Iron Fist and Loyal Heart

Chapter 12 Strange Things Happening at the Street Office

At the end of October, the Beihe Subdistrict Office received four complaints in succession.

The first call came from Old Wu, the hardware store owner, who said that items on the shelves in his store had been moved every few days. It wasn't theft—nothing was missing, just repositioned. The night before, he had placed three boxes of expansion screws on the right side of the counter, and the next morning, the three boxes were neatly stacked on the left side of the floor. Old Wu repeatedly emphasized on the phone that he wasn't mistaken, saying that he had run a hardware store for half his life, and the arrangement of goods was one of the few things he never took lightly.

The second case came from Mr. Zhang, a retired accountant living on the second floor of the adjacent tenement building. Mr. Zhang said that his dog had recently started baring its teeth and growling at the door every night around midnight, and nothing he did could stop it. The dog was an old dog, eight years old, and had never barked inside before. But for the past four nights in a row, it had gotten up at the same time, walked to the entrance, stared at the door, and arched its back. Mr. Zhang opened the door and checked; the hallway was empty, the motion-activated light was on, and there was a draft in the stairwell.

The third case involved a single migrant worker renting a room on the edge of the old district. She came to the window to complain that she kept having nightmares, in which someone stood at the foot of her bed staring at her. The content was the same, the characters were the same, and even the creases of the sheets in the dream were exactly the same as before she fell asleep. She hadn't slept through the night for several days.

The fourth complaint call was answered by Aunt He. When Su Xinpei glanced at her from his workstation, Aunt He had already tucked the phone between her ear and shoulder, her old fountain pen still writing on a form. She listened for a while, answered with an "Mm," then listened again, her pen never stopping. After hanging up, she pushed a note to Su Xinpei; it only had two lines: "Seventh row, fourth house in the bungalow area, surname Zhou, whispering louder, afraid to leave the house. Don't go alone."

Su Xinpei took the note and looked at it for a few seconds. Aunt He used an old-fashioned ballpoint pen, writing very lightly, with a scratchy sound like a pencil writing on absorbent paper. The handwriting was exactly the same as the "unresolved" marks in red pen in the files. He stuck the note on the bottom edge of the monitor without asking any further questions.

These four complaints came from four different addresses and seemed unrelated. The hardware store was an old-style row of shops, Uncle Zhang's tenement building was a residential building, the migrant worker rented a basement room, and the resident in the bungalow area lived in an old bungalow at the other end of the old district, separated by two alleys and a row of vegetable markets. But after Su Xinpei marked the addresses on the administrative division map, he found that although the four addresses were scattered, they were located at the four corners of the same old town area. If you circled the area from the tenement building in the north to the bungalow area in the south, from the hardware store in the east to the basement in the west, it would contain only one building: the Beihe No. 2 Primary School, which was abandoned three years ago.

He sat at his workstation, twirling a pencil across his knuckles twice, then opened the resident information management system and searched the historical complaint records for each of the four addresses. The hardware store's address hadn't received any complaints in the past three years, but the system had marked it as a vague "suspected security dispute" in an earlier year, categorized as "resolved." Two years ago, the apartment building where Uncle Zhang lived received two similar complaints: a dog owner reported his pet barking abnormally at night, each time marked as "no abnormalities, case closed." The basement room rented by the migrant worker had a new address number that appeared after the renumbering two years ago, with no corresponding complaint records in the past. However, three years ago, a tenant in the same building complained that he "always felt like he was being watched at night," but the record was only drafted and never followed up. As for the Zhou family resident in the bungalow area, his wife said on the phone that their child woke up in the middle of the night saying "there's someone under the bed." They searched under the bed and in the cabinets but found nothing. The couple stayed with the child all night, and the next morning, the child was still saying the same thing.

Su Xinpei released the mouse and leaned back in his chair. He turned to a new page in his notepad, syncing the timestamps of these messages to the recent weeks' abnormal petition statistics section. Then, he drew a curve in the blank space—a curve representing the cumulative petition trend since the first complaint about "whispering in someone's ear." It had a period of stability in August, dropped to almost zero in mid-September, and then suddenly rose again in the last two weeks, with a slope exceeding the steepest point in August. He placed the pencil on the notepad, without drawing a conclusion, but simply put a question mark next to the starting point of the rising slope.

He decided to go to the site first. Not as a consultant for the Special Affairs Bureau, but as a coordinator for the local street office. It was a resident satisfaction survey within the jurisdiction. This pretext was perfectly reasonable, wouldn't be questioned by anyone, and wouldn't require any additional records in the filing system.

At 3 PM, Su Xinpei packed his visit materials into his briefcase and changed into the dark blue work vest issued by the subdistrict office. The vest had "Beihe Subdistrict - Serving the People" printed on the chest. The zipper pull was plastic; after nearly three years, it only had one small fuzz, which he didn't mind and pinched off with his fingernail. He rode a shared bicycle to the hardware store, where Old Wu was squatting at the entrance, oiling the chain of an old bicycle. Seeing him, Old Wu stood up and wiped his hands. Su Xinpei explained his purpose, instructing him to double-check the store's inventory in the next two days and suggesting that he also take stock of the low-lying pallets near the ventilation openings on the outer shelves, and call the subdistrict office immediately if there were any changes. Old Wu agreed.

Uncle Zhang lived on the first floor of the tenement building. Su Xinpei knocked on the rusty security door, and Uncle Zhang let him in. The room was very clean; old newspapers were spread on the coffee table, and a yellow dog lay on a mat in the corner. Su Xinpei squatted down to look at the dog—the dog's spirits weren't bad, but the whites of its eyes were a little red, and its pupils reacted to light slightly less than usual. He asked Uncle Zhang if the dog had had diarrhea or a change in appetite recently. Uncle Zhang said it ate a little less, but was still eating, just wouldn't leave the bedroom in the middle of the night, no matter how much he pulled it. When Su Xinpei petted its head, the yellow dog squinted its eyes, neither excited nor trying to escape. Su Xinpei stood up and said he would write down the situation and asked Uncle Zhang not to lock the bedroom door for the night.

The young woman working didn't open the door. Su Xinpei knocked a few times, waited a moment, and knocked again. There was no answer. He stopped—the bottom edge of the door was a little cold, not from the weather, but the kind of penetrating chill that creeps up your trouser legs after being in a basement for a long time. He pressed his ear close to the door and listened. There was no television sound, no footsteps, only an extremely low hum, intermittent, like an old fan still humming under a thick cloth. He wrote the room number on the bottom page of his notepad and took a picture of the door crack for future reference.

The last stop was the one he cared about most—No. 4, Row 7, Pingfang District.

The speaker was Uncle Zhou's wife, her face sallow, her hands clutching the edges of her apron. She said the child was inside, and her husband had taken leave to stay home with the child. Su Xinpei didn't ask to see the child; he simply sat on an old wooden chair in the main room and asked a few casual questions in a conversational tone. The child's description matched the phone call—he woke up in the middle of the night saying there was someone under the bed, but the area under the bed was empty, not even a marble. He asked the child to point in the direction he had been looking, and the child pointed to the left corner of the bedroom. Directly above the corner, near the ceiling, a piece of yellowed, peeling wallpaper was gently curled up, revealing a hairline crack on the wall below, extending from the floor to about half a person's height. The crack was less than two millimeters wide, with no dampness or mold around it, and a distinct cooling sensation when touched with the back of a finger—about three degrees cooler than the same height on the opposite corner.

Su Xinpei didn't reach out to touch the crack in the wall. He squatted down, placed his work logbook on his lap, and, while taking notes, looked up carefully for a while—the inner surface of the crack wasn't the rough cross-section of the brick, but a very thin, semi-transparent film. When illuminated, the reflective surface appeared dark purple, much like the sheen of the subspace exudate he had seen in the crack area last time. He drew the location of the crack in the wall on the floor plan of the apartment in his work log, then got up and said some reassuring words to the homeowner, saying that the neighborhood committee would prioritize arranging for the property management to conduct wiring and wall inspections in the next few days.

As Su Xinpei left the bungalow area, it was just beginning to get dark. The streetlights on the dilapidated exterior walls were not yet lit. He pushed his bicycle along the alley for a while before riding it up.

It was almost closing time when he returned to the street office. Aunt He was still in the inner room organizing meeting notices to be sent out tomorrow, with several stacks of stamping papers spread out on the table. Su Xinpei changed out of his work vest, washed his hands, and sat back down at his workstation. He didn't immediately turn on his computer, but instead spread out the visit records from his briefcase on the table: four follow-up forms, each with the same wording in the "preliminary judgment" column in printed form—"No routine safety hazards found, further investigation recommended." He added a few lines of text in pencil below the wording, symbols and abbreviations that he could understand: four complaints, located on the outskirts of the abandoned school; the content of the complaints differed from last year's "whispering in the ear," lacking a sound source, and leaning more towards a directional sense of gaze and localized physical disturbance; he left the number of the crack in the corner of the wall in the bungalow area blank for the time being.

He put the pencil back in the pencil holder, leaned back in his chair, and looked out the window at the almost completely dark sky over the downtown area. The streetlights came on, casting a cold white glow on the corrugated iron eaves of the building opposite.

The next morning, Su Xinpei reviewed the architectural files of Beihe No. 2 Primary School in the archives. The school had been closed three years prior due to insufficient enrollment, and the school buildings were now under the management of the district education bureau, but no maintenance funds had been generated since the transfer. The dusty campus floor plan was tucked among a stack of unfiled document bags in the filing cabinet. The building facilities section of the plan marked the locations of two underground drainage ditches beneath the south exterior wall of the main teaching building, one of which ran right past the corner of the wall of house number four in the seventh row of the bungalow area.

He folded the blueprints neatly and tucked them inside his coat, without making copies or noting their purpose on the borrowing log. When he arrived at Tiegutang in the evening, he was more than ten minutes earlier than usual. After changing his shoes, he proceeded with his usual stance training, boxing practice, and leading the skin-refining class. A light bulb in the courtyard was broken, and Old Tie Tou told Wu Xiong to rummage through the storeroom for a spare. He kicked the toolbox from the bench, saying the bulb might have been soaked by the last rain. Su Xinpei finished his boxing practice by the dim light from the streetlamp outside. During the latter half of the skin-refining tempering class, the two took turns using an infrared lamp and an ice water bucket to alternate between hot and cold. Wu Xiong grimaced from the ice water, and Old Tie Tou, sipping his iced tea from his enamel mug, remarked, "Those with the most sensitive skin talk the most."

After training, Su Xinpei didn't leave immediately. He placed his coat on the bench, sat down, and took out the floor plan from his pocket. He unfolded it on the low stool in front of Lao Tietou, pressing down the four curled corners of the plan with the foot of his water bottle. "Four complaints, the addresses forming an irregular quadrilateral, with the abandoned school building of Beihe No. 2 Elementary School at the center. The cracks in the bungalow area feel cold to the touch, and the inner wall coating has the sheen of subspace overflow. Last year's 'whispers in the ear' were ring-shaped, this year's have become quadrilaterals."

Old Tie Tou looked down at the diagram for a while, then pulled out a cigarette from his pocket and tapped it on his knee a few times. The evening news was playing on the radio, and he listened to two reports before speaking: "Last year, the agricultural machinery factory's cracks spread outwards on their own. This time it's a different kind. It was originally dormant under the school building, but last year it was swept up by the waves of crack expansion, woke up once, and only fully came to life this year. The four complaints form the 'edge' of its perception, not the 'edge' of its radiation—it's inside the school building, and the ends of the four perception zones just happen to lie outside the walls of the four complainants, because it hasn't taken shape yet and is still building its own perception circle."

Su Xinpei picked up his enamel mug and took a sip of water. It was from the herbal tea mug at Tiegutang, and it tasted a bit bitter. He didn't speak, but simply moved the blueprints half an inch to the side, making it easier for Lao Tietou to see the location of the culvert. Lao Tietou held a cigarette in his mouth but didn't light it. After saying this, he remained silent for a while, finally only throwing out a sentence: "You should first figure out the gloss characteristics and temperature gradient of the seepage from the cracks yourself before deciding on the next step." He didn't ask Su Xinpei for any guarantees, nor did he mention the word "be careful." The evening news on the radio finished, and only a faint static crackled from the speaker.