The Ghost's Borrowed Womb

1996, the twenty-seventh day of the twelfth lunar month. The cold was bitter. Wu Gensheng, an old bachelor from Liujiagou, smashed his head against the foot of the stove and died without leaving a word.

The funeral was held in the main room of the old family home, incense curling through the air. I took my daughter Yadan to pay her respects, but the six-year-old stared fixedly at the ground in front of the incense burner, trembling all over. “Mom... There's a grandpa in black. His face is covered in blood, and he's standing there watching me.”

I looked down. On the dry cement floor was a pair of dark gray adult footprints, unmistakably imprinted there. The left toe was crooked, exactly like the way Wu Gensheng had limped when he was alive.

Yadan ran a high fever that night and babbled deliriously. When Third Aunt Ma, the village shaman from the eastern end of the village, lit incense and took a look, her voice turned grave. “You let your mind wander in front of the coffin. You showed disrespect to the dead. He can't rest, and wants to borrow your daughter's pure body to ‘speak’...”

A paper effigy was used as a substitute, and ash burst from the incense burner. The child narrowly escaped, but someone smashed the bricks beneath the footprints in the dead of night, as if trying to cover something up.

Yet it wasn't over. This was only the beginning. Wu Gensheng's death was far more complicated than it appeared, and those footprints in the ash appeared again and again in the funeral halls of more and more villagers...