Ever since I was old enough to understand things, I had never personally encountered—or even seen—“them.” But my family had crossed paths with “them” many times, and those experiences filled me with fear and confusion.
Ever since I was old enough to understand things, I had never personally encountered—or even seen—“them.” But my family had crossed paths with “them” many times, and those experiences filled me with fear and confusion.
When I was in elementary school, my family lived in a small village called “Bayi Sangchang” by the Ouchi River. My mother raised silkworms to pass the time, while my father worked as a projectionist at the town cinema. He came home once or twice a week; the rest of the time, he stayed in the front building of the cinema.
In 1989, the county town began constructing apartment buildings similar to today’s commercial housing. There was also a government policy stating that buying one apartment could solve the “nongzhuanfei” issue for two people—that is, converting rural household registration into urban registration. Hoping that my younger brother and I could someday eat “state grain” and live as city residents, my parents decided to use all their savings to buy an apartment in the county town.
Unfortunately, when my parents rode their bicycles to town to pay the deposit, the staff handling the transaction happened to be absent. With no choice, they rode all the way back home, planning to return the next day.
By the time they headed home, it was already late. The journey from the county town to our village was about twenty kilometers. When they were only a few li away from home, my father said he was thirsty, so they stopped at my aunt’s house by the roadside for some water. The bicycle was left outside, and the money for the apartment was still hanging on it. Both of them completely forgot about it.
Only after they finished drinking did they realize the money was gone.
For my family, that was an enormous amount of money.
All our savings had vanished. During that time, I often saw my mother secretly crying.
By 1990, I was about to enter sixth grade. Hoping to improve my grades so I could get into a better middle school, my father managed to transfer me to the town’s central elementary school. Since the school was in town and far from our village, I moved into the cinema’s front building and lived there with him.
Not long afterward, my father felt it was impractical for my mother, younger brother, and grandmother to remain in the village. Raising silkworms had only ever been a pastime, but now that the money was gone, we desperately needed income. At that time, the cinema business was still booming, so my parents planned to sell snacks inside the theater—things like melon seeds, peanuts, and sugarcane. They thought it might bring in some money.
When the plan was put into action, our whole family moved into the cinema.
What I’m going to tell are the things my family experienced inside that cinema.
For some reason, calling my mother “Mom” here feels strangely unnatural. That probably sounds confusing. Ever since we were little, my younger brother and I had always called her “Auntie.” I still don’t know why. Looking back now, I realize my mother may have gone her entire life without hearing anyone call her “Mom.” Thinking about it feels deeply sad.
But enough of that. From here on, I’ll call her Mom.
First, let me tell you about the cinema itself.
Back then, cinemas weren’t like they are today, existing solely to show movies. In those days, a cinema could also serve as a public assembly hall, a theater for opera performances, or a venue for song-and-dance shows. It was a multifunctional building, generally referred to as a “cinema-theater.”
According to the older residents in town, before the cinema was built, the site had once been a large assembly hall. The old hall had walls made of mud bricks and a roof covered with straw. Sometime in the 1950s, shortly after a large meeting had ended and the crowd dispersed, dark clouds suddenly gathered overhead. A violent storm erupted with thunder and lightning. After one tremendous crash of thunder, the entire hall collapsed.
When people cleared the rubble, they discovered countless snakes beneath the ruins, all apparently struck dead by lightning. Even more horrifying, beneath the foundation itself were piles upon piles of snakes. The government eventually sent people to deal with them, carrying away load after load of dead snakes to be buried somewhere else.
Even hearing about it was enough to make your skin crawl.
Later, the cinema was rebuilt directly atop the old assembly hall’s foundation. At the time, it was probably the grandest building in the entire town. The structure was divided into three connected sections: the front building, the main auditorium, and the rear stage building. The front and rear buildings were both two stories tall, while the auditorium itself was only one story but extremely high and spacious. The floors and staircases in the front and rear buildings were made entirely of wood, and after years of use they creaked constantly.
I forgot to mention earlier that our old house in Bayi Sangchang had been sold. Since then, I’ve only gone back there once. The flowers I used to grow and the grapevines I planted were all gone. Many of the trees we had planted had been dug up and sold for money. Such wonderful things… Looking back now, what was really sold that day was my childhood itself. So many memories that could have remained tangible survived only as memories inside memories.
But I’m getting sidetracked. Back to the cinema.
When we first moved there, the entire family lived in the front building. (Later, the front building was taken away from us, and we were forced into the rear building—but that comes later.)
As for all the rumors surrounding the cinema, aside from my younger brother and me, my grandmother and mother surely knew at least something about them. But since we had always lived in the village before and suddenly found ourselves in town, everything still felt fresh and unfamiliar. So during those first six months or so, all of us—Grandma, Mom, my brother, and I—were still adapting to the new environment.
There’s an old saying: “Fear water when unfamiliar with it; fear ghosts once familiar.” If you stay in a place long enough, you learn the depth of the water and stop fearing it. But once you begin to understand the ghost stories tied to a place, you only become more afraid.
Gradually, even I began hearing about the stories—or rather, the incidents—that had once taken place inside that cinema.
As I mentioned earlier, one of the cinema’s main functions was serving as an assembly hall. Public sentencing rallies were also held there. I don’t know the exact details, only that one young man received an especially severe sentence. His mother firmly believed her son had been wrongly accused. During the sentencing assembly, she shouted repeatedly that he was innocent, begging the authorities—whether it should be called “the court” or “the government,” I’m not sure—to reopen the case and avoid a miscarriage of justice.
But considering the nature of those rallies and the era in which they took place, nobody paid attention to her pleas. Instead, she was forcibly removed from the hall for disrupting the proceedings.
No one could have imagined what would happen afterward.
After the rally ended and everyone had left, the mother went alone to the room furthest to the right in the rear stage building and hanged herself there. Her body remained suspended in that room for many days before anyone discovered it.
I often think that unless her grievance had been unimaginably great, she would never have chosen such a tragic end.
As for whether strange events occurred afterward because of that suicide, no one can say for certain now. But the strange happenings inside the cinema were far from over.
Sometime in the early 1980s—though I never paid attention to the exact date—another death occurred there.
Back then, entertainment in rural areas was nothing like it is today. There were no televisions or DVDs. People learned about the outside world through loudspeakers set up at the village entrance. Because of that, cinemas did incredibly good business. Attendance rates were astonishingly high. Even now, whenever my father reminisces about the crowds lining up for ticket inspections, he does so with obvious excitement, as though reliving those glorious days.
Though it’s beside the point, I still want to say it: Chinese cinema is dead now. There’s nothing left to look forward to.
Social order at the time was hardly admirable either. There were gangs everywhere: the Qinglong Gang, the Renzi Gang, the Plum Blossom Gang… countless factions. Out of every ten young men, four or five would have tattoos—some with dragons, some with the character “忍” (“Endure”), some with plum blossoms. Back then, just seeing them was intimidating.
Young people loved excitement. If there wasn’t any excitement, they would create some themselves. And in a small town, the cinema was one of the liveliest places around. There were plenty of young women there too. What local tough guy wouldn’t want to show off a little in front of a pretty girl?
Unfortunately, one member of the Renzi Gang picked the wrong girl to impress—she happened to be the girlfriend of a minor Qinglong Gang leader.
And just like that, chaos erupted.
The two gangs started fighting, turning the cinema into complete pandemonium.
But unexpectedly, the people causing the trouble were fine. The one who died was merely a bystander.
A young man had been quietly watching the movie near the back of the hall. Suddenly, the front rows exploded into chaos, with shouting everywhere. People stood up to watch the fight. Perhaps he wasn’t very tall, because he climbed onto his seat to get a better view. But even then he still couldn’t see clearly, so he climbed higher—onto the backrest of the seat itself.
Tragically, he failed to notice the large ceiling fan spinning loudly above his head.
According to witnesses, everyone had been so focused on the fight that nobody noticed what happened until the young man suddenly collapsed stiffly to the ground. The screams that followed were louder than the sounds of the fight itself. Only then did people realize someone had died.
Those enormous high-powered fans in the cinema… you can imagine the horrific scene.
A young man lost his life just like that, for no reason at all.
That’s why cinema ceiling fans are installed so absurdly high nowadays. Even if you stood on the backrest of a seat, you’d still need to be two meters taller than Yao Ming to touch them.
Personally, though, I think the cinema never needed electric fans at all. No matter when you entered that building, it always felt icy cold inside. The place was vast and hollow—if a single drop of water hit the floor, it would echo throughout the hall.
Of course, that’s only how I felt. Maybe it hadn’t always been like that.
Those were some of the stories I heard after our family moved into the cinema. Back then, I often noticed townspeople gossiping about the place. I wanted to listen, yet I was too afraid to hear more.
At the time, I comforted myself by thinking: the woman who hanged herself and the young man killed by the ceiling fan had both died in the auditorium and rear stage building. Even if there really were “things” in the cinema, surely they wouldn’t wander into the front building where we lived.
But one conversation between my aunt and grandmother terrified me more than anything before.
After we moved into the front building, my aunt came to visit our home for the first time. There was a movie screening that night, so after dinner my mother went to prepare the melon seeds and peanuts she would sell during the show, my father went to clear the theater, and my younger brother ran outside to play. The rooms in the cinema’s front building were spread far apart, and my aunt still did not know where everyone in the family slept, so she quietly asked my grandmother:
“Is elder brother still living in that room?”
My grandmother replied, “No, he moved downstairs.”
I quickly interrupted. “Moved from which room to which room? Nobody ever moved.”
My grandmother hurriedly said, “Your aunt is confused, she’s just asking casually,” while secretly signaling my aunt not to continue.
My aunt was the sort of person who never thought too much about things, and she was also very nearsighted. The kitchen light was dim that evening, so she could not see my grandmother’s little gestures, though I noticed everything. She continued:
“You haven’t seen that thing again, right? Superstitious stuff is still better believed than ignored.”
At that point my grandmother became anxious and quickly said, “No more, no more,” urging me to hurry off and do my homework.
Some people reading my story may feel disappointed, because I myself never actually saw “them.” It may not sound all that frightening. But for those of us who lived inside that cinema, you had no choice but to face it every single day. The terror was immediate—you never had time to sit around reliving the fear or dwelling on it afterward. Life simply went on. Yet to outsiders, that cinema was a haunted place. A terrifying, haunted place.
I entered university in 1996, and after my family moved out from the theater stage area, I rarely went back there again. Of all the days we spent living in the cinema’s front building, the knocking incident left the deepest impression on me, because it was the first time I truly felt that one day I myself might encounter “them.”
Teenagers are fearless in strange ways. At night I was timid, but once daylight flooded the world, all thoughts of ghosts and spirits vanished. I always believed ghosts could never appear during the day, otherwise “they” would die. So in broad daylight I even went into the room where my father had once seen “her.” Of course, I never encountered anything there.
Instead, I was delighted to discover stacks of film slides—colored promotional slides, hand-carved slides made by my father, as well as the projector and gramophone from the theater. They all became experimental toys for my teenage self, and before long I had dismantled them into pieces.
But during that period I also heard even more stories about the cinema, and witnessed things that people would later talk about for years. The following incident was told to me by Chen Zhengbo.
The lost souls inside that cinema were certainly not limited to the grieving mother and the unfortunate young man.
By the late 1980s, alongside booming business activities, entertainment culture had also begun flourishing. Every city, county, and even rural township had its own song-and-dance troupe. A small-town cinema like ours could at most host a minor municipal troupe, though most were merely cheap knockoff groups using names like “Municipal Song and Dance Ensemble.” Back then these fake troupes still performed ordinary singing and dancing, but after the 1990s many evolved into strip shows and even seedier performances. I witnessed all of that personally.
The troupe in this story came from Hubei, pretending to be the Wuhan Municipal Song and Dance Ensemble. Their lineup was indeed larger than most amateur troupes, so my father heavily exaggerated their advertising campaign.
To boost attendance, the township government even issued official notices demanding every village absorb a certain number of tickets in the name of promoting “spiritual civilization.” At the time the cinema had not yet been privately contracted out—the profits were shared between the film team and the township government—so the authorities were happy to cooperate.
Normally, when movies were shown, my father and Chen Zhengbo handled ticket inspection, Yan Dingli operated the projector, and a man nicknamed Ximao sold tickets. (Stories about him and his son later became legendary in our area.) But when song-and-dance troupes performed, tickets were much more expensive than movie tickets, so gate-crashers were everywhere. There were also plenty of local gangs, like the Qinglong Gang and the Renzi Gang. My father and Chen Zhengbo alone could never hold the entrance.
Besides, the troupe members themselves feared the theater staff might tamper with ticket sales, so they usually sent their own guards to watch the doors. These men knew martial arts and were powerfully built.
It made sense. These people drifted around the underworld for a living. Many had belonged to gangs before and understood all the street rules. Usually the police station would also send one or two officers to maintain order, so nothing ever went wrong.
But this time, something did.
A minor leader from the Qinglong Gang arrived with over a dozen followers, none of whom had tickets. They tried to force their way inside to watch the performance. The troupe’s guards spoke politely at first, but the gang leader refused to back down. The show was about to begin, and the policemen had already wandered off to watch the performance themselves, so the situation quickly descended into chaos.
In the end, the gang leader and his men viciously beat the four guards and stormed into the theater.
Afterward, everything seemed calm. The troupe finished performing and left town.
A few days later, however, one of the gang members disappeared.
Nobody connected such a small matter to the cinema. Perhaps another gang had kidnapped him—that sort of thing was common enough.
Several nights in a row, after clearing the theater and shutting off the electrical breakers on the stage, my father and Chen Zhengbo noticed a terrible stench. At first they assumed nearby toilets were being cleaned out, so they paid little attention to it.
One day before the audience entered, they went to switch on the power. Chen Zhengbo suddenly thought he saw someone moving on the right side of the second floor, as if someone were sneaking in to watch without paying. Neither of them thought much of it. They turned on every light in the cinema—all the lights together created a spectacular brightness rarely seen except during major meetings—and headed upstairs to search.
The second floor smelled even worse than the first. It was clearly not the smell of sewage.
They gave up searching for trespassers and instead began tracking the source of the odor.
Chen Zhengbo muttered that perhaps a stray cat had died somewhere inside, though even he admitted no dead cat could possibly smell this bad.
Then both men heard movement coming from the room on the far right side of the stage’s second floor.
The two froze.
That was the room where someone had once hanged himself.
The entire upper floor was made of wood, so every creaking footstep sounded painfully loud. In the end neither man dared open the door. Pale-faced, they retreated downstairs.
Later, among the audience gathering outside, they found several acquaintances and convinced them to go upstairs together. More people meant more courage.
Back on the second floor, everyone agreed the smell was definitely coming from that room. Yet once they all reached the same conclusion, nobody dared open the door.
Finally one brave soul stepped forward and kicked it open.
Some people collapsed on the spot from fright. Several others vomited violently.
Inside lay a rotting corpse, green with decay. According to witnesses, even the gums had decomposed enough to expose the roots of the teeth. It was horrifying beyond description.
But the people most terrified at that moment were my father and Chen Zhengbo.
The “person” Chen Zhengbo had seen. The sounds they had heard.
Could all of it really have been caused by him?
Dear God.
Eventually the case was solved. The dead man turned out to be that gang leader. Yet the cause of death remained deeply mysterious.
After the performance that night, the beaten troupe members had secretly followed him, captured him, and tied him up. They never intended to kill him—they only wanted him to suffer for a few days. Back then there were all sorts of shady tricks involving drugs and smoke torture, things meant to make a person weak, miserable, or unconscious for days at a time.
They bound his hands and feet, forced him to swallow something, and dumped him into that room where the suicide had once occurred.
Of course, they had no idea about the room’s dark history.
They assumed he would wake up four or five days later, scream for help, and eventually be rescued.
Instead, he died there.
The autopsy concluded he had not died from poisoning. There were no external or internal injuries either. The death was simply… strange.
Some people believed he had literally been frightened to death. Witnesses said his eyes were still wide open when he was found, and his mouth hung open in terror.
Whenever I heard stories like this, I would spend several nights feeling uneasy, sleeping with the lights on. My brother and I shared a tiny room—barely enough space for a bed, a large desk, and a television sitting on top of the desk. The gap between the bed and desk was only wide enough for a single stool. We usually watched TV lying in bed. Yet with a huge 100-watt bulb blazing overhead, the room somehow felt safe.
Eventually the fear faded, and life continued as normal.
At the time I remember thinking: Thank goodness our family now lived in the cinema’s front building. If we were still in the back building, it would have been unbearable.
But life often works the opposite way.
What you hope for slips away from you.
And what you fear most is exactly what finds you.
When I was in the second year of middle school—around the latter half of 1992—the family planning campaign was being enforced with unbelievable intensity. After all, it was national policy, and every local official in the township government was desperate to climb the ladder. Success in enforcing birth control meant political achievements.
At that time, almost every family still desperately wanted a son. If the baby born was not a boy, they would keep trying, no matter how many children they already had. As a result, countless families were fined until they were completely ruined financially.
If you could not pay the fines and still insisted on having children, the officials would seize your furniture and sell it. If you owned a house, they would literally tear it down and sell the bricks to cover the penalty. The local enforcers wanted to force people into surrendering voluntarily.
Eventually, many people could not endure it anymore. Think about it—people wanted sons so they would have someone to support them in old age, but under those circumstances it felt like they would never even survive to old age in peace. So during that period, huge numbers of people voluntarily came in for sterilizations and abortions.
But soon another problem appeared.
The township clinic was tiny—barely bigger than a fingernail compared to the number of people flooding in. There were nowhere near enough staff either. Every day, crowds arrived for sterilizations and abortions, but there was only a single operating room. And if another medical procedure happened to be scheduled, it could not even serve exclusively for family planning work.
And then some local official, with those crafty triangular eyes of his, set his sights on the cinema.
Demolish the cinema’s front building.
In its place, build a family planning center dedicated to sterilization and abortion procedures. The storefronts on the first floor could even be rented out to businesses for extra income.
My poor cinema front building…
Did that mean my family would finally move into the rear building behind the stage area?
Not a chance.
The back building no longer belonged to us. Every single room on the first and second floors backstage was converted into operating rooms or hospital wards. Anyone coming for sterilization or abortion would stay right there inside the cinema building itself.
And the movies still continued as usual.
That was the tragedy of a rural township cinema.
Just imagine it: anyone who came for family planning procedures got to watch movies for free.
The small shop my family operated in front of the cinema was demolished too, which meant another source of income disappeared. We could not afford to buy a new house, so we had no choice but to rent a place elsewhere.
Oddly enough, I was thrilled at the time.
I had always feared my father would move the whole family into the cinema’s rear building, but instead we rented a place outside. I thought that surely there would not be any of those strange things outside the cinema.
Later, though, my parents still arranged a small room on the far left side of the cinema’s first floor to stay in occasionally—partly because it was more convenient for showing films, and partly to save money on rent.
Back then the cinema building was crowded with people all the time, so nothing strange was said to have happened there.
Looking back now, though, the place we rented was hardly any better.
It was an old dormitory belonging to the township grain station, probably built around the same era as the cinema itself. Centipedes constantly fell from the ceiling. My grandmother, my younger brother, and I lived there in constant fear of being bitten.
But the centipedes were the least of it.
Less than two months after we moved in, an old man living right beside us suddenly died.
It was my first time being so close to a funeral, and it terrified me. My grandmother warned us not to wander around recklessly, saying we should avoid “offending” anything unlucky.
Since burials were still traditional earth burials back then, I stupidly became more curious the more frightened I was. I watched every detail of the funeral preparations. The old man’s body had already been left at home for several days, and the flesh had begun changing color. I remembered what Chen Zhengbo had once said about corpses turning green while decomposing, and the thought filled me with nausea and horror.
The less you talked about or looked at such things, the better.
But once you had seen them and started thinking about them, the fear only became worse.
At night, how was I supposed to sleep?
And I noticed that even my younger brother, who had always been incredibly brave, was no longer fearless.
Back then, the toilets were communal. To reach them, we had to pass the dead old man’s house. After his death, neither my brother nor I dared go there anymore. If we needed to pee, we simply opened the door and relieved ourselves outside near the entrance, not even daring to glance around.
One night, my brother urgently needed to pee. I had only heard the sound for a few seconds before he suddenly burst back inside screaming hysterically.
My grandmother had no idea what had happened. She scrambled out of bed and turned on the light. My brother was so terrified he could barely speak—he could only cry.
Perhaps my grandmother already guessed what he had seen. She hurried to the doorway, opened the door, grabbed a handful of rice, and scattered it outside. I never knew exactly what that meant, but I suppose rice was considered something spiritually protective.
That night, both my brother and I slept in my grandmother’s bed, though I never truly fell asleep.
The next day, my brother said that while peeing, he saw the dead old man standing in front of his own house.
I was absolutely terrified.
After that, while we stayed in that rental place, my parents stopped sleeping at the cinema altogether. My father, brother, and I shared one bed, while my mother and grandmother shared another.
At that time, I honestly began to feel that the cinema was paradise.
At least everything frightening there had only been stories I heard or atmospheres I sensed. I had never actually seen anything with my own eyes.
So I kept begging my father to move again. I used the centipedes as an excuse, because I could hardly admit that I was afraid of ghosts.
I just wanted my father to find us somewhere that felt “safe.”
Within my lifetime, I actually witnessed our township government accomplish something with astonishing efficiency.
In just a little over three months, they somehow finished constructing the four-story family planning building that replaced the cinema’s front section.
Unbelievable, right?
The cinema’s temporary role as a hospital finally came to an end, and peace seemed to return to the theater once again.
After all the medical equipment was moved out, my father made a decision: the whole family would move back into the cinema’s rear building.
At the time, my younger brother and I were overjoyed. It felt as though we had finally reached a safe zone—a liberated area.
Counting everything together, I lived in the cinema’s rear building for about four years. Though during the last three years I was already in high school and living on campus, only returning home during weekends and school holidays.
Looking back now, my parents truly lived exhausting lives. My grandmother suffered alongside us as well.
But the most pitiful one was probably my younger brother.
He could supposedly see “them,” yet he was too young to board at school and escape the place. Worse still, he also had to endure my beatings. People used to say that whenever my brother and I fought, it looked like a fight to the death. Maybe “they” were afraid of me too after seeing how recklessly I beat him.
“He loves provoking, and I love fighting.”
That pretty much summed up the relationship between my brother and me.
Because that place was never truly safe.
I posted a photo earlier from the period after we moved back into the cinema’s rear building. We always entered through the back door. To get to our room, we had to pass by the stage. The moment you looked up, you could see the room on the far right. If you turned your head slightly, you could see that memorial spot as well. It was fine if you did not think about such things, but once you did, your scalp would start tingling.
Every time I went home, I sang loudly to myself while jogging all the way inside.
At night, going to the toilet also meant passing the stage, so my father kept the stage lights on permanently. With the lights on, it did not feel quite as terrifying.
But strange things still began to happen.
I have repeatedly said that I never personally saw “them.” But I did hear them—or at least, what I believed might have been them.
For several nights in a row, deep in the middle of the night, we could hear the crying of many babies.
There should not have been any children inside the cinema at all. Both sides of the theater were empty and uninhabited. Behind the building was only a small grove of trees, then a foul-smelling drainage ditch, and beyond that were the township officials’ offices. Nobody lived there.
So where were the babies coming from?
The entire family became deeply disturbed by it. It left everyone feeling constantly uneasy. Of course, adults would never openly discuss such matters in front of children.
My father and mother even walked around the entire cinema building to investigate. Once they stepped outside, the crying would stop. But as soon as they returned inside, the sound of babies crying would begin again.
That period felt very similar to the time after my brother claimed to see the dead old man near our rental house. Every day we dreaded going home, yet there was nowhere else to go.
After school, my father personally waited for us at the back entrance and escorted us inside. At night, he accompanied us to the toilet too.
But eventually, life had to continue.
The crying remained, but nothing else seemed to happen, so we gradually learned to coexist with it.
In the end, we even became used to it.
Perhaps because they sounded like babies, they somehow felt less frightening than other “things.” Back then, I even thought to myself that if they really were babies, I could probably beat them in a fight anyway.
Eventually, though, my grandmother could no longer endure it. She blamed my father for doing nothing and insisted on finding someone to “deal with” the problem.
She said that hearing those sounds constantly was harmful, that it would eventually bring disaster.
Somehow, news spread through the town that the cinema had gained yet another “presence,” and people even came over out of curiosity to take a look.
My father was furious. He blamed my grandmother for telling others about the crying.
Grandmother did not argue back. My father was her only son, and she could not bear seeing him suffer.
Eventually, rumors began circulating.
People said that during the period when the cinema had served as a temporary family planning station, aborted fetuses had simply been discarded beside the drainage ditch behind the building. The babies’ spirits were supposedly restless and unwilling to leave.
In any case, at some point, the crying finally disappeared.
Later, my mother said that my grandmother had secretly paid someone to retrieve the discarded fetuses from the filthy ditch and properly bury or dispose of them. Supposedly, after carrying out a series of “superstitious rituals,” the crying stopped.
Whenever I imagined that foul drainage ditch, the waterlogged fetuses, the greenish decomposing body Chen Zhengbo once described, and the dead old man from before, I felt another wave of nausea and terror.
I forgot to mention earlier that after the cinema’s front building was demolished, Yan Dingli no longer worked there. My mother took over her job as the projectionist.
And as I mentioned before, once the front building was torn down, the original screening room disappeared too. Movies were now shown from a large temporary platform built at the back of the audience hall.
The cinema only served as a temporary hospital for a few months, but the horror it left behind haunted us for far longer.
And just when the sound of babies crying had finally stopped, something even more terrifying happened.
One night, there was a movie screening.
My father and Chen Zhengbo had gone to check tickets. My mother was preparing the projector. My grandmother had gone to visit my aunt.
Only my younger brother and I were left inside the room, watching television.