Chapter 40 - The Secret Door/ Just a Dream?

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After my short conversation with Yibo, we waited for the other three to wake up so I could tell them about my dream. Yibo said that I should prepare myself for the fact that they will not believe me. However, I had considered that before. I probably wouldn't believe it either just because someone told me.

When Cheng slowly woke up, and Haikuan and He Peng too, I gave them some time to wake up properly. A few minutes until they were a little more awake. After all, we had time. The expected attack of the jungle warriors would hardly happen in the next moment. I watched the three as to see when they were ready to receive.

And just when I thought, now is the time, now I can tell them. I saw Cheng staring into the corner of the room. He was frozen and I followed his gaze in confusion. What I saw then I could not believe at first. There was a huge shadow and this shadow was moving! And then, from one moment to the next, the shadow was gone!

Cheng cried out and kept pointing to the corner. "What was that? Who was that? Where did it disappear to?" He was so startled that he was shaking all over.

The next moment the door flew open and one of the guards yelled at us, "Why are you yelling? Shut your mouths!" Then he slammed the door shut again. I listened and waited for a certain sound. But it didn't come.

"He didn't lock it!" I said quietly to Yibo. Yibo nodded, indicating to me that he too had overheard.

"Maybe they'll let us go right back outside to the toilet. Or they know we have no chance to escape." Whispered Yibo. This time I nodded in agreement.

While Yibo turned his gaze back to Cheng, my attention fell again on the torch whose fire was flickering and dancing once more. I had noticed it once before last night, but I thought that I might have been mistaken. Because the torch did not flicker and dance after that. But now it did again. Even if only for a short moment.

I stood up and walked over to the torch. I put my index finger of my right hand in my mouth and moistened it with saliva. Then I held my finger at the same height as the torch and spun once in a circle. I definitely felt something like a draft. So I moved toward the place from where I thought I felt the draft.

On the wall where the draft was coming from, there had been a shelf with a back panel. It was empty and the shelves were screwed tight. That was all I could see. So I took the torch and held it directly in front of the shelf and then Yibo and the others also saw what had so caught my attention. The torch flickered and danced again. And this time much stronger.

Immediately, the others began to investigate why the torch was flickering. Yibo and Haikuan took a closer look at the shelf and Haikuan finally found something. Together with Yibo, he pushed the shelf aside. Behind it was a passageway! An open door, where a stone staircase led down. But we did not recognize where to, because there was complete darkness.

We would have liked to go down immediately and see what was there. However, we kept our hopes for a secret exit low. Because a lot of these very old farmhouses at that time still had these extra rooms down in their basements. Because they didn't have refrigerators. And down in a room with no light and deep in the ground, it was practically always cold. So they could store their sausage, vegetables and fruits for a while. BUT, there was this draft there and at least that meant that somewhere there the draft had to come from.

But since we heard footsteps in the hallway outside our cell and then conversations, Yibo and Haikuan quickly pushed the shelf back. Cheng and I distributed the hay again and finished just in time. For the next moment the door opened and we were again taken one by one upstairs and outside to empty our bladders.

Each of us was given a piece of bread-like pastry, a bottle of water and two fist-sized almost burnt pieces of meat on the way back. After that, they locked us up again. This time we heard the sound of the door being locked. I wondered where they even got the keys from? Were they perhaps still stuck in the door when they infiltrated the house?

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