Chapter 170: The Door
"I am curious about everything about this child, but there is also a faint sense of worry. He is like a quagmire—the closer you get, the more dangerous it becomes."
"The child's mother suffers from bipolar disorder. She only becomes less tense when she sees her own child. To facilitate treatment, the doctors here always bring the child to see her, mainly to alleviate her condition."
"The child has a natural dependence on his mother. Even at such a young age, he can already recognize her."
"But what strikes me as strange is that the first word this child spoke was not 'mom' or his own name, but—'door.'"
"At first, I thought I misheard, or that it was just an unconscious sound from the child. But when the nurse picked him up to leave, he pointed his tiny pink finger at the door of the room where his mother was confined, repeating the same word over and over—'door.'"
"He seemed to be trying to convey something to us. He wanted to get close to that door."
"This is what unsettles me the most. I questioned everyone in the hospital, and no one had taught him that word!"
"No one taught him, yet he uttered it and clearly understood its meaning. Who told him? Could there be something else in my office?"
"What happened later was even more terrifying. When the nurse carrying the child and I entered Ward 3 to visit his mother, the boy looked toward the end of the corridor, waving his hands as if greeting someone."
"I saw it clearly at the time. There was no one else in the corridor besides us."
"If it were just that, I wouldn't be too concerned."
"But then the nurse also sensed something was wrong and asked him, 'What are you doing? Who are you greeting?'"
"The child stammered three words—'He Yajun.'"
"The nurse didn't understand the meaning of those three words, thinking the child was just babbling randomly. She didn't take it to heart and carried him deeper into the corridor."
"In truth, I wanted to stop her right then, because He Yajun is a real person. Before the Third Ward was built, a worker had an accident, and that man's name was He Yajun."
"Even the doctors and nurses in the hospital don't know about this. How could he have blurted out He Yajun's name?"
"I stood at the door of the ward, watching the nurse walk away with the child. When she went up the stairs, the little boy waved his hand again toward an empty corner beside the nurse."
"To be honest, I've seen countless madmen with bizarre illnesses and have never been afraid. But that day in the corridor, I felt fear for the first time."
"After this incident, I paid even more attention to him."
The first letter ends here. Until the very end, the director didn't say who the letter was addressed to. Chen Ge read it all and only found the words "Dr. Chen" at the beginning.
"Surname Chen? Could it be my father? But he runs a haunted house—how is that related to being a doctor?" Chen Ge had been overjoyed, thinking he had found clues left by his parents, but now it seemed he had been too optimistic.
Opening the second letter, the content was even more unsettling.
"Dr. Chen, we need to meet. Things have gotten somewhat out of control."
"As soon as the child learned to crawl, he would actively seek out his mother. No one in the Third Ward knows how he left the office and got to the outside of Ward 3 on his own."
"Other nurses and doctors have also noticed something off about this child. He rarely cries, always smiles at certain places, and becomes happier as night falls. He doesn't behave like a child at all."
"His learning ability is extremely strong, and his speech has become fluent. He can accurately say one word after another, but the things he says always evoke fear."
"Perhaps the world the child sees is different from ours. He calls patients who take sedatives and sleeping pills 'toys,' looking at them as if they were lifeless objects."
"He also punches and claps at patients who have lost their minds, facing them but staring at their shoulders, as if there's something on them."
"The most puzzling thing is that he loves to go outside Ward 3. He doesn't go in, just stares straight at the door, able to sit there alone for an entire afternoon."
"Some doctors and nurses suggested sending the child away to a welfare institution. They were also scared by him."
"Sending the child away might affect the mother's treatment. It took us nearly a year to stabilize her condition, and we can't give up halfway."
"I vetoed the suggestion. About a few months later, the police brought good news. Using the fake license plate as a clue, they found the child's biological father in the south."
"By then, the mother's condition had basically stabilized. We hired a lawyer to sue the father, demanding he cover the hospitalization and treatment costs, and also asking him to give the mother a proper status."
"The lawsuit was won. Whether out of fear of imprisonment or genuine remorse, the father's attitude changed significantly."
"Everything was moving in a positive direction. The mother gradually emerged from her illness. This young mother showed remarkable strength in front of her child."
"Treatment continued for another six months. The mother's illness was fully under control. She had no close relatives, and when she left, aside from a few doctors, it didn't cause much of a stir."
"The child left with his mother. But those three years in the psychiatric hospital had already caused irreversible damage to his development. Even on the night before they left, the child sneaked to the corridor and talked to the door in words no one could understand."
"After the mother and child left, I thought everything had settled and come to an end. But no one expected things to spiral completely out of control."
"Just a year later, when the child was four, his father sent him back!"
"According to the father, the mother was killed at home, and the child witnessed the entire process."
"When I saw the child again, he had changed a lot. His only pillar had collapsed, and his state was exactly like his mother's when she first arrived at the hospital."
"Given the child's past behavior, our hospital didn't accept him. We told his father to take him to a major hospital."
"That very night, at the first minute after midnight, the white-painted door of Ward 3 in the Third Ward began to seep blood."
"It lasted about a minute before stopping. I didn't find out about this until a week later. During that time, all sorts of inexplicable things started happening in the ward."
The second letter ends abruptly. Chen Ge looked at the text, matching it with the director's description, and thought of someone with a similar experience.
Eagerly opening the third letter, the envelope contained a photo of a woman and a child. The moment he saw it, a storm raged in Chen Ge's mind.
He had seen this photo before, when he was helping Men Nan organize things at the Ha Ming Apartment!
A woman in a hospital gown lay on a bed, beside her a shy, timid little boy.