Chapter 18 Chapter Eighteen

The isolated building is located in the suburbs. The reason why it is an isolated building is that it is not a building in a large residential area, but stands there alone. Among the bungalows built by farmers around, the six-storey isolated building is very eye-catching. .Everyone will feel weird when they first see it, especially when I went there at sunset, the weird feeling is even stronger.In fact, it is no different from other buildings, except that such a lonely building draws a long figure in the sunset, with no shelter on all sides, except for the people in its own building, you have to go to the fields far away to see it. Get other houses, more and more lonely.I don't understand, there is obviously an open space around this building, why not build two more buildings?

Weirdness is weirdness, since I rented the house here, I can only accept its weirdness, but the biggest advantage here is that the rent is cheap. There are two units in the solitary building, and the house I rent is on the fourth floor of the first unit.Although no one has lived in it for a long time, the inside is very clean. The walls are newly painted, and there is a smell of wall paint. The floor is also very new. Only the furniture is a little old, but it is not damaged. The TV, refrigerator, and air conditioner are all available. , except for some cleaning, I can move in directly without doing any processing on the house, which makes me very satisfied, and I feel that I have picked a great deal.

Just after cleaning and sitting down, the landlord called: "Hehe, how are you doing? Are you still used to it?" "Very good, very good!" I don't like to lie, good is good, "How can you rent such a good house so cheap?" I'm not afraid to say it directly, anyway, once the contract is signed, he can't go back on his word. "Oh? Very good, isn't it? Hehe, that's good, that's good!" The landlord hung up the phone after chatting a few words with a smile.When the landlord signed the contract with me, his expression was very serious, and his brows formed Sichuan characters because of frowning for a long time, which seemed to be the unsmiling type. Now I am not used to the constant hahaha on the phone, and I always feel like there is something wrong What a conspiracy.

The novelty of my new house wore off quickly, and the night turned into a normal night of eating, walking, talking on the phone, and finally dozing off while watching TV.The only difference is that when I look out the window, I can't see the lights on other buildings, I only see occasional lights in the distant fields, and the rest, the sky is full of stars, but it is quiet. I fell asleep around 12 o'clock. I have always been a heavy sleeper and I like to dream.The dream this night was about mice. I dreamed that many mice were eating biscuits on top of my head. These mice were much smarter than the real mice. One mouse mysteriously announced to the other mice: the new neighbor is a man, and he had a bucket of instant noodles for dinner with a lot of chili.The other rats agreed that this was an important situation, and they rustled notes in my dream.This situation amused me, I never thought that my dinner could be intelligence.I woke up with a smile on my face.

After waking up, I was still sleepy for a minute or two, but soon the drowsiness disappeared without a trace. I literally heard rats, right above my head.Although mice are not scary animals, a mouse moving above my head always makes people feel creepy. I suddenly sat up, turned on the light, and looked back carefully. There is nothing on the head of the bed, only a few hairs that I have fallen out. The rustling sound still rang out, and the sound came from the wall, as if something was crawling inside.But that's clearly not a mouse.Although the sound was crawling, it sounded very large. If there was anything, it was definitely a dog, or something larger than a dog.Of course there would not be such a big animal crawling inside the wall. I brought my ear closer, and now I heard not only the sound of crawling, but also the sound of people talking. What is it, and I feel as if the speaker is going away.I noticed that not far from my bed, there is a thick pipe with a diameter of about one decimeter. I understood why there was such a pipe in the bedroom, but I didn't bother to think about it, not to mention that the sound gradually disappeared, so I fell back and continued to sleep.

After living for a few days, I gradually felt something weird.The so-called weirdness is mainly due to the neighbors here.It is said that in such a Drum Tower far away from the city center, the neighbors in the building should be relatively close. However, I have paid attention to it for a few days, and I can meet many neighbors every day. It is a pity that every time I am full of smiles and want to take the initiative to say hello. , but was choked back by the expressions on their faces.These old residents in the Drum Tower don't know what's going on, but they can control their facial muscles so well. They don't even move the corners of their eyes even when a living person like me walks in front of them, as if I It's like a transparent person.If I hadn't seen my shadow in their eyes, I would have thought I hadn't entered their sight.They are always serious, flat, and expressionless. At first I thought it was because they were not familiar with me, a newcomer, but later found that they never greeted each other, and people passed by like two people. Parallel lines never cross.Even during the busiest hours of work and off-duty, there is almost no sound of people talking downstairs in our building-even within their own family, they never talk outside.

If there is no night, based on the impressions during the day, I can almost judge that they have lost their language function.However, in stark contrast to the silence during the day, every night around ten o'clock, the whole building began to make noise.This kind of noise cannot be heard from outside the building. If you pass by the solitary building at night, you will see many dark windows silently, so quiet that you may even think that there is no one living inside.However, for me who lives in the building, the night is extremely noisy.The design of this building is very bad. The big iron pipe leading to the bedroom acts as a good sound conductor, conveying the voices of other residents to me, so I inevitably heard all kinds of gossip and gossip, who What is the actual price of the new pajamas you bought, whose water pipe broke for three days and was not repaired, whose daughter fell behind in the exam... etc., etc., of course, the most heard is about my new neighbor. discussion.What amazes me is that even I have never understood myself so comprehensively. These magical neighbors, they not only understand my every move every day, but even when I throw away a pen worth how much. , when they wrote a few things and tore them up, the color and pattern of pajamas, and so on, which are impossible for outsiders to understand, they also know it clearly, and they talk and laugh loudly in their own homes. The comments and ridicules reached my ears through those channels without exception, which made me blush, shame and anger every night.I doubt that they peeped into my life through the window. Although there are no tall buildings or houses opposite me, I still developed the habit of drawing the curtains. This new habit soon became a topic of discussion among neighbors. .I have no privacy from my neighbors.This situation made me feel first anger and then deep fear.

Incomparably deep fear. I began to pay attention to my neighbors—from the outside, they are all people with legitimate occupations, some even have high social status, their expressions are always so serious, it is difficult to distinguish them from the gossip that spread at night Those who connect together.However, judging from the sounds at night, the people who participated in spreading the news were almost the residents of the entire building—there are 24 households in the building. According to the boring statistics I made on a certain night, there were 63 different people’s voices in total. The sound came to my ears, and this figure shows that at least 80% of the residents in the building participated in the discussion.It's a pity they never spoke during the day, which made it impossible for me to match the voice with the person.

I decided to induce them to speak. I first aimed at the little girl who lived downstairs from me.She is said to be a little girl, but she is actually 25 or 6 years old, but she likes to wear clothes with puff sleeves and dress herself up very tenderly, so I followed her wishes and positioned her as an innocent little girl. The little girl's whereabouts are easy to track. Basically, she leaves at 7:00 in the morning and returns to the nest at 7:00 in the evening. The time is consistent with mine, which creates a very favorable condition for me to approach her. "Hello, what time is it?" I asked as I walked past her one morning when I came down the stairs deliberately "in a hurry".

She continued walking downstairs unresponsively. I simply took a quick step and stopped her intentionally or unintentionally at the bottom of the stairs: "Excuse me, what time is it?" The little girl's face twitched for a moment, but she quickly regained her composure.She stood on a ladder one step higher than me, looking down at me without saying a word.I waited for a few minutes, but she remained silent. I couldn't stand it anymore, and if I kept going on like this, I would be late, so I had to rush out in embarrassment, and looking back, she walked down slowly as if nothing had happened.

I failed the first round. But I didn't give up, and this encounter aroused my interest. "Good morning, what time is it?" I stopped her early in the morning and asked. "Good evening, did you just come back?" I also stopped her when I got off work. "Can I borrow some soy sauce, please? If there is no soy sauce, I can do anything else." When she and I were at home, I would take the initiative to knock on her door. Although she never opened the door, I never got tired of it. This kind of entanglement gave me a unique experience. Now I get up very diligently, and always rush to her door downstairs to wait early, just to ask her what time it is; when I get off work, I also pinpoint the time. , rushed home as quickly as possible, waited downstairs, followed her all the way upstairs - there were two times when the company was delayed by get off work, I was so anxious that I gritted my teeth and went home, finally I did not delay my meeting with her.I have already thrown away the usual things such as soy sauce and salt at home, in order to have an excuse to knock on her door to borrow things - it is difficult to describe my state of mind, sometimes I wonder if I am in love with her , but every time I see her, I deny this idea-this is obviously not love, but something else, more fanatical than love. During the few days when I aimed at the little girl with bubble sleeves, my neighbors continued to observe me and each other, and intensified.Finally one day, let me discover their secrets, I finally know how they master the details of my life. That morning, after tangling the puff sleeves, I still had time to spare. I remembered that the garbage at home hadn't been cleaned up, so I went back upstairs and brought the garbage bags down.The solitary building is different from other buildings. There is no garbage dump here. I once asked Puffy about this matter, but she remained silent as usual.I had no choice but to follow other neighbors, trying to find the whereabouts of the garbage pile through them. After tracking for several days, I finally gave up and came to the conclusion that none of my neighbors produced garbage.I resentfully thought they must have eaten the garbage.Since there is no rubbish dump, and there are so many rubbish in my house every day, the only way is to put the rubbish bags on the open space downstairs.The open space has always been very clean, not even paper scraps can be seen, and the black garbage bags are placed there, which is very eye-catching.At the beginning, I was really ashamed for a while, but later I found that the garbage bags were always cleaned up before I came back. That morning, as usual, I put the garbage bags downstairs and went to work.After walking for about 5 minutes, I suddenly remembered that I forgot to bring an important document, and hurried back. So I saw it. Near the small building, I found several neighbors gathered together, which was a new sight to me—before this, they all appeared as independent individuals, as if they had never had the desire to cluster—out of Instinctively, I immediately hid in the bushes beside the open space, watching their movements silently. Although these neighbors gathered together, they still didn't speak to each other. They were not too young, and they were some elderly people who retired at home and didn't have to go to work.A total of 4 or 5 people looked closely at something in the open space. I was curious about what it was. Fortunately, the grass was deep enough. I moved forward a few steps quietly, but no one noticed me. I was taken aback when I saw what they were looking at. It was a black plastic bag, the mouth of which had been opened, and they were taking things out of it one by one, and those things were all familiar to me-a broken CD, an old dress, yesterday's meal, two A battery...wait, it's all mine, they're digging through the same garbage bag I threw away 5 minutes ago. I began to try hard to recall whether I accidentally threw away my passbook. Seeing their serious and enthusiastic work ethic, the more I thought about it, the more I felt it was possible. When they came back, they took further action. After laying everything out on the open space, they glanced around vigilantly, I hurriedly lowered my head, their eyes swept over my head, but they didn't find me.After confirming that no one was around, what they did next confused me even more.One of them took out his digital camera and started to take pictures of this booth, from various angles, panoramic shots and close-ups, which made my heart shudder, every time he took a picture, my heartbeat stopped for a moment—— ——I can’t blame me for being timid. If taking pictures is nothing, then the actions of other people are enough to scare anyone——While taking pictures, another person took out a small notebook and kept recording on it Looking at something, while the other two took out white gloves and tweezers from their pockets, they picked up and looked at the things one by one, and then put them into a small plastic bag-they were doing all this methodically, this This scene reminds me of the police collecting evidence at the crime scene that often appears on TV. What on earth happened?