It is not easy to change a mentally ill person's mind. Their logic is self-contained and cannot be persuaded by mere debate. Malcolm once told Jania a story about a madman: They were passing a lonely bridge outside the village, and a madman stopped there, claiming that they had stolen his treasure. He was a pitiful man covered in sores and his behavior was so strange that no one could mistake him for blackmail.
Somehow, everyone present seems to have read some introductions about mental patients and become experts in persuading mental patients. They coaxed him nicely, took off their clothes to prove that the treasure was not hidden on them, and even made up a story that they were chasing a group of suspected thieves. The stories they tell are much more vivid than that lunatic's, and they definitely have to be more believable, more amusing, and more amusing. Following professional advice, they first followed the other person's words completely, and then easily twisted them into their own meaning, trying to get the poor, dirty and sick man to get out of the way. But it doesn’t work! No matter how eloquent they are, the lunatic will always get back to where he started. Finally he concluded that they had not only stolen his treasure, but had hidden it in their stomachs. He even wanted them to open their mouths and let him put his hands in and take a look. The strange paranoia and vague malice frightened several of them out-of-town wanderers, so they decisively slipped away, walked several miles further, and crossed the river at another ford.
Jania will always remember the look on Malcolm's face when he told this story. He looked at the sky, and the polished stone beads he held in his hand clattered. Finally, he admitted to her that people often say that madmen are paranoid and only believe the stories they tell, but this is not always the case. There is at least one kind of lunatic who does not take his own words seriously. Although they have some extremely paranoid thoughts in their hearts, they have not lost the ability to pretentiousness and cover-up like ordinary people. So of course a mentally ill person can lie and flexibly change his crazy words to fit his true inner impulses...just like all normal people.
Maybe the madman wanted to scare us, Malcolm guessed. Maybe he just didn't want anyone to cross the bridge, or wanted to prove that everyone had failed him. So no matter how that story about a stolen treasure is spun, ultimately it's not going to be satisfying. Simply being better than a mentally ill person in eloquence and speaking skills will not really make him trust you, unless you are catering to his hidden desires, hatred or love, violence or flattery. There may be some truth to this phenomenon, psychiatric, psychological, or even anthropological, but when her artist father talks about it, it takes on an eerie quality. Creepy and gloomy colors - isn't this the unique logic of nightmares? No matter how hard you try, the situation is bound to get worse because the motive of this dream is to scare you. They eventually fell silent, pretending that the story was no different than any other "Adventures of a Wandering Muralist."
Jania didn't think she could really convince Lot. She sometimes thought that Klein didn't seem stupid—really, how could it make sense for someone who wasn't stupid to believe that he could extend his life by abusing and violating children? But...if it was a twisted resentment, resentment that she was getting older while the young child was still full of vitality, resentment that she was gradually losing her important status...she didn't know. She would never know what Klein was really thinking, not even Klein himself. Are there not many people in this world who know nothing about their own hearts but make up a bunch of great truths?
But now, Jania knew what Lot was interested in. She said that when her brother met Colin, Lot had a strange expression on his face that was almost like enlightenment. "You're lying." He said this, but he couldn't hide his satisfaction with this information. This guy's pretense is actually a bit lame, Zhaniya thought to herself, no wonder even someone like her brother can see through it.
Her shoulders slumped down into a look of disdain. "Believe it or not, but my brother did meet Klein. He encountered strange things when he was in Africa," she paused, creating a little hesitation about what she was about to say, "I...I don't know him. How did he do it? I think it was impossible for Klein to be in Africa at that time, but he described many details... I think he did see Klein recently." A trace of confused anger appeared on her face. "The Kollein he met wanted him to join something. He refused and came right back from Africa, but—"
"What kind of activity?" Lot interrupted her and asked. A layer of dark green fluorescence seemed to light up in the depths of his pupils.
"No one will know the answer," Jania said, almost holding her breath. "You killed him."
The brief silence felt stretched out in her mind. A halo of cobalt blue seemed to swirl around the edge of the window, creating an even pale white glow. This pale blue confused Zhaniya's perception, and for a moment she thought it was almost dawn outside. But then she realized that this was impossible. It might not even be early in the morning now. No matter how long she passed out, it might not even be three in the morning. There must have been some quiet car passing by outside, because in the blink of an eye, the moon-white light blue that illuminated Lot became thicker again, pressing heavily on her chest. In this bad nightmare, maybe Lot will overturn what he said before...
"Then let's see if there are any clues left on him," Lot said. He turned sideways and gave up his position near the corner. Then he looked at Jania to see if she dared to go up. Jania knew she had to go. If Lot went alone to look at the body - body, she tried not to understand the meaning behind the word - he would try to prevent her from escaping first by tying her up or getting rid of her. She has one leg. That would be all over.
"Very well," she said. "I was just wondering what he was hiding from me." Then she moved toward the window that reflected the nightmare. With each step up, the air seemed more choking. The smell of blood mixed with the cold poured into her trachea. Lot looked at her approaching and suddenly grinned. "It seems that your relationship with your brother is not very good."
Zhaniya lowered her arm and adjusted the knife hidden behind her back to a position where Lot could not see it. She felt that her little actions had probably been exposed. But she was now very close to the window at the stairwell, and she couldn't help but imagine that she could jump out and escape to the street outside, asking for help from passers-by. "We are not a father," she said coldly, "One of Isaac or Ishmael must be driven away, right?"
Lot chuckled. "You can have two kingdoms." He ordered with some inexplicable pride, "You walk in front, little girl. Go up the corridor and turn right."
Jania dug her toes into her shoes to stop herself from doing anything impulsive. She turned around and walked up without saying a word, feeling Lot's eyes staring back at her. There was a sickening coldness clinging to the bare back of her neck, as if a toad was lying there in a puddle. But she resisted looking or reaching out to grab it. Instead, she climbed up the stairs indifferently. There was a puddle of liquid under her feet, and she lowered her gaze and glanced over. Blood. Of course it's blood. After she and Lot spoke these words, the blood dripping along the way had not yet dried up. Jania suddenly felt frightened.
The hallway was covered in blood, almost like the floor had been painted a dark coat of paint. The door to each room was open, and a faint light crept from the window through the door, illuminating the damp and smelly corridor. Zhaniya could see the wall clock hanging at the end of the corridor at a glance. It should not be more than twenty steps away. But in her feeling, this corridor was extending endlessly, door after door, bloody road after bloody road. This was like the Eastern Hell and the Ten Halls of Hell that her brother had told about. Each room contained its own horrors, leading all the way to the floor of the eighteenth level of hell.
At the end of this hell corridor, Antique Pierre's favorite wall clock hangs quietly on the wall. This antique-like old clock has the style of Arabic tiles, with a mud-colored wooden frame and snow-white inlaid stones. The complex patterns and metal edging give off a bronze-like sheen. Jania had carefully considered this clock in the past and knew that it never kept the local time, and that it kept running faster and slower. She had liked its mystery before, and thought that she would have to keep such a useless antique in her private room to confuse her guests. Maybe she would still do it, but she would definitely not choose the wall clock. The wall beneath the clock face was deeply cracked, as if someone had taken a chainsaw and stabbed it hard, cutting an ugly gash in the house and causing the poor thing to bleed profusely. Nowhere was there more blood than under the clock, but still no body.
Jania hesitated a little, but the cold air was approaching from behind her. "Keep moving forward." The whisper contained the threat of schadenfreude, and she had to obey, while the hope in her heart was extinguished little by little. The light was dim, for one thing, but there was too much blood here... She really shouldn't have been unconscious for so long! She slowly moved forward and hung the knife in front of her right leg, not as if she was trying to hide it from the person behind her, but as if there were monsters in the room in front of her laying out to attack her. When she passed the first door, she glanced inside from the corner of her eye and almost mistook the wrinkled carpet for a dead person, and there were many odds and ends scattered on the floor. The situation in the second room is similar - damn, every room is in a mess. Could it be that this is an unimaginably tangled battle? This really doesn't make sense, since Lot had that kind of ability, and he would have killed any unarmed person without batting an eyelid.
Only the last room remains. Jania knew it was a dance studio: a square room with almost no furnishings, with maroon wooden floors and rows of floor-to-ceiling mirrors on three walls. Only the wall near the backyard had windows and a terrace, as if there were always people there. Watch Ante Pierre practice her bizarre dance there. But as far as Jania knew, only she and her mother had ever sat there.
She inched closer to the doorframe, as carefully and slowly as a ship about to enter a harbor, expecting the worst and the faintest hope. No, she must not be allowed to see faces for the first time. If she looked directly into a pair of gray eyes or a broken head, she was not sure whether she could still remain calm.
A few broken glass fell beside the door, sparkling strangely, like a rare treasure covered in pearlescent light. They were part of a broken mirror, but the source of that strange light was unknown. Zhaniya's eyes followed the wall mirror with spiderweb-like cracks, and what she saw was a corridor extending infinitely into the distance. In the corridor, there were people sitting at regular intervals. They looked exactly the same, all of them. Leaning against the wall, his head was lowered, as if he was sleeping. There are endless dead people lying on an endless road! Jania was startled, blinked twice, and the hallucination disappeared. It turned out that it was just multiple projections caused by two parallel wall mirrors. The deep corridor leading straight into the darkness was just an illusion caused by her nervousness, and there was only one person in the room from beginning to end, leaning against the wall opposite the mirror she could see, motionless.
Jania ran inside. She forgot that the terrifying evil was following her, and she no longer had time to worry about seeing dead faces. Instead, she rushed straight towards the deepest part of the room. In the darkness, the first thing she saw was the man's hand. It should be the left hand, palm facing up, hanging limply beside the thigh, like a pale and curled dead maggot. The man's back was against the mirror, his legs were straight in front of him, and his body was dragged forward by his head. He looked exactly like the corpse trapped in the maze in the comics. Jania shouted silently in her heart, hoping for a miracle, hoping that the mirror surrounding the room actually led to a different space, and that a strange corpse happened to fall out of the secret passage, replacing her knocked-out brother— -But that person was wearing clothes she was familiar with. Her chest was filled with sourness, and her tongue was filled with numbing bitterness. It's that simple, it's that easy. Some people go out for a walk after dinner, only to be hit and killed by a car driven by a drunkard; some people can still talk nonsense during dinner, but are killed by a madman at midnight.
Her right leg was in unprecedented pain, making the last few steps hobbled. But she gritted her teeth and persevered, and steadily came to the man's side, squatting down with her left leg as support. The smell of blood had always been strong in the air, but when she got close to the corpse, she smelled another smell, almost fragrant and rotten, making people think of morning mist and woods. No one has ever mentioned that the smell of death is sweet. She blinked hard to stop her vision from being blurred by moisture, and then touched her pale, cotton-like hand. The skin was still soft, but as cold as ice.
"I told you." She heard someone say with lazy complacency outside the door. But she didn't feel angry or scared. She still has to do things to the end, because people will say "you must see your corpse before you die." She gritted her teeth, reached out and grabbed the hair on the man's forehead, and slowly lifted his head.
A face that looked very much like her brother looked at her. The face was colorless and expressionless, calmer and duller than the plaster figure. No living being, no mammal with the flexible muscles and soft tissues of the face, could remain blank like this for long. And when Zhaniya just raised its head and laid her gaze between its eyes, the eyes turned suddenly, the pupils shrank, and the focus turned from nothingness to Zhaniya's stunned face. He looked at her indifferently, his pupils moving slightly but quickly and incoherently, as if staring at countless invisible flying insects moving among them. Jania was stunned and speechless. Her leg injury prevented her from standing up. This was not her brother. This was not even a living person. This was more like... the pet snapping turtle Emma had shown her. The one suddenly stuck its head out and chewed up the head of a live shrimp. cold-blooded animals. She retracted her hand subconsciously. The thing was still staring at her, and its vision seemed to gradually become clearer, no longer turning suddenly. It was paying attention to her little by little.
Maybe she screamed unconsciously, or maybe the silence lasted too long. Lot, who was at the door, deliberately stepped in with heavy steps. "How much time do you need to mourn your brother?" He said hypocritically, "Don't be too sad, we still have business to do."
Jania said nothing. She feels like she's not the only one who doesn't understand the situation. She didn't dare to turn her head and look at Lot, and Lot didn't seem to take another look at the corpse in his mouth. He wandered around in the mirror room, crushing the broken glass on the ground into fine sand little by little. If he planned to shake her spirit in this way, it was destined to be in vain. Zhaniya was nervous only because she found that the face opposite was also slightly tilted, showing a listening expression.
She licked her lips and tried not to breathe as she spoke. "You killed him."
"I told you a long time ago. Do you think I'm bragging?"
"At least it wasn't intentional," Jania said dryly. She hammered her face hard, not only hoping to wake herself up from her dream, but also to order herself not to remind Lot again. But maybe she should give it, since the thing was staring at her silently again now. She couldn't say whether it was a "lesser of two evils" moment. Maybe her brother was just beaten and his facial nerves were damaged, or, (not too bad considering the current situation) her brother became patient zero of some kind of zombie virus.
"I certainly didn't plan to kill your brother so early," Lot said, obviously misunderstanding her completely. "When he started to learn to cause trouble, I had to strike first. If I had known that his epiphany came from Yucolain…”
"What would you do? Convince him to join your mission?"
"That's not completely impossible."
Jania didn't quite believe him. After the report that the prison collapsed due to termites came out, she carefully read the articles introducing the missing criminals, secretly thinking that Rod was the kind of lunatic driven by latent desires that Malcolm said, and was not invested because of faith. Hate, but fabricating beliefs to keep it alive. You are just pretending to be generous, she thought bitterly in her heart, because you have already killed him. "So, if he could come back from the dead, would you still be willing to let him join your operation?"
"Back from the dead!" Lot said heavily, with a stage accent. "If he could have been pardoned like that, of course I would reconsider everything. Everyone should be judged appropriately."
"You swear you will rule impartially?"
Lot humbly said, "I only obey the judgment of the Holy One."
Jania almost smiled with a smile of revenge, but someone beat her to it. A few seconds after Rhodes' oath fell, the thing opposite her that was listening indifferently actually smiled. In an instant, its eyes lost focus, like a blind man's lack of focus, but the smile was undoubtedly intelligent. There was another look that had nothing to do with her brother: that kind of almost innocent happiness with malicious intentions. Its lips moved. Jania noticed that it seemed to be counting in German: one, two, three - then its head suddenly tilted to the side, its gray pupils stared into space, and it died very convincingly.
Jania stared at her dead brother's body. She began to shake him, and the head swayed as if it had been planted. It was really a damn wallflower! She secretly worked hard on her fingers, pinching and twisting, pulling up his hair like she did at the beginning. The body remained calmly dead.
"Don't waste any more time," Lot urged. "Take all your brother's belongings, and then you must get out of here with me."
"Yeah." Jania said through her teeth. She endured it again and again, trying to overcome all unknowns with ethical emotions and detached rationality. She would adapt to circumstances, would try her best to deal with the murderer, and would overcome the sadness of her brother's death and the bizarre and short-lived resurrection. Thinking of this, she finally couldn't help it, and reached out to slap the dead man hard.
"Ah!" the dead man yelled, and the back of his head suddenly smashed the mirror behind him.
(End of chapter)
