Chapter 15: A Dog Carries a Head

2022-05-20

“What is love in this world? Only something worth pledging your life and death for.”

Love has always been something people yearn for. It seems to represent innocence, kindness, and beauty. But if someone used blood to write such poetry on a gray wall, it suddenly feels chilling. Right now, Gu Chen and I were standing inside a half-finished building.

The building’s structure was done, thirty stories high in total.

The poem scrawled in blood had been written on the fifteenth floor. Not too high, not too low, right in the middle. There was no elevator. Pathetic as it sounds, by the time I climbed fifteen flights, I felt like I could cough up blood from exhaustion.

Construction on this building had been paused for a while. Word was, the real estate developer miscalculated the budget by a zero. Halfway through, they realized the money wasn’t nearly enough. That’s why everything here had stopped. Old Zhang had been working here as the watchman for over a month now. His job was to keep people from sneaking in to steal the steel beams. He ate here, drank here, and slept here.

Even though the developers botched their budget, paying someone like Old Zhang to watch over the place was no problem at all.

Last night, Old Zhang killed another stray dog. He’d noticed the number of stray cats and dogs around here was growing. Maybe it was because this huge construction site was so empty of people, it became a real paradise for animals. The cats and dogs kept slipping in through the gaps in the perimeter fence.

Old Zhang had special tricks for dealing with dogs.

If the dog was wearing a collar or was obviously a fancy breed, Old Zhang would leave it alone. Clearly those belonged to someone. Sometimes, he’d wonder about city folk: they call their kids ‘puppies’ but then turn around and call their dogs ‘sons’.

Old Zhang felt like he’d been crushed under the wheels of modern times.

But when it came to true strays, the ones nobody cared for, Old Zhang never showed mercy.

He’d say those stray cats should be glad their meat’s too sour to eat.

This place was like Old Zhang’s own little kingdom.

Until last night, when he found an intruder.

Every night, Old Zhang was supposed to check all the floors. That was the rule. But honestly, even if he skipped work for a couple days, nobody would notice. Still, he kept to his routine. Not out of any sense of duty, but because he needed to catch more dogs.

Ever since the strays started turning up, Old Zhang had been setting traps in every stairwell. Every night he’d catch something.

Last night, Old Zhang was going about his usual business. Only this time, he didn’t catch a dog. He caught a person. Just as Old Zhang moved closer, the intruder was pulling their foot out of a rope trap.

Old Zhang had no idea what anyone was doing here halfway through the night. He was about to scold them, when they suddenly bolted. It was too dark to see the person’s face, only that they were about 170 centimeters tall. He didn’t even know if it was a man or a woman.

But Old Zhang didn’t care much, just figured it was some dumb thief who’d stepped on his trap. Then, suddenly, he heard footsteps echoing through the empty floors. Shining his old flashlight upstairs, he saw nothing.

But he definitely heard it—‘drip drip, drip drip’.

A cold wind swept through.

The construction site was pitch black. Turning on the lights at night would cost more than Old Zhang made in a day, so obviously nobody did that. The only light came from his ancient flashlight. Glancing back at the looming building, the windows looked like the eyes of some monster.

Old Zhang was terrified, but decided to go have a look anyway.

Sometimes, curiosity is stronger than fear. Old Zhang climbed the stairs step by step; in the silence, his footsteps echoed through the building—thump, thump, thump. Up and up, until he reached the fifteenth floor.

As soon as he stepped onto the fifteenth, a sharp smell of blood hit him. He quickly shined his flashlight around and spotted the words on the wall. Old Zhang was illiterate—he couldn’t even write his own name. His parents died when he was young and he never went to school.

Still, he’d picked up a new word lately: ‘Shamate.’ Old Zhang figured the kid who ran off just now must be one of those punks—they loved to scribble all over walls.

He moved closer to the wall with his flashlight, trying to make sense of the characters. Suddenly, his foot caught on something and it rolled away. He quickly pointed his light down.

In the corner, Old Zhang found a bucket, blood spilling everywhere. He hurried to set it upright. This was a bucket he knew well.

Old Zhang hated wasting food. Every part of a dog could be useful—even the blood was cooked up into blood pudding. When it came to eating, Old Zhang was serious. He used this very bucket to collect dog blood. Never expected that brat to steal it to make a mess.

Cursing loudly, he grabbed his bucket and started heading back.

Halfway down, he couldn’t resist dipping his finger in the blood for a taste. The moment it touched his lips, Old Zhang froze.

The next day, after a long struggle, Old Zhang decided to call the police.

That’s why Gu Chen and I were here now, staring at the love poem painted in blood.

We could tell the blood was still fresh when the words were written last night—a few streaks still trickled slowly down the wall. Still, we couldn’t just take Old Zhang’s word for it and assume this was human blood. We’d have to analyze it later to be sure.

“Who comes here in the dead of night to write creepy poems like this?” Gu Chen muttered.

“Hey, you two come down here!” Old Zhang shouted from below. “You have to see this! There’s a dog running around with a head in its mouth!”

A dog with a head in its mouth?

Gu Chen and I looked down from the fifteenth floor.

A husky was strutting across the courtyard with a human head between its teeth.

It was a woman’s head. Long hair covered her face, making it impossible to recognize her. Oddly, her head wasn’t bleeding—the neck was dry, as if all the blood had already clotted. One side of the skull was caved in.

Everyone around was too stunned to even scream. The dog’s owner stared as his husky trotted toward him, mouth agape. He’d just thrown a frisbee, never expecting his dog to bring back a human head.

Staring at the head dangling from the dog’s mouth, I couldn’t help but blurt out, “What the hell is this?”

By the time Gu Chen and I reached the ground, the husky’s female owner had collapsed in shock. The crowd erupted in shouts, so I quickly called out, “We’re undercover officers, everyone back up!”

“You get that thing out of the dog’s mouth,” I told Gu Chen.

Gu Chen looked exasperated. “And how am I supposed to do that?”

“Whatever you want—use your charm, play the victim, I don’t care,” I said.

Gu Chen tried every trick he could think of. As more people gathered, his frustration boiled over. Finally, he tackled the husky head-on. I never thought I’d see the day we’d be wrestling with a dog.

Luckily, Gu Chen’s got real skills. After a struggle, he managed to pry the head loose.

I whipped off my t-shirt and used it to wrap the head. Then I slipped into the car.

“The thing Old Zhang mentioned rolling away last night was probably this,” I told Gu Chen.

Gu Chen answered, his voice a little strained, “So, you’re saying that kid was walking around at midnight carrying a human head, and stopped to write poetry in blood?”

The idea made my skin crawl.

And on his way down, he’d stepped right into Old Zhang’s trap.

Logical as it sounded, I just couldn’t accept it. If someone was calm and obsessed enough to be writing poems with blood, they wouldn’t panic over a simple dog trap and end up getting caught. So, who was the kid that night, and who actually wrote the poem?

“Why are you shirtless?” Xiao Liu spotted me and asked, “What’s that bundled up in your shirt? Watermelon? Bet it’s ice cold!”

Xiao Liu joked as he followed me into Team Leader Shao’s office: “Let me check that melon for you, I know my stuff.”

Before I could stop him, Xiao Liu pulled the shirt open.

“I-it’s a human head!”