No one understands the situation better than Jania. Before she actually saw anything scary, she smelled some kind of commotion in the air, like livestock panicking before an earthquake. As she paced back and forth in her bedroom, the thought lingered in her head: This was going to be a disaster.
She had tried not to take this intuition too seriously because she was aware of both her strengths and weaknesses. In a secret corner of her heart, the word "catastrophe" showed a drama that transcended boring life, so she liked it quite a bit. Some kind of immoral desire made her always want to find an occasion to use this word. But she also understands that her thoughts are extremely inappropriate for people who really encounter that kind of situation, so she always tries to restrain herself and make herself look serious and correct, but sometimes she inevitably looks like a sanctimonious hypocrite.
"Jennia." Hannah, standing at the table, stared out the window and said in a very dramatic and calm tone, "This could be a disaster."
These words, and what Hannah saw, finally freed Jania from the moral burden of delusion and restlessness. Both she and Hannah agreed that now was the time to plan ahead, or rather, to make amends before it was too late. She went to her mother's bedroom to find a gun, and locked Leo in her room. The harrier was smart and strong, but if it had to deal with people, it would be too weak. Leo is neither tame and well-behaved enough to be reassuring, nor fierce and vicious enough to cause death. She was still thinking about the gun, because her swinging stick had been lost at sea.
What is frustrating is that people always fail to bring the most suitable things when they are most needed. Once before, she had just put some of the styptic strips she carried with her into a drawer when Leo stepped on broken glass while walking. The styptic strips had been hidden in her coat pocket for two weeks before that day. Such bad luck sometimes made her wonder if there really were fairies in the forest. He is not the kind of beautiful little person with gorgeous butterfly wings who flutters among the flowers, but a green-faced little monster who is afraid of chaos in the world.
She often dreamed of such foreign objects during her childhood. She dreamed of them baring their fangs and claws, slithering out of the woods in the dark night, and sneaking into her unsupervised home. They will search for her, hunt her, and try to devour her flesh and eyeballs. They chased around the rooms and gardens, leaving behind fallen branches and streaks of rancid, dark green slime. The nightmare of monsters invading her home was so real that she always woke up stretching her legs to run, her calves aching from cramps.
Adults used various reasons to explain this matter, such as she was too active, played too much on her mobile phone, didn't like to eat vegetables, and didn't finish her morning milk. She didn't know if these answers really made sense, or if some people were born with cramps in their legs and feet while sleeping. The reason is not important, what is important is the order of cause and effect, because her mother always emphasized that it was the pain of cramps in her legs and feet that made her subconscious make up nightmares, not the nightmares that caused her cramps in her legs and feet. She didn't like this statement. It seemed that adults thought that as long as you did everything right when you were awake, you didn't need to have the slightest fear in the dark night.
She hoped she had done nothing wrong tonight. Just tonight, her nightmare invaded reality, leaving blood stains and fallen trees in the garden. The blood was not thick dark green, but fresh human blood. The bulb of the night light was dazzlingly bright, but it could only illuminate a thin circle of air around it, as if the outline of the night had tightly wrapped all the light sources. Darkness flooded her home, and the light only managed to create tiny, fragile bubbles in it, reminding people of the shimmering jellyfish in the deep sea.
This tone of detachment from reality permeated the garden, and when Zhannia chased her out, she felt like she was in a dream again. But this time her legs were stable and there was no sudden cramping pain to help her out. She crossed the street toward the darker house opposite, like a fish diving from the surface of the seabed into the deeper depths.
The bloodstains along the way seemed to belong to Gerd Schilling, as he was clearly at a disadvantage. Then she realized that some of the blood was also her brother's. His leg was injured and he hesitated to explain the cause of the injury.
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It made Zhannia feel quite strange. Behind the words attacking the appearance, she felt that she seemed to have grasped something.
Guanqiao. But the time was not right now. She saw "Ged Schilling's" blood-stained face full of scrutiny. That is not the attitude of a person who is anxious to protect himself.
She had to hold him steady. They need time to prepare and figure out what's going on. The other party's choice of tonight cannot be accidental. There is one important difference between tonight and other nights: for some reason, Mademoiselle Antoine Pierre is not at home. Two people who were supposed to be there tonight left, and Gerd Schilling arrived at that moment.
Zhannia has not fully seen the connection yet, but she is determined not to follow the pace arranged by her opponent, and she is also determined to be one step ahead - that is to say, if her opponent believes that she is sincerely showing her kindness, then she should also take advantage of the opportunity. Act and fire first if necessary. She did do that, but she didn't think her behavior was a sneak attack. At best, it was an afterthought counterattack. Because she saw the look on Gerd Schilling's face. In that young, mean and almost ferocious face, she could clearly see a deceit and gloominess that was far older than his apparent age. Those black eyes were like those of a ghoul—like Lenny Colin appearing in the sea. This association stimulated her nerves, and when she found something shaking under the other person's body, she pulled the trigger without thinking.
What was hidden beneath Gerd Schilling stretched out. She knew what it would be, a strange shadow, a sharp blade, a pointed spear. It would pierce her palm as fast as lightning and knock off her pistol. Things should have been like this, but what broke out from under Gerd Schilling was an endless black tide. The tide swallowed everything like a tsunami. Now she realized that she was dreaming again, but this time she was dreaming of a sea of shadows.
She fell into the black tide. whereabouts. whereabouts. After falling, there is still falling. It reminded her of a rabbit hole leading to wonderland, and then she felt the wind, or maybe the water, blowing coldly but gently on her cheek, making her want to just sleep. Then she heard a scream of terror, and the sound was not human at all. It's the fairy in the forest! Those dark green creatures jumped out of the darkness. They pounced on her and bit her, and one of them bit her on the back of her hand. The pain was too real.
Jania suddenly felt frightened. She has realized that she is dreaming, but she is not able to control the content of the dream as stated on the Internet. She had never been able to control the wind and rain in her dreams, she just kept running into trouble - but this time it was different! This time she desperately wanted to wake up, to see her mother and father, and even to see Hannah in elementary school. Some urgent fear urged her to escape from this dream as soon as possible. So she ignored the ghosts and monsters coming towards her, closed her eyes and ran wildly. She knew that every time she worked so hard in her dreams, the cramps caused by stretching her legs would always make her wake up screaming.
A sharp pain shot from her right toe to her back. Zhannia lifted her upper body upright and retracted her legs with a gasp. Instinct tears blurred her vision, her palms were wet and sticky, and she could barely feel them. But this kind of benevolent numbness was very short-lived. After her toe, which seemed to have been kicked on a hard object, recovered, the tearing pain in her right hand made her nerves beat violently in her head, as if there were thousands of horses and troops marching above her head. . The surroundings were very dark, and there was a very violent sound near her. That kind of movement was undoubtedly caused by biological activity, but because of the tinnitus, she didn't hear it clearly. Jania struggled to feel the ground around her as she remembered she was holding a gun. But she might be confusing dreams with reality. There are no forest spirits in reality. Who is she trying to deal with with a gun?
Lenny Colin. An escaped ghoul.
When she thought of the name, she recalled the shipwreck and thought she might have drowned, wandering between earth and hell, what theologians call the "middle ground" or "limbo." The place. She may also have become a lonely ghost - in the Eastern supernatural stories her brother once told, the dead souls would not return home until seven days later. Before that, they had been living in exile in the outermost areas of the underworld, or in other places. Wandering in the sun at night.
Regarding the underworld in the Eastern world, Zhannia had a debate with her brother when she was a child. She doesn't like a paradise with only light, clouds and stars, but she doesn't believe in a paradise that governs death.
Government of men. Her view at the time was a rather simple and harsh view of fairness based on the nature of children: death should be the most equal thing that life can get, a moment to settle good and evil and show justice. But no theory of death is truly satisfactory: the town priest believes that babies who died young and saints born in BC had to wander in Limbo, or even suffer in purgatory. Until all their sins were washed away, because they had not been lucky enough to receive enlightenment from the Holy Son - so she asked her brother: So how do primitive people who were born in the Eastern world find their place in the underworld? How do they identify with those who came after them to become the leaders of this territory? What criteria are used to choose Yama and Ghost? And, if people can use their achievements, fame and status in life to gain status after death, it means that the social structure of the Yin world is completely affected by the Yang world, and the values of the two worlds always remain close, and the dead people will also be more willing to Let someone who is of the same era as you and whose values are closer to you be the king of hell. No matter what, she was not willing to have to be told what was right and wrong by an old man wearing a robe and speaking ancient language after her death, using that set of ancient rules that she had never agreed to. This is as unfair as the priest's treatment of the saints of BC. She couldn't bear to go to bed with this unfair view of life and death, unless her brother could give her a satisfactory explanation or admit that it was all nonsense.
No excuses to stay up late. Her brother said from the bedside. Oh my god, you are my king of hell!
Jania struggled to turn over in the darkness, thinking that if she had to go to the so-called purgatory or the underworld, or even places reserved for more evil people, then she might as well stay here. This depressing thought only appeared for a moment, and was quickly thrown away. She found that her cheek was pressed against the cold and patterned floor. The patterns were dense and embossed, like marigolds or hydrangeas. Jania immediately realized where there would be such floor tiles - she must be lying in Miss Pierre's kitchen!
She climbed up from the ground in a hurry, touched the wall with her fingers, and touched the light switch next to the door along the refrigerator. Her vision suddenly became brighter, and a flash of lightning flashed through her mind, remembering how she was thrown into this house: She wanted to run home, but something got entangled in her feet. , and then - she didn't feel like she was being pulled down, but more like losing weight, spinning around, and finally a hard blow from her back. This may have been mixed with her brother's shouting, or maybe it was just the sound of wind filling her ears. She couldn't tell because her subsequent memory was interrupted when she fell onto the dark hard ground. She guessed she had fainted briefly.
It seemed that she had been thrown directly from the street into Mademoiselle Pierre's house by some means by Gerd Schilling. And since her vertebrae were not broken into pieces, she guessed that she came in through the door and window rather than the wall. She poked her head out of the kitchen and saw the entrance door open, and felt a pain in her back. She had felt that the lock on Anti-Pierre's door was a little loose, and she would never complain about it again.
She stood in the kitchen for a few seconds, unable to concentrate due to fear and pain. But then she snapped out of her daze and realized she wasn't alone in the room. The sound of commotion was echoing in the room. She held her breath and realized that the sound originated from the top of the stairs.
If it wasn't a leopard that had broken into a house and was wreaking havoc in Pierre's house, then there was something fiercely fighting on the second floor. In just ten seconds, Zhannia could distinguish various sounds: soft heavy objects falling to the ground, tables and chairs overturning, broken glass or porcelain being crushed, doors opening and closing due to violent collisions. She vaguely heard a few rapid footsteps, but could not judge the number of people from this. No one could explain why, but Mademoiselle Antiy liked thick carpets in her rooms.
Jania listened with her ears straightened up, feeling a little creepy. She found that although the noises upstairs were so intense, none of them were reliable enough to be accurately identified as coming from living creatures. There were no gasps, groans, or curses, making it all seem like a haunted house. There might be some movement from her brother, but...she felt that gritting her teeth was not her brother's style. He had always been the kind of person who couldn't control his tongue even in a life-or-death situation.
A small chill crawled from Jania's back to her neck, like many small ice worms trying to burrow into her skull. The brightness in the kitchen makes it even darker outside, and the two worlds are as distinct as life and death.
. Zhannia reminded herself with her constantly wavering rationality that although it was human instinct to stay by the campfire to be wary of wild beasts, the current situation was not suitable for staying in the open. Moreover, she cannot abandon her brother who may have become mute.
There is a wall-mounted knife rack in the corner of the kitchen counter. There is only a lone spoon, a fork and a pair of overly long tachyons inserted in it, but it is filled with a wide variety of knives. Zhannia walked over quietly and hesitantly picked up the most eye-catching and thick bone chopping knife. She just weighed it, put it back in place, and then pulled out the long knife in the corner. It is supposed to be a bread knife, but it is thicker and longer than the common bread knives on the market. Jania had witnessed Anti-Pierre use this knife to cut through frozen chicken and brittle bones as easily as cutting through butter. That may be mostly attributed to Anti-Pierre herself, but she has always believed that the knife was of good quality.
At this moment, she held it with her uninjured left hand and waved it tentatively twice. She found that the weight of the handle was much more reasonable than its appearance. She felt like she had gotten a lightweight stick, with a long blade as bright as new and fine serrations on the edge. This kind of saw blade can not only put her at a distance from danger, but is not so heavy that it is easy to lose her hand, it can be useful even in places where she cannot move to exert strength. She decided that she had made the best choice, so she held it and slowly moved out of the kitchen. Just as she was about to follow the sound to the stairs, the movement on the second floor suddenly disappeared.
It was completely silent except for the slight noise made by the electrical appliances in the house. Danger lurked in the oppressive darkness, but Jania had already stepped out of the kitchen. She decided not to go back, but held her breath and walked to the blind corner of the kitchen where the light could not reach, and observed the situation on the second floor there. Unlike her neighbors who had to worry about children or the elderly all day long, Jania had never seen a night light installed in any corner of Pierre's house, but there was a small window on the landing at the corner of the stairs. The blinds were not closed tightly, and the moonlight was chopped into streaks and fell on the lower stairs, as if the steps themselves had grown a scar-like texture.
Zhannia stared intently at the light source, seeing countless dust particles dancing in a cobalt blue that was colder than darkness. Her scalp stung and itched. She had never felt the uneasy trembling in the air so clearly, and she had never believed that ghosts were real as she did tonight. There it was, in some room up the stairs. But she still wasn't sure whether she should go up or turn around and flee the house.
Come out. she said in her mind. Even if you are really a devil, let me see what kind of virtue you have.
There was movement deep in the corridor on the second floor. It was the sound of a person stepping lightly in shoes, and the weight of the two feet was different. Zhannia's heart skipped a beat, remembering that her brother's foot had been injured. She couldn't help but leaned forward, trying to see who was coming down from upstairs. But before she saw anything moving, a slow voice came from the darkness: "So, you are awake."
Zhaniya felt her scalp was electrified, and her heart dropped like a lead weight into her stomach. She recognized the voice that greeted her in German, and at the same time she understood that hiding in the corner of the living room was pointless. She held the knife behind her back and slowly walked out of her hiding place.
Footsteps sounded softly and heavily on the stairs, and then Gerd Schilling's arrogant face emerged from the darkness, deliberately stopping in front of the small window that emitted cobalt blue light. He looked down into the living room, his face facing her. Zhannia saw blood and sewage covering his forehead and less than half of his face. There were brand-new bruises on his chin where the beauty groove was faintly visible. Even the moonlight-shined shoulders were slightly reflecting light - blood. It's all blood. His upper body was covered with a large amount of blood, and the blue moonlight made them look particularly strange, as if they were covered with wet fish scales.
Zhannia stared at him in rapt attention, almost forgetting her fear and precautions. Until she noticed that there seemed to be no serious wounds on Gerd Schilling's body, she asked, "Where is my brother?"
"Oh, he's dead," said Gerd Schilling. "I just killed him."
