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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cHey, Jack, didn\u2019t you take the day off yesterday? How come you look so much more energetic today than you did yesterday?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I almost spilled the coffee I was holding, and a chill instantly ran down my spine. \u201cMark, are you kidding me? I spent the whole day at home sleeping\u2014I didn\u2019t even step outside.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mark furrowed his brow, his tone very certain: \u201cDon\u2019t 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\u2019t even look up\u2014you just walked straight into that abandoned old archive room.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My breathing began to quicken. That gray hoodie was indeed mine, but I was certain I\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAre you sure it was me?\u201d I asked, forcing myself to stay calm.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt was definitely you,\u201d Mark said in a hushed voice, a flicker of fear in his eyes. \u201cAnd\u2026 when you were walking, your heels weren\u2019t even touching the ground.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I whipped my head around toward the break room\u2014it was completely empty. Just then, my phone vibrated. It was a text message from an unknown number, containing only a single photo.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That face\u2014it was definitely me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But in the lower right corner of the photo, the time it was taken was clearly displayed: 3:00 p.m. yesterday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I trembled as I zoomed in on the photo and suddenly realized that \u201cI\u201d 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\u2014the one that had been boarded up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cJack?\u201d Mark\u2019s voice suddenly rang in my ear, tinged with an unnatural stiffness. \u201cWhat exactly were you looking at in the archives yesterday?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019t even touching the ground.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He leaned close to my ear and whispered in a voice with an inhumanly cold breath, \u201cActually, more than one \u2018Jack\u2019 walked out of the archives yesterday.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The \u201cI\u201d That Appears and Disappears<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":564,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[18,22],"class_list":["post-563","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-suspense","tag-story","tag-suspense"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/storyrecyclebin.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/storyrecyclebin.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/storyrecyclebin.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storyrecyclebin.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storyrecyclebin.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=563"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/storyrecyclebin.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":565,"href":"https:\/\/storyrecyclebin.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563\/revisions\/565"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storyrecyclebin.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/564"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/storyrecyclebin.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storyrecyclebin.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/storyrecyclebin.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}