Chap 3: Ashes

The first day of the lunar month.

Darkness crept across the impoverished neighborhood, leaving only a few dim streetlights flickering at the end of the road. Tonight, the children had snuck out of their homes without their parents knowing.

It was midnight. Though the sky was devoid of moonlight or stars, the children swiftly ran along the uneven sidewalk, dodging loose bricks.

Eleven years of living here had made them intimately familiar with every pothole, every manhole cover, and even the makeshift bricks supporting the stoves of families forced to endure the suffocating fumes of coal just because they were poor.

The night was pitch black. They couldn't see each other's faces. Everything was as murky as Dũng's memory of that night.

All he could recall was the eerie flickering of incense sticks in Minh's hands, dancing like a ghostly ritual. Then, the incense was planted into an old can on the ground. And then—the sound of his own terrified scream:

"Run!!!"

Hearts pounding, they all sprinted in the same direction, pursued by that strange entity. Minh was nowhere to be seen. Panic set in—had "it" taken him?

But there was no time to worry. The chilling, metallic clinking rang relentlessly behind them, echoing down the street—a sound that would later haunt their sleepless nights. A sound that turned a boy not yet eleven into an old man with a head full of white hair.

They ran as fast as they could towards the nearest streetlight, desperate to escape the iron fangs of the monster their own childish fears had conjured. If the legend was true, "it" wouldn't be able to exist in the light.

Yet under that weak, flickering streetlamp, the horrifying joke was revealed.

The so-called Ma lon was nothing more than a rusted old tin, its jagged edges crafted into grotesque, metallic teeth—tied to an almost invisible fishing line. And at the other end of that line, skillfully pulling it along, was Minh.

He had been hiding there since the chaos started, trailing the can behind the terrified kids.

When they realized they had been fooled, anger surged through them. Furious at being treated like fools, furious at the fear he had instilled in them, they grabbed Minh by the collar.

Minh shrieked with laughter, "Let me go! It was just a joke!"

"Oh yeah? Then we'll 'joke' too."

They hoisted Minh into the air, with Dũng—who had been the most terrified—leading the charge. At first, Minh laughed even harder, thinking it was all in good fun. His laughter rang out, wild and carefree.

But later, whenever Dũng was forced to recall that moment, it sent chills down his spine.

That pure, childlike laughter had warped in his terrified mind—twisting into the shrieks of a thousand demons, wailing from their graves.

That was the last image Dũng had of Minh.

And that was the last time Minh, or any of them, ever laughed again.

They had left Minh locked inside the abandoned public restroom of the neighborhood, blocking the door with bricks and wooden planks.

It was meant to be harmless. Just one night inside, a punishment for his prank—let him suffer a few mosquito bites, and they'd let him out in the morning.

Ngọc had protested, nearly becoming an outcast for trying to defend Minh.

But that was all it took. A single night.

Because that night, a storm came.

And by the next morning, Minh was nothing but ashes, carried away by the wind.

A single lightning bolt, following a long, funeral-like roll of thunder, had incinerated the entire abandoned restroom. And with it, Minh and his Ma lon.

The working-class neighborhood slept soundly, exhausted after another day of laboring just to put food on the table. The children, having spent their energy playing, slept deeply, unaware.

No one heard the desperate, agonized screams.

No one heard his final cries for help.

By morning, the neighborhood was shrouded in a gray, lifeless haze—eerily silent, suffocating. The fire had come and gone unnoticed, leaving behind only the hoarse, broken sobs of a mother who had lost her child. And a strange, gray dust that drifted on the thick, stagnant air of a summer morning.

The dust clung to everything. The highest rooftops, the deepest alleys. It stuck to strangers passing by, staining their clothes. It spread greedily, blanketing everything—the past, the present, and whatever future remained.

For over a month, the people of the neighborhood stayed locked in their homes, trying to avoid that foul, metallic-smelling dust. If it settled on your clothes, you'd have to burn them to rid yourself of the stench. You'd have to scrub yourself raw to feel clean again.

The street became a place forgotten by time. It felt as if, here, time would never move forward again.