The director's first letter ended there, leaving the final sentence hanging like an unfinished warning. Chen Ge stared at the page for a long moment, feeling the weight of the words settle into him. The director had never explicitly named the recipient of these letters, but one detail stood out sharply: the salutation at the beginning of each entry—"Doctor Chen." That surname echoed in Chen Ge's mind like a half-remembered sound. Could it be his father? The possibility flickered briefly, stirring a strange mix of hope and confusion. But then reality pressed back in. His father had been a Haunted House operator, not a psychiatrist. There was no record of him ever holding a medical license or working in a hospital. The connection felt too convenient, too optimistic. Chen Ge shook his head slightly and set the first letter aside. He reached for the second envelope, dated a few months later, and unfolded the paper with careful fingers.
"Doctor Chen, we have to meet in person. Things are getting slightly out of control."
The second letter opened with that blunt, urgent sentence. The director's handwriting had grown tighter, more hurried, as though the words had been forced out under pressure. He began by describing how the child had learned to crawl far earlier than expected. Almost as soon as he was mobile, he began actively seeking out his mother. No one in the Third Sick Hall could explain how he managed to leave the director's office and travel the length of the corridor to end up sitting directly outside Room 3. The nurses and orderlies swore the door had been closed and watched; yet somehow the infant had slipped through unnoticed, drawn like a magnet to the one place he should never have been able to reach alone.
The other staff members had begun to notice the child's strange behavior more and more. He rarely cried, even when hungry or uncomfortable. Instead, he smiled at empty corners of rooms, at blank stretches of wall, at places where no one was standing. He grew noticeably more animated as daylight faded, his small face lighting up with quiet excitement when shadows lengthened across the floor. He did not act like a normal child his age. Where other toddlers his age would babble nonsense syllables or demand attention, this boy spoke in startlingly clear fragments—words that should have been far beyond his developmental stage. And the things that came out of his mouth often sent chills down the spines of the adults who heard them.
The director noted that the child possessed an almost supernatural ability to learn. He absorbed language at a pace that defied explanation. Yet the words he chose were never simple greetings or baby-talk. They were precise, sometimes eerily adult. The nurses who spent time with him began to feel uneasy in his presence. He would stare at patients who had been heavily sedated or given strong sleeping pills and regard them as though they were already corpses—his gaze calm, detached, almost curious. When he passed by patients lost in psychosis, he would wave at them cheerfully, but he never looked directly into their eyes. Instead, his gaze fixed on the empty space just above their shoulders, as though something invisible were perched there, something only he could see.
The strangest habit of all was his fixation on Room 3. Once he could walk steadily, he began going there on his own almost every day. He never tried to enter. He simply sat outside the door—small legs folded beneath him—and stared at it for hours. An entire afternoon could pass with him motionless, eyes fixed on the plain white door as though waiting for something to happen. Some of the doctors and nurses grew so unnerved by his behavior that they quietly suggested sending the boy to an orphanage or foster family. They were spooked by him—by the way he watched, by the things he said, by the way he seemed to see things no one else could. But the director refused. The mother's condition had finally stabilized after a full year of treatment. Removing her child now might undo all that progress. They could not afford to give up on her recovery, not when they had come so far.
Chen Ge finished reading the second letter and carefully refolded it. The director's growing unease was palpable in every line. What had begun as curiosity about an unusually intelligent child had slowly turned into something closer to dread. The boy was not just precocious—he was wrong, in ways that defied easy explanation. And the deeper the staff looked, the more they realized that something about him refused to fit inside the normal boundaries of childhood.
"I rejected the doctors' suggestion to transfer the child away," the director wrote, his handwriting growing slightly more unsteady as the entry continued. "After several additional months of careful observation and debate, there came good news from the police investigation. Using the car's license plate as their starting point, they tracked down the boy's biological father in a southern province. By that time, the mother's condition had improved dramatically—she was stable enough to hold coherent conversations and show genuine affection toward her son. We immediately hired a lawyer and brought the father to court, demanding that he repay the full hospital and treatment fees that had accumulated after his prepaid funds ran out. At the same time, we pressed for him to acknowledge the child officially and provide the mother with a legal marriage and name."
"We won the case decisively. It remains unclear whether the threat of prison or genuine guilt finally moved the father, but the outcome was positive. Everything appeared to be moving in the right direction. The mother continued to improve steadily; she displayed remarkable strength and clarity whenever she was in her son's presence. The child, too, seemed to thrive when allowed near her. For the first time in years, the hospital staff dared to hope that this tragic story might have a relatively happy ending."
"The treatment continued for another full half-year. By the end of that period, the mother's illness had stabilized completely. She no longer experienced violent mood swings, no longer required constant supervision, and was able to engage meaningfully with both staff and her child. She had few friends and almost no remaining family, so her departure from the hospital passed quietly. Only a handful of doctors and nurses saw her off. The child left with his mother, but the three years he had spent growing up inside the mental hospital had already left deep, permanent marks on him. The night before they were discharged, the boy slipped away from his mother and returned alone to the corridor outside Room 3. He stood there in the dark, speaking softly to the closed door in words no one could understand—repeating phrases that sounded like fragments of a private language."
"After they left, I honestly believed the entire matter was finally over. I assumed the hospital could return to some semblance of normalcy. But who could have predicted that events would soon take a completely unexpected and far darker turn?"
"Just one year later—when the child was only four years old—his father brought him back to the center and demanded readmission. According to the father's account, the woman had been murdered at home, and the little boy had witnessed the entire killing. When I saw the child again, he had changed profoundly. The only stable pillar in his young life had been violently torn away. His condition now mirrored almost exactly how his mother had first arrived—silent, withdrawn, eyes empty, as though part of him had been extinguished along with her."
"Given the previous history and the center's already strained resources, we did not dare admit him immediately. We strongly advised the father to take the boy to an official government psychiatric hospital instead, where he could receive more appropriate long-term care. That same night—after we rejected readmission—right at the stroke of midnight, the white door of Room 3 began to leak blood. A slow, thick trickle seeped from the edges of the frame and pooled on the floor. It lasted exactly one minute before stopping as suddenly as it had begun. When I learned of the incident, a full week had already passed. In that single week, many strange and unbelievable things had begun happening throughout the hospital."
The second letter ended abruptly there, the final sentence hanging unfinished like a cut thread. Chen Ge sat motionless for several seconds, the words sinking in. The director's description—of a child witnessing his mother's murder, then being rejected by the very place that had once kept them alive—echoed another story Chen Ge knew all too well. He had heard of someone who experienced almost exactly the same sequence of events: a young boy losing his mother to violence, then being turned away when he needed help most.
Chen Ge set the second letter aside with deliberate care and reached for the third envelope. His fingers trembled slightly as he opened it. Inside lay a single photograph. When he saw the image, a wave of emotion crashed over him so violently that he had to brace himself against the desk. He recognized the picture instantly. He had seen it before—when he helped Doctor Gao pack up Men Nan's belongings at Hai Ming Apartments years earlier.
The photo showed a woman dressed in a patient's gown, leaning back against the side of a hospital bed. Her expression was soft, tired, but peaceful. Beside her sat a small, shy-looking boy, no more than three or four years old. He was pressed close to her side, small hands clutching the edge of her gown, looking up at her with quiet trust. The background was unmistakably one of the patient rooms in Jiujiang Third Psychological Convalescence Centre. The mother and son stared out from the photograph across two decades, frozen in a moment of fragile connection that had not lasted.