“Is anyone there?” Someone knocked on the security door. “Your delivery is here.”
Jin Feize’s mouth was covered, so he could not speak. All he could do was raise his phone for Jiang Ye to see. It was the Meituan delivery screen. Jin Feize had ordered pork-bone rice noodles, and the map showed the rider was only five meters away from them.
The person outside really was a food delivery rider.
Li Miaomiao patted her chest and let out a breath. She had been so scared that tears had come out.
“Is anyone there? Anyone?” the delivery rider was still calling from outside the door.
Jiang Ye let go.
Jin Feize said, “Please leave it at the door. Thank you.”
Li Miaomiao said, “All right, open the door and get the delivery.”
“Wait.” Jiang Ye took out his phone and turned it on. “The last tenant who rented my apartment installed a smart peephole. I can monitor the stairwell in real time through the app. Let’s take a look first.”
He opened the app. Jin Feize and Li Miaomiao both leaned their heads over to look.
The monitoring screen showed the stairwell. The voice-activated light was off, and the whole stairwell was pitch-black. Jiang Ye switched to night vision, and a ghostly green glow covered the surveillance feed, giving it an especially eerie atmosphere.
Jiang Ye adjusted the angle of the peephole camera.
Left, right—
Up, down—
The image froze.
All three of them fell silent.
They saw a spider-like human figure clinging to the ceiling.
The figure did not move. Its head was pressed against the door of Jin Feize’s apartment. If they opened the door, they would come face-to-face with that thing’s upside-down face.
The thing seemed to notice the light from the smart peephole turning on. It slowly turned its head back.
The angle of its turn was grotesquely exaggerated. If a normal person turned their head to that degree, their neck would already have snapped.
The image on the phone suddenly flickered. That thing’s strange face was blown up several times in front of the camera. Its two eyes shone with a sinister green light in the night-vision feed, carrying an indescribable malice.
“Open the door. Let me in.”
“Open the door. Let me in.”
“Open the door. Let me in.”
Jiang Ye said, “You want me to open the door? Fine. Tell me where my mom is.”
He had the feeling these things were not very intelligent. Maybe he could trick them.
Outside, there was only dead silence.
They waited for a while, but the thing did not answer.
They checked the surveillance footage again. The stairwell was already empty. That thing seemed to have left, but something had been placed in front of Jin Feize’s door.
It was square and boxy, like a delivery package. From its shape, it did not look like the pork-bone rice noodles Jin Feize had ordered.
Jiang Ye frowned and closed the app.
Out of habit, he tapped open WeChat. Candy-Loving Witch had not replied to his message.
Then he opened his chat with his mother. The last message was still from the day before yesterday, when his mother had asked him to call her back as soon as possible.
Jiang Ye felt uneasy.
Where exactly had his mom gone?
Was she still alive?
Jin Feize smiled and said, “That was really scary. It frightened me.”
When he said it, his eyes were curved in a smile. He did not look frightened at all.
Li Miaomiao said guiltily, “I’m sorry, Senior. We didn’t mean to trouble you. We really had nowhere else to go.”
Jin Feize shook his head. “It’s fine. I really like helping Jiang Ye.” Then he asked, “Do you want to bring in the thing outside?”
“Tomorrow morning.” Jiang Ye turned off his phone and said, “We’ll get it tomorrow morning.”
He just had the feeling ghosts and monsters did not dare do evil in broad daylight.
Jiang Ye and Li Miaomiao went inside.
It was a small fifty-square-meter apartment, kept very clean. In the trash can was Jin Feize’s bloodstained white short-sleeved shirt. He had not washed it. He had thrown it away directly. That white T-shirt was Prada’s new summer release and cost at least over a thousand yuan. Jin Feize threw it out without a thought, which showed he was not short on money.
Since he was not short on money, why did he live in a place this run-down?
There was no dining table in the apartment. Against the wall stood a bookshelf, neatly filled with medical books on human anatomy.
The most eye-catching thing in the living room was the large freezer. It was packed full of popsicles in all kinds of flavors. Jiang Ye swept his gaze over it. The most common kind was hawthorn popsicles.
Jin Feize saw Jiang Ye staring at the popsicles and said, “I like sweet things. When I was little, my dad wouldn’t let me eat them, so now I want to indulge all at once. Do you want any? Take whatever you like.”
Without changing expression, Jiang Ye rummaged through the bottom layer of the freezer.
It really was full of popsicles, and they were all frozen hard. That meant they had been in this freezer the whole time.
In that case, there was no room in this freezer to store a corpse.
Maybe Li Miaomiao was right. Maybe he really was too suspicious, and Jin Feize was just an ordinary high school student who liked popsicles and loved medicine.
Jin Feize took out some popsicles to make room for the woven plastic sack.
“Sorry for the trouble,” Jiang Ye asked. “Can the remaining popsicles still be eaten?”
Jin Feize smiled and shook his head. “It’s fine. Once the corpse is dealt with, I’ll throw out the freezer and buy a new one.”
“I’ll pay for the freezer,” Jiang Ye said.
How to handle the corpse pieces afterward was still a problem. Jiang Ye felt a headache coming on.
He opened the smart peephole app again. The peephole had captured the strange image of that delivery rider clinging to the ceiling just now. Maybe it could become evidence when he reported the case.
Jin Feize seemed to guess what he was thinking and said, “Tomorrow, I’ll go to the police station with you to report it. I count as an eyewitness too, right? Even if the police don’t believe in headless corpses, your mother’s disappearance is a fact. You can at least file a missing-persons report.”
Jiang Ye nodded.
He lowered his eyes and looked at the woven plastic sack, his heart heavy.
When Jiang Ye considered things, he had always prepared for the worst-case scenario.
Now that matters had developed to this point, how much chance did his mother still have of surviving?
He had been so set on leaving his mother’s home, yet he had never imagined that one day, she would be the one to leave him first.
It was time to sleep.
Li Miaomiao was a girl, so she slept in the bedroom. She climbed into bed. Jiang Ye stood by the door and helped turn off the light for her.
She clutched the quilt and suddenly asked, “Brother, Mom is going to come back, right?”
“…”
Jiang Ye did not know how to answer. He gave a stiff nod. “Mm. She’ll come back.”
Li Miaomiao looked at him. There was no telling whether she believed him.
After a long silence, she said, “Brother, good night.”
“Good night.”
Jiang Ye closed the door.
Through the thin wooden door, he heard Li Miaomiao’s suppressed sobs. She definitely wanted to bawl her eyes out, but she was afraid he would hear.
What had happened tonight was too terrifying. Especially his stepfather turning into a headless walking corpse. With her father suddenly dead, Jiang Ye did not know how to comfort her either.
He stood there for a while with his brows furrowed. By the time he came back to himself, Jin Feize had already spread the bedding out on the floor.
Jiang Ye and Jin Feize slept on the floor in the living room. The air conditioner was on, and the cold air blew over the tops of their heads.
This was Jiang Ye’s first time sleeping side by side with someone else. It was truly uncomfortable.
Jiang Ye turned his back to him, facing the entryway. Jin Feize slept behind him. He seemed to be able to feel Jin Feize’s faint breathing, soft and light as feathers, brushing the back of his neck again and again.
They were too close.
Jiang Ye wanted to tell him to sleep farther away.
Before he could say it, Jin Feize spoke first. “It’s so cold. Can I move a little closer to you?”
“No,” he said.
“All right.”
The thin quilt trembled faintly.
Jiang Ye noticed that Jin Feize was shivering from the cold.
Jiang Ye turned the air conditioner temperature higher, but no matter how high he set it, Jin Feize kept trembling.
In the end, Jiang Ye simply turned off the air conditioner.
June in Shenzhen was unbearably hot. The living room was like a steamer, and Jiang Ye started sweating all over, like a steamed bun in a bamboo basket.
Jiang Ye could not take it anymore and turned the air conditioner back on.
“It’s all right,” Jin Feize said softly. “I can handle it. I’ve had poor health since I was little and got sick often, and I even recuperated in the mountains before, but one night under the air conditioner is nothing. I won’t catch a cold.”
Jiang Ye sighed inwardly.
He and Li Miaomiao were the ones troubling him. If they even made him catch a cold and get sick, that would really be unacceptable.
Jiang Ye compromised. “Move a little closer to me, then.”
“Really?”
“Mm.”
Jin Feize moved a little closer.
“Can I get a little closer?”
“…Yes.”
He moved closer again.
Now he was pressed against Jiang Ye’s back, so close that not even a sheet of paper could fit between them.
There was a special scent on him, clear and cold, like cedar in winter. The quilt was also full of Jin Feize’s scent. Jiang Ye was completely wrapped in it.
Jiang Ye’s body was stiff as a wooden puppet. He forced himself not to move at all.
Behind him, Jin Feize laughed softly. “Jiang Ye, you’re really cute.”
Jiang Ye did not know how to respond, so he simply answered with silence.
He always felt Jin Feize was strange, but he could not say exactly what was strange about him.
The darkness wrapped around them like a womb. They fell asleep pressed together like conjoined twins.
The room was silent and still.
Jiang Ye could not fall asleep. The back of his head prickled, and he kept feeling as if the person behind him was staring at him.
He quietly turned his head to take a look.
Jin Feize was already fast asleep, his profile enclosed in the dim light. The lines of his face were soft, without sharp edges, like a sleeping stalk of white mugwort.
Jiang Ye thought he was overthinking again.
He slowly turned back around and drifted into sleep.
He did not see that behind him, Jin Feize opened his eyes again.
After sleeping for some unknown length of time, Jiang Ye was shaken awake.
He thought something had happened and quickly sat up, only to find Li Miaomiao squatting barefoot beside him.
Jin Feize also sat up. This guy looked clear-eyed, as if he had not slept at all.
“I got up to use the bathroom just now, and I think I heard something outside the door,” Li Miaomiao whispered.
The three of them exchanged a look, then crept to the security door and listened closely.
Someone outside the door was whistling.
In the cold stairwell, the clear, empty whistle drifted through the air. It was especially eerie.
Jiang Ye turned on his phone and switched back to the surveillance screen.
The stairwell was empty. There was no one on the ceiling either.
And yet all three of them could hear that there really was someone whistling outside.
“Could they be in the peephole camera’s blind spot?” Li Miaomiao asked, clutching her trembling hands.
“Not likely.” Jiang Ye shook his head. “The blind spot isn’t big enough to hide a person. And this sound is very soft. He has to be pressed right against the door to make it, or we wouldn’t be able to hear it.”
“Then where is the sound coming from?” Li Miaomiao instinctively grabbed Jiang Ye’s shirtfront.
Her hand was trembling, making Jiang Ye’s shirt tremble too.
Jiang Ye stared at the screen and said, “It’s that delivery box. The box the rider left at the door.”
Everyone’s gaze shifted to the delivery box on the screen.
“Could there be a human head inside?” Jin Feize said with a faint smile. “Judging from the size of that box, it really could fit an adult human head.”
“A human head can whistle?” Li Miaomiao said in disbelief.
Jin Feize said slowly, “If people without heads can walk, why can’t a head whistle?”