Chapter 40: The Cornfield

2022-05-20

Do ghosts really exist in this world?

I’ve lived twenty years and never seen one—all I’ve ever found are people putting on spooky acts. If ghosts truly roamed our world, I doubt they’d be all that frightening. Sometimes, people are scarier than any ghost.

Take the woman sitting in front of me now for example—she’s so shockingly ugly that if it were night, someone might honestly mistake her for a ghost.

First thing this morning, Zhao Mingkun took us out to investigate what really happened. If we wanted to get to the bottom of everything, we had to figure out who this Chu Mei was, why the villagers were so afraid of her, and what exactly went on between her and the six brothers.

That brought us here, sitting face to face with this woman.

I examined her carefully, trying to spot even the smallest hint of attraction. A famous sculptor once said beauty is everywhere—it’s just that our eyes miss it. If that’s the case, then I must be blind.

I’d never seen a woman whose features were all so unattractive—not a single redeeming trait.

Her eyes were so small they were barely slits, clouded with gunk sticking in the corners. Her nose turned upward, revealing long tufts of nose hair. Her mouth hung wide open, showing off snaggleteeth stained yellow—not from cigarettes, but more like a toothbrush had never once seen the inside of her mouth. Her ears were pinched and tiny, barely visible unless you really looked.

Pimples swollen across her face made it clear she wasn’t that old. Her figure was balanced—she probably wasn’t even thirty yet.

She was likely the same age as Zhao Mingkun, but the two of them gave off entirely different impressions.

This grotesque woman’s name was Daiyu. I wondered if her parents were fans of Dream of the Red Chamber. Rumor had it that before Chu Mei died, the two were best friends. But ever since Chu Mei passed away five years ago, Daiyu had sunk into depression, almost verging on paranoia.

Daiyu was always unattractive, and five years back, she even stopped washing her face or combing her hair. If not for her family coming by each month to cut it for her, it would have been a tangled, stinking mess by now. Even so, we could smell something awful—that stench came from her feet. Judging by the yellow-black hue of her toes, they hadn’t been washed in forever.

Even Wang Ergou caught a whiff and stayed far away. That said a lot about how intense the smell was.

I’ve never thought appearance or family background defined a person, but even I found it hard to stay neutral looking at Daiyu. Maybe that’s just human nature—our flawed instincts, no matter how deeply buried.

I nearly threw up my breakfast on the spot and quickly waved my hand. “We’re here about Chu Mei. Why does everyone in the village seem so afraid of her?”

As soon as Zhao Mingkun took out a thousand yuan, Daiyu began telling us a story.

She and Chu Mei had been best friends since childhood—eating together, drinking together, in the same class from grade school all the way through high school. Both were good students, though Chu Mei’s grades were even better.

When college entrance exams came around, they picked the same university. By pure luck, both got accepted.

Countless girls envied them—what could be better than having a best friend like that throughout life?

Daiyu never had many friends—mostly because of her looks. Even those who hung around her couldn’t help but give strange looks now and then. Though no one at university ever mocked her outright, Daiyu knew deep down, they looked down on her.

She remembered, as a child, every time the teacher called her name, all the kids would burst out laughing.

Lin Daiyu—such a beautiful name.

Those kids might never have even opened Dream of the Red Chamber, but they knew it was a classic, and Lin Daiyu was a lovely heroine. Her parents gave her that name, probably hoping their daughter would be pretty and talented. But maybe they never realized what having that name would really mean for her life.

She needed friends more than anyone else. Yet in the end, she had only one true friend—Chu Mei.

But then, one holiday, Lin Daiyu lost her only friend.

It happened five years ago, on a summer night.

Daiyu and Chu Mei got off the train at eleven at night, then took a bus to the county town, and finally walked home. It was already two in the morning.

It was summer vacation. Chu Mei and Daiyu planned to stay at school for summer jobs, but their families insisted they come back.

Their families weren’t poor—there was no need for them to work at all. And what parent doesn’t want their daughter around, knowing one day she’ll be married off and hard to see again?

The two girls chatted as they walked forward.

The path into town was long and pitch black—no streetlights on either side. Cornfields stretched as far as the eye could see on both sides that summer. The corn stood tall, nearly up to their shoulders.

These fields were the county’s lifeblood. But for these two girls, all those endless rows of rustling stalks only made their fear worse. They couldn’t help feeling that something horrifying was hiding out there in the swaying corn.

Then suddenly, two men rushed out from the darkness.

Daiyu screamed—a piercing shriek that sliced through the night and made all the insects go silent.

A moment later, a huge hand clamped over her mouth. Daiyu struggled but it was useless—the man must have been at least five-foot-nine and as strong as an ox. She didn’t stand a chance. Glancing sideways, she saw that Chu Mei was pinned too.

The two of them were dragged straight into the cornfield. As the girls vanished, the insects slowly started singing again, the breeze still rustled the corn as if nothing at all had happened. The path stood quiet as ever, not a sign that anything was wrong.

But inside the cornfield, things had changed.

Someone shoved rags into Daiyu and Chu Mei’s mouths.

By the end, Chu Mei’s mind was gone. Surrounded by those men, her body trembled nonstop, muffled sounds rasping through the cloth in her mouth—harsh and broken, so much like the wailing ghosts Daiyu remembered from horror films.

Daiyu couldn’t even describe her feelings—if it hadn’t been for her face, it would’ve been her lying there too.

She was paralyzed with terror, just sitting there, not daring to move as she watched the six men disappear deeper into the corn.

After a long time, Daiyu finally realized what she needed to do. She sat beside Chu Mei’s body and called the police.

Chu Mei’s corpse lay facing Daiyu, eyes among open. Maybe in her final moments, she wondered, ‘Why me?’

That night, those six men vanished without a trace. To this day, they’ve never been caught.

Since then, Daiyu never dared wash her face, never tried to dress up again.

“I only survived because of my ugliness.”

Whenever anyone asked what really happened that night, this was always Daiyu’s answer.

Just like that, five years drifted by. No one wanted to hear Daiyu’s story anymore. She spent all five years alone in this crumbling house. Nobody else ever came to bother her.