Section 49 I glanced once more at the man lying there; he was no longer convulsing, nor was he breathing, and the blood at his neck seemed to have stopped flowing, leaving only a large, viscous puddle on the cement floor, beginning to seep into the corners and various cracks. It was imaginable that soon, a scream would echo from the room next door or downstairs. But for now, what could be confirmed was that the dead man in front of me was definitely not Wang Fei, and Xiao Song was definitely not talking to this man. The problem was, besides him, there was only me and the man on the ground in this room... so who exactly was he talking to? In this dim, cramped space, a man who had just died, a suddenly changed cold-blooded killer, speaking words that seemed both absurd and impossible, and yet when he spoke, even I, as a psychologist, could not detect any flaw in his expressions... This scene was even more terrifying than being squeezed into a small compartment with an actual ghost, because you have no idea what exactly is in this space, right next to you... I rubbed my temples, forcing myself to escape from this intense fear, stopping myself from thinking about whether Xiao Song had really been talking to Wang Fei, and from wondering if Wang Fei was actually in this cramped space. Only after calming down did I open the door and step out, watching Xiao Song's cold figure not far ahead, and I followed him with extreme apprehension. Passing through the long corridor, turning through the dim passage, there were stairs leading down; beneath the stairs was still a dim corridor, only this passage seemed to be outdoors now instead of indoors. This outdoor corridor continued to twist several more times, and I followed Xiao Song for quite a distance until we finally stopped at a doorway with blue light. I walked up and looked at the blue light; it turned out to be some hard-to-recognize illuminated characters, seemingly written in a very special and ancient script. I could only make out one character, '火' (fire), placed on the upper left side of an equally ancient wooden door in vertical alignment, making it look like a door sign or shop sign, though I had no idea what lay beyond this wooden door. Xiao Song knocked three times on that door; the rhythm of these three knocks was just like the rhythm of being poked on the thigh in the crowd.A slit suddenly opened at the height of a person's face on the door, and noisy sounds came through that gap. At the same time, a pair of eyes pressed against the back of the door slit, carefully observing us.
2010-09-02 13:11:00
Xiao Song slipped something like a card through the door slit. The person inside took it, and after a while, handed it back, then the door opened, and the noisy sound grew louder. Xiao Song quickly slipped inside, and I followed in.
As soon as I entered, the noisy sound immediately made me understand what kind of place it was—a bar.
Walking a few steps further inside, the explosive music with beats and the various kinds of people quickly surrounded me. I followed Xiao Song, pushing through the crowd of head-banging people toward the deep part of the bar, all the way to the bar counter. Xiao Song whispered a few words to a bartender inside. The bartender glanced at me and then opened the bar counter partition. Xiao Song went in, then beckoned me to follow.
On the other side of the bar counter, there was a door. I followed Xiao Song through that door into a small, empty room. It looked like a storage room because there were several large liquor cabinets inside, filled with all kinds of alcohol. Xiao Song pulled on one of the bottles, and a nearby cabinet shifted, revealing a hidden door.
Judging from the wildly dancing crowd in the main bar outside, this place could very likely be dealing in drugs such as ecstasy. Therefore, it was not surprising that a hidden door was installed to avoid police investigation.
I said nothing and continued following Xiao Song into the hidden door. We walked through a pitch-dark passage for about half a minute, then down some stairs. At the bottom, we heard the noisy sound again, but this time it was different from the bar above. There was no beat, no music—purely human voices, and bursts of cheering, as if something was provoking the crowd to continuously scream and shout.
Following the sound further, we soon saw another door. A large man in a suit stood at the entrance, his face rough and menacing, very tall. Seeing us approach, he put his hand out to block us, without saying a word.
Xiao Song took out the card-like thing from earlier and handed it to the large man. The man took a look at it, then opened the door and let us in.2010-9-2 13:12:00 As soon as I entered this door, I saw a densely packed crowd that almost filled the not-so-spacious interior to the point of no space to breathe. Continuous exclamations and screams erupted from the crowd, the sound reverberating in the ears with a unique infectivity that nearly made one's blood boil. The scene seemed like watching an exciting match. Beyond the heads, a few meters away, there was a space similar to the area surrounding a basketball court, enclosed by a wire fence around a narrow area. Inside this space, a few figures were vaguely moving, and the cheers and screams from outside the wire seemed to rise and fall along with the movements of these figures… With a burst of an extremely strange sound, it was as if everyone gasped in unison. All other noises abruptly stopped, and the entire space instantly fell silent. Everyone stared motionless inside the wire, no one spoke, as if the whole world had suddenly stopped… At that moment, I suddenly realized Xiao Song was gone. Did I lose track of him?! I hesitated for two seconds, then began to desperately push my way toward the wire. The people I pushed aside cursed continuously, but I paid them no mind. I only wanted to see what was inside the wire that Xiao Song had brought me to. When I finally reached the wire and clearly saw what was inside, the crowd had once again become restless. Shouts, screams, roars, the sound of people frantically shaking the wire—all erupted like a volcanic explosion… And I, amidst these tremendous sounds, watched the scene inside the wire in front of me, trembling all over, shivering uncontrollably…
