The lunch meal that day was unexpectedly delicious. I think it was because Sister Cai helped. During the meal, Fu Yunni looked at each of us with expectant eyes. Hu Zongren must have endured hardships.
, picked up the rice bowl and wolfed it down without saying a word. After trying Fu Yunni’s food, I found it was much better than I imagined, so I started eating it.
After the meal, the two girls who were laughing and joking went to wash the dishes, and I called the village chief back and said that we had accepted the order. As for the remuneration, it was up to the village chief. For this kind of company,
I was too embarrassed to ask the customer to withdraw money, so I could only give him this choice. Then I told Sister Cai and Fu Yunni that Hu Zongren and I were going to Qijiang for a few days, maybe 2 days soon.
It would be difficult to talk if it was slow. Just ask Sister Cai to go home later in the afternoon. If you don't want to go back, you can just stay at Fu Yunni's house. Since these two women became friends, they kept chatting every time they met.
So I asked Hu Zongren to pack his things, and then he followed me back to my home. I also took some necessary things with me and started driving towards the location of the village that the village chief told me.
The distance from Chongqing to Qijiang is not that far, and it only takes a few dozen minutes. However, it did take me a lot of time to get from Qijiang County to that village, and the road was particularly difficult. Fortunately, the scenery in the mountain villages along the way was still good after the beginning of spring.
Qijiang is located at the junction of Chongqing and Guizhou. The beauty of the Guizhou Mountains can occasionally be seen in these small villages. I saw some fruit farmers picking loquats on the road. When I was intoxicated with this atmosphere, from my
An unpleasant snoring sound came from the right side of the room. When I turned around, I saw that Hu Zongren was asleep in a very ugly sleeping posture.
So I parked the car silently, then took out Ash Simpson's record from the CD bag and put it into the CD player. I turned off the volume first, then fast-forwarded to about the chorus, then I covered my ears and turned up the volume suddenly.
Twist to the maximum.
After witnessing a weird carp fight, I had a great time driving the rest of the way.
We walked on the mountain road for almost an hour before we arrived at the village. After asking the villagers about the location of the village committee, we drove directly there and called the village chief on the way. He was at the village committee early.
He was waiting for us at the door. When he saw us, he probably realized that we were not very old. He was a little surprised at first, but soon he said nothing more and moved two stools out of the house.
We sat in the yard and started chatting.
The village chief's surname is Wu. Village Chief Wu told us that on the way into the village, we should have seen a large pond in the ravine, which could be as big as a school football field. The accident was that pond. Village Chief Wu said
He himself grew up in the village since he was a child. When he was a child, he heard the old people in the village say that there was no such pond in this place originally. It was used by the Japanese to blow up the road that the Kuomintang used to mobilize troops from Guizhou to Sichuan.
Bombs were once scattered around here for hundreds of miles, and a big crater was created. I was a little surprised when I heard that bombs could be so powerful and blow up such a big place. Village Chief Wu said, the old man said
Well, originally this pit was not that big. Because the hillside was damaged by the explosion and there was a landslide, water began to accumulate after a few rains. Later, I don’t know why, but there was more and more water, and the area became larger and larger.
Bigger.
Village Chief Wu went on to say that when he was a child, many children went to play by the water because the water was very clear. But in the 1960s, it dried up and was about to bottom out. But a strange thing happened at that time. That is, overnight, the water reappeared.
The pond was full. The old man in the village told the children that there was an old turtle living under the pond. In order to prevent the water from filling up and causing a flash flood, the old turtle used his shell to block the underground water outlet of the pond.
When the pond is dry, the turtle will turn over and let the water fill the pond again. And when the children go to play in the water, the old people always warn them and scare them, saying that the turtle will bite people.
It would take thunder to bite someone before they let go. But for so many years, it has been peaceful. Until two years ago, a child in the village secretly went swimming and drowned. The village organized manpower to search for a long time but could not find the body.
, until one night there was a thunderstorm, and the villagers found the child's body on the water the next day. So the legend from that year was revealed again.
Hu Zongren interrupted Village Chief Wu and said, Village Chief, wait a minute. Didn't you say on the phone that it was about the water ghost? Why does this involve the turtle again? Hu Zongren glanced at me and said, this weird thing,
There is really nothing we can do!
Village Chief Wu frowned and said to Hu Zongren, please listen to what I have to say. Originally, after the child drowned, the village dug out the legend of the year just to remind other children in the village not to do it again.
I went swimming without permission, but those who are a little older and have some common sense know that it is just a made-up story. The real problem was a year ago, in the summer, when several teenagers made a date
They went swimming in the pond, but one of them drowned that day. Later, when the village police station asked about the matter, the children on the shore said that the one who drowned was their classmate, and he had good water skills.
Several of their children were playing a game in the water, which was to find a strange-shaped stone. Everyone remembered the shape of the stone, and then one of them threw the stone into the deep water to see which of the children would dive down first and find the stone. As a result, one of them
After a child dived, he could not get up again. After the children told the villagers that day, they also fished once, but found nothing. It was thundering and raining that night, and everyone was still fishing in the water with flashlights in the rain.
, at this moment, the child's body surfaced.
Village Chief Wu said that it was precisely because of this that someone told the legend of the early years again. As they talked, some of these people gradually began to believe the story. Since the village has traditions and is relatively closed-minded, so
Rumors such as "The Dragon King is looking for a son-in-law" were spread. Village Chief Wu sighed and said that after that, despite the villagers' persuasion, there were always people who ignored the instructions and went into the water privately. For more than a year, people drowned every now and then.
Hu Zongren asked, were all the people who drowned going swimming? Were the bodies found only after thunder? Village Chief Wu said, not all of them were. Most of the time when people drowned were when the weather started to get hot.
, that is, when most people like to go into the water to enjoy the coolness. There are many thunderstorms in summer, which may be a coincidence. But some people who drowned did not go into the water to swim. For example, some people went to the pond to fetch water, and some people
I went to the pond to wash clothes, which was very strange anyway.
I asked Village Chief Wu, after you said so much, apart from those rumors, do you have any witnesses? Because you told me on the phone before that someone saw a dark figure on the water.
Village Chief Wu said that there are witnesses, and there are people who have directly experienced this incident and survived. Isn't it because of what she said after she was rescued that the village thought it was a water ghost.
I said to Village Chief Wu, please tell me about that person in detail. Village Chief Wu said, that is the eldest daughter-in-law of the Wang family, who lives not far from here. Come with me, and I will take you to ask directly.
Ask her. After saying that, Village Chief Wu put out the cigarette in his hand with his heel, and led us towards an earthen house not far up the slope.
The eldest daughter-in-law of the Wang family is a middle-aged woman in her 40s, and I heard her surname is Wu. After the village chief explained our purpose to her, she quickly put down her work, rubbed her hands and talked to us in a lively way. She
She said that that night she was visiting someone else's house. On her way home, she passed by the large pond and heard a child shouting for help from the direction of the water. In those days, people often drowned in the village, so everyone was somewhat concerned about this pond.
She stayed away and after hearing the call for help, Sister Wu was a kind-hearted person and quickly shined a flashlight towards the water. Although she didn't see anyone, she saw someone struggling and splashing on the water that had been calm before.
Water splashed. So she became anxious, shouting to the sky and the earth to save people, someone fell into the water, while groping to the water's edge, took out her phone and called the men in the village, hoping that they would come to rescue people quickly, but the result was
When she was near the lake, she was pulled violently by something, and she was pulled into the water.
Sister Wu said that everyone in the village knows this pond. There is a buffering slope from the shore to the center, so a woman of her stature can still step through it more than ten meters away from the shore.
After falling into the water, she instinctively touched the stones on the ground and stood up. Before she could recover, her left foot seemed to be tightly grabbed by something and was being dragged towards the center of the pond.
Sister Wu said that she didn't know where she got the courage at that time. Instead of struggling in the opposite direction, she turned around and got into the water. She picked up the flashlight in her hand and hit the thing grabbing her feet. She told us
She said that everything she did at that time was just instinctive, and she didn't even think about what was holding her foot.
Sister Wu spoke with great joy, which reminded me of many middle-aged women I saw in the news. They would chatter non-stop whenever someone asked about them. Sister Wu went on to say that after beating herself like this for a while,
Suddenly the thing that grabbed her feet let go, and because the flashlight had not been turned off, she saw something in the water in a trance during the flashlight. But she didn't have time to think about it, so she hurriedly swam to the shore.
When I was a few meters away from the shore, I took advantage of the fact that the flashlight hadn't short-circuited yet, so I swung it in the direction I was swimming from, and found a dark, round thing with a head, facing Sister Wu, and then
Slowly sank.
Sister Wu was frightened now. She recalled the thing she saw when she was fighting underwater. She told me and Hu Zongren that it was something like a child, with black skin, but not entirely black.
It's a bit earthy in color. The claws on the hands are very long, the fingers are pointed, there is some hair on the head but not much, it's sparse, the eyes are round, there are no eyelids, the mouth is big, and there is something in the mouth that looks like
There were teeth, but there were many more than normal people. When she thought of this, she was very frightened, so she turned over and ran back along the road screaming.
Sister Wu said that she met villagers who came to rescue people on the road. She told everyone what happened, and just like that, word began to spread in the village.
Hu Zongren and I looked at each other, and then I asked Sister Wu, are you sure what you saw that night was not a hallucination? Sister Wu said a little angrily, of course it was not a hallucination! That night everyone found my
At that time, everyone saw the scratches on my left ankle.
Village Chief Wu said that it was like this. He also saw it that night, and it looked like a bruise that had been pinched tightly by a few slender fingers. After Sister Wu’s accident, the village went to the neighboring village to invite a goddess.
The method was used, but it still didn't work. Two people died next, but no one knew why these two people came to the river.
Hu Zongren suddenly asked Village Chief Wu if the two people who died after Sister Wu were villagers in the village. Village Chief Wu said yes, honest farmers. Hu Zongren asked if these two people had children at home or
Were they old people? Village Chief Wu said yes. The two people who died were a boy and a girl. They both had a child under 10 years old at home.
Hu Zongren glanced at me, and then told the village chief and Sister Wu that it was unmistakable, it must be a water ghost. Village chief Wu asked Hu Zongren if someone in our village had done something that was harmful to nature and had been punished.
Oh! Hu Zongren said, it has nothing to do with this. Where there are water ghosts, people will definitely die one after another. It’s just that I didn’t expect that this time is so close. Village Chief Wu asked, why are people dying one after another?
I took what Hu Zongren said and told the village chief because the water ghost was looking for a substitute.