Chapter 1

The northern farm country in the eighties was all mud walls and dirt roads. The noon sun beat down hard enough to make your eyes swim.

A blind man in ragged clothes, leaning on a bamboo cane, felt his way to the gate of the Lawson yard. His voice was hoarse. "Have mercy. Spare a bite to eat?"

Matt Lawson's grandmother, Martha Lawson, was shelling corn in the yard. At the sound, she got up and went inside without a second thought. When she came back out, she was holding two big white buns, still steaming.

"Fresh out of the oven. Take them for the road." Grandma pressed the buns into the blind man's arms.

The blind man squeezed the buns with his grimy fingers, feeling how warm they were, but he didn't thank her right away. His grayish-white eyes "gazed" emptily in Grandma's direction. After a long moment, he spoke in a flat, dry voice.

"Ma'am, you've got a kind heart."

He paused, then said something that froze the air in the whole yard.

"But someone in your house is going to die."

Without waiting for the Lawsons to react, the blind man turned around. His cane tapped against the ground, tock, tock, tock, as he walked away step by step. In the glaring sunlight, his thin, wasted figure looked strangely eerie.

The yard went dead silent.

The warmth and kindness on Grandma's face stiffened in place. Her hands were still held out the way they had been when she handed over the buns, and her fingertips trembled slightly.

"What... what did he say?" Her voice sounded faint and unsteady.

"That's a load of goddamn bull!"

Matt's father, Frank Lawson, shot out of the house with a wrench still in his hand. He had obviously been fixing something inside. His sunburned face was full of rage, and the veins at his temples were bulging. "A blind beggar spewing filth like that! I reckon he's tired of living!"

With that, he grabbed the wooden carrying pole leaning against the wall and started after him.

"Frank! What are you doing?" Matt's mother, Susan Lawson, hurried out of the kitchen and grabbed hold of him.

"I'm gonna break his damn legs! Teach him what you can say and what you can't!" Frank was so angry his eyes had gone red. In those days, telling someone to their face that a death was coming to their house was the most vicious curse there was.

Matt came out of the house too. He had been studying his schoolbooks in the back room and had heard every word of the conversation outside. He felt a tightness in his chest as well, but mostly he felt an odd unease and a chill he couldn't put into words. The blind man's voice had been too calm. So calm that it didn't sound like a curse at all. It sounded like he was stating a fact.

"Dad, forget it," Matt said. "He's just a beggar. Why bother with him? He's probably not right in the head."

Grandma came back to herself too. Shakily, she took hold of her son's arm. "Let it go, Frank. Don't go... don't go..."

Her face was white as paper, and her lips were quivering. She had clearly been badly frightened. Out in the country, the older generation always held a certain awe and fear of these mystical things.

Seeing that both his mother and his son were telling him the same thing, Frank's chest heaved a few times. In the end he slammed the pole down on the ground with a loud crack.

"Bad luck! Goddamn bad luck!" He went back inside, cursing under his breath.

Susan quickly helped her shaken mother-in-law to a bench in the yard and patted her back to help her catch her breath.

"Mom, don't take it to heart. He's just a madman who says that to everyone. Think about it. If he really had that kind of power, would he be out begging?"

That was what she said, but a shadow had fallen over the whole family all the same. At lunch, hardly anyone spoke. Frank drank in grim silence, his face set like stone. Susan kept glancing at her mother-in-law, and Grandma only picked at a couple of bites before saying she had no appetite.

Only Matt kept eating while absently glancing out the window.

He couldn't shake the feeling that ever since the blind man had said those words, even the sunlight in the yard didn't seem as warm.

Just then, he saw a dark shape flash across the top of the wall.

It was the village's old black cat.

Nobody knew how many years that cat had been alive. It was pitch black from head to tail without a single stray hair, so thin it was nothing but skin and bones, and it always roamed the village alone. The villagers all thought it was bad luck and chased it off whenever they saw it.

Now it was crouched in a gap in the Lawsons' yard wall, perfectly still, its glowing green eyes staring straight at the dinner table inside the house. That look wasn't like other cats, which would dart away when people saw them. Instead, there was something unspeakably cold about it, and... something almost human.

Matt's heart lurched, and an inexplicable chill ran through him.

The blind man's prophecy had lodged in the Lawsons' hearts like a thorn. Frank swore he didn't believe it, but over the next few days he worked more carefully than usual, afraid something might go wrong. Susan grew even more jumpy, fussing every day and warning everyone to be careful about this and that.

Grandma, though, was another story. Since that day, her spirits had sunk lower and lower. She no longer liked to sit out in the yard the way she used to. She kept to herself in her room, and sometimes when Matt went in, he would find her sitting on the edge of her bed staring into space, muttering something under her breath that he couldn't make out.

Days passed like that, tense and tight, for three or four days, and nothing seemed to happen. Frank felt half the weight lift from his chest and started calling the blind man a con artist again.

That afternoon, Susan was washing clothes in the yard. The family's few old hens were pecking lazily in the corner. They had been raising those hens for years. They were the family's treasure, and their eggs were saved up to build Matt's strength.

Suddenly, without any warning, the hens started thrashing in their coop as if they'd seen a ghost!

"Bawk! Bawk! Bawk!"

The shrill, piercing cries tore through the quiet afternoon. As if they'd gone mad, the hens slammed their heads against the slats of the coop, wings beating wildly, stirring up a cloud of dust and feathers.

"Hey! What's gotten into them?" Susan jumped, dropped her washboard, and ran over.

Matt rushed out of the house too.

The sight in front of him made his scalp prickle.

The old hens, usually so docile, were all crammed into one corner of the coop, as if something terrifying were chasing them from behind. Their eyes were bulging and bloodshot, their cries already gone hoarse. It was pure, instinctive terror.

The whole thing lasted less than a minute. The thrashing grew weaker and weaker. Finally, the hens twitched a few times, their necks went limp, and they lay completely still.

Dead silence returned to the yard. The only sound was the wind blowing past the eaves.

Susan and Matt stood frozen.

Frank came running at the noise. When he saw what had happened, his face went dark. Without a word, he opened the coop and pulled out one of the hens.

He turned it over and over, examining it. There wasn't a single wound on it, no sign of poison, and its neck wasn't broken. It was as if... it had been scared to death.

"Something ain't right here..." Frank threw the dead hen to the ground, his brow knotted tight. He was a farmer who had spent his whole life around animals, and he had never seen anything die such a strange death.