Historias de fantasmas

Capítulo 14

The man with the buzz cut grabbed Sun Jing's right hand and pressed it onto the stone.

"I've practiced," he reassured her. Then, with a sudden burst of strength, he plunged the pen into the ground with a "thud."

After the first strike, he glanced up at Sun Jing. Then, after the second strike, he glanced up at Sun Jing again.

From the third stroke onward, his speed suddenly increased, as fast as a gust of wind. The sound of the pen tip striking the stone surface was continuous, like a cacophony of raindrops. His speed continued to increase, so fast that the hand holding the pen almost became a blur. The flesh on his cheeks trembled, and he breathed rapidly, each breath catching in his throat, one after another, like a chicken waiting to be slaughtered.

With a crisp "crack," the plastic ballpoint pen snapped, the refill and barrel scattering. The crew-cut man tossed aside the broken pen barrel, opened his hand to look at his pierced palm, and nodded to Sun Jing.

“You’re very good,” he said.

With his other hand reaching out from the side, he grabbed Sun Jing's arm and pulled him away.

This was an elderly man in his sixties or seventies. He was wearing the same blue uniform as the young women, and he pulled Sun Jing along for more than ten steps before letting go. He frowned and said, "What's wrong with you? It's dangerous."

Sun Jing smiled and said, "I recognize him. I know he's very skilled."

"Even with the best technique, he's still crazy. Do you know where he'll insert it?"

Sun Jing smiled again.

The old man shook his head. "You haven't changed at all. Actually, that's a kind of mental disorder."

“Don’t confuse personality with disorder. Is this an occupational hazard, Dr. Wang?” Sun Jing smiled wryly. “Having a personality means being a bit extreme in some aspects, right? In this boring world, I always have to find some fun for myself.”

“Only madmen would find amusement in danger, Sun Jing,” Dr. Wang said jokingly, but not entirely. “I’ve lived this long and I still don’t find this world boring. Maybe you should come and chat with me more often.”

"Oh, what did you talk about? Did you talk about your father dying and your father going crazy, so you had childhood trauma that caused personality defects? Doctor, I know that theory very well."

Dr. Wang chuckled, "Actually, I think you should find a good woman to marry soon, so you'll feel a sense of belonging. But I'm worried about what kind of woman would attract you."

"You should worry more about the patients staying here. How's my mother doing lately?"

"She's doing quite well. Compared to previous years, her emotions are more stable now, and her thinking is more logical. Most of the time, she's like a normal old woman."

Dr. Wang has been in charge of Sun Jing's mental health treatment ever since she sent her mother to this sanatorium, for more than ten years. He and Sun Jing are very familiar with each other.

"Does she still hate me?" Sun Jing asked.

"She seems much better. After all these years, we still can't figure out why she hates you. If we can find out the reason, the treatment will be more targeted."

"Anyway, I've told you every detail I can remember," Sun Jing said with a sigh.

Since Sun Jing's father, Sun Xiangrong, suddenly collapsed and died on the street when he was nine years old, his mother, Fang Ling, who was with him at the time, also suffered a mental breakdown due to the shock. After her breakdown, Fang Ling showed a strange hatred towards her son, Sun Jing, which puzzled her doctor, Dr. Wang. He tried to find the reason by asking Sun Jing to recall the past many times, but to no avail.

Dr. Wang accompanied Sun Jing to the residential area on the other side of the lake, saying as they walked, "There must be a reason for this hatred. It's strange that we haven't been able to find it for so long. But now that her emotions are gradually fading, I won't deliberately stir them up. Maybe in a few more years, when she has recovered to a certain extent, you should take her out. Otherwise, some patients who are still in serious condition will have a negative impact on her."

"You mentioned on the phone last time that she really likes to talk about the past these days?"

Dr. Wang nodded. "Yes, sometimes when no one listens, she talks about the past by herself. Look, she's right there."

Following Dr. Wang's hand, Sun Jing saw in the distance an elderly woman dressed in white, with snow-white hair, sitting alone on a chair by the flower bed in front of the ward building. At first glance, she appeared to be no younger than Dr. Wang, but she was actually only fifty-five years old.

“I’m here today to listen to her recount her past,” Sun Jing said in a low voice.

He was about to head towards his mother when he remembered something, turned back, and said to Dr. Wang, "If someone is suddenly frightened and can't recall certain things, how should they be treated?"

"You need to explain in more detail."

Sun Jing explained Xu Xu's situation, making some changes, of course. Old Doctor Wang only thought of him as a scholar of oracle bone inscriptions, unaware that he was both creating replicas and digging up old tombs.

"It sounds like the scene she experienced left her with a rather negative psychological memory. Your stimulation has caused her psychological protective mechanism to block out that memory. It's not a very serious problem; this situation is usually short-term. If the memory isn't very important, it's best to let her leave it as it is. In most cases, she'll gradually recover over time. In particular, she shouldn't take any medication; psychiatric drugs always have side effects and aren't good."

"Oh." Sun Jing nodded. "How long will it take, I suppose?"

"It could take a few months, or more than a year."

"Would showing her similar scenes or people that evoke similar associations help with memory recovery?"

"That's possible, but I don't recommend it. She originally..."

The memory trauma was caused by overstimulation; if Ran continues to be stimulated, it's more likely to lead to truly serious mental problems. In her current state, conservative treatment is the most appropriate approach.

"I understand." Sun Jing thanked Dr. Wang for his advice and walked towards her mother.

There was an empty chair opposite Fang Ling, and she was looking at it, muttering to herself as if an invisible person was sitting in the chair and talking to her.

Sun Jing walked to the chair, hesitated for a moment, and then sat down. His mother looked at him, yet seemed not to look at him at all, murmuring as before. Now that he was closer, Sun Jing listened intently and could still hear what she was saying.

"The Zhang family downstairs is noisy all day long, keeping everyone awake at night. The working class, you know, they're not even united at home, so who are they supposed to unite with? People like that, what exactly is their level of awareness? Their awareness is high, while our family, which is all about scholarship, has low awareness."

It turned out they were talking about their old neighbors. Since the Cultural Revolution swept away all the "monsters and demons," the Sun family's house had been "revolutionized from the bourgeoisie," and many families had been suddenly taken over, creating a mixed-use situation like "seventy-two tenants." Neighbors living so close together inevitably led to some friction.

Fang Ling's gaze was intensely focused as she spoke, so focused that it made Sun Jing a little uneasy, because he didn't know what she was looking at or what she was seeing. He chuckled self-deprecatingly. In truth, Sun Jing had always felt that his mother's mental state was too fragile, the complete opposite of his own.

He understood the devastating blow her husband's death would be to his wife. But what struck him as Fang Ling's fragile psyche was that she hadn't gone mad from excessive grief after Sun Xiangrong's death. According to those present, Sun Xiangrong and Fang Ling were walking hand-in-hand along the Bund embankment before Sun Xiangrong suddenly collapsed. Fang Ling stood frozen for a few seconds, then followed suit. Sun Xiangrong was already dead when he arrived at the hospital, while Fang Ling had only fainted and went insane upon waking. The fact that she went mad simply from witnessing her husband collapse before her eyes was difficult to comprehend.

But sitting here today, Sun Jing had a strange feeling.

The circumstances of that year, and the death of Han Shang on the small street, and the lingering fear, bore a striking resemblance. Perhaps his mother had witnessed something?

Fang Ling was still rambling on when Xiao Zhi suddenly switched to another topic: "The Huangpu River is getting a bit dirty, and the fishy smell is getting stronger every day. When we were little, we had to swim across the river for our PE class and swimming team exams. Now we can't swim in this water anymore."

Fang Ling's world is almost entirely frozen twenty years ago, so when she says the Huangpu River is a bit dirty, it's also a shared memory of the early 1980s. After that, the Huangpu River went from being a bit dirty to being extremely dirty, and then, through vigorous efforts to clean it up, it transitioned back to being a bit dirty.

Such recollections, scattered and disorganized, were not what Sun Jing wanted to hear. What he wanted to hear were recollections of his great-grandfather. In truth, Fang Ling had never met Sun Yu; Sun Yu died young, and his lineage consisted entirely of single-lineage heirs, each generation dying in middle age. But perhaps she would hear something from her mother-in-law—Sun Yu's daughter-in-law.

Sun Jing lost his parents when he was nine years old, and his grandmother died when he was fourteen. His grandmother never mentioned his great-grandfather to him; perhaps some things were not suitable to tell a child. But it's hard to say. Sun Jing's deepest memory of his grandmother was when she solemnly touched his head and told him not to get married too early and not to have children too early. Sun Jing was only thirteen years old at the time.

"Do you remember... something from long ago? Grandma often talked to you, and you two got along very well," Sun Jing said hesitantly.

Fang Ling's gaze shifted slightly, as if she had only just realized who was sitting opposite her.

"You, you are..." In her memory, her son had always been a very young child. If she weren't reminded, she might not have realized that the young man sitting opposite her was her son. Now, she just felt that this person was very familiar, very familiar.

“I am…” Sun Jing hesitated. Usually when he came to see his mother, he would just stand by her side for a while and listen to her talk, but he wouldn’t acknowledge her. Because his mother harbored a strange hatred for him, every time they recognized each other, it would lead to an unpleasant scene.

But Fang Ling eventually recognized her son. She stared intently at Sun Jing, her gaze so intense it seemed to burn a person to ashes. She gripped the armrests of the chair tightly with both hands, her chest heaving noticeably.

Should I leave first and call the doctor? Sun Jing thought to herself.

“You are Sun Jing, my son, Sun Jing, my son.” She repeated, her tone initially harsh and ready to explode, then gradually softening.

“Sun Jing, my son… he’s already so big.” He sighed heavily and said, “It’s fate. Who told me to give birth to you? It’s fate.”

Sun Jing couldn't help but ask, "What kind of fate?"

“It’s fate, it’s fate.” Fang Ling shook her head and sighed a few more times. It’s very difficult to have a normal conversation with a mental patient; she always lives in her own world, only opening a very small channel to the outside world.

"What did you just say?" Fang Ling asked her son.

"I want to ask Grandma, she often talked to you, do you still remember her?"

“Grandma…Mom.” Fang Ling nodded.

"Did she mention her father-in-law?" Sun Jing was unsure how to address Sun Yu to Fang Ling. From the grandmother's perspective, she should call him father-in-law; from her mother Fang Ling's perspective, she should call him great-grandfather.

“My great-grandfather, Sun Yu,” he added.

"He had a fever and was delirious, and he was bedridden for more than a month. He was only a few years old at the time, maybe ten," Fang Ling said.

“Nine years old,” Sun Jing said with a sigh. He had fallen seriously ill when he was a few years old, on the very day his father died suddenly, as if there was some unseen connection between father and son. But he was asking about Sun Yu, so how did the conversation turn to himself?

"My head hurts terribly. The doctors have been examining me, but they can't find anything wrong with me," Fang Ling continued to say to herself. "Even when I'm lying in bed and asleep, I talk nonsense and say that my head is going to burst."

Sun Jing still remembers her serious illness when she was nine years old. The pain was unbearable; she had a high fever, headache, and weakness in her limbs. She went to the hospital many times, received IV drips and antibiotics, but they couldn't find a definite problem. It took more than a month for her to gradually recover. But by then, her mother, Fang Ling, had already been hospitalized with mental health issues. How did she know? Perhaps her family members who visited her told her.

"When the pain was severe, I would cry. My voice was hoarse all day long, and I would talk nonsense that no one could understand. I was restless day and night. Sometimes I would roll around in bed with my head in my hands. As a result, one time no one was watching me, and I fell off the edge of the bed."

Sun Jing couldn't remember that, he thought to himself. He had forgotten the details of how he got through those days, but the intense headaches he had suffered at the time left a deep impression on him, often appearing in his dreams.

Fang Ling seemed to have completely entered her memories of the past again. She sighed and said, "When I fell, my forehead hit the drawer of the bedside table that wasn't closed properly. That's how the scar on my eyebrow came about."

These words struck Sun Jing like a thunderbolt, making him tremble. The thunder made his head ring, and for a moment he couldn't hear anything. He jumped up from his chair and stared at his mother.

Fang Ling didn't care at all. Her son was no longer in her eyes. The fingertips of her left hand gently touched her left eyebrow, as if there was a scar there.

She certainly didn't have any scars on her eyebrows, but neither did Sun Jing.

That's Sun Xiangrong's scar, Sun Jing's father!

She was recalling what her mother-in-law had told her, about Sun Xiangrong's childhood, which must have been told to Fang Ling by Sun Jing's grandmother.

It turned out that his father had also suffered from a similar inexplicable serious illness when he was a child, with symptoms exactly the same as his own. When he was ten years old! Sun Jing's thoughts flashed like lightning, instantly illuminating the deepest darkness.

Sun Xiangrong was born in 1955. When he was ten years old, it was 1965. Sun Xiangrong's father, Sun Jing's grandfather, and Sun Yu's son, Sun Xieping, died that same year—suddenly.

Sun Jing had never trusted his intuition so much before. He was certain that his father, like himself, had suddenly fallen ill on the day his grandfather died. He could find out by checking when he got back; it was definitely true.

Could it be that Sun Xieping also suffered from a similar illness around the time of Sun Yu's death?

Often, the difference between understanding and not understanding is just a thin veil.

Sun Yu possessed the Medanzo bronze plaque, proving his connection to the mysterious inner world experiments. If he truly was an experimenter, he should have acquired some special abilities, but Sun Jing had no idea that his great-grandfather had possessed any extraordinary powers. Now he knew.

Those mysterious powers seemed destined to be beyond human control, so no one experimenting on them knew what kind of power they would unearth from within, whether it would bring fortune or curse. Some powers didn't even manifest immediately, like Han Shang's ancestor, Wilton. His uniqueness lay solely in passing down some of his memories to Han Shang through dreams and hallucinations, a process that bypassed his own lineage.

So why is it that after Sun Yu, every generation of his descendants became experts in oracle bone inscriptions, and achieved profound mastery of this difficult subject at a very young age?

Sun Jing showed great interest in oracle bone inscriptions from a young age. By his early teens, he had read through all the books on oracle bone inscriptions in the study, and he was constantly praised as a child prodigy. Now, as he reflects on his learning of oracle bone inscriptions for the first time, something strange immediately comes to mind.

Because of an illness he suffered at the age of nine, his previous memories became hazy. He had naturally assumed that he must have started learning to read at a very young age and been exposed to oracle bone studies by his family. That's why he could read the oracle bone studies books in the study so easily, as if he had read them before!

Looking back now, he often had flashes of inspiration when he flipped through those books, and sometimes he didn't even need to read the whole book once to understand what it was about.

He never doubted it. After more than a month of severe headaches, that nasty memory had perfectly blended into his mind!

Yes, now Sun Jing understood that this was not his memory at all. It belonged to his father, his grandfather, and ultimately to his great-grandfather, Sun Yu. He had passed down his knowledge of oracle bone script from generation to generation in such a bizarre and mysterious way.

Why did Grandma say those inappropriate things when she was a child? Because she knew how Grandpa died, watched Father become a "child prodigy," watched Father die, and then watched herself become a "child prodigy." Even if she knew nothing about the experiments, she could still glean something from these facts.

The reason for delaying marriage and childbirth is that when a child reaches around ten years old, the father will pass on his knowledge of oracle bone inscriptions to the child, at the cost of his own death. Therefore, having a child means having only ten years left to live, or perhaps even less.

This is the source of Fang Ling's hatred for her son; the topic must have been discussed between the mother-in-law and daughter-in-law at some point. Before Sun Xiangrong's death, this could be seen as unfounded speculation, a lingering superstitious belief among the older generation. But after Sun Xiangrong's death, Fang Ling saw her son as the direct cause of her husband's death.

Even Fang Ling's madness was probably caused by her being too close to Sun Xiangrong when he died. This was not a normal death; the transmission of memories caused the recipient more than a month of excruciating pain. Fang Ling, who was so close, must have also suffered some kind of shock.

The knowledge about oracle bones swirled in Sun Jing's mind at that moment, and the headache from twenty years ago seemed about to return. He gazed at his mother across from him, wanting to say "I'm sorry," but felt that these three words should not be uttered by him, nor by his father.

Is this all fate? No, it's all because of that experiment.

There are no residents left on the street, maybe just a few, before a construction crew moves in and starts demolishing the houses. Then, it will be impossible to walk anywhere.

Sun Jing strolled along the small street. He had come here specifically today because he could still sense Han Shang's last breath here.

The exact date of the illness that my father, Sun Xiangrong, suffered when he was ten years old has been found, and it was the same day that my grandfather died. My grandfather's medical records are no longer verifiable, but according to the recollections of his surviving relatives and friends, he also suffered a serious illness when he was ten years old, and Sun Yu died that year.

Everything was just as his intuition told him.