I don't know if it was because of my words, but from that day on, the strange knock on the door never sounded again, until a year later, that is, on that day in 1998, Xiuhe River experienced a major drought for the first time in my memory, and the water level dropped to a record low.

At that time, the water level was decreasing little by little on the scale on the piers, and there was no sign of rain in the sky. It wasn't until we stood on the bridge of the Xiuhe River that we could see the silt under the river, it was the summer vacation, and a few of my classmates and I walked outside to the Xiuhe Bridge when we saw a lot of people looking down on the bridge, and we all ran over, and when we looked at it, we realized that it was a broken steel building under the river.

Because there has been no drought for so many years in the river, this drought has exposed a lot of things in the river, and the steel building is the third hole truss of the Tujiabu Bridge blown up by the Kuomintang army in 1949, 49 years old, in the eyes of our children, it is also an antiquity, we are curious to lie on the railing of the bridge and look below.

When I was young, the holidays were actually very boring, and we still missed the school days in addition to being able to sleep late. So sitting on the bridge and looking at the arid river below the bridge is actually not a move to have enough to eat and have nothing to do. But soon I noticed that there was a commotion on both sides of the river below, because one of them was walking towards the ruined bridge by stepping on some bulge in the river.

Although there was not much water in the river at that time, but there was still a lot of silt in the river, if one was not careful, I was thinking about it here, and suddenly I saw a black thing in the river under the bridge jumping over the water level and jumping out of the silt, everything happened too suddenly, the whole time was less than 5 seconds of process, and then I heard a scream below, the black thing in his mouth, the person disappeared into the silt under the river bank.

It was the first time I had witnessed the death of a person, and the screams still lingered in my ears. The scarlet blood bloomed in the river and the strange lotus flowers bloomed.

"What's that?"

"Did you see that?"

"Black is so big."

The people below all exploded for a while, and they all fled away from the shore, leaving only a huge hole in the mud, from which it could be seen that the creature was at least nearly ten meters in diameter, how could such a huge thing live in a small river? One such thought came to me in my frightened mind, and then an answer was automatically searched out: "There is an underground river below the Xiu River." ”

But the convulsion below was not over, and then everyone present heard a "bell" sound. As if something had hit a steel bridge, the mud in the river began to stir up piece by piece, like a whale stranded on the beach, trying to wriggle and swim back into the sea. "It wants to get back." At this time, a voice sounded, probably someone who knew the legend of the underground river, and he shouted loudly on the bridge, "That thing wants to go back, you are far away, don't go near this river again." ”

Time seemed to freeze, and all the mud began to be emptied. A huge cavern had been dug out of the mud, from which it was evident that the creature had escaped, but no one had seen what it was, but I had seen something else, and I saw a bright thing under the mud reflecting the sun's rays on me. "Something else under the bridge?" I looked down in disbelief to see that it was a pattern, and the pattern disappeared in an instant, as the silt had refilled the estuary after the monster had escaped.

And that motif is a woman and a puppet.

Then the clouds rolled in the sky, just like the scene a year ago. The torrential rain poured down without warning, and most of the onlookers who did not know the truth dispersed. They seemed to have forgotten the bloody scene just now, cheering for the beauty of the heavens, and the cheering appearance of the river god. But I was stuck in the rain, because I saw a woman dressed in black on the bank of the bridge walking into the river step by step.

Because I was drenched in a lot of rain that night, I naturally had a high fever, and I had a dream at night. I dreamed about what happened when I was five years old, it was my creature that day, I saw five candles on the cake, I saw the big mansion of my family, I saw a door. I saw the pattern on the door, it was a woman and a puppet.

I woke up from my dream, covered my head, and began to mutter, "Before the age of six? I actually remember? ”

Backyard? I suddenly thought of my grandfather's big house on the grave mountain, the backyard where no one was allowed to enter or leave, and there was a set of such patterns on the door of a small wooden house in the backyard, but no one in the family knew where my grandfather had picked it up, anyway, from its dusty door frame, I could see that the door was an old thing. But no one can say why there is such a pattern on it, and of course no one has ever asked about it.

In fact, after a long time, I have been exposed to more things, and I will also start to think about some things that parents don't let me ask, maybe it's the so-called rebellion! It's just that this kind of rebellion came to me a little earlier, and I sometimes wonder why I don't have the memory of when I was six years old, why did my great-grandfather make a rule that every child born in the family should stay in that house for a few years, will the adults have a lot of things to hide from me?

That summer, I asked the elderly people in the neighborhood about the things under the Xiuhe River, but unfortunately the old people said a lot but did not say the news I wanted to get, but I unexpectedly heard such a rumor, an elderly man said that he remembered that it was 1985, that day a cargo ship capsized under the bridge of the Xiuhe River, and since then people have died in the river every year. Although I was not sure if this rumor was true, I always suspected that the door was fished up by my grandfather from under the Xiu River, and at the same time a bold idea came to me: "Could that door be what the ship is transporting?" ”

I have to say that when I was a child, the character of the child really determined my current style of doing things, 2 days later, the condition improved, I asked my dad to go to the same school to live for a week, because at that time I personally relied on my parents, so my dad has been a headache whether I can be independent, no, as soon as I asked he immediately agreed, that day he found a driver on his unit to take me from Yongxiu County, back to Sanxi Bridge.

Grandpa's house is on a hill in Sanxi Bridge, there was originally a small stream under the mountain, and the stream has always been drawn from the reservoir in Tuolin, but now with the completion of the reservoir, the river has dried up, and in the middle of the night, the car passed by the tomb mountain, and I saw that the mountain was pitch black and there was no light, and I knew that the house had been completely abandoned. Because of the bad feng shui and geographical location, even the rich people in the county are reluctant to buy a vacation, so this house is vacant, and it has basically become a deserted house if no one takes care of it for a long time, but as expected, the few big yellow dogs that the family once raised are still in the mountains.

Sighing, once upon a time, this house has always been my capital to show off, but now when I look at it, I realize that it has long since become an abandoned vacant land. At 11 o'clock in the evening, I arrived at the same school, he was my first-grade classmate, a real little fat man, surnamed Hu Dan and a night, we used to laugh at him at that time, he was standing taller than lying down, and he was embarrassed to call it "emaciated Xiao" should be called Hu Fei.

I hadn't seen that guy for several years, and the only way we kept in touch with him was when I was in the first grade because my family moved to the county seat, and the greetings were indispensable after the meeting, but he shook his head when I asked to go to my family's old house. said: "It's not that I'm cowardly and won't go with you, I just heard that two big yellow dogs died at the foot of the house half a year ago." ”

"Isn't that my family?" I was amazed, "Why did you die?" ”

"God knows how they died, and the only thing that was alive on that mountain was the two dogs, but now that place has become a veritable ghost mountain, but ten days ago, when a colleague of my father was passing by, he saw two dogs standing on the mountain, exactly the same as the one that died before." (To be continued......)