Tombkeeper Village

Deep in the hundred-thousand mountains of western Hunan lies a village called Tombkeeper Village. Everyone there knows a nursery rhyme about the tombkeepers, but no one can say what they are guarding. Lin Wang was fourteen and had grown up in the village. He had followed its rules all his life: never disturb the soil on a Wu day, never whistle after dark, never enter the shadowy lane on a full moon, and always bow your head and take a detour when passing the great tomb without an inscription. The adults said that if you broke the rules, the mountain's evil spirits would drag you away. He believed them for fourteen years. Until one full-moon night, when he saw a corpse-driving procession enter the village. Nine "yin people," covered in yellow talismans and led by copper bells, walked step by step toward the great tomb without an inscription at the heart of the village. The last one in the procession was Little Shitou. He had played tops with Lin Wang just five days earlier. The cinnabar mole was still on his wrist, and he was alive. The procession wasn't driving the dead. Lin Wang wanted to find out what was going on, but the more he investigated, the stranger things became. The mute old woman who feigned madness told him, "What you've seen, pretend you haven't." His own father, Chen Shouyi, crept out at midnight with a chisel and carved names into the back of the blank tombstone, stroke by stroke. The newest name on the stone was his mother's. The tomb the people of Tombkeeper Village had guarded for generations held no ancestors. It held the living. The nursery rhyme's line, "Twenty years of life for an autumn of prosperity for the village," described a rule the village had followed without interruption for six hundred years. Lin Wang didn't want to be the next one claimed by it. Before the next full moon, he was going to uncover what lay beneath that tomb.