Chapter 14 final sleep

Tomorrow is Martha's seventy-fourth birthday, and just today, she received a special "birthday gift" - a cabinet. Downstairs the porters unpack the box and carry it up the wide, winding staircase.It took so much effort that they accidentally scraped the cabinet against the doorknob as they passed the bedroom.When Martha heard the slight vibrato when the cabinet collided with the door handle, her heart also trembled. "Carry it over there against the wall." She directed the workers to put the cabinet in place, then dismissed them absent-mindedly.Martha looked at the familiar cabinet alone, a sense of familiarity and mystery that had not been seen for a long time rose in her heart.

When Martha was little, she used to visit her aunt—the poor thing who died young.Every family gathering, the younger generations will casually talk about the past of their aunt: she was kidnapped by a gypsy when she was three years old, and later her lover committed suicide for her, and wild birds in the forest often flew to her house to beg for bread crumbs to eat . Until now, Martha can still clearly recall the last time she saw her aunt.Just that morning, my aunt said something strange to her: "Martha, I want to give you that chest with many drawers. Other children are always curious to open those drawers. Only you know how to respect other people's things and Secret. So, that cabinet will belong to you in the future."

Martha's eyes were still fixed on the cabinet, and she was thinking in her mind: it has been almost thirty years since she saw this cabinet then.This rough cabinet is about one foot thick, four feet wide, and five feet high. It really looks like an old European-style building.Since three sides are fan-shaped, the middle of the cabinet is the tallest.It was painted black as a whole, and a thin layer of golden streaks were exposed through the cracks in the cracked paint.The drawers of the cabinet are divided into twenty-four rows, fifteen in each row, and there are five flush drawers on the lower left, and a small door on the right, with the word "leap year" engraved on it.The drawers are all the same size and have old fashioned wooden handles on the outside. ——This is exactly the cabinet in Martha's memory: one drawer represents one day, three hundred and sixty-five drawers are just enough for one year, and the small door with "leap year" is dedicated to February 29th.

Martha remembered that her aunt used to work with cabinets, and whenever she took a note from a drawer, she would say solemnly, "See what luck I'll have today." Thinking of this, Martha frowned slightly.She knew to read the notes in these drawers in order, but she was not sure whether to read them from New Year's Day or from her birthday.She vaguely remembered that those slender strokes on the light blue note constituted a beautiful font, but she never knew what was written on the note. Then Suzanne interrupted her contemplation: "Miss Martha, today's evening paper." The part-time college student lived with Martha to take care of her: put her in the wheelchair in the morning and help her out of the wheelchair in the evening. Go to bed and rest.Since the accident twenty-five years ago, Martha has hired many girls to look after her, and some of the more acquainted girls still write to her.

"This cabinet is really weird." Suzanne said inadvertently. Martha was a little unhappy: "It's quite old, and it's completely handmade." Susannah quickly explained, "Oh, I'm not saying it's bad, I mean, these drawers are so small, what can they hold? Maybe not even a deck of cards. Is this a kind of jewelry cabinet or something?" A special cabinet?" "You shouldn't be so curious about asking too many things—you should respect other people's things," Martha said sharply, but she heard in her voice the tone of her aunt all those years ago.

"Sorry, I thought the drawer was empty." Suzanne felt aggrieved. Martha softened her tone and said comfortingly, "It's okay, maybe there's really nothing." That night, Martha lay in bed, shivering.The room was filled with darkness, like a mysterious fog seeping through the screened windows.The light in the corridor caresses the dark cabinet, looming and erratic. "Ridiculous," she scolded herself secretly, "Martha, you are not the kind of woman who loves fantasy." Indeed, before marrying an older and respectable man, Martha taught mathematics in a private school.How could she be so superstitious about such a piece of furniture at this time, she was very conceited of her intelligence and wisdom?She was ashamed of what she had just thought, how could she believe that stupid superstition?My aunt entrusted her fate to this cabinet, but it was just a slight dementia.

"Really, Martha," she coaxed herself, raising her voice as usual the next morning, "there may be nothing in the closet after all these years." Finally, she slowly and unconsciously pushed herself in front of the cabinet, and stroked the cabinet up and down with her hands. She touched drawers one by one, several rows in a row, then took a deep breath and murmured: " There's something in there." She reached over, pulled out the first drawer, put it on her lap, and found to her surprise that there was indeed a small note inside.The ink on the crumpled blue note had faded to a rusty color and looked like dried blood.The elegant font is such a sentence: a message from the past.

No punctuation, just a few words. Martha looked at it for a few minutes, refolded the note, put it gently back in the drawer, and said to herself while putting it away: "Martha, 'a message from the past', this cabinet itself is That means." That afternoon, Suzanne brought a letter in a large, thick white envelope. The address of the letter was a law firm, but the sealing date was twenty-five years ago. niece Martha, on her seventy-fourth birthday. The letter reads: Dear Martha, there will be a long time between when I write this letter and when you read it, and by the time you read this letter, I will be dead.I know people laugh at me behind my back and call me weird; but I know the past and the future.I recently made a will to give you that chest of drawers, the day before your seventy-fourth birthday.Aunt Karen.

After reading the letter, Martha couldn't help feeling cold, so this was "news from the past", not the cabinet itself, and it was news from her aunt. In the next few days, Martha always regarded the cabinet as an evil thing and didn't want to take a step closer to it.But on the fourth day, she couldn't take it anymore.Martha skipped two drawers and opened the fourth: a beautiful child with fair hair. She thought about this sentence for a long time, but couldn't figure it out.She couldn't think of a single child she knew with fair hair, and she rarely saw children these days.

After lunch, Martha fell asleep until Suzanne woke her up. "Miss Martha," she said softly, "you used to tell me that if any children wanted dessert, I would bring them to you." Martha looked up and saw a lovely little girl with long fair hair and a red cap.She was surprised to think of the words on the note... After the little girl left, Martha said to herself: This is pure coincidence.However, the uneasiness in my heart was lingering. Every day when she woke up, Martha tried to make herself ignore the dark cabinet, but every day, she was attracted to the cabinet by an inexplicable "force", and then opened a drawer.

One day, the note in the drawer read "Blessings from an old friend". Sure enough, on this day, she received a letter from a good colleague many years ago.Another day, she saw a note saying "a young guest", and in the afternoon, a friend who had taken care of her daughter in the past brought her six-month-old daughter to see her. Although Martha was still reluctant, she had gradually gotten used to it and began to trust the things in the cabinet. Summer passed, autumn came again, and each note was like a piece in a jigsaw puzzle, predicting her life that day.The cabinet seems to be getting bigger and darker every day.And Martha kept telling herself that this cabinet couldn't predict her future. On this day, she opened a drawer with a white porcelain handle, and wrote on a note: A memory of deceit and crime. When Martha finished reading with a frown and put the note back, she heard a slight sound inside.She opened the drawer again and looked carefully, and found a ring with a small sapphire set on it. Martha took out the ring, put it on her finger unconsciously, and found it was too small.So she turned the ring over and over again, and was suddenly taken aback. She recognized it, and Martha's face turned ugly for a moment.She put the ring back and remembered that many years ago she had firmly denied to her aunt that she had never taken her ring, when in fact she had hidden the ring in the shoe box in the closet. Martha quickly closed the drawer, turned the wheelchair back to the cabinet, trembling all over, said to herself "I don't understand", then turned to the cabinet after a while and said, "I don't understand, how does she know..." A few days later, there was a note that read: A lie, a lifelong mistake. Martha thought hard, but she never remembered the so-called "lie".At this time, Susanna came to deliver lunch: "Look, the people across the street are flying the national flag. What day is it?" Martha suddenly remembered that today is November 11th, Armistice Day.Many years ago, her aunt's boyfriend invited her to a parade in town.At that time, Martha happened to be playing at her aunt's house, and she ran into her aunt's boyfriend at the door. She didn't know whether it was a whim or something else, so she lied to him and said, "Aunt Karen is not at home, and she went out for a parade with a very handsome uncle." The next day, people found my aunt's boyfriend in the woods. He was dead, having fallen from a horse. Martha wasn't lying maliciously, she was just trying to make a joke.When the body of her aunt's boyfriend was found, Martha panicked a bit, but when no one mentioned it again, she slowly forgot about it. But my aunt knew it, she knew it a long time ago. On January 14, the note read: A marriage of convenience.Today is Martha's wedding anniversary.Although her husband had an accident twenty-five years ago and she has been a widow until now, she still remembers this day.It wasn't a good marriage, she mused, but it was a marriage of convenience, until she learned later that her husband was having an affair. On February 14th, Martha opened a drawer with a heart-shaped handle, and the note read: A gift full of resentment. Yes, she remembered, but he had deserved it—she remembered finding in her husband's pocket a scented handkerchief with an embroidered lettering and an address.She washed and ironed the handkerchief, and put it in a pretty heart-shaped case, with a loaded pistol attached.Then she sent it to the address, with a card in it, on which Martha wrote in imitation of her husband's handwriting: It's all over, we've been found. In the weeks that followed, after dinner, they met each other in silence, and Martha looked at her husband with admiration.But he stopped working overtime, and he read the same book night after night, with a dead expression on his face—not so much an expression as a mask.And Martha embroidered the lace stitch by stitch. On an uncomfortable sunny day in March, Martha saw the words on the note: a cup of coffee.Her breathing quickened as she remembered her husband's grim announcement that he was divorcing her after she had told her about the February 14th gift.When she mentioned this matter, she just wanted to warn him, but she didn't want it to come to this point. She protested: "What you said is not true." "It's true, I packed a few things and moved to the hotel," he said, "to-morrow." The next day, Martha sneaked into the kitchen and put a lot of sleeping pills in the thermos that the cook had prepared for her husband.His car had been in an accident six miles from home, and Martha was upstairs, and no one suspected her.She had hoped that the police would come and catch her, but instead, no one caught her and she fell down the stairs herself. Martha was discharged after several months in the hospital with hemiplegia.She was the only one in the huge house.So Martha, who was financially well off, kept the cook and hired a female college student to take care of her. She read a lot, played some games by herself, and continued her needlework.Until the mysterious cabinet arrived, her whole mind was occupied by it. In theory, she knew that fate was unpredictable, so she often said to the cabinet: "It's purely a coincidence." Every morning, she was determined not to open the drawer, but she couldn't resist the mysterious power after all. One cold March day she opened the note and read: "A day of reckoning." Martha sat staring at the rows of drawers, distracted.Now, only a few drawers have not been opened. Then Suzanne interrupted her thoughts: "Miss Martha, your letter." Another letter from the law firm.She opened it wearily and found a sealed letter inside.When I opened it again, the letter said: Martha was stunned, the past scenes reappeared in her mind, and the horrible memories kept stimulating her now very fragile nerves.From that day on, Martha couldn't sleep or eat, and her whole mind was in a mess: what would Karen write in the letter?Will the police believe what Karen says?Will the police prosecute someone my age? She began to think about what to do with the disgusting cabinet, either by selling it or by burning it.But she would much rather have opened her eyes one morning and found it wasn't there anymore.In the dark, she said to the cabinet, "I wish you would disappear." This morning, when Susannah was helping Martha dress, she said, "Miss Martha, you seem to have been up all night." "I'm fine," Martha said, puffing out her chest to watch Suzanne finish making the bed and dusting the bookshelves.After Suzanne left, Martha faced the cabinet, and now there were only two drawers left open. "I will never open any of them," she swore. After nine o'clock, she read the morning paper over and over again.At ten o'clock, she finished reading.At eleven o'clock Martha capitulated, and she stepped forward to open the penultimate drawer, where the note read: DAY OF PREPARATION. Martha frowned. After Susannah washed her hair, she went to change the sheets, while Martha trimmed her short nails, and asked Susannah to change the cushion on the wheelchair. At night, Martha lay in bed, thinking what else was there to prepare?She listened to the grandfather clock as it struck ten, eleven, then fifteen past eleven.At half past eleven, Martha rang the bell beside the bed, and Susannah rushed in, asking worriedly, "What's the matter?" "I'm going to get dressed and sit in the chair," said Martha, firmly. "I'm going to wear a blue dress." So Suzanne helped her get dressed, helped her sit in a chair, then leaned over in front of Martha, and asked with concern: "Miss Martha, are you okay? I mean...you seem very irritable, like this in the middle of the night Get up and dress up, some... are you okay?" "I'm fine, Suzanne," said Martha, "you go to your room and rest." "Okay, but I'm a little worried about leaving you like this." Although she was still worried, Suzanne stopped talking, leaned over and kissed Martha's cheek - she had never kissed like this before Martha. Martha caressed mournfully where Susannah had kissed, listening to footsteps in the hallway and lights going out.Then she slowly pushed the wheelchair to the front of the cabinet and reached out to feel for the last drawer. At this time, the grandfather clock struck twelve midnight with a dull sound. She said to the cabinet, "I'm here." She opened the drawer, and in it was not just a note, but a small package: a beautiful lettered handkerchief wrapped in a small lady's pistol.She opened the handkerchief, and wasn't that the same handkerchief she had seen long ago?what!Why didn't she notice that the words on it were Karen before, why didn't she see it before?She remembered the card she had written back then, but it was not in the handkerchief at this time. This mysterious cabinet means nothing to anyone.It turned out that Aunt Karen, who was older than her but about the same age, was actually her husband's mistress back then. She took out the note and said calmly, "Maybe she has something to say at the end." Then she read it. Martha held the note lightly in her left hand, and with her right hand put the pistol under her breast and pulled the trigger. ——The note flew to the ground, and the note in the three hundred and sixty-fifth drawer said: Last sleep.