Ch17: The Two-Colored Vehicle at the Country Bridge

The sun during the dog days of summer was vicious, as though fire had been poured over the land. It was a little after one in the afternoon, and waves of heat shimmered above the country road. The asphalt gleamed with an oily sheen, while even the weeds along the roadside hung their heads, limp beneath the sun.

I gripped the steering wheel as sweat ran from my forehead down my cheeks. The air conditioner was turned up as high as it would go, but the car still felt unbearably stuffy.

My older sister sat beside me in the passenger seat, and her five-year-old daughter, Duoduo, was in the back. We were driving from the city to our hometown along a country road riddled with potholes. We had covered nearly half the distance without seeing so much as a single gas station.

“Slow down!” my sister said suddenly, reaching over to tap my arm, urgency in her voice. “There’s a three-wheeler coming from the little bridge on the left. Let it go first.”

I stepped on the brake without thinking and looked toward the bridge.

It was barely half a meter high, with a narrow deck that was completely open to view. Under normal circumstances, you could have seen anything crossing it clearly—not only a three-wheeler, but even a person on foot.

Yet when I looked, I saw a green vehicle slowly edging onto the bridge.

The strange thing was that there wasn’t so much as a head visible in the driver’s seat. It was as though the empty vehicle were moving by itself.

“What three-wheeler?” I muttered, keeping my foot firmly on the brake. “Sis, that thing’s green, isn’t it? And there’s nobody in it!”

My sister stared at me for a moment, then leaned forward to look.

“Green? No. I saw a red one just now, and there was a man driving it. It was coming straight toward us.”

As the two of us argued back and forth, Duoduo rubbed her eyes in the back seat.

“Auntie? Mom? Where’s the car? Duoduo doesn’t see anything.”

My sister and I looked at each other, and each of us saw the same fear in the other’s eyes.

The countryside around us was frighteningly still. Only the cicadas kept up their shrill, incessant chorus, the noise grating on the nerves. The bridge was empty in both directions. There was no red vehicle, no green one—not even the shadow of a person or a car.

Ours was the only vehicle stopped at the junction, baking beneath the merciless sun.

“This is uncanny,” my sister murmured. “I know what I saw. It was a red vehicle with a man driving it. He was almost at the top of the bridge.”

I swallowed, a layer of cold sweat breaking out across my back.

“What I saw was green, and the driver’s seat was empty. There wasn’t even a head visible. The bridge is so low and narrow—how could I possibly have seen it wrong?”

Neither of us dared stay there any longer. After exchanging a few frightened whispers, I quickly pressed down on the accelerator and drove on.

Even after we had left the village behind, my hands were still trembling on the steering wheel.

No one spoke for the rest of the journey.

When we finally reached our family home and unloaded the luggage, I could no longer keep the incident to myself. I told the family what had happened.

The moment my mother heard the story, her expression changed. She hurried off to fetch my uncle, her brother.

My uncle was known in the village as someone who understood a little about such matters. After listening to both our accounts, his face turned grim.

“You ran into what we call a ‘replacement ghost,’” he said. “Someone drowned beneath that bridge years ago, and the ghost has been looking for someone to die in its place ever since.”

He paused, looked at me, and sighed.

“That thing is deeply sinister. It can put on two different ‘skins’ just to confuse people. The red vehicle your sister saw, with a man behind the wheel, was meant to make you think it was an ordinary vehicle. But the empty driver’s seat in the green one you saw was where it gave itself away. That bridge is so low—how could a real driver cross it without his head being visible?”

“You were lucky you yielded to it,” my uncle continued gravely. “It was deliberately blocking the way ahead. If you hadn’t let it pass and had driven straight on, you might have gone into the ditch beside the bridge, or it might have latched onto you.”

Then he pointed at me.

“Especially you. You were the driver. You would have been the first one it came after.”

His words struck me like a bolt from a clear sky. My legs went weak, and I nearly sank to the ground.

My period was more than twenty days late, and I still hadn’t managed to get my body back in balance. My sister had only recently recovered from a serious illness, and Duoduo was just a little child, far too young to understand what was happening. All three of us were physically vulnerable at the time.

No wonder we had encountered something like that.

“It can toy with my feelings, but it can’t take my life!” My nose stung, and tears nearly spilled from my eyes. “I’m a perfectly good young woman, and I haven’t lived nearly long enough yet. Why did it have to be so wicked?”

My mother immediately took me to burn paper offerings. My uncle also gave me a talisman and told me to keep it with me at all times.

A few days later, my period finally came. My sister’s health gradually improved as well, and Duoduo never mentioned what had happened that day again.

But from then on, I never dared take that country road at midday again, much less stop at the junction by the little bridge.

Whenever I remember that afternoon—the red vehicle my sister said she saw and the empty green one I saw edging onto the bridge—a chill runs through my entire body.

Thank goodness we yielded to it that day.

Otherwise, there might now be one less young woman in this world—one who still hadn’t lived nearly long enough.