I spent six years of primary school in a rural primary school. The location of the school is not in my village, but in the isolated village, which is three kilometers away. And the school is not in that village, but at the foot of the hillside outside the village.

At the foot of the hillside, except for a lonely school, there are orchards and woods on three sides. There are mountains of yellow grass growing on the hillside, and hidden inside the long yellow grass are the graves and coffin pits all over the mountain, as well as the coffins that have been dug up, and the coffins that have been eaten and broken everywhere are broken by insects.

To put it bluntly, this is a mass grave, and after the death of several villages around it, almost all of them were buried on this hillside. After a long time, this hillside is full of convex and concave long graves for corpses that have just been buried for less than three years, and concave is the coffin pit left after digging up the long grave to collect the bones.

Our custom there is that after the coffin is buried for three years, we should ask the local guy to collect the bones, connect the bones to a human shape with copper wire, put them in a jar, and bury them in a circular tomb.

However, due to the age and chaos of the past, many corpses were left on this hill, so if you are lucky, pulling a lush yellow haired grass here may bring out a skull.

Fifty meters to the northeast of the school is a canal that has been dug for nearly 40 years, and the water is so clear that sometimes even the fish in it can be seen clearly. Here, the canal is split in two, leaving one to the northeast and one to the northwest.

When the canal was dug that year, in order to regulate the river water in this place, sluices were built at the two branch mouths.

So, almost every once in a while, a corpse is blocked here. Some of the bodies had just been rushed here before someone came to claim them, and then they cried out and cried out in tears. Tired of crying, he did the ritual, so he dragged the body to the hill near the school and buried it, and from a distance, there was a long red bag of dirt.

Some of them had not been claimed for a long time, and within a few days, the corpses that had been blistered like inflated balloons began to decompose, decay, and a stench of disgusting enough to spit out the milk that had been drunk since childhood. These two sluices are the only way for children in our village to go to school.

Because of this, I lived on campus for a while. There are 20 people living in the school with me, all of whom are far away from the school, and the parents are worried that our children will come home at 9 o'clock in the evening, so they let the school come out with an empty room on the side of the teacher's dormitory for us to live in.

As mentioned earlier, there is a mass grave not far from the school, and in the summer evenings, there are often ghost fires floating around, which is very terrifying. Therefore, after studying at night every day, we went back to the dormitory early, closed the door and went to bed. Although the toilet is about 30 meters away from the dormitory, no one dares to go to the toilet alone in the middle of the night.

Although I am more courageous, I still have to find someone to go to the toilet, first, I will not be so afraid that I can't pee, and second, I can chat to relieve boredom.

In the middle of the night, I woke up. I climbed down from the top bunk and wanted to pull my second brother, who slept on my lower bunk, to go to the toilet with me as usual.

Strangely, his bed was empty, and there was still a figure of him there? I thought he had gone to the toilet one step ahead of me, so I went to the toilet alone. Seeing that the door of a lattice toilet was hidden, I thought he was inside, so I called his name while shouting, without any response.

"Damn! Nor should you be called! I got impatient, so I walked over and kicked the door open, and the toilet was empty.

He's not in bed, he's not in the toilet, where can he go? I felt a chill in my back, so I ran back to my dorm. The short distance of 30 meters scared me into a cold sweat.

When I got back to the dorm, I woke everyone up. Everyone also confirmed that the second brother did not go home that night and lived in the dormitory. But where did he go?

At this time, Ah Qing said in horror: "It seems that someone is crying outside!" ”

In fact, without him saying it, we all heard the cry. It seemed that the cry was far away from the school, but it was still very clear to us. After hearing Ah Qing's words, everyone panicked and was so scared that they didn't know what to do. In the end, I suggested going to the teacher's room immediately and waking up the teacher before I could do it.

The head teacher, Mr. Yang, was a fat man who was woken up by us in the middle of the night and came out with impatient squints and asked us what was going on.

I first said, "The second brother is gone, and when I got up to go to the toilet, I found that there was no one in his bed." ”

Teacher Yang glanced at me and said, "Are you in the toilet?" ”

"Not there! I didn't see him in the toilet either. ”

"Teacher Yang, someone is crying on the other side of the mountain, it seems to be the second brother."

After Mr. Yang told everyone to be quiet, he listened carefully, and there was indeed a cry from the mass grave. In the middle of the night, it was dark everywhere, and the crying was very terrifying in the quiet night, and the crying from the mass grave was even more terrifying.

"Who's going to see me over there?" Teacher Yang looked at us with frightened expressions and said, "Go over and see if the second brother is over there." ”

"Teacher, could it be a ghost? My mom said it was very unclean. It was Ah Fei who spoke. He was right, the mass grave was indeed very unclean, and few people dared to go there alone during the day, not to mention that it was two or three o'clock in the middle of the night.

"What nonsense. Where the hell came from? Amu, Nissin, and a few of you, come with me, and the others go back to the dormitory, close the door, and don't come out. "Teacher Yang ordered me and a few classmates to go to the mass grave with him. Although we were all scared and reluctant to go to the kind of place where coffin boards and coffin pits were everywhere, the teacher called us and we had to follow him and walk to the mass grave where the crying was heard.

Before I could get to the playground, my arm was grabbed by Nissin, and I scolded him for being a "coward" and shook off his hand. Actually, I was scared, but I didn't show it.

On the other side of the playground is a forest, those trees are decades old, walking in the woods is eerie, under the cry of night insects and the cries of getting closer and closer, it looks very strange and terrifying. And a few of us who followed the teacher were all hairy because of this strange night, so we really wanted to run back to the dormitory and hide.

"Hurry up, keep up, don't get lost. Be careful. "Teacher Yang was dissatisfied with a few of us who walked and shrunk and drank a few words from us.

At this time, the cry was getting closer. That's right, it's indeed the cry of the second brother! Why would he run to such a horrible place in the middle of the night and cry? Our minds are full of questions.

Walk through the gloomy woods and you'll arrive at the mass grave. We cautiously followed the teacher, following the cries, carefully dodging the coffin pits, coffin boards, and tattered shrouds that were everywhere.

When we found the second brother, we were all stunned! He was sitting in a coffin pit with newly buried bones, crying, unaware of the arrival of the few of us. The coffin pit was surrounded by fresh dirt and freshly dug up moth-eaten coffin boards and shrouds.

The teacher handed me the flashlight, jumped into the pit and picked up the second brother. He stopped crying, but still didn't seem to be aware of our presence, and his eyes were a little glazed.

I looked at him and called him a few times, but the teacher hurriedly stopped me: "Don't wake him up, he's sleepwalking!" ”

Sleepwalking? I didn't know what it was, but seeing the teacher's serious expression, I didn't dare to ask more. Teacher Yang hugged his second brother, and we followed all the way back to school safely.

After returning to the dormitory, the teacher put the second brother on the bed, and after a while he fell asleep. And how come we can't sleep, and we keep thinking, how can he run there in the middle of the night and cry? And crying in the coffin pit? Sleepwalking? What is sleepwalking? Could it be that sleepwalking would go to that kind of place? The more I thought about it, the more terrifying I felt in my heart, so I kept my eyes open until dawn.

The next day, when the second brother woke up, we asked him what happened last night? He didn't even know that he had run out of the dormitory, let alone that he was crying in the coffin pit.

A few days later, I learned from the adults in the second brother's village that the coffin pit with the newly buried white bones belonged to the second brother's grandmother. It had been three years since his grandmother died, and according to our customs, two weeks ago, his family called the local guy to collect the bones of his grandmother.

When I heard the news, I sat still and couldn't speak for a long time.