Funeral Home: The Night Watchman

The funeral home's rules number just twelve. Memorize them and you can stay alive. But you won't be allowed to read the twelfth rule until you're made a permanent employee.

Lin Zhou landed the city's most obscure public-sector job: a mortuary cosmetician at the funeral home. On his first night, he heard knocking from the morgue in the basement. His mentor told him not to look, not to answer. That was the third rule. But his mentor never explained why the label on freezer 119 bore his own name. Nor did he tell Lin Zhou that the person who failed to remember the third rule now lived in the psychiatric ward.

Lin Zhou survived his three-month probation. On the day he was made permanent, he received a letter from his mentor. It contained just one sentence: “The thing that knocks every night isn't human. It's learning to knock in a human voice. It's been learning for forty years.”

And his mentor had one more thing to say: his grandfather's name had once been on locker 119, too.