My third uncle spent ten years in prison. After he got out, he shut himself away in the old house and spent three years drawing a map. The night he finished it, he died. When I felt around beneath his bed slats and found that notebook, I realized his map wasn’t a map at all. It showed an entire ancient Miao city in western Hunan, buried beneath the hundred thousand mountains. But when I turned to the last page, I found the same sentence traced three times in red ink: “Don’t open the bronze door. Something inside is waiting.”
