The most notorious haunted house in Jinling has claimed another life.
Su Tao crouched on the flagstones and touched the dark brown stain in the crack beneath the door with her fingertip. Blood, mixed with cinnabar and overnight dew.
A kick suddenly struck the door from within. Chains rattled, and Huo Ye, the “mad dog” of the Six Gates, kicked open the half-rotten wooden door. A scar ran from his brow to his jaw. “What business does a coroner’s daughter have meddling here? Everyone who died in this house had their tongues torn out by a ghost!”
She tilted her head and smiled, bringing her bloodstained fingertip to his nose. “Captain Huo, take a sniff. There’s a bitter-almond scent in this blood. Ghosts don’t poison people with arsenic.” She turned and lifted the straw mat. A crescent-shaped bruise on the back of the victim’s neck came into view beneath her finger. “Besides...” She looked up at him, the corners of her eyes sly as a fox’s. “If a ghost really could claim lives, why would it write the words ‘Zhenbei’ on the beam?”
The bloody characters on the beam were still seeping their stench, and the reek of the massacre from twenty years ago was now crawling out of the old case files along the trail of blood.
