The Child's Past Life

by Cai Jun

  “I want to know something first. What was the sentence?”

  “Death.” As someone who had caught countless killers, Ye Xiao made the declaration solemnly. “He confessed and didn’t appeal. He wanted his sentence to be carried out as soon as possible. The Middle-Level Court will ask the Higher Court to review, and they’ll file for final approval from the Highest People’s Court.”

  Si Wang coughed through a frown and said, “This beef tripe is too spicy!”

  “You still haven’t answered my question.”

  “If he’s been sentenced to death, what else is there for me to say? When will Ma Li be executed?”

  “Seven days after the Highest People’s Court confirms the sentence.”

  “Shot?” The young man bit off a chunk of the tripe.

  “No, they use lethal injections now.”

  Ye Xiao’s words startled Si Wang. He bit into his tongue and held his mouth in pain, mumbling, “Les Misérables.”

  “What?”

  “Everyone who reads this book would be doomed. They would die, either by knife or needle!”

  CHAPTER 79

  June 19, 2014.

  It was early morning when Si Wang got up to wash. His nineteen-year-old face was already weathered with the character of a grown-up, especially his deep black eyes.

  Ten days earlier, he’d completed his college entrance exams. He was the first to turn in his paper during almost every test. As the stunned teachers and students watched, he walked out with no expression.

  After the exams, all he did was go online to watch horror movies. His behavior worried He Qingying a bit, though she thought it was better than him getting into trouble outside. Ye Xiao came by to warn her not to let Si Wang go anywhere on June 19. If Si Wang did leave the house, Ye Xiao told her to call the police.

  He Qingying stayed up the night before and finally passed out at 4:00 a.m. She was sleeping soundly on the couch, having thought she’d hear her son if he did try to go out. But he walked noiselessly out of the building and rode his bike out of the neighborhood. The rainy season air was humid, making breathing difficult. The ground was soaked, and more rain was on the way.

  Si Wang bought two egg pancakes and watched the crowds of morning commuters. He finished eating and headed for Serenity Road. Ten minutes later, he pedaled onto the quiet block. The ginkgo trees were growing robustly. Several nice houses peeked out of the leaves, and birds chirped.

  He stopped in front of the old house and could hear the sounds of face washing and toothbrushing. The basement window was covered in a thick layer of dust. He thought of Yi Yu and the old man from the last lifetime.

  He turned to look at the house across the street, still empty after a murder committed thirty years ago.

  Serenity Road Number 19.

  He crossed the street. The rusty door sign was about to fall off. Chains and a big lock hung on it. He hopped over the low wall; no one was around to notice. He went into the yard and felt nauseated. He looked up to the second floor before crawling into the house through a broken window on the ground floor. The early-morning light trickled into the dim living room, which was still dusty and not very different from his last visit.

  On a fall night in 1983, his mom He Qingying had killed her adoptive father here.

  The symbols and lines on the wall were still there. Only the blood had faded.

  He covered his nose as he walked upstairs. The second floor window was open, letting a breeze pass through the hall and pick up dust and cobwebs.

  The first door off the hallway was the dirty bathroom, and the second room had that corpse-like big bed. Behind the last door was He Qingying’s childhood bedroom.

  He gingerly opened the door, and a familiar sensation washed over him—the same as the one he experienced on the night of June 19, 1995.

  Was the Demon Girl Zone here, too?

  Just as he was about to run, a cold gust blew past him and someone’s shadow was cast on the opposite wall.

  He had nowhere to go. He prepared to throw a punch, but before he could, a metal club hit him in the head.

  It felt like the metal had entered his body.

  Dizziness. He fell to the dirty floor as blood spurted out of his forehead and flowed into his mouth. It tasted salty and bitter, like death.

  Heavy footsteps sounded, pounding in his eardrums. He opened his eyes, but his vision was clouded by blood. All he could see was a tilted, murky world.

  Someone grabbed his ankles and dragged him into the small room; his chest and cheeks rubbed against the floor and burned like crazy.

  A shabby dresser, a few naked wooden dolls. His mom’s childhood playthings. They stared at him. Had the dolls attacked him?

  A small bed frame was next to the dresser, on top of which was a thin bamboo mat, a pillow, and a blanket. A suitcase sat by the wall. There were a lot of instant noodle wrappers, a travel cooking range, and a big jug of water.

  Si Wang tried very hard to move his neck enough to see that mirror by the wall. Someone had wiped it clean.

  That someone was reflected in the oval mirror. It was a blurry shape in the dim room, but as the person moved closer, Si Wang could tell that it was a man.

  “Lu Zhongyue?” Si Wang’s teeth chattered as he spoke, and blood continued to fill his mouth.

  The man found Si Wang’s cell phone and went to the window. He pulled open the thick curtain to look outside. He went downstairs but came back up almost immediately.

  Si Wang’s body was stronger than most. The bleeding on his forehead had stopped, though he was still dazed and had no strength to fight back as the man used thick rope to tie him to a chair.

  Si Wang was able to see the birthmark on Lu Zhongyue’s forehead.

  He huffed as he bent down, frowning and almost looking regretful. “So we meet again.”

  “You—you’re still alive!” Si Wang’s head throbbed with every word he spoke.

  “I can’t believe you came here. After eight years as a fugitive, I’ve learned to be careful, though. If not for my sharp ears, maybe I’d be the one tied up and bleeding.”

  “Were you waiting here for me?”

  He held Si Wang’s chin. “I’m not that crazy. I was freaked out when you brought that cop to track me down four years ago.”

  Si Wang closed his eyes and mumbled, “For Huang Hai.”

  “I’ve been back in town for two months. I have three IDs from my days on the run, but I don’t stay at motels. This house was my uncle’s. He was killed about thirty years ago, right downstairs. It became a murder house and no one has lived here since. I didn’t think you or the cops would ever think of it. How did you find this place?”

  “June 19. You didn’t forget this day, right?”

  “You really think you’re Shen Ming? Remember, Wang Er, I was your adoptive father. You’re crazy paranoid. Plus, you’re a liar who’s controlled by others, like your mom He Qingying, and that bastard Ma Li. He wanted the Gu money, and then he wanted to take me out.”

  “Lu Zhongyue, you should thank me. I was the one who found out what Gu Qiusha was doing to you.”

  He slapped Si Wang, but then rubbed his cheek. “Sorry. You’re pretty grown up now. I bet a lot of girls like you.”

  “I had no idea that you were hiding here! I wanted to visit the basement where Shen Ming lived, across the street. My mom lived in this house. This was her room. These dolls were hers. I wanted to go to Nanming High this afternoon and then the Demon Girl Zone at ten, just like how Shen Ming did back in 1995.”

  Lu Zhongyue’s smile was odd. “Kid, you’re more paranoid than ever. No one in the world knew Shen Ming better than I did. I knew him better than he knew himself.”

  “What else do you know?”

  “Dying in the Demon Girl Zone was probably the best fate he could have met.”

 
; “What do you mean?”

  “Even if Shen Ming had married Gu Qiusha and become Gu Changlong’s son-in-law, do you think he actually could have made it? You think he’d get away from his pathetic pedigree? No one in the Gu family or the Education Bureau really respected him. Gu Changlong was just using him. He wanted to keep Shen Ming loyal and then toss him aside. In 1995, as soon as Shen Ming got arrested, didn’t Gu Changlong ditch him? It was bound to happen sooner or later, even if Shen Ming never made a mistake. He’d have died a thousand times from other people’s jealousies.”

  “Interesting.”

  “Only I treated Shen Ming like a real friend!”

  “You still see him as a friend?”

  “My best friend. I still miss him to this day.” Lu Zhongyue fell to his knees and prayed to the wall. “Shen Ming, I’m sorry. I was truly happy for you. When you got sponsored admission to Peking University, when you got engaged, when you became a respected teacher. I knew you could be successful and no one would look down on you anymore. But this world doesn’t like people like you. Hard work, being careful, and doing everything right doesn’t matter. People’s fates are set the minute they’re born. If you wanted to change it, you’d be destroyed. Didn’t you know? Everyone talked behind your back. They said, ‘Shen Ming, that illegitimate kid, growing up in a maid’s basement, how dare he have anything?’ ”

  “You told everyone about Shen Ming being illegitimate?”

  “I was always curious about Shen Ming. You never mentioned your parents or invited us to your house. I followed you once and saw that you lived in someone else’s home and that your grandma was just a maid. A middle-aged man came to visit and gave you some money. He said something about being your dad. I found out later he was a prosecutor.”

  “This is how you found my secret?”

  “Yes, I never told you about it because we were best friends. If I told people about it, you’d lose the last bit of self-respect you had and not be my friend anymore. I didn’t want to lose you, so I kept the secret from you, too.”

  “But you still told people.”

  Lu Zhongyue lit a cigarette near the window. “At your engagement ceremony in 1995, I felt jealous for the first time. I watched everyone congratulate you. I knew how much they hated you, but they acted so friendly. They would have licked your shoes! You were going to have it all: status, power, money, and a pretty woman. My dad was a bureaucrat, but I didn’t do well. I was just an engineer at an almost-bankrupt factory. Back in high school, I paid for you a lot. When I wore new clothes to school, you’d be envious, too. But at the engagement ceremony, it was the other way around.”

  “I’m sorry, I should have thought of how you felt.”

  “There was something else, too. After seeing Gu Qiusha at the engagement ceremony, I remembered that our families were old friends. We probably played together as little kids. After the party I dreamed about her. I tried to force myself not to think about her, but then I missed her even more. I started drinking at bars every night and met a girl. Guess it was meant to be. She gave me my only son.”

  “You have a son?”

  “Yes, his name is Lu Jizong. He’s nineteen, like you. Tall and good-looking, too. He’ll be popular with the girls.” He smiled but stopped when he saw Si Wang’s expression. “Let’s go back to 1995. I started to hate Shen Ming then, especially when he asked about my job and love life. I just wanted him to disappear from this world.”

  “You spread the rumor about him being born out of wedlock?”

  “I only told the math teacher Zhang Mingsong, but I knew telling him meant telling the whole world. I knew how jealous he was of Shen Ming.”

  “What about that fake letter?”

  Lu Zhongyue stubbed out his cigarette. “I wrote that! Only I knew how to fake his handwriting, because we were best friends. Funny, right? I got He Nian in on it. He made some mistake and was sent back to the city Education Bureau from Beijing. We worked on the letter together. I wrote it, then He Nian gave it to Gu Changlong.”

  “You killed He Nian?”

  “Yes, we set up Shen Ming, and I became Gu Changlong’s son-in-law. He Nian only got a management job at Erya Education Group. He thought that was unfair and wanted to make everything public. He blackmailed me. So I killed him. I hid his body in his jeep and drove it to a random place by the Suzhou River. Somehow you found it two years later. That’s when I knew you were a scary kid.”

  “You killed Gu Changlong, too?”

  “I didn’t want to kill him. He broke into my place early one morning and pointed a knife at me. I don’t remember fighting him but when I realized what had happened, he was a bloody corpse. It was self-defense, but I had killed before. If I’d ended up in Huang Hai’s hands, they would have known everything soon enough. So I ran, but there were cops everywhere. Going to train stations was suicide. I also needed to do something before I went away.”

  “You wanted to kill Gu Qiusha?” Si Wang’s strength was coming back.

  “There was no one I hated more! My wife actually castrated me, slowly. What man would forgive that? Yes, I killed her. She was infertile so decided her husband had to be, too. Good thing I knocked up another woman before marrying her. If I didn’t have Jizong, I’d have no reason to go on like this.”

  “Your kid is the most precious thing in your life.”

  He lit up another cigarette. His lips looked a bit purple now. “My life sucks. I’ve been living with rats like some rabid dog. Being executed would be better than my life now. But if I died, who’d protect my son? He’d be a fatherless kid and be discriminated against, just like Shen Ming was. I don’t want my son to become like Shen Ming!”

  “You’ll ruin his life.”

  “No, I’ll live with Jizong.” Lu Zhongyue smiled indulgently. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “I have another question. How did you recognize me? I don’t think I’d recognize myself from my elementary school days.”

  “When I got back to town, I visited your old address and saw that it’s now a construction site. I asked around and found out your new address. I’ve been following you. In fact, I saw you eating with someone at a street vendor’s cart two weeks ago.”

  “I knew it.”

  “Kid, I have to thank you for chatting with me. This is more talking than I’ve done in the last eight years combined.”

  “I’m not a kid.”

  “Sorry.” Lu Zhongyue gave him another quizzical look. “Well, I need to go and find someone now. You’ll stay here. Bye.”

  Shen Ming blurted out, “In a hurry to reincarnate?”

  Lu Zhongyue didn’t react, but his heart beat wildly. He took out a roll of tape from his luggage. Once he’d covered up Si Wang’s mouth, Lu Zhongyue patted his face. Then he checked the room and windows—and he left.

  Serenity Road Number 19. The murder house was as quiet as a tomb—except for the sounds of Si Wang panting like a wild dog.

  CHAPTER 80

  June 19, 2014—7:00 p.m.

  It was getting dark and the thick clouds still hadn’t shed any rain. The damp air felt suffocating.

  Ouyang Xiaozhi hadn’t gone out all day. She was debating whether to go to Nanming Road—just as she had two years ago—to burn some paper money for Shen Ming. But she didn’t want to run into Si Wang.

  She missed him.

  She stroked her lips and neck and thought about how that young man’s lean fingers glided across her skin. She looked at herself in the mirror, thinking about how her face would age. In a few years, maybe Si Wang wouldn’t even recognize her.

  She turned on the tap and carefully washed her face. She used toner and moisturizer, then added some foundation, and a bit of cream eye shadow followed by powder eye shadow, and then lined her eyes and added mascara. She gingerly put on blush and lipstick. The makeup was almost indiscernible, but men would no
tice. She picked up her comb and found a white strand in it. She plucked it away and combed her hair into a silky black waterfall.

  She left home with the offerings she’d bought a few days ago.

  Since moving back to the city, she’d been living in a rental apartment in a neighborhood where very few people were around at night. Even her coworkers didn’t know where she lived. She walked down the dark hallway and felt panicked. She stopped and listened. She heard what sounded like crying. She knew it was a hallucination.

  A hand covered her mouth when she reached the ground floor. Before she could struggle, a distinctive smell rose into her nostrils. Just as she lost consciousness, she thought, Ether!

  She woke up at Serenity Road Number 19.

  Her head felt like she’d slept for ages, like she’d already died once. She saw a tired-looking man with a smooth chin and a pale birthmark on his forehead.

  It had been twenty-six years since she’d last seen him.

  That had been in the late spring of 1988, when he was the senior at Nanming High and she was the disheveled young girl who stole a drumstick from his lunch.

  If Shen Ming hadn’t rescued her three days later, she’d have been a tiny, dried-up corpse.

  For the last eight years, she’d looked for the man, hoping to kill him.

  For Shen Ming.

  Xiaozhi wanted to attack him, but she couldn’t move. Her hands and feet were bound to a wooden chair.

  She turned to see the bed nearby and the naked dolls on the dresser. When she was ten, toys like those were often found at the trash pile near the homeless huts.

  Then she saw Si Wang.

  He was even more solid and muscular than before. She wondered how he did on the college entrance exams. Where would he go to college? He was tied up, too, and she could tell he’d been hurt by the blood-stained tape covering his mouth. He was shaking his head violently, his eyes full of surprise and worry.

  “Si Wang!”