"Husband, what strange things are being broadcast on the TV inside?"
A young woman stood at the door of the room, looking in from time to time through the crack of the hidden door and from time to time looking at the man sitting on the sofa in the living room, "You don't want to show the baby anything strange."
"He's just a baby; what kind of weird stuff can I show him that he can't understand." The man was half lying, half leaning on the sofa, his eyes temporarily moving away from the mobile phone in front of him, "Didn't you say that you want to exercise him to sleep independently now? I then found a guided video that can calm babies down and played it on a loop in the nursery. I've watched it, and the sound and picture are pretty gentle, so don't worry about it.
"By the way, if you want him to get used to sleeping alone, he'll probably cry at first. You don't want to go in and coax him as soon as he cries, or it'll be hard to succeed."
"I know. I'm just going to see what's on the TV, and it's not like I'm going in." The woman was still standing in the doorway of the room, looking in, "What's that song playing? I've never heard it; it feels like an ancient song in a foreign language. The sound quality isn't outstanding either. Does the baby need to hear this ..."
She was still rambling on; the man was already engrossed in his mobile game and had stopped replying to her. The woman was hesitant to go in to see how it worked when, at that exact moment, a gentle tone came from the nursery TV: "Parents, please do not interrupt this process and do not approach your child at this time. If your child begins to cry, there is no need to check immediately; the child will stop independently after some time."
The woman lurched as she entered, constantly feeling like this video had spoken to her. Although she knew that it was just a coincidence, she still inexplicably felt a slight weakness and then really hard-heartedly closed the room door, returned to the living room, and sat down.
But as a mother, how can you leave Wazir unattended? The woman sat on the sofa, holding the mobile phone, but quite fidgety. Especially after a few minutes, the child's crying came from inside the room, and the woman could not sit still.
She swished up, thumped a few steps to the door of the baby's room, and put her hand on the doorknob at once. Her husband finally divided his attention a little at this moment and said, "Didn't you say to let him cry? You go in as soon as he cries, so what's the point of exercising."
"But ...," the woman hesitated in the doorway, hesitating. She looked at the time on her phone repeatedly, and finally, after the single digit representing "minutes" jumped twice, she couldn't resist and pressed the door handle.
Click.
With the sound of the door opening, the crying inside immediately stopped.
"See, it stopped right away." The man commented, "If you do that, next time he'll know that as long as he cries, you'll go over ..."
The woman stopped listening to what her husband was saying, and since the door was already open anyway, she decided to see how the baby was doing. She walked into the house; the TV was still playing a foreign language song with inferior sound quality, and a line of text flashed on the screen.
--Do not view crying baby.
"What a weird thing ..." The woman mentally grumbled about her husband's decision and secretly decided never to show the video again. But she wasn't in a hurry to switch it off now. Instead she approached the cot with the music ...
"AH!!!"
A scream rang out suddenly, and her husband dropped his phone in shock, frowning as he got up and said as he walked towards the nursery door, "What are you screaming about? You're scaring me!"
The woman was panicking, kneeling by the crib, feeling around towards the bottom and side of the bed for a while, even though nothing was visible at a glance.
"The baby, it's gone!"
***
"... So the baby just disappeared into thin air?"
This time, it was Lupin who was out in the field with Henry, sitting across from the missing baby's parents and much calmer than the parents, "You haven't seen the baby with your own eyes since this gentleman put him in his bed last night around eight o'clock, have you?"
"That's true, but he was still crying before I opened the door and entered!" However, in the past day, the child's mother's voice became hoarse, and her eyes were red and swollen, obviously having cried in a hurry, "It was only when I opened the door that he suddenly stopped crying, so how could he have disappeared in just a few seconds?"
His husband also said anxiously, "Yes, there is only one door in that room, and our house is still on the 18th floor; someone can't climb in through the window and carry the baby away in a few seconds, right?"
Lupin asked again, "You called the police last night; what did they say?"
The man of the house was suspicious: "Don't you guys communicate internally?"
"We are not affiliated with the criminal investigation system. Normally, even if we work with the police, we need them to refer the case to us officially." Lupin calmly explained twice, "It's not like we're officially taking this case now. It was the resident of the same building as yours who heard about you guys and said it was just too unbelievable. She also said you guys wanted someone 'special' to come and take a look, and that's why we're here."
And this same building's occupant was Lily, whose housemate had been replaced by a pseudo-human, and who had nearly been attacked by a pseudo-human herself.
Though she is not allowed to talk about the pseudo-human, after hearing about the strange disappearance of the resident of the same building, Lily's first reaction is to seek help from the "Collector." So, with her help, the Collector decides to come and take a look at the situation.
However, the mother of the child communicates with Lily, and her husband, hearing Lupin's statement, only finds it absurd: "'Special someone'?" He looks to his wife. He looked at his wife, "You actually asked this kind of person to find the child?"
"What else could it be? All the surveillance cameras in the building have been looked at, and there's nothing strange about any of them. Now the police suspect that we killed and dumped the baby, and now the thieves are crying out for help!" Saying this, the baby's mother was about to cry again, "Lily said they could help, that's why I invited them. If you disagree, go find them! You're the one who brought the baby in last night, and you wouldn't let me in to see him even when he was crying. If I had gone in earlier, how could he have disappeared?"
"It wasn't you who said you wanted to exercise him to sleep on his own?" The couple were both anxious and angry, not caring that there were still outsiders present; they complained to each other, "And it wasn't me who didn't let you watch it. Doesn't that video also remind you that you can't go see him?"
"How dare you talk about that video? What is it playing? That English song has a bad and weird sound quality; how can it be like something a child would listen to? It's more like scaring a child to death!"
"How can it be? I've seen the whole video, and it's just some simple English children's songs with good sound quality; how could it scare a child? If it would have scared him, he would have cried already, right? Why did it take so long for him to cry?"
"Open your eyes and talk nonsense! You come over and watch right now, see what kind of shit you put on your son ..."
As the two men spoke, they both got up to go to the baby's room to open the video and confront the video's content face to face. As soon as they entered, the two met Middendorffi's gaze.
Only then did the couple remember for a moment that there were three "special people" in the room. The youngest, who hadn't said a word when he came in, had been put in the nursery to 'see the scene.'
"Bear, come here."
Henry also reached the room door, called Middendorffi out, then turned towards the couple, "Since you're not cooperating and don't trust us, we do not need to continue talking. You guys wait for the results of the police investigation."
After saying that, the three "collectors" really left.
Before closing the door, Henry also heard the couple inside arguing again and said that they would go to the police to report the three "magicians." Henry listened to the cold laugh, closed the door, and did not look back, and the other two left the place.
In the car, the three of them discussed the strange "missing baby case."
Lupin first asked Middendorffi, "Bear, did you find anything strange?"
"No." Middendorffi said, "No signs of anything strange."
"The cot, the window, the doorway, did you look at them all?"
"Looked at them all." Middendorffi said, "Everything is normal, more normal than it was at that Lily's house before."
Henry, who was driving, asked, "What about the two parents?"
"Also ... normal?" Middendorffi was a little unsure how to answer that question, "I can only be sure that they are human, but I don't know if they lied."
"I also think they may not be telling the truth." Henry said, "I understand the police suspecting them. Is it possible that no one else has been in or out of their home, and the child is the same as disappearing out of thin air on their watch? It could very well be that they killed the child, disposed of the body, and then now come to stage an obfuscation and pretend to be the victims."
Lupin said, "If that's the case, why would they call the police so soon? The longer it takes, the harder it is to get to the truth. And wouldn't it be easy to pull suspicion on themselves by staging a backroom disappearance?"
"Hell, maybe they just missed a murder, so they messed themselves up." Henry returned, "Did you hear what they said? You're not allowed to see a baby when it cries, just for the fancy name of 'exercise'! There was a news story in the past about a new mother who didn't look at her child even when she cried in order to exercise her child to sleep on her stomach, and then the child was smothered alive. What if these two also killed the child because of this mistake and wanted to get away with it, so they acted out like this?"
"It's not unreasonable for you to say that; after all, it's normal for ordinary people to lose their minds when they run into this kind of thing." Lupin paused and turned his head to ask Middendorffi, "Bear, what do you think?"
"I don't really understand." Middendorffi said, "But if it really can take a child in only a few seconds and leave no trace, it should be something pretty powerful. So why does it only take children?"
"Indeed. Why target only children when it can get under the close guard of parents like nobody's business?" Lupin mused, "There are legends of demons that only take children, such as the Gurus ..."
Middendorffi remembers something else, "I heard them arguing about a video and saying that the video wouldn't let them see the children; what was it?"
"I think it's a video for kids, and kids are many of these things nowadays, the so-called 'science of feeding' ..." Henry snorted. "It's getting more and more suspicious that they can get into a fight over a video when they haven't even got the kid back."
Middendorffi said, "Maybe we should look at the video."
"Hey, let's wait until we actually get this case. Seeing as how they're like this now, they might actually go and report us to the police, annoying as hell." Henry said, "I'd say in a couple of days, the kid's body will be found in some septic tank. Have you heard of the XX wife murder case? It's when a nice person who goes missing from their home turns out to be killed by a pillow talker ..."
The trip back was spent on Henry's homicide story after homicide story.
***
The next afternoon, the police did contact the Collector.
But not because someone had reported them for superstition but because another shocking incident required their cooperation in the investigation.
"Huh? That missing kid's mum is dead?!"