Chapter 4

Chapter 4

The kitchen was at the end of the east wing.

I remembered when I was a child, Mom was always busy in front of the stove. She liked to steam the rice until it was firm, saying that children had strong teeth and shouldn’t eat soft rice.

At this moment, the fire in the hearth flickered, and the iron pot bubbled and hissed.

A woman stood before the stove with her back to me.

She wore a blue floral apron, her hair tied back. Her silhouette was identical to the mother in my memories.

“Little Jiu, wash your hands,” she said.

I didn’t move.

The woman turned around.

Her face was perfectly intact, but her skin was as white as if it had been soaked in water, and there was no light in her eyes.

“Mom?” The word escaped my lips almost unconsciously.

She smiled and placed a bowl of rice on the table.

A pair of chopsticks was stuck vertically into the rice.

My back went numb. “This is Offering Rice.”

“You were always meant to eat Offering Rice,” she said.

Several more people walked in through the door.

Grandfather leaned on his cane, Grandmother carried a lamp, my father wore the grey shirt I often saw in my memories, my eldest uncle held a wine flask, and my cousin Zhou Xiaoman had her hair in a ponytail.

They sat around the table, leaving only one empty seat at the very head.

I counted them.

Six people.

And then there was that child, standing at the door.

Exactly seven.

Father looked at me. “Sit.”

I didn’t sit.

“You aren’t them,” I said.

Grandfather thudded his cane against the floor. “If a member of the Zhou Family doesn’t recognize their ancestors, they’ll have their Soul Pinched by the Door.”

Grandmother remained silent. The lamp in her hand was very old; inside the glass cover, there was no flame, only a mass of black ash.

I looked at her and suddenly remembered something.

The night before the fire, Grandmother had taken me to the Ancestral Hall and dabbed a bit of Cinnabar on my forehead. She said Little Jiu’s fate was light, so I shouldn’t look back at night and shouldn’t answer no matter who called my name.

I asked her why.

Grandmother said the family was going to have a Guomen tomorrow.

Back then, I didn’t understand what a Guomen was.

Now, I understood a little.

This manor wasn’t a house.

It was a door.

I didn’t eat that bowl of rice.

Father’s expression turned cold, and the fire in the kitchen dimmed along with it.

“If you don’t eat, how will you set out on your journey?” my uncle asked.

My cousin Zhou Xiaoman rested her chin on her hand and watched me. “He doesn’t remember.”

“Does not remembering mean he doesn’t have to pay it back?” Grandfather said.

I turned to leave, but the kitchen door had turned into a solid black wall. Dense handprints surfaced on the wall-small ones, large ones, the withered hands of the elderly, the slender hands of women-all appearing as if pressed out of soot.

The child behind me said softly, “There are three things you cannot do tonight.”

I looked back at him.

“You cannot eat the Offering Rice.”

“You cannot sleep in the main house.”

“You cannot finish writing the report.”

“Why?”

He looked at me. “Because those three things are meant for the dead.”

In the next second, his body was pulled into the darkness by a hand.

That hand belonged to Grandmother.

Grandmother stood by the table, finally looking up at me.

“Little Jiu, don’t listen to his nonsense,” she said softly. “I was the one who saved you.”

“How did you save me?”

She didn’t answer.

Father suddenly spoke up. “Mom, you shouldn’t have done that back then.”

Everyone in the kitchen fell silent.

Grandmother’s face darkened inch by inch. “If I hadn’t, the Zhou Family line would have ended.”

“But who was it that you actually saved?” Father asked.

“He is Little Jiu.”

“He isn’t.”

Those words were like a needle, stabbing into the deepest part of my brain.

I looked at Father. “What do you mean?”

Father didn’t answer. He simply reached his hand into his own chest.

From his charred clothes, he pulled out a copper key and placed it on the table.

“Go to the Ancestral Hall,” he said. “Whatever you want to know, it’s all there.”

Grandmother slammed her hand on the table.

The bowls and chopsticks on the table rattled in unison, and white rice poured out of the bowl like countless wriggling maggots.

“No one is allowed to open the Ancestral Hall!”