my skull.
Tap-tap-tap. Tap-tap-tap. Tap-tap-tap.
Then, all at once, it stopped.
Silence. Like something had sucked all the sound out of the world.
I lowered my hands from my ears and slowly raised my head.
The duty room door was shut. Through the small window in the door, the corridor light had come on — I didn't know when — and the yellowish glow slanted in, casting a rectangle of light on the floor.
In the center of that rectangle stood a pair of feet.
The door blocked everything above the ankles. I could only see bare feet. The skin was gray-brown, rough-textured, covered in fine cracks like dried clay. The toes splayed, gripping the floor. Where the toenails should have been, there were five small black holes.
The feet stood outside the door, motionless.
I stared at them. I don't know for how long. Time, in those minutes, became a unit without meaning.
Finally, the feet moved.
They walked away from the door. Step by step. Slap-slap. The sound of bare soles on marble was completely different from leather shoes — muffled and thick, like wet mud slapping against stone.
The sound receded, up the stairs, toward the Ceramics Hall on the third floor.
————
After daybreak, the first thing I did was go to the third-floor Ceramics Hall.
The motion-sensor lights had gone out. Winter morning light filtered in through the window at the end of the corridor — pale gray, washing the whole third floor like a faded photograph. The Ceramics Hall door was open, same as I'd left it last night.
I walked in and stood in front of the storytelling figurine's display case.
The glass was pristine, polished clean, reflecting my own face. The figurine held the exact same pose as yesterday — kneeling, head tilted, mouth open. Laughing or screaming. The label unchanged: Han Dynasty Storytelling Figurine, Excavated in Luoyang, Grade II Cultural Relic. At time of excavation, mouth contained a tongue.
I stood there for a long time. The morning light slowly brightened, slanting into the hall and falling across the figurine. Its shadow stretched against the white wall behind it — a vague shape, like something curled up and crouching.
Then I noticed something.
On the label, that tiny line of text — the character for "tongue" — its surface had faint scratch marks. I leaned in close. The scratches weren't random. They were deliberate, horizontal and vertical strokes — like someone had carved a different character into the metal plate, then scraped it off.
I studied it a long time before I could make out the strokes of the erased character.
It was the character for "eye."
"At time of excavation, mouth contained an eye."
I stepped back. Images flooded my brain all at once. What Old Zhou said before he left — four years, and he'd never gone into the Ceramics Hall at night. The tapping sound behind Liu Xu's voice on the walkie-talkie. The temperature imprint on the monitor — something pressing its face to the glass, looking out. And last night, under the door — those gray-brown, cracked bare feet.
I pulled out my phone and photographed the label. Then I opened my browser and searched: "Beicheng Museum Han Dynasty storytelling figurine."
Not many results. Mostly just a paragraph on the museum's official site, with a daytime photo of the artifact. I scrolled further down and found a local news piece from three years ago. The headline read:
"Beicheng Museum Artifact Restorer Mysteriously Vanishes — Still Missing."
I clicked it.
The article said that three years ago, a Beicheng Museum artifact restorer disappeared during a night shift. The next morning, coworkers found the Ceramics Hall display case glass shattered all over the floor. There were mud tracks — barefoot prints — leading from the case out into the corridor, disappearing at the stairwell.
Surveillance footage showed the restorer entering the Ceramics Hall at 3 a.m. He stood in front of a Han Dynasty pottery figurine's display case for a long time, then suddenly raised his fists and started punching the glass — punch after punch. He was alone in the footage.
But from the way he was hitting — his fists were aimed not at the glass itself, but at what was behind the glass. The figurine's face.
He punched about a dozen times. The glass shattered. His hands were wrecked. Then he stopped, turned around, and faced the empty corridor behind him. His mouth opened and closed, forming words. The surveillance video had no audio, only his lip movements.
A lip-reading expert with the police analyzed the footage. What he said was: "It got out."
The restorer's body was never found. The surveillance showed him walking into the stairwell, and after that — nothing. Beicheng Museum's stairwell was enclosed, no windows, only one exit: the fire escape. But the fire escape door was locked from the inside. When the security guard unlocked it that morning, the lock was intact.
He vanished inside the stairwell.
I lowered my phone and stood in front of the display case, staring at the storytelling figurine's gaping mouth. Deep inside that dark oral cavity, nothing was visible.
But I knew the eye was still in there.
Watching me.
————
I took the day off. Went home and slept for an entire day and night. Woke up at noon the next day. A sliver of sunlight leaked through the curtain gap, warm across the blanket. I lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, letting my mind empty out for a long time.
Then I thought of something.
The news article said that after the restorer smashed the display case glass, the floor was covered in shards. But the display case I'd been looking at — the glass was intact. No cracks, no signs of replacement. Had the museum swapped in a new case? No. In the news photo, the case was the same one in front of me, down to the label position and the scratch marks.
Another thing. Old Zhou said he'd worked here four years and never once entered the Ceramics Hall at night. But normal night patrol procedures — there's no way you go four years without entering an exhibition hall. Unless — unless when he took the job, someone had already warned him. Stay out. That rule existed before Old Zhou got here.
How long has that rule been around?
I sat up in bed, opened my laptop, and kept searching. This time I used the museum's internal database. The captain had given me an account for shift scheduling and handover logs. Inside the database, there was a document titled "Night Patrol Precautions." I clicked it open — just one page of simple text. Three rules:
1. During post-closing patrol, if you hear sounds from inside a display case, do not shine a flashlight at it.
2. If you have already shined a flashlight at it, do not read the artifact label.
3. If you have already read the label and noticed something abnormal, leave the exhibition hall immediately, lock the door, and do not re-enter before daybreak.
The document was created nine years ago. The revision log showed it had been edited seven times. Every edit streamlined the content, cutting things out. I restored the earliest version.
That version had the three rules above, plus a fourth:
4. If you hear footsteps following behind you, do not turn around. It won't follow you out of the museum. It'll be fine when the sun comes up.
A fifth:
5. The following morning, do not go to the third-floor Ceramics Hall alone. At least three people, one of them carrying a high-powered flashlight.
A sixth:
6. If the display case glass shatters during the night, do not approach. Do not clean up. Do not call the police. Notify the museum director.
I stared at the screen and reread every word three times. Then I noticed a line of text at the very bottom of the document, in a faded gray color, as if the opacity had been deliberately dialed down. I selected the text and inverted the colors so I could read it:
"The above content does not represent the position of museum management. It is independently compiled by employees. The described phenomena have not been scientifically verified. Please exercise rational judgment."
I closed the document and leaned back in my chair.
Rational judgment. Nothing I'd gone through in the past month could be explained by rational judgment.
I decided to go back to work.
Don't ask me why. I can't explain it myself. Maybe the pay was decent for the area. Maybe I needed the job. Maybe, deep down, I was the same as those horror movie protagonists who just have to go back and look — can't rest until I see the truth with my own eyes.
————
The day I returned to night shift, the captain was waiting for me in the duty room. He was sitting in my usual chair, turning a thermos in his hands. When he saw me walk in, his face showed nothing. He just said, "You're back."
"I'm back."
"Liu Xu quit. Replacement won't be here till next week. You good covering alone for a few days?"
I said I was good.
He stood, clapped me on the shoulder. At the door he paused, didn't turn around.
"Xiao Shen," he said. "The third-floor hall. Don't go in at night anymore. I had someone put a lock on it."
I nodded.
He left. I sat in the duty room, looking at the wall of monitors. Sixteen screens cycling. When the Ceramics Hall feed came up, I saw it — a brand-new padlock on that door, cold silver-white gleam under the infrared.
I stared at that lock and suddenly thought it was funny.
You think locking a door keeps what's inside from getting out?
That lock was for people to see. Not for that thing. It couldn't even get out of the display case — no. Wait.
I thought about Liu Xu's voice that night. That tapping sound behind his words on the walkie-talkie. The gray-brown bare feet under the door gap. It could get out. It had always been able to get out. That locked door wasn't keeping it in — it was keeping people out.
But that didn't add up. If it could get out, why hadn't it pushed open the duty room door when it stood outside that night? Why had it stopped at the stairwell and gone back to the third floor? Why had Old Zhou said, "It won't follow you out of the museum"?
Something confined it to this building. Or — there were rules it had to obey.
Then another thought hit me. The rules that had been deleted from the document — who deleted them? And why?
————
A little past eleven that night, I did my patrol as usual. Alone. Flashlight, walkie-talkie, leather soles on marble, slap-slap. On the second floor, I stopped at the stairwell and looked up. The third-floor motion-sensor lights were on. From my angle, I could see the ceiling of the corridor, washed pale by the light.
I went up. Step by step, footsteps echoing in the stairwell. The third floor. Corridor, empty. The Ceramics Hall door, locked. The padlock hung securely on the hasp.
I stood in front of the door, listening through the wood for a while. Inside, silence. Nothing.
I was turning to leave when I heard it.
Behind me. The other end of the corridor. From the stairwell.
Tap-tap-tap.
I froze.
Tap-tap-tap.
The sound came from inside the stairwell. Muffled. Like something was between it and me. I glanced back. The stairwell door was shut — the one leading to the fire escape, never opened on normal days.
Tap-tap-tap.
The sound was climbing. Step by step, from the stairwell upward, to the ceiling above, then directly overhead.
The fourth floor.
The fourth floor was storage and offices. Three years ago, the restorer had vanished inside the stairwell. The surveillance had caught his last figure walking through that door.
I tilted my head back and stared at the fluorescent light on the ceiling. The light flickered slightly, like the voltage was unstable. Between the base of the fixture and the ceiling, there was a narrow gap. Black inside.
And then I saw something moving in that gap.
Slow. Light. Like a strand of hair descending from the crack, longer and longer, closer and closer, until it stopped less than half a meter from my face.
It wasn't hair.
It was a tongue. Gray-brown, rough-surfaced, like cracked clay. It slid out through the ceiling gap, its tip swaying gently in the air.
My legs finally started running.
I spun and charged downstairs, three steps at a bound, flashlight swinging wild in my hand, its beam painting chaotic arcs across the walls. Behind me, I heard movement — not footsteps. The sound of that tongue retracting, like wet mud scraping across a wall. A wet smack.
Then footsteps. Bare soles on concrete. Slap-slap, coming down from the third floor. Fast.
I burst into the duty room, slammed the door shut, leaned against it, gasping. The footsteps stopped outside. Right on the other side of the door. Less than ten centimeters of wood between us.
Then it knocked.
Tap-tap-tap.