On Tuesday morning, as I walked into the office with a cup of coffee in hand, my coworker Mark suddenly looked up at me with a strange look in his eyes.
“Hey, Jack, didn’t you take the day off yesterday? How come you look so much more energetic today than you did yesterday?”
I almost spilled the coffee I was holding, and a chill instantly ran down my spine. “Mark, are you kidding me? I spent the whole day at home sleeping—I didn’t even step outside.”
Mark furrowed his brow, his tone very certain: “Don’t mess with me, Jack. Around 3:00 p.m. yesterday, I saw you with my own eyes coming out of the break room. You were wearing that gray hoodie, head down, and your face was as pale as a sheet. I said hello to you, but you didn’t even look up—you just walked straight into that abandoned old archive room.”
My breathing began to quicken. That gray hoodie was indeed mine, but I was certain I’d thrown it in the washing machine yesterday. What sent even more chills down my spine was that the old archive room had been sealed off half a year ago; the manager had taken the key, and even the windows had been boarded up.
“Are you sure it was me?” I asked, forcing myself to stay calm.
“It was definitely you,” Mark said in a hushed voice, a flicker of fear in his eyes. “And… when you were walking, your heels weren’t even touching the ground.”
I whipped my head around toward the break room—it was completely empty. Just then, my phone vibrated. It was a text message from an unknown number, containing only a single photo.
The photo was taken from above, showing that very same abandoned old archive room. A person wearing a gray hoodie stood with their back to the camera in the center of the room, their head twisted 180 degrees backward in an eerie manner, facing the camera and flashing a stiff smile.
That face—it was definitely me.
But in the lower right corner of the photo, the time it was taken was clearly displayed: 3:00 p.m. yesterday.
I trembled as I zoomed in on the photo and suddenly realized that “I” had no shadow beneath my feet. What left me even more breathless was that, in the background of the photo, a pool of dark red liquid was slowly seeping out from under the crack of the door—the one that had been boarded up.
“Jack?” Mark’s voice suddenly rang in my ear, tinged with an unnatural stiffness. “What exactly were you looking at in the archives yesterday?”
I slowly turned my head and saw that Mark had somehow come to stand behind me. His face was as pale as paper, and his heels weren’t even touching the ground.
He leaned close to my ear and whispered in a voice with an inhumanly cold breath, “Actually, more than one ‘Jack’ walked out of the archives yesterday.”
