Chapter 183
Chapter 183
The family of three made their way down the village paths, trembling with fear, until they reached the village chief’s house.
After waking the chief, they summoned several more strong young men from the village. Only then did their courage return.
Even after they had set out for the fishpond, the village chief remained dubious.
“Sixth, are you sure you saw it clearly? You weren’t dreaming?”
He knew all about the pond Sixth Lu had contracted.
He had helped with many things when Sixth Lu first started. Later, he had even helped advise him on buying fingerlings, feed, and so on…
The village chief knew perfectly well what kinds of fish were in that pond.
If someone told him there was a man-eating creature inside, he would be the first to disbelieve it!
Sixth Lu wore a bitter expression.
“Oh, my dear Chief, do I look like I’m lying? It’s the middle of winter, yet I ran home, fell down, got mud all over myself, and even woke my wife and kid when they were sound asleep.”
“And didn’t we stop by Zhao Zhiming’s house just now? He really wasn’t there. I saw some evil thing in the fishpond eat him with my own eyes!”
The village chief looked over the poor man’s sorry state. Sixth Lu was covered in mud and had not even taken the time to change his clothes–the two shoes on his feet did not match.
Apparently, he had been so panicked on the way home that he had run part of the distance with one foot bare.
The village chief patted Sixth Lu on the shoulder.
“I know you wouldn’t make such a huge commotion as a prank. I’m only worried you had a nightmare… though that doesn’t seem very likely either. We’re almost there anyway. Let’s go take a look.”
Before long, the group reached the fishpond.
Everything had returned to normal.
The surface of the pond lay perfectly still.
There was no sign of Zhao Zhiming’s corpse, and the terrifying blood from earlier had already dispersed without a trace.
It truly seemed as if the whole thing had been nothing more than Sixth Lu’s dream.
What were they supposed to do now?
Everyone looked at him…
He felt a little awkward.
In the end, the village chief was the one who spoke.
“Ahem. Let’s take the little wooden boats out together and dredge the pond for Zhao Zhiming’s body.”
The fishpond covered a large area, and the water was quite deep–six to ten feet in most places, and as deep as thirteen to sixteen feet in a few spots.
Sixth Lu knew that, with the economy growing so rapidly in recent years, city people had developed a taste for big fish!
That was why he had deliberately dug certain parts of the pond deeper.
Fish such as bighead carp and common carp could grow larger in those deep-water areas.
If he left a few behind each year when harvesting the pond, he could eventually sell them as giant fish!
He had heard that not long ago, some wealthy businessman in Lianghe Town had spent several thousand yuan on a seventeen-pound common carp.
For that very reason, Sixth Lu had asked some craftsmen in the village to knock together several crude little wooden boats.
They were not well made, but they could just about be rowed.
After all, they were only meant for use on a fishpond. How good did they need to be?
Now that the village chief had made the suggestion, the able-bodied young men they had gathered all agreed. They began preparing to haul the boats into the water and asked Sixth Lu to point out where Zhao Zhiming’s body had gone under.
He shook his head fiercely and waved both hands, rejecting the village chief’s proposal.
“No, no! It’s too dangerous. If there really is something evil in the fishpond, wouldn’t taking a boat out there now be the same as delivering ourselves straight into its mouth?”
With so many people around, and after having some time to recover, Sixth Lu had gradually calmed down.
He said to the others,
“Thank you all for coming to help. I’ve thought it over carefully. Whatever happened, there’s no reason we have to get to the bottom of it in the middle of the night. Let’s go home and sleep first. Tomorrow morning, I’ll report it to the township police station, and then we can help them dredge up the body.”
“Sorry for dragging everyone out of bed and making you come all this way tonight. This one’s on me! Once this is settled tomorrow, I’ll give each of you a three- or four-pound grass carp and a pack of cigarettes.”
Some of the men had originally been grumbling, but Sixth Lu knew how to treat people right, and their moods brightened at once.
They were just preparing to leave the pond
when suddenly,
a strange rumbling noise rang out.
It was loud.
It truly did resemble thunder, except that it sounded unusually muffled.
It came from inside the fishpond!
Sixth Lu spun around to look.
At the very center of the pond, the water was churning violently. Concentric ripples spread outward in every direction, and waves slapped against the pond’s concrete walls…
It looked as though some enormous, uncanny creature lay hidden beneath the water.
The calm Sixth Lu had only just regained instantly gave way to terror.
“That’s the sound! That’s what woke me earlier, and then I saw Zhao Zhiming in the water calling for help.”
Faced with such an unnatural sight, the village chief and the other young men felt their courage falter too.
One of the more timid men in the group finally lost his nerve and shouted,
“Run!”
He turned and bolted toward the village.
That was how people were. The instant one person’s courage collapsed, no one else dared linger. Even Sixth Lu and the village chief fled the fishpond area as fast as they could.
…
After returning home, Sixth Lu could not sleep.
At the first hint of dawn, he went with the village chief to the township police station and reported the incident.
They asked the police to come take a look.
Someone had died, after all. The authorities certainly needed to investigate.
At noon, when the sun was high, everyone mustered their courage under the supervision of officers from the station. They rowed two little wooden boats out to the place in the fishpond where Zhao Zhiming had died…
and began casting nets to recover his body.
But after two or three hours, they had dragged nets through the entire pond and recovered absolutely nothing!
Of course, they did catch plenty of fish of every kind–bighead carp, silver carp, grass carp, common carp, crucian carp, even softshell turtles… Sixth Lu really had done a fine job with the pond.
But Zhao Zhiming, whom Sixth Lu had watched being dragged underwater by some unknown monster, seemed to have vanished into thin air… Not even a corpse remained!
“You said someone died in the fishpond. So where’s the body?”
An officer from the township police station questioned him.