Xie Shuang still failed to go to school as she wished.

The fortune teller's ritual seemed to soothe the restless souls of the river.

The village was quiet for half a month.

Xie Shuang's illness gradually improved.

Except for the dream that every night the boy in blue stood in the river and smiled at him, and approached her step by step, everything seemed to be going for the better.

At this time, more than a month has passed since the start of school, and the teachers at the school are still responsible, calling the village from time to time to ask when her illness will be cured.

After the National Day holiday. On the day she packed her things again and prepared to leave home and go to school in a distant (at least in her mind) provincial town, something happened again.

At the time of the incident, the family of three was standing at the intersection of the village, waiting for the bus to the provincial capital to pass by.

Xie Shuang's father carried a large bag of luggage, silently looking into the distance, occasionally stomping his feet anxiously, complaining, "Why haven't you come yet?" ”

Her mother, on the other hand, was holding her hand with red eyes and chattering about the precautions for going out. Repeating over and over again told her to be careful, eat well, pay attention to her body, don't have conflicts with her classmates, and study hard...... This has been said thousands of times.

After more than ten years of cold violence, the pair of middle-aged people who are not confused show a trace of warmth to their little daughter.

"Xiaoshuang, when you arrive in the provincial capital, don't tell others about the dreams you had!" Mother took her hand and shook it tightly. He said earnestly: "It's best not to dream anymore." ”

How can one not dream?

Xie Shuang smiled helplessly, nodded solemnly, and agreed to her mother.

"Don't worry, I'm sure I won't say it casually."

Mother stared into Xie Shuang's eyes. I don't know what I thought, and I started crying again.

"You!" She cried and sighed, "What will I do in the future!" ”

Xie Shuang didn't understand her mother's words at the time, she just smiled to soothe her mother's emotions, and didn't dare to think about it.

At this moment, more than a dozen young and strong men walked out of the village and gathered around the three of them.

The father threw his luggage on the ground. stopped in front of the mother and daughter, and shouted loudly: "What are you going to do!" ”

The group looked at each other a few times, and finally introduced a middle-aged man in his thirties.

The man took a deep breath and said to the three people in front of him, "Your little girl can't go. ”

After he said this, he didn't explain much, just turned around and waved his hand at the one behind him.

The group of people rushed up, like escorting prisoners, and escorted the three members of the Xie family back to the village.

Amid the beatings and shouts, the forgotten bag of luggage lay quietly in the corner.

Just like its owner.

That night. The group separated Xie Shuang from her parents and locked her in a dark cellar on her stomach.

It's easy to say.

The evil spirits in the river not only did not leave, but came out more blatantly to harm people.

After half a month of calm in the village, just last night, there was another death.

And it's three lives.

Still on that embankment, three elementary school students who sneaked out in the middle of the night to play rolled down the embankment hand in hand and fell into the river.

Still no bodies have come up.

According to witnesses who were on the side at the time. It was like a tug-of-war with three children in the river. The three children stood in a row holding hands, and the one in front held his hand forward. Seems to be holding something.

But there was only air in front of him.

Then the three children shouted slogans and threw themselves backwards, and one of them shouted something into the river.

It's as if someone in the river is playing the game with them again.

In the end, the three of them still lost, and were all dragged into the water by the "people" in the river at once, and after a few flutters, they disappeared into the water, leaving only a string of small bubbles.

It stands to reason. This kind of thing happened again, and the first thought of the people in the village should be to go back to the fortune teller who was not well maintained, but why did they find the head of the Xie family again?

That's naturally because someone said that this little girl named Xie Shuang is the culprit of all this.

Even more ridiculous. These words actually came from the mouth of a crazy woman.

The crazy woman was none other than the grandmother of the boy in blue who had drowned in the river.

The boy was playful to his parents, and he didn't come home all day, almost to the point that he didn't even know how old the child was. If it weren't for the old lady at home who was still thinking about this grandson, I am afraid that she might die because of neglect of care when she was not sensible.

His grandmother dragged him until he was seven or eight years old, and almost regarded him as her own life, and she couldn't spoil him.

Even so, he still couldn't escape the fate of his untimely death, and was taken by a flood to be a boy in front of the river god's grandfather.

"I became a boy in front of the river god's grandfather" is a sentence that his grandmother recited when he met people after his death.

The illiterate old lady of seventy or eighty years old, just because she could not accept the fact that Du Miaomiao's grandson was so absent, actually made up a set of stories that "the grandson is a god in the sky, and he can't live to be nine years old, so he was taken away by the river god's grandfather to be a boy" There is nothing too wrong in logic.

At first, the people in the village didn't take this story seriously, but when the old lady was stimulated, the perfunctory laughter of listening to the story passed.

Even the old lady's son and daughter-in-law didn't believe it. He even cursed maliciously after a few glasses of wine, "Why didn't this old lady go with his precious grandson?"

Only the old lady believed in the story she had made, and every day she went to the place where her grandson had an accident by the river and shouted his name to him. I want her baby grandson, who has been "ranked in the immortal class", to come out and meet her.

At first, she just went to the river and shouted a few times. But shouting like this day after day, the grandson never came out, and the old lady finally went crazy.

After she went crazy, she didn't make trouble. I still go to the river every day to sit and chat with my "grandson". When I caught someone, I talked about how good my grandson was when he became a big official with Grandpa River God.

Her son and daughter-in-law had already kicked her out of the house, so she ordered something from the east and the west, wandered around the village during the day, found a pyre to sleep on at night, and miraculously survived several winters.

When the village was building a river embankment. She also came out to make trouble for a while, but I don't know who persuaded her to go back, or beat her back, and gradually disappeared from people's eyes.

After tea and dinner, the people in the village would occasionally discuss whether the old lady was dead, and if she was dead, where was the body.

This incident also became an unsolved mystery in the village for a time.

This mystery was suddenly solved a few days ago.

The old lady was not dead. I just don't know where I'm hiding.

After so many deaths in the village, she suddenly returned to the village silently as if she had disappeared silently.

Only this time, she no longer dragged people to say that her grandson was a big official in the river, but began to chant "My grandson is going to marry a daughter-in-law!" ”

At first, everyone only thought she was more completely crazy, and didn't pay much attention to it.

The old lady said it a few times, and when she saw that others didn't believe her, she no longer took the initiative to dislike people. It's back to the original embankment. He whispered this to the river as before.

Until yesterday, she started to make trouble again.

She stopped at the entrance of the village. He shouted loudly to everyone who passed by: "My grandson said, if you don't send your daughter-in-law to him today, you will die at night...... Three people are going to die today! If you don't want to die, hurry up and give your daughter-in-law to him! The later the day, the more people will die, and if you don't want to die, send that girl to him quickly! Otherwise, you will all die! ”

Because she is blocking the road like this, it is too disturbing to the people. It's also delaying everyone's business. In the end, as soon as the villagers summed up, they asked her son to take her home.

I didn't expect three people to really die at night.

Now they can't help but believe the old lady's nonsense.

Those who once heard these things as jokes have seen their IQs plummet under the fear of death.

A corpse that never floats into the water one after another, plus an old lady who talks crazy. All this tormented the nerves of everyone living in this small backward village.

They got together and studied it all day. At last it was unanimously decided that the old lady would send her grandson's chosen daughter-in-law to him to appease the evil spirits in the river.

That's right, the unlucky "daughter-in-law" is Xie Shuang.

Xie Shuang was locked up in the cellar all night, listening to the noise outside all night.

As she saw a glimmer of light peeking through the cracks above the cellar, she heard a roar coming from above.

"Someone has fallen into the river again!"

The crowd, which had been arguing fiercely all night, suddenly fell silent.

People who couldn't agree all night seemed to be on the same side all of a sudden.

They dragged Xie Shuang out of the cellar and pushed him to the river.

Xie Shuang was hungry all night, and his mind was actually completely confused at this time.

She only remembered all the noise around her, as if it was separated from her by something, and she couldn't hear it very clearly.

The people around her waited for her one by one with hatred, pointing at her face and cursing loudly.

Then she was pushed into the river.

Probably because of expecting something too much.

In this memory, it seems that there are parents crying and begging the boiling crowd to stop, and the father even knelt down to the crowd for her and was beaten.

Again, it doesn't seem to be.

Many years later, she still can't be completely sure what happened that day, and can only rely on her own speculation to restore the truth at that time.

Every time she thinks about it, she comforts herself in her heart, the memory of her parents should be true, after all, she is her own flesh and blood.

Her life didn't end in that little ditch.

The moment she was pushed down the river, the boy in blue who had drowned in the river appeared at her feet, grabbed her by the ankles tightly, and dragged her underwater.

Her originally confused mind woke up the moment she fell into the water.

One by one, the people who died in the river appeared to her side, and together with the boy in blue, they pulled her down to the bottom of the river.

After touching the soft sand at the bottom of the river, the group did not let go of their hands, but gathered together, watching the boy in blue press against her, laughing and watching her approach to death little by little.

Including the high school student whose name has been hidden in her heart so far.

The boy was still wearing the white shirt he had worn when he fell into the water, and a pair of black-rimmed glasses on the bridge of his nose. His eyes were not as polite as before, but full of crazy malice.

When the river water poured into the lungs, it did not bring a cold feeling, but a bit hot.

The horrific memories of falling into the water as a child coincide with the scene in front of me.

The distorted smile on the puffy face of the blue-clothed boy also merged with the face that often gave Xie Shuang nightmares when he was alive.

Her hands were tightly tied behind her back, unable to struggle, she could only twist her fingers, constantly scratching in the sand beneath her, powerless and desperate struggle.

Soon, she had carved a shallow pit in the sand.

Her fingertips seemed to touch something hard, what seemed to be a small stone, and she subconsciously held the stone in the palm of her hand.

The stone had sharp edges and corners, and as she held it tightly, the sharp corners of the stone pierced into her palm.

A few wisps of blood floated from her palms into the water, merging with the rushing river.

The dead people around disappeared with a "boom".

Xie Shuang lay at the bottom of the water, blinking a few times, completely unable to understand what had just happened.

There was a thunderclap over the river.

Just after the villagers pushed her into the river, a rainstorm fell into the small mountain village in a matter of minutes.

The rain fell intermittently for a week.

It brought landslides, mudslides, and floods.

By the time the rain had stopped and the flood had dispersed, the small village, which had not been so small and not so many, had been completely buried in the mud and had disappeared.

Xie Shuang miraculously survived.

When she was pulled out of the rubble by the People's Liberation Army for disaster relief, she was still holding a black stone tightly in her hand.

Marvel.

The people present at the time, when they found that she still had this faint heartbeat, couldn't help but think like this.

Later, she was picked up by her eldest brother who rushed to hear the news.

The eldest brother has just gotten married, and his wife is also a migrant worker who has gone out to work. The three of them were crammed into a small rental house, and after living in it for half a year, my sister-in-law's belly gradually grew bigger.

Xie Shuang was kicked out again and officially became a homeless wanderer.

On the day she was kicked out, all she had was a black stone dug out of the bottom of the river, and only enough money to eat for three days.

In the following seven or eight years, she traveled to many places, did all kinds of jobs, and met all kinds of people and things.

She didn't save much money, and barely had a few days that could be called "good".

In fact, it's not that she doesn't work hard, and even many things are always better than others. It's just that for some reason, every time she sees some hope, some strange accident happens, causing her to return to square one again.

This bad life lasted until she was thirty years old.

On her thirtieth birthday, she met a blind fortune teller on the side of the road.

(To be continued.) )