C23 I saw you!

I saw you!

I couldn't find any valuable clues from Mu Hanzhi and her son, so I bid them farewell. When I turned around, I saw the child take out a few glass beads from his pocket and put them into the five bowls one by one. I curiously watched his actions.

The child spoke in a tender voice.

Come back to dinner.

He lives in a world of his own fantasies, he can't remember anything when he's awake. Looking at this child reminds me somewhat of my childhood, when the shadow of rejection and isolation has been with me for most of my childhood. I look at him with some pity.

The child's hand stopped in front of the fifth bowl, and when I opened it, I saw that there was no more marble in his palm. The child looked at the bowl in front of him, then searched in his pocket.

I suddenly remembered that the marble that the child had lost on the street was with me. I took it out and walked back to give it to him once more, but Mu Hanzhi shook her head to the side to stop me. The child's connection with the outside world was broken, and he was still living in a world that was constructed by himself, so he cannot be disturbed by anything from the outside.

I withdrew my hand and looked at the helpless child, who was still blankly searching for the marble. Then I saw him get up and walk to the corner by herself, pressing her hands against the wall to cover her eyes.

"Even after eating, you guys still won't listen. You guys still want to play hide and seek? Alright, you guys go hide. I'll come look for you guys."

The child began to count down from five.

Five... Four... Three...

"What is he doing?" I curiously asked Mu Hanzhi beside me.

"If he can't find the marble, he knows how to play this game." Mu Hanzhi looked at the glass bead in my hand. You can't just give it to him. "

I looked at the glass bead in my hand thoughtfully. I didn't know if it was because I pitied this child and wanted to play with him, or because I wanted to know how he could find the marble in my hands in this dark building. I actually gave up on the idea of leaving and told Mu Hanzhi that I planned to play with this child.

I walked up to the seventh floor, where there was no light, and the long hallway was dark, like a deep black hole, and the old building was dead silent, and I had a gloomy feeling as I walked down the long dark corridor.

I was attracted by a place that was filled with junk. There were a lot of discarded things that I couldn't deal with in time, and they were all piled up in a messy place. It was just enough for me to be here by myself, so I carefully hid inside with the marble in my hand.

In the dim moonlight, I could vaguely see the empty corridor through the gap in the debris. In front of the debris, there was a mirror with a crack on it. It should have been left here by accident.

The mirror just reflected the pile of junk I was hiding in. Could a kid find me in this position? I began to regret playing the game with a sleepwalking child. He was so serious, and if he couldn't find me, he wouldn't be able to complete the game he had to complete every night.

I remember when I was young, I used to like to sit alone in front of the mirror, and it was always at night. At the beginning, my mother didn't care, but when she woke up from sleep many times and saw me sitting alone in front of the mirror talking to myself, my mother became a little frightened and frightened, until my mother, hysterical, smashed the mirror in front of me.

And then …

My mother hanged herself the next day, when I was still young, and I still don't understand why she suddenly chose to kill herself. I only remember that night when my mother was still holding the windmill she had promised me, and the memory of my mother's cold body hanging on the beams of the house. I held her body and tiptoed to blow on the windmill in her hand, and my mother's body swayed like a swing under my tugging.

But after that fever when I was seven years old, many things became blurred and lost in my memory, and I couldn't remember why I sat in front of the mirror every night or why I talked to myself in the mirror.

What exactly did I see in the mirror? Or rather, like the child, I was sleepwalking, but the sleepwalker would not know what I had done. I still remember it clearly.

Ding dong... Ding dong...

The crisp ring of the bell interrupted my memory. The sound was especially clear in the deathly long corridor. The child had already reached the seventh floor, so I didn't know what the child was searching for. According to the time that passed, he should have come all the way from the fifth floor.

The place where I was hiding was out of sight of both sides of the corridor, and could only be judged by the sound of the bell on the child's ankle-chain. Every step the child took, the bell would ring, and the ringing grew louder and louder until it struck my heart, giving me an inexplicable sense of nervousness.

I could see the mirror across the way through the clutter. I could see both sides of the corridor, but not much light.

The bell chimes were so close that I saw a child's feet in the dark mirror, and then his body, and the child's white clothes stood out in the mirror, and because they were black trousers, I could not see his feet, they appeared in the mirror, and somehow he looked like a floating white shadow.

I didn't understand why my heart was beating faster. The closer he got to me, the more nervous he got, as if he was really afraid he'd find me. He even tried to control his breathing and hide in the clutter, completely blending into the darkness.

The child drifted past me at a steady pace, and if it weren't for the bells on his feet, I would have suspected that he had no feet until he disappeared from the mirror onto the other side of the corridor, like a ghost that had never been seen before.

I secretly heaved a sigh of relief, but was actually a little disappointed. Forget about the place where I was hiding, even an adult might not be able to find it, Mu Hanzhi said that the child had to find the glass bead by himself, so if this goes on, I doubt that his game would be completed tonight.

I suddenly realized that it was too quiet here. When the child passed by me, I could still hear the sound of the bell, but now that the darkness had returned to its dead silence, he hadn't even left the seventh floor yet.

He was supposed to be in darkness that I couldn't see.

What was he doing?

Again my doubts were interrupted by the ringing of the bell, which this time came from far and near. I looked into the mirror, which was the only way I could see the gallery.

A white blur slowly emerged from the darkness. The child's back came out first, then his hands. He had come back upside down, and his heart that had just fallen slowly rose up again, like an unarmed man hiding in the grass. He suddenly realized how it felt to be discovered by a wild animal.

The child retreated to the front of the clutter, still on his side, and after standing in silence for a long time, slowly turned to me, and I involuntarily moved my Adam's apple.

Until he was standing right in front of me, staring at me.

I don't know if he actually saw me, because he wouldn't have been able to see me in the dark.

But I no longer dared to look directly into the child's eyes. His dark pupils made them look unusually large, perhaps because of the light. I could no longer see the whites of his eyes, as if they were two bottomless black holes embedded in his face.

The expressionless face and rigid body just stared at me.

I wriggled my Adam's apple and my breathing became heavy beyond my control.

I saw the child slowly raise his hand and point a raised finger at me.

I see you, go back to dinner!

A tender voice resounded in the darkness, breaking the silence of the corridor. A sinister aura flowed in the air.

At some point, my hands were covered in cold sweat. I wanted to walk out of the clutter and hand him the glass bead, but I was regretting playing this game with him.

Ding!

The sound of glass drops falling to the ground began to roll forward. The sound came from behind me, and when I tilted my head, I saw a marble rolling out of the darkness behind me, rolling all the way to the child.

The glass bead was still in my hand.

While the child was digging for the marble, the mirror opposite me appeared in my sight once more. In the dim light, I could clearly see a pair of child's hands stretching out behind me, as well as a pair of eyes that didn't blink in the darkness.

I frantically turned around, but it was still pitch black without my five fingers.

I can hear my own heartbeat now.

There was always a child in the clutter where I was hiding.

I slowly lifted my hand and groped around in the darkness. There was nothing in the narrow space, so I held onto the marble tightly. When I turned my head back, the child had already left.

How did the marble roll out of the darkness behind me?

What about the hand and the eyes I saw?

Was it really me the kid was looking for?

My mind was full of inexplicable doubts. I stopped in front of the broken mirror, and my head began to hurt so badly that I covered it with my hands to make myself feel better.

I was born at two in the morning, right when the door to hell was opened, and everyone said that memory had colors, and my memories of that time were a mixture of white and black. Later, my mother told me that the innumerable black crows that were born gathered from all directions on the sycamore at the entrance to my courtyard, and the noisy, ear-piercing cries continued throughout the night, and the entire courtyard was covered with a layer of frost that was like the white cloth of the mourning hall.

Father was determined to find someone to calculate eight words for me, saying that I am.

The crows roosted over the Wutong tree, and so did the hundred ghosts. Black and White Impermanence, the next in line, the last in line.

It was not until many years later that I understood the meaning of these words.

The adults in the village wouldn't let the children play with me, because the babies in the swaddles would cry and panic all night long after they saw me, and the villagers would believe that the children would be able to see the dirt before the top of their heads was fully grown, and that for a long time I would have no playmates around me, only the village black cats and black dogs.

For some reason, they kept staring at me after dark, and then realized that they were staring right behind me.

Mother loves me, always with the wheat straw very dexterous weave crickets, dragonflies or grasshoppers, sometimes even grass people to accompany me to play, in fact I am not alone at all, I always like to sit in front of the mirror to talk to myself.

Mother would look at me with a sad face and wipe the corners of her eyes. Then she would stand by my side and stroke my head with a kind smile. She would say to the mirror, "Look, there's my darling in the mirror."

I saw my mom's smile freeze on her face, and I took a step back frantically. Ergou is a neighbor's child, he fell from the bed and died a year ago. I think my mom was scared because I've never seen Ergou before.

I looked at my mother's feet, raised my head and calmly said, "Mother, you stepped on Uncle He."

I saw my mother's hands were trembling slightly, and there was a look of panic on her face. Uncle He was an old man from the village who had died five years ago due to an illness. No one had ever told me about it, nor did my mother know how I knew about this person.

The corner of his mother's mouth twitched, and she finally squeezed out a few words. Who else?

Lots of people in the mirror. Mother, can't you see? My childish smile contrasts with my mother's pale face in the mirror.

Mother crazily grabbed a chair and smashed the mirror, the broken pieces of glass scattered on the floor. I squatted on the floor and picked up the pieces, crying and crying. The sharp edges of the chair cut my finger, and the broken glasses reflected a shocking blood-red.

Mother promised to make me a windmill, at night I went to my mother's unlit room, the dim moonlight shone through the window, Mother always tried to make me happy, this time she hung from the beam, I saw her hand windmill, I grabbed my mother's hanging leg, tiptoed up to the windmill to blow the air, turning the windmill in all different colors, I was giggling nearby, my mother's body swayed like a swing, but she never talked to me, her body was cold.

Mom was carried out with a white cloth over her body. I used the windmill to blow, and between the stops of the windmill, I saw my father's resentful and resentful gaze, causing the room to become deserted. My father drank all day, so no one paid attention to me anymore.

After a moment, my father crazily smashed the wine bottle in his hand and grabbed me by the collar as we walked towards the pond. The pond was so deep that no one could see the bottom of it, and many people would die every year.

I trembled in fear, I had never seen my father like this, although I knew he had never really liked me, that my drunken father stumbled and fell into the pool, but no matter how I looked at him, it was as if he had been pushed down, my father struggled in the water, but he could not get up, as if something was grabbing at his legs from under the water, I sat blankly at the edge of the pool, watching my father slowly disappear into the water, all night long I sat there, and at dawn I saw my father again, floating up motionless, remembering that my father, too, had been carried away, covered with white cloth, and then everyone's eyes, and I remembered the alienation and enmity in their eyes.

Then I was sent to an orphanage. When I was seven years old, I had a serious illness and a high fever that lasted for more than ten days. I thought I would die, but maybe I was just lucky enough to be able to carry it on my back, but when I woke up, I could no longer see the things that had been following me for so long.

The more I thought about it, the more my headache got worse, until the images slowly disappeared from my mind and the pain in my head started to ease up. The illness at the age of seven was really not light, and it made my memory go into disorder.

In short, I tried to find all sorts of reasons to comfort myself. When my head no longer ached, I returned to my original path, and by the time I reached the fifth floor, the slumbering child and Mu Hanzhi were already nowhere to be seen.

I even had the illusion that I had never seen them before.