sunk in yesterday

The old lady's words are really confusing, like broken glass into several pieces, and the key points connecting the front and back have become slag.

She seemed to be very sensitive to this kind of topic. Guan Yuzhou tried to ask around a few times, but her answers were all a bit weird, and she couldn't dig out deeper details.

The afterglow of the setting sun cannot penetrate the dark clouds above the rainy sky, and only the fading brightness indicates that the sun is about to set.

Guan Yuzhou saw that it was not early, so he asked for a vacant room that had been put on hold, and promised to stay here for one night and leave tomorrow morning.

When talking about the room, the old lady hesitated and said: "This...there is no room in the house, you still..."

Guan Yuzhou pointed to the closed door on the right side of the main room, which was lined with red paint: "Is anyone living here?"

The old lady's eyes stopped on the door, and after a while she said: "No, no... you go."

So the two decided to sleep in this room for the night.

The family was poor and poor, and the old lady gave up the best quilt in the house because of Guan Yuzhou's kindness to her granddaughter for a meal, while she and the little girl huddled on the cardboard in the next room, sleeping in a messy bed. I piled up clothes I didn't know where to pick up to keep warm.

Although I mentioned to the aborigine at that time that I wanted an empty room to make do with for one night, the room they are in now clearly has the atmosphere that people have lived in recently.The lights in the main room have been pulled out, and this place is no exception. Fortunately, the sky is still barely able to see the layout of the house.

The walls inside the house were damp and moldy, but there were no traces of red paint like the main room, only a line was drawn on the threshold, as if separating this room from the house as a whole.

Almost all the furniture had been emptied, there was no mattress on one bed, and there was only a pen with red ink leaking at the foot of the bed. The plastic casing had been crushed, and the red paint stuck to it was so glaring that it made people feel creepy.

Xia Zhuo didn't have the interest to bend down to check, and leaned on the bed a little sleepily: "It's going to be dark."

Ever since he had revealed his fear of the dark in front of Guan Yuzhou before, he simply stopped hiding it and used his good temper as a child to play the rogue temper of a child.

Guan Yuzhou responded, and was not at all annoyed by his behavior of finding a bed board to sit on the bed and enjoying the benefits as soon as he came in. He held a flashlight to illuminate every corner that was easily overlooked, and said while observing the situation in the room: "You first rest Yes, I'll come over when I'm done."

"What should I call you better?" Xia Zhuoti squinted around the window frame back and forth, without stopping: "Mr. Guan? Brother Guan? Teacher Guan?"

Guan Yuzhou held up a flashlight to illuminate the black and white photos on the mottled wall, and directly rejected all the titles he mentioned: "Just call me by my full name."

"Oh, Guan Yuzhou." Xia Zhuo tried to call him, and when he said the name, he felt a little tingling on the tip of his tongue.He smacked his lips, tightened the quilt involuntarily with his fingertips, stared at Guan Yuzhou's serious side face and said with a playful smile, "Then what do you call me? Honey? Baby? Or Darling?"

Guan Yuzhou raised his hand and tore off the row of photos of different sizes one by one, and gave him a headache-looking look: "Are you sure you want to leave me disgusted?"

Xia Zhuo smiled mischievously.

He tried his best to distract the uncontrollable fear in his heart during the conversation with Guan Yuzhou, but this approach did not have much effect at all. His nails almost tore the poor-quality fabric, but his heart followed. The light that dimmed in a second jumped faster and faster.

Seeing that Xia Zhuo's mouth stopped, Guan Yuzhou walked back to the bed naturally, and handed the photo in his hand and the flashlight to his side: "Take it, and illuminate it for me."

Xia Zhuo shrank to the corner of the wall at some point, and planted herself on the bed like a mushroom.He tidily arranged the photos, wiped the thin sweat from his forehead, and with the help of the flashlight, he saw the faces of the people in the photos clearly.

There are three photos in total, two are about two inches in size, and the other is a family portrait the size of a palm.

The two-inch photos are old, and the corners have long turned yellow.

In a photo, a young couple are very close together. The man is holding a pair of wrinkled children who have just been born in his arms. Although the woman looks happy, her face is slightly depressed. It should be a newborn I didn’t take any more pictures after that; the other photo still shows this woman, but in it she has half-white hair, supporting the shoulders of a little girl who has been raised in her teens, and the smile on her face seems to have disappeared beside her. The husband and the other child generally disappeared.

These two women with the same appearance are precisely the old lady who was talking incoherently in the main room not long ago. The time between the two photos should be taken by a whole generation.

There are a total of four people in the family portrait, and the shooting location is not outdoors, but indoors. The old man sitting in the middle is still the old man, but in the photo, she is not as depressed and haggard as she is today.A man and a woman stood on her left and right. The man looked honest and honest, holding a pale child in his strong arms.The woman with her head down looks gentle, she is exactly the enlarged version of the little girl in the two-inch photo, holding a snare drum in her hand, looking at the baby in her arms.

These are the photos of the three generations of this family, witnessing the old lady from giving birth to a child when she was young to embracing her grandchildren when she was old.

The paper has no color, but it highlights the dark eyes of the people inside it more eye-catching.Knowing that these people were watching the camera at that time, Xia Zhuo still felt uncomfortable, especially when he looked at the empty swaddling baby under the snare drum, a feeling of being watched continued to climb up the spine, which made him unable to help but point his fingers. Hook, directly stuck the piece of paper in the past, and muttered in a low voice: "This is still playing with toys..."

No matter what's in it, in short, don't look at it, don't worry about it.

Guan Yuzhou originally wanted to study the photos by himself, but he still tried to show them to Xia Zhuo to distract him.While Xia Zhuo finished admiring the three photos, he also looked away from the black pot used for wine making in the corner.

Xia Zhuo slipped the photo aside, and the light from the flashlight hit Guan Yuzhou's back. Seeing the big living man approaching him, he felt more at ease, "Have you finished reading it?"

After all, the brightness of the flashlight is limited, and the remaining half of the room seems to be eroded by darkness.Guan Yuzhou didn't carefully check all the items in the room at all, but he still neatly cleaned up the cardboard on the floor, and sat down against the edge of the bed, "Well, it's over."

Xia Zhuo put the quilt over his head, and the light from the flashlight shrouded him in a small piece of faint light along the thick cotton wool, and the extra soft light also reflected Guan Yuzhou's somewhat cold side face , Across a distance of half a meter, Xia Zhuo could even see how the other party's shiny eyelashes kept moving up and down.

With the slight sound of rain outside the window, Guan Yuzhou suddenly turned his head and asked him, "Are you sleepy?"

Xia Zhuo seemed to be caught on the spot peeping, her heartbeat, which had finally calmed down a little, accelerated again, and her head shook so much that even the fragile bed under her shook.

"not sleepy!"

"If you're sleepy, it's best to sleep for a while now." Guan Yuzhou's tone was flat: "I might not be able to sleep after a while."

He said it easily, but Xia Zhuo understood the meaning of the words.He kept shaking the flashlight in his hand, glanced at the eyelashes of the other party's shadows that were constantly lengthening and shortening in the light, and asked absent-mindedly, "Can all the so-called ghosts here be seen and felt?"

Guan Yuzhou nodded: "Well, they can touch people, and people can touch them in turn."

Xia Zhuo seemed relieved: "Then there is nothing to be afraid of."

"Your tone is not small." Guan Yuzhou smiled when he heard the words, I don't know if he was laughing at his overreach, "If you touch it, you can touch it, but once you hit it, most of the time you have to escape. Most of them are so powerful The steel plate can be bitten off in one click, let alone a human body. You can’t notice it now because the overall difficulty of the dream has been lowered because of your participation in this dream.”

Xia Zhuonao made up the scene of being bitten through the skull by Gabeng, and asked again: "What would have happened if I hadn't caught that little girl named Lailai before?"

Guan Yuzhou seemed to have had different guesses about the ending, and answered very smoothly: "It may be that she turned into a ghost after falling to her death and killed you, or it may be that the old man went crazy and killed you after seeing her dead body."

Xia Zhuo pretended to be afraid and shook her shoulders: "Wow, feelings are dead anyway."

"There is another situation, that is, she will eat me after I catch her." Guan Yuzhou said: "Each choice may trigger a different ending. Things that seem good on the surface may cause serious problems after the butterfly effect. Very bad consequences."

"Forget it, listen to your words, it's like a teacher teaching students, I can smell the smell of chicken soup." After chatting with him, Xia Zhuo casually mentioned: "Hey, Guan Yuzhou. There seems to be something wrong with those photos , have you seen it?"

Guan Yuzhou had just glanced at it briefly before, but failed to take a closer look.Hearing this, he stretched out his hand and pinched three yellowed upside-down pieces of paper from the old bed board, "What's the problem do you see?"

"Look at this man." With the quilt on his head, Xia Zhuo looked like a tortoise with all its limbs shrunk in its shell, and carefully stretched out his index finger to point to him at a distance, "Here, look at his face."

Guan Yuzhou stared intently at the man holding a pair of newborn children in the small photo for a moment: "What's wrong?"

Xia Zhuo directed him: "Look at the other one."

Hearing this, Guan Yuzhou picked out the family portrait, and looked at the young man standing on the left side of the old lady in the photo again.These are the old lady's husband when she was young and her daughter's husband respectively. He compared the men in the two photos from side to side, but he couldn't see any connection. If Xia Zhuo wanted to imply that these two people who were about the same age were actually the same One, that can't be justified just by looking at it.

On the contrary, Xia Zhuo saw that he frowned and pondered for a long time without any result, so he couldn't wait any longer: "Did you see anything?"

Guan Yuzhou glanced back at him, seeing his face eager to answer and couldn't help but smile: "No, Teacher Xia will teach me."

Xia Zhuo coughed in a dignified manner: "Classmate Guan, your eyesight is not good. The teacher will give you another chance, and you can take another look at them."

Guan Yuzhou did so, and after a few seconds, he looked at Xia Zhuo gently: "I can't see it."

Xia Zhuo raised his chin: "Then teacher will tell you."

Guan Yuzhou put on a posture of listening attentively.

Xia Zhuo: "None of them look as good as me."

Guan Yuzhou: "..."

Xia Zhuo proudly: "Really?"

Guan Yuzhou: "..."

Seeing that people were unwilling to speak, Xia Zhuo finally got down to business: "I really found the problem. This family portrait was taken in this room."

As he said, in the family portrait, there happened to be an open window on the background wall, and this window was exactly the same as the closed one on the opposite wall where they were.

In order to confirm this, he quickly picked up the flashlight, illuminated the opposite corner of the room, and quickly reset the light again to appease the body that began to be on pins and needles within a moment.

However, this photo not only illuminated the window, but also illuminated the slender wires hanging outside the window.

Guan Yuzhou restrained his relaxed expression just now, while Xia Zhuo was suffocating for breath, still reminiscing about the scene he saw at that moment.

The sound of rain still came through the window, and it sounded a bit dull.The momentum was not strong, and the overall sound was even more blurred. If the newspapers pasted on the windows were not too thin, the people in the room should not be able to hear it at all.

Xia Zhuo's support on the small broken bed is a bit choking, and now Guan Yuzhou is on board again.

A short creak sounded in the empty room. After his body fell into darkness, Xia Zhuo resisted the discomfort, turned his head and looked at Guan Yuzhou, and once again swept the flashlight against the wall little by little, while moving On the one hand, he hissed presciently: "I may hold you back later, you should be mentally prepared in advance."

Guan Yuzhou: "...um."

When Guan Yuzhou entered the house, he had already locked the door and window. Without making any movement, it was impossible for the window to be pushed open from the outside under normal circumstances.

It seemed to confirm his conjecture. When Xia Zhuo was sweating all over his body and went against his instinct to find the position, the window was still closed under the circular light, as if the short glimpse just now was a hallucination produced by the two of them at the same time. .

But he could clearly see the half of the child hanging on the wire outside the window, glistening with water all over his body, and the swaying appearance reminded him instantly of the scene he happened to bump into in the car before entering the village.

For a moment, he didn't know whether he should take the flashlight back. His body was locked in the soft cage he made. Obviously, the surrounding quilts enclosed him in it, which should give people a sense of security, but he was shaking like It was because the things in his hands would be dropped at any moment, and the round light hitting the window would also tremble violently.

Guan Yuzhou wanted to touch him, but he clenched his hand into a fist.He was afraid that his touch would make Xia Zhuo worse, and would only make his situation worse, so he could only grab the corner of the quilt that wrapped Xia Zhuo, and stared at the window firmly.

In sight, a bloated little finger suddenly punctured the old newspaper along with the adhesive tape, and a small eye with only the white of the eye appeared under the flickering light, peeping close to the window and peering into the house.

Guan Yuzhou suddenly understood why the old lady had to cut off all the light wires. He reached out and snatched the flashlight from Xia Zhuo's hand to turn off the switch, and then quickly rolled the person under the bed together with the quilt in his arms.

The moon on a rainy day is covered by dark clouds, but it is always brighter than an airtight room.Guan Yuzhou hugged Xia Zhuo, and while wiping the cold sweat on his forehead with the corner of the quilt, he closed his eyes and waited amidst the abnormal heartbeat of the other party.

In the background sound of continuous drizzle, the sound of newspapers wrapped in tape being torn sounded, as if a butterfly that should have died was breaking out of its cocoon.