Xiao Tang wore earrings on her ears today, and they looked pretty good from the side. I thought she would take them off when she went to school and put them on when she came back.
"What? Do I like snakes? Brother Xiang, why do you ask that?"
"Eh... I'm scared of snakes..." Xiao Tang said fearfully: "There are a lot of snakes on the mountains here in summer, and there are also venomous snakes. I was bitten by a snake when I was a child, and I'm still scared now. I'm scared of all kinds of snakes.
.”
After being here for a long time, I always feel that there are no good people in this village, and there is a sense of weirdness everywhere. I stared at Xiao Tang without blinking, trying to see something on her face.
"You...are you watching what I do?"
"Are these my earrings? I just bought them last week."
I came to my senses and said that the earrings you were wearing were made of fake diamonds and plastic, and they were only worth two yuan.
Suddenly, Xiao Tang's face looked a little ugly. He casually said that I still have something to do, and ran forward with his little cloth bag.
Lao Yapo came back from the hospital. I also wanted to see her, so I followed Xiao Tang to the entrance of the village.
As I walked on the road, I frowned and thought.
A certain secretary of the Changchun Society in Hunan gave me the information that the true age of this generation of "self-harming snakes" is under 45 years old, their gender is unknown, and there are no photos.
That is to say, this person may be a male or a female.
Because of the sachet matter, I also suspected the forest ranger Mr. Hu. With his status within the association, the Hunan officer had no need to lie to me.
This means that the hard conditions are not met.
It is possible for both men and women under the age of 45. I can use the elimination method.
Forest ranger Lao Hu, Lao Yapo, and Grandma Tang Gui should not be the ones. These people are all in their seventies or eighties.
Who else could it be...
I thought about everyone in my mind, even some people I had contacted in Xi'an, Yulin, and Xianyang.
Have no idea,.
This "self-harming snake" is hiding in the dark, too deep, and may be an ordinary villager that I have never met.
When they arrived at the entrance of the village, Xiao Tang asked: "Brother Xiang, are you waiting for Grandma Yapo too?"
I said yes, I could help get something or something. (Ya Po didn’t hurt the snake, but I wanted to ask her something.)
You can only feel at ease if you find things that were taken from the snake or the tomb.
"I'm coming."
At around 7 o'clock, a shabby taxi slowly drove over.
Yabo was already quite old. After getting off the bus, I saw her carrying a plastic bag containing medicines from the hospital. Her mental state seemed to be declining and even older.
"Let me get this." I took the snakeskin bag from the trunk, probably containing old clothes.
When she got home, Lao Yapo looked at the empty house and couldn't help but secretly wiped away her tears.
Xiao Tang sniffed and said comfortingly: "Grandma, you have watched me grow up since I was a child. It makes me feel bad for you to be like this. Don't worry, I will be filial to you on behalf of Sister Xiaoyun when she is gone."
I nodded and said, people cannot be resurrected after death, so we must express our condolences.
"Good boy...."
Ya Po held Xiao Tang's hand tightly.
I feel a little uncomfortable. What if you tell her that the grandmother of this good boy in front of you dug your granddaughter out of the soil and took off her clothes and pants? Would you strangle her to death?
child.
Yapa's house was destitute. This time she was hospitalized, which not only used up her little savings, but also owed the hospital more than 2,000 yuan. When talking about this matter, it can be seen that the old lady is a very strong person. She said she wanted to buy a house
If you sell it, you can sell it for several thousand yuan and pay back the money you owe.
After helping Xiao Tang clean up the house briefly, she left. She said she was going to school in the morning and would come back to see her in the evening.
Yapo can speak Mandarin. If you speak slowly, you can roughly understand it. After Xiao Tang left, Yapo suddenly called me over.
Her eyes were cloudy, and she suddenly grabbed my hand and said, "Young man, let's go, leave this village and leave quickly."
"Grandma, what do you mean?"
Yapo said in a very small voice: "The ghost temple is useless. Those ghosts are about to run out. There is something in the village that no one can see. It is this thing that killed my granddaughter."
"Young man, I didn't want to live anymore after my granddaughter died. The reason why I came back was to drive back all the ghost kids who ran away. That thing... I can feel its existence, so I want to kill it.
Rush back to Guizailing."
I frowned and withdrew my hand, wondering if this old lady was too stimulated and started talking nonsense. Don't become Tang Gui's second wife.
I squatted down, looked into Yapo's cloudy eyes and asked, "Grandma, you said you wanted to drive that thing back. What is that thing...?"
Yapo closed her eyes and was silent for a few seconds. After opening her eyes, she said:
"It's a snake."
I frowned and asked what kind of snake it was.
She looked at me and said seriously: "A black snake with no eyes and no visible mouth. It is as long as a chopstick. It will come out of the soil and slowly crawl up people's trouser legs.
"
"Hook the blind snake?" I blurted out subconsciously.
"I don't know what a blind snake is, that's a ghost snake."
Yapo struggled to get off the bed. She walked to the cabinet and stopped. She waved to me and asked me to help her move the cabinet away.
This kind of cabinet is a red-lacquered dowry cabinet used for dowries in the southern region in the old society. It has a tenon-and-mortise structure and a copper ring with a lock. The quality is very good and the paint will not peel off after being used for a hundred or ten years. This kind of dowry cabinet in Ya's mother-in-law's house has a total of
There are three of them, stacked on top of each other.
After I moved two away, she took out a copper key from her arms, bent down and opened the last cabinet.
There are many old items in the cabinet, such as crotchless pants, cotton coats, tiger hats worn by little girls, etc., which may have been worn by Xiaoyun when she was a child. After removing all the clothes, there is a hidden compartment at the bottom of the cabinet that can be opened.
This is a kind of dowry cabinet. In the past, when people married a girl, they would secretly hide some things in this secret room for fear that she would be bullied when she came to her husband's house. This was considered a custom.
Usually they hide money or gold and silver jewelry.
What I know is that in 2007, a group of Fujian people formed a team and went to rural areas to purchase a large number of these original dowry cabinets, which cost seventy or eighty yuan each.
The young people didn't understand and sold them to the old people. Out of ten, at least one had a dowry item at the bottom of the box.
What are there, there are old banknotes from the Republic of China, food stamps, old silver bracelets, silver dollars, copper coins, etc.
The secret compartments usually contain the most old banknotes and copper coins. Those copper coins are privately minted and old money with blessing meanings, such as "the number one scholar comes into the house", "give birth to a son early", "peace and safety", "a good harvest", etc.
As of now, in some remote mountainous areas, there are still many dowry cabinets with hidden compartments handed down from generation to generation. As for whether there are anything hidden at the bottom of the cabinet, I don’t know.
Lao Yapo's dowry box really hides something.
She put aside all the old clothes Xiaoyun wore when she was a child, and took out a package of things from the secret compartment.
Just by looking at the cloth it's wrapped in, it's very old. I guess it's at least a hundred and eighty years old.
She carefully held the package with both hands and went to bed.