Remnant Dream
I don’t know if it was because I was tired, or if San Yi was too harsh and hit my brain hard, but at this moment when the crisis was temporarily relieved, I actually started dreaming again.
It was just very strange that the content of the dream was the part that I had not finished telling others in the hospital last time. It did not have any elements related to ghost stories. It just came from an event in my childhood.
I have to point out that this dream was very incoherent, and probably because I still remembered the actual environment I was in and my sleep was very light, even in such a warm dream I still had a strong sense of restlessness and discomfort.
At the same time, it seemed that some of the guys on the stone pillar had woken up and were chatting quietly. They probably didn't realize my unusual state, and didn't know that I could hear the outside world in my deep sleep. The chattering continued.
I vaguely heard that they seemed to be discussing whether to lower the safety rope and retrieve the bodies of the two guys who died near the drilling machine during the day. But there was a voice, probably from the deputy, who expressed opposition in a strange and almost fierce manner. Their discussion was buzzing in my ears, making me upset.
In this state, another buzzing sound slowly became clearer. It was the old-fashioned fan spinning tirelessly in the room to dissipate the heat.
When I was very young, Xu Ping, Zhang Tianyi, and I were doing homework together around an old sofa and coffee table in our home. Three small pieces of clothing were hanging outside the window, dripping with water. They were obviously freshly washed, and there was a strong aroma of too much laundry soap powder.
The warm yellow light swept into the whole living room through the thin screen window. My mother passed by us kids with the freshly killed fish in her hand. She held the plate high to avoid it from touching our freshly washed clothes.
My father was chopping vegetables in the kitchen, banging on the chopping board while chopping pork ribs. Old Xu was always in charge of cooking at home, and he took the plate and seemed to be whispering to my mother about how inconvenient it was to wash vegetables in the kitchen because the sink was clogged.
Strange, were we naughty at that time, and did we go somewhere and get ourselves dirty, why did we change our clothes and wash them right after we got home to do our homework? In our era, children should have very few changes of clothes, only one or two sets.
The surprise passed in a flash, and the dream moved on to the next part, and it was already night.
In the silence, it seemed like someone was knocking on the door outside. I didn't know whose house they were knocking on, and they were pacing back and forth in the corridor. The pungent and smelly smell of low-quality tobacco could still be smelled through the door and the living room.
As the three of us were too young to have any sense of avoiding suspicion, we slept soundly in a small bed, huddled together, and were not at all awakened by the disturbing noise outside.
The perspective of the dream was very strange. I seemed to be overlooking the small room from a third-person perspective. I saw my parents putting up the bed board and sleeping outside the crib to watch over us.
I should sleep until dawn that night, and the room would be filled with the stinky smell of tobacco and the fresh smell of blood after killing fish for a long time.
Zhang Tianyi and I squeezed together on the side close to the wall, holding a thin blanket. We might have had an argument before going to bed, because I kept kicking the blanket, and Zhang Tianyi woke up several times, always hesitating for a moment before groping and pulling the blanket over me in a somewhat unfamiliar way.
That should be me. Since it has been such a long time, only Zhang Tianyi is certain in my memory. In fact, it is difficult for me now to tell which of the two children in my memory is which.
When we were little, Pingping and I looked very similar. Before she fell ill and became extremely weak and precocious, our favorite thing to do was to pretend to be each other to trick our parents, and it almost always worked.
Of course, looking back now, maybe this trick wasn’t so successful, it was just that the adults cooperated spontaneously and looked at the two little radishes with their round heads and silly faces so cute.
In the early morning when the sky was not yet fully bright, four clear breathing sounds were heard in the room, sometimes far away and sometimes near.
Pingping woke up first. She opened her dark eyes wide and crawled over to squeeze between me and Zhang Tianyi.
The two of us who were unreliable were sleeping soundly, and in a daze we both reached out and hugged her in our arms.
It was a small bed with plenty of space, but because of this octopus behavior, Pingping was squeezed so tightly between us that she could only wriggle around pitifully, and occasionally angrily attack us two bullies with her head.
She didn't wake us up, and she blinked helplessly, then finally curled up and leaned lightly on my chest.
The child's hair was fluffy and it made me feel a little itchy. I touched her head in a daze and she grabbed my hand.
Then, in the strange perspective of the dream, Pingping revealed genuine distress, grabbed my hand, and began to write something stroke by stroke.
But for a five-year-old child, pretending to learn to write from his older brother Zhang Tianyi, being able to draw a few strange curves, and enthusiastically "helping" with homework, this is the limit. Pingping muttered and gestured for a long time, but really didn't write anything.
In fact, at that time, my vocabulary was even less than Pingping's, and I looked like I would grow up to be a fool.
The so-called homework of the three of us always ended with the elder brother Zhang Tianyi writing three copies with a bitter face, pretending that we were also diligently participating in his studies with this unnecessary workload. And he was robbed of his pocket money by Pingping, who was really "exhausted", as a reward.
In the last dream, I had seen Pingping’s little movements, and I really couldn’t tell what the little guy was drawing at that time. It was probably something like “Ranran Shadan”.
I never thought that I would relive this dream again. Amid the heart-pounding tenderness and sadness, I almost subconsciously reached out to Pingping and held her chubby, dimpled little hand.
In the midst of my nonsensical sleep talk, I whispered, "What do you want to write? Let Ranran teach you, okay?"
Young Pingping looked up at me.
Her eyes were as quiet as water, like some kind of unspeakable compassion, which wrote a sentence very clearly in the palm of my hand.
When I read that sentence, I was stunned.
The next second, the little face quickly began to become weak, pale, strange and deformed, and suddenly became extremely ferocious, opening its barbed fangs and rushing towards me with a hissing sound.
No, it’s not Pingping, this is clearly the bloody giant mandrill!
I screamed and suddenly woke up.
All the warmth and vague strangeness in the dream turned into cold sweat of fear. My chest almost surged and I began to retch in nausea.
No, it was just a dream, just a dream.
I took a deep breath and told myself that all dreams came from accumulated stress and fragmented information. I just didn't want to face the cruel conjectures that had arisen during that short and terrible attack during the day.
I am afraid that a group of children died early before the Zhang family was rescued. I am afraid that it was those children who were harmed and deformed into mandrills by the pollution of the stone forest.
I'm afraid... the little girl who became a goddess in the story might be related to Pingping, and Zhang Tianyi came to the valley many years ago to find her, or her remains.
I felt dizzy and nauseous due to the strong feeling of vomiting. Someone patted me on the back and handed me a towel and a bottle of mineral water.
I took it reluctantly, and the scenes around me slowly came back to life, connecting to my aching brain.
It was already dark, and in the silence, a strange wailing could be heard from all directions.
I was startled, and the first thing I felt was a slight shaking and rustling. My first reaction was that the tide was rising and the waves were gradually getting stronger. And those sounds were the sirens crying to lure the lost ships.
But then I came to myself and realized I was still in the stone forest.
The ups and downs like the waves were the stone pillars rising up. The sounds like chopsticks breaking were ringing one after another.
Sanyi signaled me not to make a sound, and pointed downwards in the starlight that was so dim that it was almost imperceptible.
Everyone was awake at this time, and I seemed to be the last one. I saw the guys around me holding their breath involuntarily and looking down.
I followed the movements slowly and was immediately lost in a dream.
It's not an illusion, the tide is really rising.
The earth's crust, which was extremely fragile during the day, was now covered with holes of all sizes. Looking around, in the white light of the flashlight, clear and almost transparent water was overflowing from the collapse, and the surface around the stone forest was completely covered by water, sparkling.
Tiny bubbles gurgled up and burst from time to time, and the first thing that came up from the ground along with the accumulated water was white mud and sand.
The white mud and sand accumulated around the collapsed pit, forming rings of varying sizes.
Then, along with the accumulated water came a layer of old, dusty plastic food packaging bags and a lot of miscellaneous household garbage.
In those straight pits, there seemed to be something floating up and down, as if it was the broken limbs in the quicksand that I had seen in Taizi's memory.
But for some reason, even in the dim night with such low resolution, it can still be seen that the severed limbs seem to be from adults.
In our field of vision, the water waves kept rippling gently, as if deeper underground, where we couldn't see, the mandrills were swimming back and forth.
I was suddenly startled and subconsciously looked at Sanyi, wanting to ask him why he didn't give any warning.
But soon, I found that the mandrills didn't seem to have any intention of attacking us. They just swam deep underground, making low sobs and wails.
At the same time, there was a very slight sound of metal collision.
It was like... it was like they were dragging some extremely heavy and rusty chains, and moving through them, interweaving the chains together to form a huge and bizarre net.
——What are they catching?
This seems to be extremely important to the mandrills. The wailing sounds like crying and echoing in the valley for a long time. The sound is extremely ghostly and ethereal.
I didn't understand what he meant, so I wanted to turn on the flashlight to see where the mandrills were through the waterways formed by the collapse.
But I felt a weight on his hand, and the deputy silently held me down. When we looked at each other, his eyes were almost glistening in the darkness.
The slight feeling of strangeness passed by, and at this moment, a fellow with a crew cut seemed to have discovered something and whispered dryly:
"You think... the water level... has just reached the first height mark?"
The other guy was probably shocked and immediately retorted: "Don't talk nonsense! With this visibility, we are on the top of the stone pillar. It would be a miracle if you can see how deep the water is from a distance of 108,000 miles! Stop talking nonsense and scare yourself."
The man with the crew cut shook his head, with a hint of bitterness on his face.
"I can't see clearly. But didn't you notice?" He turned the flashlight to the dimmest setting and shone it almost vertically downwards.
"When the consultant was thinking about something, he knocked on a stone pillar for a long time, which was about the height of the first notch. So probably there, the stone pillar is full of fragments and stone chips that will not fall off."
When the light source arrived, there was indeed a small layer of blue-black color floating on the water surface, which should have been gently washed away by the accumulated water.
Everyone was silent for a moment.
"so……"
In the extreme silence, the man with the short hair listened attentively to the continued crying of the mandrills below, and asked anxiously: "The accumulated water will not rise further, will it? How high can it rise?"
He asked a seemingly absurd and worrying question: "Will the tide rise to our feet? Is the stone pillar growing faster, or is the water accumulating faster?"
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