Daomu Biji

Chapter 24 The Story of the Letter

I felt chills running down my spine and my hands were shaking. After a while, I said, "Why is your grandma like this? Does she have some strange disease?"

"Later, I was found by the nanny, and it turned out that she had gone to the toilet. After that, I was always afraid of my grandma. When I became sensible, grandma told me that this is the way for women of the Huo family to practice soft kung fu. You have to hang your sleeping bones to achieve it. Maximum flexibility, she has been sleeping like this since she was a girl at the age of nineteen, and now she can't sleep on the bed at all. There are bone spurs in many places, and it only stops hurting if she hangs them."

"Damn it, your grandpa must have been practicing for a long time before the wedding," the fat man said.

Huo Xiuxiu ignored him and continued: "Because this left a deep impression on me, I care very much about her last words."

Judging from Huo Xiuxiu's own narrative and my observations of her, she is a girl who has her own world view very early, is independent in thinking, and is good at thinking. Therefore, she was worried about her grandma's sleeping position and those few words she murmured in her sleep. Of course, this kind of resentment did not disappear overnight. The reason why she felt that this sleep talk had some unusual meaning was that she heard the same sleep talk many times later.

As she grew up, she began to believe that her grandmother, who seemed as strong as a rock, had a huge knot in her heart.

This knot in her heart was so secret that her grandmother might never tell it until she died. However, Huo Xiuxiu was certain that the knot in her heart must be related to that sentence.

"There's no time."

What is it that we don’t have time for?

It's hard to tell whether it was curiosity, or the same Tai Chi feeling in my heart, or maybe it was what she said herself, hoping to untie this knot for her beloved grandma, so she began to explore this matter intentionally or unintentionally. What surprised me was that this little girl showed amazing mobility in spying. Her clarity of thinking and grasp of things are out of proportion to her age.

"The girls in our Huo family are often beautiful and smart, and the boys are also handsome but often stupid." She explained, "I don't know why, maybe it's because the girls are brought up by their grandmothers since they were young. My brother only knows how to date people all day long, which is very unseemly."

"I don't think it's the right thing for a serious person to check up on my grandma or aunt." The fat man poked.

She thought about it, and it probably felt right, and sighed: "Anyway, after checking it out, my grandma's knot has become my knot."

She really started to investigate this matter probably four years ago when she was fifteen. There were no clues about anything except the sentence "there is no time." If it were me, I would have been completely unable to find out, but for her, there was actually A touching point that I couldn't imagine.

At first she wanted to find her grandma’s diary, but unfortunately not everyone has the habit of keeping a diary. Her grandma’s previous written materials were very sparse. Unlike people in my family, my grandma was a lady (note that this is my grandma). ), the sons and grandsons who have been educated are more or less scholarly. Even the third uncle can pretend to be a 30% white-faced scholar when he is silent. The style of the Huo family is more utilitarian and social. Women have to fight, fight, and support their husbands and children. They don't have time to practice calligraphy, write articles, etc., so Mrs. Huo's temperament back then will definitely not be Lin Daiyu's kind. Therefore, there will inevitably not be too many words left.

However, it was not that Huo Xiuxiu didn't find anything at all. She found a lot of letters, and the correspondence was kept on file. With the idea that she might be able to find her grandma's love letters through voyeurism, she read through several boxes of old letters. Unfortunately, all the letters were basically business correspondence and contained absolutely nothing she wanted to know.

However, she also discovered a strange place.

She discovered that since 1995, there has been a very special mail every year. It was a package, which was usually sent in the second half of March. When packages were sent back then, there was a notice.

Then I went to the post office to pick it up. Because the Huo family had different statuses, everything was filtered by several people and then filed. Most packages will be opened and inspected, and the contents inside will be filled out on a form. The person to whom the package will be sent will also be written on the back. It was on this form that Xiu Xiu discovered something strange.

On the forms for 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, and 1999, the contents of the package were all: video tapes. And the person who took the things was her grandmother.

That is to say, in March of those years, someone would send a video to her grandma.

Her grandma is a very old-school person who can only watch plays. It is unimaginable that things like video tapes will have anything to do with her grandma.

There was no doubt that she was very interested in the whereabouts of these tapes. So she began to pay attention and took every possible opportunity to find those tapes.

(I remembered that I had the same experience before, but I was looking for the third-level movies that my dad got from a friend in Hong Kong. Later I realized that what I loved was not the erotic scenes, but the tapes themselves. stimulation.)

For this reason, she even made a very detailed plan, such as when her grandma would go out to take it out and what she would do after seeing the strap. To this end, she saved two months of money to buy a video recorder and set up a ripping connection with the video recorder at home.

Finally she found the tapes, which were under the floorboards under her grandmother's closet. She picked one, quickly went to the living room, ripped it, and put it back. The whole process was as tense as working as a secret agent.

Afterwards, she chose a time to go to her friend's house and read the tape.

The content of the tape was just as she said, it seemed to be a surveillance scene. It was a very dark hut, with several people in white clothes crawling on the ground. The entire tape contained scenes for more than 30 minutes. , she recognized her aunt, Huo Ling, inside.

Her aunt seemed to have no soul inside, crawling on the ground. It was really terrifying.

She had known about her aunt's disappearance since she was a child, so when she saw this tape, she was frightened to death. She didn't know what the situation was or what was wrong. She just knew instinctively that this was something very bad. It seems that her grandma is hiding some secret. Her grandma really has a very terrible knot in her heart.

However, she did not dare to ask her grandma what was going on, because she knew there would be no good results, and she did not dare to tell others. She was always in panic for the next month.

However, maybe it is because she and I have similar personalities. After she slowly calmed down, her thirst for the truth began to torture her. The so-called person who committed Tai Chi was so curious that other people hard to believe.

After that, she continued to investigate, with no results at first, until she took a very clever but risky approach.

She actually spent several months imitating her grandmother's handwriting and writing a reply to all the addresses on those old letters.

The letter went something like this:

Everyone:

I dreamed about that thing again recently. Over the years, this nightmare has lingered. I wonder if we are well. In my old age, I have half a foot in the coffin. I hope to see you again. There is one thing I never said back then. Going out, now that I think about it, may be the key. I hope we can talk again in person, just as old friends.

The age of these letters spans nearly half a century, and the latest one is far from the present. Generally speaking, these addresses cannot be sent, but Huo Xiuxiu said that she feels that the places where business is done are all in rural areas. Or small counties, rural areas and small counties are the places that change the least, especially in rural areas. Even if the address changes, because the geographical area is not large and people are familiar with each other, as long as the letter reaches the village, someone will deliver it to the recipient. in human hands.

After the letter was sent, she took the initiative to take charge of the mailbox at home, making others think that she was in love and waiting for a letter from her boyfriend. In fact, she was just filtering the letters. There was no response in the first two months. From the third month on, There were sporadic replies one after another, mostly expressing confusion.

The little girl has always insisted on reading the mailbox at five o'clock every morning, never stopping.

On the fifth month, the letter finally came.

There is only one line:

Don’t mention old things again.

She knew immediately that there was a door. This person must know the situation. Looking at the address, the letter came from a small shop in Liulichang, a local in Beijing. So he immediately packed up his bags and went to the shop.

It was a heavy rainy day. The whole city of Sijiucheng was covered with rain hats. Liulichang was sparse and there were not many people there. Many shops had closed early. She knocked on the door and went in. She saw an old man in the inner room. The old man looked at Then she smiled, revealing the gold teeth in her mouth.

Huo Xiuxiu said: "That old man, his name is Jin Wantang, did you remember anything?"