Chapter 121: The Rusty Key
“As long as I’m careful, it should be fine.” Chen Ge unzipped his backpack, tucked Xiao Xiao into his chest, then pulled out a tool hammer and a flashlight.
“What are you planning to do?” Doctor Gao heard the commotion and walked out of the bedroom. Seeing Chen Ge’s unconventional getup, he felt a headache coming on.
“Perfect timing.” Chen Ge dragged Doctor Gao over to the window. “We’ll keep in touch. You stay in Room 304, and I’ll go check out Room 303.”
“What’s in Room 303?” Doctor Gao’s gaze swept over the iron hammer in Chen Ge’s hand, finally settling on the cloth doll tucked in his chest, his eyelids twitching wildly.
“The root of Men Nan’s illness should be in Room 303. I plan to take a look before dawn.”
“You’re just going to go like that? With a doll?”
“If I were alone, I might hesitate, but with you backing me up, it’s different.” Chen Ge dialed Doctor Gao’s number and slipped the phone into his chest pocket. “Keep the line open.”
Doctor Gao nodded instinctively, holding his phone, suddenly feeling the weight of responsibility—he had to ensure the safety of two “patients” at once.
“Be careful!”
Chen Ge stepped onto the windowsill using a chair, stashed the tool hammer in his pants pocket, and, gripping the wall, stood on the windowsill of Room 304 to push open the window of Room 303 with his foot.
“Doctor Gao, don’t hang up. Be ready to back me up at any moment.” With that, Chen Ge held tight to the window of Room 304 with his left hand, leaned his body out, and stretched his leg onto the windowsill of Room 303.
At this point, his center of gravity was still on the Room 304 side. Once his extended leg was firmly planted, he slowly released his grip on the window, tilting his body toward the adjacent window.
When he was about two-thirds of the way over, he aimed for the window frame of Room 303, let go of his left hand, and reached out with his right to grab it.
With his right hand secure, Chen Ge shifted his body over smoothly.
“Breaking into a neighbor’s window to treat a patient?”
Watching Chen Ge disappear from the window of Room 304, Doctor Gao had no time to stop him. In his decade-plus of practice, this was the first time he’d encountered such a situation while treating a patient.
Gripping the window frame firmly, Chen Ge slowly crouched down, fully opened the window, and jumped inside.
“Finally made it in.”
Room 303 had never been rented out since the incident. The interior was mostly preserved as it was, covered in dust, with faint, mottled stains visible on the walls.
The room was very dark, the concrete floor uneven. Chen Ge turned on his flashlight and saw that the center of the floor was covered with a worn, foul-smelling carpet.
“None of the other rental rooms, including the landlord’s, have carpets. This room even has one specially laid out.”
Where there’s an anomaly, there’s a catch. Chen Ge grabbed the edge of the carpet and flipped it over.
A strong, pungent odor wafted up. Chen Ge covered his nose and mouth and tossed the carpet aside.
There was no gruesome scene as he’d imagined. Under the carpet were just some old clothes.
All the clothes were men’s, the same size, likely belonging to one person.
“Moldy clothes shouldn’t smell this strong.” Chen Ge used the hammer to push the clothes aside and soon made a startling discovery—several dead sparrows were hidden beneath them.
“The bodies are intact; they must have died within the past week.” Since mastering the art of embalming, Chen Ge had also gained some basic knowledge of thanatology. “This room hasn’t been rented out since the incident, yet someone came in within the last week and buried these things under the clothes.”
Chen Ge felt the problem was getting trickier, diverging from his earlier assumptions.
“Wang Haiming died in this room. I don’t know the exact spot, but it doesn’t matter much—if I search thoroughly, I’ll find something.” Finding nothing valuable in the living room, he stepped over the clothes on the floor and entered the bedroom.
A metal-framed bed was pushed against the wall, and near the headboard stood an old bookshelf with a few books leaning crookedly on it.
The pages were damp and moldy, emitting a faint, unpleasant smell.
Chen Ge checked all the drawers and cabinets but found nothing. Finally, on a whim, he entered the bathroom.
The internal layout of all the rooms in the apartment building was similar. As soon as he opened the bathroom door, Chen Ge saw a mirror directly facing him.
Under the flashlight’s beam, his reflection in the mirror looked oddly off compared to his real self.
He didn’t step inside, just glanced from the doorway.
“There doesn’t seem to be much else in this room.” The rental was small, and Chen Ge had searched nearly every corner.
Standing in the center of the living room, he looked at the clothes hidden under the carpet. “Strange. All these clothes seem stained with blood. The blood from just a few sparrows couldn’t possibly soak so many garments.”
With his Yin Eyes, his vision was sharper than most, and he gradually sensed something wrong.
“There’s something off about the clothes.”
He used the tool hammer to inspect each piece of clothing and finally found a plain gray jacket in the very center.
The shoulders and back of the jacket had patchy, dark bloodstains. Wang Haiming might have been wearing this when he hit his head against the wall.
Only a head wound would produce such a bloodstain pattern.
“What’s this?” Chen Ge shook the jacket and, for the first time, found something in the pocket.
He pulled out the object from the jacket pocket. It was cold to the touch. Holding it up to the light, he saw it was a rusty iron key.
“I’ve seen the keys to the apartment rooms—they’re flat brass ones. This key is much bigger than those.” Chen Ge couldn’t figure out why a patient discharged from a mental hospital, with nothing to his name, would have a key that didn’t belong to his own room.
“Did he pick it up somewhere? But if it were just a random find, he wouldn’t have kept it so carefully.” Chen Ge didn’t yet know the key’s purpose, so he just pocketed it. As he was about to leave, his flashlight swept across the window.
The open window glass reflected a figure—the tenant from Room 302 was leaning out, trying to peek into this room.
“Why is he so interested in me entering Room 303?” Chen Ge pretended not to notice, bending down to put the clothes back in place, his mind racing. “Only the tenants in Room 302 and Room 304 can enter Room 303 without going through the door. Men Nan in Room 304 is the victim, so the sparrows in Room 303 were likely left by that young man from Room 302.”
“But why would he do that? Has he already been taken over by the monster in Room 303?” Chen Ge recalled the strange behavior of the young man in Room 302—talking to himself, arguing with himself—all so similar to Wang Haiming back then.