“You’re right.” Gu Chen said, “With the killer’s speed and familiarity of this place, there was more than enough time for him to return. But what would he need with a dead body?”
I lifted my head to look into the sky. Through the branches, the sky was cut into irregular shapes. We were like birds trapped inside an irregular cage.
“Regardless, we don’t have much time left. Based on the killer’s habit, he’ll make his move latest by tomorrow night. In other words, we only have one day’s time.” And that was in the most optimum scenario. There was no way of telling if the killer was already killing Guan Zhenglin as we spoke. All I could do was to pray.
“Let’s go!” I told Gu Chen. Before we headed up the mountain, I had called the village head. He was waiting at home for us. As he answered the phone, I said directly, “Sir, Guan Zhenglin has gone missing in the mountain, and we can’t reach her by phone. I need you to gather some youngsters and help us look for her at the mountains.”
When the village head heard me, he said, “I’m telling you no villagers is daring enough to go up the mountain because the place is haunted at night…”
I was in no mood for his excuses. I said coldly, “Sir, we are talking about the life of a police officer here. I don’t care how you do it. When I return to the village, you need to have 20 people in the search team. Do you hear me?” Then I hung up without giving him a chance to say anything.
The village head was in his 50s, and I was only 20 plus. It was disrespectful of me to employ that tone I did, but this was an emergency. I didn’t have the time to negotiate. I needed him to follow my orders. And I believed that he would.
Gu Chen and I hurried to the village. We jogged all the way back to the village entrance. Gu Chen looked at me. His mouth opened, but he said nothing.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
As he ran ahead, he said, “I’ve never seen you so full of stamina before. We’ve been running for 20 minutes already, but you don’t even look tired. Plus, I haven’t heard you employ the tone that you did with the village head before. You do like her, don’t you?”
“What do you mean?” I didn’t stop, but my heart did skip a beat.
Gu Chen continued, “I can see that Guan Zhenglin likes you too…”
I stopped him by saying. “If you were captured, I would react the same way. But we don’t have time for that, and we don’t have much time left. If we waste any more time, when can we rescue Guan Zhenglin? The longer we linger, the more danger she’d be in.” When we arrived at the village, all the houses had their lights on. Many people were standing in the yard looking out, and dogs barked everywhere. I understood this would be a busy night for Xing Dong Village.
A young man saw us and said, “Sirs, the village head told me to wait for you here, and he also told me that he’d be waiting for you at his home.”
I glanced at Gu Chen. “See, most times you’d need to push people to get some effects.”
When we reached the middle of the village, we saw the village head standing there in his pajama and a coat. Many youths were gathered around him. Seeing me, the village head came to me and said, “Brother Wu, what happened that you were so nervous…”
I looked at the 20 plus people gathered. “There’s a girl around 20 who had been captured when we were on the mountain. Her kidnapper is the ghost that you mention. As men, how can we let that happen? Plus, there is no ghost. What are we afraid of? We are going to go rescue her!”
The villagers were clearly not interested. However, money could solve many problems. When I said that everyone who joined the search team could get 100 and the person who found Guan Zhenglin would get 2000, the villagers became more interested. Such was human nature. Then again, they couldn’t be blamed. After all, they hadn’t seen Guan Zhenglin. They didn’t know who she was. For them, Guan Zhenglin’s death would be nothing more than an article in the newspaper.
Soon the group of men headed up the mountain.
I turned to Gu Chen. “We still need reinforcements from the city station. If the killer is the ghost mentioned by the villagers, then he would have a vehicle to travel between the village and the city. Tell the people at the station to seal up the path between Xing Dong Village and the city.” Gu Chen immediately obliged. I passed a cigarette to the village head and whispered, “I was rude on the phone. I am so sorry. I hope you can understand.”
The village head waved his hands. “Of course, if my wife went missing, I would be in the same state.”
As I smoked, I asked, “What is so scary about this mountain that the villagers don’t dare to venture into it?”
The village head pulled on his clothes and said, “I didn’t want to discuss such things. After all, I am the official of this place, and I don’t want to give you guys the wrong impression. However, many of the villagers have seen and heard it, so it can’t be fake, right?”
“What have they seen and heard?” I asked.
The man said, “At first, it started as a rumor among the village kids. The kids have nothing to do, so they ran up the mountains quite often. Even though the families forbade it, how many kids listen to their parents? The kids said that they heard a woman crying up the mountain.”
I had heard the killer laugh, and I had heard him cry. When the killer committed murder, he often made that shrill laugh. But when we were in the sewer, I also heard him cry. The killer had a dissociative personality disorder, so we couldn’t tell what his emotions were when he did these things.
The village head continued, “At first, we thought it was Wu Xiufen. After all, most of the kids have seen Wu Xiufen burn the paper money. Wu Xiufen was crying for her dead husband. There was nothing strange about that. However, the kids said that it was not the case. It was not Wu Xiufen because they would have been able to recognize her voice.”
“It was not her?”
“No.” The village head took another big drought of smoke. “At first, we didn’t mind it too much. However, there were adults who heard the woman’s cries as well. The logger went up the mountain at night to do his job, and when he heard the cries, he immediately ran back to the village. Some of the villagers didn’t trust him, so they too went up the mountains at night.
“Some heard crying of babies, others heard a man laughing. There were many different voices.” The village head looked up the mountain. “This continued until someone saw the female ghost laying against the tombstone on the mountain. The villagers said that the female ghost was just a human head and it was crying before the tombstone.”
I frowned. “A human head crying before the tombstone? Is it Zhang Qiang’s tombstone?”
The village head nodded. “The human head was floating in the air, and it had long hair. The villager saw the head’s side profile. At first the female ghost was crying and then there was a male voice and finally a little girl’s voice. It was like there was many people but there was just one human head.
“But the strangest thing was…” The village head dumped the cigarette butt on the ground. “The different voices appeared to be conversing, talking about life and death, and sleep. The villager was shocked as he hid behind the tree. At that moment, the human head suddenly turned to look at him.”
“And then?” I asked. “Did he get a good look of the human head?”
The village head shook his head. “Then the villager fell seriously ill, no doctor could cure him. We eventually had to find a shaman for him. Strangely enough, after the shaman came and did the exorcism, the villager became instantly healed. The villager started to share his experience with others and that was how the story of the human head on the mountain started to spread.”
By then, I already had an answer in my mind.
The village head continued, “Therefore, no one dares to go up the mountain anymore, other than Wu Xiufen who still continues her journey every day. Speaking of, she should be returning from the mountain already. You should have run into her. Where is Wu Xiufen?”
Seeing the dark expression on my face, the village head already had a guess.
I said, “Wu Xiufen is already dead. If we can’t find Guan Zhenglin soon, she’d be dead too.”
“Wu Xiufen is dead?” The village head was shocked. “But she has been to the mountain for the past 30 years, and nothing ever happened to her. Is this the doing of the female ghost?”
I shook my head. “No, there is no ghost in this world, it’s a person.”
“A person?”
At that moment, Gu Chen interrupted. “Wu Meng, the station said that they can’t send us any reinforcement…”
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