I've been a bit stupid and bold since I was a child, and when I walk at night, I'm afraid of the living people who rob the road. I don't have much fear of dead people and ghosts. On the contrary, there is an inexplicable interest in the dead, ghosts, and the night, as if there is always infinite magic and mystery in the dark mystery.

When I first came into contact with dead bodies, I was probably only eleven or twelve years old.

It was an old man from a five-guarantee household in front of my house, and I called him Grandpa Gao. He never married a wife in his life, and certainly had no children, and I vaguely remember that in the winter, he liked to squat in front of his adobe house, wearing a dirty, shiny torn cotton jacket, holding his hands, squinting lazily, basking in the sun with his face up, his toothless mouth still squirming, and his goatee shaking and shaking.

I remember one early summer, I don't think I had seen him for many days, and usually every morning he would sit under the big locust tree nearby, then go down to the field to mow the grass, feed his two skinny goats, and come out to sit for a while in the evening.

The adults in the family were busy working in the fields, and no one would pay attention to him. And I'm very sensitive to whether he comes out or not, because almost every afternoon after school, I go to play under the locust tree, and he usually stays. He loved to talk to me, always asking about that, but I couldn't hear what he was saying.

What did Grandpa Gao do? I haven't seen him for so many days, and I went to visit relatives? But I've never heard of any relatives in him, and I've never seen him go out for so many days.

I remember that it was an early evening, and I suddenly felt the urge to go to his house. In fact, his house doesn't have any courtyard walls or gates, so he just takes some corn stalks and surrounds them casually, and then makes a fence gate that is about to fall apart.

It was already dark, and in the thick twilight I saw that his dirty door seemed to be hidden, and that there was a strange smell in the courtyard, and the more you walked to the door, the stronger the smell became.

When I pushed the door open and tried to go in sideways, the strange smell suddenly came to my face, and it slammed into my nose, and then it seemed to quickly seep into every cell in my body, I grew so big, it was the first time I knew what it was like to be uncomfortable, I quickly turned around and ran out, and as soon as I got outside the courtyard, I began to vomit, and my snot and tears kept flowing down, and I cried. I will never forget that strange smell: not a simple smell, but a strange, sweet smell, like a cat's claw, scratching your brain, scratching your stomach, tickling every cell in your body.

Since then, I have never eaten watermelon again because the smell of watermelon is a bit similar to that smell.

I ran home crying, and my parents asked me what was wrong, but I couldn't say a word, just kept crying, crying, and then I fell asleep.

The next day, I went to school as usual, because my parents didn't have time to mow the sheep because of the busy work in the fields, so they told me to go and herd the sheep after school. Outside our village is a big embankment, there is a lush forest on the embankment, usually during the day to the inside feel obscured, in the evening the light is darker, but there is a lot of grass inside, after school in the afternoon, I led the three sheep, into the woods.

Alas, how come in the woods, not far from me, I saw an old man standing there, as if it was Grandpa Gao, but he didn't look like he was mowing the grass, but standing there straight, usually the slightly hunched back is not so hunched, and the clothes are quite strange is not the usual dirty undershirt, but a very white robe, a bit like a singing costume, such a hot day, it is really strange to wear like this.

As I walked over, I shouted: "Grandpa Gao, I've seen you for a few days, what are you doing", Grandpa Gao didn't seem to hear, he was still standing there very demented, looking somewhere, and when I was about five or six meters away from him, he suddenly turned his head to look at me. That's right, it's Grandpa Gao, he looked at me, and suddenly grinned, in the faint light, his shriveled mouth seemed to have fine snow-white teeth! And his face was so pale! The hairs on my body immediately stood on end, and I stood there unconsciously.

Grandpa Gao muttered a few words, and instead of leaning over to me, he turned around and walked down the embankment. The strange thing is that he walks so lightly, and he does not have the usual old state of hunched back and swaying. For some reason, I suddenly got goosebumps all over my body, and a cold air went straight down my spine. Although I had only been here for a while, I wanted to go home immediately.

On the way home, when I passed the courtyard of Grandpa Gao's house, I found that there were several people in the yard, as well as the village party secretary. I was inexplicably flustered, and I wasn't interested in anything, so I wanted to hurry home.

When I entered the house, my parents had already cooked the meal, and I wanted to tell them that I had seen Grandpa Gao in the woods on the riverbank, but my body was trembling and I couldn't speak. When my parents saw me, they stopped what they were doing and stared at me. Mom asked: "Mingming, what's wrong with you, why is it uncomfortable, your face is so white?" ”

I wanted to answer my mother's words, but it felt like a nightmare, when you wanted to shout or speak, but you couldn't make a sound, as if there was some force preventing you from talking. I gritted my teeth and tried my best to barely squeeze out a few words from between my teeth: "I was in the forest on the river embankment, and I saw Grandpa Gao just now."

After hearing this, my father's hand shook, and the bowl fell to the ground and shattered with a thud. My mother, too, was terrified, pulled me into her arms, hugged me tightly, and rubbed my head with her hands.

My dad suddenly said loudly: "Uncle Gao, we have been good neighbors for decades, you can't pester my family." I also cried as if I had been wronged by something.

Later, I learned that on the evening of the day I was herding the sheep, Grandpa Gao was found dead at home for many days, and the corpse had rotted and grown.

So what I saw in the woods was a hallucination? But that scene is so real that it is still fresh in my memory decades later.

Because Grandpa Gao had no children and no relatives, the day of the funeral was very deserted. Everyone pooled money to buy a thin coffin, hastily decorated Uncle Gao, and the dozen or so strong guys who took turns carrying the coffin were each given a bottle of liquor to drink a few sips by themselves, and then poured it on themselves, just to resist the disgusting corpse stench, but even so, a few people still vomited.

According to the regulations, he should be cremated, but the cremation costs thousands of yuan, and in the condition of Uncle Gao, no one is willing to do it for him, and the superiors also turn a blind eye, so it's over.

As soon as Uncle Gao died, his yard and adobe house were in ruins. Usually, when he was alive, few people removed people from the village committee, and occasionally gave him rice and noodles and the like.

Anyone who lives in the countryside knows that every family is most afraid of the kind of houses around them that no one lives in and people have died. Because in this kind of house, there are often flocks of rats and fleas breed, which will cause nearby families to suffer greatly. A month after Uncle Gao's death, I obviously felt that there were more rats in our family, and sometimes when I came home from school and pushed the door into the house, I often saw the rats running away. I didn't even want to wear a new dress that my mother bought for me, so I let the rats spoil it.

Mom and Dad decided to get a cat.

At noon in the middle of summer that year, it was stuffy and hot, and my parents went to the big tree outside to enjoy the shade, and I turned on the fan and watched TV dramas at home alone. Looking at it, I don't know when, I fell asleep.

Suddenly, something snapped and woke me up. I jerked over and sat up, and it turned out to be a fat, big black cat that jumped down from the beam and pressed a mouse under its paws. Then he picked up the mouse in his mouth and went to a hidden place to enjoy his meal.

It was a cat of unknown origin that was initially thought to be a neighbor's, but it was later confirmed that it was not. If someone's dog or cat is lost in the village, the owner will often shout it with a loudspeaker at the head of the village. But this cat has been in my house for more than ten days, and no one has looked for it.

As time went on, I felt more and more that this cat was weird.

For example, one day, my mother said, "This cat has been in our house for so long, and I haven't fed it yet, so you can serve it this bowl of leftover fish bones."

It was lying lazily in the sun at the door, and I walked over with a bowl of fish bones as my mother had instructed, and then squatted down when I placed the bowl in front of it. It looked up at me, it was the first time I had looked at it, and it was the first time I had seen it so closely, and suddenly I trembled like an electric shock.

That face! That eye! That mouth! So familiar! Its eyes are not like the round eyes of ordinary cats, and they are more like human eyes when they squint in strong light, flat and long, even like eyelashes, and the eyeballs are very cloudy, and there is a shadow in the left eye like Grandpa Gao's left eye. And that mouth, not at all like a cat's mouth, more like an old man's toothless mouth. Oh my God, this is a cat face, it's just a freak face.

I sat on the floor with my butt on my ass and it took me a few minutes to recover before I realized that my crotch was wet and I was peeing.

I don't know what psychology I had at the time, but I didn't mention the weirdness of a cat to my parents at all, but silently buried the secret deep in my heart. I remember that time, I often had nightmares and my heart was often terrified. The whole person also became silent, unable to eat or sleep soundly, and became dark and thin. My parents also took me to the hospital in the township for a check-up, and the doctor said that there were parasites in my stomach, so I could take some medicine and take it.

When my parents were not at home, I tried to chase the cat away several times, but when I scared him with a shovel, it did not run away like a normal cat, but arched its front legs and hind legs in an aggressive manner, and confronted me angrily. At that moment, its face became less and less like a cat's face and more like a human face with a vivid expression, which made me feel terrified, and I had to put down the shovel and run out of the house in fear.