Chapter 2
Chapter 2
Liu Erwa was younger than us and immediately burst into tears.
I was terrified too.
Just then, a line of ripples appeared ahead of us, clearly visible even among the waves.
I had grown up playing by the river, so I knew at a glance that something was swimming rapidly toward us beneath the surface. I could even make out a blurred black shadow in the water.
“Swim! Get to shore, now!”
My instincts screamed danger. I shoved Liu Erwa forward, then turned and swam.
We both used every last ounce of strength we had.
We were swimming for our lives!
I did not dare look back. I had no idea what was behind us, but I knew that if it caught me, I was finished.
Almost there. Almost there!
The bank was just within reach when something suddenly clamped around my lower leg. Pain shot through me.
My scalp prickled, and a jolt like electricity ran up my spine.
It had caught up to me. It had grabbed my ankle!
No! I can’t die!
A fierce will to survive erupted inside me.
Then, all of a sudden, the little wooden tablet I had worn around my neck since infancy radiated warmth and seared my skin.
Though I had been completely exhausted, I abruptly found the strength to swim faster.
With those final few strokes, I reached water shallow enough to stand and run. Several adults threshing grain beside the river were already hurrying toward us.
“Dad! Dad!”
Liu Erwa had reached shore just ahead of me and was sobbing so hard that tears and snot covered their face. I crouched on the bank with my arms wrapped around my knees, unable to stop crying either.
“What’s wrong with you two?”
Liu Erwa could do nothing but cry, their words too garbled to understand. Stammering, I pointed at the river behind us.
“Uncle Liu… Wang Fei… Wang Fei went under. He sank…”
What?!
Uncle Liu and the other adults erupted into chaos.
Wang Fei’s uncle was among them. He sprinted desperately toward the river.
More and more adults soon gathered, and everyone searched along the bank. But there was no longer any sign of Wang Fei.
He had clearly drowned.
“My son! Oh, my son! I told you not to go into the water! How could you die like this?”
Wang Fei’s mother sat beside the river and wailed, her cries piercing with grief.
Several men who had kept their composure began asking Liu Erwa and me what had happened.
I stammered through the story. The faces of some of the older villagers changed as they listened.
“Make way! Let me through!”
My father arrived then. He pushed through the crowd, rushed over, and pulled me into his arms.
Holding my hand, he looked me up and down in alarm, asking over and over, “Are you hurt?”
“I’m not hurt. I was just scared. Something in the water grabbed my ankle, and it still aches a little…”
My father and the other adults looked down at my ankle and all drew in sharp breaths.
Their expressions were so strange that I looked down too.
A distinct black handprint marked my skin, all five fingers clearly visible.
It looked exactly as though a human hand had gripped my ankle with tremendous force.
“Good heavens! It really might have been a river-log!” a middle-aged woman cried.
A river-log was a kind of drowned ghost.
Sometimes, even an excellent swimmer would drown for no apparent reason. People said a drowned ghost had seized them to serve as its replacement.
The crowd grew restless, everyone whispering among themselves.
They all believed a river-log had dragged Wang Fei under to take its place…
Wang Fei’s father clenched his fists. His eyes were red, but there was nothing he could do.
“No matter what, my boy’s body has to be recovered! Friends, neighbors, please help us search. I, Wang Dalong, will never forget your kindness.”
He clasped his hands to everyone, pleading with them to help recover the body before dark.
Once night fell, the search would become far more difficult. By morning, there was no telling where the current might have carried Wang Fei.
My father crouched beside me, stroking my head and telling me again and again not to be afraid.
I glanced down and discovered a deep crack across the little wooden tablet I had worn since infancy. The whole thing had split.
“Dad, I think my wooden tablet broke.”
“Hmm?”
My father froze and lifted it for a closer look.
Sure enough, a crack ran through it from front to back. Perhaps it had only barely held together until then, because the moment his fingers touched it, it snapped in two with a sharp crack.
“That folk Taoist master really did save you once, son…”
He spoke almost to himself.
Clearly, this encounter with the river-log had been my first life tribulation. Without the wooden tablet’s protection, I would probably have met the same fate as Wang Fei and been dragged to the riverbed to drown.
I would have become the river-log’s replacement.
But the shattered tablet also meant that I would have to face my next two life tribulations on my own.
“Go home to your mother and get some rest. I’m going to help your Uncle Wang recover Wang Fei’s body.”
My father thought the ordeal had badly frightened me and wanted me to go home.
I shook my head.
“No. I want to watch.”
I had been thin and frail since birth, but I was also unbelievably stubborn. Once I made up my mind, not even nine oxen could drag me away.
My father had no choice but to wave a hand in surrender. “If you aren’t scared, then stay beside me and watch.”
And so, the entire village began helping recover Wang Fei’s body.
Some families lived right beside the river and regularly took boats out to fish.
They launched several wooden skiffs, each three or four meters long. As they moved across the river, they probed the water with long bamboo poles and dragged fishing nets against the current. If a pole or net touched the body, they could haul it up immediately.
Several experienced elders said it would never work. They needed to try the eddy downstream.
River-logs washed down from upstream tended to circle inside that pool and sink there, the old men explained. Once caught in the eddy, they usually did not wash away again.
If Wang Fei’s body had drifted downstream, it should be circling beneath the surface of that pool.
The villagers agreed and sent a group downstream.
At that moment, someone suddenly darted into their path and blocked the way, cackling with contempt.
“Hee-hee! Ha-ha-ha! You’ll never recover the body like that. Search all you want–it’ll be a waste of time. In feng shui, that eddy downstream is called Toad Entering the Pool. Living or dead, once something goes in, don’t expect it to come back out. The riverbed is layered with bodies that no one has ever managed to recover.”
When everyone saw who had stopped them, they realized it was the Madwoman who lived at the far end of the village.
The Madwoman was something of an oddity in our village.
My father said she had wandered in when I was about four or five years old.
No one knew where she had come from. She had been filthy from head to toe, her face so smeared with mud that her original features were almost impossible to make out.
Her clothes resembled torn burlap sacks wrapped around her body. Even in summer they covered her completely, yet she never seemed bothered by the heat.
An abandoned shack stood at the edge of the village. No one had lived there for years, and both its doors and windows were broken.
The Madwoman simply moved in.
She often wandered along the road, only to burst into laughter for no apparent reason. Sometimes she suddenly shouted at people or blurted out a few strange words, startling anyone nearby.
At first, the villagers thought she was truly insane and tried to drive her away.
Later, they realized that although her behavior was theatrical and bizarre, she could still speak and interact with people normally.
By then, however, the nickname “the Madwoman” had already stuck.
Once I grew a little older, I became a mischievous child. I liked racing around the village with the others, chasing chickens and dogs, so I often ran into her.
She was always sitting on a rock behind the ruined shack, basking in the sun. She would pluck lice from her clothes, toss them into her mouth, and crunch them like roasted soybeans.
Whenever she saw us playing, she deliberately made eerie noises. The other children would scatter in terror. I was the only one who did not run.
Not only was I unafraid, I would walk right up to her and ask what she was yelling about.
“Aren’t you afraid of me?”
“You don’t eat people. Why should I be scared?” At only six years old, I puffed out my chest and tried my hardest to look like a grown man.
She burst into laughter and reached out to pat my head, but I dodged her hand.
Whatever the reason, from that day on, the Madwoman seemed to like me more than the other villagers. Sometimes I even brought her steamed buns from home, which she always devoured with a gleeful smile…
That was how things went for the next several years.
I never expected her to interfere with the villagers’ corpse retrieval that day.
Wang Fei’s father had just lost his son. He was already overwhelmed by grief and barely holding himself together as he tried to bring the boy’s body home. When the Madwoman blocked his path, his fury erupted. Eyes bloodshot, he cursed her.
“Get out of the way, you crazy woman! Or else I’ll make you regret it!”
As he spoke, he raised his fist to threaten her.
But the Madwoman behaved differently that day. In a cold voice, she said, “Before he died, your son was the only person besides Little Wu who wasn’t afraid of me. We didn’t speak much, but I still want him laid to rest. You won’t find him by searching this way.”
“Little Wu” was me.
I do not know why, but as I stood quietly to one side holding my father’s hand, I sensed a peculiar force around the Madwoman. It made me feel as though we had no choice but to listen to her.
The adults appeared just as cowed as I was.
The old village chief asked, “Then tell us. How are we supposed to find him?”