The sound of my nails scratching at the stones became clearer and clearer, as if it was close to my ears, I don't know why it was so loud, the side of the cliff facing the river was the place where the corpses were hung, and I only had to take two more steps to reach out and see it. It was daylight, but I didn't have the courage to take another step forward at the thought of the rotten corpses, and after a few endurances, I was going to go back the way I came, no matter how strange the sound was, and pretend I couldn't hear it.

I turned and walked a few steps, and the sound of scratching the stones continued, and suddenly, a faint cry of a baby came from the cliff to the other side of the river, and the cry was incessant, and all the sounds were silenced at once. I stopped and listened, not too far away, and my ears were so good that it sounded as if there was a newborn child crying on the other side of the cliff.

It's not that I praise the people on both sides of the Yellow River, in that era, there were many selfish and greedy people, but there were also many people who were warm-hearted, especially people like me, who grew up in the village and had no contact with the real society. There must have been something wrong with this, but I didn't think much about it, and when I heard the baby's cry, I immediately turned around and took a few steps back that way. The wind on the river carried the cry of the child, and drilled into the ears one by one.

The foul smell was overwhelming, and I untied the flask from my waist and took a sip and sprayed it on the corner of my clothes to cover my nose. Most of the people who walk the river love wine, soak in the water all the year round, the liquor can invigorate the blood and get wet, I am not addicted to alcohol, but I still follow the rules of the river walker, with a wine jug. Covering my mouth and nose with a cloth sticky with wine, I felt better, and I emboldened myself and climbed all the way to the edge of the cliff, looking down at the river.

It's similar to what I thought, there are more than a dozen corpses hanging on the cliff, and the bottom ones have been for a long time, and it is estimated that the family has not claimed them, and they look miserable in the wind and sun. I looked away, and the one that hung up was closer, probably recently placed here by the boatmen.

A rather special corpse immediately caught my eye.

The corpse was in rags, with hair more than a foot long, which was scattered to cover its face, and the corpses hanging on the cliff were all worn with two ropes from the front chest, and then wrapped around their arms, tied to the stones on the edge of the cliff, the corpse drooped its head, and its face was completely covered by hair, but it looked like it should have died not long ago, and its body was still roughly intact. There was nothing unusual about this corpse, but it had a big belly, like a pregnant woman.

My heart immediately tightened, my legs and stomach turned tendons, in the folklore on both sides of the river, whether it is the suicide by throwing themselves into the river, or the person who drowns, the pregnant woman who is pregnant with the child is definitely the most difficult, there is no one. One big and one small died in the water, and the resentment was heavier than anyone else, and the people who walked the boat would hide when they saw the corpses of pregnant women in the river, and they would not dare to provoke. I wondered who had transported the body of this pregnant woman to the cliff?

What makes me even more frightened is that the sound of a baby crying seems to come from the belly of this pregnant woman, from the outside of the corpse, the death is not long, but at least seven or eight days, the adults are dead, can the child in the belly be saved? Naturally, I remembered the rumors of ghost babies that the people in the village used to say.

The older generation said that the ghost babies in the river rarely hurt people, and most of them were prank-like teasing, even if they scared people, they would not make innocent people to death. It's the first time I've experienced this kind of thing, and there is a lot of curiosity in the panic, so I subconsciously grabbed the ghost whip in my waist and continued to observe.

The cries continued one after another, sounding a bit miserable and pitiful. Life is actually difficult to say, fragile, very fragile, good people passed all at once, said tough and very tenacious, before liberation, Xiaopanhe Village once suffered a hundred years of rare floods, the whole village was flooded, the embankment broke thousands of miles, there was a family in the village did not have time to escape, two people with a one-year-old child, climbed to an old elm tree in danger, was trapped on the tree for seven days and seven nights, did not bring a grain of grain, a family of three actually survived until the water receded.

I didn't think about anything else at the time, but wondered if the baby in the pregnant woman's womb really survived. But I'm not a fool after all, the baby's cry was very clear, coming from the belly of the pregnant woman's corpse on the edge of the cliff, but I still felt a little wrong when I thought about it, so I didn't move, and continued to watch in the same place, and if I didn't figure things out, it was better not to take risks.

The river wind was strong, blowing from the river one by one, and more than a dozen corpses on the cliff were constantly swaying with the strong river wind, which looked a little funny and a little scary, but when the river breeze blew, the smell dissipated a lot, I rubbed my nose, put down the corner of my clothes, and took the opportunity to take two breaths.

At this moment, the corpse of the pregnant woman swayed back and forth twice, and her hair was scattered by the wind, and her face was suddenly revealed. I was stunned at once, the body was a little decomposed, one eye may have been injured when it entered the water, it looked like a black hole, it was scary. But what surprised me wasn't what he looked like, it was something else.

It looked like it had thick eyebrows and big eyes, a full beard, and slightly open lips full of dry river sand. This is clearly a man! How can a man have a big belly?!

I was amazed as the corpse suddenly writhed, its legs trembled violently, and its arms turned behind me at an unimaginable angle as if they had been wound up. At first, I thought I had met a corpse, but I had never seen a corpse that could be deceived under the sun, and I didn't think much about it at the time.

burst

A whip slammed into the corpse, and the tip snapped, and then the corpse's belly suddenly cracked, and a small shadow burst out of it, grabbing my hair. Although the thing was not big, it came very suddenly, and I was caught off guard by it, and the whole person suddenly fell down the cliff and almost fell down.

For a brief moment, I saw the little shadow, a little like a baby fish, but black and a bit like a pangolin, with four fingers on its two front paws, almost as flexible as a human hand, and pulling my hair tight. The thing had been hidden in the corpse's stomach all along, and it suddenly came out with a foul of stinking slime, and its eyes were only the size of peanuts, but their eyes were blood-red and had a fierce light.

This thing was much more nimble than a human, tugging at my hair, and my body dangling under the cliff, dragging it down hard. Its teeth were like two rows of serrated teeth, dense and sharp, and its mouth constantly emitted the kind of crying sound like a baby's cry. I was grabbed by my hair, and my scalp hurt, but I suddenly remembered what it was.

Mandrills, for sure. I haven't seen it, I've only heard my grandfather talk about it, and if I think about it before and after, it must be this thing.

Rumors have it that the mandrills in the Yellow River, which are drowned by children under the age of drowning, often lurk near the shallow waterways, and can make baby-like cries to attract passing boats. Legend has it that where there is a mandrill, there must be a big ao, and the mandrill is responsible for attracting the boat, and the big ao overturns the boat all at once, which is a very annoying thing anyway.

Folklore has some basis and is not entirely nonsense, but it is not entirely true. Later, I specifically checked that the mandrill is an amphibian reptile that dares to make trouble during the day because it is a living thing.

I was tugged at by my hair and tried to back away, but the mandrill's two hind paws clung to the cliff, and its body almost straightened and stalemate with me. I suddenly exerted my strength, endured the pain and shrank back, although the water ray was fierce, but its size and physical strength were limited, and I dragged it to the edge of the cliff with all my strength.

But before I could catch my breath, the mandrill's other claw scratched at my ear, and the claws of this thing were very sharp, and often climbed to the stones on the shore in the middle of the night to grind, but fortunately I dodged quickly, leaving a small blood mark on my ear, and I could avoid it.

However, I casually touched it, and found that the blood flowing from the wound was a little black, and at the same time, a faint feeling of dizziness and swelling quickly spread along the wound to the head. Before I completely lost consciousness, I suddenly remembered that the mandrill likes to wander around with floating corpses, and after burrowing in the stomach of corpses for so long, its claws can be clean? The thought of this sends a chill through my heart.

It was probably just a few blinks of the eye, and the dizziness was stronger, and it seemed that my hands and feet didn't obey the call, and I wanted to stand up reluctantly, but my legs were weak. I covered the wound with one hand, and wrestled with the mandrill with the other, and the thing was as cunning as a fox, and it pulled my hair and dragged it towards the side of the cliff, and I gasped for breath, and the scene in front of me became more and more blurred, and all the strength in my body seemed to pass away with the small wound. The body rolled crookedly a few times, and immediately rolled to the edge of the cliff.

The mandrill screamed, tugging at my hair and not letting go of its claws through the gap where I couldn't control my balance. I tried to shake it off, but my body was completely unbalanced, and when I rolled slightly, I immediately felt that my whole body suddenly emptied and fell straight down the edge of the cliff.

Immediately, my mind was completely empty, and the remaining consciousness told me that soon, I would fall into the river below the cliff, whether I would fall to my death, whether I would drown, it was hard to say, but the mandrill was next to me, and I would never end well. However, the body has fallen, and there is no room for any turnaround.

Just as I was rapidly falling, among the corpses hanging on the cliff, one of them suddenly moved, and the movement was extremely fast, and the two hands reached out one after the other. Although I am thin, I have about 100 pounds, and with the inertia of falling from above, ordinary people can't catch it at all. But the sudden movement of the corpse was a bit outrageous, with one hand, firmly grasping my collar, and the other hand grasping the water mandrill like lightning, the time and strength were exactly right.