Chapter 85: I Should Be the One Afraid!
The stall door wasn’t fully closed. Chen Ge watched as that red shadow stopped in front of the sixth stall, with only a thin door panel separating them.
Time seemed to slow down. A direct confrontation was imminent.
After a few seconds, the red shadow’s body leaned toward the door. At the same moment, Chen Ge raised his tool hammer.
In his pupils, the red shadow touched the door panel. Accompanied by the creaking sound of the door opening, every nerve in Chen Ge’s body was stretched to its limit.
Before the door was fully open, the red shadow’s body began to tilt inward. Facing a potential threat, survival instinct drove Chen Ge to react directly.
He swung the tool hammer he had raised high, smashing it into the red shadow’s leaning body, then kicked the stall door open!
"Bang!"
The old bathroom stall door couldn’t withstand such force. The lower hinge flew off into the distance, and the entire door slammed into the red shadow, which was too slow to dodge.
The red shadow outside the stall hadn’t expected such a turn of events. Its figure grew dim and ethereal, rolling on the ground and fleeing toward the bathroom exit.
Chen Ge gasped for breath. He had anticipated a fierce battle, but he hadn’t expected the other party to seem even more frightened than he was. His sudden charge seemed to have startled it.
"Did this thing forget what it is?"
Holding the tool hammer, Chen Ge didn’t relax. As the red shadow fled, the sound of a child crying came from the fifth stall. The two children, presumably the black, thin woman’s offspring, were still in the bathroom.
"Stop crying!"
Countless similar scenes had appeared in horror movies—eerie crying from a bathroom stall, a terrifying image. But when Chen Ge, wielding an iron hammer, shouted "Stop crying," the child’s sobbing in the stall actually ceased.
He stood menacingly at the entrance of the fifth stall. The two children covered their mouths, their pale faces full of terror.
"Don’t play the victim!"
His nerves frayed from the red shadow encounter, Chen Ge’s emotions were a bit out of control. His voice was loud, and with the swinging tool hammer, the two children in the stall were terrified. Holding each other’s hands, they scrambled and crawled out of the bathroom.
"Was I too harsh just now?" Those two children were likely Fan Yu’s younger siblings. Whether for the Deep Well mission or to uncover the truth behind Fan Yu’s parents’ disappearance, he needed to follow them.
The two children ran very fast. Chen Ge chased after them with all his might. They quickly left the teaching building and entered the adjacent office building.
Chen Ge followed closely. After running up to the second floor of the office building, the two children suddenly vanished.
"Where did they go?"
The internal structure of the office building was completely different from the other two buildings of Muyang Middle School. The fire hadn’t spread here, and the surroundings looked relatively clean.
Casually pushing open a nearby door, Chen Ge peered inside. The room had two desks and a bookshelf, with a pot full of soil on the windowsill.
"They disappeared in the blink of an eye. Where could they have hidden?"
Entering the office, Chen Ge first noticed a faded sign on the floor that read "Mathematics Group."
"All the math teachers for the three grades at Muyang Middle School worked in this small office?" After thinking for a moment, Chen Ge quickly understood. Muyang Middle School didn’t have many students, so the number of teachers wouldn’t be large either.
He made a rough round and finally found a moldy, old backpack in a drawer of a desk against the wall.
The backpack was small, with childish cartoon patterns printed on its surface.
Chen Ge placed it on the desk and unzipped it. Inside were a cartoon picture book and a box of crayons.
"Why would these things be in a math teacher’s office?" The backpack and its contents didn’t seem like something a middle school student would use. Chen Ge thought for a moment and concluded that the backpack probably belonged to the office teacher’s child, forgotten for some reason.
Opening the crayon box, Chen Ge noticed that only the red and black crayons were missing. These two familiar colors immediately made him think of Fan Yu.
Flipping through the picture book, the various patterns inside confirmed Chen Ge’s guess.
The entire book depicted one scene: a black room containing two red little figures.
All the pictures had a black house as the background, with the only difference being the positions of the red figures inside. Chen Ge took out Fan Yu’s drawing from his pants pocket and placed it next to the picture book. After examining them, he took a deep breath. "This kid has been drawing the same way for years, his style hasn’t changed at all."
These simple drawings revealed a lot to Chen Ge. The backpack smelled moldy and was stuck with cobwebs in the drawer corners, suggesting it had been stuffed into the drawer before the school was shut down.
That meant the boy had started drawing ghosts very early on, and his eyes might have been innate.
If the black house in his drawings represented home, then several years ago, two ghosts had already moved into the boy’s house.
Connecting this with what the aunt had said earlier and Chen Ge’s own recent experience, the ghosts that lived with them back then were likely the black, thin woman’s children.
"Living together for so long, Fan Yu’s aunt must have known he could see dirty things." Chen Ge flipped through the black-and-red drawings. "Because she knew, she felt comfortable letting Fan Yu visit the haunted house. Because she knew, she doted on him so much, as if pouring the love for three children onto one person."
Pacing around the desk, the backpack’s appearance also told Chen Ge something else: this desk, where the backpack was stored, was probably where his father usually worked and graded assignments.
In his conversation with Fan Yu’s aunt, Chen Ge learned that Fan Yu’s father had been fired from his school for mishandling alcohol.
Chen Ge hadn’t thought much of it at first, but then Fan Yu’s aunt added that other schools had also rejected Fan Yu’s father. With no other options, he came to teach at Muyang Middle School.
This struck Chen Ge as odd. What exactly did Fan Yu’s father do while drunk to warrant such severe punishment, being treated like a pariah by all legitimate schools?
At the time, Chen Ge was puzzled, but before he could ask, Fan Yu’s aunt brought out that photo, and his attention was completely diverted afterward.
"What kind of person was the missing father?" Chen Ge used the tool hammer to pry open the locked drawers on both sides of the desk. After a thorough search, he found a few slips of paper inside a book.
"Teacher Fan, we know what you did in the sixth stall of the third-floor women’s bathroom. Apologize to that girl immediately and get out of this school!"
"You have two more nights to think it over. We demand a public apology!"
"This will be your last night. Since you refuse to leave here, then stay here forever."