139. Footsteps Behind

"This is my first month here, and my first time keeping watch."

"I heard from the seniors that although the hospital pays well, sometimes some strange things happen. When we eat lunch in the cafeteria, they tell ghost stories, which are quite scary."

"But hospitals always have stories about dead people. I heard them when I was in nursing school. It's nothing serious."

"In the evening, all the other nurses went off duty, leaving Sister Wang Ping and me to keep watch here. Sister Wang Ping went straight to sleep in the middle of the night. When I went to the cafeteria for dinner, I ate with Sister He. When she heard that it was my first time keeping watch, she said something to me in a rather mysterious way."

"She said that the hospital was built against a taboo. This place was originally the ancient execution ground, a place for killing people. Now it was used to build a place for saving people, which was inherently inauspicious. So the hospital had many problems during construction, and people even died. In the end, they had to drive Living Stake to finally complete the project."

"I asked what the Living Stake' were, Sister He chuckled and said that when workers died in accidents at construction sites, the hospitals would give their families a large sum of money so they wouldn't have to keep the bodies, saying that the bodies had been crushed by the machines. But in reality, these bodies were sealed into the foundation, inside those pillars. Only in this way could the things here be suppressed." After saying that, she pointed to the pillar next to me.

"Although Sister He is a senior, she seems to have had an accident a few years ago. After that, she would sometimes talk nonsense. However, she is preparing to transfer to a public hospital this year, so everyone stopped paying attention to her. After she finished talking about this, she told me that I should never go to the Room at the end of the corridor on the fifth floor when I am on night watch, otherwise something bad will happen."

"I thought to myself, isn't that the storage room? Why would I go there? But I didn't ask any more questions Sister He picked up her bowl and left."

"When I returned to the nurses' station, Sister Wang Ping was already asleep. I waited until it was almost time, then picked up a flashlight and went upstairs. They all like to take the elevator, but I prefer to walk to get some exercise."

"But when I went upstairs, I always felt like someone was following me. But when I turned around several times, I didn't see anything. When I got to the fifth floor, I even heard the sound of footsteps."

"I turned around and shone my flashlight around. There was no one there. But when I shone it around, I noticed a series of footprints on the ground behind me."

"These are less like footprints and more like crawling marks, yes, the kind of marks a child has made on the ground, as if the child had something dirty on them, and the crawling marks were left little by little on the floor."

"There are no children in the hospital, it's impossible. I don't know why, but our hospital doesn't have an obstetrics and gynecology department and doesn't deliver babies, so there definitely won't be any children there."

"I crouched down to see where the footprints came from, and I saw that they had already passed me and were crawling towards the End of the Corridor."

"Most of the lights in the intensive care unit on the fifth floor were off. It was pitch black at the End of the Corridor. I shone my flashlight there, and there was nothing there except the wall at the end."

"But these footprints, step by step, staggered toward the room at the end of the road."

"I feel a little guilty, but what if I really have a child?"

"After thinking about it, I decided to go and take a look. After walking past a few wards, I came to the Room at the end of the corridor. Strangely, there was light coming through the crack in the door, and there should be no one in the room."

"Did the cleaning lady forget to turn off the light?" I thought, so I pushed open the door to turn off the light.

"But I saw it in the Room at the end of the corridor, and in that room, there was that thing."

"I was startled and hurriedly closed the door, running away as fast as I could, not daring to look back, afraid that thing would catch up with me. No, I have to tell Sister Wang Ping. I saw that the elevator had just arrived at the fifth floor. I pressed the elevator button and before going in, I mustered up the courage to take a look at the Room at the end of the corridor. I only saw the door slowly opening and a shadow lingering at the door."

"The elevator doors finally closed. I was so scared my legs went weak and my mind couldn't think of anything. As soon as the elevator doors Door Opening on the first floor, I went straight to the nurses' station. I don't know why, but the lights in the nurses' station were off. Maybe Sister Wang Ping thought it was too bright. I turned on the lights and shook Sister Wang Ping hard. After shaking her for a while, she finally woke up."

"I told her what I saw in the Room at the end of the corridor the fifth floor. She was also very surprised. She got dressed and prepared to go with me to see it. We took the elevator upstairs. When we got to the fifth floor, the door to that room was already closed. I used the greatest courage I had in my life to push open that door. Then, I found that Sister Wang Ping was gone, and the things in the room were gone too. The place was empty, with only clutter."

"I turned around and saw that the patients in the ward were gone. It was very strange. I didn't know what had happened. I could only go back to the nurses' station to call the police."

"But the phone call didn't go through either. I looked outside, and it was very dark; there weren't even any stars."

"I didn't dare go out, so I just turned on the light at the nurses' station and sat here waiting for the others."

"I'm so scared! Is there anyone who can save me? Is there anyone?"

"Can you save me?"

Lu Ban saw that the handwriting had become messy and illegible by the end, and even the sentences were incomplete and unreadable.

He sat there, looking at these words, and suddenly felt as if there were people beside him.

It's as if the nurse, unaware of the unexpected turn of events, is sitting in her chair, meticulously recording the last things she saw.

"Xu Xiao's and Wang Ping's records match in some parts, but not in many others. In Wang Ping's record, Xu Xiao was already acting strangely when she woke her up, but in Xu Xiao's record, she was perfectly normal until she went to the End of the Corridor for the second time. It seems that one of these two people's records is wrong, or perhaps what they saw was real, but there was a discrepancy?"

What's in the Room at the end of the corridor?

Lu Ban grew increasingly curious. According to Xu Xiao's records, the Room at the end of the corridor was originally a storage room, but it seemed to contain something surprising and was guarded. It seemed that all the secrets of this hospital were in that room.

All the information and clues pointed to that one room, as if all Lu Ban would need to do was push open that door and all the problems would be solved, with all the answers waiting for him there.

Rather than saying that Lu Ban was going to explore that house, it would be more accurate to say that the house was chasing after Lu Ban, like the whispers of a devil, tempting him to go there.

"This memo is missing pages, but it seems to be untouched for the time being. Could it be that I need to take it to the corresponding location for the records inside to surface?"

Lu Ban immediately thought of Sister He that Xu Xiao had mentioned. According to this description, Sister He should be He Bixiong.

"The only places associated with her, besides the nurses' station, are Room 502."

Thanks to "Cold water with sugar cubes", "Taisu Nine Needles", "xiaotang246" and "Dazhou Zz" for their 100-coin reward!