Discours étrange

Chapitre 3

Two days ago, I received Huang Zhi's second letter seeking help regarding her missing daughter, and I felt uneasy. I don't have her phone number on hand, and going to another city to verify it seems a bit too much—what if it's just the nonsense of a mentally ill person?

I happened to be here for an interview today, so it was convenient to take a look. Even though I saw her daughter playing peacefully in the house, it eased my sensitive heart.

As I watched the scenery rushing past the car window, I thought to myself, "Time really flies." More than a thousand days and nights have passed since that interview, which was ultimately deemed too bizarre and never made it into the news. During this time, I've certainly had many fascinating experiences, but recalling that doctor holding that paper-thin infant in his hand and raising it before me still sends shivers down my spine.

As I got closer to Datang Village, fragments of memories kept surging from the depths of my mind, piecing together and taking me back to that afternoon.

"What the hell is this?" Composing myself, I took a deep breath and asked casually. The baby skin opposite me emitted a fishy smell, which entered my body with each deep breath, making my chest churn and almost causing me to vomit.

“This…” Dr. Zhang glanced at the stillborn baby in his hand, a look of disgust on his face. He shook his head and said, “I don’t know either. Well, now that you’ve seen it, I’m sure you won’t be interested in studying it in detail.”

I gave a wry smile. Who would be happy to keep looking at this bizarre and disgusting dead baby?

“If you still want to conduct the interview, let’s go somewhere else, but I don’t have much time,” Dr. Zhang said.

"Okay, if it's convenient, let's just sit in the hallway outside."

There were benches on both sides of the corridor, and we found a place to sit. I don't know if it was psychological, but after leaving the delivery room, I even felt that the air was much fresher. Before, it felt like there was a big stone pressing on my chest, but now it felt much better.

"Isn't it very rare for a child to have such a deformity?" I asked.

"It's not just rare, I've never seen anything like it before," Dr. Zhang said.

"As a layman, from an ordinary person's perspective, I simply cannot imagine how a person could give birth to such a baby. How could it develop like this in the womb?"

"To be honest, although I have never seen such a deformed fetus, and I'm afraid no doctor in the entire hospital has ever seen one, there was a similar stillborn baby in the past."

"Oh?" I was a little surprised.

"Yes, there are such cases. It's called a paper baby, and it's so rare that it's only mentioned in case textbooks."

"Paper baby?" That's quite an apt term, but it only deepened my confusion. I distinctly remember asking the doctor in the delivery room what it was, and he replied that he didn't know. Yet now he says there have been cases like this, called paper babies. Isn't that a contradiction?

Chapter Two: The Illusory Twins (Part Two)

"Uh, paper baby, yes." Dr. Zhang's tone became unpredictable again, as if he wasn't very confident.

"how?"

"To put it simply, the paper babies I saw in the book do look like this, but to be honest, I find it hard to be sure that this is a paper baby."

His words completely confused me. What did he mean?

Seeing my surprised expression, the doctor gently shook his head and said something that he himself was also confused about.

"Do you think what I'm saying is contradictory? It's really because this case is so strange. Although there are all sorts of strange cases in medicine, especially in modern society, where changes in living conditions and habits lead to the emergence of new diseases, but..." The doctor shook his head again, as if his thoughts were severely disturbed and he couldn't organize his thoughts to explain the matter to me for a moment.

The fear I felt earlier had now been overwhelmed by curiosity. I stared at the doctor across from me, urging him to continue with my eyes.

Not long ago, the commotion caused by that scream had subsided. Perhaps it should be said that everyone who heard the scream was overwhelmed by the despair and fear expressed in it. All living things seek to avoid danger, and they will soon disperse, surely trying to forget the incident, but who knows, they might be awakened by that scream in the middle of the night.

Only one person was still standing not far away, from a position where she could hear my conversation with the doctor. She was the young nurse who had been guarding the delivery room door earlier. Undoubtedly, her current behavior was a bit abnormal, and in any case, she was definitely not at her post at the moment.

The nurse knew what kind of thing Huang Zhi had given birth to; her doubts were no less than mine, and she must have been terrified as well. The fear she felt upon seeing the paper baby was intense enough to leave a psychological scar on many. I guess she just wanted to hear how the doctor explained it to me. Fear often stems from ignorance; once the truth is understood, the fear naturally disappears.

Not everything can be explained clearly, and right now...

The doctor sighed.

“I don’t think it’s a paper baby,” the doctor said again. “It just looks like a paper baby. Let me explain what a paper baby is, and you’ll understand why I say this. You know what multiple pregnancies are, right?”

"ah?"

"Oh, that's what's commonly known as twins or multiple births. This happens to about one in a few hundred pregnant women. We usually consider it a happy event, but the risks of multiple births are much greater than those of single births. This is not only due to the difficulty of delivery, but also because the fetuses will encounter more problems developing in the uterus. After all, the mother's body only needs to provide nutrients to a single fetus, but with multiple births, the nutrients have to be divided into two or more."

"You mean, paper babies are deformed babies caused by insufficient nutrition in multiple births?"

“No, no.” Dr. Zhang shook his head repeatedly. “If that’s all there is to it, how can it be considered a rare case? In a sense, the paper baby is an unfortunate infant who was murdered before it was even born.”

"He was murdered before he was even born. Who murdered him? Was it his twin brothers?"

"It should be called twin brothers. It's too difficult, almost impossible, for multiple births to produce stillborn babies. Normally, twins grow up evenly in the womb. However, under certain extreme conditions, one of the twins is particularly strong. Initially, he will take away most of the nutrients and squeeze the living space of his brother. Finally, at a certain moment, the mother cuts off the supply of nutrients to his brother, and then the stillborn baby will be gradually absorbed by the mother."

"Strong individuals always survive more easily; using 'murder' to describe it seems a bit extreme," I said.

"The problem is that many people question whether the absorption by the mother alone can make a stillborn baby as thin as a sheet of paper," the doctor said meaningfully.

I suddenly felt a chill and looked at the doctor.

"So, one possibility is very likely. When the strong baby is pressing down on the weak baby, the weak baby slowly deforms, and then part of its body is absorbed by the mother's body, while another part is absorbed by the strong baby. Perhaps this absorption happens after the weak baby has completely lost its life... Who knows!"

The doctor didn't mention another possibility, which was unbelievable and disgusting. An image flashed in my mind: one baby in the womb clinging tightly to another, slowly absorbing its life essence until it withered and shriveled like paper. It was practically a vampire in disguise!

What would a person feel if they grew up and learned that they had been born by draining their own brother's life force?

"When I saw this deformed stillborn baby, my first thought was that it was a paper baby. But then I thought, if this is a paper baby, then where is the other one?"

The doctor stared intently at me, but his gaze wasn't actually focused on my face; it seemed to penetrate my body and project onto some point in the void. He appeared to be asking me a question, but didn't actually expect any answer. The more I thought about the paper baby Huang Zhi had given birth to, the more inconceivable it seemed. Even a doctor nearing middle age with over a decade of rich medical experience was overwhelmed by a barrage of questions swirling in his mind.

"Why did the patient only give birth to a paper baby? Where did its flattened sibling go? If there wasn't another baby, how did this stillborn infant become like this in the womb? What was oppressing it and absorbing it? Where did that thing go?"

The doctor asked questions faster and faster, his face growing paler and paler, beads of sweat appearing on his forehead in the blink of an eye. After asking the last question, his eyebrows trembled, and his eyes widened so much that it made my skin crawl.

"It's impossible for such a thing not to exist!" he blurted out a few seconds later, his words so forceful and vicious, like a cannonball fired from his mouth. "Such a thing couldn't grow naturally!"

As those words shot out of his mouth, spittle flew up and hit the tip of my nose.

"Oh, I'm sorry, I got a little lost in thought," the doctor apologized to me.

Bewitched? I think he's been possessed by the paper babies.

A series of hurried footsteps faded into the distance. I turned around and saw the nurse who had been eavesdropping nearby. She walked faster and faster, tripped, and almost fell.

The dose of sedative wasn't large, and Huang Zhi woke up soon after. She didn't sit up in bed, but stared blankly at the ceiling. Her daughter sat in a small chair, watching her mother.

"Mom," she called softly.

Huang Zhi did not react at all.

The girl quieted down; in fact, she had always been quiet, introverted to the point of being a bit withdrawn.

The other patients in the ward would sometimes glance at the mother and daughter and ask them a few questions out of kindness, but Huang Zhi would not respond.

I stood outside the ward for a long time, hesitating whether to interview Huang Zhi. It would be cruel to interview her at this time, and she might not cooperate. But if I didn't interview her, the news article I wrote based solely on what Dr. Zhang had said earlier would be very incomplete and might be rejected by the editor, never even making it to the press.

Dr. Zhang's unanswered questions swirled in my mind like a revolving lantern, and the image of the baby's paper-thin skin followed me everywhere, lingering in the shadows of my vest, impossible to shake off.

I licked my lips, which had become dry without me noticing, and slowly slipped my right hand into my shirt pocket.

Huang Zhi's eyes remained wide open, staring at the mottled ceiling. The sweat on his face had long since dried, and his vitality seemed to have vanished into thin air along with the beads of sweat. His once delicate and beautiful face had become ravaged by the withering of his spirit, giving him a fleeting, almost mummy-like appearance.

A slight gust of air made her blink.

Her pupils remained vacant, showing no change with blinking, but instead reflected the image of another person.

“Hello, I’m Nado, a reporter from Morning Star.” I bowed and said to her.

"This is my business card." I took the business card out of my pocket and handed it to her.

She blinked again and slowly turned her pupils toward me.

Chapter Three: The Serial Disappearances

Datang is a relatively wealthy village under the jurisdiction of Kunshan City. Most villagers now live in newly built three-story houses, and the village's businesses are thriving, attracting a large number of outsiders to work there. Many villagers have even stopped farming and leased their land to outsiders. More than half of the people living on the land of Datang Village are no longer villagers of Datang.

As the interview vehicle drove into Datang Village, I glanced at the village square we passed. It was quite impressive, with a tall globe sculpture and a large electronic display screen. Actually, the square was a bit too large, making it seem rather empty.

This is no longer strictly speaking a rural area; its farmland is decreasing for various reasons, and it is in a transitional period of rural-to-urban transformation.

Street signs aren't as ubiquitous here as they are in the city. The address was written on the envelope Huang Zhi sent me, but I still had to ask for directions several times before I found the general area.

The car was parked in an area with many buildings, somewhat like a residential community in the city. After thanking the driver, I turned the interview vehicle around and headed back to Shanghai.

Huang Zhi's land was requisitioned by the village to build an eco-park. As compensation, she receives a monthly living allowance. With the local standard of living, she can barely make ends meet, even with a child. If she could find another job, she could live quite well. Her letter didn't mention this, and I told her she might not be able to find work. After all, everyone in the village knows that her mental state is not normal.

It's almost four in the afternoon. It rained a while ago, and the ground is still wet, so the temperature isn't very high. Not far ahead, I saw an elderly woman with a face full of wrinkles sitting on the steps of a three-story building, picking vegetables. The buildings here have become urbanized, but people's habits aren't so easily changed.

This is Ercun. Huangzhi's address is simply written as "Huangzhi, Ercun, Datang Village," without any more specific house number. I walked up to the old woman and asked her.

She stopped what she was doing, looked up at me, and a bright smile spread across her wrinkled face. But then she shook her head and asked, "What did you say?"

She shook her head again, indicating that she didn't understand.

"Huh?" she asked in Kunshan dialect.

I realized she didn't understand Mandarin, so I quickly switched to Shanghainese and asked her again. People from the Jiangnan region can understand each other fairly well if they speak their dialects slowly.

When I mentioned the name Huang Zhi, the old lady's face immediately changed, her wrinkles revealing disgust and a hint of fear.

"Why would you go to her house? It's bad luck."

"Bad luck?" I was a little surprised. She didn't say Huang Zhi was crazy, but instead said that going to her house would be bad luck.

"That woman is evil. If you go to see her, be careful not to get cursed." The old lady said this very carefully.

I laughed. People like Kofu, I'm afraid only old people of that age would still believe in that nowadays.

Seeing my smile, the old woman knew I didn't believe her. She sighed and said, "Young man, sigh!" She pointed in a direction and said, "If you want to find her, just walk in that way. Her house is a little different from other people's houses."

I walked a short distance in that direction and then I saw it. It was indeed easy to spot, as it was a dilapidated two-story house. Dilapidated in the sense of crumbling walls and broken tiles, but rather in its rigid, old-fashioned style. The paint on the walls was almost completely gone, giving them a grayish-brown hue, a stark contrast to the more modern houses of its neighbors. Furthermore, it was noticeably far from the other houses, huddled alone in a corner of this residential area.

I stood at the door and rang the doorbell.

Judging from the outside, her house hadn't been renovated in many years; her circumstances were quite evident. I knew that her husband had passed away unexpectedly a few months before she gave birth, and she cherished her unborn child, so she went to the best maternity hospital she knew to deliver. That's why I saw her at the Shanghai First Maternity and Infant Hospital, and why she was alone except for her daughter. But I don't know about her other family members. What was that old woman referring to when she kept saying "bad luck" and "unlucky"?

I rang the doorbell again.

I still remember seeing Huang Zhi in the hospital three years ago; she didn't look like a peasant woman at all. In traditional Chinese aesthetics, sometimes a woman's frailty is also a kind of beauty, and Huang Zhi was a perfect example. Three years later, seeing her again, I wonder what she looks like now. Many mental patients age rapidly after a relapse, but some patients, because they are free from worldly worries, actually live more healthily than normal people.

Still no one answered the door. It seems the timing was bad; no one was home. But given her condition, she's probably just wandering around the village and won't be back late. Since she's only come once in a while, I'll wait for her.

I walked around her house and looked around carefully, and it seemed even more desolate. The top of the fence around the yard was uneven, with occasional missing corners that exposed the bricks underneath; a window on the second floor was broken, but it hadn't been replaced, just covered with a piece of cardboard.

I suddenly felt the hardships of life coming rushing at me.

I turned back and rang the doorbell again, but there was still no response. I walked back the way I came. There's an ancient town called "Qiandeng" next to Datang Village, which I could visit to pass the time.

As I passed the old woman picking vegetables, she was looking at me. I stopped, thinking perhaps I could talk to her.

Can I chat with you for a bit?

"Okay, okay," the old lady nodded at me, her hands still busy. Old people always enjoy chatting with young people.

"Why did you just say that Huang Zhi's family is unlucky?" I asked.

"Oh!" The old lady stopped what she was doing and shook her head. "She's very evil."

"It's very strange, why do I say that?"