Chapter 5 5 Charlie's Castle Frozen in Summer Dusk 5
2425 Words
One's fears are infinitely magnified in the darkness.
A drop of cold sweat slid down the manservant's forehead. The more he thought about it, the closer he felt the third man's breathing getting, almost to the tip of his nose.
With his back against the hard stone wall, the manservant's panicked heart finally felt a bit safer, and his whole body, along with his hands, pressed against the wall.
The sound of breathing became smaller.
Good, he said in his mind, it's obvious that the one in the darkness isn't sure of his position either. And I'm much more familiar with the terrain, if memory serves...
He took a slow step with his right foot, moving to the right in small steps. As expected, after taking a few steps, his right foot explored the stairs.
Suddenly, there was a thump from his left. It was clearly the sound of something heavy hitting the wall.
It was the man! He gave a jolt of fear, the man had pressed on to try and attack in the darkness!
Realising this he no longer hesitated but touched the wall and sidled up the stairs. He was going to run first.
His panicked footsteps were already somewhat noticeable in the darkness already, yet he couldn't care less anymore. He stumbled up the stairs holding onto the wall, afraid that if he was a step too late he would be caught up.
--
Zoe listened to the footsteps of the manservant fading away and then disappearing, finally letting out a sigh of relief.
The original plan was to sneak attack the manservant, so she was clutching the knife in her hand, but the timing suddenly changed, she immediately changed her target and decided to extinguish the only source of light, in the moment of crisis, she directly stretched out her hands and pressed the candle to extinguish it, and the knife slipped off without knowing where it went.
In the darkness and lost her weapon, she could only find a way to force the manservant back to the wall. This is actually a common psychology of people in the dark, if a person touches a wall in the dark, this sense of security will make it difficult for people to actively move away from the wall, it is also difficult to actively launch an attack.
Zoe remembered the terrain of this place perfectly, and the position of the manservant before the light went out was exposed to her eyes.She extinguished the candle and then took two painful steps from the side of the manservant to the middle of him and the t*****e device, and then in order not to reveal her height, she put up her toes, and then deliberately increased her breathing, in order to force the manservant to retreat until he retreated to the wall near the staircase. As soon as the manservant realises that the stairs are not far away, Zoe throws the candlestick in the other direction to create noise and excitement, and there is a high probability that he will choose to escape through the stairs.
Of course, there is also the possibility of gambling, perhaps the manservant is not willing to retreat but to find a way to attack, or perhaps she will be in close contact with the manservant when she moves in the darkness, but there is no way to avoid this risk, and this is the best method Zoe Miller can think of.
Fortunately, it worked.
The crisis passed and Zoe's whole body shook, she'd just fallen quite hard and was only now feeling pain all over her body as an afterthought. She she sat down on the floor in a heap, as if her strength had been drained from her.
She sat on the ground gasping for air and asked, "Can you understand me? If you can you shout a word."
In the darkness, there was a resounding, "Ah."
Thankfully the man in the t*****e device retained his sanity.
"Are you the previous intruder? Scream once for yes, twice for no."
"Ah!" The man in the t*****e device screamed miserably.
"Listen, I'm here to save you, now tell me, is there a second way out of here?"
The manservant had escaped, but there was no telling when he would return with his men, leaving Zoe Miller not much time to escape from here.
"Ah!" The man in the t*****e device suddenly started slamming against the cage.
"You wait." Zoe saw that he obviously had something to say, and she carefully recalled what she had seen of the man in the t*****e device at the time, which appeared to be a t*****e device on his face, holding open his mouth.
"Can I open the t*****e device on your mouth now? Scream if you can and stop moving."
"Ah!" The man did quieten down.
Alright, Zoe regained her strength even after sitting for a while, so she braced herself to stand again. She groped her way through the darkness by waving her hands in small increments, and soon found the location of the t*****e device.
She asked the man, "Can I open this iron cage?"
"Ahhh." There was some frustration in the voice.
Well, it really wasn't possible. She mentally estimated the height and sighed. If she remembered correctly, the t*****e device was still some distance away from the ground, the t*****e device itself was about 2 metres high, her own small body standing on the ground couldn't even reach the t*****e device on someone's face, so she could only try to climb it.
She grabbed an iron bar and instructed the man, "You try to keep your balance inside, I'll climb up and try to open the thing on your face first."
Saying that, she stomped on the ground and climbed onto the iron t*****e device. The entire t*****e device slammed into the weight of one more person and began to shake.
Zoe struggled to hold onto the iron bars, "Is this going the right way?"
"Ahhh."
Zoe's right arm clamped down on the bars while her left hand reached into the t*****e device and touched the soft texture of the fabric.
"Feel my hand?"
"Ah!"
"Is the position of your head further up?"
"Ah!"
With that, and based on the man's continued co-operation and instruction, Zoe finally managed with difficulty to get her hand to the back of his head, open the tightly fastened crossbuckles, and remove the mouth yoke.
Whew, she jumped off the t*****e device, it was getting a little too physical.
The man was finally able to speak, and was very emotional at this point, "Are you one of the people who came here by mistake? Oh my god, run, there's a door out the back here!"
His voice was hoarse as hell, but it could be heard as an adult male.
Luckily there were other exits, Zoe's hanging heart fell, she was really afraid that there was only one way out when she came in, and then the manservant would be waiting with a group of men at the top stairway for her to throw herself out.
"Where does that door lead?" She asked.
"It leads to Charlie his stash. I'm sure you've met Charlie! Ever been to his stash?" His voice was fast and furious.
"The hideout I haven't been to."
"You can't even imagine Charlie the man, he forces all comers to spit out what he doesn't know and t*****e is served if they don't. His storeroom is full of valuable knowledge that living people like us have written down with our lives. I would have had a companion, only he was tortured to death a few days ago."
Zoe listened to him as she searched up for the other door he was talking about. She had to hurry and escape through the other door as soon as she heard any noise from this side.
And the man had been locked up for so long and had so much to say that he didn't care about Zoe's silence, "Damn it, that bastard Charlie locked me in this man-sized iron cage with no way to move my arms and legs, and dragged me out into the sunlight so hard a few days ago that the skin on my legs is stuck to the iron. Damn it, I can't even find a chance to escape, even if I return from the real world, I'll just wake up in the iron cage, I'll fucking..."
Hearing this, Zoe asked, "Would you have memories of this place while in the real world?"
"Of course not, not until every dream is completed... Wait, how can you not know this common sense? Is this the first time you've ever been in a dream?"
Zoe narrowed her eyes, "Could there be a second time after one?"
"Yes. No one knows when it will end. But as soon as you start dreaming, you'll always be entangled with the dreams of the dead. So you're really a first timer? It's amazing that a newcomer to dreaming for the first time could find his way here and chase off that manservant. Oh, I'll tell you anything you want to ask, as long as you help get me out."
Zoe knew she had exposed her inexperience and simply admitted it, "Yes, it's my first time. So do you know how to get out of here?"
The man immediately replied, "To get out of a dream, you have to find the owner of the dream, find out exactly what their obsession is, and then try to help them dissolve it. Simply put, it means granting them their wish. The owner here is obviously Charlie, just grant his wish."
Grant Charlie's wish?Zoe frowned.
A short time had passed since the manservant had run off, and Zoe had felt around the wall for another door, a double door that wasn't locked, and she pushed it open with a gentle push.
A ghostly blue light came into view. Finally, after so long in the darkness, there was light.
The source of the glowing light was from the walls. The walls were dotted with blue light, which seemed to be some kind of rare mineral.
With the source of the glowing light, Zoe could see the next room.
It was a huge space, and the small room where the men were being held was no match for this one. A soft chair made of leather sat in the middle of the space. To the left of the soft chair were rows of bookshelves that held not hard cover books, but stacks of manuscripts. And to the right of the soft chair was an uncountable number of display pillars about a metre high, on which various things were placed. By the dull blue dot, she seemed to see that there was a Newtonian pendulum, and a textile machine. And on either side of the walls of the room, there were all sorts of t*****e devices hanging.
The man heard the commotion as well, "You opened the door? That's where his stash is! He locks us up in a small dark room to t*****e us, and then what we spit out he puts in the stash along the way. There's no telling how twisted this p*****t's psyche has become!"
Since there had been no sound coming from the side of the stairs, Zoe decided not to immediately go out the other side of the stash house just yet, but to get a closer look at the man.
"Forget the stash house for a moment, do you know what Charlie's wish was?" She felt that this question was much more important than the stash house.
At the mention of it, the man was visibly more exasperated, "That f*****g bastard. At first I arrived here with another man and inadvertently found a diary of what happened to Charlie and the first person who came here, and that diary said that he let people go after two months. Coupled with the fact that Charlie was kind to us at first, we let our guard down thinking this was a dream bubble of no danger. Then later Charlie kept asking us to tell us what he didn't know, and I had assumed that this desire to learn was what he wanted."
Dream bubble, the man mentioned a new word that Zoe silently memorised.
"Who knew that the more we spoke, the more Charlie's desire was never satisfied for a single day, until we finally sensed something was wrong and began to refuse his demands, and he stopped being kind to us and took us prisoner and tortured us, and my companion couldn't withstand the t*****e and went that way."
"How long have you been here?"
"More than a month, I can already feel myself getting weaker and weaker, if I don't get out of here I'm afraid I'm really going to get cold. You don't know yet do you, if a living person stays in a dream bubble for too long, the body itself will be haunted by death then slowly die out." His voice lowered, "Get me out of here, please."
Zoe thought for a moment and asked, "Do you know anything about his father?"
"His father? I've never heard of it. Doesn't he only have a sister?"
"And did you ever talk to his sister?"
"Yes, his sister has appeared in nothing but the dining room for dinner and in the garden. We asked her three or two times before about anything in particular that her brother cared about, and she would only reply that she cared about that diary."
That diary, there wasn't much else in that diary at all except about Tang Wuqing.
"Then have you not thought that his wish might be to simply see Tang Wuqing again? If that's really his wish, how could we possibly help him fulfil it?"
"Actually, we tried." The man replied, "Anyone who read that diary knew that Tang Wuqing was special. At the time, after we realised something was wrong, my companion offered that he could help find Tang Wuqing in our time and space, but Charlie refused."
"Wait, Charlie knew that we had a way to return to another dimension?"
"You can't imagine how many people Charlie met and how much he got out of them before that."
Zoe was silent.
The man continued, "But he refused, he didn't even want to find Tang Wuqing as a person. If that was truly his wish, I can't think of any reason why he would refuse."
- Writer
