There are three rules in the haunted-house cleaning business: don’t ask how anyone died, don’t touch their belongings, and don’t take photos.
I broke the second rule.
Because the moment I lay my hand on an object, it tells me what its owner saw just before they died.
A table, a cup, half a charred watch.
For six years, I used these hands to clean haunted houses until they gleamed.
Until one day, on the windowsill of a house, I saw a pair of hands that didn’t belong to the dead.
The next day, the police came.
The day after that, another group arrived.
They weren’t there to arrest me.
They were lining up to ask me one thing: who had closed that window?
My father was a watch repairman. He spent forty years fixing watches on an old street in Nancheng.
He repaired watches all his life, then burned to death in his shop.
He left me an employee badge, number K-07.
On the back was a line of writing:
Your father received one too, back then.
