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Grandma Gave a Beggar Two Buns; Leaving, He Foretold a Family Death
NovelShort
Completed
The northern countryside in the 1980s was a place of mud walls and dirt roads. The noon sun beat down mercilessly, glaring 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 farm. His voice was hoarse. "Have mercy. Spare me a bite to eat?" Matt's grandma was in the yard shelling corn. When she heard him, she got up and went into the house without a second thought. When she came back out, she was holding two big white buns, still steaming hot.
Chapters (4)
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.
Chapter 2
Susan's face had gone white with fear. She braced herself against the wall, her voice shaking. "Frank... Frank... is it... is it what that blind man said..."
"Don't talk nonsense!" Frank cut her off sharply, but his own voice carried a faint tremor that was hard to catch.
Matt said nothing. His sharp gaze swept every corner of the yard. Just now, in the instant the hens went mad, he thought he had caught a black shape flashing past behind the chicken coop out of the corner of his eye. It had moved shockingly fast.
His heart sank. The old black cat again.
He walked around behind the coop and crouched down. In the damp mud was a trail of small paw prints, each shaped like a tiny flower.
The prints ran all the way to the foot of the wall, then vanished.
Matt stood up and brushed the dirt from his hands, his expression grave. He didn't tell anyone what he had seen, because he knew it would only frighten his family more.
But in his heart, he no longer took the blind man's words for the ravings of a madman.
Some kind of shadow, unseen and untouchable yet completely real, had already fallen over this house.
On the second night after the hens were frightened to death, trouble came to the Lawson house.
At nightfall, the family locked the yard gate and the house doors early. Frank even dug out a thick wooden beam and wedged it hard against the front door. A single dim kerosene lamp burned in the room, its flickering light throwing their shadows onto the walls, where they writhed and clawed.
No one could sleep.
Grandma lay on the bed, tossing and turning. Susan and Frank sat on the edge of it, ears straining for any sound outside. Matt leaned by the window, watching the yard warily through a small hole in the window screen.
After midnight, dark clouds swallowed the moon, and the yard went so black you couldn't see your hand in front of your face.
Just when everyone was at their most exhausted, a sound began.
Scritch... scritch... scritch...
It was soft and slow, with a strange rhythm to it, like fingernails scraping lightly across the wooden door, over and over again.
Frank and Susan sat bolt upright, cold sweat breaking out at once.
"Who's there?!" Frank kept his voice low as he grabbed the shovel beside the bed.
No answer came from outside. Only that scritch... scritch... went on. It was unhurried and patient, one stroke and then another, as if it could scrape straight into a person's heart.
"Is it... is it a tree branch in the wind?" Susan's voice was shaking badly.
"Like hell! There aren't any trees in the yard!" Frank swore, his eyes locked on the door.
Matt's heart was in his throat too. He crept over to the door and pressed his ear close.
That was no wind. It was the sound of something alive. He could even sense that something was right outside, pressed flat against the door.
The scratching stopped.
Just as the family thought it had gone and were about to let out a breath, an even more bloodcurdling sound rose up.
"Mrrrowww..."
It was no ordinary cat's cry.
The sound was thin and shrill, drawn out impossibly long, carrying an indescribable venom and misery, like a small baby wailing in despair in the dark.
Grandma gave a violent shudder on the bed and let out a stifled moan.
Every hair on Matt's body stood on end!
It was the black cat!
He pressed close to the crack in the door and squinted out with one eye.
The yard was still pitch black. He couldn't see a thing. But just as he was about to look away, he saw it.
Less than a foot from the door, two points of green light glowed faintly in the darkness, like two tiny will-o'-the-wisps.
A cat's eyes!
That cat was crouched right on their doorstep!
"Dad!" Matt stumbled back a step in fright, his voice cracking.
Frank realized what it was too. Blood rushed to his head, and he roared, "I'll kill you, you damn beast!"
He yanked back the bolt, ready to charge out.
"Don't open the door!" Grandma cried out shrilly from the bed.
But it was too late.
Frank flung the door open and charged into the black yard with the shovel raised.
"You beast! Come out!"
The yard was empty. There was nothing but the wind. The cat seemed to have vanished into thin air.
Frank stood in the yard for a long time and found nothing. In the end he could only go back inside, cursing under his breath, and wedge the door shut again.
No one dared close their eyes for the rest of that night.
The whole family sat back to back under the flickering lamplight, eyes open, enduring it until dawn.
Only when the first rays of morning light reached the yard did everyone feel that bone-deep chill ease a little.
Matt went to the door and crouched down.
On the thick wooden door were five deep, parallel claw marks. They were long and thin, as if raked there with an iron hook, cut as deep as a wound that reaches the bone.
Chapter 3
Ever since that night, Grandma had been completely bedridden.
It wasn't a fever, and it wasn't a cough. She was simply weak. She lay in bed all day, refusing food and water, and wasted away so fast you could see it happening. Her eyes sank deep into their sockets and her cheekbones jutted out. In just a few days, she had grown so thin she was barely recognizable.
The village country doctor came by. He took her temperature and listened to her heart, but he couldn't find anything wrong. In the end, all he could do was shake his head and say it was old age, that her blood and energy were depleted. He left a few packets of herbal medicine, but they didn't help at all.
The most frightening part was that Grandma started talking out of her head.
Drifting in and out of sleep, she kept mumbling, "Get off me... so heavy... so cold..."
Once, when Susan was giving her water, Grandma suddenly grabbed her hand. Her eyes were stretched wide, full of terror.
"Black... a black shadow... it's sitting on my chest... I can't breathe... it's sucking the breath out of me..."
Susan was scared out of her wits, and the bowl of water fell to the floor.
Frank was frantic with worry. He went out to work during the day with his mind somewhere else, and when he came home at night he sat by the bed smoking one cigarette after another until the room was thick with smoke. He was a hardheaded man who believed only in what he could see, yet now he was at a total loss, forced to watch helplessly as his mother grew weaker by the day.
Matt saw it all, and it ate at him.
He knew no doctor could save Grandma. This was beyond anything ordinary.
The Blind Man's words, the gruesome death of the hens, the scratching at the door in the night, the "black shadow" on Grandma's chest... every clue pointed to the same thing: that eerie old black cat.
It wasn't just harassing them. It was coming for her life!
They couldn't wait any longer. If they kept waiting, Grandma really would die!
That night, looking at Grandma barely clinging to her last breaths, Matt made a decision.
He stood up and said to his parents, who were out of ideas, "Pa, Ma, we can't go on like this. I'm going to find that blind man."
Frank's head jerked up, and he stared at his son with bloodshot eyes. "Find him? What for? That jinx!"
"If he could see it coming, he has to have a way to stop it!" Matt's voice was unusually firm. "He's the only hope we've got!"
Susan hesitated. "But... where would you even look? He could be anywhere..."
"I know where." Matt clenched his fists. "I remember what he looked like that day. He came from the villages to the east, so I'll follow the road and ask in one village after another. As long as he's still around here, I'll find him!"
Seeing the resolve in his son's eyes, Frank fell silent. All his life he had been proud and stubborn, and he had never believed in any of this. But now, looking at his mother hanging by a thread on the bed, his convictions wavered. Harsh reality was forcing him to bow to that unknown power.
He squeezed the words out through his teeth. "...Go. Get there fast and come back fast."
Matt nodded without another word. He went to his room and put on a heavy coat, tucked away what little food the family had left, and asked his mother for some pocket change. Then he took one last look at Grandma, sleeping fitfully on the bed.
"Grandma, wait for me to come back."
With that, he pulled open the door and walked resolutely into the endless dark of the night.
Chapter 4
Matt set out that same night on the family's battered old heavy-frame Schwinn bicycle.
He followed the direction the blind man had gone, stopping at every village and asking everyone he met.
"Sir, have you seen a fortune-teller who walks with a bamboo pole and can't see?"
"Ma'am, excuse me, has a blind stranger from out of town come around here begging lately?"
In the countryside of the eighties, news traveled slowly, and a blind stranger was like a stone dropped into a lake. He always left a few ripples behind. After two villages, Matt found someone who had seen him.
"Oh, you mean that blind old man! He showed up at the edge of our village the day before yesterday. Then he headed off toward East Ridge."
"East Ridge?"
"That's right, the East Ridge with the abandoned chapel. Folks say he sleeps in that old chapel at night."
With this crucial lead, Matt's spirits shot up. He swung his bike around at once and pedaled toward East Ridge, about five miles off.
The road got rougher and rougher until he couldn't ride anymore. He had to leave the bike at the foot of the ridge and climb on foot. The trail was steep and broken, wrapped in night fog. The trees rustled all around him, and unseen insects droned, making the place feel deeply eerie.
Matt had only one thought in his head: find the blind man, save Grandma. That thought kept him going and pushed down every bit of fear.
After climbing for more than half an hour, he finally made out the outline of the chapel halfway up the slope.
It was small, and half of it had long since caved in. All that remained was one main wall and a few posts. Inside, a weak fire flickered.
Beside the fire sat a thin, bony figure.
It was the blind man.
He seemed to have known all along that Matt would come. He showed no surprise at all, just quietly added a dry branch to the fire.
"You've come?" the blind man said, his voice hoarse.
Matt hurried over and, not bothering with manners, dropped to his knees with a thud.
"Sir! Please, I'm begging you, save my grandma!" His voice cracked with tears as he bowed until his forehead struck the ground hard.
The blind man didn't help him up. His grayish-white eyes "looked" at the fire as he said slowly, "Your grandmother... she doesn't have much longer, does she?"
"Yes!" Matt said urgently. "She won't eat or drink, she has no strength left, and she keeps saying a black shadow is pressing down on her. Sir, I know it's that black cat doing this! I'm begging you, have mercy and show me a way out!"
The blind man fell silent. The only sound was the crackle and pop of wood in the fire.
After a long while, he let out a slow sigh. "It isn't that I won't help. It's that once a 'thing' like this has grown powerful and latched on to you, it's very hard to shake off. It has its eye on the years your old woman has left, and it means to drain her life force dry. Forcing your way in comes at a price."
"Whatever the price, we'll pay it!" Matt raised his head, his eyes pleading. "As long as you can save my grandma's life, I'll do anything!"
The blind man slowly turned his head, his unfocused eyes aimed straight at Matt's face. In the dark, his expression was impossible to read.
He spoke one word at a time, slow and clear:
"The price? Your family... has already paid it."
Matt froze where he knelt, his face full of disbelief.
"What? We... what did we give?"
The blind man held up two withered fingers and waved them in front of the fire.
"The two buns your grandmother gave me."
His lips split into a strange smile, his yellow teeth glinting in and out of the firelight.
"Why do you think I only asked for two that day?"
