Chapter 121
Chapter 121
An indescribable terror clutched Xia Degui’s heart like an icy hand.
His entire body seemed bound by an immobilization spell. He couldn’t move at all.
At that moment between life and death, Xia Degui shouted in terror.
“Xia Mi! I’m your dad!”
The instant he forced out those words, the suffocating stench of decay and the freezing presence abruptly vanished.
Stranger still, the kerosene lamp in his hand suddenly relit itself.
Dim yellow light returned, illuminating the main room.
The terrified Xia Degui saw only his wife, Xia Dong, standing before him. No one else was there.
Then he noticed the muddy footprints again.
This time, they didn’t cover the entire room. They appeared only where Xia Dong had just been standing and directly in front of Xia Degui.
That meant the stench of damp earth and decay he had smelled hadn’t been an illusion.
It had been real.
Xia Degui felt as though he were losing his mind.
He spun around.
Before going to bed, he had locked the front door with his own hands. Now it stood half open, the bolt somehow lifted from inside.
Huff. Huff.
Panting heavily and drenched in sweat, Xia Degui demanded, “Honey, did you open the door? You can’t open it at night without a good reason!”
Xia Dong gave him a strange look.
“Our daughter came home and knocked. Of course I opened the door. What kind of father are you? You couldn’t even hear your own daughter knocking when she came home.”
“Aaaah!”
Xia Degui completely broke down and screamed wildly.
Whether he was yelling at Xia Dong or merely venting his terror, even he probably didn’t know.
“Aaaah!”
Another terrified scream rang out from outside the house.
It sounded almost like an answer to Xia Degui. The shock silenced him, and he stared outside with Xia Dong.
“Honey…let’s go look together.”
At first, Xia Degui had considered telling Xia Dong to stay home while he went outside alone.
But a shriek that piercing in the middle of the night clearly meant danger.
If he and his wife separated, there was no telling what unnatural thing might happen.
Even if the terrifying presence truly had some connection to their daughter, Xia Mi was unquestionably dead.
When Xia Degui rushed home from the city several days earlier, he had seen his daughter’s body lying in the coffin with half its head shattered.
“All right, honey,” Xia Dong said as she took his hand.
The couple had a genuinely good marriage.
Otherwise, Xia Degui wouldn’t have sent twenty or thirty thousand yuan of real money home every year when his life as a small construction subcontractor in the city was comfortable enough.
Xia Dong was the same. Though her husband was away, she kept their household in perfect order.
If not for their daughter’s accidental death, they would have remained a happy family. In another few years, perhaps all three of them would have moved to the city and left Xia Family Hamlet behind.
Xia Degui grabbed a flashlight from the clutter beside the front door and handed the kerosene lamp to Xia Dong. Together, they pushed open the door and stepped outside.
Across from them, an elderly man everyone called Fifth Uncle Xia sat sprawled in his courtyard, trembling all over. His pants were soaked–he had literally wet himself in fear.
“Fifth Uncle, what’s wrong? What happened?” Xia Degui asked.
Tracing their ancestry back two centuries, everyone in Xia Family Hamlet was related. It was essentially a small clan village. Even though most people were separated by more than three generations, they still addressed one another according to family seniority.
Perhaps reassured by the sight of other people, the old man shakily climbed to his feet. Tears and mucus streamed down his face.
“Degui, I came outside to use the toilet. Just now, I saw something that looked exactly like your daughter, wearing a red dress, run out of your front door. It was so fast. So fast.”
“I thought, didn’t your daughter die a few days ago? Didn’t Xia Dong bury the body herself? I got scared and tried to back away, but I stepped on a dead branch in the courtyard. It snapped.
“Then that thing–whatever had your daughter’s shape–turned toward me. I…I…”
He couldn’t continue. Terror once again filled his face.
He had clearly seen something truly horrifying.
Xia Degui helped him to his feet.
But the old man refused to return home alone. He said he would rather go to the commune office at the far end of the village and share a room with his nephew, who was on duty there.
The road was difficult to walk in the dark, and Xia Degui didn’t trust him to go alone, so he suggested that Fifth Uncle Xia spend the night at their house.
That frightened the old man even more.
“That thing wearing your daughter’s face ran out of your house! It’s already a ghost. How could I possibly dare go inside?”
In the end, Xia Degui had no choice but to let Fifth Uncle Xia head for the commune office.
But after daybreak, someone found the old man’s body about fifty yards from the building.
He was dead.
The villagers summoned a doctor from the township clinic. An examination determined that he had died from a sudden heart attack.
The villagers didn’t understand the medical terminology and asked the doctor to explain it plainly.
In simple terms, an extreme emotional shock or intense fear had caused his heart to stop.
Put another way, he might have been frightened to death.
“But what could scare someone badly enough to kill him?”
The doctor muttered the question casually and didn’t give it much thought.
The villagers gathered around him, however, felt their skin crawl.
Most of them had heard that Xia Degui and Xia Dong’s home was haunted. Now that Fifth Uncle Xia had been frightened to death, panic spread through the village.
Even Xia Sanjin, the village Party secretary, was unnerved by the terrifying incident.
He questioned Xia Degui carefully and began to suspect that the problem might be connected to Xia Dong. She seemed to have known that something resembling Xia Mi would return.
Further questioning revealed that Xia Dong behaved normally when discussing anything else. The moment someone mentioned her deceased daughter, however, she became incoherent and erratic, stammering nonsense no one could understand.
Eventually, Xia Degui lost his temper and even threatened to hit her, but it made no difference.
Xia Sanjin had no idea what else to do. He and his father, the village chief, had to attend a meeting in the township that afternoon, so for the time being, Xia Degui would have to think of a solution himself.
At the village officials’ meeting, Xia Sanjin ran into the elderly chief of Wujia Village.
When Xia Sanjin described what had happened, the old chief immediately recommended my Master.
I already knew everything that followed.
“Ah…Young Mr. Wu, do you think the ghost of Degui’s daughter is really behind all this?” Xia Sanjin asked with a sigh after finishing the story.
Xia Jianguo looked at me as well.
I frowned slightly. “If there are no errors or omissions in your story, then I am ninety-nine percent certain that some ghostly entity is responsible.”
Both men’s expressions changed.
I added, “Of course, I won’t know the exact situation until I’ve examined Xia Dong’s house and the place where her daughter was buried. Let’s hope Fifth Uncle Xia merely happened to stumble across it. Otherwise…”
I left the sentence unfinished.
Partly, I didn’t want to frighten Xia Sanjin and Xia Jianguo. More importantly, we had reached Xia Degui and Xia Dong’s home.
The moment I arrived, my heart grew heavier.
“Just as I thought. This is going to be troublesome.”
Even in broad daylight, I could smell the faint stench of a corpse from the entrance to Xia Degui’s courtyard.
The odor was so slight that an ordinary person would never notice it.
But someone like me could.