Chapter 123: The Road of No Return (1)

The so-called Dragon-and-Phoenix Sites can exist wherever the time, place, and people are all in harmony. Dragons come in large and small, phoenixes in noble and lowly varieties. A larger pit calls for a larger radish; a small coffin cannot bear an eight-man sedan chair. Everyone has a patch of earth suited to them.

“Maocao Bay” is what we locals call it. No one knows how many graves are buried on that small, palm-sized slope. Moving through old burial grounds has become somewhat familiar to me by now, and that patch of black earth beneath the sole of the shoe was our only clue.

The soil of northwestern Zhejiang is mildly alkaline and generally yellowish, scattered with gravel the size of fingernails. Occasionally there is sticky red earth, but never black soil, so it should not have been difficult to find.

Sure enough, we discovered that patch of black earth on a small hillside. It was simply too conspicuous, too jarring.

The idiom “not a blade of grass grows” is something of a contradiction when used to describe a stretch of woodland, because this place was thick with shrubs taller than a man. On the way there, hacking through brambles and thorns, I had been scratched hard enough to draw blood. Yet here, all at once, the land opened into a broad clearing, scorched black from end to end. Even I could recognize it.

Northwestern Zhejiang was a place of seven parts mountain, two parts water, and one part farmland. Land was desperately scarce. In those days, people worked themselves to the bone, and the grain supplied by ration coupons was nowhere near enough to fill their stomachs, so they had to clear additional wasteland. The locals would choose remote mountain slopes, set fire to the shrubs, and use the ashes as fertilizer before planting a little food—mostly corn.

Judging from the condition of the place, it had been burned some time ago but had not yet been sown. Since it was now the season for spring plowing, we concluded that Gao Cheng had probably been here before, and that he might well have been the one to clear this plot.

It had not rained for several days, so the footprints on the ground were still visible. Clearly, someone had come here two days earlier. The tracks led toward the middle of the field, then turned back. The center was slightly unusual: the ground rose just a little above its surroundings. I went over to take a look. It did not seem like a grave mound, but strangely, two round hollows the size of bowls had been left in the ground in front of it.

“What is it?” Cha Wenbin came over and asked.

“Look here. Doesn’t it seem strange? It looks like the marks left by someone kneeling.”

As I spoke, I half-crouched and was about to test it myself, but Cha Wenbin seized my arm and pulled me upright.

“Don’t kneel blindly. If there really is something here, kneeling would lower your standing in its eyes and make it easier for you to attract trouble.”

Before long, he went into the nearby woods and brought back a length of timber. He sharpened one end and thrust it several times into the mound. It was the simplest kind of Luoyang shovel: bamboo was hollow, so it could bring up soil from below, though it could not reach very deep. For an inspection, however, it was sufficient.

Cha Wenbin placed some of the soil beneath his nose and sniffed it, then said to me, “Bring some people up the mountain this afternoon. Strong young men, preferably. There may be something nasty beneath this.”

“What kind of thing?” I asked.

He held out a finger before me. “Look. The soil is brown beneath the surface, different from the blackened earth above, and it has a faintly fishy, foul smell. It resembles blood that has dried and congealed.”

“A Red Binding Burial?”

After following Cha Wenbin for so long, I had picked up a little knowledge myself. This method of burial had existed since ancient times and was most common in the southwestern borderlands. It was rarely seen in the Jiangnan region.

Cha Wenbin was not entirely certain either, but he was extremely cautious about this type of burial.

“It resembles one. Red Binding Burials usually involve mixing cinnabar into raw soil and using it to refill the grave. This, however, seems more like something soaked in liquid. To be honest, seeing this stuff makes me uneasy.”

Big Brother Liu had never encountered such an expert before. Apart from repeatedly expressing his admiration, he secretly congratulated himself that he had not overestimated his own abilities and taken on the job alone. As he followed us down the mountain, he embellished the story with every step. By the time he was done, bamboo poles were supposedly drawing blood from the earth. Before long, everyone was terrified, and we nearly could not find anyone willing to help.

It was close to two in the afternoon when I bought two cartons of cigarettes and handed them out everywhere. In the end, I managed to gather seven or eight young men, many of them childhood playmates. With whatever tools they had, the whole group made its way up the mountain.

Everyone in our generation had heard stories about Maocao Bay. I remembered that when we passed this place as children, we always ran—faster and faster, as fast as our legs could carry us. The child leading the pack would usually shout, “There are ghosts in Maocao Bay! Run!” The one who fell behind was generally the last to return, sobbing all the way home.

Cha Wenbin used lime to draw a rectangle on the blackened earth, roughly two meters long and no more than half a meter wide. Within that boundary, we began swinging our arms and digging.

At first, everyone could still joke and banter.

“What if we dig up a beautiful woman?”

“Then we’ll take her home and marry her to so-and-so.”

Once we had reached a depth of about half a meter, there was no laughter left. Anyone who could avoid gasping for breath and keep his calves from trembling already counted as a tough man.

I was smoking at the time, but the stench had become unbearable. The soil was like the blood collected in a basin after slaughtering a pig for the New Year. Rub it between your hands and your palms would turn red. Who could still laugh in the face of such a sight?

One person climbed out of the pit, then a second, then a third. No one wanted to continue the work. Finally, I steeled myself and shouted, “Finish clearing it out, and tonight I’ll take you all to the county town for disco. My treat!”

Disco had only just become fashionable in those days. I had gone dancing with Fatty when I was in Guangzhou, and it was not cheap. The young people from our mountain village had only heard about it.

The trick worked. With enough money on offer, brave men were easy to find. A few at a time, they jumped back into the pit. But after only several more shovel strokes, a stone stele appeared. They kept digging until it was fully exposed. Several characters had been carved upon it in Small Seal script, which I could not read. Big Brother Liu, however, read them aloud:

“Those who enter without permission shall die!”

“Trying to scare people, are they?” I shouted down into the pit. “What use is this thing? Smash it! Let’s rebel against this feudal old fool for a while and tell it that this is New China now, that the land belongs to the people. If we want to dig, we’ll dig! To hell with it!”

One of those present was a man called Big Ox, one of my classmates in primary school. He had been a hopeless troublemaker since childhood and was somewhat reckless. He raised his pickaxe and brought it down.

Once he had taken the lead, things became easier. The others followed suit, pounding away until, not long afterward, blue bricks began to emerge.

These blue bricks were different from ordinary bricks used for building houses. A single one was as large as four or five common bricks. By then, we had dug roughly a meter and a half down. Patterns had been carved into the bricks—rolling clouds, birds, and beasts. Today, they might well have been considered cultural relics, but at the time no one cared about such things.

We drove iron chisels into the bricks and took turns striking them with sledgehammers. Even two or three men working in rotation could not break them, which showed how solidly they had been built.

Beneath the blue bricks lay the burial chamber. It was not large. Through the pitch-black opening, we could see a coffin inside. By then, our blood was already running hot, and someone immediately jumped down. Apart from the coffin, there was nothing inside—only emptiness.

I assumed it was merely a commoner’s grave, and Cha Wenbin thought so too. He suspected that the so-called Red Binding Burial might have been nothing more than a coincidence.

The coffin was brought out without incident. It was wooden, but far heavier than we had imagined. Eight men hung ropes from a wooden pole, four on each side, and strained together with all their strength. Even then, they could barely haul it out.

By Cha Wenbin’s usual practice, once we had found the thing, we would simply have burned it and been done with it. But by the time we finished all that work, the sun was already sinking.

What sort of place was this? Maocao Bay was a mass burial ground. Who in their right mind would build a fire here at night? Besides, cutting enough dry wood to burn a coffin would take considerable effort. The Gao family still had to perform a ritual at six or seven that evening to see Gao Cheng off on his final journey, and Cha Wenbin had to get back down the mountain.

So he used an ink-line reel to draw a grid over the coffin: seven horizontal lines and seven vertical ones. He left it there in that haunted place, where he did not fear anyone stumbling upon it, intending to return and burn it in daylight the following day.

By the time we reached the foot of the mountain, the sky was completely dark. My group of good-for-nothing friends immediately began clamoring to go into town and enjoy ourselves. Everyone went home to bathe and change clothes.

One of the friends who had come along that afternoon drove an unlicensed taxi. He had a large minibus. I said goodbye to Cha Wenbin, then climbed in with a crowd of people and headed toward town.

Looking back, there had indeed been signs that something would happen that night. We left a little after six. Rural roads had nothing as advanced as streetlights in those days. The highway followed the river, and for some inexplicable reason, the night was filled with dense fog.

The driver was named Lin Baobao. I was sitting in the passenger seat. We had gone less than two kilometers when he muttered to me, “Little Yi, maybe we should turn back. The fog is too thick. It’s hard to drive.”

The people in the back immediately began jeering.

“Baobao, you’re such a killjoy. Are you afraid your wife will punish you when you get home?”

The fog really was terrible. Baobao’s headlights were barely any stronger than a flashlight, and whatever they illuminated was swallowed in a blinding white haze. I turned around and said to the people behind me, “If it’s really too dangerous, don’t force it. We can go another day.”

Big Ox shouted, “No way. Boss Xia, we only get to see you a few times a year. How are we supposed to know when you’ll leave again? Better to seize the day than choose one. Even if we have to walk, we’re going to town tonight.”

“That’s right… We’ll walk there if we have to!”

I could not be bothered with the lot of them. I only asked Baobao, “Can you manage it?”

“Hard to say. I know the road well enough. We can inch along slowly. Maybe it’ll clear once we get over Huangling Hill. The road doesn’t follow the river there.”

Huangling was the unavoidable route from Hong Village to the county town, a stretch of road about four kilometers long, rising and falling over the hills. Seeing that he wanted to try, I reminded him to slow down a little.

“There are nine people in this car. All of our lives are in your hands. Take it slow.”

“It’s fine. Don’t worry.” Keeping his eyes on the road ahead, he gripped the steering wheel and replied, “You counted wrong. There aren’t only nine of us. There are ten.”

At the time, I paid no attention to what he said. I leaned against the window and began smoking. The fog seemed not to be descending from above but rising from the ground itself. Even so, I failed to recognize the warning.

If only I had insisted a little more that night, perhaps none of what followed would have happened.