Chapter 0036 The Strange Illness
Wang Hong expressed his regret and hung up the phone. However, ten neatly tied bundles of RMB kept flashing in my mind. Feeling unwilling to give up, I called Frank Fang and explained the situation. Unexpectedly, my friend immediately launched into a fierce lecture: "Have you been in Shenyang too long that your brain is rotting? You won't earn 100,000 RMB when it's handed to you? You're too lazy to go, right? Fine, give me the address. I'll go. At most, I'll split some of the money with you after the job is done."
I immediately objected; how could I surrender such a lucrative business? It was against the rules. Frank Fang was furious. "You complain that it's too tiring to go, yet you're unwilling to let it go if you don't! It's a miracle someone like you can make money in business!" Under Frank Fang's scolding and persuasion, I decided to make the trip. Hard work is hard work; I'd treat it as a way to lose weight. Finally, Frank Fang warned me that since I was unfamiliar with the place, I should be careful, keep my wits about me, gather evidence, and call him immediately if I didn't understand something.
I called Wang Hong back and told him I could go and check it out, but the journey was long, and he would have to book the plane tickets for me. Wang Hong was overjoyed and quickly agreed. We arranged to meet three days later at the Bijie City Railway Station. I would fly from Bangkok to Guangzhou, then transfer to Guiyang. Bijie hadn't built an airport yet, and the train station was quite far from the city. Wang Hong was punctual. When I left the train station, his car was already waiting outside. He was tall and thin, looking quite shrewd. After exchanging greetings, he first drove me to his matchmaking office in the city, and then smoothly reimbursed me for the plane and train tickets.
After eating, Wang Hong said, "Mr. Tian, let's leave now. We'll go to the county first, then the township. It will take about four hours to drive, and we should reach the village before 5 PM." So, I sat in the passenger seat, and Wang Hong drove us toward the village whose name I still didn't know. The road from the city to the county town was relatively easy, but the road from the township to the village was difficult. It was my first time seeing mountain roads. The left side was all mountain, and the right side was genuinely steep. Sitting in the passenger seat, I could see the cliff if I craned my neck. The road surface was also narrow and uneven, and my heart was in my throat.
Wang Hong smiled. "Don't worry. I've driven this road hundreds of times. As long as the brakes don't fail, we'll be fine." Hearing that, I became even more terrified.
The mountains came one after another. I didn't know how many we had crossed. I thought that the people who built these mountain roads back then were true heroes. Wang Hong hadn't exaggerated; it took exactly two hours and ten minutes of driving on mountain roads to get from the township to this village. The village was hidden in these continuous mountains, nestled in a mountain hollow. Strangely, there was a stone gate at the village entrance with a slide track at the bottom. A man was squatting on the hill next to the stone gate, smoking a pipe, looking like a lookout. Wang Hong honked a few times, and the man waved toward the bottom of the gate inside. The stone gate slowly opened, and the car drove through.
I looked back outside the car and saw two middle-aged men jointly pushing a wooden lever behind the stone gate, used to open and close it. After the car drove in, they forcefully closed the stone gate again and secured the wooden lever.
Driving into the village, dust flew everywhere. Many places had no road at all, and the paths were narrow and steep. We had to rev the engine several times just to manage to crawl up and down. Occasionally, I saw boys and girls in tattered clothes leading cows. Their clothes could no longer be called clothes; they were more like sacks, covered in dirt.
The houses were mostly brick buildings with a whitewashed exterior. Many walls still had incomplete slogans like, "Loyalty to Chairman Mao is Loyalty to..." and "Land Reform is Good." The entire village had only two main colors: green and gray. Green was for the vegetation, and gray was for the houses. I constantly saw people carrying water buckets with shoulder poles. Wang Hong said, "The village's well water is insufficient, so they have to go to the neighboring village to borrow water. The neighboring village has many people, so we have to queue up behind them, sometimes for two or three hours."
I asked, "Can't you fetch water at night?"
Wang Hong shook his head. "No, no one in this village is allowed to leave at night."
I was confused. "Why? Is someone blocking the road and robbing people at night?"
Wang Hong chuckled. "This village is the poorest in the whole county. The only valuable things are the villagers' hearts, livers, and kidneys. What is there to rob?" I pressed him about why they weren't allowed out at night. Wang Hong's reply was evasive. He said the village wasn't "clean," and things came out at night. It would be bad if they ran into them.
I immediately became interested. Just as I was about to ask more, I looked through the window and saw a man lying by the roadside, naked from the waist up, wearing dirty, torn pants, constantly moaning in pain. He had many large, pus-filled blisters on his body, some oozing yellow fluid. At the same time, I smelled an intense stench, like hundreds of dead rats piled up in a room during summer.
A woman was squatting beside him, scooping water from a small iron bucket with a ladle and slowly pouring it over the man. My stomach churned. If I hadn't seen roasted infant corpses and smelled the flesh jars at the Arjan masters' homes in Thailand over the past year, I probably would have vomited right then. That terrible odor was definitely refreshing; even someone who hadn't slept for three days would be energized by it.
"W-what's wrong with this man? Why does he smell so bad?" I covered my nose.
Wang Hong smiled bitterly. "This is one symptom of those strange illnesses. He has festering sores all over his body that won't heal, and the stench is awful. That's why he has to lie downwind, or the whole village would be throwing up." The car drove a little further and slowly stopped in the village. Two elderly women slowly walked over, scrutinizing me. Wang Hong walked over and chatted with the old ladies, pointing at me as he spoke in the local Bijie dialect, which sounded close to Sichuanese but was still quite difficult to understand. The two old women happily waved around the village and spoke loudly. Before long, over a dozen villagers gathered from various directions, pointing and gesturing at me.
An old man, around seventy, approached me, accompanied by a few male villagers. He nodded and spoke to me. The Bijie dialect was really hard to understand. I could only catch less than 20% of it, but the gist was that they welcomed me.
Wang Hong said, "This is the most respected person in the village. His surname is Hong. Just call him Grandpa Hong." I shook hands with Grandpa Hong. Wang Hong whispered a few words to Grandpa Hong. Grandpa Hong nodded repeatedly and finally waved his hand. A woman walked over, carrying a small bamboo basket. In the basket was a wide-mouthed clay pot. She used a small bowl to scoop half a bowl of water from the pot and offered it to me with both hands, smiling.
I didn't understand. Wang Hong quickly said, "This is the custom in nearby villages. When an honored guest from afar arrives, the guest must first drink a bowl of the local well water to show respect." I couldn't refuse, so I took the bowl and drank. The water was not very clear and had a faint, strange taste. It was probably because the village's groundwater wasn't very clean. I didn't think much of it and quickly finished the bowl.
Seeing me drink all the water, everyone looked delighted. Wang Hong said he would take me to see the houses where the new cases of the strange illness had occurred in the past few days.
We were led by the villagers into a dilapidated house. The ceiling was open due to years of disrepair. Sunlight streamed in, providing good lighting, but I wondered how the people inside managed when it rained heavily. The room was very rudimentary. Two boys, about ten years old, were lying on a wooden bed, both topless, groaning, "Itchy, so itchy!" as they relentlessly scratched their bodies, legs, and arms. One of the boys had already scratched the base of his thigh into a bloody mess. His hands were covered in blood and torn flesh, and every scratch drew more blood. A dazed woman stood nearby, holding a magnet, moving it back and forth over the boy's wound, occasionally dropping something into a small bowl of water, making a light clinking sound.
"What is going on?" My heart pounded.
Wang Hong sighed. "It's only been five or six days, and it's already this bad. The body itches, and the scratching won't stop. They scratch the flesh raw. Then needles start emerging from the wounds—steel needles—and they have to use a magnet to draw them out."
We visited another house. The doors and windows were tightly shut. Looking through the window, I saw four people—two adults and two children—sitting side by side in the room, seemingly fine. Wang Hong said, "The symptoms of this family are better, but they are always mentally unstable. They could have an episode at any time, like a spirit possession, talking nonsense, even changing their voice."
Before he could finish his sentence, one of the adult women inside suddenly stood up, covered her face with her hands, and shouted, "Hong Erfa! Stop hitting me! You'll kill me!"