Chen Ge who was lying on the bed inside the mental asylum had the expression and said the words that perfectly matched the environment that he was in.
[Why does his condition become so serious at night when he was acting so normally in the morning?] Zuo Han sat back in his bed and stayed far away from Chen Ge. “I study forensic science, I have been studying for so many years and I have not heard of any cases where a person’s lost memory could be recovered through constant stimulation of horror.”
“You forensic science students deal with dead bodies, the situation of a living person might be more complicated.”
“Do you know how low your body temperature was earlier when you were acting up? The only difference that you had then compared to a dead person was you still possessed a heart beat.” Zuo Han’s initial thought was to cooperate with Chen Ge but now he gradually realized that might not be such a good idea because he slowly noticed how dangerous his roommate could be, the man might lose control and ambush him at any moment. From Zuo Han’s perspective, Chen Ge was not only suffering from mental sickness that simple, there had to be more secrets on this man.
“Is it possible that this hospital has been conducting human experiment on its patients?” Zuo Han tried to use his knowledge to search for the answer, but the more he thought about it, the more confused he became. Even science could not explain Chen Ge’s situation, this was already within the realm of theology and mythology.
“Zuo Han, can you tell me a few ghost stories? It is best if they are the one that are incredibly scary.” Chen Ge laid in bed and twisted his head to look at Zuo Han. His eyes were shining with anticipation in the dark.
“What is wrong with you? Why do you suddenly want to listen to ghost stories?” Zuo Han blurted out from his mouth, he realized he was completely unable to understand Chen Ge anymore. “In the middle of the night, you want to hear your roommate tell you a ghost story inside a mental hospital, I really cannot understand what is going through your mind when you made a request like that.”
“I just wanted to see whether the sensation of fear could help me stimulate the recovery of my memory or not. It is just a test, we have nothing to lose.”
Hearing what Chen Ge said, Zuo Han did not have any argument to retort. The corner of his eyes twitched and then he told Chen Ge a few ghost stories that he knew. “Well, are you scared?”
“Nah, it did not work. Your stories failed to give me any excitement at all.”
“Who will get excited from listening to ghost stories?!” Zuo Han crawled out from his bed. He moved his bed as far from Chen Ge as he could. He only stopped when his bed was right next to the door. At this distance, if Chen Ge suddenly decided to attack him, he could open the door and run out immediately.
“Has anything scary happened to you in your life?”
“Yes, I was trapped inside a mental asylum and my roommate insisted on having me telling him a ghost story in the middle of the night.” Zuo Han could not understand Chen Ge’s behavior at all. From both scientific perspective and mythological perspective, Chen Ge’s action made no sense what so ever.
“Your ghost stories are not scary at all, how about…” Chen Ge forced himself to raise his hand. “We play some haunted games? Games like Pen Spirit or Plate Spirit?” Without even needing to think, certain things were already branded in his body, Chen Ge was very familiar with these terms.
“Didn’t you lose your memory already? How come you are so familiar with these strange things?” Zuo Han realized the source of the problem.
“In my memory, I was once an owner of a Haunted House but the doctor told me I had inputted myself into the identity of another person and my memory was just a projection.”
“The doctor might be lying to you. From the various strange behavior that you have showcased tonight, it is clear that you are an adrenaline junkie, likes to be scared and you are very familiar with scary games like Pen Spirit and Plate Spirit, so you probably really did own a Haunted House in real life!” Zuo Han scratched his chin and shared his thought.
“But why would the doctor lie to me?”
“How would I know?”
“Then shall we play a game of Pen Spirit? Perhaps I might be able to slowly remember something.”
“We can’t, we have no pen or pencil?”
“How about Plate Spirit? I also know another scary game called back to back. One person will be lying on the bed and the other one will be hiding under the bed…” Once he started to reach into his mind, Chen Ge’s brain felt like it was being torn apart. So no matter whether he was speaking or acting, he tried to act on his instinct as much as he could. Zuo Han stopped interacting with Chen Ge. He looked at Chen Ge frostily before turning away to face the wall. With his back against Chen Ge, he started to formulate the plan to escape from the hospital. He maintained this position for a while when Zuo Han suddenly felt strangely unsettled. He thought back to what Chen Ge had said and he kept feeling something was not that right. [Is it possible that this man is just acting all along? Now that I have turned away from him, is it possible that he is standing behind me now?]
Goosebumps appeared on the back of his neck. Zuo Han whipped his body around and he realized Chen Ge was already asleep. “He looks so normal when he is asleep, no one would have expected such scary things would come out from his mouth.”
The room returned to silence again. At around 2 am, suddenly a loud crash from somewhere inside the hospital, it sounded like something had exploded. Both Zuo Han and Chen Ge were startled awake, before they realized what had happened, suddenly the sound of footsteps came from outside the corridor again.
“Someone is coming!”
The door of the room was knocked on lightly twice. Before Zuo Han or Chen Ge could get up to open the door, the footsteps had faded away already. When Zuo Han did open the door, there was no person outside the door at all. “Who was the person who knocked on the door?”
“Oh right, when you were out exploring the hospital yesterday night, someone also came to knock on our door, but at the time, they only knocked once.” Chen Ge realized when he was thinking about the things that happened inside the hospital, his brain would not be assaulted by pain but the moment he tried to think about the memory that occurred before his fainting, the tearing would come to his brain.
“They had knocked once yesterday and today, they had knocked twice? Looks like they came here on purpose and were doing this deliberately.” Zuo Han stared at Chen Ge. “Do you know any other patient at this hospital?”
“I cannot remember. From the time I was hospitalized here, I appeared to have fainted many times already. Whenever I wake up, the memory before the most recent fainting would become very blurry.”
“So is this possible? The hospital wants you to become a ‘normal person’ that is following their standard but every time their ‘treatment’ has failed so they could only repeat the ‘process’ every time?” The more Zuo Han thought about it, the more he realized how probable that was. “You probably have undergone similar treatment many times already but you yourself simply could not remember them.”
“But what does that has to do with the person who came to knock on the door?” Chen Ge laid in the bed. He tried to control himself to stop thinking and hopefully that would help recover his body as fast as possible.
“Perhaps the relationship between you and this person is similar to the relationship that you currently have with me?” Zuo Han gave a brave stipulation. “They perhaps were once your roommate but you were ‘reactivated’ due to the failure of your treatment but they were hidden away. The knocking could be some kind of promise between you two and perhaps they were thinking to pass some message to you.”
“You have a point there.” Chen Ge nodded.
“This means that they might show up again tomorrow night. We have to figure out a way to gain contact with them then.”
“Okay.”
The hospital that night was not that quiet. The footsteps kept echoing on the corridor and it was not until it was almost dawn when Chen Ge drifted back into sleep. At around 8 am, the room door was pushed open and Xu Wan as well as Doctor Gao walked into the room.
“How did you rest yesterday night?” Doctor Gao once again Zuo Han who was lying on his side in his bed. He directly moved towards Chen Ge’s bedside. He looked quite exhausted.
“Not so good. I think I heard something exploded inside the hospital yesterday night, the loud noise woke me up from my sleep.” Chen Ge looked rather weak and his tone was slow and sluggish.
“There was a small accident at the boiler room, it was nothing serious.” Doctor Gao sat on the bed in the middle of the room. “Did you have any dream yesterday night?’
“No.” Chen Ge shook his head. “I felt like I have forgotten some things, some blurry memory fragments are being wiped away by new memories. It is very contradictory, I do not know which one to believe, which one is the real me.”
“The fact that you can realize that is a solid proof that your condition is improving. Do not force it, we should take this slow.” Doctor Gao was very patient. “one cannot rush the recovery of mental illness. One has to accept it, recognize it and then finally overcome it.” After saying that, Doctor Gao turned his head to look at Zuo Han, “Chen Ge, I heard from the hospital workers that someone was loitering at the halls of the hospital yesterday night, neither you nor your roommate left your room yesterday night, right?”
Hearing this accusation from Doctor Gao, Zuo Han’s eyes flew open but since he was facing away from Doctor Gao, neither Doctor Gao nor Chen Ge saw this.
“we have been staying inside our room all night but I did hear some footsteps on the corridor right around midnight. There were so many of them, it sounded like the halls were filled with people.” Chen Ge did not continue on this topic but returned to the issue where he was startled awake from his sleep. “Doctor Gao, I still discovered something strange yesterday night.”
“Do tell.”
“Yesterday night, when I was startled awake by the sound of the explosion, it felt like a surge of electricity had crawled through my body in that moment. I hate that sensation of fear a lot and my body could not help shaking.” Chen Ge crossed his arms before his chest and color drained from his face. Doctor Gao listened to his patient kindly while Zuo Han who was pretending to be asleep crimped his lips. The madman who was smiling while having a staring contest with another mental patient inside the hospital now said he hates the feeling of being scared?
“It feels like I was thrown into an endless nightmare, headache, heart palpation and cold sweat broke out all over my body, I found it difficult to breathe, in fact there was even a loss of gravity and the imminence of death.” Chen Ge gripped his head and he was speaking very rapidly. “My former memory appeared to be filled with fear, whenever I was scared, the heavy sense of helplessness would overwhelm my whole body. I hate my memory from the past, I want to completely delete them from my mind! Doctor Gao, can you please help me?”
Before Doctor Gao who sat on the bed could say anything, Zuo Han’s eyes already widened. He already knew what Chen Ge was up to.
“Fear could make you feel disgusted and averse to the memory from your past?” Doctor Gao slowly nodded. “Like what I have told you before, the stories that you have invented for yourself are indeed scary and they are indisputably very horrible memory.”
His eyes were fading in concentration, Chen Ge glanced at the ceiling numbly, “That was such a painful experience, I hate the feeling of being submerged into helpless horror.”
“That is a normal reaction. The fact that you can feel something like that means that you are slowly recovering.” Doctor Gao took out the medication bottle from his pocket, and tipped out two pills. After he saw Chen Ge swallow them, he turned to leave. “I shall go and update our treatment formula. In a bit, you shall follow Xu Wan to go and have breakfast.” After Doctor Gao left, Xu Wan helped Chen Ge up from bed, and with his morning routine and then she brought Chen Ge to the hospital canteen. “This is the third sick hall’s canteen, after your condition stabilize further, you can come here on your own in the future.” Xu Wan only left after she had helped prepare Chen Ge’s meals.
“I am familiar with this scene a lot, in my memory, she often helps bring me food as well.” Chen Ge mumbled to himself. He had no friend and thus sat at the corner of the canteen alone. Occasionally he would lift up his head to study the other patients around him. “Xin Hai Central Hospital’s Third Sick Hall is the treatment centre for people with mental problems, similar to the place called Third Sick Hall in my memory.” The memory was weaving together with real life, forming a tight tapestry. Chen Ge held the spoon and lightly tapped it against the surface of the table. With no expression on his face, he was thinking about something on his mind.
“Doctor Gao said self perception is very important to a mental patient. In my mind, at the earliest part of my memory, the term self-perceptive key once appeared before and the term appeared as the same time as the Third Sick Hall. Even though I cannot remember clearly what I have done inside this Third Sick Hall, one thing is certain, there is some kind of connection between this Third Sick Hall and the self-perceptive key. Assuming the Third Sick Hall in my memory is based on this Third Sick Hall in real life, does that indirectly mean that the self-perceptive key is hidden somewhere inside this Third Sick Hall?”
The veins on the back of his hand pulsed as he tightened his grip around the key in his palm. The pain was torturing Chen Ge’s senses but he used his strong determination to suffer through it. “Doctor Gao said my past memory is all an invention, but the things in my memory are based on actual thing that exist in real life, in that case, I do wish to see what does the self-perceptive key that has appeared in my invention would look like in real life.” When Chen Ge made the connection between the self-preceptive key and Third Sick Hall, another memory fragment appeared naturally in his mind, “Self perception was important to a mental patient, the self-perceptive key was related to a mental asylum, this is not a coincidence, it feels like someone has purposely planned. It was as if they knew that one day I would end up trapped inside a mental hospital and have already placed this self-perceptive key to help me.”
Whenever his mind operated, it would feel like it was punctured by millions of needles, this kind of pain was not something that could be stomached by a normal person. “The self-perceptive key appears to be something important that might trigger my memory, it has provided me with a direction to formulate my thoughts.” Gripping the key that was almost twisted out of shape, Chen Ge resisted the pain and fed himself the food little by little. He was slowly getting used to the pain. He used this most stupid and cruel method to help himself face his own past. After having his breakfast, Chen Ge returned to the hospital garden with the aid of his crutches. “No matter what I cannot be moved back to the quarantine area again. I will play the role of the patient that the hospital wants me to, only then I have the chance to investigate the truth.”
Sitting on the bench, Chen Ge looked at the pergola that was not far away from him. Zhang Jingjiu was not there that day. “he was given such a serious punishment simply because he had uttered a single word to me?” The sun showered on Chen Ge’s face but he could not feel any warmth at all. “Looks like Zhang Jingjiu won’t be coming today.”
Several minutes later, the bushes were parted away and a cat’s head poked out. The stray cat appeared to be waiting for Chen Ge but who could say that Chen Ge was not waiting for it as well. Crawling out from the bush, the white cat bit on the edge of Chen Ge’s pant bottom and dragged him to the fence, Chen Ge did not resist. But this time, there was something different from last time. When the white cat led Chen Ge to the fence, it meowed several times at Chen Ge and then it crawled out through the gap in the fence and raced to the theme park across from the road.
“it wanted me to wait for it here?” Chen Ge had no impression of this cat at all. Be it his memory from the past or his current memory, this cat did not occupy either of them. About 10 minutes later, just as Chen Ge suspected he was being toyed by a cat, the white cat showed up again. Behind it was a woman in a red dress.
“Zhang Ya?” The woman was dressed as a ghost. When she heard Chen Ge call her name, she was slightly startled.
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