Chapter 7

Chapter 7

I snapped my laptop shut.

“I can’t finish the report,” I said.

The grown-up version of “me” stared at me. “If you don’t finish it, you’ll have to return your life before dawn.”

“Return it to you?”

“Return it to Zhou Jiu.”

“You are Zhou Jiu?”

“I am the half that was left behind in the fire.”

He extended his right hand.

In his palm lay a charred wooden tablet with the character “Jiu” carved into it.

“Back then, Grandma failed to craft the Life-Replacement Doll,” he said. “What she crafted was half of you. She tore your life in two-one half went out the door, the other stayed to guard it. You aren’t a paper effigy, and I’m not a ghost. We are both Zhou Jiu.”

I fell silent for a long time.

If what he said was true, I had lived for fifteen years while he had been imprisoned for fifteen years. Neither of us was more innocent than the other.

The pounding against the door grew louder.

The seven memorial tablets on the offering table began to bleed. The blood dripped down the edge of the table, turning into small black flames as it hit the floor.

Grandma’s voice came from behind me. “Little Jiu, don’t believe him.”

I turned around.

Grandma was standing in the center of the main hall, still holding that soot-covered black lantern.

She looked much older than she had just moments ago, her face covered in cracks from burn scars.

“Grandma just wanted you to live,” she said.

“Which ‘me’ did you want to live?”

Her lips trembled.

“Someone always has to guard the door,” she said. “Generations of the Zhou Family have lived this way. But you were only seven… how could I bear it?”

“So you split me in two?”

Grandma wept.

When her tears fell, they weren’t water-they were ash.

“I thought I could mend it once tonight passed,” she said. “But the fire was too big, and the door was sealed shut. I saved one, but the other could never be pulled back.”

I asked, “How do we mend it tonight?”

Grandma looked up toward the master bedroom.

“Sleep in that bed. Before the rooster crows at the fifth watch, whoever is awake, lives; whoever is asleep, returns behind the door.”

The master bedroom was located behind the main hall.

It was the deepest room in the Zhou Family ancestral house, and the place where the fire had started fifteen years ago.

When the door was pushed open, there were no signs of fire damage inside. The rosewood bed, the carved cabinets, the bronze mirror, and the wedding curtains were all intact, looking as if the entire room had been transported directly from years past.

Two pillows lay at the head of the bed.

One was white, the other black.

Grandma said, “The white pillow is for the living; the black pillow is for the dead.”

The grown-up “me” stood at the doorway, refusing to enter.

“Are you afraid?” I asked.

“I can’t go in,” he said. “This room only recognizes the aura of the living.”

I walked to the bedside.

The bronze mirror reflected my face.

But there was more than one of me in the mirror.

On the left was the current me; on the right was his charred form. The two faces slowly drifted closer, as if trying to piece together a complete person.

Outside, those things had already broken into the front courtyard. Roof tiles shattered, wooden doors groaned, and the sound of gongs mingled with the sound of wailing.

I suddenly understood that Grandma’s so-called “mending” wasn’t a form of salvation.

It was a choice between two options.

She wanted me and my other self to swallow each other whole, leaving only one complete Zhou Jiu to continue guarding the door.

This was the rule of the Zhou Family.

Always sacrifice the weakest person to suppress the calamities within the old house. Then, thirty years later, sacrifice the next one.

I looked at the bed and asked Grandma, “What if neither of us sleeps?”

Grandma’s expression shifted. “That’s impossible.”

“Why?”

“People are always afraid of death.”

I smiled thinly.

Of course I was afraid of death.

As a haunted-house test sleeper, what I feared most wasn’t ghosts, but the day I would realize that no amount of logic could save me.

But I was even more afraid that fifteen years from now, another child would be forced down in the Ancestral Hall and told it was “for the sake of the family.”

I pulled out my lighter.

Grandma shrieked, “What are you doing?”

I said, “Writing my report.”