The Tenant in the Jack-o'-Lantern
When Lin Xia moved into that apartment in the old town, the landlord repeatedly warned her: "Don't open the window on Halloween night, and never touch the old jack-o'-lantern at the door."
She paid no attention to itβat her early twenties, she always thought "horror" was just a lie made up by adults. Until the night of October 31st, a strange smell of caramel mixed with rot drifted in from outside the window. The jack-o'-lantern at the door suddenly lit up on its own. In the orange light, the wick was not a candle, but a wisp of throbbing gray mist.
Curious, she leaned in to look. From the gray mist, half a human face emerged: shriveled skin clung to prominent cheekbones, and its eyes were two dark holes, staring straight at her wrist. "It's time to pay this year's 'rent'," a hoarse voice drifted out of the jack-o'-lantern, like rusty iron scraping against wood.
Lin Xia stepped back in shock, only to find an almost invisible thin black thread wrapped around her wrist. The other end of the thread was stuck in the crack of the jack-o'-lantern. She recalled that when she was tidying up the attic last week, she accidentally broke an old wooden box carved with pumpkin patterns. At that time, her fingertip was pricked by a splinter, and the blood oozed into the fragments of the wooden box.
"The tenant in 1943 owed me blood, the one in 1978 owed me bones, and you broke my 'account book'βso you have to pay with your shadow," countless black threads stretched out from the cracks of the jack-o'-lantern, coiling around her ankles like snakes.
She tried to scream, but no sound came out. She could only watch as her shadow was slowly torn away from her body by the black threads and dragged into the jack-o'-lantern. The gray mist of the wick grew thicker, and inside it, one could vaguely see more than a dozen shadows piled up...
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