The room holding the spirit tablets was probably an ancestral shrine.
But I had no time to think about why there were so many spirit tablets.
Something had changed inside the room, and I suddenly heard some inexplicable sounds.
Old Shen was actually the one hearing these sounds. I was sharing four of his senses: sight, hearing, touch, and smell.
The sudden sounds in the room startled Old Shen. Like a bird frightened by the twang of a bow, he hurriedly aimed his flashlight toward their source.
What the beam revealed scared him stiff.
Under extreme fear and danger, people instinctively entered a "freeze response," as though they had been frozen in place.
I followed the flashlight beam and saw a family of four.
Two elderly people and two children.
The family of four looked as though they had just crawled out of a mud pit. They were covered in thick yellow mud, with bits of weeds stuck to it.
When they opened their mouths, large quantities of yellow mud gushed out and splattered onto the floor.
That was the sound Old Shen and I had heard.
Old Shen's freeze response lasted more than ten seconds. He was completely stunned with terror.
But his years on the job stirred his will to survive. Gasping heavily, he bolted outside.
I hurried after him, but before I had taken more than a couple of steps, Old Shen froze again just outside the door.
Only then did I see that there was a courtyard outside, filled with people. I counted twenty-one, including a baby held in a woman's arms.
These twenty-one, plus the family of four inside, corresponded exactly to the twenty-five spirit tablets.
The room had been pitch-black, but now that we were at the doorway, the courtyard was brightly lit with