Chapter 2
Chapter 2
People in the crowd began to scream.
Aunt collapsed where she stood and fainted.
“What happened?” Uncle Guisheng seized Hu Laosan by the collar. “Did you kill my son? Someone obviously bashed his head in!”
“I didn’t! I swear I didn’t! Your son did that to himself!”
Shaking uncontrollably, Hu Laosan told us what he had seen.
He had gone to the reservoir that night intending to steal a few Buddhas and sell them on his own. As he approached, he heard a dull, repeated thudding from the reservoir bed.
When he shone his flashlight toward the sound, he found Tianye kneeling alone before a statue, slamming his head against it with all his strength.
Hu Laosan called his name.
Tianye slowly turned around, revealing a face covered in blood. Worse still, he smiled at him.
Hu Laosan was terrified, but thought Tianye had suffered some kind of fit. Foolishly, he tried to talk him out of hurting himself.
Tianye ignored him and turned back toward the statue. Then he arched violently backward and brought his head crashing down against the stone.
Hu Laosan said the blow forced Tianye’s eyeball partly from its socket. He froze in horror. Only when Tianye’s body slowly slid to the ground did he recover enough to run screaming back to the village.
Uncle Guisheng refused to believe him. He insisted Tianye must have caught Hu Laosan stealing the statues, so Hu Laosan had murdered him to silence a witness.
Hu Laosan lost his temper too. Were the Buddhas really so valuable that he would kill someone over them?
“You couldn’t even keep your own brat tied down at night, and now you’re blaming someone else?”
His filthy mouth nearly started a fight right there on the reservoir bed.
Holding back my fear, I pushed through the crowd and approached my uncle.
“D-don’t fight, Uncle. Remember what Grandma said? These are the Eighty-Eight Buddhas. There’s something underneath. They mustn’t be disturbed.”
The crowd broke into anxious whispers.
“You think the statues really are cursed?”
“I knew there was something sinister about them when I saw them this afternoon.”
“Tianye worked harder than anyone at digging them up.”
“Oh no. I touched one too. Am I going to die?”
“I heard the old folks say this reservoir used to be a graveyard…”
The village chief and Dad hurried between Uncle Guisheng and Hu Laosan. Dad urged my uncle to tend to his unconscious wife. The chief asked several braver villagers to retrieve Tianye’s body, then proposed that we put every unearthed statue back before the night was over.
Hardly anyone dared approach them now.
Only after Dad and the chief took the lead did a few young men gather the courage to follow.
Aunt eventually regained consciousness. The sight of Tianye’s body sent her into fresh tears.
Dad came over and told me to return home. He would stay with the chief and discuss what to do about the statues.
“Don’t wake your grandma,” he warned.
I nodded. I was no longer remotely sleepy, but there was nothing I could do there.
I crossed the drying mud with several others and climbed onto the bank. Looking back, I saw Dad and the chief still standing before the statues.
Their black silhouettes did not move. They looked as though they too had hardened into stone Buddhas.
A fear even greater than before crawled slowly into my heart.
I was a university student. I could not believe something so bizarre and horrific had truly happened around me.
Had Tianye really beaten himself to death against the statue, just as Hu Laosan claimed?
What exactly was buried beneath the Buddhas?
And would my cousin be the only victim?