Mysterious Country 1: Mist-Shrouded Champa: Volume 1: Chapter 4: The Ghost Alley

Mysterious Country 1: Mist-Shrouded Champa: Volume 1: Chapter 4: The Ghost Alley

Deep in the night, the three of them had lost their way among the wild graves and were growing more and more frightened.

After twisting and turning so many times, they had completely lost their bearings.

Luo Dahai was generally fearless when it came to causing trouble or getting into fights, he could take on anything, ghosts and monsters included, or so it seemed. But as a child he had once reached into a henhouse to steal eggs, only to pull out a weasel that had crawled inside. The creature had just killed a hen and its mouth was smeared with blood, its eyes blazing red. It had given Luo Dahai a terrible fright that had never quite left him. Because of this, the one thing he truly feared above all else was talk of fox spirits and weasel spirits. His previous shows of bravado on such matters had been mostly bluster. When confronted with something genuinely beyond common explanation, his mind would inevitably drift toward that old terror, and his courage would shrink to less than a rabbit’s. Having grown up hearing northeast folk tales, he was now convinced they had been bewitched by a weasel spirit lurking in the graves. The thought made his blood run cold. His legs had actually begun to tremble.

Xia Qin, hearing him say the ghost city was haunted by an ancient weasel spirit, found the image deeply unsettling. Despite herself, fear crept in, and the color drained from her face.

Sima Hui, however, didn’t buy it. He knew that reverence for the “weasel immortal” ran very deep in the northeast, but before the Manchu conquest, this belief had barely existed inside the Pass one could say it was almost unknown. It was only after the Eight Banners rode south that Manchu and Han cultures began to influence each other, and the custom of worshipping the weasel spirit gradually took hold among the inland population. There were many explanations for how a ghost alley came to be, and not every country tale deserved to be taken at face value. There was probably no fox or weasel making mischief in these particular graves. But the situation they were in was genuinely strange and couldn’t be explained by ordinary reasoning and even Sima Hui, for all his nerve and his talent for improvising, was young and inexperienced, and at this moment felt completely at a loss.

Then he noticed that the kerosene lamp in his hand was growing dim. It was on the verge of going out. A sinking feeling of dread welled up in him. He said to Luo Dahai and Xia Qin: “We’ve properly lost the path, and getting out easily doesn’t look likely. There’s almost no oil left in this lamp it won’t last much longer. As they say, when the light goes out, the ghosts come calling. If we want to get out alive, we need to think of something quickly. Once the lamp is gone and we’re completely blind out here, we’ll have even less chance of escaping.”

Luo Dahai threw up his hands. “I’m completely out of ideas. You’re always the one with schemes terrible ones, usually, but still. What do you think we should do?”

Sima Hui racked his brains. Back in Beijing, he had studied under someone known as the “Civil and Martial Teacher,” and had picked up a fair amount of outlaw lore. The term xiangma bandit riders originally referred specifically to mounted brigands on the Shandong roads who hung bells on their horses as a private signal, men who gave off an air of chivalry and were hard to identify as criminals, who plundered with extreme secrecy and killed without leaving a trace. Over time the term broadened to cover any band of outlaws Manchurian bandits, western horse thieves, southern migratory brigands, the river gangs of Hunan and Hubei who claimed to rob the rich for the poor and act on heaven’s behalf, and who kept the God of War as their patron deity and the Eighteen Arhats as their founding ancestors.

The bandits of old would often plunge into mountain ravines to escape pursuing soldiers into primeval forests where sunlight never reached the ground; into grass plains taller than a man that stretched without end, where anyone who didn’t know the terrain would be sucked dry by clouds of giant mosquitoes within hours; into marshes, snow valleys, and blind gullies all sanctuaries where outlaws hid and threw off their pursuers. They would scatter at the first clash with soldiers and vanish into forests where no one followed, then regroup once the danger had passed.

It was for this reason that people said bandits had an uncanny ability to find their way. Even lost in the most tangled mountain terrain, they could orient themselves by the stars. When clouds blocked the stars, they found water follow water downstream, and it would always lead you out. But right now there were neither stars nor streams. What could be done?

Finally Sima Hui remembered an old outlaw technique called the “door-pushing method” a way of divining an exit using folk mysticism, drawn from a branch of palm-reading called the innate rapid eight trigrams. It was normally the job of a group’s advisor to perform. Sima Hui had no real idea whether any of it worked, and had never tried it himself but desperate times called for desperate measures. Following inherited tradition as best he could, he stacked three stones in front of a grave mound to make a makeshift spirit altar, scooped up some loose earth to serve as an incense burner, and pushed a few stalks of wild grass into it as incense.

At this point he was supposed to recite the door-pushing incantation but he’d long since forgotten every word of it. He had to improvise on the spot. He muttered to himself in a low voice: “I hereby invite the Lord Guan to descend to the altar, the Old Lord Laozi to manifest in this world, all patriarchal ancestors, the Jade Emperor, the Bodhisattva Guanyin, the Commander-in-Chief, the old and the young all those above, please show yourselves and deliver your disciple from this predicament…” When he finished, he reached over and snatched Luo Dahai’s cap off his head, and flung it up into the night sky. Whichever direction it landed that would be the “open gate,” the way out.

Luo Dahai had no idea what any of this was about, but he cared very much about his army cap, and shouted: “Have you lost your mind? You actually believe in this feudal superstitious rubbish?” He started looking for his cap where it had fallen, but the graveyard was utterly dark in every direction, the wild grass knee-high, and the cap had dropped into the undergrowth and disappeared without a trace.

Luo Dahai was so anxious his nose was running down to his mouth, and he was berating Sima Hui without pause when from deep in the grass came a rustling sound. Convinced it was a weasel spirit crawling out from a grave, he was frightened half to death, and with a great open-mouthed gasp sat down hard on the ground.

Sima Hui hadn’t expected the cap-throwing trick to actually do anything he was as surprised as anyone: Could the ancestors really have appeared to show us the way? He pushed Xia Qin behind him, raised the dying lamp, and peered toward the sound. Out of the mist-shrouded undergrowth walked a figure carrying a lantern, humming quietly to himself the ditty that gamblers always sang: “The god of wealth descends to earth today, all those who gamble are one family; play clean and win like the founding emperor, play mixed and win all eighteen Buddhas; ten thousand mountains, one blossom; clean money and dirty money are one and the same; when you prosper I catch a lucky glow, when you eat the meat I’ll drink the broth…”

The tuneless, off-key folk song drifted through the darkness, drawing steadily closer, until the man came near enough for Sima Hui to make out his face. It was Zhao Laobie.

It turned out Zhao Laobie had arrived at Luosi Bridge on time, found no sign of Sima Hui or Luo Dahai, and then noticed lamplight flickering out among the graves. Without needing to ask, he understood exactly what had happened. He followed the light in. The moment he saw them he said: “I told you to wait under the old bridge at midnight. What possessed you to go stumbling into this graveyard on your own and bringing a girl along too? Do you have no care for your own lives? If you fell into a grave pit and got dragged off by a weasel, no amount of ability would get you out again.”

Luo Dahai was overjoyed to see his rescuer arrive at last, but kept up a stubborn front: “Old Zhao, you never told us we couldn’t come into this graveyard. Don’t start playing the wise man now after the fact.”

Zhao Laobie ignored Luo Dahai’s nonsense and looked at Xia Qin, asking Sima Hui who she was.

Sima Hui noticed that Zhao Laobie’s clothes had seams and that his body cast a shadow in the lamplight which confirmed to his satisfaction that this was a man, not a ghost and gave a brief account of who Xia Qin was.

Xia Qin already knew Zhao Laobie was an acquaintance of Sima Hui and Luo Dahai. Though she hadn’t yet recovered from her fright, she maintained proper courtesy and stepped forward to shake his hand: “Good to meet you, Master Zhao.”

Zhao Laobie paid her no attention. He turned to Sima Hui with a furrowed brow: “We agreed beforehand no outsiders. How did you both forget that?”

“We can discuss that later,” said Sima Hui, and quickly described their current predicament. The place was deeply strange; ideally someone would be standing on the riverbank holding a light to guide them out. But now all four of them were inside the graveyard, and short of waiting for dawn or for the clouds to break and reveal the moon, there seemed to be no way out.

Zhao Laobie squinted and looked around him slowly, then said in a low voice: “In truth, when you travel through wild mountains by night, running into a ghost alley now and then is unavoidable. As long as you don’t let any stray spirits follow you home, there’s no great harm in it. The thing about walking a dark road is you can’t go silent. According to the old method passed down through the ages, when you stumble into a ghost alley, you sing. One righteous voice can suppress a hundred evils. Sing and shout your way through it.”

The three of them stared at him blankly. “We’ve never heard of that. What are you supposed to sing in a ghost alley? The Red Lantern? Azalea Mountain? Can you actually sing opera, Master Zhao?”

Zhao Laobie didn’t answer. He simply told them: “Just follow behind me and keep walking. But whatever you do, don’t turn around and look at that city with the flickering lights. If you do, you’ll never leave.”

Sima Hui didn’t understand. “Why not?”

Zhao Laobie said: “That city, glowing like ghost-fire, half-visible among the scrubland and dead grass it shifts and drifts, now near, now far, never fixed, always changing. The more you stare at it the more confused you become. We must not use it as a guide under any circumstances. Fall into its pull and there is no coming back.”

With that, he led the three of them forward, and in his ragged, broken-pan voice began to sing: “Walking in darkness I have no fear, I was born with bronze hands and iron nails, on my body seven halberds and eight steel warriors, I raise my fire dragon to light the four directions…” What he sang was a type of folk tune called a “cavity-reed melody,” long lost to the wider world his voice was hoarse and cracked, but heard in the dead of night, it carried something raw and vast, a fierce and soaring quality.

Whether it was purely psychological or something more, once those few bellowing notes rang out, the creeping dread in Sima Hui and the others simply lifted. They shook themselves alert, lowered their heads, and pressed forward and sure enough walked clean out of the graveyard, finding themselves once again before the broken ruins of Luosi Bridge.

All three let out a breath of relief at having finally escaped. Sima Hui now felt more convinced than ever that Zhao Laobie was a man of unfathomable depth. For all his rough, country plainness, the saying was proved true: a person cannot be judged by appearance, nor the sea measured by the cup. He asked Zhao Laobie directly how had that worked? Why did singing get you out of a ghost alley? And what exactly had he been singing?

Zhao Laobie had walked quickly and was crouching on the ground to catch his breath. He lit his old pipe, closed his eyes, and drew on it greedily a couple of times. After a long cloud of smoke, he replied at an unhurried pace: “Why? Simply this all who travel the night roads, a thousand li, go by the name of Tiger.“

What did that mean? The “Tiger” referred to was the Mountain God. When a mountain-traveler lost their way, the right thing to do was naturally to sing the “mountain-walking cavity-reed” a prayer, in song, to the spirit that rules the hills.

Luo Dahai also asked Zhao Laobie what that blazing city in the distance actually was, and whether there really was an old weasel spirit living inside.

Zhao Laobie said the place was called the City of Wrongful Deaths. It was inhabited by the two spirits of Injustice and Grievance, and guarded by a great host of five thousand yin soldiers. The living could not approach it. He then drew out the Wind-Calming Pearl and said: with this in hand, it might be possible to enter the city and look around at the cost of one’s life. Did they dare try?

The moment Luo Dahai heard there was no weasel spirit involved, his courage came flooding straight back. He raised an eyebrow and wiped his nose on his sleeve: “I refuse to be scared of that. We’re all the same two arms and two legs. You don’t have an extra head on your shoulders. Anywhere you, Zhao Laobie, dare to go, I, Luo Dahai, can go too.”

Zhao Laobie had some genuine ability but very little tolerance for rudeness. Hearing Luo Dahai’s bluster, he gave a cold laugh and held out his left hand: “In my eyes, you’re all just a bunch of half-grown children. So hold off on the boasting. Look at this left hand of mine — six fingers. That is one more finger than you have. Can you grow something extra on your hand? Show me something impressive.”

Luo Dahai saw that the man indeed had six fingers, and could only bluster back: “What’s there to show off about? Don’t forget there’s always a bigger fish. You think six fingers makes you special? If you want the truth, I was born with three arms. But my father, in response to Chairman Mao’s great call to practice thrift and frugality in the revolution, didn’t want to waste fabric making a three-sleeved shirt for me, so he took a kitchen knife and chopped one right off. That arm is still sitting in our pickle jar at home. You’re welcome to come and check.”

Zhao Laobie finally grasped that there was simply no reasoning with a mouth like Luo Dahai’s, and shut his own. He turned to look at Sima Hui and Xia Qin and asked what they intended to do.

Sima Hui likewise had no faith in Zhao Laobie’s ominous warnings. There was no such thing as a City of Wrongful Deaths in this world, and he too had decided to go and see for himself. Xia Qin, unwilling to stay behind alone once more, had no choice but to follow along again.

Zhao Laobie gave his usual low chuckle, tapped out the ember from his pipe bowl, and stood up to lead the way.

The four of them skirted a broad stretch of graves along the riverbank, making a long detour but strangely enough, with each step they took, the ghost-fire city grew closer rather than further, and for the first time it seemed reachable. When they had nearly arrived, Zhao Laobie suddenly stopped, extinguished his lantern, and gestured for Sima Hui and the others to crouch down. They pressed themselves into the undergrowth and peered silently ahead.