"Yidan, what are you doing here? Are you trying to scare me to death?" I couldn't help feeling annoyed. Watching his back, I had no intention of approaching, because I sensed something ahead that my instincts told me not to go near.
And my wife-sister's hand seemed to be pulling me back too. I knew, however, that even if I suddenly turned around, I wouldn't see her.
"Is that Brother Tian...? Brother Tian... don't go back."
Zhang Yidan spoke to me in a trembling voice. He didn't turn around. From behind, his filthy clothes looked as though they had been soaked in muddy water, and his shoes were made of papier-mâché.
Hearing that something was wrong with his voice, I pulled a long face. "You little brat, are you trying to dress up as a ghost and scare me?"
Looking at that figure, I really wanted to kick him so he wouldn't scare people like that at night again. But just as I was about to approach, a gust of sinisterly cold wind swept past right in front of me, and the fog instantly blocked my sight.
I stopped in my tracks at once. When the fog dispersed, where was there any sign of Zhang Yidan?
I lowered my head and pondered. Had I imagined it? Or had Zhang Yidan, who had been crouching around here every day lately to catch field mice, taken the opportunity to play a prank on me?
I felt that I was only a little over halfway to Little Yi Village. Although what had just happened felt rather supernatural, I had no intention of returning to Dragon-Carrying Village. When I turned around, I sensed something tugging at my clothes again—and it was even stronger than in the direction of Little Yi Village.
Even when you knew danger was present, sometimes you had no choice but to choose between two dangers, picking the lesser one.
So I could only grit my teeth and head back to Little Yi Village.
Standing where Zhang Yidan had been, I saw a puddle of wet yellow water. I had no idea where water had come from on this otherwise dry road. The fishy stench was rather pungent. Perhaps Zhang Yidan had fallen into a foul ditch and, annoyed, decided to make me his target for a prank.
My wife-sister's warning and Zhang Yidan's eerie disappearance filled me with an ominous premonition about this night journey. As I continued onward, I began paying attention to the surroundings.
But after another half hour, I found nothing strange at all, and my heart relaxed a little.
Ahead, the thick fog gradually revealed the shape of a stone bridge two meters wide. The huge stone I had been carrying in my heart finally dropped.
It was the ancient bridge called "Thought Bridge." According to the village elders, it had already existed when Little Yi Village was founded. They all said it had been built before the founding of the country. I thought it must have been back when Little Yi Village was still a funeral estate.
Regardless of how old it was, the village lay on the other side of the bridge. I could faintly see its dim lights.
I stroked the ancient bridge, remembering how, as a child, I had swum in the river beneath it with Zhang Yidan and our other friends. Back then, the stream was clear enough for us to see the rounded stones on the riverbed.
By the light of the night, I looked down beneath the bridge in nostalgia. What I saw made every hair on my body stand on end!
Beneath the bridge, a group of people dressed as monks used bamboo poles to fish corpses out onto the bank. Several children stood in a line, hopping and skipping as they chanted a nursery rhyme while passing along the riverbank.
"Thousands of flowers, tens of thousands of flowers, drifting, drifting, scattering, scattering, piling, piling snowmen, not afraid of the cold, not afraid of the frost..."
The corpses included children, women, and old people. They had soaked in the water until their skin had turned pale, and some even had maggots crawling all over their faces. Their constantly writhing dead forms were horrifying. After hauling them up, the monks stacked them into a small mountain. Another group of monks performed rituals, sprinkled them with talisman water, and then buried them.
My wife-sister suddenly tugged hard at my clothes from behind. I had been about to approach, but I stopped dead in my tracks, so startled that I couldn't move.
A wave of icy water mist swept past. I looked beneath the bridge again, only to find that there was nothing there!
The water still burbled beneath the little bridge. The monks and children had vanished as if they had never existed. I was deeply suspicious. Had exhaustion caused me to hallucinate? Or had the thick fog produced the legendary mirage?
But what about the nursery rhyme? Could a mirage transmit sound for thousands of miles?
"Brother Tian! Why are you still standing there? Hurry back to the village."
As I wrestled with the sight beneath the bridge, a girl's voice called to me from the other end.
The shout startled me. I whipped around and let out a sigh of relief. It was Yu Xiaoxue, the little shadow who had followed me everywhere in childhood.
She had once been a snot-nosed little girl, but now she had grown into a beautiful young woman. If I remembered correctly, she should have been sixteen or seventeen that year. She had written to me before, saying she wanted to go to Guangdong to work, but I had stopped her on the grounds that she was too young and didn't have an identity card. After all, I couldn't let the village's last "precious fruit" go out and be ruined by bad people.
As I stared at her uneasily, I noticed that her father was standing by their gate too. It was Uncle Yu Gen. He stared at me blankly without saying a word.
When my maternal grandmother had first arrived, Little Yi Village had still been wasteland. Over the decades, people had gradually gathered there, and many of the villagers had come from all corners of the country.
"Why did you come?" I greeted her as I walked toward their gate, intending to say hello to Uncle Gen.
Xiaoxue ran over and said sadly, "Brother Tian, why did you only come back now? Grandma has been gone for two days already. Let's go to Grandma's place."
At those words, my heart sank instantly. It seemed that what had been destined to come had finally arrived—my maternal grandmother really was gone.
My eyes threatened to overflow with tears, but I quickly pinched the bridge of my nose and concealed it. If I was going to cry, I felt I should do it in the mourning hall.
Uncle Gen didn't come with us. He merely stood silently at a distance, watching me. I didn't know how the uncle who had once fussed over me and asked after my well-being had become so taciturn.
The sky had darkened completely. As we passed through the village, I found that the electric lights in every household had been turned on early, yet the gates remained tightly shut. That wasn't strange either. The village had no streetlights, and once darkness fell, hardly anyone was willing to walk around.
Aside from Uncle Gen, however, I noticed that the other neighbors were also standing far away at their doors, watching me enter the village. I was still some distance from them, so I didn't go over to greet them. You people sure knew I was back.
I hurried to my maternal grandmother's house. White mourning cloth already hung at the entrance, and the mourning hall had been arranged. A paper horse and a male and female paper figure stood outside the door.
Other than that, there wasn't a single person nearby. Going by the usual customs, there should have been three or five tables set up, with relatives and neighbors gathered together to chat and drink tea.
But I supposed that my maternal grandmother had been a shaman respected by all her neighbors, so perhaps her funeral would be different from others.
Two Door Gods painted by my maternal grandmother were pasted on each of the two doors. They looked crooked and twisted, but the brushstrokes were vigorous and powerful. White paper bearing my maternal grandmother's surname, name, and dates of birth and death had also been pasted on the doorposts. I only glanced at it before realizing that she had written that herself too, in extremely messy handwriting.
It seemed that her prediction of her own death really had been true.
A coffin covered in red paper lay quietly in the main hall. That was the treatment normally given to an old person who had died a natural death.
There was no one keeping vigil inside, and the incense before the coffin had burned out. My heart gave a sudden lurch before I even had time to grieve. The incense for a wake was not supposed to go out. Could it be that no one had come to offer incense?
I glanced at Yu Xiaoxue. She shook her head, her face somewhat pale. "Brother Tian, just now... No, only a few minutes ago, I had just lit it. I saw you at the village entrance and went to meet you. How did it go out again?"
My maternal grandmother's house stood on relatively high ground in the village, with no neighboring house right beside it, so they could see the village entrance. It was perfectly normal for Yu Xiaoxue to notice me returning home.
The merchants these days really had rotten consciences, making money off the dead. They were even faking incense now—how else could it have burned so fast?
I hurried across the threshold, but the moment I stepped inside, I shuddered from head to toe. I felt sinister wind blowing from every direction, and my wife-sister seemed to tug at me as well.
But I had no choice. My maternal grandmother had died, and offering her incense was something I had to do. I knelt resolutely before the coffin and lit four sticks of incense.
After shaking out the flames, I placed three in the ash basin in front and one in the ash basin behind.
Nothing unusual happened.
I let out a sigh of relief. It seemed my wife-sister wasn't always right. Hadn't I come here without anything happening?
After standing up, I chose a straw mat on the left side of the coffin and sat down. Yu Xiaoxue glanced left and right, then, seeing me sit, hunched her shoulders and came in too, sitting on the right side of the coffin.
Although she wasn't directly wearing mourning clothes, there was nothing inappropriate about Yu Xiaoxue keeping vigil with me. In the past, whenever an elderly neighbor died, we would sometimes sit beside the coffin and chat with the deceased's friends and family.
Besides, her family had a good relationship with ours. When I wasn't around, Yu Xiaoxue often clung to my maternal grandmother and called her "Grandma." My maternal grandmother's house had never lacked candy or biscuits, and Yu Xiaoxue was a little glutton. Sneaking bites of the offerings meant for the gods was something she did all the time.
My maternal grandmother's death left both of us feeling hollow, as though we had suddenly lost our pillar. Although we hadn't seen each other in a long time, there wasn't anything we could think of to say.
Inside and outside, the silence was frightening. I could feel the yin energy gathering little by little, so I prepared to say something and break the silence.
But suddenly, I saw the smoke from the three sticks of incense in front of me twist into disorder. I frowned.
The three sticks burned very irregularly. The one on the left was long, the one on the right short, while the middle one burned the fastest. When I noticed it, it was already the shortest. The words "evil omen incense" immediately welled up in my heart, and I felt that something was about to happen.
"Grandma... I'm sorry I came back late. Don't be angry. The incense burned quickly, so please bear with me." I thought a deceased elder might inevitably become angry if the incense went out during the wake, so I stroked the cold coffin and tried to comfort her. But then I discovered something that shocked me:
The coffin hadn't been nailed shut.
A cold, dreadful feeling surged out from inside, making my heart pound violently. Why hadn't it been nailed shut? Had the person presiding over the funeral forgotten?
"Brother Tian... I'm a little scared... I want to sit beside you..." Yu Xiaoxue looked at me fearfully.
"Okay, come over." I forced myself to remain calm. It wasn't only Yu Xiaoxue—my own heart was pounding like a drum, and the yin energy around us felt far too thick.
The coffin had remained un nailed for two days, and there wasn't a single person around the house. It was as if everyone had no idea my maternal grandmother had died.
When other elderly people died in previous years, the place would never have been so deserted. Someone should have been organizing the funeral, no matter what.
I also noticed that there was no sign of anyone cooking large pots of food nearby. Could it be that no one had ever come to pay their respects after my maternal grandmother died?
This was definitely not a good omen.
I watched Yu Xiaoxue walk toward me, and my heart clenched all at once. After my wife-sister's warnings, I had become so jumpy that even the slightest movement made me suspect danger.
Fortunately, my wife-sister didn't tug at my clothes this time. Yu Xiaoxue didn't seem to pose any danger to me.
"Snow, where did everyone else go?" I looked around. White paper had been pasted everywhere, making the main hall look bleak and miserable.
Bang!
Before Yu Xiaoxue could answer, the two old doors were suddenly blown together by the wind. Not only was I startled—Yu Xiaoxue leaped up as well, cried out in alarm, and grabbed my arm.