chapter 3

When my eyes opened again, I saw incense, candles, the mourning hall, and the coffin.

I waved a hand before my face. I could still see.

It took a long moment to realize I had been dreaming.

Yet the dream had felt far too real. My vision was intact, but my eye burned fiercely.

Grandpa Eighteen’s warning flashed through my mind.

Had that creature been a weasel spirit?

I shook my head. No. It had only been a dream.

More than a decade of education had trained me to reject such claims on instinct.

The window showed only darkness. Night had fallen.

I added more paper money to the brazier, then rose and stretched my stiff limbs.

The world outside the mourning hall was silent. A hazy moon hung overhead.

Restlessness drove me into a wandering walk. By the time I came to my senses, I was standing at the edge of the woods behind the village.

Those woods held every memory of my childhood with my brother. They looked just as they had in my dream.

The trees were still there. The stream was still there. Only one of the two boys who had once come here remained.

As I walked, old memories surfaced one after another. My brother and I had raided nearly every nest in these woods. I even remembered which trees bore our marks.

That one had held cuckoo eggs. The other had held woodpecker eggs. And I remembered this tree especially well: my brother had once slid down the trunk and torn the crotch of his trousers. He had run home grimacing, both hands clamped between his legs.

Every scene seemed to unfold again before my eyes.

While I was lost in those memories, a strange sound drifted from deeper in the woods.

“Keh… keh…” It sounded like an old woman with a ruined voice.

I looked around. “Who’s there?”

“Keh… keh…” The sound came again.

What old woman would be wandering in the woods at midnight?

Fear had begun to tighten my chest. I swallowed and listened closely.

At that instant, a black shape shot across my path and vanished behind another tree.

It disappeared so quickly that I saw little more than its outline, but it seemed hunched like an old woman.

No old woman could move that fast.

I picked up a branch and swung it a few times to bolster my courage, then crept toward the tree where the shadow had vanished.

“Keh… keh…” Sure enough, the sound came from behind its trunk.

“Whoever you are, stop playing tricks. Come out, or I’ll shout for help.”

I wiped the sweat from my nose. My heart felt ready to burst from my chest.

In the moonlight, a stooped figure crouched among the roots. It wore a bright floral jacket of the kind old village women favored, and its body writhed in a deeply unnatural way.

I let out a breath. It really was an old woman.

“Granny, what are you doing out here so late? You nearly frightened me to death.”

I lowered the branch and reached out to help the old woman. Perhaps this stranger suffered from some illness of the mind and could no longer remember the way home.

The moment my hand touched the old woman’s shoulder, the body went still.

Something was wrong. She felt far too slight.

Before I could understand why, the old woman’s head turned toward me.

At the sight of its face, sweat burst across my skin again.

Moonlight sharpened every hideous detail. Its eyes had sunk deep into their sockets, glittering with cunning and malice. Its nose was pointed and hooked, like a beast’s claw.

Worse still, its skin was the dark yellow of rotting leaves. Its mouth stretched backward at an impossible angle.

A few strands of white hair stood upright like frost-coated weeds. Something black clung around its lips and dripped from its chin.

Then the moonlight showed me what it was chewing: an animal’s paw.

“Were you calling me?” it asked slowly.