Chapter 1

Chapter 1

In the fields to the west of Li Village, there sits an abandoned Brick Kiln, ancient and weathered by time.

From the time we were very young, the children who grew up in our village were warned by the adults with grave persistence-

Don’t go near the river to play, don’t talk to strangers coming into the village to sell popsicles, and absolutely do not go near the abandoned Brick Kiln at the edge of the village.

The first two were easy enough to understand.

After all, people had drowned in the river before, and the newspapers had reported on human traffickers disguising themselves as popsicle vendors.

As for that Brick Kiln, the superstitious adults simply said you couldn’t go there, period.

Rumor had it that a villager once saw a python as thick as a bowl coiled inside that overgrown, towering, dilapidated Brick Kiln.

Other villagers, while working the fields, had seen swarms of rats running into the kiln vents like they were possessed.

The most outrageous claim was that there was a ghost in the kiln.

A terrifying female ghost with disheveled hair and blood leaking from her seven facial orifices.

Those were all just rumors, though they were told with such vivid detail that they sounded true.

The fact was, there used to be a rather formidable Spirit Medium from the neighboring village who kept muttering that the Brick Kiln in Li Village needed eighteen people a year to guard the vents.

I don’t know exactly how the original saying went, but the gist was that this Brick Kiln was sinister and claimed lives.

At first, no one paid it any mind.

Which village doesn’t have people die?

Birth, old age, sickness, and death-natural disasters and man-made accidents-those are just part of life. You couldn’t just pin everything on the Brick Kiln.

Besides, people had done the math; there were never eighteen deaths a year. It was nonsense.

…

The reason the adults were so taboo about the Brick Kiln was because when I was very young, a loud-mouthed auntie from our village went for a stroll in the fields on a midsummer afternoon and never came back.

The corn was growing tall and thick back then. It wasn’t until a day later that her body was found in the field.

The police were called, and a forensic doctor came from the town.

The auntie’s body was still there, but her head was gone.

It had been severed by something like a chainsaw.

The surrounding villages were thrown into a state of panic. The town took this homicide very seriously and established a special task force.

The police were efficient. Half a month later, they narrowed down the suspects.

They were from Zheng Village, which was some distance from our village.

A father and son who made a living cutting and hauling timber.

They drove a motorized vehicle and often went around the nearby villages shouting that they were looking to buy trees.

Right at the edge of the auntie’s field, there happened to be a few trees that were growing exceptionally well.

However, the price the father and son offered was too low, and the auntie refused to sell.

After going home for a nap, the auntie was suddenly struck by a strange, nagging thought: what if those two took advantage of the empty fields to steal her trees?

So, she rushed back to the field to check.

As it turned out, she caught the father and son in the middle of actually stealing her trees.

Caught red-handed, the two felt humiliated and offered to pay for the tree.

But the auntie had a loud voice and a fierce temper. She was relentless, cursing them out until her insults became increasingly foul.

In a fit of impulse, the son was the first to lose his cool and struck her in the head with a stone.

Coming to her senses, the auntie clutched her head and screamed for help, trying to dive into the cornfield.

Deciding to finish what they started, the father, fearing discovery, chased her down with a chainsaw and cut her head clean off.

What did this murder have to do with the Brick Kiln?

The father and son confessed that they had discarded the head inside the kiln vents.

Consequently, the police cordoned off the Brick Kiln and even brought in police dogs.

They searched every inch, inside and out, but they simply couldn’t find it.

Yet the father and son swore to the heavens that they had thrown it into the kiln.

The head that vanished into thin air added another layer of terror to the Brick Kiln.

…

Those things all happened when I was very young. I have no personal memory of them at all. Having heard my mother mention it repeatedly over the years, I had long since started treating it as just a story.

My initial fear had transformed into wild curiosity.

Later, I asked my mother: had she ever considered that the head might have been hidden by someone?

My mother got goosebumps all over. She said she’d rather believe the villagers’ talk about it being eaten by a giant snake or carried off by a weasel… if it had actually been hidden or buried by a person, that would be the truly terrifying part.

What kind of person would do such a thing? Was that person still in the village?

My mother said just thinking about it made her blood run cold.

Thinking about it later, I also felt a sense of dread. After all, the human heart is far more terrifying than any talk of ghosts and gods.