Preamble1
Wake
Daniel.
That was his name.
From a very, very deep dream, he slowly Danieled over. It was the ringing of the phone at the foot of his bed, the sound that kept stimulating the nerves in his hearing and brain, making him suddenly think of a death knell. Another premonition?Daniel's mind shook as he opened his eyes and stared at the telephone set, and then at the time, which was now 1:40 in the morning.
The ringing continued. Strangely, before his hand even touched the phone, he had a premonition of what was on the line-someone was dying.
He picked up the phone. A young woman's voice came on the other end of the line, “This is Lovejoy Hospital, are you Mr. Daniel?”
“It's me, is someone dying?” He bluntly stated his premonition.
The person on the other end, perhaps an inexperienced young nurse, was overwhelmed by Daniel's words, but she immediately said yes and told Daniel to hurry to the hospital.
Daniel hangs up the phone and sits on the bed for a few moments, then gets up and walks over to the mirror. In the mirror was the face of a young man with weariness written all over his face. He looked out the window at the late fall night that was covering the sleeping city like thick ink.
A few minutes later, he came out onto the road and stepped over a field of yellowed leaves and looked up at the sky, there was no moon. It was the fall of 1996, there was hardly a single person on the remote road at 1:00 a.m. There were only a few wild cats, walking silently on the roadside fences, with a ghostly light flashing in their eyes.Daniel stood in the cold wind for quite a while, before he stopped a cab.
Half an hour later, he arrived at his destination. The twenty-story building of the hospital stood in front of him like a big wall, flashing a few cold lights against the background of the dark night sky.
Walking into the cold hospital lobby, the nurse on duty seemed to be asleep.Daniel didn't check in and rode the elevator to the thirteenth floor of the building - a number that could easily make people feel uneasy, especially at a time like this.
On the thirteenth floor, which was lit with dim lights, Daniel gently walked into the ward and saw the man lying on the hospital bed. --He was dying.
Daniel saw that there was some kind of death hanging over the patient's face. He tried to stay calm, but his feet made some noise. Then the patient slowly opened his eyes and he saw Daniel.
It was a single hospital bed and the patient was lying tiredly. Saline was dripping slowly from a bottle, it looked like it might just be some kind of decoration, Daniel's heart was still a little uneasy, he didn't know if the patient could still talk, judging from his pale and thin face, it seemed like he had been suffering for a very long time. It's time to end this, Daniel said softly in his mind. The patient still didn't speak, they just stared at each other, but he understood what the patient's eyes conveyed. The last time they had seen each other before today had been a year and a half ago, when Daniel had gotten into the folk orchestra, and Daniel hadn't expected to see him again when it was actually the moment of his death.
Daniel's mind was a little scrambled when a 1:40 a.m. phone call called him to the hospital because an old man wanted to see him at the end of his life. How old was the old man, Daniel couldn't remember for a moment. He only remembered that the first time he saw the old man was when he was eleven years old, his father sent him to a rickety house, and at eleven years old, through a dim light, he saw a white-haired old man in his early sixties sitting in the center of the room, which was his flute teacher.
His teacher had no wife, no children, and lived alone in that old house, accompanied only by a dozen or so different kinds of Chinese bamboo flutes. Sometimes Daniel felt that his teacher considered him his son (or grandson). From the age of eleven until seventeen, Daniel went to his teacher's every Friday, not so much to learn the flute as to relieve the old man's loneliness. For six years, Daniel was accompanied by an odor like a rotting corpse that always emanated from the teacher's ramshackle house.
Now Daniel smelled the odor again, released from every corner of this ward, mingling with the smell of sterilizing alcohol and various potions that enveloped the dying patient. He moved closer and looked into the teacher's cloudy eyes.Daniel saw that his own reflection was being reflected in the dying man's eyeballs.
Suddenly, the teacher's eyes rolled and a hoarse, low voice came from his throat, “Daniel, I can't do it anymore.”
Daniel suddenly got a little agitated and he leaned into the teacher's ear and said, “No, you're going to be okay.”
The teacher shook his head, “He's going to take me away.”
“He's taking you away?” Daniel asked blankly, “Who is he?”
The teacher slowly reached out her hand and pointed to a drawer in the nightstand, Daniel pulled it open and there was nothing else in the drawer but a long box. Wasn't that a “he”, but an “it”?
Daniel's heart trembled, and he instantly recognized the box. It was seven years ago that Daniel found this blue silk box by chance in a corner of his teacher's house. Fourteen year old Daniel's first impression of the box was very special, only to feel his heart beat inexplicably faster. This strange sensation gave him a desire for adventure, and he couldn't help but want to open the mysterious box. Just as he was about to open the box, he was discovered by the teacher. The usually mild-mannered old man became furious, snatched the box out of Daniel's hand, and gave him a severe reprimand. That night the teacher's expression looked fearful and anxious, and he sternly warned Daniel that he must not open the box under any circumstances, or else it would bring great trouble. As for the reason for this, he did not reveal half a word. This reminded Daniel of that famous ancient Greek myth - Pandora's Box. Pandora, a woman created by Zeus, came to earth. Driven by curiosity, she opened the box given to her by Zeus, and out of the box flew the special gifts given by the gods to mankind: disaster, pestilence, and scourge. Since then, mankind has had a love affair with disaster.
After that night, Daniel never saw the box again. Strangely enough, Daniel's impression of the mysterious box grew stronger as he grew older. Even many years later, Daniel could still dream about it. In his dream, he opens the box and sees a shriveled baby's body hidden inside - the most terrifying nightmare he has ever had.
Is this nightmare real? Daniel now stared at the box and silently asked himself in his mind.
He placed the box in front of his teacher. The terminally ill old man squeezed a few words from his throat, “Open the box.”
“Can I see it now?” Daniel, who had never forgotten his teacher's warning back then, looked into his teacher's eyes; this might be the last request the old man would ever make in his life. He looked again at the mysterious box in his hands, and once again his heartbeat inexplicably sped up - a baby's body?
Daniel opened the box.
