Chapter 23: The Man in the Chicken Coop at Midnight
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“What the hell are you talking about?”
Qiu Yiyao quickly scrambled to her feet and rushed over to Bai Peiyu, demanding loudly, “How did you try to persuade me before? Why are you suddenly using fate to argue against me now? If everything is predestined, then everything happening to me now must be fate too. Should I just sit around and wait? Why bother fighting at all?”
Her eyes blazed with anger, and her chest heaved.
Bai Peiyu opened his mouth as if he wanted to explain, but in the end he merely turned toward the river. “It’s getting late. Uncle Qiu is waiting for us to go back and eat.”
“I’m not hungry. Go back if you want.”
Qiu Yiyao felt that even looking at him was a waste of time. She walked over to the bench, sat down, and stared at the ground in silence.
Bai Peiyu did not argue. He simply turned and walked away.
Darkness fell quickly. Before long, the riverside streetlights came on.
Qiu Yiyao sat there like a statue, staring blankly at the river.
Passersby pointed at her and whispered, but she paid them no attention.
The chestnut-haired woman’s words kept echoing in her ears: “Run. We’re being watched.”
Had she experienced the same hallucination? Or was that forum real, and had the chestnut-haired woman logged in and read that post too? Was that why she had said those words?
But if the forum truly existed, why could it no longer be found no matter how hard she searched? Had some online expert deliberately erased all traces of it, or…
Qiu Yiyao did not dare pursue the thought. Yet if she began reasoning from that one sentence, it seemed that everything only made sense if the forum was real.
Someone had been watching them, which was why the forum had suddenly disappeared.
But who was watching them?
Qiu Yiyao thought of the two people who had committed suicide. Could there really have been some hidden story behind their deaths?
Just as her mind was filled with doubts, a man’s hand reached from behind and settled on her shoulder.
Qiu Yiyao jolted and hurriedly turned around. It was Qiu Shengming, standing behind her. The streetlamp shone down from above, making him seem almost wrapped in light.
“Dad, you scared me half to death!”
“You’re the one scaring me. It’s so late, and you still haven’t gone home. Aren’t you hungry?”
Qiu Shengming sat down beside her. “What are you thinking about so intently?”
“I thought of something strange.”
Qiu Yiyao was about to tell him about the chestnut-haired woman, but the words stopped at her lips. “It’s nothing. I just feel a little bored staying here all the time. It would be nice if we could go to a nearby city and have some fun.”
She decided to keep the matter from Qiu Shengming for now, lest she drag him into it.
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Qiu Shengming laughed. “You’re not a little girl anymore, yet all you think about is having fun.”
“What do you mean, I’m not a little girl?” Qiu Yiyao pouted indignantly. “Am I not still your baby in your eyes?”
“Haha, yes, you’re our baby. You’ll always be the precious darling of our old Qiu family.”
Qiu Shengming laughed and ruffled her hair. “When I have a free day, I’ll take you to the neighboring city, all right? It’s huge there, and they have every kind of amusement you could want.”
“Really?” Qiu Yiyao happily took hold of his arm. “You’re the best, Dad.”
“Listen to that sweet little mouth of yours. I’d be even happier if you were this polite to Little Bai.”
At the mention of Bai Peiyu, the smile instantly vanished from Qiu Yiyao’s face. “To him? Hmph. I’d be grateful if he simply stopped picking fights with me. Besides, with that cold-blooded attitude of his, I can’t even be bothered to talk to him.”
Seeing the disgust on her face whenever she spoke of Bai Peiyu, Qiu Shengming shook his head helplessly. “All right, all right, we won’t talk about him. Let’s go home and eat.”
…
Late that night, Qiu Yiyao awoke from her sleep. Moonlight slipped through a gap in the curtains, like a gleaming line cutting the room in two.
Suddenly, the “crack, crack” sound came again from next door. Qiu Yiyao’s body trembled involuntarily.
Was this a dream within a dream? Or had she fallen ill again?
She did not want to pay attention to it, but the sound beyond the wall kept forcing its way into her ears.
“That smells wonderful. See? I told you I wasn’t lying.”
“Mmm. It’s delicious.”
A man and a woman spoke in voices with a faintly shrill quality. Their words were so clear that it was almost as though they had been deliberately spoken for Qiu Yiyao to hear.
Were they having a feast of chicken together?
The moment Qiu Yiyao imagined the scene, she felt sick. She rolled over and pulled the quilt tightly around herself, but a chill slipped through the gaps and spread from the soles of her feet all the way up her back.
She began to shiver violently. When she tried to change position, she found that her body was completely immobile, just like the legendary experience of being pinned down by a ghost.
What was happening?
Qiu Yiyao panicked completely. She knew this time was different from before. She tried to call out, but no sound would come from her throat.
She cursed furiously in her mind.
Back in school, one of her roommates had told her that if she ever suffered from sleep paralysis, she should curse the ghost viciously and drive it away.
Qiu Yiyao was not the sort of person who swore freely, but this time she cursed with every filthy word she had never used before.
Sure enough, before long, she felt the weight lift from her body.
She sighed in relief and quickly crawled out from under the quilt.
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Standing beside the bed, she found that the voices from next door had grown even clearer.
“Slow down. No one’s going to take it from you.”
“You don’t know how hungry I’ve been for days. I’ve had to watch it every day, and only now can I finally eat. Of course I have to hurry.”
In the dead of night, when all was silent, only the voices of the two people remained—mysterious and eerie.
Feeling her heartbeat quicken, Qiu Yiyao raised a hand and patted her head. “What’s there to be afraid of? It’s all fake. It won’t come and eat me, anyway.”
Though she said that, she still rose onto her toes and crept quietly toward the window.
It was not that she was especially brave. She was simply too curious. The last time she had seen someone eating chicken, it had been Granny Wang. She wanted to know who the male voice belonged to this time.
When she reached the window, she patted her chest and steadied her breathing. With one hand, she pinched the corner of the curtain, narrowed her eyes until only a sliver showed, and slowly pulled it aside.
As expected, inside the chicken coop were two people with heads full of white hair, both bent over and chewing on something. They were crouched in a corner, with a wooden rack in front of them, so all she could see was their hair, not their faces.
One person’s hair was somewhat disheveled, but judging from the bun at the back of the head, it was undoubtedly Granny Wang. The other person’s head bobbed up and down incessantly, evidently savoring the meal.
Although she could not see the disgusting scene clearly, Qiu Yiyao still felt uneasy in her stomach. She was about to let the curtain fall when the old man spoke again.
“What do you think of that girl?”
“She’s all right. Fair skin, and she looks pretty enough. I heard her temper isn’t very good, though.”
“What does a bad temper matter? Who’s born with a good one?”
“That’s true.”
Qiu Yiyao had not expected the two of them to gossip while eating chicken, and she found the whole thing absurd.
Could it be that she was simply too fond of gossip in real life, which was why she had dreamed up such a hallucination?
“Oof, my legs are tired from crouching. I’ll take a break.”
The old man suddenly stood up. His face and chest were smeared with bright-red blood.
He raised both arms and stretched.
Through the thin pane of glass, with less than two yards between them, the thing in the old man’s hands appeared in plain sight.
Qiu Yiyao’s eyes widened in disbelief, and she clapped a hand tightly over her mouth.
It was not a chicken at all!
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