The weapon by the pillow

This report was published thirteen years ago.

Cheng Tan's heart felt as if it had been gripped tightly by an invisible hand, and he suddenly clenched his fist. A chilling current shot through his spine and up to his head, sending shivers down his spine. He forced himself to focus on the accompanying image.

It was a reproduced old photograph, with low resolution and rough image quality, filled with gray and white noise. The photograph showed a woman lying on the floor of a messy, simple room, her body contorted in an unnatural posture.

Her face was slightly turned towards the camera.

Pale as frost. Eyebrows extremely light. Cracked lips slightly parted. Those empty eyes, even in such low resolution, seemed to pierce through the dust of thirteen years, staring straight out.

Cheng Tan's breath caught in his throat for a moment. His blood seemed to freeze instantly, then surge wildly through his brain in the next instant, a deafening roar that made his eardrums ring. He looked at the photograph again, every muscle in his body tense to the limit, every pore screaming the same name:

It's her! It's definitely her!

This face that he killed in his dreams every night in various ways! That face that belonged to "that woman"!

A tremendous fear washed over him, engulfing him like a tsunami.

He felt a sharp dizziness, his stomach churning, and he almost vomited. He instinctively gripped the newspaper tightly in his hand, feeling as if he were still in reality. He forced himself to look away, repeating to himself, "It's not true, it's not true..." but he still looked over, staring at the few lines of cold, printed words at the bottom of the report.

"...The deceased, Ms. Li (pseudonym), was a 28-year-old woman who rented room 403, Building 7, Anpingli, in the old city area of ​​western Chengdu... The cause of death was blunt force trauma resulting in a comminuted skull fracture... Several items suspected to be the murder weapon were found at the scene, but no valid fingerprints or biological samples were extracted from any of them... Among them was a large pair of pliers stained with the deceased's blood..."

Pliers!

These three words were like three red-hot steel nails, fiercely chiseling into Cheng Tan's retina, burning his vision until it turned blood red.

hum-

The sounds of Jiangzhou in the early morning were instantly silenced. The occasional car passing by the newsstand, the faint cries of vendors at the breakfast stalls in the distance, the rustling of leaves overhead… everything was cut off. Only the deafening pounding of his heart in his empty chest remained, blood rushing to his head. His vision blurred for a moment.

The woman's desperate gaze in this blurry photograph perfectly overlaps with the frozen expression of astonishment on her face when the pliers closed in her dream last night.

"Clatter!"

The newspaper slipped from his stiff fingers and hit the cold cement floor with a dull thud.

The old man at the newsstand looked up at the sound and gave him a puzzled look:

"Young man? Are you alright? You look terrible."

Cheng Tan didn't answer. He suddenly sprang up from the bench, then staggered back a step. His lips trembled, as if he wanted to say something, but he could only gasp at the dry, cold air, unable to utter a single syllable.

He glanced at the newspaper spread out on the ground with terror, as if fleeing a plague. The tiny article and the woman's blurry face seemed to burn with a scorching heat. It forced him to turn abruptly and flee the place almost on his hands and feet, leaving the old man at the newsstand looking utterly bewildered.

The apartment's iron door slammed shut behind him with a heavy thud, sending dust flying from the doorframe. Cheng Tan leaned against the cold door, panting heavily, as if he had just run a desperate marathon. His heart was still pounding in his chest, and the printed words on the old newspaper, especially the three words "pliers," felt like a red-hot iron, repeatedly searing his nerves.

He stumbled back, opened the door, rushed to his desk, and roughly pulled open the drawer.

The pair of pliers, stained with dark brown dirt, still lay on top of the clutter.

He reached out, his fingertips trembling violently a few centimeters from the cold object, afraid to go any further, as if encountering an invisible repulsive force at the opposite pole of a magnetic field. The images in his dream were so clear: the jaws of the clamps slowly and coldly closing, the crisp sound of bones breaking, the frozen astonishment on the woman's face... and the same desperate look in the blurry photograph in the newspaper.

"Room 403, Building 7, Anping Lane..." He murmured the address from the report. This name, this address, was like a rusty key, trying to pry open a heavy door deep in his memory.

He frantically searched his memory, like salvaging a sunken ship from deep quagmire. Thirteen years ago? How old was he then? Seventeen? Eighteen? Just graduated high school? His memories were like a jumbled videotape, blurry, static-filled, fragmented. He only remembered that sweltering summer, having just received his university acceptance letter, and that something seemed to have happened at home… something seemed to have occurred? About moving? About money? But the specific details were like reflections in water, fragile and easily shattered.

Thinking this, his headache suddenly intensified, as if countless steel needles were being plunged into his temples, churning his brain.

Cheng Tan clutched his head in anguish, his nails digging deep into his scalp. No, he couldn't think about it anymore! If he continued, he felt his fragile nerves would snap like a string stretched to its limit.

Just then, his phone, which was on the table, suddenly vibrated, and the screen lit up, emitting a faint white light that illuminated the dust scattered on the table.

The light seemed to awaken him!

Cheng Tan practically lunged at the computer and pressed the power button. The hum of the computer seemed particularly jarring in the deathly silent room. The screen lit up, its pale blue light reflecting on his bloodless face. His fingers trembled as he opened a popular local forum in Jiangzhou and found a section called "Strange News and Amazing Stories."

He recalled that the place was filled with urban legends, unsolved mysteries, and posts seeking answers to paranormal events.

He created a new post, the cursor blinking in the title bar like the pounding of his anxious heart. He carefully chose his words, trying to put the absurd and terrifying experience in his mind into words, yet he had to carefully conceal any key information that might expose him. He couldn't mention "Anpingli," he couldn't mention the specific pair of pliers, and he certainly couldn't mention the woman's death.

Finally, he wrote the following title: [Help Needed: For thirteen consecutive nights, I've dreamt of the same strange woman dying in different ways; the details are so realistic they're suffocating. What does this mean?]

In the main text, he vaguely describes his "dream": a woman with a blurred face is killed by him in thirteen different cruel ways over thirteen consecutive nights. He emphasizes the eerie tactile sensations left on his body after waking up, as well as the deep-seated exhaustion and fear.

In the comments section, he asked whether this was a hallucination caused by extreme psychological stress, or some kind of premonition? Or... was there a possibility of something supernatural, that the brain was unconsciously receiving some "information" that didn't belong to it?

He clicked "Publish".