Decoded Read Online Free Page B

people said that this was because they had supped on human blood. But by the time that the plum blossoms bloomed in January, the mysterious woman was long dead and her soul had flown off to become a hungry ghost haunting some desolate stretch of hillside.
    Those who were there at the time said it was a miracle that the mysterious woman was able to give birth to the baby at all; some of them also said that having given birth to the baby, for the mother to survive would be adding one miracle on top of the other. That didn’t happen here – the baby was born, but the mysterious woman suffered a haemorrhage and died. It is not that easy to have one miracle happening right after the other. That was not the real problem though
    – the real problem was that when the midwife cleaned the baby of blood and slime, everyone was shocked to discover that he looked just like the Killer: the thick mat of dark hair, the huge head, right down to the shape of the Mongolian spot above his buttocks: the two were the same. Young Lillie’s innocent little deception stood revealed now as a nasty trick; the mysterious baby born after his mother’s pilgrimage turned in the blink of an eye into the illegitimate brat of a murderer foisted on his long-suffering relations. If it had not been for the fact that Mrs Rong found some resemblance in the baby to his grandmother, the sainted Miss Lillie, even she would have steeled herself to abandoning him in some uninhabited stretch of wilderness. In fact, it seems that when the question of simply getting rid of the baby was seriously mooted, it was his connection to his grandmother that saved his life and ensured that he was brought up in the Rong mansion.
    The baby survived, but this certainly wasn’t a matter of congratulation for the Rongs – they did not even recognize him as a member of the family. For the longest time, anyone who wanted to talk about him called him the ‘Grim Reaper’. One day, Mr Auslander happened to walk past the front door of the old servant couple who were tasked with looking after the baby and they politely invited him in, hoping that he could choose a new name for the child. They were both pretty elderly by this time and found it most unpleasant to speak to the baby like that, as if he had come there to kill them. They had been thinking about changing his name for a while. To begin with they had tried to come up with a name themselves – the kind of baby-name that other children in the village had – but they couldn’t find anything that really seemed to stick; they used it but no one else did. Hearing their neighbours call him the ‘Grim Reaper’ all the time gave both of the old people the willies and they found themselves often having nightmares. That is why, for want of any better suggestion, they were forced to ask Mr Auslander to think of something, something that would appeal to everyone.
    Mr Auslander was the foreigner who all those years before had been invited to the house to interpret Grandmother Rong’s dreams. Grandmother Rong adored him, but he was certainly not every rich man’s cup of tea. There was the time when, down at the docks, he interpreted the dream of a tea merchant from another province: that earned him a crippling beating. Both his arms and legs were broken, but that was not the half of it: one of his bright blue eyes was put out. He crawled back to the Rong family mansion and they took him in, thinking of it as a good deed that would help the old lady to rest in peace. Once he had entered their household he never left again. Eventually he found himself a job to do which suited him right down to the ground – as befitted such a wealthy and prominent family the Rongs decided that they needed a genealogy compiled. As the years went by, he came to know the various different branches of the family better than anyone. He knew the history of the clan, the men and the women, the main branches and the illegitimate offspring, which ones were