Haunted Houses’ Chronicles – Vol.1, Chapter 6

After I came back with the incense sticks, Qin Yiheng kept himself busy and refused to let me help. I stood to one side, watching him burning the paper money while murmuring something under his breath.

He quickly completed the ritual, then turned to me and smiled, saying that he had read the tortoise shell wrongly just now because he wasn’t entirely sure of how to perform this divination. He mistakenly read the divinatory diagram¹ in the opposite way. There was in fact nothing in this house at the moment, but it had been left uninhabited for too long, causing a lack of human energy. That was why ‘unclean things’ that passed by would want to enter the place. Now, we just needed to look for a strong young man to stay the night, then everything would be fine.

¹ 卦象 [gua xiang], roughly translated as “divinatory diagram”, is a diagram that resulted from an attempt to perform divination. In this chapter, Qin Yiheng obtains the diagram by reading the pattern on the tortoise shell. The diagram is based on either a) one of the eight figures in the Bagua or b) one of the sixty four figures in the Book of Changes. More explanation can be found at the end of chapter.

I was scared out of my wits upon hearing that. Obviously, that meant I would be the ‘young man’ to stay a night here. He reassured me that everything would be fine, but having to spend a night in this house still made my stomach churn. That said, I actually lived in a place that used to be a haunted house; some time had passed yet nothing happened to me, which I believed was because I convinced myself into overcoming the fear. “People die for wealth, birds die for food” – there was nothing I would do rather than risking it all.

Qin Yiheng helped me to swiftly tidy up everything and moved the bed that we previously discarded back into the house. He even let me buy a new quilt, then we placed the bed right in the center of the living room.

Now, except for this bed, the whole house was completely emptied of furniture. Such a sight gave me some chills even in broad daylight. I pondered about taking two sleeping pills later, thinking it would help me pass the night more comfortably.

When it finally turned dark, Qin Yiheng said that he couldn’t accompany me. Before leaving, he gave me a plastic-frame mirror. Its quality looked like those from a random roadside vendor – there was even a photo of a beautiful woman with heavy makeup at the back. He tied a string around the mirror and asked me to hang it on my neck. 

He warned me, “The mirror side definitely must face you. When you sleep, you have to lie flat and not turn over. Do not let the mirror face up.” I was absolutely confused, but it wasn’t like I could reject his words.

After Qin Yiheng left, I obediently lay on the bed and covered myself in the quilt. It was almost dark. I peeked through a small gap in the quilt, seeing the room entirely swallowed by darkness.

As he told me not to turn over, my plan of taking sleeping pills failed miserably. I was afraid that if I slept like a log, I might mess this whole thing up. So I lay there in an extremely uncomfortable posture, playing games on the phone to kill time. After two or three hours, I looked at my watch and it was barely past 10 PM. This was really boring me out, and I figured how agonising this would be if I had to spend the entire night like this. I decided to lift up the quilt and stretch my body. Qin Yiheng had already confirmed that nothing was wrong with the house, at most, it would just be one or two passing ghosts, which likely would cause no harm to humans.

Thinking that, my mind loosened up and I unconsciously felt sleepy. As soon as I closed my eyes, my body instinctively shuddered. This sort of dilemma came without any warning: I wanted to shut my eyes, but just a split second later, the urge to stay awake shot up. I was about to open my eyes, then in a flash, I realised my body couldn’t move! 

“This is bad,” I said to myself. Sleep paralysis had come to find me now. This sensation had happened to me before so I didn’t freak out that much. I recalled the methods to break away from sleep paralysis that I saw on TV, like spilling vulgarity in my mind or moving my finger tips, but none of them worked.

I stayed unmoved, having no idea how much time had left. Just when I decided to give up, all of a sudden, my phone which was sitting next to the pillow rang, and the force that had been pressing on my body disappeared instantly.

I was finally able to move. Touching my forehead, I could feel beads of sweat all over it, but I was in no mind to wipe them away. I picked up the phone and saw an incoming call from Qin Yiheng.

When I answered the phone, Qin Yiheng asked if I felt that someone had blown into my ear.

I was stunned at that question, but still could reply to him, “No.”

“Good,” he said, “You must not fall asleep now. Prepare yourself mentally and carry the mirror with you. If you sense someone blowing into your ear, turn the mirror in that direction.”

“Didn’t you say this house is okay?” I asked. “You burnt so much paper money and incense sticks earlier. Aren’t you just fooling me?”

“Who told you to touch the turtle shell? If I didn’t do the burning, will you dare stay there tonight? Just do what I said, otherwise I’m afraid you won’t be able to get out of that house tomorrow,” he replied, his tone full of conviction.

His words had me scared stiff, and cold sweats streamed down my back in a blink. My voice trembled a little bit, my internal thoughts screaming, this motherf**ker couldn’t care less about making me feel safe. I begged him to give me some assurance.

Qin Yiheng just calmly said, “If I come now, sure, you could avoid being alone tonight. But there will be a time when I couldn’t be there. Sooner or later, you will have to face things yourself.” Then he hung up.

Putting down the phone, my heart sank. When people were nervous, it was easy to stress them up. I sat on the bed, feeling as though someone was blowing at every part of my body and not only my ear. I anxiously pointed the mirror at all directions, but nothing happened. Each second, each minute passed by so slowly that I even wanted to kill myself. In fact, the most terrifying thing might not be that something would happen, rather, it was the nothingness that came prior. As people of said, “The tranquility before the storm is scarier than the storm itself”. This was exactly what I felt.

To tell the truth, I wanted to smoke, but I didn’t dare do so. I was afraid that when the lighter lit up, it would light up a corner of the room and expose whatever was standing there. It would be downright frightening. Again, I had no idea how much time had passed, but the tension I felt before had gradually subsided.

Because of the limited vision, my other senses seemed to have become more sensitive. I could tell precisely whether there was air flowing into my ear. After a long time, I vaguely felt that someone was actually blowing into my left ear. I dared not turn my head, trying my best to glance to the side, but the effort was all for naught as I couldn’t see anything.

I thought there was only so much that I could handle, and that I would lose nothing if I used this mirror. Immediately, I shot the mirror towards the left. My body suddenly was able to move to that side and all my senses became focused on the upper body. At that moment, I could feel the sensation of flowing air disappear.

Frankly speaking, I still suspected that it was only my psyche tricking me back then. But I really no longer felt any air flowing into my ear. I sat there like a cat on hot bricks all the way until dawn, when Qin Yiheng came to find me in a hurry. The first thing he checked was the mirror. At one glance, it seemed fine, but a crack had formed without me knowing.

Qin Yiheng wiped the mirror with a red cloth for a long while, then took a deep breath and asked if I had seen what it was like.

How could I dare look? He should be glad I could still talk normally now!

As I told him I didn’t see it, he shook his head, lamenting that it was a pity.

I asked him, “Am I safe now?”

Qin Yiheng went quiet for a moment then nodded. I felt like I had been bailed out from prison, my heart flying over the moon. It turned out that when Qin Yiheng was using tortoise divination, the shell was still wet, but the water droplets were there for a split second then vanished completely.

He concluded that the new thing that entered the house could totally defeat the one that originally belonged here, so he purposely chose to come at noon, when the yang energy was at its peak. However, he didn’t expect that thing to hold such great power.

When I touched the turtle shell, it was equivalent to having direct contact with that thing. Qin Yiheng was afraid that I would be ‘taken over’ – or what people usually said, ‘possessed’. Having touched that thing made myself susceptible to its detection, similarly to being put under GPS location service. I might be caught by its power, or my luck would be horribly affected. Thus, Qin Yiheng asked me to stay in the house right at the midnight point and used the mirror to have my own soul under control, preventing my soul from being led out of my body. Thereafter, I needed to wait for that thing to lose patience and come at me, at which point I would cast the mirror at it. Since ancient times, mirrors had been used to ward off evil energy. Until today, many people still kept the habit of hanging mirrors that face outwards on their window. To put it simply, last night, I used that mirror to reflect the attack back to that thing.

Based on what Qin Yiheng said, I had successfully saved myself. That said, there were two drawbacks. First, people who had directly touched ‘unclean things’ couldn’t have children in the next few years, because the children surely would be handicapped. That didn’t bother me one bit, for getting married and having children was, to me, a foreign notion. The second thing was that for a period of time, my luck would definitely be very bad. I could accept this, because at least that sounded much better than losing my life. But the most frustrating thing was that this house might not be habitable after all. All we could do was to leave it like this, patiently waiting for the demolition. Luckily, the price was terribly cheap, so it wasn’t a loss for me.

Thereafter, Qin Yiheng consulted someone with expertise in this area. The two of them finally concluded that the two cats seemed to have become demons and possessed the elderly couple. No one knew what happened to the cats later on, but it looked like one of them went back to the house at the same time when the student died. Thus, it stayed unknown whether it was the cat’s or the student’s soul that wanted to take over my body. It was said that cats would grow an extra tail every ten years, just like the fox demon. When they reached a certain number of tails, the cats would be able to speak human language. Qin Yiheng just casually shared with me these findings, yet I had no idea if they were the truth or not. Later on, we still didn’t hear any news from the couple. I paid attention to the matter for a while but gradually let go of the thought.

After this incident, I was really unlucky for some time, my money being tossed around wastefully. However, as I had Qin Yiheng by my side, the impact on my finances wasn’t too bad, and I even picked up a big fortune.

There was this house that the owner himself admitted was haunted, because as long as someone stayed in the place, he would be awakened in the middle of the night by a certain noise. If he opened the door to check around, the noise would stop. The situation kept repeating; the more it was passed on, the more bizarre it sounded, and no one dared live there.

At one point, Yuan Zhen introduced the place to me and Qin Yiheng. After looking around the house, Lao² Qin confirmed that there were no ‘unclean things’ inside. Rather, it was that the family didn’t know how to carry out the ritual correctly, so they invited two deities to come, and it ended up affecting the family’s luck, causing them many difficulties and hardships. The scenario was similar to a rookie swearing his loyalty to two different bosses. As this whole thing sounded new, I was eager to explore to broaden my experience. Both the type and the location of this house weren’t bad at all. Except for the price which I couldn’t manage to lower any further, I was satisfied with everything else. This wasn’t a haunted house anyway, so I had to be as profit-minded as possible. But this business still had me excited for several days because I had faith that this time there would be both good prospects and good money. I then waited at home every day for Yuan Zhen to contact me, but it turned out, I had to first look forward to an old friend’s call.

² 老 [Lao], lit. translated as “old”, is placed before the first name or the surname to indicate an endearing or respectful regard. It is commonly used to address a close friend who may or may not be older than you or an acquaintance who is older than you.

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More on the concept of Gua, Gua Xiang, Bagua and Book of Changes, as briefly mentioned earlier.

As explained, Gua Xiang is the resulting digram of an attempt to perform divination. When a master performs divination, he picks up a Gua, which can refer to either a) one of the eight figures in the Bagua or b) one of the sixty four figures in the Book of Changes. In simplest terms, the Book Of Changes and the Bagua are both methods of reading divination that employ the same basic structure, which is the Gua.

1. Eight figures in the Bagua

八卦 [Bagua], also known as Eight Trigrams, are the eight figures used in Taoist cosmology to represent the fundamental principles of the universe and reality. Each of the eight figures is made of three stacked horizontal lines (trigrams) and carries a specific representation. For example, the figure ☰ (made of three unbroken lines) represents the natural entity “sky”, the element “metal” and the planet “Neptune”.

2. Sixty four figures in the Book of Changes

易经 [Yi Jing], also known as Book of Changes or Classic of Changes, is an ancient Chinese divination text. The Book of Changes uses a system of sixty four figures that are made of six stacked horizontal lines (hexagrams). In fact, the hexagram used in the Book of Changes are two stacked-up trigrams from the Bagua. Each of the hexagrams is then attached to a specific meaning, for example, the figure |||||| (made of two sets of ☰) means “purely positive (yang)”, “extremely generous”, “highly beneficial”, etc

The Book of Changes has applications on various aspects of life, including astrology, geography and divination. By reading the meanings of the hexagrams, one could estimate the outcome of a situation.