Thirty years ago, Coffin Village was reduced to a deserted village overnight, leaving only unburied coffins on the ground and copper bells wrapped around the locust trees. Legend has it that people in the village have become "living coffins", trapped in the mud forever. Every midnight, they will ring the bell with their finger bones to call for new sacrifices.
My grandfather's will brought me back to this forbidden place, but it didn't explain why the rusty lock at the entrance to the village was chained with bloodstains from thirty years ago, why the coffin in the old house was engraved with the date of death twenty years ago, let alone the woman in red—she always smiled at me in the bronze mirror, with my grandma's eyes embedded in her eye sockets.
When the puppets began to mend human skin, and when the skeletons crawled out of the ground to sing ritual songs, I realized: the so-called return home was nothing more than stepping into the blood curse woven by my ancestors for hundreds of years. And that woman in red has been waiting for me for twenty years.
