On the third day, he did come back.
Still after nine-thirty, wearing a black trench coat, he came silently to the last row of bookshelves in the Metro bookstore and picked up a copy of Kafka's Love Letters to Milena. He was so engrossed in his reading that he didn't seem to notice Charlotte behind the bookshelf.
Charlotte was separated from him by a layer of bookshelves, and she could see his eyes through the gaps between a few books. In this particular perspective, those eyes gave the impression of being more magical.Charlotte quietly asked herself: who is he? Why does he come to the bookstore every night? For a few minutes, her mind envisioned countless possibilities, but none of them convinced her.
Suddenly, a man in his forties walked into the store and said he wanted to buy a copy of the Jin Dynasty's Ganbao's The Book of the Searching Gods.Charlotte knew the book, which could be considered a Wei and Jin version of Liaozhai. She led the customer to the bookshelf of classical literature, but didn't see the book. However, she remembered seeing it a few days ago, and she was the one who put it on the shelves.Charlotte asked the cashier to check the books sold in the last few days for her, and there was no such book, so it should still be in the bookstore. Maybe she had misplaced it herself, but where was it? She couldn't really remember. The customer was also very anxious, looked like he wanted the book urgently, because several bookstores in the neighborhood were closed, so the only way to come here.
That's when she saw those eyes. He slowly walked up to Charlotte and stared into her eyes for a few seconds, and Charlotte suddenly felt a slight tingle in her eyelids, as if she had been touched by a slight electric current. He blurted out, "The Sojourner's Tale is at your feet."
"Under my feet?" Charlotte looked down; there was no book on the floor.
"Open the cabinet by your feet." He reminded again.
Charlotte did as he said and opened the door to the cabinet under the bookshelf. Sure enough, there were a dozen or so books of Sojourner's Tale sitting in the cabinet. She then remembered that she had put these books in the cabinet underneath a few days ago because the classics were spread out on the shelves.
The customer got the books he wanted and left satisfied.Charlotte looked at those peculiar eyes suspiciously and said: "Thank you. But how did you know?"
"Like I said, it was your eyes that told me."
Charlotte shook her head, sure that it couldn't be. She had put the books underneath herself, no one had seen them or opened the cabinet, and he was even more unlikely.
"Who are you?" Charlotte finally asked bluntly.
He fell silent, those eyes staring at Charlotte for a moment, and was just about to speak when he heard the female cashier's voice, "Closing time."
"Sorry to interrupt your shift again." He owed Charlotte a very polite, "Bye."
Then he walked out of the store with a quick step.Charlotte couldn't help but ask behind him, "Will you come back tomorrow?"
Charlotte's voice was so soft that perhaps he didn't even hear it, and his figure quickly disappeared into the ticket gate.
Five minutes later, she locked the store door and took the subway home. It was a ten-minute walk from the subway to where she lived, and Charlotte was used to walking at night as she stepped forward over a field of dead leaves. All around were residential buildings built in the eighties, which looked dead at night.
The siren sounded.
Turning into a side street, a strange sound drifted into Charlotte's ears and she stopped immediately. The sound was silky, with a certain low melody that sent shivers down Charlotte's spine. She struggled to search her mind for the various sounds she had heard, and finally she heard it: it was the sound of a flute.
She tilted her head in bewilderment and looked at the dozen or so residential buildings in front and behind her; she couldn't tell where the flute was coming from, but it was drilling straight into her ears as if it had eyes. She suddenly gasped out loud, feeling her breathing getting more and more rapid. So she desperately ran forward quickly, and the scene of the summer when she was seven years old, when she ran away from the fatal wall, came back to her eyes. The brightly colored, poisonous oleander lashed her cheeks, thunder shook the sky, and her father's warning echoed in her ears: one night, when you hear the mysterious sound of a flute, you will be taken to hell by the ghostly children who roam the night, never to return to earth.
But it was the flute that chased her now.
The evening breeze swept through Charlotte's hair as she darted like a frightened deer. By the time she got home, the flute was long gone. She closed all the doors and windows in the house tightly, then huddled in a corner of the room, listening quietly for movement outside.
There was no sound, dead silence.
She couldn't forget, couldn't forget the summer when she was seven years old, the oleander grove, the mysterious fence, and the words her father had said a thousand times. She had told herself a thousand times: don't believe her father's warnings, they are just ghost words used to scare children. But in the back of her mind, she could never reject those words, and as she grew older, her fear of that terrible legend grew stronger and stronger. Until she was convinced that the midnight flute existed.