Latent Syndrome

Chapter 1 1. The beginning

The walls were covered with foul spots that looked like insect eggs.

Dense mold on the furniture made the house look extremely damp.

A pile of corpses of moths and strange insects were laid out inside the vertical lamppost, and the light cast was unusually weak.

A few cockroaches scurried across the cracked, shoddy wooden table.

The brown rust on the stool had condensed into misshapen lumps.

A tall woman in a black dress is sitting on an iron stool and combing her hair in front of the mirror.

Colin glimpsed this scene through the small hole in the wall, not that he had a dirty hobby like voyeurism.

For some unknown reason, a hole the size of two fingers suddenly appeared on the bedroom wall.

And there are always some weird noises coming from next door.

Either it was the sound of dense chewing and grinding, or the tumbling sound of a pile of small reptiles.

But every time I heard a noise and looked around, there was nothing unusual, and the owner of the room didn't care about living in such an environment.

What a weird woman, Colin frowned.

The woman's hand combing her hair suddenly stopped.

Colin was startled by this reaction, his eyes stayed away from the small hole, and he quickly moved away.

The pit is relatively low, only about 20 centimeters above the ground. You can only see the other side by lying down or half-kneeling with your head bent.

Colin felt a little creepy for some reason. Even a garbage dump couldn't describe the place. It looked like the slaughterhouse of a perverted murderer.

I didn't expect that my neighbor would be such a weirdo after I bought the apartment only half a year ago.

This may be the disadvantage of the one-bedroom, one-living room type.

Do you want to discuss it with her? Although this hole is extremely small, it is deep enough. If it were to be filled, there would be a lot of movement and it would alarm her.

But the other person is someone who cannot be treated with common sense, and is probably a little crazy. Colin is extremely reluctant to talk to her.

He simply stopped thinking about it. Maybe it was because of his busy work these days, and there were throbbing pains in his temples.

The long and painful pulling away feeling was like fishing line and iron hook embedded in his brain, pulling outward.

Colin stood up, it was getting late and he had to go to bed.

The next day.

He got up and went to the bathroom to tidy up his shirt and suit and wash up.

His oily hair was combed meticulously, and he had to work in a securities firm. Credit card debt and large loans prevented him from slacking off.

An unusually gloomy spring, with long gray and silent days.

Ever since the day-long solar eclipse, Colin could feel that the weather was getting colder and colder, even in April, it was bone-chilling.

High-rise office buildings with all-glass exterior walls reflect the hazy sky and the torrent of vehicles on the ground.

The office illuminated by cold white electric bars was a bit eerie. The numb faces and the faint sound of electricity from the printer made Colin's thoughts wander.

In the narrow grid space, Colin put his hands on the keyboard. The chaotic interlacing of stock index lines made him trance-like, and the scene from last night appeared in his mind.

That weird and ugly space and the woman combing her hair, the more you look into it, the more horrifying you find it.

Colin wanted to erase this thought from his mind, but he couldn't do it. The terrifying black figure lingered on him.

He kept shaking his legs, his tyrannical anxiety making him irritated to the limit, and he finally couldn't control himself and stood up violently.

This strange behavior attracted the attention of everyone in the office. Their dull, cold eyes without any emotion were like robots.

Colin felt uncomfortable and got up to go to the fire escape to smoke.

night.

The cold wind was biting into his bones, and when Colin returned to the apartment, he felt even colder. He couldn't help but look at the hole in the wall.

clatter……

The sound of water dripping came from the tiny gap, again and again, like a faucet valve that was not fully closed.

Colin swallowed.

He obviously hates that place.

But there seems to be a magic there. If there were just ordinary people living next door, there would be no interest in it.

Even a sexy girl will feel guilty about voyeurism and despise its vulgarity and inferiority.

But that kind of weirdness and mystery, mixed with madness and chaotic curiosity, will drive Colin crazy.

This is indeed unethical behavior, but the thirst for knowledge and curiosity cannot be easily curbed.

He just wanted to figure out the source of the sound and what the crazy woman was doing, so that he wouldn't let the freak affect his rest.

Colin walked towards the pothole. After his body stiffened for a while, he still couldn't restrain the human instinct to explore the root cause.

He slowly squatted down and the voice became clearer.

Tick...

The sound of water droplets was not clear and crisp, but had a slowly spreading stickiness, like saliva dripping from the mouthparts of some kind of insect.

His eyes closed on the hole, looking through the wall.

There was only a dark red color in the bottom of his eyes, very blurry, and some black dust spots.

Colin breathed a sigh of relief, and his heart dropped. The other party must have noticed the hole, so he blocked it.

After staring for a while without finding anything, Colin had a headache. Along with a long and sharp tinnitus, the scene in front of him was full of changing and distorted abstract ripples.

Is it because the blood is not supplied to the head due to squatting for too long?

Colin stopped caring and fell asleep after taking a bath.

Three days later.

High-rise office buildings in Los Angeles' central business district.

"Mr. Colin, you are fired."

There was lightning floating in the clouds, and with a startling sound, violent rain poured down.

The rain spattered against the floor-to-ceiling window glass, and the spacious office decorated in cold colors was filled with the sound of shattering.

"Do you have any questions?"

He lit a cigarette and turned his back. In front of the heavy desk with black horseshoe legs, all he could see was his smooth back, the back of his high-end custom-made suit, and the black clouds pressing outside the floor-to-ceiling windows.

Colin's face was expressionless, with a few strands of hair combed back, looking a little embarrassed. Although the Vacheron Constantin on his wrist could barely hold up the scene, the water-stained suit completely ruined the image.

As a stockbroker, his advice led to investors losing money, and the loss of clients caused a sharp decline in the firm's efficiency. Various bad decisions also led to his own disrepute, and he would bid farewell to this profession forever.

"I accept this result."

Colin slowly unbuttoned the top button of his collar and spoke calmly.

He seemed to have expected it. For some reason, he had been in a trance recently, perhaps suffering from a severe neurasthenia.

Ever since I saw that room, I have been restless. Once, the woman even appeared in my dream.

Colin was a little troubled by the lack of a source of income. Fortunately, the company gave him a considerable dismissal compensation, because after Colin's reputation as a bad agent spread, the rich people in the circle would never hire him. A kind of deprivation meal in a sense.

Colin drove back after getting drunk in the pub.

As the sun sets, the sky turns a dirty red and yellow color, which is extremely uncomfortable.

But when he arrived at the community, he found that it was extremely lively. There were seven or eight police cars parked at the entrance, and there were many good people talking together.

Colin didn't care about this kind of thing, but when he found his building, he sobered up a little.

Something big happened in the building where he was, and people doing good things came here. The police had to maintain order and keep out irrelevant people.

Colin was also stopped and was not allowed in until he proved that he was a resident of this building.

While riding in the elevator, the electronic billboard played advertisements that almost repeated idiotic words. For some reason, Colin always felt that something was wrong with the atmosphere.

When he arrived at his floor, the corridor on the fourteenth floor, he was completely sober from the wine and his drunkenness was gone.

The corridor was crowded with police officers in uniforms and hats, not auxiliary police officers, but criminal police officers.

They set up a cordon and repeatedly warned people not to watch, otherwise they would be arrested for disturbing public peace.

But they still couldn't resist the general public's instinct to watch the excitement, so they stood outside the cordon and looked in hard.

There were beads of sweat on Colin's forehead, because the place where the cordon was raised was suddenly his next door.

The place where you can look through the small hole.

"What happened here?"

Colin squeezed his way to the cordon, but the door next door was only open a crack and he couldn't see what was going on inside.

"It has nothing to do with you. There are others. Leave immediately, otherwise I will really arrest you."

An older detective had a pale face. He just entered the room and took a look. He had never seen anything like this in his more than 20 years of work. It was too shocking. His fingers were still trembling slightly.

"I live next door and I think I have a right to know."

Colin said firmly, this room is too puzzling.

When he heard that Colin lived next door to the woman, the elderly detective's pupils shrank and he looked at Colin in shock.

"Do you know the deceased?"

The detective's throat rolled, and his expression was extremely surprised.

Colin's expression froze and he shook his head, emotions surging in his heart.

died……

The woman combing her hair turned out to be dead.

At this time, a troublemaker said to Colin: "I took a look when the door was open just now. The female corpse was kneeling in the corner with her hands on the wall, as if she was looking for something."

Those who do good things tremble a little.

Even in the daytime, there are people all around.

Colin still felt a chill spread from his spine, spreading to every inch of his skin, and all the pores were closed tightly.

"Give way, give way."

Three criminal police officers came out of the room carrying a medical cart. On the stretcher was a human-shaped body bag wrapped in black chemical material.

The moment the body bag came out, the door was instantly closed by the police, locked with a key, and a note and paper affixed with a ban.

At the same time, the police officers pushed away irrelevant people to ensure the smooth passage of the carts.

All the onlookers, including Colin, focused their attention on the body bag, because corpses are very strange to modern people.

The faces of the three criminal policemen pushing the cart were as white as paper, and their hands and sleeves were stained with colorful liquid tissue, which looked like congealed oil floating on the surface of the ditch. There were signs of cleaning, but it was still soaked in the clothes.

They seemed to have been greatly stimulated and were out of their minds.

Bang bang...

When entering the elevator, a criminal policeman accidentally touched the lever of the medical trolley, perhaps because he was too nervous.

The stretcher tilted and the body bag hit the ground with a heavy thud.

"What are you doing to eat? Why are you so careless!"

The leading police sergeant roared loudly, his sharp gaze seeming to tear the erring police officer alive.

The zipper of the body bag that fell to the ground was torn open, revealing the head of the corpse.

Colin froze on the spot, staring at the head.

It was an extremely terrifying human face. One eye was pus-filled and swollen and covered with deformed tissue. The other eye was open and the retina was severely congested.

That kind of blood red.

Saw it through the pothole that night with Colin.

same.