Behind him, a wall of noise pressed on his heels; all individual voices melted in the cacophony. The words were mostly various abusive terms of address directed at Gela, that included 'poisonous little insect', 'little reptile', 'rotten little turd', and 'vile little demon', among others. These words slid from people's mouths up above the crowd to form an angry mess of noise, tearing up the air. One by one, faces of people from the village swung into his vision; the first faces in the procession belonged to a few village boys slightly older than him: Aga from the Keji family, the Wang Qin brothers, and loudmouth Lhowu Dongzhug's son Jimi harelip. Of course, the clamour coming from behind the boys' was not the product of their underage voice boxes, but those of their fathers and elder brothers, the leaders of the village. He was driven towards the wilderness outside the village by the force of many heavy and hateful hands, and of course the shouting, which was still violently surging and frothing all around him. Gela suddenly thought of a film shown a few days earlier by the commune film team; there was a villain with a long beard who was driven out of town by an angry mob, where he was 'physically obliterated', and yes, those were the words used in the film. Gela twisted his body round and grabbed on to the leg of Bunny's father, the angriest of the many angry people there, and tried to speak with him:
"Where's my Ah-ma?" Receiving no answer, he called into the night: "Ah-ma, quick, come save me!"
But he couldn't hear anything in the noise that sounded like his mother.
The crowd broke out in a wave of cold, mocking laughter before Enbo once more hauled Gela into the air by the scruff, and said:
"No one's going to kill you, you little brat. Tell me, where did you take my Bunny earlier today?"
Gela now understood what was happening. At that very moment, Bunny was in bed, convulsing and babbling in the throes of a fever. Among other things, he said that a flower god told him the world of humans was too cruel, that the spirits wanted to take him up to Heaven. In his delirium, Bunny also said that he originally came from Heaven, and that now he wanted to return to his home in the beautiful sky. It didn't take long for the adults to deduce that, naturally, it must be the fault of that fatherless wild child, Gela. He was always with Bunny; he probably took the boy out of the village and summoned a flower demon to possess him, or something like that.
The toddler's words struck a spark that electrified the whole village—all the madness was on behalf of his wellbeing, which of course was very insignificant in the grand scheme. It was a quirk of this era in which long-held superstitions were being cast aside wholesale, and all the relics that had been so recently abandoned were still able to raise themselves from the trash can with the help of a little madness and the silver light of a full moon. The myriad mountain ghosts and water spirits, all the old tales of the supernatural; all leaped back into existence as if they hadn't ever left. The madness did not neglect the activists either: the members of the People's Militia and the Communist Youth League, the production team cadres, all of whom had progressive ideals to uphold, but all of whom willingly and without a second thought, sank back into that ancient variety of village collective conscience in which the supernatural is powerful and plays its own part in the world. They threw away their sanity for the sake of soft feelings for a pitiful little baby.
Enbo waved the torchlight around, directing its powerful beam from point to point on the meadow in which they now stood. Each time the light settled, he would ask:
"Did you touch this flower? Speak! Louder, you little shit, I can't hear you!"
The light enveloped a patch of hyacinths.
"Yes," Gela sobbed.
All the flowers of that patch: red, white, those with only one petal, all were trampled into the mud under the feet of the villagers.
Next, the light stopped on a wild lily. Again, Gela sobbed:
"Yes."
The lily, pretty like a miniature brass trumpet, was trampled into flowery mud paste.
Other flowers condemned to trampling included dandelions, azaleas, and beautiful silk-petalled mugwort; all this beauty that normally danced in the summer wind in mountain meadows was erased because, in their beauty, the flowers were said to be a demon, and because it was said that the demon had possessed one of their own.
Gela was weeping, his arms latched round both of Enbo's legs:
"Uncle, tell the flower demon to take me instead of Bunny!"
Enbo seemed to hesitate, but the crowd was still at full throttle, so with one forceful kick of his leg, and a shout of "Get off!" he freed himself of the little boy. His next move was to lay down paper offerings in a bid to appease the flower demon that may or may not now be already laying trampled in the mud. The crowd watched him for a while, then dispersed in a sudden swell of noise, as if the people didn't know how they had come together in the first place. After the events of that night, no matter how Gela remembered them, it always seemed to him that the only demons there were the people of the crowd. He recalled how they made themselves disappear suddenly in a burst of noise. On that night, he was left alone where he lay on the meticulously trampled ground, frightened out of his senses, though the one thing he could feel was pain all over his body. While the last embers from the mob's torches burned out, the smoke that had smothered the air dispersed out of visible. As Gela lay there, nothing but dead silence on all sides, he was fully willing to believe that flower spirits existed. But at the same time, he was equally convinced that such ethereal beauty could never be allowed to exist in this world. If even a lowly human could live here and feel only disgust for their existence, then surely no spirit or divinity would ever be willing to stay, not when they control supernatural powers and can do as they please.
