Chapter 147 — The Long-Awaited...
Years of Heartflutter · Page 45 of 501
Now that so much time had passed and the New Year was over, Chen Afu made a couple of casual turns past the hospital and found nothing unusual. He relaxed and prepared for another scare campaign.
Hiding in the restroom to frighten people had begun to bore him. This time he planned something even more perverse. Human desire is boundless, and perversity is boundless too. And the perverse are more boundless still.
Chen Afu had hit on an idea even more frightening and thrilling—hiding in the hospital morgue and posing as a ghost. Just thinking about it set his blood racing.
To ensure the plan went off smoothly, Chen Afu first sought out the old man who watched over the morgue. While the man lay drunk, he stole his key, pressed a mold from it with plasticine, and then went to a private, unlicensed key-cutting outfit. There he paid a little extra to have an identical key made.
Once all this was done, Chen Afu slipped into the hospital morgue late one night. Corpses did not frighten him; a man with a twisted mind always has a certain store of nerve.
Chen Afu dragged the bodies out of the cold cabinets one by one and propped them side by side against the wall facing the door. Frozen stiff as they were, they stood against the wall with ease.
That done, Chen Afu smeared a jar of vanishing cream over his face until his complexion turned a ghastly white, and only then did he bellow, "Sound off!"
Then, pinching his throat, he answered himself: "One, two, three, four!"
Outside, the old morgue watchman was lazily sipping his liquor. Half tipsy, he caught the sound of counting and was much puzzled. He glanced at the little television beside him, but it was not even switched on.
He looked at the radio by his bed, but its power light was dark as well. Who on earth was calling out numbers? The hospital security?
The old man shook his head, thinking he had misheard. The morgue stood in one of the hospital's more out-of-the-way corners; even if the guards trained, they would never come all the way out here to do it.
So the old man paid it no mind and went on drinking, even humming a little tune under his breath. But before long he heard another shout: "You there, fall out!"
Then came more cries of "At ease!" and "Attention!"
The old man frowned. This time it could hardly be his ears playing tricks. He rose quickly and peered out the window, thinking the guards had come here to drill and meaning to tell them to keep it down. But outside the window there was not a soul.
The old man rubbed his eyes and looked again. There was indeed no one outside, yet the drill commands kept rising and falling.
Holding his breath, the old man searched high and low for a long while before he finally determined that the noise was coming from the morgue next door. He had watched over that morgue for several years and had never once met with such a strange thing.
Bold as he was beyond most men, a man alone in the dark of night could not help but feel a chill, and so he borrowed courage from his liquor. The old man halted at the morgue door and fearfully pressed his ear to it.
Sure enough, the sound came from inside the morgue. Cold sweat broke out on the old man at once, and most of his drunkenness fled; he felt his calves turning to jelly.
Having found the source of the sound, the old man wanted to run. But then a thought struck him: could it be a cell phone ringtone? These days ringtones were strange things, and there was no telling what they might sound like.
He recalled that once before a cell phone had rung from inside the morgue, though that time it had been the most ordinary sort of high-pitched ring. The old man had been less afraid then and had opened the door and gone straight in. In the body of a car-crash victim he had found a phone, and a rather fancy one at that.