Thousands of veils, the mercy of the Night Mother
“Pah.”
The old mouse made a sound, and the image on the screen was further enlarged.
The lens is deforming.
The rotten face on the old newspaper was stretched and distorted by the field of vision, as if it was looking at the screen at an angle, trying to squeeze out an eye. The hand was looming in the shadow behind the paper portrait, connecting a pale section under the bloody face.
It was as if the flat, bloody face that seemed to be smiling had grown a curved, long neck, and was lying on the ground with its invisible limbs bent backwards.
The person behind me didn't make a sound. In my peripheral vision, I saw a face leaning over my shoulder, staring straight at me in the reflection of the screen.
“Pah.”
A small piece of sticky skin fell off and hung on the chin of the face.
Then it fell under my collar.
The muscles and fat were exposed where the skin was missing. If you looked at it vaguely in the dark, you might mistake it for a blood-red eye.
Ah, that snapping sound I had been hearing was actually this. What I thought I was looking into that day was a ragged face pressed against me.
"Where's the Coke? Pour it." I said, and heard my voice become tense and extremely strange.
The surveillance guy fell to the ground, opened and closed his mouth, making short gasps of air in his throat as if he was suffocating, and looked behind me.
“Hiss…”
The bubbles rose slowly along the surface of the glass, pushing away the remaining milk drops on the wall of the glass and turning the entire glass of liquid into a turbid color.
I didn't think about what would fall into the cup, I just held the cup tightly, lifted it up, and brought it to my mouth.
Cold sweat covered my palms and the cup slipped in my hands.
The face came closer.
The muscles in my throat were spasming, and I had to clench my teeth hard before I could squeeze out the second sentence amidst the unconscious trembling:
"There's no one in the monitoring room now, right? How are you doing security? Why don't you make arrangements?"
The face behind me hummed and hummed, and then smiled and replied, "Okay, Master."
Then there were the sounds of footsteps, one step, one step, one step, all the way to the door.
I didn't move.
The face was still on my shoulder, grinning at me on the screen.
"Go ahead," I said.
The shadow in the room, which had been stretched infinitely long, shrank back along with the face.
I sat there, watching the thing that looked like Xu You but was not quite there walk to the door, obey the instructions and leave temporarily, but the expression on his face was full of uncomfortable evil and complacency.
I understand what that thing means.
Maybe some kind of rules bound it, allowing it to maintain its already extremely weak behavioral logic and need to obey me on the surface. But I can't always use orders to drive it away.
I am going to sleep. My sight and voice can only reach so far. I will not be able to see it.
Unless I stand guard at the door, not moving, not sleeping, my rest will be interrupted again and again, and I will fall into a state of staying up late until dawn.
Then, driven by the rules that I didn't understand yet, I was quickly driven back into the darkness.
“Hu…Gu…”
The surveillance guy obviously understood and grabbed my ankle. He trembled several times before he could make a sound:
"I...I'll go find someone..."
I sighed deeply, then slumped to the ground, put my arm around his shoulders, and pointed out the unusually dark darkness outside.
The shadows of the guys coming and going were all wrapped up in the night fog, patrolling mechanically, and as I said before, they started the convoy and continued to set off. But apart from that, there was no sound of people at all.
"Okay, you please?"
There was another shudder under his arm.
I tightened the strength of my arms and half-tightened him to prevent him from completely losing his composure and sliding down, and also to avoid exposing my own weakness.
The change came so suddenly. Since he and I were the only ones who were not affected, I believe his existence must mean something.
Just like Brother Li who was unharmed in the sentry box that day.
"Brother Li, you said it was the team leader, then what are you? A security guard who loves to eat bear biscuits?"
The guy stammered, probably wanting to protest that this was not his name, but in the end he just tremblingly straightened the crooked leg of his glasses.
"I don't know either. Everyone in the team is a martial artist. I'm the only technician. I'm just a civilian who manages the machines..." The crying tone was the same as Brother Li's.
Countless thoughts made my stomach ache. More importantly, I felt that in just such a short time, the thing had "completed" the instruction and returned.
“Pah.”
The time is too short.
It doesn't give me a chance to think or ask for help.
I only had time to do one thing.
I took out my phone, picked someone at random, and started messaging them.
"Go to the monitoring room."
"Pop." The phone on its waist lit up. The message popped up on the phone screen simultaneously.
The bet was right.
"You can see all my chat records simultaneously. You are responsible for monitoring my chat messages." I was sweating and my voice was completely hoarse. I forced a smile at that thing and said, "I still remember what was just confirmed six days ago, leader."
The thing paused.
The skin on that half of the tattered face fell off more and more, and became more and more bloody. One after another, blood-red "eyes" were exposed, looking at me one by one.
What a pity, Xu You was quite attractive.
It let out a sharp hiss and finally took a step back.
I ignored it. My legs were still too weak to move, so I ripped my trouser legs open and tore them into strips.
Copy the message, save it in a quick phrase, strap the phone to my forearm, and keep my thumb on the send button.
"Take turns to keep watch. After one minute, press my thumb." I yawned, fell asleep on the legs of the fake Brother Li.
He uttered a horrified cry, and I slapped him with my eyes closed, "Sit straight, if I slide down, who will be responsible?"
A minute later, while counting my heartbeats, I heard the vibration of my phone sending a message.
It seems to work. This is also considered as a post from me "personally".
I slept peacefully for more than three hours before being woken up and it was my turn to rest.
The constant paranoid vigilance is very exhausting. I could see that he almost immediately fell to the floor and curled up in sleep, his eyeballs still trembling under his eyelids. It was probably a nightmare.
There were many more photos and two messages in the phone.
I was a little surprised, and then looking at this buddy's face which was still trembling with panic in his dream, I thought to myself that after all, he was in the team, so I underestimated him a little.
It was still dark outside, so I split the chat window and continued to send messages while counting the seconds, while reading what he had left me in the past three hours.
All the photos were taken at the door, all of them were pitch black, and the face of that thing appeared outside the window several times, and was driven away after approaching the door. But it was getting closer and closer to the door.
The face frozen in the photo is being enlarged and distorted at a rapid speed.
The skin on its face had almost fallen off, and at first glance, it was almost unrecognizable who it belonged to.
Yan Jinger’s message asked me fearfully: “If it is no longer the leader, will it still listen to you?”
Then the second one: "When you wake up, run if you still have the energy. No need to wake me up. I... I would rather just stay like this, in a dream..."
Can't run, can't go out.
The dense forest in the dark night seemed to have no end in sight in the thick fog. The broad leaves were gently swaying in the wind.
At this moment, I realized very clearly that this is what the "me" in the surveillance video wanted to say.
There is still a "flower lawn" outside, and I am still in the "guard booth". The security guard will help the "owner" to expel the "homeless person" who is biting his face.
Bright daylight is dangerous because I can see things in the lawn more easily.
The sentry box is safe and I must stay in it all the time.
It kept tempting me to lose control and run away, leaving the grocery store that belonged to me and escaping into the flower bed.
The problem is that the situation is deteriorating rapidly. He will soon no longer be Xu You and will no longer need to abide by the professional constraints brought by his identity. I cannot guess how things will turn out then.
After all, all my actions were just due to a vague and absurd idea: I felt that the operation of many things was vaguely shrouded in some contradictory and indescribable laws.
Those rules are vague and rigid, definite and ambiguous, like something lurking in the night, constantly running and constantly deteriorating.
Just like I was trying to gauge the team's tolerance for me along the way. Don't break the rules. Find your own definition, and you can step on the most sensitive boundaries to gain some breathing space.
However, the set of rules that I can use now has completely deteriorated and become unbalanced.
"Meow..." Feeling a little heavy on his knees, the little fat cat raised his head and crawled out from under the bed without knowing when.
I sighed, smiled, took off the bib on Dongzai's body, and woke the guy up.
The guy almost rolled over before he opened his eyes. Still in shock, he saw the unchanging night outside that seemed like it would never get brighter, and then he collapsed onto the ground again.
Then he saw what I was holding and his expression was completely stunned.
"A little backup plan." I said, unscrewing the bottle of medicine in my hand, grabbing a cup, pouring out half of it and handing it to him.
"..." The guy looked at me blankly, his hands began to shake, and his voice broke, "When, you..."
Of course it was that day when he flipped the table to scare the whole team.
This is a sample of the water quality from the sinkhole.
At the campfire, I put the empty soil collection bottle back into the container in front of everyone, and every pair of eyes saw it.
But along with the collection bottle, I also threw in a cat that was lying on my shoulder, curiously watching the fun.
A little fat cat that Xu You had personally verified was a cat that even he couldn't see without my immediate reminder.
I never mentioned Dongzai in front of other guys in the team and I always fed him myself.
I shook Dongzai into the container and found a small medicine bottle stuffed into his saliva pocket. He licked my finger blankly, then jumped out in a daze and slipped back to the room.
Everyone's attention was on me.
That night a bunch of people came into the grocery store and confiscated all the things I had that could be used to make a living. Dongzai, who was invisible to others, lay on my pillow with his eyes wide open, then hid under the bed, stammering.
"Try? Fight fire with fire."
I said, forcing a clink of glasses with the stunned fellow. "It's at the door."
“Bang!”
The power to the room was cut off and the light bulbs short-circuited and exploded almost at the same time.
In the darkness, a rustling sound quickly crawled towards me. In an instant, something smelly and hot pressed against my face.
“Boom.”
Another voice sounded.
I put down the empty potion bottle, my whole body was cold, and some extremely bizarre and soft mumbling swept over my body.
The sound came from the wall.
Again, very regularly, gently, like a visitor.
Someone was knocking in the wall.
It was not the man in the wall who had warned me, but something from further away that I had invited into the sentry box and into the room.
The knocking sound was so low that it was difficult to distinguish, but I knew clearly what it came from.
When I was a kid, hide-and-seek was a popular game among kids. The child chosen to be the one to be caught would find a tree or a wall, and silently look straight ahead and count.
Sometimes the waiting is too boring, and the child will count silently while leaning his forehead against the tree trunk or wall, just like now, tapping it gently -
“Boom.”
Do we have to tiptoe to find things inside the wall like in hide-and-seek?
Will it start counting down?
A strange shudder swept over me.
So I did the second thing today that I couldn't understand.
I slowly stood up and backed away until I reached the wall, leaning my whole body against it.
The cold touch on my back seemed like some kind of inspiration, or maybe it was just the confusion after the fear. I understood what I needed to do.
I gently turned my face, put my ear close to it, and listened attentively to what was going on in the wall.
There was a clear knock on the door and the wall could be heard making vague, chaotic, and fragmented buzzing sounds, as if it was mumbling.
The convoy continued to move in the night. The whispers and rules from the pit came.
I smiled at the blood-red "eyes" swallowed by darkness, and couldn't help shivering as I asked the same question I had already asked:
"Hey, are you familiar with this place or is it more familiar with it?"
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