Chapter 4

Chapter 4

More villagers arrived. With everyone’s help, we finally uncovered the bodies of Uncle Guisheng and Aunt.

Two shovels were buried with them.

It appeared they had returned during the night to dig up whatever lay beneath the statues, perhaps to avenge Tianye. The positions of their rigid bodies horrified us anew: both were kneeling and bowing, almost exactly as Tianye had been.

They looked as though they were prostrating themselves before the ring of Buddhas in repentance.

The village chief and Dad tried to comfort Grandma. She explained that we could not call the police because they would probably remove the statues as evidence.

But the Buddhas could not be moved—not even an inch.

They formed the Eighty-Eight Buddha Formation, a Maoshan ritual array. The statues’ unusual hand gesture was a Buddhist mudra known as the Demon-Subduing Seal.

If the Buddhas were displaced, they could no longer hold down the thing beneath them. The entire village would be doomed.

The villagers who had handled the statues the previous day went white with fear, terrified they would share my uncle’s fate.

The chief anxiously asked Grandma what we could do.

By then, she knew Tianye was dead too. She sat in the dirt, wiped her tears, and turned to Dad.

“Fusheng, your brother must have followed your sister-in-law back here last night. They tried to dig up that thing to avenge Tianye, and it killed them.

“Go to neighboring Wuyuan County at once. Find a fortune-teller named Cui Mingzhang. I knew him when I was young. He’s a capable Maoshan Taoist.

“Bring him here. With the Buddhas still in place, he may be able to suppress the thing again.”

The village chief pressed her. “This village used to belong to the Lin family. The rest of our families only moved here after the land reform. Surely you know what was buried down there.”

Grandma fell silent. Grief on her face, she stared at my aunt and uncle’s bodies.

I moved to help her up, but she waved me away.

“Go, Fusheng. Hurry.”

Dad nodded. The chief, realizing she would reveal nothing more, told him to gather a few men and leave immediately.

Without even eating breakfast, Dad and several others drove to Wuyuan County.

Grandma remained on the reservoir bank until the bodies had been collected. Only then did she struggle to her feet and let me help her home.

A walk that normally took ten minutes lasted more than half an hour.

I wanted to ask what lay beneath the statues, but the exhaustion on her haggard face stopped me.

Mom made rice porridge. Grandma managed only a few spoonfuls. We barely ate for the rest of the day.

I had heard fragments of our family history from Dad and Grandma. The Lins had once been the wealthiest clan in the village. During the Qing dynasty, the family produced three provincial graduates and one successful imperial scholar.

The three-courtyard compound that now housed the village committee had once been the Lin family’s inner residence. Villagers used to call it the Scholar’s Manor.

The family declined during the Republican era. By the founding of the People’s Republic, only a handful of Lins remained. After the political movements that followed, the male line had dwindled to Dad’s branch and Uncle Guisheng’s.

Grandma had entered the Lin household as a child bride before 1949. She had witnessed the clan’s final years as a great family.

If the thing beneath the reservoir had been buried in those days, she might truly know what it was.

So why would she not tell us?