Chapter 2

Some residents reported that the people bundled into the hospital vehicles seemed to fight desperately, screaming themselves hoarse.

“I’m not ill!”

“You’ve got the wrong person! I’m not ill!”

“Help me!”

Their anguished cries rang through the night. Only when the engines and tires faded into the distance did those voices dissolve into the thick black mist.

Reading the reports on my screen, I had a frightening thought.

Where was Lily’s father?

Could he have been taken to the psychiatric hospital?

Was it possible that, rounding people up in the dark, the doctors had mistaken him for one of the escaped patients?

Perhaps Yang Xinghua bore some resemblance to an escapee, and a disastrous mistake had followed.

He might have shouted, “You’ve got the wrong person!” or “I’m not ill!” as they took him away. The doctors might simply have ignored him.

After all, every psychiatric patient said they weren’t ill.

If a healthy person had been taken by mistake, a real patient must have slipped through the net.

The pale, vampire-like “fake father” Lily described could be that missing patient, impersonating her father for some twisted reason.

There was no time to waste. I had to investigate the hospital at once.

I examined the photograph Lily had left me.

Yang Xinghua wore a broad, guileless grin, showing straight white teeth. His wheat-colored skin gleamed in the sunlight. He looked honest and openhearted.

All I had to do was compare the photograph with the thirty-two people taken to the hospital.

If he was among them, surely I could explain the situation, clear up the mistake and get him released.

Then I could close the case with a job well done.

The night was dark and windy.

Clinging to the bars outside a window, I stared at a white hospital bed inside.

A rope was knotted tightly around my waist, its other end fastened securely to the rooftop railing.

In my line of work, being able to work at heights was essential.

Once, dressed as a window cleaner, I had hung outside the floor-to-ceiling windows of a five-star hotel and photographed a couple in the middle of an affair. The wife had thanked me with a hundred thousand yuan.

I knew how institutions like hospitals operated. If I walked up to the front door and explained what I wanted, they would sweep me out like rubbish and tell me to crawl back wherever I’d come from.

So I skipped that tedious step.

Why trouble other people when I could do it myself?

Rows of narrow windows lined the hospital’s outer wall like enormous square black eyes.

Behind each eye lay a ward much like the rest, furnished with stark white beds.

The patients lay neatly in place, obedient as corpses, motionless in a drugged sleep.

Peering in from outside, I felt rather like Spider-Man.

The abnormalities were concentrated in eight wards on the fourth floor.

Each ward contained four beds.

Exactly thirty-two people.

Unlike the other patients, these thirty-two had their wrists and ankles chained to the bed legs. They were clearly being held there by force.

In the moonlight, I spotted a man whose face closely resembled the man in Yang Xinghua’s photograph.

I tapped on the glass.

“Yang Xinghua!”

He turned toward me, astonishment and excitement written across his face.

His mouth opened, but only muffled, painful moans came out.

Switching on my helmet lamp, I took one hand off the bars to pull the photograph from my pocket and compare it with him.

“Are you Yang Xinghua?” I asked, my face close to the glass.

He nodded vigorously.

Then he pointed to his mouth.

The harsh white light fell across his face.

His mouth was open wide, a black cavern.

Inside… there was no tongue.

Every hair on my back stood on end.

The other three patients woke up: a woman, a child and an old man with white hair.

Together they turned toward me, their eyes full of misery and reproach.

They all opened their mouths.

Slowly, I turned my head, passing the helmet light over each face.

None of them had a tongue.

My palms were so slippery with sweat that I could barely keep my grip. I steadied myself and climbed back to the safety of the roof, trying to make sense of what I’d seen.

Thirty-two patients had fled from the highway. A few days later, thirty-two had been brought back.

Now thirty-two people were chained to hospital beds.

Was that number a coincidence?

The arrests had taken place in Yangjia Village.

And here was Yang Xinghua, a resident of that village, lying in a hospital bed without a tongue.

Was the location a coincidence too?

What had happened to his tongue?

An appalling picture began to take shape.

I thought I could guess what had happened.

The mass escape had caused an online uproar. The public condemned the hospital; the media descended.

Under pressure from every direction, the hospital’s management had resolved to bring back thirty-two people as quickly as possible, whatever it took. Silence the outrage. Save the hospital’s reputation.

They had spent the night knocking on doors in Yangjia Village until they had collected thirty-two people.

But were those necessarily the same thirty-two who had escaped?

As they were taken away, they had shouted:

“I’m not ill!”

Some had screamed for help.

I couldn’t stop myself from forming a theory.

The hospital couldn’t find the patients who’d scattered, but it still needed an answer for the public.

So it had investigated the residents’ circumstances and selected thirty-two vulnerable villagers with no one to protect them—the old, the frail, the young and the sick—to stand in for the missing patients.

The illusion that “everyone had been recaptured” would take the hospital out of the spotlight.

Yang Xinghua was one of those substitutes.

And why had their tongues disappeared?

Because people who couldn’t speak couldn’t protest their innocence.

The viciousness of the idea chilled me.

To test it, I had to investigate Yangjia Village.

If the thirty-two captives really were innocent residents, the thirty-two actual patients were still out there.

People online had reported a grave-digger, a naked man and a woman searching for her arm.

Were they still in the village?

I went straight there that night to look for them.

I found nothing.

At midnight, the hillside cemetery was deserted.

No naked man was running around by the bus stop.

Nor did I encounter the woman said to be knocking on doors in search of her arm.

Where were they?

Where had they all gone?

As the sky began to lighten before sunrise, I decided to visit Yang Xinghua’s address and see this pale, vampire-like impostor for myself.

Morning light filtered through green leaves onto a wicker chair on the balcony.

A pallid man sat cross-legged in it, absorbed in a newspaper. Tall and emaciated, he looked like a skeleton wrapped in human skin.

Judging by his appearance, this was almost certainly Lily’s “fake father.”

I had acquired a workman’s uniform and a toolbox, and secured myself to the outside wall with a safety line. Pretending to repair the plaster, I watched him carefully.

He studied the newspaper with great seriousness, muttering to himself and occasionally nodding in satisfaction.

There was just one thing wrong.

The newspaper was upside down.

“Morning, friend. What’s your name?” I called cheerfully.

The “fake father” raised his gentle eyes and smiled at me.

“Good morning. I don’t value surnames. I value love.”

Having delivered this philosophical remark, he lowered his head and resumed reading.

Food sizzled in the kitchen. Holding my safety line, I edged carefully to the right and leaned toward the kitchen window.

Cauliflower and pieces of meat tumbled in hot oil. A middle-aged woman in an apron stirred them with a spatula, humming happily.

Lily had said Yang Xinghua had remarried.

Was this his wife?

“Mom, is breakfast ready?”

A sharp-faced boy in his teens poked his head around the kitchen door and came skipping in.

“Almost. Go wash your hands,” the woman urged. “It’s smoky in here.”

The boy smiled. As he passed, he casually stroked her waist.

Then he walked out with his hands clasped behind his back as though nothing had happened.

The woman’s round eyes darted warily from side to side. Suddenly, she bent over the pan, grabbed pieces of meat with both hands and crammed them into her mouth, chewing ravenously.

After a while, she raised her head, wiped the oil from her face and became perfectly composed again.

At eight sharp, they sat down to eat.

The pale man, the woman in the apron and the sharp-faced boy gathered around a round table. Golden sunlight fell over them, making the scene look warm and peaceful.

They ate, drank their rice porridge and discussed the weather.

“Remember your umbrella if you go out.”

“This rain’s been falling for ten years.”