18
The dark figure!
He was right below my apartment, as if waiting for me.
I was certain it was him.
I froze for a moment, then stepped closer.
When he saw me coming, he turned and walked away. His pace was neither fast nor slow, as if he wanted me to follow.
The dark figure stayed at the edge of my vision. When I was about to lose sight of him, he would stop and wait, then walk on quickly again.
Past the school, past Lê Mặc Các, past the last village in my memory, and on to the mountain behind it.
The mountain path was hard to walk, and we both slowed down.
The sun dragged its weary body along, hoping to leave me a little last light to illuminate the path beneath my feet.
But its body was too heavy, and it slowly disappeared behind the peak.
A small wooden house appeared before me, and the dark figure went inside.
19
“Creak…”
The wooden house was unlocked.
A cloud of dust made me cough violently.
The house was small, with only a few simple pieces of furniture, all covered in dust.
There was a chair inside, lying on its side with a dead rat crushed beneath it.
Above the chair, someone was hanging from the rafters. Their skin was swollen, mottled with dark spots, and rotting sores had begun to fester in several places.
Only then did I catch the stench. I nearly vomited.
20
“Found him.”
“Who’s there?”
A strange voice sounded behind me, startling me. I hurriedly turned around. “Trương… Trương Tiểu Niên? Aren’t you in the hospital?”
He didn’t answer. Instead, he stared blankly at the body hanging from the rafters. “I’m sorry. I’m the one who did this to you.”
I looked at the body too and cleared my throat. “Who is that?”
“It’s you.”
“Me?”
Somehow, Trương Tiểu Niên produced a mirror and held it up to my face.
My face was deathly pale with a yellowish tinge. A deep ligature mark encircled my neck, bruised purple.
21
“Bang!”
The door was kicked open, and two people came in, a man and a woman.
The man was my father. The woman was the great immortal who had taken Trương Tiểu Niên’s voice.
When my father saw the body hanging from the ceiling, his eyes reddened and both his fists clenched tight.
The woman was nimble. With a single leap, she took the body down, pressed a yellow talisman over its nose and mouth, bit her finger, and smeared blood across the body’s forehead.
“Junior Sister, I’ll leave this place to you. I have to get over there right away.”
After speaking, my father looked at me. “Come with me. Now.”
I wanted to ask him something, but Trương Tiểu Niên slipped past me and followed my father out.
So he hadn’t been calling me. He’d been calling Tiểu Niên.
For a moment, I didn’t know what to do.
The woman glared at me. “What are you still doing here? Follow your father.”
22
It was the same rented apartment.
My father ran all the way up to the sixth floor, his hands shaking as he opened the door.
“Dad, how do you have a key to this place?”
He was in no mood to answer. He shoved the door open and rushed inside.
The place seemed different from how it had been when I left, though I couldn’t say exactly how.
I followed my father into the bedroom.
Trương Tiểu Niên lay on the bed, his eyes wide open. His body was withered and gaunt, and from the knees down, there was nothing there.
Was he… Trương Tiểu Niên?
Then who was the one behind me?
I turned around. The Trương Tiểu Niên behind me was looking at the Trương Tiểu Niên on the bed, his expression full of sorrow.
My father lifted the man’s neck, pried his mouth open, and fished out a talisman.
Talisman paper was usually yellow, but this one had rotted black, with only a small corner retaining its original color.
My father let out a breath. “Thank goodness. Thank goodness we made it in time.”
“What is that?” I turned around, but Trương Tiểu Niên behind me had vanished.
23
“Cough, cough, cough…”
Trương Tiểu Niên coughed violently, bringing up several mouthfuls of yellow pus before he finally eased up.
“Uncle, did you find it?”
My father wiped the corner of his eye. “We found it. We found it.”
“Good.”
“My boy, I’m sorry you had to suffer. This soul-separation talisman tore your heavenly soul to pieces…”
“It’s all right. I’m dying anyway. Finding it is what matters.”
My father gave Trương Tiểu Niên a few sips of water, and he looked a little better.
“Uncle, is Thanh Minh here?”
“Yes, right over there.”
Trương Tiểu Niên looked at me, then his gaze passed through me and settled behind me. “Thanh Minh, you’re probably pretty confused right now. There’s a lot to explain. Uncle will tell you. Ngọc Oánh and I are grateful to you. If there really is another life, the two of us will repay you.”
Everything shattered.
So many things shattered.
The images before my eyes, the images in my mind.
And many images I’d never seen before appeared, then rearranged themselves. I knew I’d experienced all of those things.
But I’d forgotten them. Now they were coming back in a jumble, out of order, and I couldn’t put them together.
My body could move, but my mind wouldn’t work. Those images simply flooded my head, brutally.
“Uncle, how did you keep me alive for so long?”
“Your junior aunt borrowed your voice, and she took your illness too. She’s suppressing your throat cancer.”
“No wonder. My soul’s been hurting these past few days, but my throat has felt better.”
He struggled to sit up. “Uncle, I have one last favor to ask. Take me to the bank of the Thanh Thủy River.”
On the way, my father pushed the wheelchair in front, and I followed instinctively.
My mind wasn’t listening to me at all. Countless memories poured in, though thankfully they weren’t as violent as before.
“This is far enough. Thank you, Uncle.”
Trương Tiểu Niên struggled to push his wheelchair onto the stone bridge. There was no one else on it. He quietly gazed at the river.
My father and I stood by the river. We didn’t try to stop him, and we said nothing.
“Pointed peach leaves atop the hill, willow leaves covering the sky… Autumn rain falls without end. Frost descends upon the Thanh Thủy River. A loving couple. Together they leap into the river. A lovestruck maiden, a lovestruck lad. A little border-town song…”
His clear voice and lilting melody were exactly like the first time I’d heard him sing.
Splash.
Trương Tiểu Niên jumped into the river without making a big splash, like his and Đỗ Ngọc Oánh’s unremarked lives.
24
Three days later, I finally pieced together the fragments of memory in my head.
Trương Tiểu Niên and I couldn’t say who had saved whom, or who owed whom.
Perhaps it was all fate.
Trương Tiểu Niên and I hadn’t met on the Ghost Festival; we’d known each other for a long time.
That Ghost Festival was my seventh day after death, and I was returning to my body.
The yellow paper my father told me to burn was for me.
I’d known him for a long time, and I also knew he had a senior schoolmate, but back then Ngọc Oánh was too shy to meet me.
Every time, it was just Tiểu Niên and me going out for drinks and shooting the breeze.
Then disaster struck. Trương Tiểu Niên was diagnosed with throat cancer, and his treatment would cost a fortune.
Đỗ Ngọc Oánh kept it from him and went to Lê Mặc Các. She knew what kind of place it was, but she needed money—money for Tiểu Niên’s treatment.
But she’d still underestimated how dark that place was.
Đỗ Ngọc Oánh was beautiful and had a lovely singing voice. A powerful man took an interest in her and wanted to keep her as his mistress.
But paying off a debt with your body and being kept as a mistress were two different things, at least in her heartThat was just how Đỗ Ngọc Oánh was.
Even after entering Lê Mặc Các, she knew she could never be with Trương Tiểu Niên, but she still wanted to preserve her good name.
She was stubborn. She wouldn’t give in, even if it killed her.
To outsiders, her behavior looked like having it both ways—being a prostitute while still wanting to be seen as virtuous. But I knew she wasn’t like that.
Trương Tiểu Niên knew it too.
So when she was imprisoned and disappeared, Trương Tiểu Niên panicked. A classmate told him Đỗ Ngọc Oánh was at Lê Mặc Các.
He wanted to go find her.
I was worried, so I went with him.
Two boys who hadn’t yet grown up—children, really—each carrying a dagger, stormed into Lê Mặc Các.
We did find Đỗ Ngọc Oánh, but we couldn’t get out.
25
I was caught first, holding them off so the two of them could escape. They hanged me alive from a beam in Lê Mặc Các.
Trương Tiểu Niên’s leg was broken in a beating. If Đỗ Ngọc Oánh hadn’t threatened to kill herself, he wouldn’t have survived either.
Đỗ Ngọc Oánh stayed behind and became their plaything. Trương Tiểu Niên was tossed onto the roadside, crippled.
As for me, my body was dumped in a cabin in the back mountains, hung from the ceiling and staged to look like a suicide.
When the police busted Lê Mặc Các, Đỗ Ngọc Oánh didn’t tell Trương Tiểu Niên anything. She left him a letter, then jumped into the Thanh Thủy River.
Trương Tiểu Niên wanted to jump in after her, but my father found him.
That day, the man who dumped my body got into a fight with the police and was shot dead on the spot. No one knew where my body was.
So my father came up with this plan: make Trương Tiểu Niên swallow a soul-separation talisman, draw out his heavenly soul, and summon Đỗ Ngọc Oánh’s spirit, so the two of them could stage a play with me.
That dark figure was actually me.
After I died, I lost most of my memories and didn’t know where my body was.
They helped me recreate what had happened, leading me step by step to find myself again.
I was an idiot, too. Trương Tiểu Niên had clearly started talking to me, and his words were so awkward, yet I didn’t recognize him.
Đỗ Ngọc Oánh was soaked from head to toe. From beginning to end, it wasn’t sweat—it was water.
And my throat was always uncomfortable; breathing was difficult. With a rope cinched around my neck, how could I possibly feel all right?
“Dad, turns out you’re amazing. I always thought you were superstitious.”
My father stayed silent.
“What was the point of finding my body? Was it really worth all that trouble?”
“It matters. I want to steal you back from the underworld.” He said it firmly and resolutely.
“Did the soul-separation talisman Tiểu Niên swallowed hurt?”
“It hurt quite a bit.”
“I feel kind of bad for him.”
“You don’t need to. In your past life, he owed you. In this life, neither of you owes the other anything.”
I didn’t really understand what he meant, and didn’t want to dig into it.
Three days later, the police found two bodies in the Thanh Thủy River. One was Trương Tiểu Niên; the other was Đỗ Ngọc Oánh.
The two bodies were locked in a tight embrace.
The officers retrieving the bodies were astonished.
“Đỗ Ngọc Oánh’s body was never found. How did it just float up now? And apart from being bloated from the water, neither body has a single bite taken out of it by fish or shrimp.”
26
I don’t know what my father and his junior did, but somehow I came back to life.
Sometimes I still think of Trương Tiểu Niên and Đỗ Ngọc Oánh. I wonder how they’re doing now, whether they’ve met again somewhere in the world, whether they’ve kept singing “Tham Thanh Thuỷ Hà.”
A little song that ran through their lives from beginning to end.
When I was five or six, I’d cry and beg to go to school. My father would always smile, pat my head, and say that school was scarier than all these things.
And apart from my father, no one could see me or hear me speak, and I couldn’t affect this world either.
Over time, I realized there were others like me.
Not many, and I didn’t encounter them often. They were all people hovering between life and death.
Keep going through the back mountains, past the peak, and you’ll reach another city.
In the mountains, I met someone named Trương Sơ.
He was like me, except he had his own shrine, with a golden statue of him inside, built by his parents.
He said that even though we couldn’t communicate with people, we could type online, and people in the living world could see it.
Just like now, as I sit here typing my story for you.
—THE END—