"You know me?" The woman wore heavy makeup, her face chalk-white, covered in red "blood stains." Even from far away, the smell of paint on her was unmistakable.
"I am Chen Ge—" The four words tumbled out of Chen Ge's mouth before he could stop them. Not "my name is Chen Ge," but "I am Chen Ge," as though they had simply always known each other.
A mental patient in a hospital gown and a haunted-house actress drenched in fake blood stood facing each other at the perimeter wall of the psychiatric hospital.
They belonged to two entirely different worlds, yet in that moment they were face to face.
"Is this your cat?" Zhang Ya didn't approach the fence. She only pointed at the white cat. "It led me here."
The white cat squatted between Chen Ge and Zhang Ya, its tail swishing back and forth with an unmistakably smug air.
"It's a stray. I don't know why it's so attached to me." Chen Ge looked at the cat crouching between them, a bitter smile crossing his face. "There's something wrong with my head — I've lost a lot of my past memories. The doctors are helping me with rehabilitation."
Though dressed in a hospital gown, Chen Ge gave off an impression utterly unlike the mental patients seen in films or television — calm, rational, with nothing visibly abnormal about him at all. An outsider might simply think he looked melancholic, his eyes carrying a quiet, indescribable pain.
Looking at the somewhat frail Chen Ge, Zhang Ya found it impossible to dislike him. "You must be this cat's owner. You fell ill and were hospitalized and forgot about it, but it never forgot you. If your cat is this devoted to you, you must be a gentle and kind person. I hope you recover your memories soon."
Zhang Ya crouched down and stroked the white cat's little head. "A cat crossing an entire city to find you — it must have gone through untold hardships on the way. Don't lose it again."
"Mm." Chen Ge crouched down as well, his gaze evasive, not daring to look at Zhang Ya's face. He simply stared in silence at Zhang Ya's hand as it stroked the cat.
Zhang Ya's hand was beautiful — slender fingers, very white, without a hint of color.
Sensing that Chen Ge had been staring at her hand, Zhang Ya gave a light cough and withdrew it. "This white cat showed up near my haunted house a few days ago and refused to leave. I could tell it was clever, so I didn't chase it away. Now that it's found its owner, there's no need for me to keep looking after it."
"Wait." Zhang Ya rose to leave, but Chen Ge called out to her.
"Is something wrong?"
Looking at Zhang Ya's profile, Chen Ge's eyes were full of confusion and anguish. "Have we met before? I remember your name — I simply can't forget it, no matter how hard I try. My past memories are filled with images of you, but I just can't recall the time we spent together."
If a stranger on the street had said something like that to Zhang Ya, she would have turned and walked away without a second thought, and if they had kept pestering her, she might have called the police outright.
But the situation now was different. Chen Ge was a patient in a hospital gown, and his condition didn't look like an act. The pain and helplessness radiating from the depths of his eyes were genuinely heartbreaking.
Zhang Ya stopped in her tracks and studied Chen Ge's face carefully. She had no recollection of him whatsoever, only a sense that the face — not exactly handsome — grew more pleasant the longer she looked at it.
"This should be our first meeting, shouldn't it? What I find strange is — how do you know my name?"
"I don't remember. The doctor told me I visited your haunted house in the past, which is how I know your name, but that might not be the whole truth." Chen Ge gripped the rust-covered fence. "I just feel that you're important to me."
Utterly ordinary words, yet coming from Chen Ge they felt profoundly sincere. His entire impression was that of a clean sheet of white paper — one on which every inch was covered with Zhang Ya's name.
Zhang Ya had heard similar things from other people before, but only when Chen Ge said them did she feel something distinctly different.
Her heartbeat gradually quickened. Zhang Ya hesitated for a moment, glanced back at the haunted house in the amusement park, then walked back in front of Chen Ge. "I usually remember every visitor who comes through my haunted house, but I genuinely think this is the first time I've seen you. Could your doctor have gotten it wrong?"
Chen Ge shook his head. "I still vaguely remember scenes from your haunted house — the Zombie Resurrection Night, Fire Officer Village, Midnight Escape, and a middle school…"
"Zombie Resurrection Night and the Ghost Marriage are indeed scenes from my haunted house, but the others you mentioned aren't." A hint of helplessness crept onto Zhang Ya's face. "My haunted house doesn't get many visitors these days. Running two scenes at the same time is already at my limit. If I opened more, I wouldn't have the manpower."
"How many employees does your haunted house have now?"
"Three — me and my parents." Zhang Ya looked a little embarrassed. "I hand out flyers and sell tickets. My dad plays the zombie, and my mom runs the ghost marriage scene. We don't make much money, but every day is happy enough."
A discrepancy flickered through his memories, and the pain in Chen Ge's head began to throb again. He vaguely recalled that the haunted house owner's parents weren't supposed to be inside the haunted house.
"You're sweating so much — you're shaking. Hey! Do you want me to call a doctor?" Zhang Ya saw that Chen Ge's face had gone deathly pale, dark bluish-green veins surfacing on his skin, and she panicked, thinking she might have said something wrong. "Stay right here! I'll go get a doctor!"
Zhang Ya was about to run toward the main entrance of the hospital, but before she had taken a step, Chen Ge seized her wrist.
"Don't go find them…"
Their hands were both cold. Zhang Ya startled. While she was still at a loss, the large bruises on Chen Ge's forearm began to bleed.
Within the fine beads of blood, tiny characters seemed to be hidden. The droplets merged into a single bright-red bead of blood, and the characters formed into a fragmented diary entry.
That drop of blood ran down Chen Ge's arm and fell onto Zhang Ya's wrist. In that instant, Zhang Ya's frantic heart turned calm.
Looking at her wrist still clasped in his hand, she felt dazed. It took several seconds before she finally pulled free.
"I'm sorry — please keep this between us. I don't want the doctors to know I've met you."
Pain crashed over him. Chen Ge hadn't delved into his past or triggered any old memory fragments, yet the agony surged in like a tidal wave, as though the dam that had once held it back had simply ceased to exist, leaving him to bear the boundless suffering alone.
His arm trembled. Chen Ge had thought he'd grown accustomed to pain, but only now did he realize that the worst he had felt before was barely a tenth of what flooded through him now.
"Why?"
He couldn't stand. Chen Ge collapsed to the ground. The white cat circled him frantically, and Zhang Ya kept speaking to him, but by now Chen Ge could no longer hear a word.
"What did I do to deserve this — why is this pain surging up all of a sudden?!"
His body felt as though it were being ripped apart. With the last shred of his reason, Chen Ge shouted toward Zhang Ya and the white cat: "Take the cat and go. Every morning I come here."
Those halting words barely out of his mouth, Chen Ge twisted around and staggered back into the hospital grounds. He used every last ounce of strength to push through the flowerbeds before finally collapsing on the garden path.