Night Watchman: My Years at the Funeral Home

In 1992, I took the night shift at a funeral home to save my wife.

I was thirty-two that year, laid off from a state-owned factory. My wife had kidney failure and needed a transplant, and the surgery would cost 32,000 yuan. I borrowed from every relative and saw the harsh side of human nature. In the end, I pulled some strings to get a job at Qing County Funeral Home. The monthly pay was 800 yuan, three times what I’d made at the factory, though the place was a little eerie.

On my first day, Old Zhou told me, “After midnight, no matter what you hear, ring the bronze bell three times first.”

I didn’t take him seriously. Not until the first corpse they brought me opened its eyes. Not until a water ghost from Broken Soul Creek appeared in my dreams, looking for someone to take its place. Not until a weasel wearing human skin came to ask me to grant it a title...

My grandfather had been the village’s spirit medium. He left behind a book called The Yin-Yang Record. It had no talismans or magic spells, only folk remedies: black dog blood, inked carpenter’s line, coins to hold a corpse’s mouth shut, and soul-guiding lanterns. I relied on these to send one restless spirit after another into the cycle of reincarnation.

The hair clutched in a dead person’s hand was evidence that could identify a murderer;

The knocks from inside a coffin were a plea for help from someone buried alive;

The footsteps returning on the seventh night after death were a loved one’s final farewell...

I kept watch on the slope of Old Crow Mountain, guarding the boundary between the living and the dead. I wasn’t a Taoist priest or a sorcerer, just an ordinary man who wanted to save his wife.

But when you guard that boundary for too long, some things make it impossible to go back.