There was no moon in the sky that night, and it was cold and dark in the mountains behind Tianguangdong Village. Walking on the mountain path, we relied on a flashlight in our hands for illumination.
I turned off the light, squatted next to a blueberry tree, wiped my eyes hard, and looked halfway up the mountain again.
Tang Gui was wearing a shroud and holding a paper white lantern in his hand. He turned around and smiled.
He walked down the mountain very quickly, as if he was walking on tiptoes.
"Yu...Brother Yu, is there something wrong with my eyes..."
Brother Yu also turned pale and asked me in a low voice: "This man is Tang Gui from the village! Didn't he drown long ago?"
I swallowed and said yes.
It is a fact that Tang Gui drowned. The appearance of a person after death cannot be faked. I saw Tang Gui fall out of the coffin at that time. His face was swollen and watery, and there were a lot of dark red corpse spots on the side of his neck. He was definitely dead.
A few days.
"What time is it now?" Brother Yu asked.
I looked at my phone and said, "It'll be one o'clock in twenty minutes."
"It's past 12 o'clock..."
Brother Yu turned pale and said, "Is it really a ghost?"
"Let's go down and have a look."
Brother Yu stood up and left. I gritted my teeth, turned on the flashlight and followed him quickly.
As soon as we got halfway down the mountain, we saw Tang Gui holding a paper lantern and turning a corner at the end of the path.
"Go, follow."
I didn't see the road clearly, so I tripped over a branch of a blueberry tree and got dirt on my knees.
I patted the dirt on my kneecaps and jogged all the way down the mountain. When I was approaching the entrance of the village, Brother Yu looked around.
At this point, all the villagers were asleep, and there was no one around. There was a small stone bridge at the entrance of the village, and we saw a few white paper lanterns falling on the stone bridge.
I boldly went over to pick it up and saw that the candle in the lantern had been extinguished. Brother Yu frowned and looked across the bridge.
From here on the bridge, walk more than a mile north to Guizailing. Walk south and you will enter the village.
"Brother Yu, why don't we go back first? Maybe we were too nervous. Maybe we were dazzled just now and saw wrongly. Tang Gui would have died long ago."
"You saw it wrong? Then we both saw it wrong? It's impossible."
"Do you still remember where his home is?"
"Whose family, Tang Gui's family?" I nodded and said I remembered.
Brother Yu didn't know why, but he insisted on going to Tang Gui's house to take a look, but I couldn't get him to do it, so I could only go on the way.
During the Chinese New Year, most of the couplets posted on the doorsteps of the villagers were still there, but the ones on the doorstep of Tang Gui's house were long gone. The door was closed and locked with a chain from the outside. The dust fell in front of the door but no one disturbed it. The house was in ruins.
Seeing the look in Brother Yu's eyes, I whispered: "Go over the wall? Goodbye, brother, Tang Gui's wife may be locked in the house."
Brother Yu whispered, "What are you afraid of?" What he meant was that if Tang Gui has a problem, come to his house and take a look and maybe you can find something.
There were a lot of broken glass scattered on the brick wall and cement. Brother Yu took off his down jacket, wrapped his hands, and climbed up the wall in two steps.
"Hurry up, come on, come up."
As soon as I stretched out my hand, Brother Yu pulled me up with one hand.
Jumping into the yard, we didn't dare to turn on the lights. It was dark all around and the yard was full of broken bowls, rags and other garbage.
It was so dark that Brother Yu didn't see it and accidentally stepped on a pool of human feces. The feces dried up and I don't know who pulled it.
"Fuck..."
Brother Yu cursed softly and rubbed his feet back and forth on the ground.
I pointed to the east room and whispered: "That room was the place where people died before. Before they were buried, Tang Gui's coffin was also placed in it."
When he got there, Brother Yu pushed the door open and found that it was locked. He went around to the window, wrapped his hands in clothes and smashed the glass with a punch.
The sound of the broken glass was a bit loud, so I looked back and forth nervously, and when I looked back, Brother Yu had already crawled in through the window.
After entering the house, it was too dark to turn on the flashlight. Neither of us could see clearly, so we had no choice but to turn on the flashlight.
Holding a flashlight, he looked around at the furnishings in the house.
Two chairs fell to the ground, and a torn sheet was also thrown on the ground. There was a lot of dark red stain on the sheet.
Brother Yu bent down and found something under the chair. He opened it and saw that it was a photo album of Tang Gui's family.
I opened it casually and saw that the first photo was oxidized and yellowed. They were both still very young and should have been taken in the old photo studio. In the photo, Tang Gui's wife was holding a handful of plastic flowers and looking down at them with a smile on her face.
