Episode 7 Chapter 069 Afterthought
In the evening, I went there according to the time that Director Gao came to pick me up that night. It was still early when I arrived at the funeral home, and most people had already gone off work. It looked like an empty building. Although I had been in and out of here several times, I still couldn't help feeling scared at night. I parked the car where I had always parked it and went in.
In order not to attract too much attention, I went to Director Gao's office first. If it were before, I would have gone directly to the fourth floor, just like Director Gao took me there last time. But now I am an employee there, and most people already know me. Besides, didn’t Xu Nuoyi also say that the fourth floor is basically a deserted place, there is no need to be on duty, and employees are allowed to go up there at will.
Director Gao was already in the office. When he saw me coming in, he asked me to sit down first and wait for a while before he and I went upstairs. He said that Old Man Nie was already upstairs. I had a lot of questions I wanted to ask, but because of Director Gao's status, I didn't think it was a good idea to ask him. Also, I was afraid that I wouldn't be able to make it up and let him see some flaws, which would expose the purpose of my coming here. This was the lesson I learned from talking to Shi Hu last time. I didn't know if Shi Hu was suspicious or not. Coupled with the fact that the text messages were deleted last night, I always felt like I had done something wrong to them, and I felt upset.
I stayed with Director Gao until almost eight o'clock, when Director Gao stood up and asked me to go upstairs with him. We were still in the same place, but the difference was that this time it was Old Man Nie sitting in the duty room, and I was the one who came later. When I went into the duty room, Director Gao had already left tactfully. I sat down opposite Old Man Nie, and I saw that the surveillance camera behind him had been turned off. He could not see clearly what was in the aisle like last time. Maybe he was scared last time, so he didn't dare to turn it on this time.
I couldn't think about these thoughts in detail. After I sat down, Old Man Nie looked at me with his haggard face and said, "Director Ting Gao said you wanted to see me and that you had something very important to tell me. What was so urgent?"
I actually said this because I was afraid that Old Man Nie would not see me, so I exaggerated a little. Now that he asked me this, it was a little difficult to speak, so I was silent for a while before saying, "It's not a big deal, I just have a question I want to ask you in person."
Old Man Nie said, "You say."
So I told him my guess. I told him that he said last time that the middle-aged man who was pestering him was brought out of his dream. What was going on? How could he be brought out of a dream? I said that the dream was all made up by myself. When I asked this, Old Man Nie stared at me intently and didn't speak for a long time. I also looked at him, but the more I looked at him, the more terrified I felt. I felt like I was looking at a dead person, so I said guiltily: "Say something, old man."
Then I saw Old Man Nie smile strangely and said slowly, he said I finally caught the point of his conversation with me last time, and he guessed that I must have encountered the same situation, he asked me if it was true? I felt that there was nothing to hide at this time, so I told him about Qiao Jie. Old Man Nie had been listening carefully, as if he was afraid of missing any details, until I finished speaking, he sighed to himself: "You are more fierce this time, more fierce."
Although his voice was not loud, I could hear it clearly. I asked what he meant. Old Man Nie said that it was obvious that Qiao Jie had given me such a message, which meant that he was determined to kill me. It was just that there might be something more powerful in my house that prevented him from entering or making it impossible for him to enter. With his violent temper, I would have been dizzy and disoriented, or even dead.
I felt guilty and asked if he was really so angry, but Qiao Jie and I had never met, let alone known each other, why did he want to kill me? But Old Man Nie said that if I couldn't figure it out, how could he understand it? I asked about the middle-aged man who was pestering him, and Old Man Nie was reluctant to say it at first, but this time his reaction was better. I mentioned it last time and I clearly saw his body trembling, as if he was extremely scared.
He told me after a while. It was only at the beginning, so I didn't know yet. It was all because of a dream. He said that over the years, the thing he feared most was sleeping, because as soon as he fell asleep, he would dream of that middle-aged man, and have that repetitive dream over and over again.
Then Old Man Nie told me about the dream he had. He said it was in a place on the outskirts of the city, full of abandoned residential buildings. When he first dreamed about it, he had never been to that place before, but he was there, and there was only one number in his head, which was 721. It seemed that something was pointing him there. Then he relied on his intuition, or walked into a building in a daze, and went to 721. He saw that the door was open, but he just stood at the door and saw a person hanging in the middle of the room, his face facing the door, his eyes wide open, as if he was staring at him motionlessly.
Old Man Nie said that this was the first time he had seen such a horrific death, and he was immediately awakened by the shock, but after waking up, the hanged face still lingered in his mind. At first, he thought it was just a nightmare, until one day when he was out of town and accidentally passed by the ruins, he found a lot of abandoned residential buildings, which were exactly the same as what he saw in his dream, so he went in to take a look, and found that this was clearly the place he dreamed of.
And the strange thing is that after going there, he often dreamed of the hanged middle-aged man. Until one day, someone sent him a MMS. The content of the MMS was the hanged face in the dream, and there was a line of text under the MMS, telling him that the man's body was lying in the morgue of the funeral home.
Although Old Man Nie was a shareholder of the funeral home, he never dared to interfere in the internal affairs of the funeral home. After receiving the MMS, he rushed to the funeral home almost immediately and saw the body of the man in the morgue. When asked about the origin of the body, the funeral home staff said that the police had notified them to transport it. It was said that it was an unclaimed body that was abandoned in the woods. The forensic doctor also determined that the person had been dead for a long time. What was incredible was that the body had not decayed.
Later, he secretly sought out an authoritative medical examiner, who told Old Man Nie that this was the first time he had examined so many corpses. According to the test results, the man had been dead for more than a year, but he looked as if he had just died and had not been frozen. If he had been frozen, it would be easy to tell from the color of the corpse.
Old man Nie was frightened, so he investigated the origin of the body and told the person in charge of the funeral home to keep the body in a cold storage for a long time and destroy all the files related to him. Since then, Old man Nie said that he would not have other dreams. He would dream about this person almost every night, and the scene was always the same. Every time he woke up, he felt that there was a person hanging by the bed, looking at him with such wide eyes.
Hearing Old Man Nie say this, I couldn't help but gasp. I had also dreamed of the scene I described to him, and I had also been there after dreaming about it. It was indeed very surprising and astonishing, because a place that I had never been to could appear in a dream. How did it appear in a dream?
When Old Man Nie heard me say that I had been there and that I had also dreamed of this middle-aged man, he became puzzled. He said that the one who was pestering me was Qiao Jie, so how could it be him? I said that I only dreamed of Qiao Jie once, and I only dreamed of the scene of the ruins once. Could it be that my situation is somewhat different from his and there is no analogy?
Old Man Nie just looked at me and said that it might be just the early stages now, and that I would slowly have the same dream later, and then I would know who was pestering me.
