Deserted Village Apartments

Chapter 8 The Fifth Day

Yes, my nightmare also gradually began.

When I first wrote "The Deserted Village", I didn't realize that it would have such great energy that the four college students found the deserted village as if possessed by a demon.Knowing that they arrived in the deserted village, I really can't predict what will happen next. You must know that the reality will never be as romantic as the novel. If the Jamaica Inn really exists, it will be ten thousand times more terrifying than Du Maurier's novel.

This morning, I received a multimedia message on my mobile phone. The sender was the mobile phone number of the college student who called me in the middle of the night last night.

I opened the MMS picture, which was taken with the camera of my mobile phone. The background is a stone archway at the entrance of a deserted village. Four college students stood under the archway, all with extremely excited expressions, and made a "V" gesture.

All four are in the picture, so who took the picture for them?Maybe the local villagers were asked to take pictures with their mobile phones.Last night, the four college students must have entered the deserted village. Where did they spend the night?
Looking at their faces in the MMS pictures, although I am also a young man, I have a feeling that I care about them.Yeah, how could they have gotten to that place if I hadn't written The Deserted Village?If something happens to them in the deserted village, at least I am morally responsible.

But how did they find the deserted village?

But now I can tell you how I discovered the deserted village—a few months ago, I finished reading the thread-bound book "Ghost in the Ancient Mirror" overnight, and I made up my mind to find the deserted village.So, I went to the Shanghai Library, which has an internal material reading room, which is a place I often visit.

However, to find a Qing Dynasty author named "Desolate Village Madman" is like looking for a needle in a haystack.At that time, every literati had several strange titles, and many famous Qing Dynasty articles and works were only known by the author's pseudonym, and it was impossible to verify who he was.Therefore, I first checked the publisher of "The Ghost of the Ancient Mirror": Hangzhou Gushan Bookstore, and the printing time was the 43rd year of Qianlong.It took me a whole day to finally find Gushan Bookstore in Hangzhou. According to the records, this bookstore was founded in the 19th year of Kangxi, and it was not closed until the [-]th year of Xianfeng.The "bookstores" back then were equivalent to today's publishing houses. At that time, there were many bookstores, but most of them were small, and they were in danger of going bankrupt and closing at any time.How many books have been printed by Hangzhou Gushan Bookstore is not recorded in the data.And "The Ghost of the Ancient Mirror" has not been mentioned in other documents. It seems that the "Phantom of the Ancient Mirror" in my hand should be a rare out-of-print book.In this way, my clues were interrupted again. How can I know where the deserted village is without circumstantial evidence?Perhaps, it is simply a place conceived by the author?
At this time, I suddenly thought of local chronicles.Yes, if Huangcun and Serang Town really existed, they should be reflected in local chronicles.The reading room happens to have a large collection of local histories of the Ming and Qing Dynasties. I only need to look up the one in Zhejiang, and the deserted village in "The Ghost of the Ancient Mirror" is located by the sea, so the scope of my research is even smaller. I just need to read the In the middle and late Qing Dynasty, the government annals and county annals of the coastal prefectures and counties in Zhejiang were sufficient.But this is easier said than done. There are several volumes of a county annals of the Qing Dynasty, and it is impossible to read them all in a few days and nights.I mainly start from the table of contents and indexes to see if there are any entries about Serang Town.Finally, at five o'clock in the afternoon, when the reading room was about to close, I found the town of Sereng from a government annals.

As expected, "Desolate Village" was mentioned in the notes on Xileng Town in this ancient book, and I immediately recorded that passage——

The deserted village, the name of the place today, is [-] miles east of Xileng, [-] miles southeast of the city, with the blue sea in the east, Cangshan Mountain in the west, a cemetery in the south, and a deep ravine in the north. The land is barren, so it is called a deserted village.The barren village has not been communicated with the outside world since ancient times. It is said that the place is ominous and the people are not kind. It is surrounded by eight villages. No one dares to enter the village. When they hear the name of the barren village, they are frightened. In a deserted village, young children stand in fear.Only during the Jiajing period of the previous dynasty, a barren village tasted a lifelong high school scholar, and the emperor Shizong of the Ming Dynasty gave a memorial archway to honor his mother's chastity.

(There are no punctuation marks in classical Chinese in ancient books. Now I mark the punctuation marks myself for the convenience of readers.)

It seems that this deserted village does have its own land, and the town of Xileng is definitely not fabricated by the author.I copied a few more pages of prefectural annals, and finally figured out the specific prefectures and counties where Xileng Town and the barren village were located, and left the library in a hurry.

The next thing was much easier. I quickly found K City today based on the names and locations of prefectures and counties in the Qing Dynasty. Sure enough, I found Xileng Town on the traffic map of K City (I also checked the map of Zhejiang Province. However, Serang Town cannot be found on the provincial map).

I finally knew where the barren village was, and I immediately made some travel preparations, so I took the book "The Ghost of the Ancient Mirror" and boarded the long-distance bus from Shanghai to City K alone.

After six or seven hours of long-distance travel, I arrived in K City, and then took a minibus before arriving in Serang Town.I asked people about the deserted village in Serang Town, but the local young people seemed to have never heard of the deserted village.I searched all over the bus station in Sereng Town, and there was no passenger minibus leading to the deserted village.

Later, I asked a few old people in the town, and I found out that there was indeed a barren village, which was just twenty miles east of Serang Town by the sea.Because it is said that the deserted village is very unlucky, the people in Xileng Town and the surrounding area are very jealous of the deserted village. No one has ever dared to go to the deserted village, and the people from the deserted village rarely come to Xileng Town. It is almost an isolated world.If you want to go to the deserted village, you can only walk a long mountain road.

The old people kept persuading me not to go. I asked them why the deserted village was unlucky, but they couldn't explain the details.In fact, what they said aroused my desire for adventure even more.So, I couldn't care about anything else, and set off on foot that afternoon, walking up the mountain road leading to the legendary deserted village.

The mountain road is rugged and difficult, and the surrounding environment is just like what I said in the novel.In the evening, I finally arrived at the deserted village. I can't describe my feelings at that time in words.I remember looking up at the big archway of the Ming Dynasty at the entrance of the village, and the four characters of "Zhenlie Yinyang" made me feel a little out of breath.

I walked into the deserted village cautiously, and occasionally I saw a few villagers. They were very surprised when they saw me, as if they had seen a ghost. Maybe I became an uninvited guest in the deserted village.I walked around the deserted village, and among the many tile-roofed rooms, I found an old house that looked like a deep house.I boldly knocked on the door, and the person who opened the door was a middle-aged man in his 50s. He stared at me for a while, and I truthfully explained my purpose to him.

He is Mr. Ouyang, the owner of this old house "Jinshi Building".Mr. Ouyang treated me very politely. I drove the mountain road for more than 20 miles that night, and I was really hungry. He immediately invited me to have dinner. To be honest, I still can’t forget the delicious dinner.Mr. Ouyang took the initiative to invite me to live in Jinshidi. He said that no outsiders had ever visited the barren village, so there was no hotel, and there were many empty houses in Jinshidi.Although this house looks scary, Mr. Ouyang lives alone in the huge house, but it just satisfies my desire for exploration and archeology, so I spent the night in Jinshi Building.

My first night in the deserted village was safe and sound, and none of the frightening things that are said to have appeared.The next day, I asked Mr. Ouyang about the history of the Jinshidi ancient house, and he told me the three ancient stories.The three stories about the ancestors of the Ouyang family deeply shocked me, and later I wrote these three stories almost intact in the novel "Desolate Village".

I also took out the "Ghost in the Ancient Mirror", Mr. Ouyang was very surprised, and he also took out the exact same book, which is said to be handed down from their family.Apparently, the "crazy man in the deserted village" is an ancestor of the Ouyang family in the deserted village in the Qing Dynasty. As for the life of the author of "The Ghost in the Ancient Mirror", Mr. Ouyang is not clear.

In the next two days, I walked around the barren village and carefully observed the nearby terrain and environment. It really was a dangerous barren land.Although the barren village is facing the sea, it does not feel the romance of the seaside village at all. Instead, it makes people feel oppressed. It seems that the black sea will swallow the village at any time.Perhaps it is precisely because of the environment that the people in the deserted village are silent and conservative.

Other than that, I didn't find anything more in the deserted village. I just felt that there was a special smell in Jinshidi, which seemed to hide something. I also tried to ask Mr. Ouyang about it, but he always kept silent, as if What are you worried about.

I understand that there are still many secrets in the barren village, but my cautiousness prevents me from going deep into the villagers. I feel that they have a gloomy air about them, which makes people daunting.It must be admitted that my trip to the deserted village did not achieve the intended purpose.The old mansion of Jinshidi, the imperial archway, the cemetery by the sea, and the three stories about the Ouyang family all made my suspense more intense.However, I can't really go in deep. The secret of the deserted village is like a huge maze. I have found the gate of the maze, but I don't have the key to open it.

Enough is enough, I don't want to recall any more, let these memories be forgotten forever.

The series of bizarre events that happened these days made me more and more tired. I didn’t go online this night (in fact, I was worried that the ubiquitous “Nie Xiaoqian” on the Internet would come to harass me again), so I went to bed early.

I don't know how long it took, but a rush of cell phone ringing pulled me back from my dream.I opened my eyes in a daze, my God, it is three o'clock in the morning, and I immediately thought of those college students in the deserted village.

Trembling, I picked up the phone, but there was no sound from the other end of the phone, and the call continued. I yelled a few times: "Is it Huo Qiang? Or Han Xiaofeng? Are you in a deserted village?"

Still no sound, I waited for several seconds, when I got a little impatient, I suddenly heard a slight female voice: "Who are you talking to?"

It wasn't them—I was stunned for a moment, the voice was completely unfamiliar, and it stimulated my eardrums very magnetically.

I tentatively asked, "Who are you?"

But the voice of the other party disappeared again. I said "Hello" a few times in a row, only hearing some strange noises.

Who is it?In an instant, my heart trembled slightly. It seemed to be a magical sixth sense that reminded me of an impossible person.

"Nie Xiaoqian? Are you Nie Xiaoqian?"

I asked cautiously, but the other party didn't answer, so I continued to ask: "It's you, it must be you. Why didn't you speak?"

At this moment, the other party ended the call.

Finally, I took a deep breath and threw the phone on the sofa.

In fact, I have no idea, is it really that "Nie Xiaoqian"?But how did she know my cell phone number?Is it really an all-pervasive ghost?
I wonder if she is mentally ill?Woke me up from a dream in the wee hours of the morning, and drifted away like a ghost again.

That night, I never fell asleep again.

(End of this chapter)