Chapter 4

Chapter 4

When I arrived at Maternal and Child Hospital No. 3, all kinds of machinery were rumbling away on the demolition site.

Maternal and Child Hospital No. 3 had been completely abandoned for seven or eight years by then, and the entire compound was slated for demolition.

The big trucks hauling materials were coming and going nonstop. Only the few guys on Peng You’s side were standing around doing nothing, leaning against their trucks with no intention of loading up.

“What’s going on?” I asked after getting out.

“Brother Long!”

Wang Cheng, Dashun, and Old Zhang all came over. Old Zhang said helplessly, “No idea what the boss negotiated. Anyway, we’re not responsible for going into the site to haul scrap. That Manager Liu said we should wait first and load the trucks after they finish packing everything up.”

“Packing?”

I was a little confused. What could a hospital abandoned for years possibly still have that needed to be packed and loaded?

“That Manager Liu talks like he’s hiding something. I don’t think he’s from the construction site either.”

Wang Cheng raised a hand and pointed ahead. “I saw him lead a group of people into that building by themselves. They brought a lot of wooden crates too.”

I looked in that direction. Unlike the other buildings that had already been stripped beyond recognition, that one was still intact. Even the windows were still there. In the middle of this demolition zone, it looked completely out of place.

And I happened to know that building. It was the old pediatric inpatient ward of Maternal and Child Hospital No. 3-the place where my little sister had died.

The strange feeling in my chest refused to fade. After going in circles for so long, I had somehow ended up back here.

“My guess? Maybe there’s still some valuable equipment inside, and the site manager secretly sold it off.”

Wang Cheng was still muttering when Dashun quickly cut him off. “Don’t talk nonsense.”

“That mouth of yours is going to get you in real trouble sooner or later,” Old Zhang said, pointing at Wang Cheng’s nose.

Wang Cheng scratched the back of his head and chuckled. “Isn’t Brother Long here to hold the line? With Brother Long around, I’m not scared of anything.”

“Ghost Festival is coming up soon, and Maternal and Child Hospital No. 3 has always been a pretty evil place. We’d better be careful,” Old Zhang warned, still cautious.

At that moment, my attention was still fixed on that building.

My sister’s ward had been on the second floor of the inpatient building. Back then, I was still in school, and my parents never took me to the hospital to see her.

The only day I ever came to Maternal and Child Hospital No. 3 was the day I learned my sister had passed away.

Even though twenty-six years had gone by, I could still see that deathly white corridor as if it were yesterday. The endless sobbing. The wards with their lights on, silhouettes moving behind the doors.

I stared at the windows on the second floor. Dust from the years lay over the glass, as if everything had been frozen in place.

In a few of the wards, curtains still hung there, their whiteness faintly visible beneath the grime.

Without thinking, I wanted to count them, to see if I could still find the room my sister had stayed in.

Suddenly, I noticed one of the windows was open.

A corner of the white curtain was lifted by the wind, as if the entire silent building had suddenly come alive.

“Uncle Zhang, what kind of rumors did this hospital have? I remember when I was little, this place was pretty crowded,” Wang Cheng asked from the side.

“Plenty. This hospital used to be famous for pediatrics. But later, I heard things kept happening over by the pediatric wards. Once, several family members stabbed a nurse. They said there was blood all over the floor, and the nurse’s uniform turned red.”

“And all because she missed a vein with one injection. Afterward, the ones who stabbed her wouldn’t admit it. They said they were out of their minds at the time and never meant to attack anyone.”

The moment Old Zhang finished, I saw a withered hand reach out from that open window. The sleeve around the wrist was half white and half red.

Between the fluttering gray-white curtains, that hand slowly hooked itself onto the window. Then it slowly pulled the window shut.

Seeing that Wang Cheng was listening intently, Dashun continued, “I heard before that there was a seriously ill child whose surgery failed. His parents spent almost everything they owned trying to save him. After the child died, they couldn’t accept it. No one knows how they got up to the roof of the hospital, but the two of them held hands and jumped together.”

“It happened to be pouring rain that day. Blood mixed with rainwater, staining the entire entrance to the inpatient building a bright, fishy red. The hospital was wronged too. The door to the roof had clearly been sealed shut at the time.”

“After that, people in the hospital said that whenever it rained hard at noon, they would hear a sudden bang outside the inpatient building-”

Whether it was a coincidence or not, the second Dashun said that, a loud bang really did explode from the construction site.

The whole site erupted at once, and a lot of people started searching.

“What was that?”

“What fell this time?”

“Did it hit anyone?”

Wang Cheng’s face went white in an instant. Beside him, Old Zhang’s legs looked a little weak too.

The workers searched the site, but they couldn’t find what had made the crashing sound.

And from the looks of it, this wasn’t the first time they had heard that noise.

Dashun had stopped halfway through his story. Now he seemed unsure whether to keep talking, and he turned to look at me in a daze.

I took a pack of cigarettes from my pocket and handed one to each of them. “What hospital hasn’t had people die in it? Don’t scare yourselves over nothing. Get the trucks ready. It’s about time we got to work.”