Dorm Story: Bangs and Crashes in the Night—"Freeze! Move and I'll Shoot!"

One night past ten, I dragged my data-and-report-drained body from the grad school lab back to the dorm, hurriedly packed a few changes of clothes and a simple bag, and planned to drive back to my old hometown of Tamsui overnight.

Over those years of long commutes, the Wanderer developed an extremely practical “night-driving philosophy”:

Before ten at night, the major arteries of northern Taiwan are basically all jammed, especially the gateway in and out of Tamsui—every evening, the relevant authorities, to make it easier for various road-connection project cases to pass review, spare no excuse to dig up the roads all along the route. That display felt like a deliberate attempt to completely paralyze Provincial Highway 2 (and honestly, this trick of manufacturing public resentment to push projects through works really well).

But actually, as long as you patiently linger an extra hour in the lab and hit the gas after avoiding the peak traffic, the actual time to get home is often about the same, or even faster.

That way, smart people naturally choose the relaxed, smooth-sailing night route.

It’s just that that night, a major unexpected incident suddenly erupted around the dorm, leaving me petrified, hidden in the pitch-black room, not daring to move a muscle, until nearly eleven when I finally slipped away, still shaken.

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1,500 a Month: The Legendary Haunted-House-Grade Budget Miracle Room

Before getting to the point, I must properly introduce that “miracle dorm” where I stayed while studying in grad school in Zhongli.

If I had to define that rental in two words, they’d precisely be: cheap, extremely close to school.

• Absurdly cheap: rent only 1,500 NT dollars a month! Even the school’s cheapest student dorm costs more;
• Incredibly close: only a few minutes’ walk to the department building—probably only my later life of directly “moving my physical body into” the lab could be closer (about the absurd history of camping out and living in the lab, I’ll write a dedicated article later to commemorate).

You must be curious: since the rent is this cheap and it’s so close to school, plus the top third floor has a clothes-drying area with an open view that doubles as an open-air barbecue spot, and you can even park your car for free on the roadside outside the gate—how on earth did I, a fresh rookie grad student, deserve to snag such a hot property?

The truth is: this house needed no snagging at all.

Because the entire three-story old building had, from top to bottom, rented out only two suites total, one of which was mine. The whole building was usually as quiet as a ruin.

As for my room: about 8 ping on paper, a square layout, genuinely quite spacious. The landlord’s furniture was also very “rustic”: a heavy iron office desk, a wooden chair, a double wooden bed frame, a three-tier bookshelf, a cheap wooden wardrobe that looked about to fall apart, plus an electric water heater and a private bathroom.

No TV, no fridge in the room, and the landlord’s wired internet was as slow as dial-up; but for someone like me who treated the room only as a sleeping air-raid shelter, I could fall asleep even without a bed, so I didn’t mind the lack of appliances at all. On luckier days, I could even occasionally catch a weak signal from the campus Wi-Fi of the girls’ dorm directly across.

The only rather fatal flaw was that one entire wall of the room faced directly outdoors, and outside the window was a stretch of untended, desolate tall grass. In the rainy season the humidity was extremely heavy, and that wall had long grown undulating, abstract-painting-like years-old mold.

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Bangs and Crashes in the Dark Night: “Freeze! Move and I’ll Shoot!”

Let me pull the memory back to that late night preparing to drive back to Tamsui.

Just as I zipped up my backpack, turned off the big light, and turned to open the door and go downstairs—

“Bang! Clang! Clang!”

A burst of extremely abrupt, huge door-smashing and things-being-smashed noise suddenly came from behind the building next door!

Our building and the one next door belong to different intersections, but the backs of the two long buildings happen to be tightly back-to-back, separated only by a narrow, cramped fire alley.

In the dead of night past ten, beside the desolate tall grass, that heavy door-smashing boom, the clatter of things being toppled and smashed, and the heavy, hurried footsteps were heard crystal clear—as if whispering right behind my back!

Before my brain could react from the shock, the alley immediately erupted with a stern, murderous male roar:

“Freeze!! Move and I’ll shoot!!”

“Oh mom…”

The Wanderer stood before the pitch-black door, heart rate instantly spiking past 200, the whole person frozen in place as if hit by a pressure point.

Hearing this, anyone could guess with their knees what major event was happening on the spot—that mysterious house next door, usually with its door locked and curtains always drawn, was either a hidden drug-manufacturing and packaging site being raided, or a wanted fugitive carrying a major criminal case being cornered by plainclothes detectives.

After all, this was Zhongli back in the day!

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A Long Forty Minutes Hidden in the Dark

After that cracking roar of “move and I’ll shoot,” the narrow back alley successively carried the sounds of fierce subduing struggle, rude cursing, and the crisp “click” of handcuffs locking.

At this moment, I held the door handle, not daring to breathe.

I didn’t even dare walk back to the desk to grab my phone, deeply afraid that any creak of the floorboards, or the faint glow of a screen lighting up, would make the plainclothes police or the fleeing suspect—nerves stretched to the extreme, ready to pull the trigger at any moment—mistake it for an accomplice trying to break out from behind and blindly fire a few shots at my window.

So I just crouched quietly, hidden in the corner of the completely pitch-black room, for nearly forty minutes.

Only when the piercing long wail of police sirens approached from afar, several police cars flashing red and blue warning lights drove into the alley mouth, and the noisy voices and escorting footsteps gradually faded, did the desolate back-alley grass finally return to a dead silence.

Only then did I slowly let out a long breath, discovering my back was already soaked cold with sweat.

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Conclusion

I glanced at my watch—it was nearly eleven at night.

I tiptoed downstairs in the dark, slipped into the old car parked outside the gate, started the engine, quickly locked all the doors, floored the gas, and fled at top speed from that 1,500-a-month apartment hidden among the tall grass and dark alley.

The night wind poured in through the car window. Racing along the empty late-night highway, the earlier irritable traffic anxiety had long been washed clean by the adrenaline of that police-manhunt just now.

Recalling it years later, that mold-ridden run-down suite, the door-smashing boom behind the tall grass, the clatter of smashed things and the detective’s roar—though spine-chilling at the time—became, in the Wanderer’s impoverished, hardscrabble engineering grad-school years, the most absurd and most vivid film noir.