The Vanishing Footprints

Tap... tap... tap... tap... tap...

The whole world sank into silence, as if only the dripping water remained, falling once every three seconds in a steady rhythm.

Tap-tap... tap-tap... tap-tap... tap-tap...

The rhythm of the drops quickened, as if someone in a dream had suddenly encountered a nightmare and their breathing had sped up.

Tap-tap-tap... tap-tap-tap... tap-tap-tap...

The dripping grew more urgent, like gunfire, changing from single shots to a full-on burst.

Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap...

In an instant, countless drops came so thick and fast they sounded like beans raining down from the sky.

There was no sky, and no beans raining down.

The space was dark and claustrophobic. The suffocating sound of dripping water came from nowhere anyone could identify.

An eerie, icy wind howled through the darkness, blowing the curtain of water in every direction and wrenching the living apart with anguish.

Suddenly, a pale hand reached out from the mud.

A hand filled with the will to survive.

It struggled to claw at the muddy earth, like a drowning person desperately trying to scrape together a thread of life.

Whoosh!

A woman covered in mud pushed herself upright from the spot where the hand had clawed.

Her long hair covered her face, making her features impossible to see.

It looked as if she hadn't had a haircut in years. Her hair was matted and tangled, hanging messily below her chest, dripping with mud.

The scene was indescribably eerie.

Huff, huff!

The woman panted loudly, like a bellows.

The right hand that had been clawing at the mud still held that same pose. It kept drawing nearer, closer and closer...

Then the hand came to rest directly on Jiang Yue's face.

"Yue'er, I'm so cold..."

Jiang Yue jolted awake and sprang up like a released spring. His sudden movement overturned the wicker chair beneath him, sending it crashing into the tea table beside it. Clatter and bang—the room was in disarray.

Inside, the windows were bright and the tables spotless. Outside, blue bricks and green tiles gleamed.

There was no curtain of rain, no woman covered in mud.

Jiang Yue rubbed his temples with both hands and shook his head rapidly, desperate to shake off the nightmare-like scene he had just witnessed.

That dream again...

It had only been four days since the start of April, and he had already had this dream for the seventh time.

Whether he was dozing briefly or sleeping deeply, the dream always came without warning.

It appeared without a trace and vanished just as mysteriously.

Was it really only a dream?

Jiang Yue rubbed his cheeks hard. The pale hand's touch had felt cold, damp, and sticky, as if it had truly happened.

Especially...

The instant the woman touched him, her disheveled, forlorn, and helpless appearance had been etched into his mind like a photograph, preserved in perfect clarity.

Clack!

As Jiang Yue stood there, still dazed, something suddenly fell behind him.

He turned to look. An old photo frame that had been resting on the large red sandalwood altar table in the middle of the main room had somehow fallen to the floor, despite there being nothing around to knock it over.

An old family home, an old altar table, an old photo frame.

The glass in front of the frame had shattered into pieces, but luckily the photo inside was unharmed.

It was a twenty-inch family portrait, slightly yellowed and clearly quite old.

The family of four in the photo looked blissfully happy. Jiang Yue was in it too, a rosy-cheeked little boy of seven or eight, holding an apple in his chubby hand.

Jiang Yue carefully examined the scene, his mind full of questions.

The altar table was about forty centimeters wide, placed in the center against the main room's back wall. The photo frame had always sat against the wall on the right side of the table.

The first thing Jiang Yue had done when he returned from the city to his old home in Panshi Ridge the day before was give the place a thorough cleaning, inside and out. He had wiped everything down and left the house spotless.

He had cleaned the photo frame himself and put it back in place. He remembered exactly how he had positioned it and precisely where it had been. He could reconstruct every detail of that moment.

Even if the frame had slipped, it should have landed on the altar table, not leaped over its forty-centimeter width and fallen straight to the floor.

For it to fall where it had, the frame would have had to do a somersault.

"Sure enough, as soon as Qingming comes around, one strange thing after another starts happening?"

Carefully picking up the family portrait from the shards of glass, Jiang Yue was about to turn and find a broom and dustpan when his gaze suddenly fixed on the photo.

Without warning, goosebumps erupted all over his body, beads of sweat appeared on his forehead, and even his breathing quickened.

The image of the woman from his nightmare, so firmly etched in his mind, slowly began to merge with the woman in the photo.

"Mom?" Jiang Yue cried out.

He clenched his lower lip between his teeth, and his body began to tremble despite himself.

Jiang Yue had never imagined that the desperate, helpless woman who had haunted his dreams these past few days was his own mother, who had been missing for ten years!

No!

On closer inspection, there were still obvious differences.

In the photo, his mother seemed poised and capable, with a hint of warmth beneath her sternness. She looked just over thirty, in the prime of her life.

The woman in the dream had been disheveled and dirty, looking at least forty or fifty. Her eyes were full of fear and helplessness, and she radiated a heart-rending despair.

But—

Jiang Yue had always paid close attention to details and had an excellent memory. After comparing them again and again—their similar features, their cheekbones, the proportions of their faces—he could still say with absolute certainty that they were the same person!

Something about this was deeply strange.

His mother had vanished ten years ago, when she was just over thirty. Yet she appeared in his dreams again and again, looking forty or fifty, weeping to him and begging for help!

Jiang Yue had always enjoyed pondering strange and mysterious things, and he knew a little about interpreting dreams, too.

People who appeared in dreams usually remained the age they had been in the past.

This was especially true of the dead. When they appeared in dreams, they usually looked as they had when they were alive.

When his mother's archaeological team had mysteriously vanished ten years ago, Jiang Yue had been only eight. His mother's appearance in the family portrait was basically his last memory of her.

He had never seen his mother at forty or fifty, so he couldn't possibly have formed an impression of her at that age. There was no reason for her to appear that way in his dreams.

Holding the photo, Jiang Yue stood there in a daze, forgetting all about the shards of glass scattered across the floor.

"Second Brother! Second Brother..."

A cheerful shout came from outside. A stocky boy came running across the courtyard and poked his head halfway through the doorway.

The moment he saw Jiang Yue inside, his face lit up. He charged over like a bear cub, his expression full of joy at seeing a relative he hadn't seen in ages.

The boy was around eleven or twelve, with healthy, bronze-colored skin and a pair of lively eyes that seemed to speak. He had the high-bridged nose characteristic of the Old Jiang Family, and his whole being radiated the untamed energy unique to country kids.

He was the only son of Jiang Yue's third uncle. His full name was Jiang Tong, and his childhood name was San Gou.

His uncle and aunt had been working in a prosperous city for years, and his grandparents were no longer alive. With no one to look after San Gou back home, he had been staying with his younger aunt in town.

With the Qingming holiday giving him a rare few days off, the boy had quickly found out that his cousin Jiang Yue was returning to the old family home in Panshi Ridge to pay his respects. He had spent the past few days pestering his aunt to take him back there.

Unfortunately, his aunt ran a small shop in town, and holidays were her busiest time. She simply couldn't spare the time to take him to Panshi Ridge, dozens of miles away.

But that was no obstacle for San Gou.

On Qingming Day, he had gotten up early and made the long trip through the mountains all by himself. As soon as he reached the village, he hadn't even gone home to take a look. He had made a beeline for Jiang Yue's old home.

"San Gou, didn't your aunt say the shop was busy and she didn't have time to bring you back?"

Maybe it was their shared blood that made them so close. Though the two boys were five or six years apart and rarely saw each other, they got along like brothers.

Whenever he came back to the village, San Gou clung to Jiang Yue like a piece of gum, as if he wished he could tie himself to his second cousin's waist.

Jiang Yue doted on his younger cousin, too. Though they were cousins, their feelings for each other were no different from those of brothers.

Faced with his cousin's question, San Gou scratched his head. He didn't want to admit that he had snuck back without telling his aunt, so he changed the subject instead.

"Second Brother, who was that woman who just went out?"

"Don't start making things up as soon as you get here! I've been alone this whole time. What woman?" Jiang Yue smacked the back of San Gou's head, assuming he was just trying to dodge the question.

San Gou immediately protested. "What do you mean, what woman? She was wearing a floral skirt and had long hair. Her head and face were all dirty, like she'd just come back from the fields. I was wondering who that silly woman was. Who goes into the fields wearing a floral skirt?"

Jiang Yue hadn't brought down his second slap yet. His arm remained raised in midair, frozen.

A floral skirt, long hair, a filthy head and face.

The image somehow merged with the dream again.

As San Gou described her, goosebumps rose all over Jiang Yue's skin once more.

He grabbed San Gou and rushed out of the courtyard.

"San Gou, which way did that woman go?"

San Gou pointed to the left. "Down that road. When I came over, she'd just left the courtyard. I ran into her right here. She went straight down that way. I even looked back at her."

San Gou spoke with such conviction, but the road stretched all the way to the end without a single person in sight.

Jiang Yue followed the road and checked it. It had drizzled on and off for the past two days, so the footprints were easy to distinguish. The only fresh ones were San Gou's, left as he came. There were no fresh footprints going in the opposite direction.

"San Gou!" Jiang Yue's expression darkened.

"Second Brother, I'm not lying! I swear, if I am, I'll get hit by a car and die." San Gou was clearly an honest kid. He swore the moment he was challenged.

San Gou could be mischievous, but he knew where to draw the line. If he went so far as to swear an oath, he definitely wasn't joking. It had to be true.

Jiang Yue let out a sigh and stared blankly in the direction San Gou had pointed.

These bizarre events really were coming one after another.