Fear of the dark. [YiZhan FF - Mystery Thriller]✔️

2. - Arrival at the forest

2. - Arrival at the forest

When I woke up this morning, the other three were already awake and sitting with the old lady in the kitchen, eating breakfast. She told them the same story she told me yesterday. The one about the insane asylum.

And there was someone else there. An older man who sat there thoughtfully and kept shaking his head. I had no idea why and actually I hadn't wanted to ask him, but at some point my curiosity was awakened and I had to know. "Is there anything bothering you?"

The two old looked at each other and the old lady shrugged her shoulders. The old man then immediately began to talk, however I did not at all like what he had to tell us.

"You can't have spent the night in Crane*." He began.

"Yes we did." Replied Meng Yao cheekily, as usual.

"You don't understand. About 40 years ago, there was a huge fire in Crane*. The whole town was affected. The fire ate through every street, every house, and every corner. All the people who lived there died in the fire." Explained the old man, while it ran cold down my spine.

The old man didn't wait for any of us to say anything and immediately continued speaking. "You must know. There were apostates from the church living in this village. All nuns and monks who left the church, because they no longer wanted to live celibate lives. They teamed up and moved to Crane*. The place was deserted at that time and so at least there were no problems in finding a place to stay. They kept to themselves and lived a quiet life and did so for almost 100 years. But it is said that God did not forget how they betrayed him and still wanted to take revenge on them. But the sinners were no longer alive, only their descendants. God, however, is said to have been so angry that he did not care. That's why he sent a great fire, which killed all the people in that place."

"God then, aha." Meng Yao replied snidely.

"Yeah, well young man, I don't think God did that either. They lived like Amish people. They lived without running water, there was no electricity either and everything they ate they grew and hunted themselves. They never hurt anyone and kept away from all other people. And then the fire came and destroyed everything. No one ever tried to rebuild that place. It is impossible that you were there. And even if you were, even before the fire, they didn't tolerate strangers in their place."

The old woman agreed. My brother and the man were still discussing the possibility that some homeless people might have settled there. But I don't know what to think about that.

Then they came back to the insane asylum in the woods. The old man knew a little bit more about it and told us what he had heard. And he started with the end of the insane asylum.

"When it came out what was going on there, lots of police officers were sent there. My grandfather, then a young man himself who had just started his duties, was one of them. He once told me that when they were in the woods and still about half a mile from the asylum, they could already smell the dead ones. The stench was said to be so beastly that it was impossible for many police officers to go any further to the village. My grandfather rubbed some mint on his scarf and held it in front of his mouth and nose. Arriving at the insane asylum, the officers were said to have been shocked, because everywhere on the grounds, lay corpses. Cruelly disfigured corpses! In one barrack they found more than 20 children's corpses. In another, women, even pregnant women. And that was not the worst for them. The worst was the cellar of the main building. There were said to be babies there who were terribly deformed. They did experiments on them, too. According to my grandfather, they found more than 200 bodies. And nobody knew where to put them, so they just left the dead there. Only a priest said a short prayer, that's all they did for the dead. No burial, nothing. And hey, the doctor's diaries disappeared in a strange way back then. Apparently no one ever wanted it to come out what went on there. Well, diaries can be destroyed. But people still talked."