Chapter 1

At 2:00 AM, I lay in bed with my eyes closed, my fingers digging desperately into the flesh of my inner thigh.

Crack... Crunch... A stomach-churning sound of dislocating bones drifted from the foot of the bed. Immediately after, a cloying stench of dead fish rolled over the mattress.

A cold, stiff finger traced my jawline and pressed down hard on my carotid artery. It was feeling for a pulse.

"Darling..."

A bizarre, dual-layered echo came from directly above my head. A cold, bloody drop of meat juice smacked right onto my eyelid.

But I didn't dare let my breathing falter for even a fraction of a beat.

Because I knew—the thing currently staring dead at me, hanging upside down from the ceiling like a spider with its limbs bent backward, was absolutely not the wife I had spent the last ten years with.

Chapter 1

The "Uncanny Valley" theory suggests that when a non-human entity closely resembles a human in appearance and motion, but is just slightly off, it triggers the most primal sense of horror and revulsion deep within the human subconscious.

As a psychology professor, I had lectured my students on this theory countless times and used plenty of physical models to demonstrate it. But I never imagined that one day, I would experience the Uncanny Valley firsthand with my own wife.

——

Blackwater Lake Camp was broadcasting a red alert for a blizzard. The temperature had plummeted to freezing, but the bonfire in the lakeside plaza was burning fiercely. People gathered around the barbecue grills, chatting and mingling; it looked quite lively.

My wife and I had arrived here a day ago, intending to spend a seven-day vacation for our tenth wedding anniversary.

This should have been a joyful occasion, but right now, I was gripping my whiskey glass so tightly that my knuckles had turned white.

"What are you looking at, Arthur?" Evelyn suddenly asked from across the table, a flawless smile hanging on her lips.

I swallowed hard. "Nothing... just looking at you."

An extreme sense of incongruity gave rise to an inexplicable flicker of fear in the bottom of my heart.

When Evelyn turned her head, there was absolutely no sign of muscle traction in her neck. Her head and shoulders seemed welded together, relying entirely on her lumbar spine to execute a mechanical, lateral shift.

Like a rusty gear, jarringly catching for a second.

I forced my gaze away and used tongs to prod the venison on the grill. The cut was entirely uncooked; dark red blood was dripping down the crevices of the meat.

My wife was staring intently at that half-raw chunk.

Illuminated by the bonfire, the eyes I had gazed into for ten years had pupils that were dilated and ashen, showing no pupillary response to the light whatsoever. They looked like two cheap glass marbles—cloudy and entirely dead.

Immediately after, I heard a wet, guttural swallowing sound mixed with the churn of mucus coming from her throat.

That was not a human's appetite for delicious food. It was a cold, primal hunger.

Sizzle—

A drop of boiling grease splattered right onto the back of Evelyn's hand.

That small patch of skin instantly blistered into a gruesome purplish-red welt, faintly giving off the scent of burnt flesh.

"Evelyn!" I stood up abruptly, knocking over my glass.

Even the most thick-skinned person would instinctively scream and snatch their hand back from a scalding burn.

But she didn't move an inch. Her breathing didn't even falter.

She merely pried her gaze away from the raw meat inch by inch, agonizingly slowly raising her head to focus on my terrified, distorted face. "What's wrong, Arthur?"

"Does it... not hurt?" A chill ran through my entire body.

She looked down blankly at the blister. "Oh. The wind is too cold. Must be numb."

As if touching a senseless plastic prop, she rubbed the blister, then casually grabbed a napkin and placed the still-bleeding, half-raw venison onto her plate. "I'm hungry, darling."

"Wait for me by the fireplace in the lounge," I said, taking a deep breath of the biting cold air. "I'm going to the clinic to get some burn ointment. We'll head straight back to the room."

Although my wife's recent movements had been somewhat bizarre, I didn't think much of it, simply assuming she was sick from recent work stress.

I ran to the medical hall, walking quickly toward the pharmacy.

"Her perception of temperature died a long time ago."

A flat, emotionless baritone suddenly drifted from deep within the corridor.

I stopped dead in my tracks, my body tensing.

A man in a dark gray windbreaker leaned soundlessly against the wall in the shadows.

"What did you say?" I asked, looking suspicious.

"Dr. Carter, staying in Cabin 4. I specialize in anomalous biological phenomena." He pushed up his rimless glasses, his gaze as cold and sharp as a scalpel. "Professor Arthur, stop deluding yourself that your wife is just stressed from work."

"When she was staring at the raw meat just now, her third through fifth cervical vertebrae were completely locked. Didn't you notice? That's not something a living human can do."

"Your wife is already dead!"

My mind buzzed. Struck by an involuntary chill, I recalled the way my wife had turned her head.

"Piss off." Snapping back to reality, I still refused to believe my wife was dead, convinced the man across from me was just a charlatan playing tricks.

"I don't care if you're some crackpot expert studying garbage pseudoscience, and I don't care how you got my name. Stay away from my wife, and get out of my sight right now."

Carter didn't get angry.

He looked at me the way a doctor might look at a terminally ill patient who was hiding their sickness.

Compassionate, yet utterly ruthless.

He reached into his pocket, pulled out a black, encrypted communicator that resembled an old-school pager, and set it gently on the grease-stained, snowy wooden table.

The communicator emitted a faint, eerie green glow.

"The blizzard is about to block off the road down the mountain, and the cell towers will be paralyzed within two hours. Both of you are going nowhere," Carter's voice pierced through the mounting howl of the wind outside. "Take this. Tonight, at 2:00 AM, do not fall asleep. Watch her spine. Count down three joints from the seventh cervical vertebra, and stare right there."

He paused, a hint of indescribable, fanatical coldness finally bleeding into his eyes. "If you're lucky enough to survive until dawn, use this to contact me. The armed squad takes time to assemble, but we will come save you."

"You're a fucking lunatic!"

I was thoroughly enraged. I grabbed a vase from the table and smashed it hard on the floor.

The sound of shattering glass finally drew the attention of people nearby.

But when I looked up again, Carter had already turned away.

Like a ghost, he disappeared into the depths of the corridor with a swift yet flawlessly smooth gait.

"Psychopath..." I panted heavily, forcing my hands to stop shaking.

...

11:30 PM, the remote Cabin 14.

The blizzard had sealed everything off, trapping us on this isolated island.

The indoor heater was running full blast, yet my limbs felt chillingly cold.

Evelyn hadn't applied the ointment, nor did she wash up.

She changed into an ankle-length white nightgown and lay down with her back to me. "Good night, darling." Her voice was dry and hollow.

I lay down fully clothed on the absolute edge of the mattress, leaving only a dim wall sconce on.

In the claustrophobic, stuffy room, I caught a faint stench—drifting from her body.

Like fermented sludge from the deep sea, mixed with the slight rotting fishiness of a dead catch.

This stench frantically tore at the defensive lines of my sanity.

Carter's warning sawed back and forth across my nerves like a rusted blade: 2:00 AM, watch her spine.

Twelve o'clock, one o'clock, one thirty...

I stared intently at the clock.

1:50 AM.

Just at the exact moment my vision blurred from extreme tension, the mattress beside me suddenly felt lighter.

A pungent smell of rotting seafood instantly filled the entire space.

The blankets were thrown back, and the space beneath them held not a single trace of human warmth.

Where did Evelyn go?

An icy chill shot straight up my spine into the back of my head.

Gritting my teeth, I slipped out of bed, stepped barefoot onto the wooden floorboards, held my breath, and followed the thick, bloody stench into the blind spots of the room.

The bathroom was empty.

The endpoint of the smell was the pitch-black walk-in closet at the deepest part of the bedroom.

I pressed my back against the wall, my heart pounding so hard it threatened to shatter my ribs. Slowly, I poked my head out and peered into the dead darkness.

Suddenly.

Crack... Crunch...

A terribly crisp, abnormal noise.

It sounded exactly like a thick section of spinal bone wrapped in flesh being forcibly wrenched backward by some monstrous strength, snapping out of alignment—the sound of jagged bone splinters grinding against flesh.

Then, accompanying the hair-raising sound of dislocating joints.

From the deep shadows of the closet came a wet, muffled sound of raw meat being chewed.