??Chapter 154: Chapter 149 Numbers Three
Chapter 154: Chapter 149 Numbers Three
“The wall?” Dr. Zhang wore a bewildered expression…
He recalled the surveillance video where the patient suddenly looked up, finding it utterly baffling…
“Why was he staring at the wall?”
The wall was bare with no graffiti, painted white, utterly plain. For a mont, Dr. Zhang felt an unexplainable eeriness about it.
Then, he glanced at the cara above the doorfra…
He stood up, adjusted his position facing the cara, and walked to the wall following the route the patient had taken in the video…
Since the cara was right above the doorfra, his current position should have been out of the surveillance range.
So the man just inexplicably looked up at the wall and then moved to where he now stood… and a minute later… he went mad?
“What’s going on?” he muttered to himself, imagining the patient moving like a sleepwalker close to the bare wall, an unjustified sense of panic rising within him…
“Did he see sothing? Is that why he ca over? Could it be that there’s sothing in this room that I can’t see…?”
Dr. Zhang shook his head, trying to dispel these bizarre thoughts.
Following that… he began to knock on the wall,
“Thud… thud.”
The wall emitted a dull sound, not hollow in the least; it was clearly solid…
He was of course aware of this.
Because many patients with nervous disorders are in the psychiatric hospital, all the wards here use soundproof solid materials. Hence, nothing could be hidden in the wall, and it was impossible for patients to hear sounds from outside just by leaning on it.
He scratched his head in confusion… then returned to the doorway of the room.
Upon pulling the door open, he faced the transverse corridor he had co through; the opposite of him was another wall, and on his side, a long line of solitary patient rooms spaced widely apart; and these past few days, there had been no patients in the rooms adjacent to this one…
The corridor stretched to the building’s corners at both ends, the overhead lights reflecting off the floor tiles, outlining the shape of the light tubes, with an up-and-down staircase at the left end, and a window to the right.
Due to the hospital’s strict schedules, all patients were already back in their rooms at night, ensuring the corridors were invariably empty. Dr. Zhang had worked long enough in this psychiatric hospital to be all too familiar with its layout, so he just casually glanced at both ends of the corridor and withdrew his gaze.
He arrived at the spot in the corridor directly opposite where he had stood inside the room, first knocked on it, then ticulously examined the floor tiles, the ceiling above, and the opposite wall
Then, he found… there was nothing suspicious on this side of the corridor.
Could it be… that the patient really had a sudden and severe relapse of his mania for no apparent reason?
He couldn’t help but think so, but just as this thought erged, Dr. Zhang scoffed at it, knowing that was impossible. After all, no condition erupts suddenly like fireworks.
“There must be sothing I haven’t noticed yet…” he muttered stubbornly, driven by a constant voice in his mind, reminding him that all this trouble was orchestrated by the new patient…
Then, Dr. Zhang returned to the room… stood by the wall, spread his arms, and started to feel around it as if he were dusting it.
The wall wasn’t large, so it was easy to cover completely with his hands.
Suddenly, he paused; he felt a strange texture between his fingertips and the wall
…He looked intently and saw, on the white paint, a small weird spot, like a mark scratched by a fingernail, but not sharp, rather indented inside, nearly invisible unless looked at carefully.
Dr. Zhang frowned as he stared at that spot, and he was surprised to find, near that scratch, a few other similar marks not far apart.
Could it be that the patient had scratched these?
But why would he scratch?
Dr. Zhang felt he might have grasped a clue…
Suddenly, his eyes widened, as if realizing sothing.
Yes, he finally understood the faint, eerie feeling he had when he first saw this wall.
…
…
People have a flaw: they often see sothing but choose not to rember it… just like a pair of shoes worn for many years; hardly anyone knows exactly how many eyelets are there for the laces…
Like this wall, Dr. Zhang had to check on patients in these rooms almost every day, and each room had a titable on the wall — a chart dictating when patients should wake up, take their dications, and so on.
But it wasn’t until now… that he noticed, in this room, that chart was gone!
Almost imdiately, Dr. Zhang was certain that the chart had been torn off by that patient who suddenly went mad,
After all, he was a doctor, not too slow-witted, and he realized, this must be a ssage the patient left for him!
Dr. Zhang’s eyes flashed with insight; he quickly rushed out of the room and pulled out the keys from his pocket.
The duty doctors at the psychiatric hospital always carry a master key that can open all the rooms in the current ward, designed to prevent so patients from locking themselves inside. Thus, he went to another room nearby and directly opened it with the “master key.”
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