Murderer

Holding the severed hand in my grasp, with a freshly torn tongue clenched in its fist, I felt as though I had been struck by lightning.

When had this horrifying thing appeared in my pocket?

I quickly understood. Jin Ze had not framed me after all. I had clearly sleepwalked out and gone somewhere, and something had happened there. The severed hand and tongue in my pocket must have been brought back from that trip. As for whether I had put them there myself or someone else had stuffed them into my trouser pocket, I had no way of knowing.

But this was not the first time it had happened. At the very beginning of this entire case, I had already seen a video in which I returned carrying that plastic bag filled with hearts and livers.

Then whose hand and tongue were these?

Unconsciously, I looked at Fang Lin’s body on the hospital bed. Both her hands were still perfectly intact.

At that moment, Miao Miao pried Fang Lin’s mouth open, only to find that Fang Lin’s tongue was still there as well.

Then Jin Ze suddenly tightened his grip on his gun, as if he meant to turn the muzzle toward me, but in the end he only held it in a death grip.

Jin Ze said flatly, “It’s Xiao Liu. This hand belongs to Xiao Liu. I remember the gold ring on the ring finger of his left hand.”

I panicked. Xiao Liu had followed me out, watching me. And now his hand had been cut off, his tongue probably cut out as well. This was obviously extremely bad for me.

Even I began to wonder if, just as Fang Qinghe had said, I had really started to split apart, and that my perverse other self had come out and killed someone, killed Xiao Liu.

While I was still in a state of dread, Miao Miao glanced at the severed hand in my grasp and said, “Judging by the shape of the hand, and the way the tongue is being held, the owner of this hand may have personally torn out and severed his own tongue. Perhaps someone threatened him, saying they would spare his life only if he ripped it out himself.”

If this had happened before, I would never have believed it. How could anyone be so cruel to himself? But a few days ago I had seen with my own eyes how Kong Wei, driven by fear of the Scarface, gouged out both of his own eyes. So I believed Miao Miao’s explanation.

The atmosphere in the ward instantly turned awkward. Xiao Liu might already be dead, and as colleagues, those police officers were surely furious. If I had not been in close contact with Fang Qinghe and Jin Ze all this time, they would probably have rushed up to arrest me.

At that moment, the phone that had once emitted the ghostly ringtone rang again. It was still the same ringtone: Give Me Back My Tongue. In other words, it was another text message.

The message told me to open my email and check the latest letter.

Fang Qinghe immediately told me to do it. I connected to the wireless network and logged into my email. There really was a message, but the sender was not the Peeping Tom. It was just an underscore. There was no text in the body either, only an attachment. After downloading it, I found that it was a video.

I opened it at once, and as soon as the image appeared, I knew how important it was, because it was footage recorded right here in the very ward where we were standing.

From the angle, it seemed to have been filmed from the direction of the window, but not by the police camera. It was another one. Soon the head of the surveillance team judged that the video had probably been shot by Jiang Haodong. In other words, while Detective Jiang Haodong stood on the windowsill smoking, he was blocking the camera set up by the police on one side, while on his back there was another camera quietly recording the ward.

All of us immediately held our breath and stared at my phone, not daring to miss a single detail.

At first there was no change in the video, as though the image had been frozen.

Just as I was losing patience and thinking of fast-forwarding, I saw a foot suddenly extend out from the bathroom door.

The moment I saw that foot, I could not help shivering. My heart leaped up into my throat and would not come back down. It was not because I had seen a person, but because the shoe on that foot was the very shoe I was wearing now, and the trousers were my trousers as well.

Which meant that unless someone was deliberately impersonating me, this person was me.

With trepidation, I kept watching, and soon I saw that more than half of his body had emerged from the bathroom, and then he stepped fully out.

And when I made out who it was, I was utterly dumbfounded. My scalp went numb at once, my hands began to shake, and I almost threw the phone away.

Because I could not see his head.

Although this person’s build was almost exactly like mine, and the clothes he wore were identical to mine, he had no head.

Yes, truly no head.

And it was not a matter of angle, nor of the camera intentionally failing to capture his head. He really had no head, because the camera was filming a wide shot, even the ceiling behind him was in frame. If he had had a head, there was no way it could have been missed.

I was so frightened my hands trembled, but I had no choice but to keep watching. Half my mind was filled with horror, the other half with bewilderment, because from a scientific standpoint this seemed impossible to explain, which meant I was simply not scientific enough.

Very soon I saw the headless figure walk straight toward the hospital bed. Even as he moved, his head never appeared. And after looking at his body proportions, I could tell they were perfectly natural; it did not look as though someone had deliberately worn oversized clothes, padded the shoulders, and buried the head inside the garment.

Could this person really have no head?

Before long, the figure arrived beside Fang Lin’s bed. The moment he reached her bedside, Fang Lin suddenly opened her eyes.

She quickly saw the headless man, but to my surprise there was no terror in her gaze at all. On the contrary, she looked remarkably calm, serene even, as if all of this had been exactly as she expected, as if the appearance of this headless man did not surprise her in the slightest.

But soon I realized that was not quite it. Intuition told me Fang Lin must be able to see his head, while we could not.

And at that very moment, a long, thin steel wire suddenly appeared in the headless man’s hand. With a slight pull from both hands, he drew it taut.

Then, without the slightest hesitation, he looped the wire around Fang Lin’s neck. Fang Lin instinctively tried to struggle, but he immediately covered her mouth with a hand, and she fell unconscious. I guessed he must have had some sort of drug on his hand to knock people out.

After drugging Fang Lin, he at once tightened the thin wire around her neck and forced it downward with brutal force.

It looked like nothing more than an ordinary wire, but in his hands it was like a razor-sharp blade. I saw a ring of blood seep out along Fang Lin’s neck, because the wire had already cut into her throat and sliced through her windpipe.

In barely half a minute, the wire completely severed Fang Lin’s head. Then the man immediately pulled a piece of white cloth from his pocket. There seemed to be liquid on it. He covered it over the severed neck, likely with some clotting medicine.

Soon after, he took out another cloth and began wiping Fang Lin’s neck, quickly cleaning the blood from the severed head.

At last he turned Fang Lin’s body and head over, laying her face-down on the hospital bed. Then he drew a sharp long knife from his waist, smeared blood onto the blade, and placed it in Fang Lin’s hand.

So it really was this headless man who had done everything.

After finishing, he covered Fang Lin’s body with the blanket and even took out his phone, placing it on the bedside table.

He did not leave immediately. Instead he stood quietly at the side for a while, and only then slowly turned and walked away. It was cold-blooded beyond belief, as though everything had been under his control all along.

After turning around, he quickly went back into the bathroom.

From beginning to end, this killer had no head.

And then, at that very moment, a head suddenly burst forth from the video.

It grew larger and larger as it rushed toward the screen: Fang Lin’s severed head. It swelled to fill the entire frame and let out a piercing scream.

I too cried out in terror and flung the phone to the floor.

By the time Fang Qinghe picked it up, the video had already ended.

Fang Qinghe tried to replay it, but the file no longer existed. I knew the sender must have tampered with the email. The video must have contained a virus, meant to play only once before corrupting the source file.

I stood there alone, overwhelmed by terror, unable to understand why this headless man was wearing the same clothes as me.

Jin Ze soon said, “It’s obvious this surveillance footage has been altered. The killer’s head has been completely edited out, which is why we can’t see it. Maybe he did it to create a terrifying effect, or maybe to hide his face. But why does he look exactly like Chen Mu, and why are his clothes and build the same?”

After speaking, Jin Ze immediately rushed toward the bathroom, because the killer had disappeared there in the end. There should be something to find.

Fang Qinghe glanced at me, then immediately gave the order: “Arrest Chen Mu!”