Chapter 5
Chapter 5
I rinsed away the stain with water, then kept watch for Dashun in the truck all night. Nothing strange happened after that.
The next day, just before we set out, we ran into Wu Defa and his group again.
Wu Defa looked at me with a grin and asked, “Brother Long, sleep well last night?”
“Pretty well,” I replied.
That was when I saw the old man again. He was holding that little black jar in both hands.
When he noticed me looking, he covered the little black jar with his sleeve.
“Brother Long, I filled the water!”
When Shao Xing came running over with the kettle, Wu Defa seemed to freeze for a moment.
But he didn’t say anything else. He turned and left.
We delivered the coal to Anhe Railway Station without incident, rested for the night, then drove back to the mine.
The mine had prepared overnight dorms for us transport drivers as well. They were in the same building as the miners’ dorms.
But when we came back this time, for some reason, the atmosphere in the mine felt strange.
That evening at dinner, we asked an old miner we knew what was going on. Only then did we learn that while we’d been on the road these past few days, something strange had happened at the mine again.
The miner’s surname was Yuan, and we all called him Old Yuan. He had worked in this coal mine for seven or eight years.
He was from the same hometown area as us, so we had gotten familiar with him pretty quickly.
Old Yuan told us in a hushed voice, “They found a Coal Puppet down in the shaft. Several people saw it.”
“What’s a Coal Puppet?” Wang Cheng asked blankly.
“It’s something that grows inside coal. The older generation says that if human bones have been buried under coal, a Coal Puppet will grow out of it.”
“That thing is pitch-black, like a few bones propping up a piece of wrinkled human skin.”
Wang Cheng’s face went pale at once. I knew he must have remembered the thing we’d seen in the restroom that day.
“Does that thing hurt people?” Old Zhang asked.
“Not really. It’s just frightening, and it’s a bad omen.”
Old Yuan frowned and said, “If this were some other mine, it might not matter. But our mine has always been taboo to the locals. Haven’t you noticed that the locals don’t want to come here?”
“What’s wrong with the mine here? Did people die here?” Wang Cheng asked again, his face full of horror.
“More than just people dying.”
Old Yuan lowered his voice and said to us, “I heard from the locals that this place used to be a sacrificial site for some ancient kingdom. They often used living people as sacrifices, and it stirred up all kinds of evil things.”
“Don’t listen to him scaring you,” another old miner, Ah Gui, said as he walked over.
He was practically half a local himself. He had married a local girl and had lived around here for many years.
“Back when they were going to build this road, plenty of people said it couldn’t be done. They said devils were buried underground.”
“And what happened? The army marched in. Forget this road-they even blasted open the mountains on the horizon.”
“Over the years, sure, there have been little disturbances now and then, but nothing major has ever really happened. This place is just too remote. It’s inconvenient for locals to go home, so they don’t like coming here.”
Old Yuan smiled a little awkwardly.