My name is Lin Mo, and I'm an utterly ordinary convenience-store night-shift worker. It's 3:17 a.m. The street outside the glass door is steeped in thick darkness. Only a few dim yellow streetlights cast blurry halos through the fog, like the cloudy eyes of an old man.
“Ding-a-ling, ”
The wind chime by the door rings abruptly. It isn't the breeze from someone opening the door. It's more like someone lightly plucked it with a fingertip. The sound is faint, but it pierces the dead silence of the night like a needle.
I jerk my head up, and my heart skips a beat.
There's no one outside.
Only that fog, impossible to dispel, seems even thicker than before, with what might be a hint of… dark red? Like blood diluted in water until barely any color remains.
“Must've imagined it,” I mutter, rubbing my temples. After half a month of night shifts, my nerves are stretched like a string about to snap. The convenience store's fluorescent lights cast a ghastly white glow over the shelves. Chips, instant noodles, condoms… These everyday items seem inexplicably strange in the silence.
The second hand of the wall clock goes tick, tick, tick. Each sound feels like a drumbeat, making my eardrums throb.
Just then, the phone beneath the cash register suddenly vibrates. The screen lights up, showing a completely unfamiliar number. There's no area code, just a string of seemingly random digits.
