Chapter 6: Below the Riverbed
H1: The Ghost of the Yangtze
The air back home still tasted of green things and damp earth. Walking the muddy path through the fields, I was flooded with memories of a childhood spent under this same sky. I remembered summer nights, sitting at the edge of the village square, listening to the old men swap ghost stories and crude jokes after dinner. The best stories, the ones that made you walk home a little faster, were always about my grandfather and his time on the river.
In our village, Grandpa was a legend. He was the local bogeyman and its resident wizard, all rolled into one. There was a mystique about him, an aura of strange competence. But in my memory, he was first and foremost a master carpenter. My childhood toys were all carved by his hand—intricate little cars, pistols with moving parts, wooden soldiers. The other village kids would follow me around, their eyes wide with envy.
But the man himself was a fortress of silence. I rarely saw him smile. No one knew what had hollowed him out, what had happened in his past to make him so perpetually grim. Perhaps only my grandmother knew the full story.
Most of his waking hours were spent with his tools. Day or night, if his hands were free, he was carving. He’d make strange, unsettling things sometimes—creatures that weren’t quite animals, shapes that seemed to twist in on themselves, like abstract sculptures born from a nightmare.
On the rare occasion his mood lifted, he would tell me stories. Tales from his years as a river hand, working the great dams on the Yangtze.
The Yangtze, he’d say, was one of the mother rivers of our civilization, ancient and deep. It didn’t have as many famous tales as the Yellow River, but that wasn’t because nothing happened. It was because the things that happened there… people were too afraid to speak of them.
One year, he told me, he was sitting on the levee with some other workers, smoking after a late dinner. Suddenly, the river below them began to groan, a deep, resonant sound that seemed to come from the bedrock of the earth itself. The water started to boil, throwing up plumes of spray thirty feet high, as if something gargantuan was about to breach the surface. They scrambled back to the barracks in a panic. An old, seasoned riverman told them to stay away from the banks. “That’s a Wyrm coming up for air,” he’d warned. “You don’t want to disturb something like that. It will bring disaster.”
Another time, a section of the river ran dry, exposing the muddy bed. The crews were supposed to go down and dredge sand, but when they got to the bank, they stopped dead. The entire riverbed, as far as the eye could see, was covered in a thick mat of fine, black filaments, exactly like human hair. The sight made their skin crawl.
The same old riverman stopped them from going down. “That is The Drowned Man’s Hair,” he’d whispered. “The collective spirits of all who have died in this river. Touch it, and they will drag you under to take your place.”
As they stood there, a roar came from upstream. A flash flood, a wall of brown water, surged down the channel, instantly swallowing the haunted riverbed. Years later, my grandfather said, that same section ran dry again. The hair was gone.
But the most terrifying story, the one that truly haunted him, was the story of the chain.
During a low-water season, his crew was clearing silt when their shovels struck something hard. They dug around it and uncovered a length of iron chain. It was impossibly huge, each link as thick around as a grown man’s waist. Convinced they’d found some ancient treasure, the entire workforce swarmed the site, digging with a feverish excitement.
They dug twenty feet down, then thirty, and still, the chain plunged deeper into the earth. And then they heard it. A sound from the bottom of the pit. The scraping, clanging shriek of metal under immense strain. It sounded like something colossal, a bound leviathan, was fighting against its chains in the darkness below.
The men’s faces went pale with terror. Without a word, they began shoveling the dirt back into the hole, working frantically to bury what they had disturbed. They walked away from the site in a shared, unspoken pact of silence. What, I wondered, could be so large that a chain of that size was needed to hold it?
It would be many years before I learned the truth of what was chained in the deep places beneath China’s great rivers.
H2: The Carpenter’s Chisel
Back in the present, I walked into the village, nodding at familiar faces. I saw our ancestral home, and under the old locust tree out front, a stooped figure sat on a small stool, shelling beans into a wicker basket.
Her hair was completely white, her back bent with age. As I drew closer, she looked up, and a flicker of light, of pure joy, ignited in her cloudy eyes. A pang of guilt and sorrow shot through me. The last time I’d seen her, she hadn’t seemed this fragile.
She rose, her hands trembling, and I rushed forward to steady her.
“Grandma,” I said, the name feeling unfamiliar and precious on my tongue.
Her teeth were mostly gone, but her smile filled me with a warmth I hadn’t realized I was missing.
After lunch, while she rested, I went to the side room where Grandpa’s belongings were kept. Everything was spotless, his woodworking tools and intricate carvings arranged with a loving, meticulous care. It was a silent testament to the love my grandmother had carried for that haunted man her entire life.
Underneath a cabinet, I found the heavy footlocker I was looking for. Inside, wrapped in oilcloth, was the thing my grandfather had called his greatest treasure. “It can subdue demons and drive away evil,” he used to say. As a boy, I never believed him.
A distinct, mineral coldness radiated from the object as I unwrapped it. I’d never looked at it closely before. Now, I saw it for what it was: a stonemason’s chisel. But it was unlike any tool I’d ever seen. It was long, about the length of my forearm, and forged from a metal that seemed to drink the light. The entire shaft was covered in intricate, swirling patterns that felt ancient and alien. The tip was honed to a wickedly sharp point.
I slipped it into my backpack. When I turned, my grandmother was standing in the doorway, her frail hand resting on the frame. She was staring at me, or rather, at the bag on my back. Her face was a mask of fear, her lips parted as if she wanted to say something but couldn’t find the words.
When it was time to leave, she insisted on walking me to the edge of the village. I stopped her at our front gate, telling her she didn’t need to tire herself out.
I’d only taken a few steps down the path when her voice, thin and reedy, called out behind me.
“My boy… where are you taking that thing?”
I turned back, unsure how to answer. How could I explain this to her? I’m going to help a friend crawl into a hole in the ground to look for a monster. Grandpa had always forbidden us from going near rivers or deep caves. “There are things in those places that demand respect,” he’d say. “It is best not to disturb them.”
“A friend of mine is meeting with a collector,” I lied, the words feeling like ash in my mouth. “He likes old, strange tools. I just thought I’d let him have a look at this.”
Grandma shook her head, a deep, mournful sigh escaping her lips. “That is not a good thing,” she said, her voice trembling. “The day your grandfather brought that home… he changed. He became a ghost. He left his soul in that long river, my boy. Are you trying to walk his same road?”
Seeing the anguish on her face, I tried to comfort her. “How could a dead thing like this change a person, Grandma? I’ll show it to my friend and bring it right back.”
Her cloudy eyes looked straight through me. She opened her mouth to speak again, then seemed to think better of it, and fell silent. She just shooed me away with her hands, urging me to go. As I walked away, I looked back and saw her small, stooped figure still standing there, a lonely silhouette against the wide, uncaring sky.
From the shade of the locust tree, the old woman watched until her grandson was out of sight.
“Old man,” she whispered to the empty air, her voice cracking. “Why did you have to leave that cursed thing behind? You were so proud, weren’t you? So determined to go into that cave. You came back, but your spirit never did. And now our boy is just as stubborn, just as proud. Are you happy now? You men of the Xia family… you never give a woman peace.”
A single, cloudy tear traced a path down her wrinkled cheek. “I will be with you soon enough. And when I am, we will watch over our grandson together. We will keep him safe.”