Chapter 8
Chapter 8
“Cast the hemp rope, loop it over your shoulder.”
“Feet brace on stone, hands claw through sand.”
“Sheer cliffs and slopes make the eyes swim.”
“Through troubled waters, keep a tight grip.”
“Red rope, red boat, red punting pole–I am a Chuan River oarsman!”
Aunt Qin’s song rang with boldness and heroic grandeur!
Scenes seemed to unfold before my eyes…
Spray flew over the raging currents of the Chuan River. Brawny men dressed in red piloted little red boats, battling towering waves to retrieve the poor souls who had drowned and carry them to Yishan Burial Grounds along the banks.
Wham!
The little boat beneath me seemed to fly off the crest of a wave before slamming back onto the water.
Great waves crashed over us, but the boat remained steady. It did not capsize!
Following the current, we merged fully into the Chuan River. Once past the rocky rapids, the boat continued gathering speed across the river…
The black clouds overhead dispersed.
The moon hung high once more, bathing everything in silver and restoring our view.
Aunt Qin giggled when she saw me soaked through and looking utterly bedraggled.
“Don’t blame your Aunt Qin, Little Wu. A river oarsman aboard one of these red boats–a Red-Boat Oarsman–was traditionally a man. In the old days, women weren’t even allowed aboard. I can imitate the Chuan River boatmen’s chant and barely hold down the water around us at the same time. That’s no easy feat.”
I wiped the water from my face and said meekly, “I know. You’re incredible, Aunt Qin. Everyone calls you the Immortal Lady, after all.”
She nodded and turned away.
Pointing toward the tallest mountain on the distant bank, whose severe outline rose beneath the moon, she told me that was where the government had built the Yishan Burial Ground for the drowned recovered from this stretch of the Chuan River.
We still had a little over twenty li to go. If everything went smoothly, we would arrive in about forty-five minutes.
Beyond the rapids, the river calmed somewhat.
The little boat rocked gently. I breathed a sigh of relief and looked around with curiosity.
Then… I saw a deathly pale face rise beneath the water beside our gunwale.
It was a woman’s corpse!
In the local dialect, it was also called a “floater.”
There was no telling how long she had been drowned, yet her face remained lifelike, as if she were merely asleep. If she had not been drifting so eerily in the water, one might almost have mistaken her for someone alive.
Black hair spread around her like river weeds, enveloping her head.
My heart seemed to skip a beat. I tried to turn away, but my neck had gone rigid. I could not move it at all. All I could do was stare fixedly at the face of the drowned woman rising from the river.
Suddenly!
The corpse opened her eyes.
There were no pupils, only a ghastly expanse of white.
A faint voice whispered beside my ear. I could not make out the words. It sounded like a woman laughing and murmuring secrets to me at the same time.
My mind grew hazy.
“Little Wu!”
Aunt Qin’s voice cracked like thunder.
I snapped awake.
Only then did I discover that both my hands were braced on the gunwale and my head was leaning out over the water. Had Aunt Qin not called to me, half my body might already have gone over the side.
“Didn’t I tell you to behave and keep your eyes from wandering? There are too many strange things to catch your gaze when you travel by boat at night. I have to keep the vicious water revenant in that coffin suppressed. I can’t watch you every second.”
“Get lost!”
That last command, I sensed, was directed at the female corpse floating on the surface.
Aunt Qin rubbed her fingers together. A drop of black dog blood somehow “leaped” between them. She flicked it away.
It shot past me toward the corpse’s forehead.
The woman sank beneath the surface in an instant.
Pat!
The black dog blood struck the river, sending tiny ripples outward and staining that patch of water black.
I finally turned back and saw that Aunt Qin had kept one hand pressed against the head of the coffin the entire time.
“I’m sorry, Aunt Qin. I was wrong. I shouldn’t have looked around.”
I spoke softly, well aware of how close a call that had been!
If Aunt Qin had reacted even a moment later, that female river-log would probably have dragged me into the water.
And if I had truly been pulled off the boat, even Aunt Qin might not have been able to save me. She still had to keep Wang Fei’s coffin under control.
“Ha-ha! A good drum needs no heavy beating. As long as you’ve learned your lesson, Little Wu, there’s no need to blame yourself. You must be bored. Come on, tell me about school.”
Aunt Qin was very understanding.
I was a nine-year-old boy, after all, at precisely the age for mischief and chasing chickens and dogs.
Expecting me to sit perfectly still without speaking or looking to either side was asking an awful lot!
So I began telling her about school and the subjects we studied.
Given how Aunt Qin usually cackled and carried on like a carefree madwoman, I had assumed she would know little about academics. I thought she merely possessed formidable abilities, some reclusive expert akin to a folk Taoist master.
To my astonishment, she was even more knowledgeable than my homeroom teacher!
She spoke fluently about language, history, geography, and all manner of other subjects. She even explained several mathematical formulas I had never understood so clearly that they suddenly seemed to make sense.
I was amazed.
“Aunt Qin, how do you know all this? Did you go to school too?”
She seemed delighted by my bewildered expression and laughed. “Tell me, Little Wu, did you think someone versed in the esoteric arts couldn’t possibly understand science? That an esoteric practitioner must be uneducated? That’s not true. The laws governing this world are fundamentally the same. Only their outward forms and methods differ. At the highest levels, you need to comprehend them as a whole.”
I continued staring blankly at her.
Aunt Qin waved a hand. “You’re still young. You won’t understand any of that yet, but you will someday.”
Oh.
I nodded vigorously.
I trusted everything she said.
By then, the moon had reached the middle of the sky, and we were less than ten li from the Yishan Burial Ground and Hundred-Bone Pagoda.
Feeling thirsty, I bent down, took a canteen from the boat, unscrewed the cap, and drank several mouthfuls.
I had only just raised my head when water splashed, followed by a heavy thud. A strange creature, dripping wet from head to toe, had leaped straight out of the river and onto the coffin lid!
In the moonlight and glow of the oil lamp, I stared at it.
It looked like a wild dog!
But its fur was much thicker than a normal wild dog’s and drenched until it gleamed. Its tail was far longer and heavier too, trailing behind it like a great club.
Two long fangs protruded beyond its muzzle. Beneath either ear, faint slits resembling fish gills opened and closed.
Its eyes glowed red in the darkness. It was terrifying!
I blurted out in alarm, “Is that… a water goblin?”
The adults used to tell stories about them to frighten us children.
A water goblin was a sinister creature said to live at the bottom of the Chuan River. At first glance it resembled a wild mountain dog, but its body was slick, hairless, and perpetually wet.
They usually lurked in mud or sand deep beneath the river. At night, they emerged in packs and roamed the surface, often attacking passing boats! They would devour everyone aboard until nothing remained but skeletons.
They were thoroughly unnatural creatures!
The adults always told these stories in vivid detail, and I believed them when I was little. Once I started elementary school and learned some science, however, I became skeptical.
I never imagined such eerie creatures truly existed!
Splash, splash… Hideous heads rose one after another from the water, and the creatures began leaping onto the bow and stern.
Aunt Qin snorted as more and more water goblins surrounded us.
“Your little friend has become quite the powerful drowned revenant, Little Wu. Even sealed inside the coffin with spirit-suppressing nails and bound by my three-blood curse, he can still summon spirits from the river. So he wants to stage a little spectacle of water goblins stealing his corpse.”