Chapter 11: Train K9746

Train K9746

In the autumn of 2015, I squeezed onto Train K9746 with a crumpled job notice tucked in my pocket and my childhood friend Akai beside me.

We were traveling from Chengdu to Xi’an. Hard-seat tickets had been impossible to get, so we gritted our teeth and bought sleeper berths instead. To my surprise, there were only four people in that hard-sleeper carriage: Akai and me, plus two strange men—a bespectacled office worker and a middle-aged man carrying a canvas bag. The four of us sat scattered among the berths, and the carriage was so quiet that we could hear the clatter of the rails.

“This train is way too empty,” Akai muttered, glancing out the window.

Night had already gathered beyond the glass. Distant lights flashed past one by one, like ghost fire vanishing into the dark.

I nodded and pushed my backpack farther under my pillow. For no clear reason, I felt a little uneasy.

At ten o’clock, the lights in the sleeper carriage went out. Only a dim yellow wall lamp remained in the corridor. Its weak glow slipped through the gaps in the curtains and cast mottled shadows across the floor.

Sometime in the second half of the night, I woke with the urgent need to use the toilet.

When I sat up, I accidentally knocked one of my slippers off the berth. The sound seemed especially sharp in the silent carriage. I crept quietly toward the toilet.

The corridor light flickered weakly overhead. The carpet under my feet felt oddly soft, almost as if I were stepping on cotton. Inside the toilet, the light was off. Only a thin wash of moonlight leaked in through the vent, just enough for me to make out the outline of the sink.

After I finished using the toilet, I had just turned on the faucet when a low laugh suddenly sounded behind me.

“Heh… heh.”

It was very soft.

Very cold.

Like someone was lying beside my ear and breathing into it.

My whole body went rigid.

I spun around.

The toilet was empty.

There was nothing there but my own reflection in the cloudy mirror.

It had to be my imagination, I told myself. I must have misheard.

I wiped my hands in a hurry and fled back to my berth. Even after I lay down, my back still felt cold.

Less than half an hour later, the office worker with glasses got up and went to the toilet as well.

A short while after that, we heard him let out a low cry of “Ah!” Then he came stumbling back into the compartment, his face white as paper.

“Wh-what happened?” I whispered.

He swallowed hard. When he answered, his voice was shaking.

“J-just now, when I was washing my hands… someone laughed behind me. Heh… heh…”

The air in the carriage seemed to freeze.

Akai sat up at once.

“I’ll go check!”

He forced himself toward the toilet. When he came back, his face was filled with lingering fear too.

“There’s no one in there,” he said. “But it feels creepy.”

Just then, the middle-aged man with the canvas bag patted his pockets, and his expression changed.

“My lighter is gone. And a few dozen yuan in loose change.”

I hurriedly turned over my pillow. The power bank in my backpack had disappeared. Akai took out his phone and realized his earphones were missing. The man with glasses also found that most of the coins in his wallet were gone.

“Someone’s definitely playing tricks on us!” Akai snapped, his voice rising.

The noise woke the railway police officer in the neighboring carriage. He came over and checked around. Seeing that everything missing was small and worthless, he waved it off.

“Probably some passenger took them in passing,” he said. “Nothing valuable is gone, so let it go. There’s no need to make a scene.”

“But we all heard laughter in the toilet!” I said quickly.

At that, the officer’s face changed slightly.

He hesitated for a long while before lowering his voice.

“Since you keep asking, I’ll tell you the truth. Something happened in this carriage two years ago. Back then, there was a gang of pickpockets who relied on a pair of chopsticks to steal things. While people were sleeping, they would slip the chopsticks into their pockets and pinch out money or belongings. Among thieves, this was called Kuaiqian—‘chopstick hooking.’

“One time, a Kuaiqian thief was caught by a passenger. During the argument, he was forcibly dragged into the toilet and accidentally beaten to death. After that, people in this carriage kept losing little things. Late at night, passengers would often hear that sinister heh-heh laughter from the toilet…”

The moment he finished speaking, every light in the carriage suddenly went out.

It was so dark I could not see my own hand in front of my face. The air seemed to freeze, and the cold hurt deep in the cracks of my bones.

Then laughter rose again from the direction of the toilet.

Only this time, it was no longer the low heh-heh from before. It was a thin, shrill, piercing cackle, like fingernails scraping across glass, making my hair stand on end.

“Sleeper berths, I steal… one Kuaiqian hooks four, heh-heh—”

The eerie voice echoed in the darkness. The four of us were so frightened that we shrank back onto our berths, not daring to breathe. Even the railway officer had lost his earlier calm. He pulled out his phone and switched on the flashlight. The beam swept back and forth through the carriage, but found nothing.

The laughter came closer and closer, then suddenly disappeared, leaving only a chill that filled the whole carriage.

The lights did not return to normal until just before dawn.

None of us dared close our eyes again. We stared fixedly toward the toilet until daybreak. After dawn, when the train arrived at the station, we grabbed our luggage and rushed off like mad. When I looked back, that sleeper carriage of Train K9746 looked especially sinister in the morning light.

From that day on, I never took a sleeper train again.

Whenever I think of that heh-heh laugh in the middle of the night, and that eerie line—“one Kuaiqian hooks four”—my whole body turns cold.

What exactly was hiding in that carriage?

Was it the lingering yin spirit of that dead Kuaiqian thief?

Or was there some other hidden truth?

To this day, I still do not dare think too deeply about it.