I'm a Coffin Bearer

My name is Zhang Hao, but everyone calls me Ergou. Dad says a lowly name helps a child thrive.

But it didn’t work out that way. Strange things happened throughout my childhood, until the old man took me away.

When I was in my twenties, the old man left, and only then did the wondrous, eerie world reveal its true face to me.

A mother-and-child coffin, paper effigies, someone knocking at the door at midnight: one bizarre thing after another came looking for me. Was it fate, or the design of some hidden hand?

Sometimes I feel like I’m not alone. Even when I walk through the night by myself, I hear a silvery laugh beside me, and feel those cold, pale hands.

I walk through the darkness, beyond the reach of the light. As my childhood memories slowly return, so does that red robe, but a far more brutal future awaits me.

Perhaps I’ll vanish along with the old shop. I only hope that whoever hears this remembers: once, a coffin maker passed through here.