Chapter 122: Thatch Bay (Part II)

The dead man’s surname was Gao, and his given name was Cheng. As it happened, I knew him—his daughter had been my classmate in primary school.

Gao Cheng was about the same age as my father. Like the other villagers, he spent his days going up and down the hills and working in the fields. His home stood at the foot of Maicao Bay Mountain, with the front gate facing the road. Since he inevitably greeted people as they passed by, he was well known throughout the area.

Gao Cheng’s encounter with evil had occurred two days earlier, on the road back from Gansu with Cha Wenbin. In those days, the countryside used rapeseed oil. After harvesting their rapeseed, villagers would take it to the oil mill for pressing. The fragrance was indescribable; compared with it, the cooking oil sold today was nothing but rubbish. Gao Cheng’s misfortune happened on his way home from the mill.

The oil mill stood in the town, and the surrounding villages all took their rapeseed there. After selling their harvest, villagers received oil coupons from the mill owner: one hundred pounds of rapeseed could be exchanged for forty pounds of oil, which they could collect whenever they wished by presenting the coupons. Gao Cheng had to work in the fields during the day, and with spring plowing approaching, he had no choice but to put off collecting the oil until evening.

The rural roads of that era were still unpaved, with no streetlights. For two kilometers down from Maicao Bay, there were no farmhouses at all. Chestnut trees as thick as water jars grew on both sides of the road. When we were children, we used to go there to gather chestnuts.

Gao Cheng left after dinner, a little after five in the evening. Darkness had not yet fully fallen. The round trip from his house to the oil mill was twenty li, and it took an hour by bicycle. He carried two plastic jugs, each capable of holding ten pounds of oil. The oil coupons were in his pocket, and he had a flashlight with him.

The mill owner said that Gao Cheng had collected his oil and left immediately. Judging by the time, he should have reached home at about seven. In reality, he did not return until the early hours of the following morning.

What had happened during those intervening hours? The only clue came from a hunter’s account.

The mountains behind Maicao Bay were high and thickly forested, making them ideal hunting grounds in those days. Wild boar and muntjac often appeared there. That evening, the hunter had heard a muntjac calling and decided to climb the mountain. In our region there was a saying: if a muntjac called at dusk, someone would die. It carried much the same meaning as a crow’s cry announcing a funeral.

The hunter went up the mountain sometime after eight. Following a narrow stream between the hills, he saw movement in the grass beside a patch of reeds halfway up the slope. At first he thought it was game. He raised his gun, intending to fire, only to realize that it was a man.

That man was Gao Cheng.

The two knew each other, though they were not friends. Running into one another in such a place at such an hour was purely accidental, but naturally they exchanged greetings. The hunter spoke first.

“What are you doing here? I nearly took you for a boar. That was close.”

Gao Cheng did not answer. From three or four meters away, he merely grinned at the hunter. There was something particularly sinister about that smile.

“He smiled like a clown in a traveling theater,” the hunter later told Cha Wenbin. “His whole face was twisted. It gave me quite a fright. I remember thinking there was something terrifying about the way he looked. Then I called out to him again.”

“What are you doing? Why are you climbing up here so late? Have you got a light?”

The hunter saw that Gao Cheng was carrying two oil jugs and nothing else. He was clearly neither out hunting nor returning from farm work, and he had no means of lighting his way.

“I can see.”

Gao Cheng’s voice was thin, and high-pitched.

“Thinking back, there was something wrong with his voice. It sounded like a woman’s. I blame myself for not noticing at the time,” the hunter continued. “I couldn’t understand how he had made his way up there in such darkness. I thought he was heading back down the mountain, but after coming face-to-face with me, he continued into the woods.”

“You didn’t follow him?” I asked.

“No. You can’t hunt muntjac with too many people around. They’re extremely skittish. He went that way, so I had to take another route. But the path he took was indeed in the direction from which the muntjac had been calling at dusk.”

That was the only clue anyone had from that night.

Then, in the early hours of the next morning, Gao Cheng was found in the courtyard with a red silk quilt draped over him. It was the kind of quilt placed over a corpse before burial, commonly known as a red shroud quilt.

Since his daughter had been my classmate, I agreed to go and take a look when Old Liu asked me. The people of the Gao family were weeping as though their hearts had been torn out. Gao Cheng lay on a wooden door, not yet placed in his coffin or sent off for burial. He had already been dressed in his burial clothes and old shoes, while three layers of yellow funeral paper covered his face.

The family’s affairs were being handled by Gao Cheng’s elder brother. With the household’s mainstay suddenly gone, the widow and her daughter were utterly at a loss. Gao Cheng had breathed his last in the courtyard, and the red shroud quilt over his body was impossible to ignore. Everyone said that he had been possessed by evil.

The most obvious signs of a person frightened to death were vacant eyes, loss of bladder and bowel control, trembling lips that could form no words, and a terror of everything around them. Gao Cheng had displayed every one of these symptoms before dying. After his family discovered him and carried him indoors, he died within fifteen minutes. During that time he could not utter a single sentence; his upper and lower lips shook like sieves.

Later, Gao Cheng’s brother invited Old Liu to preside over the funeral and determine what had happened, since the death had been so inexplicable. Old Liu was undeniably a half-trained practitioner, but he knew a little of the fundamentals. Once he calculated the matter, he concluded that Gao Cheng had encountered something immensely evil. He was afraid he could not handle it himself—and that any mistake might bring the danger upon him—so he called in Cha Wenbin to try.

My former classmate was named Gao Caifeng. She was kneeling at the entrance, kowtowing to the guests. Though we had not seen each other in many years, I recognized her at once. I explained why we had come, and her family simply said that everything was up to her elder uncle. We exchanged a few words. In truth, the people outside had already begun whispering. Most of them had come only because they saw Old Liu arrive and followed him to watch the spectacle.

In the countryside, anyone who died before the age of sixty—that is, before completing a full cycle of the calendar—was considered unlucky, a wrongful death. Such deaths were usually associated with malign forces, and on occasions like this, adults would warn children to stay away.

Things belonging to the deceased were being burned outside: clothes, quilts, and every other possession that would supposedly accompany him into the afterlife. At the gate lay a pair of Liberation shoes caked with yellow mud, and they caught Cha Wenbin’s attention.

“What are these?”

His elder brother answered, “My brother’s. He went out wearing them.”

Cha Wenbin picked up the shoes and examined them. Their soles were coated in a dark layer of soil. When he held them to his nose, a foul, fishy stench rose from them. The land around Maicao Bay was mostly yellow earth. Where had this black soil come from? Soil of that kind was rare in the south. More importantly, the earth clearly carried the odor of a corpse. From this, he concluded that Gao Cheng must have gone to a burial ground.

“Are there graves on the mountain behind the village?”

“There are. Lots of them.”

The mourners began talking over one another.

“The graves at Maicao Bay are piled one layer over another—stone graves, earthen graves, new ones and old ones. Who knows how many there are? The entire mountain is covered with them. Among the chestnut trees, some of the larger tombs take up nearly half an acre. The small mounds run one after another, too many to count. No one knows which dynasty they belong to, and no one has ever been seen tending them.”

They were telling the truth. Maicao Bay shared the same historical rupture as the whole of northwestern Zhejiang. Written records had existed there since the Qin dynasty, and archaeologists had unearthed large numbers of tombs belonging to aristocrats of the Warring States period. Yet the history of that place was as clear as its sky. The memories of the past had vanished, leaving behind layer upon layer of mystery.

Cha Wenbin and Old Liu were two very different kinds of Taoist. The former wanted to understand the truth; the latter merely went through the motions. Cha Wenbin could see that Gao Cheng’s death was strange. As a Taoist, what he feared was not only another Gao Cheng, but a second and a third.

“All things possess a spirit, and so do ghosts. If they can be avoided, do not encounter them; if they can be guided across, do not capture them. But anything that threatens human life, no matter how fierce or evil, must be destroyed.”

That was the rule handed down by the founders of the Way of Heavenly Rectitude, and Cha Wenbin had always upheld it as a sacred precept of his order.

Before leaving, Cha Wenbin plucked several palm leaves from a tree and laid them over Gao Cheng’s face. It was said that this prevented the dead man from seeing those around him. The greatest danger in such a death was that resentment might give rise to malignant force and strike the living.

The weather was unusually fine that day. Climbing Maicao Bay felt almost like an outing, without the slightest sense of strain. Cha Wenbin and I followed the hunter, who led us to the place where he had seen Gao Cheng that night.

It was a sunken valley, with chestnut groves on either side. Gao Cheng had gone in the direction to our right. The hunter said that the ridge there had a place-name of its own: Immortal’s Burial.

Why was it called Immortal’s Burial? No one could say. Some claimed that a celestial being had been buried on that ridge. In any case, place-names in the countryside usually had origins and were not chosen at random. The moment Cha Wenbin heard it, I could tell that he sensed something promising.

Climbing out of the valley opened my eyes to what an ancient burial ground truly was. This was the real thing.

Everywhere we stepped, everywhere we placed our hands for support, every time we looked down or raised our heads, there were tombs. Broken blue bricks as wide as a man’s chest lay scattered beneath us. Long fallen slabs of stone were strewn across the ground like children’s building blocks. The whole slope seemed to bloom with graves. Beneath the layers of dead leaves left by previous years, our feet sank into mound after mound. Countless half-buried tombstones protruded from the earth, tightly wrapped in moss and creeping vines. The entire place looked like a set built for a ghost film.

“The Twenty-Four Mountains divide the Five Elements; heaven and earth turn according to their distinctions. Within them, the mysterious aperture transforms qi into form, and when the dragon vein reaches the palace, it accords with the hexagrams.”

He gazed over the mountain and continued, “No wonder so many people chose this place. If you ask me, it is no less impressive than Mount Mang. It is truly a blessed burial ground.”

“Really?” I knew of Mount Mang. It held graves dating from the Xia, Shang, and Zhou dynasties all the way to the end of the Qing—emperors above, generals and ministers below—and was regarded as the greatest geomantic treasure in all of China.

“It has the same essential wonder, though it is somewhat smaller than Mount Mang. Still, it is more than sufficient. The dragon energy of the Tianmu Dragon Vein remains here. This mountain lies precisely at the throat of the Southern Dragon. When the dragon turns its head, it signifies a reversal of heaven and earth, perfectly corresponding to the principle that yin and yang protect one another. There is a reason this place is so ‘prosperous.’”