MLV Ch 27

Huo Ang entered a stilt house, rifle raised, cautiously searching the interior. He recognized it as the same one they had visited during the day, the one with the child’s room on the third floor. The black mold spots on the walls seemed to have multiplied, covering half the wall in a dense cluster. Some of them even appeared to form distinct shapes. His scalp prickled. He called out, “Yilale?”

A sound came from upstairs. He jerked his head up. 

“Yilale, is that you?”

There was no response.

He slowly ascended the stairs, his gun aimed forward, ready for a quick shot. Reaching the top of the wooden ladder, he crouched against the wall and peeked around to observe the wooden room behind him. The door was shut tight, but an orange light leaked from the crack beneath it. Moving with the stealth of a cat, he crept closer to a small hole in the wooden planking and peered inside.

A small child was asleep on the wooden bed, while another boy, around twelve years old, was packing a bag beside it.

The boy said to the child on the bed, “Don’t worry, I’ll definitely get you out of here!”

Just as he finished speaking, he heard something and glanced back at the door in a panic.

“Dad and Mom are coming!” He quickly tucked his younger brother in. 

“I’ll come back for you tonight!”

With that, he climbed out of the window.

The light in the room instantly went out, plunging it into darkness. Just as a chill was crawling up Huo Ang’s spine, the creaking of footsteps suddenly sounded from the wooden ladder behind him. He jumped in fright, abruptly recalling the boy’s last words: “Dad and Mom are coming.” No way, he thought. Could the original owners of this house really be back? Huo Ang quickly switched off his flashlight and scrambled into a cabinet to hide.

The creaking ascended to the third floor. There was no light; it was pitch black, and Huo Ang could see nothing. He only felt a wave of icy air wash over him. As the footsteps passed the cabinet he was hiding in, the presence moved on, heading up to the fourth floor. Huo Ang waited a moment before opening the cabinet and climbing out, switching his flashlight back on. The house was utterly silent, inside and out. The chilling presence from a moment ago felt like an illusion.

For some reason, he felt an urge to look at the boy again.

He aimed his flashlight at the small hole in the wall. Pressing his eye to the opening, he tried to peek into the room. Suddenly, a cloudy, yellowed eye appeared on the other side of the hole, staring directly into his. Huo Ang was so startled he nearly jumped out of his skin, his head breaking out in a cold sweat. The owner of the eye took a few steps back; it was the young child who had been lying in bed. He pointed in Huo Ang’s direction, his meaning unclear.

All at once, the icy presence returned, stabbing into Huo Ang’s back like a thorn against his spine. Huo Ang whipped his head around, his flashlight beam landing on the wooden wall behind him. The dark mold spots had, at some point, converged to form two rigid human figures, one male and one female, standing menacingly behind him.

Jiang Ye and Jin Feize couldn’t catch up to Huo Ang. The stilt houses in Taisui Village were a complex maze of winding paths. Huo Ang had disappeared around some unknown corner, and they had lost track of him completely. The two stood on a dark path, surrounded by a dead silence, not even the chirp of an insect or the call of a bird. Looking around, they saw that some of the stilt houses were lit, and moving silhouettes could be seen inside, as if people were living there. If not for the overwhelming quiet, Taisui Village at night wouldn’t have seemed much different from any other mountain village.

Jiang Ye didn’t dare approach. Who knew if the figures inside were human or ghost?

As he was contemplating which direction to go, Liu Bei appeared at the crossroads ahead. Her right arm was extended straight out, pointing him in a certain direction.

He patted Jin Feize’s shoulder, signaling for him to follow. The two cautiously made their way in the direction Liu Bei had indicated. As they passed under a lit stilt house, a figure stood behind a window screen, its dark silhouette cast by the light. Jiang Ye held his breath, tiptoeing past the window. Just as he was crouching to pass by, he saw the silhouette behind the window vanish. The front door creaked open. Both Jin Feize and Jiang Ye dropped to a crouch and froze.

Jiang Ye saw Jin Feize, who was in front, slowly poke his head out to check the situation at the front door.

Jiang Ye patted him and mouthed, “What is it?”

Jin Feize shook his head and continued forward in a crouch. Jiang Ye followed. Through the waist-high weeds, he could see the wooden door was cracked open, and it seemed as if someone was hiding in the darkness behind it, watching them. Pressing onward, they finally saw the place Liu Bei had pointed to. It was an unremarkable stilt house, its eaves hung with colorful banners and broken bells. Jiang Ye climbed the wooden ladder and, by the light of his flashlight, saw that the pillars and walls were carved with numerous spiral patterns. Staring at them for too long made him dizzy.

The two entered the house quietly. The flashlight beam illuminated a small area, revealing an empty space with nothing but the creaking floorboards beneath their feet. The foul stench of dead rats hit them. As Jiang Ye wondered about the smell, Jin Feize pointed up. Jiang Ye looked up, and his pupils contracted abruptly.

The ceiling was densely hung with human heads. Each one was decayed and withered. Most had been reduced to white bone, while only a few still had rotting flesh clinging to them like mud.

Among those whose flesh had not yet completely rotted away was, most likely, Liu Bei’s head.

Jiang Ye raised his flashlight, trying to find Liu Bei’s clue. Sure enough, one of the decaying heads had a pink hairpin stuck in it. It must have belonged to a girl.

“I’m going up to get the head. You wait down here,” Jiang Ye said.

“Be quick about it.” Jin Feize had put on a face mask; he was clearly disgusted by the stench.

Jiang Ye clamped the flashlight between his teeth and hugged a pillar to climb up toward the crossbeam. The moment he pulled himself onto the beam and looked up, his flashlight beam fell upon the grotesque face of a scarecrow. He gasped in shock, the flashlight slipped from his mouth and fell, plunging him into complete darkness. Before he could even call out to Jin Feize, a steel nail whizzed past his hair and embedded itself in something in front of him. He heard the thwack of the nail sinking into straw.

“Stop!” the scarecrow suddenly spoke.

Before it could finish its sentence, another nail pierced its forehead.

The voice was very familiar. Jiang Ye realized it instantly. It was Shen Duo!

Jiang Ye yelled down, “Stop shooting!”

He heard a click, the sound of a nail being loaded into the gun’s chamber. If he hadn’t shouted, Jin Feize would have surely killed Shen Duo.

Shen Duo turned on a flashlight and pulled the two steel nails from the straw above his forehead. 

“I didn’t get killed by the ghosts here, but I almost died at the hands of you two.”

Jin Feize’s leisurely voice floated up from below. 

“Professor Shen, are you all right?”

The nails had hit Shen Duo square in the forehead. If he hadn’t been wrapped in a thick layer of straw, he would have already been dead. He took off the scarecrow head, shed the straw clothes, and put on his glasses. In a matter of seconds, he transformed from a ridiculous scarecrow into a well-dressed university professor. His composure was remarkable, as if the creepy scarecrow from a moment ago wasn’t him at all. Except now there was a very conspicuous bruise on his forehead.

Jiang Ye glanced down. When his flashlight had fallen, it had been completely dark up there. How could Jin Feize, who couldn’t see anything, have aimed so accurately?

Shen Duo’s expression was grave. 

“Why did you two come here? Do you have any idea what this place is? Is this somewhere you should be?”

Jiang Ye was still skeptical. He remembered Liu Bei had clearly said that Shen Duo was dead. Was the man before him human or ghost?

“What’s wrong?” Shen Duo saw the look in Jiang Ye’s eyes. 

“You suspect I’m a ghost? It’d be better if I were. Then I could bite you two troublemakers to death today.”

“…” Jiang Ye asked, “Why were you dressed as a scarecrow?”

“To hide from the anomalous creatures,” Shen Duo straightened his straw clothes. 

“You should have seen it on your way here. There’s something in this place you can’t see or touch. No one knows where it is or what it looks like. It’s extremely sinister. No matter where you hide, it can find you. I led a team here, and starting from the third day, people started getting infected with mold, one after another. The problem is, we never touched anything. We wore gas masks and gloves when entering the village and disinfected several times a day. Even the team doctor couldn’t determine the source of the infection. On the fourth day, the doctor got it too. It spread too fast. By the time I realized the problem was with the place itself, it was too late to retreat. On the fourth night, I was infected too.”

Jiang Ye’s gaze darkened. He watched as Shen Duo held out his arm and rolled up his sleeve. Jiang Ye saw his forearm was wrapped in gauze.

“This area was originally covered in that black fuzz. I would cut the flesh away, but it would just grow back. I’d cut it again, and it would still grow back. There was nothing I could do,” Shen Duo said. 

“But luckily, I met someone.”

“Someone?”

Shen Duo took a deep breath. 

“Your mother.”

Back then, Shen Duo’s infection had worsened, and he had fallen into a coma. When he woke up, his mouth was damp and bitter, with a strange, foul taste. He dry-heaved for a while before lifting his head to find himself in a stilt house. A fire was lit in the central fire pit with a pot hanging over it, brewing a pitch-black liquid that smelled exactly like the taste in his mouth. Several burly, heavily armed men were also in the house, all wearing masks that completely concealed their faces.

Jiang Ruochu, dressed in a black windbreaker, sat on a small stool. She was an elegant woman whose beauty time could not tarnish. Years spent immersed in books, coupled with her origins in the graceful landscapes of the south, gave her a somewhat scholarly and delicate appearance. It was hard to imagine a woman like her leading a team deep into such a terrifying place, especially since the men Old Master Jin had assigned her were all ruthless characters from the criminal underworld, some with prison records for murder. Each one was a tough nut to crack. Yet now, these violent men stood respectfully behind her, silent, like spears and halberds guarding her.

“You’re awake?” Jiang Ruochu said calmly, warming her hands by the fire. 

“You shouldn’t have come here.”