Lakeside Ghost Story 9

In a silvery-white expanse stood a tall chair covered in elaborate, bizarre patterns. An old man whose face could not be seen sat upon it, watching a screen that displayed Tales by the Lake.

"The test results are in. It isn't a bug. The Traveler is a character Lord Number One used his authority to add." The debugger wiped the sweat from his brow. "As you know, every film with a special boss falls under his jurisdiction. I don't have the authority to restore the original settings."

Flames blazed up in an instant. The terrified debugger dropped straight to his knees, not even daring to beg for mercy.

"That lunatic." The old man's voice came from far away, then drew close, echoing across the vast expanse. "An Actors' Guild contacted you, didn't they?"

Cold sweat instantly broke out all over the debugger. Trembling, he said, "Y-yes. An Actors' Guild that specializes in high-difficulty scenarios offered me Flame Points as a bribe. They wanted me to put them on the list of understudies for Tales by the Lake. Once those four students were all dead, the System could slot them into the empty roles."

He spoke with absolute conviction, one hand all but raised to swear an oath. "But Chief Judge, I really didn't accept! I turned them down!"

"Hmph..." The old man gave a cold laugh. "Go tell them you've agreed."

"What?" The debugger had not expected matters to take this turn.

The old man smiled without answering. With a wave, he dismissed the debugger, then opened the list of Actors' Guilds.

He knew exactly which guild had tried to bribe his subordinate behind his back. Since Number One only had jurisdiction over films with special bosses, all he had to do was make the boss disappear.

On the screen, Liu Jingyun had already parked by the roadside outside Springwater High School. The town was utterly deserted at night. Not a single light shone from any of the surrounding houses, and beneath the mantle of darkness, the eerie cries of owls sounded now and then.

She was a little frightened, so she forced herself to focus on pushing the wheelchair all the way to the school's main entrance.

Public safety in town was excellent, so the school had no security guard keeping watch at night. Following Zhuo Yu's instructions, Liu Jingyun climbed over the iron fence into the athletic field, then ran to the exit and opened the main gate for him.

Just like that, the two of them slipped into the school without encountering a soul.

Zhuo Yu could not shake the feeling that something was off, but gathering information from the records room was more important right now.

Beyond the doors of the academic building, the first-floor lobby served as a common area. The walls were covered with pictures of teenagers' bright, energetic smiles, though the paint had grown shabby with age and many sections had clearly been refurbished.

The place felt intensely familiar to Zhuo Yu. He knew his character must have been to this school before.

Guided by the instincts that came with his role, they soon found the records room on the third floor.

The door was locked. Zhuo Yu asked for the hair clip Liu Jingyun was wearing, removed the pin, and slid it into the keyhole. Security cameras had not become common in the eighties, and locks were far less sophisticated than they were now. As long as he found the right spot inside and lifted hard, the door would open.

Zhuo Yu could only thank all the home-invasion murder cases he had studied in search of inspiration.

There was a click. The door opened.

Liu Jingyun's eyes widened yet again, and she gave Zhuo Yu a look of utter disbelief.

"Let's go in. We have more important things to do."

Zhuo Yu pushed the door open. The room was over seven hundred square feet, packed with filing cabinets labeled with faculty and student records. The cabinet doors were made of clear glass, and by the faint moonlight, the two of them went row by row, checking the dates on the folders.

When they reached 1938, Zhuo Yu stopped.

He remembered the date his wheelchair had been manufactured. Most people would not buy inventory that had been sitting unsold for years, so the accident that crushed Zhuo Yu's legs and the purchase of the wheelchair must both have occurred around 1938.

He picked the lock on the filing cabinet with the hairpin in the same way, then instructed Liu Jingyun to take out every folder inside.

Fortunately, the town had a small population. The school had only enrolled a little over two hundred students that year.

Zhuo Yu pulled out the student records. Each consisted of a single thin sheet containing a student's photograph, name, height, and other details, along with their family members and address. He gave the 1938 records to Liu Jingyun, then took out the folders from the eighties and began going through them one page at a time.

He was looking for records on the four veterans.

More than ten minutes passed. Zhuo Yu had made it to 1988 when, sure enough, he saw four familiar faces.

"Jack Biers."

"Nina Rockfina."

"Bonnie Biers."

"Buck Yerk."

Zhuo Yu softly read their names aloud. These were the students played by Zhou Wu and the others.

The Asian faces in the photographs, paired with American names and the age of eighteen printed beside them, made for a somewhat comical sight.

"Oh my God!"

Liu Jingyun suddenly jumped in fright. She dropped the record in her hand as though she had seen something horrifying.

The page drifted down beside Zhuo Yu, and he picked it up.

He could hardly blame Liu Jingyun for being frightened. The photograph in this record truly was...

The left half of the boy's face was strikingly handsome, and his deep blue eye lent him an alluring air. Yet his gaze was full of resistance, as if he desperately did not want to face the camera. Because the other half of his face was deformed.

His skin looked as though human flesh had melted, then congealed again, twisting and folding over itself across his face. His eyelid was incomplete, exposing a large blue eyeball. Even his full lips were pulled apart on that side, tearing the corner of his mouth wide enough to reveal his gums.

Half his face was as savage as a beast's, as abhorrent as a devil's, something that should only exist in nightmares. Yet the unblemished left side was so exceptional, so flawless, that he could have gone to Hollywood and pursued stardom.

Zhuo Yu stared hard at the lake-blue eyes in the photograph. That blue held a trace of deep, dark green. It was an exceedingly rare color, and there was no chance he could be mistaken!

Those were the boss's eyes!

"Seven foot two at eighteen? Was this kid some kind of monster?" Liu Jingyun patted her chest and summoned the courage to lean closer. "He scared me half to death. I thought I'd seen a ghost."

Zhuo Yu frowned instinctively and looked at the information on the record.

Age eighteen. Height: 216 cm. Congenital facial deformity and gigantism.

The student's name was—

"Asha..."

Zhuo Yu felt as though he had been struck by lightning. A violent pain suddenly tore through his mind. Clutching his reeling head, he forced himself to keep reading.

What he saw next was even more astonishing.

Asha's address was the Golden Lake reservoir. And listed as his guardian was Zhuo Yu's own signature, the same signature he had written at book signing after book signing, the one he knew better than anything.

"I'm the Traveler, and I'm his adoptive father too..." Zhuo Yu laughed under his breath. Even as he endured the pain, the thrill of cracking the secret still made him tremble with excitement.

That crushing weakness swept through his body once more. Zhuo Yu collapsed onto the floor, sending student records fluttering everywhere.

The world wheeled around him, and in an instant, Zhuo Yu returned to that summer fifty years ago.

......

Insects trilled and a breeze stirred the air. The lakeside cabin stood with its door wide open, as though welcoming its young master home from school.

"Asha, why are you wearing your mask again?" Zhuo Yu set down his copy of Seven-Day Tales and looked helplessly at the child he had taken in. "I've told you before, you don't have to be so self-conscious at home."

He had met Asha seven years ago. The child had been around ten years old, abandoned stark naked in the woods near Golden Lake. One look at the boy's face had told Zhuo Yu why he had been cast aside.

Most people would not want to see such a terrifying face in their home. Every time they turned around, it might give them a fright.

He had brought the poor little boy home, washed the dirt from his body, and fed him a full meal.

The child was extraordinarily obedient, so docile and sensible that Zhuo Yu found it startling. That in itself suggested he had been treated terribly. Only someone who had learned to constantly watch other people's moods would behave that way.

He named the child, who remembered nothing, Asha. After they had lived together for about a week, he went into town to complete the adoption paperwork. But Zhuo Yu was under thirty and unmarried, so he did not meet the requirements.

The clerk gave Asha's face a look of disgust and said no one would want the boy even if he were sent to an orphanage. Zhuo Yu might as well raise him for the time being. A formal adoption was impossible, but he could at least be named the boy's temporary guardian.

And so Asha became a member of Zhuo Yu's household, though in the eyes of the law, they were not truly adoptive father and son.

Zhuo Yu's ancestors had been among the first generation of Chinese immigrants to come to America during the gold rush. They had made their fortune operating a ferry, but over the years, the family wealth had long since been squandered. The only private inheritance left to Zhuo Yu was the tract of mountain land around Golden Lake.

Even so, he lived on the fees he earned writing for magazines and did his best to put Asha through school.

"My classmates said my face is too scary." The big boy's voice was muffled. "I don't want to scare you."

Zhuo Yu beckoned Asha over, wrapped an arm around the seventeen-year-old's neck, and gently stroked his reddish-brown hair. "Good boy. Don't listen to them. You might scare your classmates, but you can't scare me."

Asha was a little unhappy about being called a boy, but he did not pull away from the embrace. "I-I saved up to buy you a present. It's a writing desk!"

Zhuo Yu was surprised.

He knew how much discrimination Asha endured from the townsfolk. Before the age of ten, Asha had received no socialization whatsoever. No one had even taught him how to speak. It had taken Zhuo Yu tremendous effort over the past seven years to help him seem more or less like an ordinary person.

There was no telling what kind of backbreaking work the boy had done to save up that money.

"Tomorrow is your eighteenth birthday, and you're the one buying me a present." Zhuo Yu flicked him on the forehead. "Thank you, you little brat."

Asha pointed at the crocodile-head mount on the wall. "Asha wants that."

"Zhuo Yu! Zhuo Yu?! Are you all right?" Liu Jingyun shook Zhuo Yu hard by the shoulders, dragging him out of the illusory memory.

Zhuo Yu came to and realized with a start that he was still in the records room at Springwater High School.

"I heard Zhou Wu's voice. They're here too!" Liu Jingyun was extremely nervous. She hastily gathered the useless records and stuffed them back into the cabinet. "It sounds like they're arguing. Should we go downstairs and take a look?"

Before Zhuo Yu could decide, the sound of their argument reached them.

"This is all your fucking fault, you useless deadweight! That Crocodile Man is catching up to us!"

Zhou Wu's voice was furious, but beneath the anger lurked a deep terror of the boss.

"How was I supposed to know he'd still catch up after we stole a car?" Li Mingfeng shot back indignantly. "So I fell twice. What about you? You refused to listen to me and insisted on coming to Springwater Town. You wanted to run home and hide like a coward!"

Zhou Wu could not tolerate the taunt, and the two immediately began shoving each other.

"Don't move!" Li Mingfeng's tone abruptly changed. "I see the boss! He's on the athletic field!"

In the records room, Zhuo Yu's entire body went rigid.

Asha was nearby!