Rat in the Wall【Rule 1】
All I knew was that my grocery store was dug out completely, including the walls and floor, and placed in this huge carriage, but I never thought about whether the size of the room corresponded to the volume of the carriage.
There was a space behind me, at the end of the carriage. Someone was behind the wall, silently "watching" me day and night.
The voice was very low, and I seemed to have heard it somewhere before, but it was obscured by the wall and was difficult to distinguish.
I could only tell from the muffled echo that the cavity hidden in the wall was very small. The man said, "Don't think too much, Xu Ranxing. Just focus on other things."
I immediately responded by saying, "Do Xu You and the others know of your existence? Are you and the Zhang family on the same side? Do you know that I am not—"
The wall did not answer these two questions, but only said to me: "Your intuition is sometimes too extreme. You will see the dangers of floating in advance, forcing you to take action to strive for an environment that is as safe and controlled as possible. This is not a good thing for an ordinary person."
"Go to sleep. I'll keep watch for you. Don't think about it these days. Everything will be fine."
I immediately asked, "What's your name? Do we know each other? If you don't tell me, I will immediately call someone in to break down the wall."
The man in the wall stopped talking.
My heart was pounding, and I lowered my voice to repeat my question. My head started to hurt. But the man in the wall didn't make any more noise, no matter how I questioned, bribed, threatened, or played the victim.
A moment of anxiety made me want to call for help immediately.
No, I couldn't break the wall, and I couldn't let others see the existence of the person in the wall. Reason made an unfounded judgment for me.
I leaned back slowly, my sweat-soaked back against the wall, feeling cold. I forced myself to calm down, my heart filled with countless questions and frustrations.
—Wait, vigil?
What did the man in the wall just say? It was early in the morning, and I had just let Xu You go out with breakfast in my hand, and then lowered the shutter of the grocery store.
“Bang!”
The bedside lamp was on.
As if I was awakened, the sounds around me suddenly became clear, and someone kept calling me in an anxious voice.
I was startled and put my hand down, only to find that there were people beside the bed. On the table next to the bedside table were several portions of food, which seemed to have been heated up and cooled down repeatedly. The shutter door was violently broken open, and the fresh air from outside swept in along with the night.
Xu You and the team leader both had dark faces, and they didn't dare to touch me for fear of the unknown.
"After breakfast, you stayed in the room alone until dark. No matter how we called you, you didn't respond. Through the window, we saw that you were sitting on the bed with your head down."
A not-so-familiar face in the team said, checking my vital signs. "Do you still remember what happened?"
[Don't think about it.] My mind repeated the reminder of the man in the wall, and my body responded to the question on its own, thinking about the things I had experienced in the past few days.
Most of my interactions with everyone these days are at night, with the flickering bonfire in the background. At that time, I was used to it and didn't think it was wrong.
"Do I do this often?"
I asked Xu You, who had been sleeping on the floor of the grocery room to keep watch pointlessly, with a calmness that even I felt unfamiliar with: "My time seems to be fast-forwarding, always stopped at night."
"The caravan had to stop to camp and rest every night. Was it because of the need for advancement or because of me?"
The discussions and greetings around me were instantly paused.
My eyes scanned everyone who suddenly kept silent, who was avoided, and finally stopped at Xu You.
The people in the team these days have been too blindly respectful of me; everyone's almost exaggerated belief and solemnity after I made a joke; and Xu You's vague distrust of me hidden behind his respect, all of these now have a more reasonable answer.
There has always been something unusual along the way. I may have fallen into it.
They have seen and feared me, and because of this fear, they have infinitely raised their evaluation and imagination of me. Xu You, the experienced leader, may know more and is instinctively wary of the consequences I may bring.
Nineteen. I looked around at the people surrounding my bed. They were standing inside and outside, like a wall around me. The glass shell of the iron badge was dim under the light.
Except for a few people who had to stay in the driver's cabin and the trunk of supplies, all the guys in the team were here. When I was in a trance just now, they all stared at me without blinking.
I suddenly remembered a saying that it is very difficult for people to control themselves from blinking.
But often we ignore the act of blinking, and mistakenly think that we can keep our eyes open for a long time without moving. The so-called "not blinking" is just a fallacy.
Under this statement, some people suggested that if one person cannot do something, they should divide the work among as many people as possible to take turns. If each person only keeps his eyes open for one or two seconds, this unconscious error can be avoided as much as possible.
Can you divide the work among 19 people and have them watch over me together?
The bright lights in the room made my eyelids hurt.
"Stand under the light, look, don't look back." I murmured to myself. Yes, how could I forget.
The night in that sentry box had not ended. As the prey, I was still fleeing without knowing it.
My mouth was dry, I looked around, staggered to the door, and a group of people immediately followed me and started moving nervously.
From the outside, the vague outline of the carriage seemed to be exactly the same size as my room. After closing the door, the iron carriage was completely shrouded in darkness, with only a small window that was lit up.
I walked in again, silently took out the dusty toolbox under the cash register, and took out a hammer for repairing plumbers.
"Bang!"
The hammer smashed hard into the scratched wall behind the head of the bed.
The people around me had no idea why I did this and looked at each other in bewilderment. After a while, I was tired of smashing the wall and sat on the ground breathing heavily. It was embarrassing that only some wall surface was broken off, which made me want to laugh while wiping the sweat off my face.
I don't know who quietly took the hammer from my hand and went up to smash it, and someone else brought a chainsaw. I didn't stop them, because I had a strange intuition that there was no one behind the wall.
Soon, the floor was covered with cement, steel bars and dust. Even though the guy covered my bed with a dust cover, it was completely unsightly.
A hole half a person's height appeared.
It wasn't an insane hallucination. There really was a small cavity behind the wall. A large number of discarded food packaging bags were thrown on the ground, with a small fresh shoe print on them. There was also the shrunken and dehydrated remains of a gray mouse in the corner.
The man in the wall does exist.
That person was like a rat in the wall. He could not turn around or move because of the small space, and he could not see beyond the wall, but he continued to look straight ahead.
Thinking of this scene, even though the person in the wall seemed to be kind to me, I still shuddered.
The space and traces behind the wall inside the carriage almost made the whole team nervous. People kept coming in and out, checking, taking pictures, and arguing about the hole.
I held the chopsticks, opened the already cold lunch box, ate it expressionlessly, and felt very hungry. For the first time, I felt that ordinary people are really useless, and they can't stand being hungry for half a day.
"The convoy continues to move forward. Everyone, get out."
The cold rice was a bit hard, and it made my throat sore and hoarse. "Leader, stay and adjust the surveillance for me. Don't make excuses that there is no surveillance in the room at this time. Team leader, go out and coordinate the team, and everything else will continue as usual."
Xu You handed me a cup of hot milk.
This was the third time I had drunk it during the trip. The first time was when I was trapped in the sentry box and woke up in my room the next day with wounds all over my body. From then on, the world was like a wild horse running wild.
I held the drink in my hand and drank it carefully, the sugar and heat slowly warming my cold and numb cheeks. I wiped my face and asked him to sit and wait with me.
The notebook for monitoring and reading storage was quickly brought over.
This group of lunatics installed a total of twenty-six needle-shaped cameras in the room, and it is said that there are people taking turns to check the surveillance every day.
My first reaction was to laugh at myself. Fortunately, the guy who was watching the surveillance video that day was not very smart. He saw me chewing gum but didn't react and expose me.
There is no need to look at all twenty-six cameras. I chose one on the ceiling right in front of my bed. The viewing angle covers about three-quarters of the room.
Push the video memory card in and start playing.
On the screen, "I" was holding breakfast in the room, looking confused and a little nervous.
The time showed 7:32 in the morning.
Judging from the light in the room and the direction of my gaze in the picture, the rolling shutter of the room should have been lowered.
That's where it all started. I held my breath, my heart racing, and prepared for something unusual to happen in the room.
The strange thing is that the "me" in the picture just has a dazed look in the eyes, and is in a daze, recalling something.
Then, the "I" on the bed suddenly looked around quickly, sweat broke out on my forehead, I muttered something, kept backing away, and finally put my back against the wall.
This was like a simple hysterical attack. I was impatient and sped up the video to see when the abnormality occurred and when I was talking to the person in the wall.
No.
There was none. The following long process, which lasted for more than 8 hours, including when the guys realized something was wrong and called for help to break the door, and then when I was surrounded by a group of people, I only did this one thing.
The only slight difference was that when "I" kept muttering to myself, I seemed tired and slowly lowered my head.
Like the team doctor said, I just sat on the bed with my head down.
I rewound the tape and replayed it. This time I watched it very carefully, trying to understand what my lips were saying.
Something strangely familiar and uncomfortable told me that this was crucial.
Since the gap behind the wall and the people inside the wall exist, then everything I do today must have meaning.
"Here." Xu You suddenly said and pressed the freeze button.
The "I" in the picture has not changed at all.
He zoomed in on the corner, which was already the edge of the camera, so blurry that it was hard to see clearly, but there seemed to be a little movement of black.
I slowly remembered that it should be the black-covered diary that I had originally placed on the bedside, which was probably moved down by the cat at night.
Xu You called a guy in charge of surveillance and asked him to find the recording camera facing the diary beside the bed.
“Sizzle…”
The laptop makes a slight noise.
I suddenly felt a little thirsty. "Xu You, can you go to the last row of shelves and get me a 2-liter Coke? It's in a box with instant noodles and potato chips, so it might take a while to find it."
Xu You paused.
"Go ahead." My face turned pale and I gave him a firm push, watching him turn around.
A new picture appeared.
The guy adjusted the surveillance camera and zoomed in, then exclaimed, "It really is a diary. Could it be that the wind moved it?" Before he could finish his words, he stood up abruptly and fell to the ground. For a moment, his mouth opened violently, as if he was about to scream, but he was completely voiceless.
I was chilled all over, convulsed, and completely out of breath.
The diary did move.
There was a tiny, blurry speck of white behind it. That speck of white poked out and, in a very strange and stiff manner, opened the black diary.
That's a hand.
My mind went blank, and I had a sharp ringing in my ears due to dizziness. The surveillance guy might not know that I also noticed the contents of the diary page that was opened.
It was a blank page of the diary, with a seemingly ordinary old newspaper cutting stuck on it.
I immediately realized that the news I had been reading with my head down all day was the one above, a piece of news that I had heard countless times and could recite by heart.
That was half a year ago. A homeless man in the north of the city bit the face of a lost pet dog in an underground garage.
Unlike in the past, this was the first time I saw a huge close-up of a homeless man's face in a newspaper. He had only half a torn face, and was biting a piece of blurred flesh and blood, hunched over, and staring straight out of the camera.
Even though the diary was opened at such an angle and was upside down, I still recognized the familiar face at a glance.
It’s Xu You.
“Pah.”
The Coke was placed on the bedside table.
I don't know when Xu You came back and stood beside me. He also leaned over silently and looked at the screen.
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