Painting, horror
Xu Ping stood aside to make room. On the ground that had been swept away, there was indeed a body lying there.
After half a day, the corpse had become severely stiff, with its arms still wrapped around itself in a defensive position, and its upper body soaked with black, dry blood.
"Wang Yongfu cut his neck."
Xu Ping said that she felt a sense of loss, "So that's how he died."
I was struck by her almost inaudible words, and suddenly felt very sad. It was not because of pity for this scum whose death was not worth regretting, but because I realized that Pingping had finally witnessed a very meaningless murder in a fragmented, pieced together, and belated way.
As early as during the day, we had smelled the blood from the dead body and heard his screams and curses. But at that time, we closed our eyes and hugged each other tightly, waiting for the possible harm to come, and we only had a very illusory concept of this person's death.
It was not until now, when we saw the full appearance of the body and identified the cause of death, that we truly felt his death.
I looked at Pingping's expression. She still didn't let me pass. But her voice became even lower and she asked in confusion:
"Why didn't I feel too bad when I saw Wang Ping die just now, but now I feel very uncomfortable when I see this person die? Isn't he a bad person?"
He seemed to be caught in some unspeakable self-blame.
I knew that what she needed now was to digest it by herself, so I stood there silently, watching her from a distance. After a while, even I felt bitter in my mouth, so I slowly said:
"Because there is no way to deal with those ghost things. Just like volcanoes or floods, people feel the cruelty of nature, but they are still curious and want to explore. It will be exciting to summarize the rules, and they will not feel that surviving is a sin."
"I think that by now, both you and I are aware that we may be killed by strange incidents at any time. If I fall down somewhere, you will surely be able to stay strong and try to walk out."
"But this man...he was just killed by someone else."
No matter how mature she is, Pingping is still a child after all. I can understand her current conflicting feelings, which are due to her natural sympathy for others and her simplicity in terms of worldly morality.
Even if they were villains, she couldn't quite understand why they were killed so carelessly by their own kind, and the process was even less logical than the ghost stories. This kind of malice was too specific and too realistic, and the impact it had on her was far greater than the almost indifferent coldness brought by the ghost stories.
Pingping was silent for a moment and then hummed softly.
She rubbed her eyes and quickly calmed down, but still insisted that I stay by the plank road so as not to miss any movement of the fake people.
He smiled at me and said, "I'll just explain the situation here to you. I can do it well."
To be honest, my eyes are a little sore now. I don't really want to care about the trivial things of playing hide-and-seek. I just want to go over and hug her and stay with her quietly for a while. My good sister Pingping has suffered here for a long time. She is already very wronged. Why should she be so strong and sensible?
But I also know that her judgment and advice are correct, and in comparison, I am the one who is too emotional.
Xu Ping made a very detailed observation of the body and explained her findings to me.
She said that when she was helping to find an iron pipe, she did not see the body from a corner, but it just "jumped" out abruptly.
I calmed down, collected myself, and asked curiously, "Wasn't it originally buried in the garbage dump?"
Xu Ping shook his head with certainty.
In her words, it was like a cat appeared in a sealed empty box. She saw with her own eyes that a bulge suddenly appeared among the pile of household garbage and white gravel, and she was startled on the spot.
But the strange thing is that when Pingping compared it, she found that the height and volume of the pile of things seemed to have not changed.
This is where the problem lies. Since the height and volume have not changed, it stands to reason that there is nothing extra. But the feeling that "something is bulging" is getting stronger and stronger, and I can't ignore it even if I want to.
Xu Ping couldn't find a reasonable answer and found that his visual senses and the facts seemed to be in irreconcilable conflict.
Hearing this, I also felt that it was weird and frowned:
"And then you swept away the garbage and gravel and saw the body?"
"Not only that." Pingping hesitated and said uncertainly, "When I look at this body now, I still have that very strong sense of prominence, as if something has put a highlight label on it, making it impossible for me not to pay attention to it."
My eyelids were twitching and I felt like I was in trouble.
I couldn't help but back off and let Pingping come over first, for fear that something else might go wrong.
But she didn't intend to listen to me. Instead, she squatted down next to the corpse. I shouted at her twice, but there was nothing I could do to her. I had to give in and ask her to at least not do it, and I would wait and see.
Since the wooden plank road was disconnected again, I tried to move five or six steps to the other side, trying to shorten the distance and take care of both ends.
When it got closer, I felt a chill all over my body and realized that Pingping was being polite. The corpse was really trying to force its way into my eyes, which was very creepy.
I watched it for a long time while enduring goosebumps, and found that even if I turned sideways, it would still be the most eye-catching in my peripheral vision without me having to look at it deliberately, and I would be aware of it first no matter what.
After looking at it for a long time, I finally came to my senses and slapped my forehead: "Hey, Pingping, do you think this looks like a single-player game we used to play? The first one my eldest brother bought for us with his pocket money."
Pingping was stunned: "Ah?"
I'm talking about a traditional RPG game that Zhang Tianyi brought back for us on Pingping's eighth birthday. At that time, it was still a cartridge and had to be installed on a Subor learning machine to play.
What is impressive is that because the material textures in that game are rather poor, if you look closely you can feel that the props that need to be collected are on different layers, as if they are floating on a large messy pixel background behind them.
Thanks to this, every time it was Pingping's turn to play, she always collected the items very quickly and accurately, which made me puzzled and amazed for a long time. Later, I asked her about this little secret.
Pingping also remembered it after I mentioned it. Unlike Zhang Tian and I, who were almost completely clueless about colors and pictures, Pingping had learned to paint for a while when her health was not so bad, so she immediately responded to my metaphor.
She looked at the body again and breathed a sigh of relief: "Yes, that's the feeling. The so-called 'bulging' means that the layers are different, as if they belong to another layer of canvas."
Those who have used drawing software should have experienced that before a picture is formed, it may be divided into more than ten or twenty layers. The required parts are drawn on different layers to facilitate modification and correction. The parts that are not used temporarily can be hidden in the layers and released when they need to be modified or deepened and detailed.
The result of my discussion with Pingping is this: the body is like a hidden layer, which was actually there originally, but was suddenly released and became particularly eye-catching, with a sense of sudden "bulging" and disharmony.
"When did this happen? Can you be more specific about the time?"
I asked. Pingping thought for a moment, pointed at my feet, and gave a time point that surprised me: "It seems like you were listening over there when the wooden plank road made another sound. This was the only sound that was relatively loud that I heard."
I was stunned and immediately felt a chill down my spine.
Ping Ping couldn't hear it in the tent, but I still remember it. That was when a guy dug up the cement seal and found the wooden partition and mentioned it to San Yi.
Wait a minute, wait a minute, I slapped my forehead hard, wondering what was going on, the two sides seemed to be connected.
The other side was hollowed out, the "seal was lifted", and a corpse appeared over here. No matter how you think about it, it seems to be the same thing.
Oh my god! I gasped and screamed in my heart, cursing who was the jinx who said the wooden board was a coffin board. Good things don’t work, bad things do.
Ping Ping said again:
"Another thing, these tents are not right."
Pingping held her palm up to show me. There was a layer of strange grease on it. "When I was sweeping away the garbage just now, I didn't stand firmly. I used the tent next to me to gain leverage and found that the tent fabric and the ground around it were all covered with this stuff. It looked like something that had seeped out from rotting meat."
I understood immediately, and my hair stood on end: "You think the tent is so crammed full of corpses."
Pingping's face turned pale and she nodded. Only then did I notice that she was holding a broken zipper head in her other hand.
This is where the problem lies. Pingping told me that after she noticed the bodies of the mountain people on the ground, she did not dig them out immediately.
Before that, she did something that took only a few seconds.
——She was a little worried about the bulging thing and wanted to keep some distance from it, so she took two steps back and almost hit her back against the nearest tent.
At this moment, there seemed to be a slight chuckle in the tent, and also like something was breathing quickly.
Xu Ping was stunned for a moment, and fear filled his heart, but his body was out of control. As if he was trying to fight against this unknown horror, he pulled the zipper of the tent that was so close to him.
The swollen and deformed tent gave people an indescribable feeling of oppression and weirdness. The moment Xu Ping grabbed the zipper of the tent, he regretted it and subconsciously withdrew his strength.
It turned out that the zipper head was broken. It only moved down two notches and then fell off.
Xu Ping was startled and immediately let go and stepped back, catching his breath.
Fortunately, there was no other reaction in the tent. It seemed that she was just hallucinating due to nervousness.
Looking at the zipper head in her palm again, she relaxed a little and even felt a little relieved.
On the other end, I was listening nervously with my head down.
She glanced at me, exhaled lightly, and took two steps back to discuss the matter. Then she noticed again that the "bulging" thing was particularly dazzling, and it looked like the outline of a corpse. She immediately exclaimed, and her expression became solemn.
The development I have seen started from this moment.
So when we discussed the layer hypothesis, Xu Ping couldn't help but feel uneasy again about the possible corpses in the tent, and suspected that the people in the tent were the other missing mountain people.
"I want to see what's inside the tent." Xu Ping said seriously, "I have a hunch. This is very important."
I felt her seriousness. There was no need to be pretentious at this time, so I told her seriously to be careful and not to act rashly but to observe from outside first.
After the two of them discussed it, she picked up the iron pipe that I had thrown away, hung it outside a tent, and stabbed it hard at the bulging tent.
The fabric was quite strong, and the iron pipe slipped on the outside without actually puncturing it.
But it was visible to the naked eye that the place where the stab was made had sunk significantly downwards.
We were all stunned, looked at each other, and our hearts sank.
The tent seemed empty.
Pingping took a deep breath, and this time used the iron pipe to slowly clamp the zipper of the tent and move it horizontally downwards.
“Sizzle——”
The zipper opened with a sound.
Xu Ping looked into the tent, her expression was obviously blank for a moment. After a while, she raised her head and said softly, "It's empty, there's nothing."
After saying this, both of them felt unexpectedly calm.
She touched the outside of the tent, and the bloated feeling that it was obviously filled with something and about to burst did not disappear.
"So, the body isn't here. Or at least, not in our sight."
Pingping and I were silent for a while, and then we said almost at the same time: "The layer of these corpses has not been displayed yet, it is on another canvas."
Before he could finish his words, someone exclaimed and cursed in his ear.
"What the hell! There are dumplings in the water!"
Chaos ensued.
A fellow on the other side of the fake man was probably stunned. He said "Fuck" three times in a row, and then he said in astonishment: "What is that? Why do I feel like a bunch of corpses fell out of the water just now?"
The boss was obviously confused as well. He was unable to react for a long time. After a while, he said dumbly: "Another giant corpse?"
San Yi said gloomily, "This time they are scattered and not strung together. It's hard to say if they are the same thing."
They were still in chaos, but Pingping and I had already reacted. When we looked at each other again, our expressions became extremely strange.
"So... this mine is really like a painting with different layers on it."
I was a little dumbfounded when I said this. "For the painting, everyone is still on the same plane. But for us, the layers are integrated with each other but are independent of each other."
A complex yet simple picture emerged in my mind.
I saw a huge painting called Stone Forest.
It is composed of many layers. When people see one layer, the other layers will be temporarily hidden.
In the first layer, tall and sharp stone forests stood, water flooded the mine, mandrills wandered around, staring at the moon and wailing. The pseudo-people who were playing hide-and-seek put on scuba gear and swam in the water. They found a thick cement seal under the ground, surrounded by honeycomb-like entrances and exits, but they were trapped and could not enter or exit, otherwise they would be cut in half by an unknown force.
The second layer, the mine full of scaffolding and mine carts, is extremely dry. It seems to be daytime. The treacherous mountain people guard the gutless miners. The heavy ore presses down the bodies of the little yellow-rash people. The transparent water mass covers them and twists silently, waiting for the prey to be injected with digestive fluid. The goddess wakes up again and again, and what she sees when she opens her eyes is the unchanging dome.
The third layer was filled with bulging tents, slightly decayed corpses crowded in between, and strange platforms were randomly littered with household garbage. The wooden plank road was already somewhat rotten, and when something heavy pressed over it, it would make a harsh creaking sound.
I don't know which layer Pingping and I are on, maybe none of them. But in my imagination, I see countless thin scrolls stacked together, and countless layers together form a painting.
Then, something unexpected happened, and the scroll began to rot and die.
Then the rotten liquid dripped down.
As the prophet wailed, his corrupted bodily fluids soaked the scrolls, and the scrolls suddenly stuck together, indistinguishable from one another. The ink stains on them also spread and began to penetrate each other, passing through the boundaries of the originally distinct layers, vaguely appearing in other layers.
I saw the disordered lines leave their original positions and fall down layer by layer onto a figure that was blurred by water. The messy and horrible lines then spread all over the body, greedily sucking up the water to stretch the ink stains.
The "hair" seemed to be parasitic on Wang Ping's body like a living thing, making a creepy tongue-tickling sound on his abdomen. It was the sound of water droplets bouncing off the dry fibers of the canvas. As the water spread and diluted, the squirming lines finally stopped, losing their vitality and color.
I saw a Xu Ranxing wrapped in water droplets, which blurred out a blurry Xu Ranxing and reflected on the next layer of drawing, but only a rough outline was left.
There was a little man with a hollow belly on the blurred drawing. The blurring added some unfamiliar facial features to its pale and empty face, and the two bodies merged into one. Then I woke up while staring at the screen.
"So, we can't leave our respective areas." Pingping said dumbly, her throat tightened and she made a sound that was almost a sigh.
"If a character from one layer wants to escape to another layer, I'm afraid they can't completely pass through even with a medium." She made a tearing motion and asked with a chill, "The result may be... only a small part of it passes through. Is that right?"
"Yes, this is the cause of death of the deputies." I said solemnly, filled with a strange sense of enlightenment.
“Only after coming into contact with water did they melt into the layers of the scroll and gain the power to travel through it.
But at the moment of return... it is impossible for people to completely pull themselves out of the painting. Leaving means personally tearing the image in half at a certain point, leaving a trace of ink on the paper. "
If the prophet is regarded as this giant painting, then the Rotting Mine Prophet undoubtedly has the most layers.
But there is at least one foreign layer that belongs to hide-and-seek.
Many years ago, Taizi accidentally stuck himself on it, causing the two huge paintings to stick together, leaving a trace of Taizi's image and belonging in the mine forever.
Now, in the rotting giant painting, when the fake people who are hiding try to escape, all they can do is to throw themselves back into the canvas of hiding before they are completely transformed into the people in the stone forest painting.
I suddenly understood from a completely new perspective how the pseudo-human replaced the target and completed the feeding, and why the prophet used memory to replace confusion.
Because they are exactly the piece of white paper picked up by the prophet, covered over the target's mouth and nose, and repeatedly outlined with ink.
What it is doing is to copy a completely identical image, and eventually melt the target itself into ink, filling it into the completed painting, so that it fits perfectly.
The confusion, shielding and cutting of the memories of the target and people around him are not deliberate, but are natural side effects caused by the layer-by-layer imprinting.
Those who were refused entry into the painting accidentally fell into the canvas and saw the scenery distributed in various layers, so they combined them and understood them as a picture, completing the wrong understanding. After they were expelled from the canvas, they were like the people in Jin Dynasty who strayed into the Peach Blossom Spring. When they looked back, they found that the painting had disappeared.
Only the prey that has become the target has been frozen into a pattern, forever solidified and lifelike on the prophet's canvas.
And now, we are trapped in the stone forest. If there were a pair of equally huge pupils in the sky looking down, what we would see would be a horrific picture of a corrupt and broken quarry with countless human figures twisting and struggling to climb out of the canvas.
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