The crops got denser and denser further down the road. It's over thirteen miles from town to Gaomi Northeast Township. In addition to the grasshoppers' chirping, a bird or some small animal occasionally cried out in the crops.
Suddenly I felt a dense coldness on the nape of my neck, and heard the sound of my own footsteps becoming especially loud and heavy. I started to regret coming this way alone at night. I felt that countless secrets were hidden under the crops on each side of the road and that countless eyes were scrutinizing me. I also felt that something was tailing me.
All of a sudden the moonlight got hazy. I involuntarily started to walk faster, but the faster I walked, the more I felt there was danger behind me. Finally, without thinking about what I was doing, I turned around to go back.
There was nothing behind me, of course.
I continued walking toward home, and as I walked, I rebuked myself: "Are you an officer in the People's Liberation Army? Are you a member of the Communist Party? A teacher of Marxist-Leninism? You are, and you're a materialist. And a pure materialist is afraid of nothing. A communist doesn't fear death, so what else is there to fear? Ghosts, causing afflictions? No! Are there wild beasts here? No! Not in this world. It's just much ado about nothing...."
But I was still tensed up and my teeth were chattering. The ghost stories I'd heard growing up in this area seethed through my mind "en masse": The man walking along a road who suddenly heard the clacking of a peddler's poles up ahead, but when he looked he saw only two poles and two legs moving, with no body; or the man walking down a road at night who ran into someone giggling at him, and when he looked closely he saw it was the "faceless ghost", a woman whose face had only a red mouth and nothing else; or the man walking at night who suddenly saw a white-bearded old man eating grass....
Later I realized that I'd been sweating profusely, drenching my clothes.