At that time, Mr. Xia just thought this thing was weird and did not associate his wife's abnormality with these puppets. He saw that Mu Guiying's hair had grown longer, so he put it on the small table near the bed. I planned to check it carefully when I got up the next morning. Maybe it had been out of use for too long, so the wood on the puppet's head was damp. Then he picked up all the puppets that had fallen to the ground, put them back in place, and continued to sleep.
He told me that he is a person who lives a relatively regular life. Especially as he gets older, he goes to bed and wakes up at roughly the same time every day, and has already formed a stable biological clock. When I was young, I learned puppetry from my elders. I usually got up very early in the morning to practice morning exercises. After decades, this habit has never changed. A few times, it’s because my wife has been acting weird at night recently, and she must wake up later than me in the morning.
But when I woke up the next morning, I vaguely felt someone staring at me. After taking a closer look, he discovered that his wife was sitting at the foot of his bed, looking at him with a strange expression on his face. Mr. Xia said that after living with his wife for decades, he had seen her look ugly and unsightly, but there was never a moment that was as scary as the feeling that morning, mainly because of his wife. The way he looked at himself at that time.
Mr. Xia said that the eyes were very hollow and lifeless, like the eyes of a dead person, gray and white, and completely lifeless. After he was startled, he pushed his wife's shoulder. As soon as his wife was disturbed, he immediately woke up and quickly asked why he was sitting there stupidly. Could it be that he lost his mind for a moment. Mr. Xia got out of bed confused and suddenly caught a glimpse of "Mu Guiying" which he had placed on the small table the night before. Only then did he realize that the way his wife was sitting and looking at him was exactly the same as the puppet "Mu Guiying".
This was nothing, the female generals of the Yang clan who had been picked up and put away by him all turned towards him, looking at the position of his bed.
I turned around and looked at the other puppets on the shelf. Since I didn’t know much about the colors of the costumes and flags, each female general seemed to me to be pretty similar. I picked up one at random, turned the puppet's face towards Mr. Xia, and then asked, do you mean it's looking at you like this? Mr. Xia shook his head and said no, but his body did not move and his head turned 180 degrees.
I reached out and twisted the head of the puppet in my hand, and found that it was indeed moving. So I turned my head 180 degrees and asked him, is it like this? Mr. Xia nodded and said yes. Even though there is nothing weird about the expression of the puppet whose head was turned, it still looks very weird and scary. Mr. Xia said that at first he thought it was his wife who did this. After asking his wife, she said she could not remember when she got up and why she sat at the end of the bed and stared at Mr. Xia. The memory is broken.
So from this moment on, Mr. Xia began to be a little scared. He began to realize that maybe all these strange phenomena were related to the long-haired "Mu Guiying" in front of him. From that day on, I paid special attention to my wife and the puppets, and I discovered the situation on the first night. Because Mr. Xia deliberately kept himself awake that day and worked hard until 3:15. When his wife suddenly sat up, Mr. Xia did not immediately go to comfort his wife as usual, but immediately got out of bed and opened the door. All the lights in the room came to the shelf where the puppets were placed. So at this time, he watched helplessly as all the puppets among the female generals of the Yang family, including She Saihua and Mu Guiying, almost all turned their heads at the same time and looked at him.
I was a little surprised, my mouth was half open, and I couldn't speak for a long time. I stammered and asked him, do you mean that you watched them turn their heads without any external force? Mr. Xia nodded very firmly, and then said, and he was very sure that he was not dazzled at that time, nor was he sleepy.
This was the first time he realized that his home might be haunted.
So the next day he told Langzhong Mo about this matter. Langzhong Mo said that he would not deal with this kind of matter personally, but he did have people around him in this field. Since my master could not find anyone in Yunyou at present, this This errand fell on my head.
I felt a little uneasy because even though I was basically certain that it was haunted until my current location, I had no clue at all. The incredible emotion I felt in my heart far outweighed the fear of the incident itself. So I quickly imagined several possibilities in my mind. The biggest possibility is that the puppet is equivalent to the wooden support in my bag. In fact, it provides a body for the lonely ghosts around to temporarily attach themselves to. . If this is the case, it would indeed be possible for ghosts to possess puppets to control their originally movable joints.
Compared with Mr. Xia's wife, it is more like a kind of mental control. This feeling is very similar to what happened to the eldest daughter of the Tian family in the neighboring village two years ago. She also suddenly acted out of her control, and she was in After waking up, he had no memory of what had happened before. If the two conditions I guessed are true at the same time, it means that there are at least two ghosts here, one ghost controls the living person, and the other ghost controls the puppet. The movements of Mr. Xia's wife sitting on the bed were exactly the same as the puppet on the table. It was as if a living person was controlling the puppet from a distance, so the movements were consistent. Or on the contrary, a living person is controlled by a puppet.
When I thought about this, I started to feel a little scary. So I asked Mr. Xia, where is your wife now? I want to see the person first before I tell you. Before I see the person, I can't promise you that I can really handle this matter. Mr. Xia said that he was sleeping in the room over there. I closed the door when you came today. On weekdays, we are the only two people at home, and the door is usually left open.
I looked around and saw the only closed door. It's about seven or eight steps away from where I am currently standing. The position I am standing on is a wooden shelf with many puppets. In other words, if the door is opened, from my angle, I can directly see the bed in the room and even the people on the bed.
In this way, I can roughly imagine what it looked like when the old lady sat up from the bed and pointed here and cursed. At the same time, I also noticed a detail. Mr. Xia said that he could not understand a word of the language his wife cursed after she got up. As an old artist who travels all over the world, he can distinguish a few accents from various places. If he can't understand a sentence, or he is speaking a foreign language, which is obviously impossible, otherwise, it is What nonsense.
We have an idiom in China called "Literally full of lies", which means that a person's words are baseless, even made up of nothing, and are absurd and bizarre. In later generations, this word is generally used as an adjective. However, from some ancient books I have read, the concept of "ghost talk" has indeed been mentioned.
This is just like any ghost. Without the help of some special medium, although the two are on the same plane, they cannot communicate with each other verbally. People and people, ghosts and ghosts can communicate with each other. This is considered to be caused by the different forms of expression. Therefore, in the eyes of the old-timers in ancient times, "nonsense" did indeed exist. So what Mr. Xia's wife was talking about, could it be "nonsense"?
So I put down the puppet in my hand, walked to the door, and opened the door all at once. What came to my face seemed to be a burst of hot air. The hot air was accompanied by the smell of fishy, damp, and Chinese medicine that I had smelled on "Mu Guiying's" hair before. In a closed environment, a very high temperature stove was lit, and the difference between the oncoming heat wave and the feeling outside the door was very obvious. It was precisely because of this heat wave that I realized that the room where we watched the puppets was so cold in the middle of summer.
The light in the room is very dim, but you can still see what's going on inside. I saw the old lady facing the door, facing the wall, covered with a not-so-thick quilt, and seemed to be sleeping peacefully. So I turned around and asked Mr. Xia, does your wife often suffer from drowsiness these days? Mr. Xia said that was not entirely true. It was fine in the beginning, but in the past week, the drowsiness has become more obvious.
In the past week, in addition to being lethargic, my wife has also become very mentally ill. Sometimes I can even fall asleep while eating. Even when I am awake, I still look drowsy. He remembered what Dr. Mo had mentioned when he touched the bones of his wife in the first place. If he couldn't get over this hurdle, he wouldn't be able to get over it at all, and there would be no way to talk about the future.
Mr. Xia said that that's why he invited Master Situ to come this time. If he couldn't save her, I'm afraid these days would be her last. After speaking, he wiped the corners of his eyes with his wrinkled hands a few times. I feel a little sour in my heart. As a person like me, I often face life and death. Logically speaking, I should be more accustomed to this feeling than the average person, but it is difficult for me to do so. Maybe one day I will really become numb to it, and my humanity will be almost lost.
So Mr. Xia's implication has raised me from simply helping people to the level of saving people and lives.