My House of Horrors

Chang Gu sounded incredibly urgent but did not give a reason for that. Before Chen Ge could ask for more information, the call had already ended.

“Why would Chang Gu be at a psychological illness recovery institute? Also, isn’t he almost completely blind? How did he get there in the first place? Was he kidnapped?” Putting the phone away, Chen Ge grabbed the backpack that he had packed earlier and slowly stood up.

“For now, I think I should put the mission regarding the School of the Afterlife aside. I will make a decision on what to do after meeting up with Chang Gu in person.” He left the theme park and hailed a cab to get to Jiujiang Psychological Illness Treatment Center.

There were three currently operating mental asylums in Jiujiang, and incidentally, Chen Ge had been to all three of them already. After entering the lobby, Chen Ge found a deserted corner and summoned Qiumei out from the comic.

“Hey! What are you doing over there‽” Before Chen Ge could communicate with Qiumei, he was spotted by one of the doctors. “The visiting time is already over. If you wish to visit someone, please come earlier tomorrow.”

“But I’m not here to visit a patient…” Chen Ge slowly turned around while his brain turned quickly trying to come up with an excuse. To Chen Ge’s surprise, he managed to recognize the doctor. When he was there in Lee Zheng’s name to investigate Jiang Xiaohu, he had encountered this doctor. Even though he had forgotten the doctor’s name, Chen Ge could still remember the doctor’s face.

“Did Inspector Lee tell you to come here again?” The doctor was also surprised to see that it was Chen Ge.

After nodding, Chen Ge added in a soft whisper, “I wish to ask about someone from you.”

“Who?”

“His name is Chang Gu.”

“There are no patients here with that name.”

“Then, could he be one of the visitors that came today? He has weak eyesight, and one of his eyes is missing a pupil.”

“If such an easily recognizable person showed up today, the nurses on duty would have talked about it. Wait a minute, I’ll go ask them for you.”

In the breakroom, when the doctor listed Chang Gu’s physical characteristics, it struck a bell with one member of staff immediately. “I think they arrived around dusk. They were visiting a patient in a deep coma.”

“They?”

“Yes, other than that blind man, there were two men and a woman with him. I have no idea what their relationship is, but they acted strangely around each other. It felt like they did not know each other at all.” Since the doctor was there and Chen Ge looked like he was part of the law enforcement, the employee answered truthfully.

“Where are they now?”

“They left after visiting the patient, but now that you mention it, there was something weird.” The employee thought about it before explaining further. “The two men and woman returned about half an hour after they left. They asked me if I’d seen the blind man. They seemed to have been separated, and I even helped them look around the grounds for him.”

Chen Ge had a basic grasp of the situation. Chang Gu had been found by the ‘parents’ and dragged there for some reason. After visiting this mysterious patient, Chang Gu had made use of the chaos and slipped away.

“Brother, who is the patient that they visited today? Do you mind showing me this patient as well?”

“This…” The employee turned to the doctor with difficulty. After the doctor nodded at him, the employee stood up and said, “Okay, I’ll take you there.”

The group walked out of the building and headed toward the quarantine zone at the back of the institute. Chen Ge had visited this kind of quarantine zone before—they were normally used to treat and accommodate highly dangerous and hostile patients.

“The patient that they visited is Chang Wenyu; she is in a coma. She has been with us for many years now. She does not have much family left, but every month, someone comes to deal with her hospital bills.” The employee had a deep impression of Chang Wenyu.

“Why would you place a coma patient in a quarantine zone? I don’t think she’ll be able to harm anyone else, will she?” Chen Ge asked out of curiosity.

“Even though she is in a coma and shows no sign of resuscitation so far, those who went too close to this female patient had some strange things happening to them.” The employee still wanted to say some more, but the doctor next to him suddenly coughed, interrupting the employee.

“I have heard of this patient, Chang Wenyu, before. After her physician examined her body, they realized that her mental nerves and nervous system are working perfectly. She does not have the symptoms of a coma patient. Instead, it is more fitting to say that she is in a deep sleep,” the doctor explained to Chen Ge.

“What do you mean by deep sleep?”

“To put it simply, you can understand it as the patient is in a dream that she cannot wake up from.” The doctor appeared to be reluctant to continue this topic with Chen Ge, so he walked faster. “We’re here. This is it.”

Jiujiang Psychological Illness Treatment Center’s quarantine zone was different from the Third Sick Hall’s quarantine zone. It was more humane in appearance. There was no sign of wires and walls. There was merely a no entry sign that hung on the door to pose as a warning.

After entering the quarantine zone, Chen Ge felt a conspicuous drop in the surrounding temperature. The temperature inside the building was much lower than outside, and it was much quieter. There were no other sounds; it was as if they were the only living people in the area. As he was led down the corridor, the curiosity in Chen Ge’s heart grew.

Normally, the more dangerous the patient, the deeper their room would be assigned. Chang Wenyu was merely a coma patient, but her room was in the deepest part of the building!

“Can I enter the room to take a look?” The room door was not locked. Before the doctor even gave him the permission, Chen Ge pushed the door open and entered it.

The room was surprisingly big. There were three beds in the room, but only the bed in the middle was occupied. Walking to the bedside, a face that could only be described as uniquely beautiful entered Chen Ge’s eyes.

The patient’s information hanging at the end of the bed showed that the woman was supposed to be almost thirty, but the woman lying in bed could easily pass as an eighteen-year-old girl. Time seemed to have left her untouched. Maturity and sweetness mixed into a deep, scented cocktail or a milk tea with ice.

The only flaw was that the woman’s left eye was missing, and only a hollow eye socket remained. It ruined the overall beauty of the face. However, in another way, it also made her stand out from the rest.

“So, she is Chang Wenyu.” The patient lying in bed was completely different from the Chang Wenyu in Chen Ge’s imagination. He definitely did not imagine a mature woman trapped inside a young woman’s body.

His gaze moved downward, and Chen Ge noticed that part of the cover was pulled aside. It just so happened to show the detaining straps that were underneath.

“What are these?” Before the doctor could stop him, Chen Ge pulled the cover back. Under the thin cover specially used by the patients, Chang Wenyu’s hands and legs were all strapped to the bed.

“Why would you do this to a coma patient? Don’t tell me you expect her to wake up at any moment?” The confusion in Chen Ge’s mind continued to grow. He stared right at the doctor, demanding an explanation.

Knowing that he was not going to slip out of this one, the doctor sighed and finally admitted the truth. “Actually, it is nothing serious. Some of the staff once saw her appear in the corridor when they were on night duty, and they thought that they had run into a ghost.”

“Your staff once saw her walking in the corridor on her own?”

“Yes, and it happened more than once. Yet, curiously enough, that never showed up once on the surveillance footage. And it only happened after midnight. The strangest thing is that whenever we tried to place surveillance on her, she would not move. Only when people were not purposely paying attention to her would this happen.” The doctor pushed the employee that was next to him slightly forward. “He saw her once before.”

There was quite a number of male nurses at the hospital, and most of them worked the night shift.

“Yes, I saw her once. It was near the door of the bathroom. I was washing my hands when I noticed a second reflection in the mirror. She walked past just behind me.

“At the time, I was scared sh*tless. I screamed for help. After I calmed down and rushed out to chase after her, she was already missing. I ran back to this room, and I found her still sleeping soundly in bed.”

The employee shivered involuntarily, remembering that night in his mind.

“Could it have been a different person? Are you sure the person you saw was her?” Chen Ge started to dissect the employee’s memory from different perspective. “Perhaps it was other mental patients disguising themselves as her, or maybe something else showed up that night.”

“Cough! Cough!” The doctor kept coughing. He felt like if he did not stop Chen Ge from speaking, their institute would not have any nurses willing to work the night shift in the future. “From our perspective, the most possible reason to explain this situation is sleep-walking, but the unique point about this patient is that she is a coma patient. No one knows what she sees when she is in a deep sleep, or rather, we cannot tell what she is experiencing at the moment, so we cannot apply traditional method to cure her. Our only solution is to detain her like this.”

“Then after you detained her, did any staff on night shift encounter her again?” Chen Ge had a feeling that things were not that simple. However, no matter how hard he pressed, the nurse and doctor maintained the same story. After they strapped Chang Wenyu into the bed, she stopped appearing after midnight.

The staff should have corrected their internal version already, and they decided to push everything onto the symptom of sleepwalking. After all, Chang Wenyu was in deep coma; she could not feel anything and could not resist. In the end, it was naturally the hospital that decided what to do with her.

Knowing that he would not get anything more from the staff, Chen Ge prepared to leave. The most urgent mission for him was to find Chang Gu. Just as he was about to place the cover back on the woman, he suddenly caught sight of a hand poking out from underneath the bed.

Five fingers poked out from underneath the bed, and the hand appeared to be trying to catch Chen Ge’s attention. There was dirt stuck under the fingernails, and there were scratches caused by tree branches on the back of the hands. When Chen Ge saw this hand, he was instantly reminded of Chang Gu.

The most dangerous place was most often the safest place. The ‘parents’ who kidnapped Chang Gu would never imagine that he had not actually left the hospital.

When a normal person saw a strange hand poking out from underneath a bed, even if they did not yelp in shock, there would at least be a slight shift in their expression, but Chen Ge maintained the same calmness throughout.

He used his own leg to shield Chang Gu’s hand from view. He took one step forward and used the heel of his shoe to kick Chang Gu’s hand back under the bed. “Gentlemen, I am here today to investigate a homicide, and the situation that you described is very similar to the condition at the crime scene.”

When he heard the term ‘homicide’, the male nurse’s face turned pale. He often worked the night shift, and that had probably implanted many scary memories and images in his mind.

“This doctor should know my relationship with Jiujiang’s law enforcement. I am not going to talk in circles. Tonight, I wish to stay guard outside this room for a whole night. There is something very important that I need to check.” If it was someone else who said something like that, they would be sent packing by the doctor, but Chen Ge was a different case. The doctor often heard about Chen Ge from Lee Zheng because he was good friends with the latter.

“It is too dangerous for you to stay in the quarantine zone alone.” The doctor shook his head.

“The doctor is right. Even us nurses on night shift rarely come here at night.” The nurse thought that Chen Ge was mad. What kind of person would go to a mental asylum to spend the night there? Something had to be wrong with him.

“How about this?” The doctor gave it some thought, and he turned to whisper to the male nurse next to him. “Xiao Zhu, tonight, you will stay back to stay guard in the quarantine zone. Also, give Huang Wei a call. Get him to come report for work as well.”

“Ah? I need to stay back to accompany him?” The male nurse could not believe his ears.

“Make sure you keep a close eye on him. If anything arises where you cannot make the decision, call me immediately. I will be in my office.” Doctors at mental asylums actually had a very hard job. Many people might think, would such a doctor have many patients? But once one took a stroll around an established mental asylum, one would realize that the rooms there were always full, and some patients with light cases had to sleep in the corridor. Normally, a single doctor had to deal with multiple cases, so working overtime was considered normal.

After the doctor left, Chen Ge felt much more relieved.

Perhaps because Doctor Gao had left too deep an impression on him, when he was dealing with these doctors, psychologists, or psychiatrists, he would be that bit uncomfortable.

“Do you mind waiting outside? I have some words to speak to this woman.”

“She is in deep coma. No matter what you say, she is not going to hear you,” the male nurse, Xiao Zhu, reminded Chen Ge.

“I know.” Chen Ge entered the room and stood next to the bed. Studying the unconscious Chang Wenyu, he said softly, “Hopefully, you will be able to fall asleep tonight. I will stay guard next to you. If that door appears again tonight, I will try my best to help you.”

In Xiao Zhu’s eyes, Chen Ge was definitely not a normal person. At the thought of spending a night with such a person, his scalp went numb.

Chen Ge felt a tug on the edge of his pants. He knew that this was Chang Gu’s response. He did not leave the room but went to lie on to the other bed.

“The left eye was brought out of that school, so it should be able to see the things inside the school.” The reason that Chen Ge was helping Chang Gu was very simple. He merely wished to take a look at the School of the Afterlife, to gauge how difficult it was. If the danger level was far beyond the level that he could handle, then he would not hesitate to abandon the mission.

Chen Ge lowered his head to look at the time on his phone. It was 10 pm; there were still a full two hours until the expiry of the mission for the School of the Afterlife.

His eyes staring at the bed where Wenyu was, Chen Ge trained his focus. Several minutes passed like that, and drowsiness swept at him like waves. He had spent more than thirty-six hours awake. Holding the phone, the sight before Chen Ge’s eyes slowly blurred.

…

It suddenly became very quiet inside the room. Xiao Zhu, who stood at the door, saw Chen Ge lying motionless in one of the beds, but he could not imagine what the man was doing.

“Such a strange fella.” He sat on the bench by the corridor. Leaning against the wall, sleep also caught up to him.