Night Watchman: My Years at the Funeral Home

In 1992, I worked the night shift at a funeral home to save my wife. I was thirty-two years old that year and was laid off from a state-owned enterprise. My wife had uremia and needed a kidney transplant, which cost 32,000 yuan. I borrowed money from relatives to see how people are, and finally got a job at a Qingshan County funeral parlor through connections. The monthly salary was 800, three times that of the factory, but it was a bit evil. On my first day at work, Lao Zhou told me: "After twelve o'clock, no matter what you hear, ring the bell three times." I didn't take it seriously. Until the first corpse was sent to me with open eyes, until the water ghost in Duanhun Creek asked for a substitute in his dream, until Huang Pizi came to ask for the title in human skin... My grandfather was the village "keeper" and left behind a copy of "Yin Yang Lu". There are no charms or spells, just folk methods: black dog blood, ink pipe thread, mouth-pressing money, and soul-inducing lamp. I rely on these to send souls with unresolved obsessions into reincarnation one after another. The hair in the dead man's hand is evidence to identify the murderer; The knocking sound coming from the coffin is the cry for help from the pretended deceased; The sound of footsteps coming back for the first seven nights is the last farewell of relatives... I am guarding the hillside of Laoya Mountain, guarding the boundary between the living and the dead. Not a Taoist priest, not a mage, just an ordinary person who wanted to save his wife. But there are some things that you can't go back if you keep them too much.