"Hey," he said. "How are you?"
I closed my eyes.
"Do you want me to call 911 or something?"
I took a deep breath as much as possible and felt the stretching of the muscles around my chest and the pain caused by the various intersections of my body when it collided with the universe.
"I don't know," I said.
"Okay," he said uncertainly. "Tell me when you know, okay?"
I sat up and looked around. I was in a dark gray room with thick soot and grease on the windows, and the sun could not get in. This room smells like mold and feels like a dungeon.
"Where am I?"
"Don't you know?" he said.
"If I knew, would I still ask?"
"You are in the ward of Salem Lunatic Hospital."
"The Institute of Weak Thoughts?"
"Yes," he said. "Did you get beaten or dragged here?"
"What?" I said.
"Your face," he said. He waved in front of him. "That's what you said, you should look at the other guys," he said playfully. He smiled beautifully and sincerely.
"No, it's not beating and abandoning," I said, "At least I didn't realize it, but considering my recent luck and life, it's not a big deal." I waved to my face and imitated what he had just done. "Car accident. Most of it."
"So, you don't know how you got here?"
"I don't know," I said.
"Wow," he said.
"What are you doing here? How did you find me?"
"I am a" he blushed and said timidly, "I am a ghost hunter."
He waited for me to be surprised, or to laugh at me, or to show some kind of emotion, but meeting a ghost hunter was the least strange thing that happened to me recently.
"I am—" he continued hesitantly, "—I was investigating the survey site tonight. This whole place is haunted, and we are going to focus on this wing and this room tonight, because it is considered the most haunted. Place. The whole body is ghostly, screaming, conscious interaction. Any place full of violence has a special tendency to be haunted. I opened the door, heard the scream, and then I saw you, right there, screaming on the floor . This is strange."
"Immersed in violence? What happened here?" I rubbed my temple alternately with my healthy hand.
"This is crazy," he said. His eyes lit up. He sat cross-legged on the floor and put the backpack on his knees. He took out a three-ring binder and opened it. He printed out the newspaper clippings and punched a hole in it. "There is such a guy, a doctor, whose name is Dr. Elias Black. He murdered his son and a girl who was hospitalized. His son became pregnant before committing suicide. All this happened in this room. ."
He handed me the binder and showed me the newspaper clippings.
"No," I said. My stomach sank and my hands started to sweat. When I looked at the black and white photo of Claire, my hands trembled; she looked exactly like I had imagined. There is also an external photo of the institute in the article, which looks clean, sterile and suitable, and is the perfect place for a lunatic asylum. There is also a photo of the old Doctor Blake with a high spirit and a smile. He proudly put his arm Embracing him on the shoulders of his son. Neil looked equally proud and happy.
The bloody scene at Phillips College in Salem.
Dear gentle reader, what is said here is not for the faint-hearted. This morning, our peaceful town of Salem was awakened and learned that tragedy had come to our peaceful community. Last night, the local law enforcement department received an anonymous phone call to inform that a violent crime was taking place at the Fiblide Institute. As soon as he arrived at the scene, Jǐngcha saw the bloody scene.
It has been determined that the local community leader and well-known advocate of the eugenics movement, Dr. Elias Neil Black, beat his son Elias Neil Blackbo Jr. in a treatment room in the institute Death, and then commit suicide by hitting the temple with a gun, presumably because of fear of what he did. A female head of the institute was also found dead on the spot. It is unclear whether the old Doctor Black ultimately caused the girl’s death, or whether she died of shock and physical weakness, a well-known complication of idiot patients. The forensic doctor will make a final judgment on the cause of the girl’s death, and we will report to you soon.
As an editorial, the reporter couldn't help asking how the eugenics movement would suffer losses due to the excessive behavior of its most important leader. The elder Dr. Neil Elias proudly displayed the impeccable thoroughbred pedigree of his family. There is no doubt that every member of this community has either seen his framed thoroughbred pedigree or heard of it. Now, the reporter has to ask a question, what is "blood"
"Cool?" The boy said after I read the article.
"It's a word," I said. "I'm Abby. What's your name?"
"Brian," he said. "You don't look like you're going to faint or die. That's good."
"Thank you for helping me," I said.
""no problem. So you really don’t know how you got here?"
"Even if I tell you, you won't believe it."
"Listen to it. The school counselor said I am very vulnerable, so I might," he said. He took out a bag of miscellaneous grains from his backpack. "Want something?"
I took a large handful of dried fruits and a bottle of water he handed me. He sat, relaxed and waited.
"You would think I was crazy," I said.
"Maybe. Good place to tell me. We are already in the lunatic asylum."
"I am pretty sure that in my previous life, I was Claire Johnson, the girl in that article. I have all her memories, and I always seem to sneak into her life recently."
"You are right," he said. "You are crazy."
"Only when I was in Salem would I remember that I was Claire. When I was at the beach, I remembered that I became another person. Her name was Anna Beth Sugerman. It’s as if I’ve been escaping from my current life and into other people’s lives. I can see everything through their eyes, just like I can tell you everything about Claire. I can tell you that she has a younger sister named Sybil, She was also sent to the Institute of Weak Thoughts. I can tell you that her mother worked as a receptionist in a lumber factory until she was fired, and then she started to work as a female, because she couldn’t find other jobs. She was always away from home. There was nothing to eat, Claire and Sybil were starving. When she was thirteen years old, Claire stole a loaf of bread and beef from the grocery store. She knew it was wrong, but she and Sybil had been for several days. There was no food, and they hadn’t seen their mother for a long time. Their mother became more and more unreliable and unstable. Claire was arrested, and she and her little sister were arrested because of criminal tendencies, mental retardation and potential * * And was sent to a shelter. She never saw her mother again. How would I know all this?"
Brian had already browsed his three-ring binder quickly, stopped on a page purposely, and then looked up at me. "Did Scott let you do this?"
"what?"
"Scott? Did she make you do this? If she did, it would be a pretty terrible prank. You found out. You lied to me completely. Salute you."
"I don't know someone named Scott."
"Seriously, come on, enough jokes," he said.
"I don't know someone named Scott," I said again. Talking to this boy is a stupid idea. Really, which normal person would believe me? I thought Nick would believe me. I beg him not to leave me. anyway. When I needed him most, he was gone.
"Forget it," I stood up.
I don't even bother to wipe the dust and debris from my pants.
"Wait."Wait," Brian said. "What's Claire's mother's name?"
"Cici Johnson," I said.
"When was Claire's birth?"
"In the past few weeks, I have collected as much information as possible about Claire, Dr. Black, and Old Dr. Black. I hope I can reach them, you know, on the other side. I really want to have a good interview. If I had a coherent contact, I hope to be able to ask real questions. They don’t have much personal information, it’s not easy to find, but you get everything. Everything," he swiped his finger across the page he was looking at. Come and go. He handed me the binder again. The page he mentioned contains all the information about Claire. "I didn't even tell Scott about this. She thinks all this is stupid, and I don't want her to make fun of me. So unless you have been studying this issue for the past few weeks. Maybe you are what you are. That person—well, maybe you are the person you are talking about.". "If you think about it, it's pretty cool."
"The coolest," I said coldly.
"So," he said. "How did you get here? This is the first mystery we need to solve."
""I told you. I have no idea. "
I sat back on the floor.
"I have a theory," he said. He slowly and methodically turned a ballpoint pen with his fingers. "Do you want to hear it?"
"Of course." I said.
"I am a nerd in physics and science fiction."
"And Ghost Hunt," I interrupted him.
"And ghost hunting," he modified. "So, how about this? This is a question I've been thinking about recently. The discussion about whether time is linear or just our perception. So I said if time is not linear? If all of this-all this What happens if everything happens at the same time. The past, the future, and the present are all neatly stacked like a deck of cards. What about this? Everything around us is a manifestation of energy, just like light. All animals, trees, Human beings, we are all its roots, an expression of energy and light. The interesting thing about light is that it is both a particle and a wave." He continued to rotate his pen and looked at the space above my head. He frowned and fell into thought. "You will ask, how can it be a particle and a wave at the same time? Someone might think that these two things are opposite? No one knows, but they are both. Unbelievable, isn't it?" He stopped and waited for my answer.
"It's great," I agreed. I like this boy. He was immediately loved by people in a humble, kind, scrawny, and quirky way.
He continued: "The nature of light, whether it is a particle or a wave, depends on whether it is observed.". think carefully. Wow, right?"
"Okay," I said, trying to clear the cobwebs from my head for years and remember anything about high school physics. I don't remember well, but I remember that the observer is very important.
"The behavior of observing things changes its essence," he said. "So, suppose your original character, generally speaking, is a particle, right? You are now living your particle life here, completely and completely touchable, but maybe you and your xìng qualitative expression have some It's fundamentally wrong, not that a particle is solid and exists now. When no one is watching, you enter a wave, like light, like energy. Observing your behavior turns you into a particle again."
"Interesting theory," I said, still eating the dried fruit in the bag Brian had placed on my lap. "I especially like the part where I have some essential problems."
"How many times have you slid from now to past?"
"Oh, my goodness, about six times. It's terrible." I said.
"Did this happen when you were with others?"
I thought for a while, "No. No, it doesn't. It's always when I'm alone."
"What brought you here? Because obviously there are things that must be done, otherwise you will have to wait for a while."
"Someone found me," I said. "The car accident was caused by medical staff. In Annabeth’s house, a man lived. On the edge of the highway, a woman stopped. Every time someone found me, and today, you found me ."
"Oh, God, this is great!" he said, patting his knees.
"But there are more likely and more logical explanations. I'm crazy and should promise," I said.
"This is boring," he said.
"Boring," I raised a hand, with an imaginary balance on one side. "Or maybe there is some fundamental error in my book." I raised the actor's hand and looked at the other side of the imaginary balance. "Which one would you choose?"
"You are like Schrödinger's cat, a real Schrödinger's cat!" he said.
"You are like a nerd in real life," I said, but I smiled when I said it. Nerds rule the world. "I want to eat all your dried fruit pies"
I dug the last one out of the bag.
He waved his hand, smiled and said, "Of course, eat it all." "This store will sell me more things."
"Bruce Danman told me that I need to be kept under surveillance. I think it's just for safety reasons, so I didn't go through an episode alone, bumped my head, fell over, and couldn't get up. But you think he Do you think so too?"
"Bruce Danman?" he said. "You know him?"
"Friends of friends," I said. "He wants to help me."
"I have a weird feeling for that guy, as if something is wrong?" Brian said.
"I'm not quite right. Do you have a strange feeling for me?"
He smiled, "Yeah, of course."
Brian and I finally got up. First, he took out a new piece of paper and recorded all his observations. When he did this, I flipped through his binder. Page after page, some pages have equations, some pages are titled "Observation", but most pages are about ghosts and local haunted places research.
"You say you like ghosts, you mean you like ghosts very, very much, right?"
"I think so," he said. His hair fell on his face, and he left it there. He played with his pen. "I can't believe that there will be nothing else after that, right? I want to prove that it's more than just the end."
"You are still a child, you shouldn't think about such heavy things. Shouldn't you relax, relax, hang out with girls, don't you care about the world?" I said.
"Yeah, wait a minute," he murmured. He took the notebook back from my hand, carefully and religiously, closed it, and put it back in his backpack. We walked towards his car together. "What's the next step?" he said.
I shrugged. "Aren't you preparing for the ghost hunt tonight?"
"The plan has changed," he said.
He opened the suitcase on the small hatchback and threw it into the backpack. He put his things in the trunk of the car, which contained a sleeping bag, a pile of strange-looking electronic devices, and three or four bags of warehouse-sized groceries. The child likes his dried fruit platter.
"I intend to observe you so that you can always be there, don't go to other places, and don't go to other places at other times."
"Are you sure?" I asked, and I secretly breathed a sigh of relief despite having him by my side. I don't want anything, just don't want to stay alone for a while.
"Yes. I will go wherever you go," he said.
"I can borrow your phone." I somehow lost my cell phone. Again.
He handed me the phone and said, "My lady...".
I dialed Nick's number. He answered as soon as the bell rang.
"Where are you?" Nick asked.
"I'm at Salem Lunatic Hospital," I said.
""what? How did you get there?" (to be continued) (end of this chapter)