Chapter 1: The Boy in the Red Dress: Gaoshikan
by cnwebnovels.comOctober 24, 2009 — Farewell
The schoolbag had been washed so many times it had faded to almost nothing — a pale, shapeless thing hanging from Kuang Zhijun’s shoulders as he stood in the doorway and grinned at his parents. He was thirteen years and ten days old. His cheeks still carried that particular softness boys lose without noticing, and he waved them off with the easy confidence of someone who had learned, long before he should have, how to manage on his own.
Be careful in the city, he told them. The pigs are fine. I know how to lock up. He paused, then added — with the solemn gravity of a promise — When you get back, we’ll slaughter the New Year pig together.
They watched him until the road bent and took him out of sight. Neither of them could have named the feeling exactly: not quite worry, not quite pride. The particular ache of watching a child who no longer seems to need you.
What neither of them saw — what no one saw — was the moment a wind came up behind him as he turned back into the courtyard. It lifted the hem of his shirt for just a second, exposing a faint reddish mark across his lower back. A shallow scrape, the kind a doorframe leaves. No one thought to ask about it.
It was the last time they saw him alive.
November 4, 2009, Before Dawn — The Nightmare
Gu Denghui came up out of sleep like a woman surfacing from dark water — gasping, heart battering, the rough cotton of her work shirt plastered cold against her skin. The construction dormitory smelled of concrete dust and other people’s exhaustion, and for a moment she couldn’t place where she was.
Then the dream came back.
A man with nothing where his face should have been — no nose, no mouth, just two black voids where eyes might have sat — pressing through the unlatched back door of the old farmhouse, a burlap sack knotted over his shoulder. Something inside the sack was moving. Scrabbling. When the figure passed through the main hall, he turned and opened his mouth in a grin so slow, so deliberate, so full of blackened and yellowed teeth, that she woke up.
She found her husband’s arm in the dark and gripped it.
We have to go back. Her voice was almost steady. Something’s happened to our boy.
He muttered the usual things — just a dream, you’ll feel better in the morning. But her heart was still slamming, her left eyelid jumping, and she had the irrational, absolute certainty that something was moving through the dark along the telephone wire, following it home.
November 5, 2009, Around Noon — What the Father Found
Three hours on a borrowed motorcycle over roads that were barely roads. When Kuang Jilu finally pulled up to the farmhouse, the front gate was bolted from the inside.
He told himself there was a reasonable explanation. He walked around to the back.
The rear door — the one that was always kept locked — stood open an inch. He pushed it, and it gave with a slow, complaining groan, and a smell came out to meet him: damp straw, old iron, and something beneath both of those things that he recognized without wanting to.
He stepped into the main hall.
The afternoon light came through the cracked window at a flat, low angle, and what it illuminated stopped him where he stood.
A small figure hung from the roof beam, dressed in a girl’s red floral skirt — he recognized it, a hand-me-down, had seen it folded in a box somewhere. Below the skirt’s hem, the bare legs were the color of ash, bound at the ankles with hemp rope. From the rope dangled a rust-mottled scale weight, turning very slowly in the draft.
The boy’s arms had been wrenched behind his back. The rope at his wrists had cut to the bone, and the dried blood was almost black. Under his fingernails: earth. And his head was wrong — thrown back and then tucked forward, chin to chest, as though the neck had been folded rather than broken. On the center of his forehead sat a small dried spot of blood, dark and precise as a full stop.
Kuang Jilu dragged a wooden stool over and stepped up. He pressed his palm to his son’s hand.
Stone cold.
The sound he made — he would not remember making it. He went down into the straw and couldn’t get back up.
November 5, Afternoon Through Evening — The Investigation
The sirens arrived. They sounded obscene against the mountain stillness.
The forensic officer worked methodically, crouching beside the body with a flashlight while the local officers stood back and said nothing useful. The older officer found the knot first — a fisherman’s dead hitch, the kind that requires a certain practiced angle of force. He looked at it for a long time.
A thirteen-year-old couldn’t have done this to himself, he said, quietly, to no one in particular.
Beneath the red skirt they found a women’s one-piece swimsuit, adult-sized, its edges worn smooth with use. No ligature mark on the neck — the cause of death was chest compression, the rope having tightened so gradually that the lungs simply ran out of room. The pinhole wound in the center of the forehead had pierced to the periosteum; whatever had made it was long and thin and had gone in more than once. The scale weight had been close to three catties. It had deformed the ankle bones.
The only footprints in the hall: one set belonging to Kuang Jilu, one to the dead boy. Every window sealed, every door intact.
The forensic officer leaned close to his colleague and said, just above a whisper: It doesn’t read like suicide. But you can’t prove it wasn’t.
Under the bed: a handful of old animation discs, several spent candle stubs. The wax had pooled and set into strange shapes on the floorboards, like something trying to become a symbol.
Mid-to-Late November 2009 — The Verdict No One Believed
The police briefing was short and visibly uncomfortable.
Official finding: accidental death by autoerotic asphyxiation. The discs contained bondage material. The candle wax suggested private ritual. The swimsuit carried biological trace. The rope showed signs of repeated use. The boy, they said, had done this before — and this time had slipped, or misjudged, and kicked the stool away.
Kuang Jilu was on his feet before the officer finished the sentence. His eyes were raw. His hand was shaking.
My son, he said, was quiet as stone. Innocent as a child half his age. He had never once held a girl’s hand. You are standing there and telling me he did this?
Outside, the village elders gathered in clusters near the wall, their voices low and close.
Soul-borrowing, one old man said. The others went still. Pure-yang boy — thirteen years and thirteen days. The red dress calls the wandering dead. The swimsuit seals the soul inside the body like a cork in a jar. The weight pins it down, stops it climbing toward heaven. And the needle through the forehead— he paused, —that splits the soul from the flesh. So someone else can take what’s inside. Buy themselves a few more years.
The wind moved through the cracked window of the empty hall, and made a sound that wasn’t quite a sound.
November–December 2009 — The Curse Spreads
Everyone knew Uncle Li. He was the sort of man who laughed at ghost stories and pushed to the front when someone needed a coffin carried. He had carried Zhijun’s himself, without hesitation, joking softly to keep the mood from collapsing entirely.
Three days after the burial, he went mad.
Just after midnight, his wife found him at the village pond, barefoot, both arms wrapped around a willow tree, screaming: The red dress — I didn’t see anything — don’t come for me! She hauled him home, and when she finally got his fists open, there it was: a scrap of red cloth, the same floral weave as the skirt, clutched so hard his knuckles had gone white.
A week later, someone found him in the pond. At his wrists, faint and precise, were the marks of rope — in exactly the positions they had documented on Zhijun.
Granny Zhang had dressed the boy for burial. She said nothing about it afterward, which was unlike her. Then, some weeks later, she told her daughter that she had woken in the night, gone to the outhouse, and on the way back had seen a small figure standing in the center of the courtyard, back turned, something hanging from its right hand. When it turned around she had time to see the mark on its forehead — and then she was on the ground and she didn’t know how she got there.
She had the stroke the following morning. She lay in bed after that, and whether she was asleep or awake, her lips moved in a constant, barely audible loop: Scale weight. The wrists. The red dress.
December 2009 — What Came to My Pillow
In those weeks, I kept seeing him.
Every time I closed my eyes — Zhijun, hanging in the red dress, his face the gray of old ash, the mark on his forehead bleeding black into the surrounding skin. He would look at me. His mouth would open, no sound at first, and then I would catch it, just at the edge of hearing: I didn’t do it myself. Someone did this to me.
I would reach for his hand. It was always cold, and always wet.
Then one night something woke me — a sound I couldn’t place at first, soft and dry, like paper being dragged slowly across wood. The room was dark except for where moonlight pushed through the gap in the curtains and fell in a pale strip across the wardrobe door. In the thin crack between the wardrobe’s two doors, something was glowing: a dim, reddish light, pulsing faintly.
I didn’t move. I watched it. After a while — I couldn’t say how long — it went out. Then came a sound from the floor. A heavy, definite thud.
I reached for the lamp.
On the pillow beside my head sat a rusted scale weight. The same shape as the one from Zhijun’s ankles. Stuck to it were a few strands of black straw. I touched it with two fingers. It was cold in the particular way that things are cold when they’ve been at the bottom of water.
Early 2010 — The Old Taoist Speaks
My uncle brought me deep into the mountains to find an old Taoist named Chen. He carried a bundle of paper offerings. Neither of us said much on the way up.
The old man took the scale weight without comment and turned it over once in his hands, drawing a single finger across the rust. Something shifted in his face — not alarm exactly, but recognition, the look of a man who has been hoping not to see a particular thing and has now seen it.
He set it down and spoke carefully.
What had been done to the boy was called the Soul-Borrowing Array — a working from the darker lineages of Maoshan practice, used once and then supposedly lost, or at least that was what people preferred to believe. You found a child who had reached exactly thirteen years and thirteen days. The red garment served as a lure for wandering spirits, drawing them close and keeping them agitated. The swimsuit, worn against the skin, acted as a seal — it pressed the soul tight inside the body, the way a cork holds liquid in a bottle. The scale weight prevented the soul from rising. The needle through the forehead — what the old texts called the Soul-Splitting Pin — was the final instrument: it separated the soul from the body precisely enough that the practitioner could draw the vitality out, as you might draw smoke through a tube, and use it to extend his own life.
The old man was quiet for a moment after that.
He’s not far from here, he said. He gave a child’s remaining years to himself. But this kind of debt doesn’t stay paid. He looked out toward the window. Within three years, what he stole will return to collect it. And it will take him the same way he took the boy.
He burned a talisman, stirred the ash into water, and handed me the cup. I drank it. There was a faint metallic taste at the back of the throat. I didn’t ask what it was.
Winter 2011 — The Reckoning
Word came down from the neighboring town: a bricklayer named Wang had been found dead in his own woodshed.
The village received this news in silence. Not the silence of shock, but something older — the slow, collective exhalation of people who had been waiting.
Those who had seen the scene described it in the same careful, lowered voice: bound with hemp rope. Red cloth in the mouth. A scale weight at the ankles. On the forehead, a small dry wound, dark and deliberate, the size of a nail-head.
The police went through his house. Inside a water-bloated copy of the Maoshan Secret Canon, folded among the talisman pages, they found a photograph of Kuang Zhijun — taken from a distance, without his knowledge. He was in the courtyard, laughing, feeding the pigs. He had no idea he was being watched. On the reverse, in cinnabar red, was his birth date and the eight characters of his birth hour. And beneath those, in a hand that had been unsteady enough to smear slightly:
Pure-yang soul. Three years’ extension.
Someone remembered, then, that Wang had been seen in Gaoshikan in the weeks before the boy died. Wandering. Asking people, almost casually, when the kid’s birthday was.
Three years, to the season. The old Taoist had not been wrong.
The Years After — The House That Would Not Rest
The farmhouse still stands, technically. Weeds have come up past the windowsills. The roof has developed a slow sag on the western side, and will keep sagging until it gives. No one goes near it.
The village elders say that on full-moon nights, if you come too close on the road, you’ll hear a child crying — thin and far away, like sound carried across still water — and below that, a slow rhythmic drag, heavy and deliberate, moving across stone.
One young man, a few years back, climbed the wall to prove something to himself. He came back and said that in the corner of the main hall, the whitewashed plaster kept showing dark marks — reddish, branching, the shape of old characters or symbols. He’d wiped them off himself, he said, and they were back within days. Same marks, same position. The same pattern as the talismans they’d found tucked inside Wang’s copy of the canon.
Nobody walks that stretch of road after dark anymore. They cross to the other side and pick up their pace without discussing why.
The mountain wind moves through the weeds at the base of the old wall, and if you happen to be standing close enough, it makes a sound that is almost — not quite, but almost — the sound of a voice.
I didn’t do it myself.
Someone did this to me.