After making it through that long, exhausting night, I could finally lie down and relax in my soft bed. Just as he’d said he would, Zayn slept on the floor using a folding mattress.
I felt like I’d only been asleep for a few hours when my eyes were forced open by chilling air that pierced straight through my bones. I could feel the air around me growing heavier, pressing down on my chest.
Srrk... Srrk... Srrk...
The soft but unmistakable sound of wet, coarse fabric dragging slowly crept across the floor, coming from the corner of the room toward the side of my bed. An overpowering stench of rotting flesh and grave soil suddenly spread through the room, filling every corner until my stomach churned.
I squeezed my eyes shut, pretending I was still sleeping soundly in a beautiful dream. But then, all at once, my chest felt unbelievably heavy. It was exactly as if a fifty-kilogram sack of rice had been dropped right on top of it, making the alveoli in my lungs struggle to expand.
I forced myself to open my eyes a tiny bit, just a narrow slit, then quickly closed them again.
The female ghost’s face was hovering exactly five centimeters above mine! Damn it. No wonder that rotten stench wouldn’t leave my nose. This creature was the reason. Ugh, it was making me want to throw up.
And it wasn’t just the smell. Her appearance was absolutely horrifying too. The skin on her left cheek had peeled away, exposing layers of bloody red flesh and veins shifting beneath it. Her eyes were deep, empty sockets, oozing thick black fluid that slowly dripped downward. One drop of that cold fluid landed right on my forehead.
Plop.
The female ghost’s mouth opened far wider than the anatomical limits of a normal human, revealing rows of sharp black teeth. Don’t ask about the smell. Seriously, it was disgusting.
Then a sorrowful, heart-rending moan echoed. Not through the air, but directly inside my ears.
“I know you can see me...” she whispered. Her voice was no longer an ordinary breathy murmur, but layered echoes of dozens of women’s voices whispering at once. It was so close and deep that the hair all over my body stood on end.
“Don’t put on an act in front of me. I can smell the fear in your blood.”
My heart pounded violently, hammering against my chest like a marching band drum. This was the most intense and terrifying level of horror I had ever experienced in my twenty years of living with this second sight. My tongue went stiff. Her ghostly hand, cold as a bar of ice, began slowly tightening around my neck, pressing down on my airway.
Black blood dripped from her eye sockets again, landing on my right cheek.
I drew a long breath through my nose, gathering every last scrap of courage and mental patience I had left—both already at their breaking point—to make one final stand. I couldn’t lose. If I gave in now, my life in this house would turn into a twenty-four-hour ghost concierge service.
With extremely slow, calm movements, I forced my heavy right hand up and slapped my own face as if there were a mosquito on it. Then, casually, I rotated my entire body ninety degrees, turning my back on the terrifying face of the female ghost hovering above me.
I could feel the aura of darkness and terror that had filled the room suddenly stop. The bone-chilling air and rotten stench wrapped around my nose were gone. All that remained behind my back now was confusion, awkwardness, and despair.
Faintly, I heard her lips form the words, “I just wanted to ask for help...”