Chapter 159: Two Bowls of Water
Hearing Chen Ge's question, the three people in the iron cage reacted differently.
The old man, whose face was stained with grease, silently licked his fingers, as if savoring the food he had just eaten.
The woman's eyes widened, and she struggled desperately in the cage, like a big fish thrown onto the shore.
The middle-aged man's reaction was the most unusual. Among the three, he was the only one who kept staring at Chen Ge without blinking.
"Why are these three people locked up in the psychiatric hospital?" Chen Ge first walked over to the old man's cage. Inside the iron cage welded from steel bars, two plastic bowls were placed.
The old man noticed someone approaching but wasn't afraid. He sat in the center of the cage, sucking the residual grease off his fingers as if no one else was there.
"He's the one transferred from the first ward." Chen Ge stared for a long time but couldn't find anything off about the old man. "His hair is uneven, cut with a blade—this must be new growth."
Seeing the old man's hair, Chen Ge thought of the hair on the back of the nurse station cabinet. Some of it was mixed with gray, likely belonging to this old man.
"His hair was shaved once, and it's grown back this much. It seems he's been locked up here for a long time." Back then, by comparing hair lengths, Chen Ge had concluded that four different people had been shaved, but only three were here now.
"There's still one missing."
Chen Ge's gaze swept over the woman and finally stopped on the middle-aged man. His hair was long and messy, covering his head. "This guy's hair doesn't seem to have been shaved?"
Chen Ge grew more cautious. Shaving heads seemed to be the killer's twisted hobby, a way to toy with his prey. But why would the killer spare the middle-aged man?
Did the middle-aged man know the killer? Or was he the killer himself?
Chen Ge was startled by his own thought. At the junction of the first and second wards, he had seen a stranger's face—an asymmetrical, somewhat deformed face.
Able to roam freely in the ward and even spy on and follow him, the deformed face was likely the real culprit. But now there was also this middle-aged man. That meant there might be more than one killer imprisoning the victims.
Chen Ge tightened his grip on the tool hammer. An even worse scenario crossed his mind.
What if, in this ward, everyone except him was the killer?
Of course, that probability was low.
After a moment's thought, he stopped in front of the woman.
Neither of the two men seemed willing to answer his questions, so he decided to try removing the pillowcase from the woman's mouth to see if he could get any information from her.
"Don't worry, I'm here to save you." Chen Ge rattled the lock on the cage. Without a key, using just a hammer to break it would take who knows how long to free all three.
The woman seemed to have an innate fear of living people. As soon as Chen Ge approached, she started having an episode, whimpering through her gag, shaking her head and waving her hands in agitation.
"Calm down, I won't hurt you." Chen Ge moved around to the woman's front. Just as he was about to remove the pillowcase from her mouth, the middle-aged man, who had been silent all along, suddenly spoke.
"I suggest you don't let her talk. She's very noisy."
Turning around, Chen Ge saw a pair of gloomy, wary eyes. This middle-aged man, whether it was just toward Chen Ge or everyone, showed a deep-seated disgust, as if what Chen Ge was doing was utterly repulsive to him.
"She's noisy?" Chen Ge wasn't afraid of them talking; he was afraid they'd refuse to communicate.
As long as these people spoke, he had a chance to glean useful information from their words.
"Yes, very noisy." The middle-aged man spoke stiffly, as if even talking to someone disgusted him.
"Can you tell me why? Has she suffered some mental trauma?"
Chen Ge asked two questions in a row, but the middle-aged man remained silent. Only when Chen Ge reached into the cage again to remove the woman's gag did the man utter three words: "I don't know."
"What do you know? You don't know this woman, but do you recognize the old man in the first cage?" Chen Ge asked the question that had been nagging at him. "Why does his cage have two plastic bowls, while yours only have one?"
"I can tell you, but only if you don't let that woman speak. She's very noisy."
The middle-aged man kept emphasizing how noisy the woman was. Curious, Chen Ge outwardly agreed. "Fine, but only if you're not lying to me."
"I never lie." The man sat upright in the cage, his voice low. "The old man is in poor health and has a bad temper. After his wife passed, he stayed home alone, relying entirely on his son to support him. His son was a doctor, not earning much, but enough to support the two of them. Later, for some reason, the old man, urged by others, married a widow. His son didn't object but moved out, sending him money every month."
"Things took a turn. Not long after, his son, the doctor, supposedly went mad from constant contact with patients and injured several patients at the hospital."
"He lost his job, and the patients' families wouldn't let it go. They drained all the family's savings before the matter was settled."
"His son needed treatment for his madness, but a public psychiatric hospital cost three to four thousand a month—too much for him to bear. At a critical moment, the hospital where his son used to work stepped in, offering to take him in at a cost far lower than the public hospitals."
"The former doctor became a patient. His son's personality grew stranger and stranger, and he never recovered until the hospital shut down."
"During his son's hospitalization, the old man's health deteriorated. Too old to find work, every penny he earned went to the hospital. The widow he married divorced him."
"He told his son about his struggles, hoping his son would pull himself together and overcome the illness."
"But soon after, his son bit a fellow villager."
"Whenever he had an episode, his son's destructive urges became extreme. In the end, the old man had no choice but to build an iron cage and lock his son inside."
"This went on for a while, and then the old man fell ill too. Forget treatment—now he couldn't even afford food."
"Looking at his son, who occasionally had episodes in the cage, the old man made a decision."
"He only brought water when his son was having an episode, placing two bowls outside the cage. One bowl had clean water, the other was laced with rat poison."
"Life or death, he let his son choose."
The middle-aged man's face was cold. He seemed unaccustomed to speaking so much, his complexion paler than before. "That's why there are two bowls of water outside the old man's cage."
Hearing the middle-aged man's story, Chen Ge recalled the words beneath the nurse station counter—"Everything you've done to me, I will return to you."