The Terrible Nursery Rhyme

"Why is the light on in Class 4? Should we call the police?" Zhai Jia was already alarmed.

"Call the police for what? To tell them a student forgot to turn off a light and ask an officer to come switch it off?" Xiao Jin then said, with feeling: "These useless students — is there anything they can do right? Uncle Du at the gate doesn't bother checking anything properly either. I'll go in and turn it off while I use the bathroom. You two go home."

The entire campus was dark except for that pale, sickly glow from the window of Class 4. Three women stopped and stared at it.

Hui Nan felt a cold current pass through her, as though something were about to happen. "Ms. Xiao, I'll go with you. It won't take long."

"I… I'll come too, I suppose. It's not like I have anywhere to be." Zhai Jia, at this point, couldn't really bring herself to walk away alone either.

So all three went in together. The window of Class 4 shone on through the darkness like the single eye of some creature of the night, watching the three women disappear through the building entrance.

Xiao Jin exchanged a word with Uncle Du at the gatehouse and they headed upstairs. The whole building shared a single switch for the corridor lights, so there was no point asking Uncle Du to turn the whole floor on for this. They moved through the dark by feel. The building that was so noisy and alive during the day became, at night, profoundly wrong in its emptiness. Zhai Jia began to regret coming in.

When the three of them reached the door of Class 4, they stopped. Because they heard a voice — a woman speaking. Not one of theirs. A fourth person.

The voice was coming from inside the classroom. It was faint, as though pressed up in the throat, but in the dead silence of the night it reached their ears with perfect clarity.

"First pockmark hangs herself, second pockmark watches. Third pockmark buys medicine, fourth pockmark brews it. Fifth pockmark—"

Bang — Xiao Jin shoved the door open and shouted: "Who's in there acting crazy?!"

The crazy one might have been herself. Inside, there was no one. An empty room. Sometimes emptiness is more frightening than a presence.

All three stood frozen. They stood there for a long time. The thing that had been speaking seemed to know the three of them had pushed open the door, and fell completely silent.

"Just now — that voice — it sounded like Huang Lu." Hui Nan forced the words through trembling teeth. A dead person's voice, in the classroom of Class 4. Why?

"Ahh—!" This one sentence from Hui Nan sent Zhai Jia shrieking backward, where she collided with and knocked from Hui Nan's hands, then got tangled in the strap and fell heavily to the floor. Hui Nan went to help her; Zhai Jia, overcome with terror, couldn't get her legs under her and sat on the floor shaking.

"Turn the light — off. And let's go quickly." Hui Nan had understood too: this place was not safe.

Click. Xiao Jin switched off the classroom light. Darkness swallowed everything. They all immediately regretted it — with the light off they were blind, but whatever was in the dark with them could still see them perfectly.

"Both of you wait here for a moment," said Xiao Jin. "I just need to use the bathroom. I'll be back immediately." The other two didn't want to wait — but they also couldn't leave her alone in this terrible building. From the stairwell, they watched with dread as Xiao Jin's figure disappeared one step at a time into the dark.

Xiao Jin was frightened too, but her stomach gave her no choice. She was fortunate that the bathroom had its own independent light switch — the light helped quiet some of the fear inside her. But when she was done and went to wash her hands, the light went out. Extreme terror seized her. It wasn't darkness she feared — she feared what she knew was now also in this bathroom, the thing that had turned off the light.

"Hush—" The tap turned on. Hot water. It ran and ran until the basin overflowed. The bathroom filled with suffocating steam. The rush of water grew slower, quieter, and finally stopped, leaving only the drip, drip, drip of the tap.

"Who — who are you? What — what do you want?" Xiao Jin forced those words out through her trembling.

The thing spoke. A woman's voice — clear as a running stream, full of childlike innocence.

It said: "First pockmark hangs herself, second pockmark watches. Third pockmark buys medicine, fourth pockmark brews it!"

At the word "brews," the voice broke — changed — became a sound saturated with poison and hatred.

The light came on. A hand pressed Xiao Jin's head into the edge of the basin, then drove her face down into the scalding water. She fought to resist, but her body had no strength. She felt blood at her forehead. Her face burned in the hot water.

She had taught physics for half her life. She knew the density of water, the specific heat of water, the melting point and boiling point of water. But none of that knowledge could stop the boiling water from flooding her nose, her trachea, her lungs. In the last moment of her life, she thought of her husband, her child, the students she had taught, and then the terrible nursery rhyme. She understood something, suddenly. She dipped a finger into her own blood and, with the hand that had written countless equations on blackboards, wrote on the tiles beneath the basin. One last character, in blood:

Medicine.