On a stormy night during Ghost Festival, Lin Shu’s mother grabbed her by the throat and forced her into a bathtub churning with blood. The moment the birthmark on the back of her neck transformed into a bloodthirsty, fleshy tendril, she glimpsed a silver lock buried at the bottom of a well, engraved with her own name. Her twin sister, who should have been stillborn twenty years ago, was reflecting Lin Shu’s face in her rotting eyes.
As she commanded a horde of corpses in battle, the spine of every body sprouted the same fleshy tendrils. Grandma’s bone knife slit open her mother’s abdomen, revealing a demon fetus gnawing on her liver. When all 999 coffins in the ancestral hall opened their eyes at once, each containing a “Lin Shu,” a thousand-year-old curse was laid bare: generation after generation, the women of the Lin family had carved the souls from their own kin to feed demons, and the original calamity was now growing in her womb.
“The mark on the back of your neck isn’t a birthmark. It’s the umbilical cord your sister tore off when she was buried alive.” Grandma pointed her pipe at the blood-red mirror. “Before midnight, either carve the flesh from your mother’s heart and feed it to the thing, or...”
The other Lin Shu in the mirror suddenly reached out and clamped a hand around her throat. Amid the rumble of the corpses kneeling as one, Lin Shu felt the demon fetus inside her clap its hands against her belly. Its rhythm was exactly the same as her mother’s agonized screams during a difficult birth all those years ago.
