Mysterious Country 1: Mist-Shrouded Champa: Volume 1: Chapter 3: The Snail Bridge

Mysterious Country 1: Mist-Shrouded Champa: Volume 1: Chapter 3: The Snail Bridge

After Zhao Laobie had finished laying everything out, he set a meeting time midnight sharp, under Luosi Bridge, to hunt for the treasure together. He tucked the Wind-Calming Pearl away and hurried off on his own.

Sima Hui and Luo Dahai could no longer sit still. The two were itching with excitement, convinced that tonight’s business would be thrilling, and quite possibly profitable. They cracked their knuckles and began getting ready.

First they divided up the cigarettes and canned goods among everyone in the group. Then they found a kerosene lamp that still worked, and worried about running into trouble each hid a triangular scraper on their person. This kind of triangular scraper had three cutting edges and came with ready-made blood grooves; if it caught a man in his vital organs, the wound simply wouldn’t close. Even if the victim made it to a hospital, death from blood loss was the usual outcome. Such weapons were common enough in the Black House area and drew no particular notice. Once they’d gotten themselves kitted out and ready, they had nothing left to do but wait for nightfall and head to the bridge to meet Zhao Laobie.

They waited and waited for the sun to go down. They were just about to set out when a girl named Xia Qin appeared at their door.

Before the schools suspended classes, Xia Qin had been a classmate of Sima Hui and Luo Dahai. She wasn’t exactly a beauty, but she was well-proportioned, with decent features and good grades. More importantly and this mattered a great deal her family’s political standing was excellent. She was certain to join the military sooner or later, and her future was bright. She rarely got mixed up in the kinds of trouble that followed Luo Dahai and his crowd. Her sudden appearance at the Black House today came as a genuine surprise to both of them.

Xia Qin had come without a hat. Her bangs were cut straight across her forehead and she wore her hair in two long thin braids. She had on a genuine military-style twill jacket, blue khaki trousers, and a Chairman Mao badge pinned to her chest. She had walked all the way from the city, and her clothes were soaked through with sweat. She seemed to have something extremely important on her mind, but when she took one look at Sima Hui and Luo Dahai their eyebrows cocked, their whole manner loose and rakish she deflated with disappointment. She let out a helpless sigh, and whatever she’d come to say got swallowed back. Instead she simply scolded the two of them, saying they shouldn’t have let themselves sink so low, that they should find ways to keep studying and not throw their youth away.

Sima Hui had little patience for this kind of lecture. He thought to himself: This girl is forever making a fuss about things. Who studies anymore? But he brushed her off with casual indifference and said aloud: “You think I want to live like this? People study to fulfill their potential, obviously. But there’s a philosopher who once pointed out that human beings need five things in ascending order — first survival, then security, then love and belonging, then respect, and only fifth comes self-actualization. We can barely scrape together enough to eat from one meal to the next. We’re not even clearing the first bar. How are we supposed to worry about studying?”

Xia Qin knew she couldn’t out-argue Sima Hui who knew which philosopher had supposedly said all that, or whether he’d just made it up on the spot so she could only say: “Sima, we’ve been classmates. I’m saying this because I care about you.”

Then she noticed that both Sima Hui and Luo Dahai were dressed for action carrying a kerosene lamp, weapons tucked in their belts and assumed the two of them were heading out to fight somebody. She quickly asked where they were going.

Luo Dahai’s mind moved nowhere near as fast as Sima Hui’s, and he blurted out: “We’re going to Luosi Bridge” He caught himself halfway through, and clapped a hand over his own mouth.

Xia Qin had heard of Luosi Bridge, out in the distant outskirts. It was an old stone bridge long since fallen into disuse; beyond it lay nothing but wilderness, rolling hills, and a vast stretch of graveyard not a soul lived out there. What were they doing going there in the middle of the night? Her suspicions deepened considerably. She was now convinced they were heading out to cause trouble.

Sima Hui quickly explained absolutely not a planned fight they were going to catch quail. The area around Luosi Bridge was all waist-high scrubland and wild grasses, and the thickets there were full of quail.

This was not entirely a lie. To establish yourself in the Black House as an outsider, you had to prove yourself through fighting and beyond brawls and mob fights, the most effective method was quail-fighting. Quail-fighting had been a popular gambling pastime among commoners since the late Ming dynasty, much like cockfighting, dog-fighting, or cricket-fighting. It had been Sima Hui who’d found a quail with purple feathers and an iron beak, and in three days it had beaten fifteen of the Black House gang’s quails in a row that was how they’d broken through and won themselves this territory to live on.

After that, whenever a dispute arose between the two sides, quail-fighting was how they settled it. But quail were hard to keep alive, and so Sima Hui was constantly having to go out into the wild grasslands to catch new ones. Of course, you couldn’t catch quail in the dead of night this was just the excuse he reached for.

Xia Qin wasn’t entirely convinced by this explanation and insisted on coming along to see for herself before she’d be at ease. Sima Hui tried once to talk her out of it, but it didn’t work, and by now the sky was already darkening there was no way to send her back to the city. He had no choice but to grit his teeth and agree.

That night the sky was thick with stars, moonless, and not a breath of wind stirred the air. The heat was stifling, almost suffocating. The three of them took a kerosene lamp and slipped quietly out of the Black House, picking their way through uneven open fields for a long while until they came upon a half-collapsed stone bridge spanning a dry riverbed. This was Luosi Bridge. Beyond the bridge the land grew even more bleak and desolate — rolling mounds stretched away into the distance, buried under boundless wild grass. It had been a large disorganized burial ground for hundreds of years, tended by no one, full of paupers’ graves, some of them shared by several people. It was said to be badly haunted, and few people dared walk through it after dark.

Since midsummer, the dry streambed under the bridge had filled with silt and tall wormwood grass. Frogs called steadily from deep in the growth. Mosquitoes bred thickly in the stagnant pools. Some of the moths that came fluttering were nearly as large as birds — when one blundered toward your face it was enough to make your blood run cold. But Sima Hui and Luo Dahai had roamed outdoors so long that none of this bothered them in the slightest. Seeing that there was still time before midnight, they simply crouched down beneath the bridge, extinguished the lamp, and smoked while they waited.

Sima Hui decided there was no point in hiding things any longer, and told Xia Qin the whole story of their encounter with Zhao Laobie, asking her not to breathe a word of it afterward.

Xia Qin agreed quietly. “Don’t worry, I’m not a snitch. But the way you two carry on, sooner or later you’re going to bring real disaster on yourselves. Two days ago I heard my father say the Public Security Bureau has decided to break up the Black House gang for good. If you don’t want to end up in a detention center, you’d be better off coming back to the city while you still can.”

Sima Hui received this news with a complicated feeling in his chest. After spending these weeks among them, he’d come to see that what people called the Black House gang were, at bottom, fairly plain and simple people mostly street vendors selling roasted sweet potatoes and scallion pancakes, or homeless wanderers with nowhere else to go, all of them living hand-to-mouth. There wasn’t a truly dangerous criminal among them. If they were really driven out of these ruins and sheds, where would any of them go?

Luo Dahai was less troubled. He said if the Black House became untenable, he’d take Sima Hui up to the northeast with him. His father had connections up there from his old army days he had contacts, he had options. Maybe when they were old enough, he could arrange for them to join up. That was better than staying here and eating humble pie every day.

Xia Qin said: “What’s so great about the northeast? You’d freeze to death in winter. Isn’t that where you got your tongue damaged as a kid?”

Luo Dahai curled his lip. “What do you know? Women long on hair, short on sense.” He turned to Sima Hui: “Sima, your old man came south through the Pass too, right? What do you make of that place?”

Sima Hui had a vague, creeping sense that his little group had no clear future and an uncertain fate but he’d always been one to take things as they came, and he didn’t dwell on it. At Luo Dahai’s question, he said: “I’ve never been to the northeast myself, only heard my father talk about it. Out there in winter the whole world freezes and goes still under ice and snow some people even get their noses frostbitten off. But deep in those old forests, strange things happen all the time. Sitting in a logger’s camp listening to the old hands spin yarns, you could fill an entire winter and still not run out of stories.”

To pass the time, Sima Hui told Luo Dahai and Xia Qin one of the strange tales his father Zhang Hulu had collected in the northeast. There was an abandoned temple deep in those mountains, and one day a Taoist master arrived, took on a young novice from a village at the foot of the mountain, and used charitable donations to build a shrine hall dedicated to the patriarchal deity. Master and disciple lived there for several years. The slopes around the hall’s entrance were thick with strange trees and unusual plants. Often, two small children could be seen playing outside the main gate. Whenever the old Taoist encountered them, he would casually give them cake or fruit, and over time they had all grown familiar with each other. But those two children never once dared step through the gate into the hall.

Several peaceful years passed like this, until one day the old Taoist brought back a handful of freshly picked peaches from the village below — stems and leaves still on them, each one full and ripe. He arranged them on the altar table inside the hall as an offering to the patriarchal deity. Exhausted from a full day’s journey, weary and drowsy, he sat down inside the hall, leaned against the table, and fell into a deep sleep.

At this point one of the children crept to the doorway and peered through the crack. Seeing those bright, tempting peaches, the child couldn’t resist, and slipped silently into the hall to steal one. But the old Taoist suddenly let out a great shout and leapt to his feet. He grabbed the child, said not a single word, clamped it firmly under his arm, and in three quick strides made for the back hall and the incense cabinet. With rapid, fumbling hands he stripped the child of every stitch of clothing, rinsed it clean with water, and threw it alive into a large cauldron, placed a wooden lid on top, and pressed a heavy stone down over the lid.

Then he called in his young disciple and ordered him to feed wood into the fire under the cauldron, keep it burning without interruption, and under absolutely no circumstances open the lid or look inside. With that, the old Taoist hurried off to bathe and change and perform his ritual prayers.

The young novice thought: a person who has taken religious vows should be rooted in compassion. How can he do something so cruel as cooking a child? I fear my master is practicing some dark art. He could hear the child struggling and crying inside the cauldron, and his heart grew more tormented by the minute. He wanted to lift the lid and let it go free, but he was afraid that if the master didn’t get the flesh he was after, he’d turn on his disciple instead. He didn’t dare disobey.

As the fire burned hotter and hotter, the sounds from within the cauldron gradually fell silent. The child had apparently been cooked to death. Worried the water might be boiling dry, the novice lifted the lid just the slightest crack to check and with a sharp crack, the child burst out and was gone before anyone could see where.

Just at that moment the old Taoist came hurrying back carrying a medicine jar. He took in the situation at a glance, and master and disciple rushed outside to search. But they found nothing, no trace at all. The old man could only stand there and weep, then finally sigh: “Foolish disciple you have ruined everything. I have lived in these mountains for years for the sake of one thing: a thousand-year-old ginseng root. Prepared as medicine and consumed, it could grant eternal life. It seems I lack the fortune for it, and ascending to immortality is not to be. Yet the soup in that cauldron and the child’s clothing are still there made into a medicinal elixir and taken, they could at least grant a very long life and freedom from all illness.” With that, master and disciple hurried back inside.

But when they went to retrieve the clothing, it was gone. And the water in the cauldron had been lapped up to the last drop by a mangy, hairless wild dog that had gotten in. The old Taoist was utterly bereft, took to his bed with illness, and within a few months had withered away and died in despair. The wild dog, so they said, grew a coat of dense black fur all over its body glossy and fine beyond compare and vanished into the mountains, never to return.

Only the young novice remained on the mountain, keeping watch over the empty shrine hall. Eventually, destitute and with no means of survival, he was driven to turn outlaw, joining Zhang Hulu as a Manchurian bandit. All of this he had told Zhang Hulu with his own mouth.

Luo Dahai and Xia Qin listened to Sima Hui recount the tale with such conviction and evident seriousness that they couldn’t tell whether it was real or something he’d invented on the spot.

Sima Hui explained: “It’s a story don’t ask whether it’s true or not. But the reason I told it just now is this: something about this treasure-hunter Zhao Laobie keeps reminding me of that old Taoist trying to catch a ginseng spirit.”

Luo Dahai heartily agreed. “They’re both rotten to the core! Look at the time where the hell is Zhao Laobie? I’m starting to think he’s played us for fools.”

Sima Hui nodded and said with sweeping conviction: “Human beings are inherently social creatures, and society is a complex collective riddled with sharp contradictions at every moment. These past years have taught us one thing above all else: no matter what happens, you have to believe this in this world, there is no shortage of truly worthless people.”

As he spoke, he stood up and looked out to see whether Zhao Laobie had come yet. What he saw instead made him flinch. He could hardly believe his own eyes, and rubbed them and looked again.

Clouds had moved in across the sky, blotting out the stars, and the surrounding countryside was sunk in absolute darkness except that across Luosi Bridge, at the far end of that pitch-black expanse of open land, a city blazed with light. It covered what looked like several li, large enough to hold tens of thousands of people no small thing. But the night was hazy, and the grave mounds and wild grass obscured the view; wisps of mist and thin smoke drifted through the undergrowth, making the light flicker between brightness and shadow, and giving the city an atmosphere of dense, bone-chilling strangeness.

Luo Dahai and Xia Qin noticed it too. All three felt their scalps tighten. But no one had ever spoken of any town or village among these wild graves. During the day people sometimes passed through yet no one had ever seen any sign of habitation in the graveyard. How could a whole city have suddenly appeared? The place looked sinister and uncanny. Could it be a city of the dead?

Sima Hui and Luo Dahai were not the type to be undone by superstition, and they steadied themselves quickly. They relit the kerosene lamp, drew their triangular scrapers, and headed straight for those ghost-fire lights flickering in the dark. They wanted to see what was behind it all. Xia Qin had no desire to go, but she was even more afraid to stay alone under the bridge, so she grabbed hold of Sima Hui’s jacket and pressed close behind him.

The three kept their eyes fixed on the direction of the ghost city and pushed through the grass between the grave mounds, feeling their way forward. They walked a long, long way yet the further they went, the more something felt wrong. No matter how they pressed on, the city with its wavering lights never seemed any closer.

Luo Dahai was beginning to feel genuinely uneasy. He urged Sima Hui to fall back: “I say we retreat for now. A wise man doesn’t fight losing odds. If we don’t go soon, we’ll have missed our chance.”

Sima Hui could see that the night was simply too dark and that they were getting nowhere. He decided to pull back for the time being. The three turned around and started back only to find that in the vast, featureless dark, the kerosene lamp’s small circle of light barely reached two or three steps ahead of them, as useless as a will-o’-the-wisp in this open wilderness. In every direction they could see nothing but grave mound after grave mound. They walked for a long while and still hadn’t found their way back to the dry riverbed beneath Luosi Bridge. When they looked back at the ghost-fire city, the distance between it and them seemed never to have changed.

Not a single star was visible anymore. There was no way to determine north from south. Without any point of reference, their sense of space had completely dissolved. In the sultry night air, even time seemed to have congealed.

Cold sweat broke on Luo Dahai’s forehead. He muttered uneasily: “Have we run into a ghost? I’ve heard they lead people astray on night roads, making them circle the same spot over and over until they die trapped. They call it a ghost alley. Don’t tell me we’ve wandered into one tonight?”

Sima Hui kept his composure. “Worst case, we wait it out here until morning. When the roosters crow and daylight comes, every trick a stray ghost or lost spirit can play will dissolve on its own.” He shook the scraper in his hand. “And with a weapon like this, whatever unclean thing is lurking in these graves had better think twice before messing with us.”

Strong words but it felt as though they had been cut off from the living world entirely. Every second stretched out strangely long. They could feel no passage of time at all. None of the three could entirely suppress the creeping dread that perhaps they really had fallen into a ghost alley. Perhaps somewhere in their wandering through the graves, they had unknowingly crossed the threshold between the living and the dead. As the saying goes: the roads of men and ghosts do not cross. If you stepped onto the road of ghosts by mistake, you might never live to hear the roosters crow.

Then Luo Dahai suddenly remembered something. He told Sima Hui and Xia Qin: according to folk belief in the northeast, if a person loses their way in the mountains and goes into a daze what they call walking the mada they might stumble into an ancient city. In that city there would be not a single living soul, only one gaunt old man wearing a bamboo hat and a straw rain cape, who upon meeting you would introduce himself with the words: “A golden hat upon my head, a robe of glazed jade on my back; I am the great king of the burial mound, riding the jade hare on my mountain rounds.”