Folk Horror tales

Ghost Employee（2）

5

Several long, agonizing hours passed. At seven o’clock in the morning, a woman appeared right on time outside the factory gate. She wore an old floral shirt faded pale from washing, her hair was messy, and her cloth shoes were caked with mud. Her eyes were swollen like walnuts, and before she even stepped inside, her dry sobs echoed across half the compound.

“Dashan! How could you die such a terrible death?! How am I supposed to live on with our child without?!”

Watching my cousin’s Oscar-worthy performance, half of my anxiety lifted. Zhao Xuming was pacing frantically in his office and immediately ordered the security guards to bring her into the private meeting room. Inside the room were only me, Zhao Xuming, Li Na, and my hysterically crying cousin.

“Ma’am, please calm down. What’s done is done.”

Zhao Xuming wiped the cold sweat from his forehead and got straight to the point. “The factory was negligent in supervision, and we are willing to offer compensation.”

My cousin shot her head up sharply, her eyes fierce like a mother wolf protecting her young.

“Compensation? How can you compensate a human life?! I’m calling the police! I’ll get this heartless factory shut down!”

The word “police” drained the color from Zhao Xuming’s face at once.

“No, no, no! Ma’am, let’s talk this over! Going through legal proceedings will only get you compensation too, and it will take a lot of time and effort.” Zhao Xuming held up five fingers. “500,000 yuan. Let’s settle this privately, shall we?”

“500,000? Are you treating me like a beggar? My husband was a living, breathing person! 1.5 million! Not a cent less, or I’ll die right here!” my cousin shouted at the top of her lungs.

An extremely tense and fierce round of bargaining began.

In the end, they settled on 1.2 million yuan.

Zhao Xuming looked as if he was being forced to cut his own flesh, but to save his factory, he gritted his teeth and agreed.

“1.2 million it is. But you must sign a confidentiality agreement and a letter of understanding. Take the money, have the body cremated immediately, and never cause us any more trouble!”

My cousin hesitated for show, then nodded firmly.

“Fine! I’ll sign when I see the money!”

Everything went unnervingly smoothly—so smoothly that it felt unreal. Zhao Xuming immediately told the finance department to raise the funds and transfer them to the bank account provided by my cousin. Once the money arrived, this crisis would be perfectly resolved.

Just then, Li Na, who had been sitting aside watching coldly, suddenly stood up. She walked over to my cousin, stared at her face for a few seconds, and then smiled.

“Ma’am, I work in administration. According to the rules, to claim such a large sum of compensation, we need to verify your identity information and marriage certificate.”

My heart sank violently, and my breath caught in my throat. I had a counterfeit marriage certificate made overnight by a forger. The document itself looked real enough, but if Li Na tried to verify it online, everything would fall apart!

My cousin’s face stiffened for a moment, but she quickly slipped back into her shrewish act.

“What are you looking at?! My husband is dead! Are you trying to renege on the payment?!”

She cursed as she pulled the fake marriage certificate I had arranged overnight from her inner pocket and slammed it on the table. Li Na took the certificate and flipped it open. Then she spoke words that sent me plummeting into despair.

“Wang Dashan, born in 1985, household registration in Pingshan County, Yu’nan Province.”

Li Na read the information on the certificate slowly, then suddenly turned to me, her eyes glinting like a poisonous snake.

“But Shen Yu, out of curiosity last night, I asked a classmate of mine who works as a household registration police officer to check.

There is no Wang Dashan with that ID number in the national household registration system.”

“This man is an unregistered person, or rather, he doesn’t exist at all!”

The air in the meeting room turned to ice.

Zhao Xuming froze. My cousin froze too.

Li Na stared at me relentlessly, a cruel smile curving at the corner of her mouth.

“Shen Yu, what on earth are you up to? Who exactly is the person who died in that machine?!”

A deathly silence fell over the room. Li Na held the fake marriage certificate as if she held my life in her hands, her eyes filled with malicious satisfaction. Zhao Xuming’s already anxious face turned beet red, and he spun toward me violently.

“Shen Yu! What the hell is going on here?!”

My mind raced frantically at that moment, cold sweat streaming down my back. If I told the truth, I was finished. Not only me, but my daughter, lying in the hospital bed waiting for life-saving money, would be finished too.

People in despair can unleash an unbelievable will to survive. I pinched my thigh hard to force myself to calm down, then lifted my head abruptly, staring at my cousin with exaggerated shock.

“Sister-in-law! Dashan’s ID card was fake?!”

I raised my voice, acting even more incredulous than Li Na.

“When he joined the company, he showed the original second-generation ID card—it even scanned on the machine! How could it be fake?!”

My cousin, a seasoned survivor from years of scraping by on the streets, was sharp-witted.

She hesitated for less than a second before playing along perfectly. She plopped down on the floor and began wailing again, her cries piercing and hollow.

“Oh my God! I can’t live like this any longer!

I told him not to use fake documents to hide from debts, but he just wouldn’t listen!”

My cousin cried as she pointed her finger at Li Na and shouted furiously.

“You evil woman, digging up his past even after he’s dead!

I’ll tell you the truth—my husband owed online loans back home, and people came to splash red paint on our door every single day!

He paid 500 yuan under an overpass to get a fake ID just so he could work here to make money!

We already lived in the shadows, and now you’re bullying us widows and orphans, aren’t you?!”

My cousin’s rapid, hysterical outburst left Li Na stunned.

Li Na opened her mouth, still trying to retort: “That’s nonsense! How could a fake ID even pass the scanner—”

“Enough!”

A violent roar cut Li Na off.

It was Zhao Xuming.

Zhao Xuming’s eyes were bloodshot as if they would bleed at any moment, and he stared at Li Na like she was his worst enemy.

“Li Na, are you f*****g bored out of your mind?!”

Zhao Xuming stepped up to her and snarled through gritted teeth.

“You think I give a damn what the dead guy’s name was?!

What I care about is putting this mess to rest! Saving this lousy factory from shutting down!

Registered or not, fugitive or not — he died in my workshop!

You insist on calling the cops, digging up his whole family tree… do you only get satisfaction once my factory is sealed shut?!”

Li Na was splattered with his spit, her face flushing pale then green. She never expected that the leverage she had schemed so hard to obtain was completely worthless in Zhao Xuming’s eyes. All Zhao Xuming wanted was to smooth things over.

“Enough! Sign the papers! Pay her!”

Zhao Xuming snatched the fake marriage certificate from Li Na’s hand, tossed it back to my cousin without a glance.

“Take the money, cremate the body immediately. Once you step out this door, this never happened.”

6

What followed was unbelievably fast. Finance had the money ready: 1.2 million yuan, transferred directly into the bank account my cousin provided.

My cousin signed the letter of understanding and the non-disclosure agreement, pressing her red fingerprint onto the documents. When the transfer alert sounded, I saw her hands tremble. Afterward, logistics staff drove the factory’s refrigerated truck to deliver the bag of mangled remains straight to a crematorium in the suburbs.

Zhao Xuming assigned two of his most trusted security guards to monitor the entire process, terrified my cousin might back out and call the police halfway. It wasn’t until twelve noon, when the guards called to confirm the body had been pushed into the incinerator and the ashes handed over to the family, that Zhao Xuming collapsed limply into his executive chair.

A catastrophic disaster had been wiped clean with 1.2 million yuan.

In the afternoon, I snuck out of the factory on an excuse. Two kilometers away, in a shabby motel, I met my cousin, who had already changed out of her ragged clothes. On the table lay a brand-new bank card.

“The password is your birthday,” my cousin said, smoking, her face still pale. “There’s 800,000 in here. I transferred 400,000 to my own card and paid off the loan sharks.”

I grabbed the card and squeezed it so tight my nails dug into my palm. The money was mine. Beibei’s surgery fees were covered, and so were her follow-up treatments. It felt as if the huge boulder weighing on my chest for three years had finally been lifted.

“Shen Yu, let me give you some advice,” my cousin said, blowing out a ring of smoke, looking at me with complicated eyes. “This money is cursed. Have you ever thought about who the person who died in that machine really was?”

I froze stiff.

My cousin stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray and stood up.

“Whoever the poor bastard was, this whole thing is evil.

That factory director didn’t even check the body’s identity before rushing to pay and cremate it. He’s definitely hiding something.

I’m going back to my hometown. I’m never coming back here again.

You should quit too. Something worse is going to happen at this lousy factory.”

My cousin left. I sat alone in the motel room for a long time. Her words pierced my heart like a needle.

Right. If Wang Dashan was a fake person I made up…

Then who was the one pulled into the meat grinder in the middle of last night?

Why was there a living person in the workshop in the dead of night, operating the machine in place of the nonexistent “Wang Dashan”?

Besides, Zhao Xuming’s reaction was deeply abnormal.

Normally, he would double-check for hours just to issue a few thousand yuan in bonuses. Yet this time, he had willingly handed over 1.2 million without even verifying the dead man’s identity.

It was less like he was compensating the family… and more like he was buying silence — buying complete cover-up of the body’s true identity.

A terrifying thought grew like poison ivy in my mind.

This “accident” was never an accident.

It was murder.

And I, in order to scam the compensation and get the money to save my daughter, had unwittingly become his accomplice.

7

It was already three in the afternoon when I returned to the factory.

The workshop had resumed production, and the roar of machinery drowned out all traces of evil. It was as if the tragedy in the early hours of the morning had been nothing but a dream.

I sat at my desk, staring at the employee files on the computer screen, my palms soaked in cold sweat.

If this had been a murder, who was the killer? Who was the victim?

To find out, I knew I had to go somewhere.

The factory director’s office.

I waited until almost the end of the workday, then snuck up to the second floor. After confirming the director was not inside,

I unlocked the office door with the universal spare key I used for managing administrative assets.

The air was thick with heavy air freshener, yet it still failed to cover a faint, fishy stench.

I closed the door and headed straight for his private lounge at the back of the office.

I checked under the bed, inside the wardrobe, and even the ceiling access panel by standing on a chair. I found nothing.

Just as I was sweating profusely and nearly ready to give up, I noticed the vertical air conditioner in the corner.

On the edge of its white plastic casing, a tiny, inconspicuous dark-red stain clung to the surface, like a half-wiped bloodstain.

My heart pounded violently. I squatted down at once and pried open the panel below the air conditioner with both hands.

Hidden in the gap beside the messy wiring and compressor was a black plastic bag, tightly wrapped with tape.

I put on disposable gloves and carefully pulled the bag out.

It was heavy, as if it contained clothes. When I untied the tight knot, a strong smell of blood rushed out, making me almost vomit on the spot.

Inside the bag was a set of men’s clothes covered in dried, dark-red blood!

Along with the clothes were a pair of leather shoes, a phone with a shattered screen, and a bloodstained watch.

I fought back the nausea rising in my stomach and picked up the watch with two fingers.

It was a gold Rolex.

Under the light, a scratch on the edge of the dial glinted sharply.

I recognized this watch.

On payday last month, Zhou Qiang—the factory’s silent partner, and Zhao Xuming’s brother-in-law—had come to cause trouble.

Zhou was a compulsive gambler. Angry that Zhao Xuming gave him too little profit, he had gotten into a violent fight with Zhao in the finance office.

I had happened to drop off a report at that moment and watched Zhou slam this Rolex on the desk. The scratch had been made that day.

Zhou had shouted in Zhao Xuming’s face:

“Zhao Xuming, you bastard! I have proof you falsified accounts and evaded taxes!

If you don’t give me five million yuan, I’ll report you to the tax bureau tomorrow and make you rot in jail!”

Afterward, Zhao Xuming pulled Zhou into his office, and they stayed behind locked doors for the entire afternoon.

From that day on, I never saw Zhou Qiang cause trouble at the factory again.

Turned out he hadn’t stopped coming.

He just could never come back.

All the clues clicked together at that moment, forming a horrifying truth.