"Xiaoming, Xiaoming, did you hear it?" When Wu Xiaoming awoke, the voice of Tammy through the walkie-talkie was the first thing that came into his attention.
"I'm here. I heard it." Wu Xiaoming grabbed the walkie-talkie from under his pillow and responded: "Director, did you get it from the mic?"
"... a little bit, can you try to search for the origin?" Leslie McKinsey's voice came from the walkie-talkie: "And it's not super weak as well, we have three mics picking up."
Wu Xiaoming thought for a moment, then spoke through the walkie-talkie: "Tammy, try pointing the mic at the ceiling on the right side of the bed."
"On it." Tammy responded after only a short moment.
Wu Xiaoming found the mic that was close to the window, then pointed at the spot where the woman was lying. "Director, do you get it? I am pointing one microphone at the spot."
The walkie-talkie went silent for a brief moment, then Leslie McKinsey responded: "Holy fucking shit, we got it. Keep the mic on for a bit longer, point another mic at it if you have to. We are picking up more than just knocking…"
Chills ran down Wu Xiaoming's back. He found the mic placed behind the TV and put it right above the spot where the woman was lying.
"Holy shit, I just saw something! Oh my god." Tammy's voice sounded both terrified and excited through the video: "I don't know if I caught it on camera though, but I definitely saw it."
"Tammy, what is it?" The director asked.
"A - a face. I saw it on the ceiling, from the right side of the bed." Tammy answered: "Looked like - looked like the face of a woman."
"Come to the control room, we caught something." The director urged.
The control room was just a bigger suite on the second floor, where the director, Jake the sound guy and the cameraman laid out their computers and other equipment.
"Here. Listen." Leslie McKinsey gave his earmuffs to Tammy, and grabbed a new pair for Wu Xiaoming.
Jake the sound guy clicked "play" on a sound clip. And a muffled voice came through, along with the knock.
"Sounds like - a woman's voice?" Tammy frowned and fixed her eyes on Wu Xiaoming.
"Can you play again?" Wu Xiaoming did not quite fit the earmuffs on the first time, so he just pushed them against his ears.
Jake the sound guy clicked again.
It was a very faint voice, if not for some kind of filtering or manipulation, it would probably just go over the heads of most people. But right now, it sounded like an old woman pleading: "Please, help me."
"What does it sound like to you?" Leslie McKinsey asked, while the cameraman was recording: "It sounded like something to us, but I want to hear what you think first. Actually - " He turned around and grabbed two markers and two pieces of paper: "Write what you heard down on these and let's compare, so that we don't influence each other."
Wu Xiaoming took the pen and paper, then wrote down "Please, help me".
"Please help me" was Tammy's answer.
"Okay." Leslie McKinsey took a very deep breath to calm himself down, then he pulled out three pieces of paper from behind him. Two of which wrote "Please help", one wrote "Save me".
"Okay, so it's the - the ghost of a woman trying to call for help?" Tammy asked, her eyes glistening and breath trembling lightly: "I'm sure it's a woman - an old woman. I saw her face through the ceiling. If that was the one who keeps knocking, then - "
"Yeah, that's a dead woman in the room. Andria did not tell us anything about this one. But I suspect she definitely knows something." Tammy scratched her jaw: "Also, why not just change the carpet there? If the dirty spot is from - "
"It's probably not that easy to clean, and I think - having a ghost trapped - tethered there would not be good for the carpet. Especially if she died on the floor like that." Wu Xiaoming took off his earmuffs, laid back on his chair and sighed.
Everyone in the room fixed their eyes on Wu Xiaoming.
"What?" Wu Xiaoming sat straight from this reaction.
"Nothing, just … " Tammy narrowed her eyes: "You seemed to know quite a bit about this - this ghost."
Wu Xiaoming's entire body tensed. He was being way too careless with this information. He did not have enough memory about the previous Wu Xiaoming, but it was quite unlikely that he would be this quick in his thinking - he was kind of a known drug addict, after all.
"Nah - I'm just - I'm just guessing." Wu Xiaoming scratched his head: "Just based on what I've read about ghosts, right? If a person dies at a place, then they might become a ghost bound to that place, right? Especially if that person had some kind of unfinished business related to the location?"
"Yeah, yeah, sure." Leslie McKinsey obviously did not want to dwell on the Wu Xiaoming's reaction for too long.
"Dude, do you know someone from MAGLAA?" Jake the sound guy asked.
"I - what is MAGLAA?" Wu Xiaoming asked.
"Not important right now." Leslie McKinsey interjected: "All we need to focus on is - we've got most of what we've got already, we just need to get as much filler footage as possible. Jake, are the mics still picking up?"
"Nah - it stopped when they came in." Jake shook his head.
"Okay. Okay." Leslie McKinsey nodded: "Now, I think we're good for now. Tammy, Xiaoming, you can take a break here until the morning, we can talk about our next steps in the afternoon."
"Are we going to shoot more scenes about these two rooms?" Wu Xiaoming asked.
"Uh - probably not. The plan is to check out the Room of - of Dreams."
"The Room of Wandering Dream." Tammy corrected the director: "Alrighty, I'll take a quick nap here. Let me know if you need me for anything." Then she just grabbed a chair and sat in the corner of the room.
Wu Xiaoming did the same, this show was indeed low on budget, he was kind of expecting another spare room for rest, but they didn't even have that. Possibly most of the budget went into renting a lot of the equipment.
If circumstances permitted, Wu Xiaoming would really like to resolve whatever issue was with the dead woman - foul stench aside, she appeared to be genuinely trapped in her place and in a state of misery.
Time wise, it was 3:48AM, which meant he still had a few hours to actually "nap". Wu Xiaoming took a final look around the room, making sure he was not needed, before diving back into the ethereal realm.
The slender, pale body of a semi-humanoid creature almost made Wu Xiaoming jump. A human whose lower body went inside the ceiling, only revealing its abnormally long torso and two slender arms.
The creature had a general human-like facial structure, but with no eyes, nostrils or mouth. It had only a vertical slit in the middle of the face. Though, it seemed that this creature was not hostile at all - even when it turned its eyeless face to Wu Xiaoming.
Wu Xiaoming kept his eye on the creature, hands and weapons at the ready as he moved around the room and left. At the final moment, the slit in the middle of the creature's face opened up, two very short, meaty tentacles poked out and sniffed the air as if they were nostrils. But still, no hostile action against Wu Xiaoming at all.
"What the fuck is this place." Wu Xiaoming cursed in his mind as he sped up the stairs.
He entered room 404. The dark smoke was still right where the woman was. But it seemed he was a bit too late - the woman's body had all but collapsed into only a pile of bones. The sockets on her body also crumbled and what remained was a pile of bones with rotten and decayed rags that used to be her clothing.
He could only try. Golden light glowed from his palms as he hovered his hands around the dark smoke shrouding the old woman's body. It worked, like frost under sunlight, the dark smoke began vaporizing. Though more dark smoke arose from the ground and came down from the ceiling to fill the gap, it still was not fast enough to keep the shroud from burning away.
A little bit of sweat dropped from Wu Xiaoming's forehead. He still had some energy, or spirit, to spare. It was likely that he could fully release this woman from the binds of the dark smoke.
Yet just as this thought crossed his mind, a hand made of only bones burst from the woman's body and grabbed Wu Xiaoming's left wrist. At the same time, the skeletal face turned to Wu Xiaoming, two glimmers of light flickering in the eye sockets, like candles in the wind.
"Help… me…" She pleaded.