87: Refused Burial Even in Death

The village had seen its share of eerie things before.

Still, once it was known that Elder Qin had been arranging everything behind the scenes, those strange events made sense.

What he was hearing now, however, made little sense at all.

The man was called Zhao Gen. In the coffin beside him lay his father, Zhao Bayi, who had died ten days earlier.

Someone who had been dead for ten days ought to have been buried long ago, by any ordinary reckoning. Zhao Gen said it was not that he did not want to bury his father, but that he could not.

The strangeness began on the day Zhao Bayi died.

Not long after Zhao Bayi passed, every animal kept at home, whether pigs or cattle, chickens or ducks, died with cries on their lips.

A man died, and the livestock died too. The family was terrified out of their wits, but when nothing else followed, Zhao Gen did not think much of it.

With a father gone, of course a son should give him a proper burial.

Zhao Gen said everything had been done according to custom, and nothing strange happened on the funeral procession. But on the night Zhao Bayi was sent out of the house, after midnight, Zhao Gen got up to use the latrine. Half asleep, he saw a figure standing by the courtyard gate. He fetched a flashlight to look, and nearly died of fright.

The Zhao Bayi who had been buried that very day stood at the gate, blood running from both eyes.

The matter spread at once, and the villagers were badly shaken. Thinking it must be some prank, that someone had deliberately dug up the corpse to scare Zhao Gen’s family, they called the police.

After inspection, the police concluded that Zhao Bayi seemed to have clawed open his own coffin and crawled out.

A dead man climbing out was known as a returning corpse.

To deal with this, Zhao Gen could only seek out the funeral master who had handled the burial. When the master came and took one look, no one knew what he saw, but his face changed drastically. He dropped to his knees, knocked his head hard to the ground several times, and then hurried away.

One master was not enough. Zhao Gen had no choice but to seek others. But his family’s affair seemed like a contagion; somehow the local masters all knew about it. When he went to ask them for help, they either shut their doors and refused to see him, or would not even open them at all.

Driven to desperation, Zhao Gen gritted his teeth, fetched rope, bound Zhao Bayi tightly, called over two friends bold enough to help, and bought another coffin to bury him again.

He thought that would be the end of it.

But at midnight, Zhao Gen said he heard a rustling sound in the yard. When he got up to check and shone his flashlight over, he wet himself on the spot. Zhao Bayi was standing at the gate just as before, blood tears streaming from his eyes.

A dead man not staying buried was a wickedly uncanny thing.

Unable to find a master, Zhao Gen had to do it himself. He replaced the straw rope with iron chains, bound Zhao Bayi up, and buried the body once more.

This time, in order to find out exactly what was happening, after Zhao Bayi was interred Zhao Gen kept watch by the grave, wanting to see whether his old man would truly crawl out of the coffin on his own.

At midnight, scratching sounds suddenly came from inside the coffin, and Zhao Gen was so frightened he went completely numb. He said that in about an hour, his father had drilled his way out of the grave.

Zhao Gen, keeping watch not far away, watched helplessly as his father, Zhao Bayi, returned to the courtyard.

By dawn, the matter had spread through the village again.

The village had seen cases before of people dying with grievance and then causing trouble after death. Some tongues began wagging, saying Zhao Gen must have done something unforgivable to his father, otherwise Zhao Bayi would never have been buried three times and risen three times.

When Zhao Gen heard these rumors, he was furious. He was widely known in the village as the most filial of sons, tending to Zhao Bayi as though he were some venerable ancestor: well fed, well cared for, and given a little spending money every month. Even Zhao Gen’s wife, influenced by him, treated Zhao Bayi with great respect.

The villagers all knew this. Even when Zhao Bayi breathed his last, he had gone in satisfaction. Because of that, they could not understand why he would go into the ground only to crawl back out.

After three failed burials, Zhao Gen knew there must be something he had not done right. He wept and begged, burned incense, burned paper offerings, did everything he could, and then buried Zhao Bayi once more.

As with the previous three times, Zhao Bayi would always climb out of the coffin in the dead of night.

By then, Zhao Gen gave up struggling. At this rate, even if the household had been well off, the cost of coffins alone would have reduced them to penury.

To prevent further trouble, he sent his wife and son back to her family’s home, bought a coffin, placed Zhao Bayi’s body inside, and kept it in the main hall, hoping to find some expert who could solve the matter.

Every midnight, he could hear Zhao Bayi scratching inside the coffin for a while, and then the sound would stop.

Zhao Gen said that during this time, someone in the village suggested he cremate Zhao Bayi. That way there would be no more midnight climbing from the coffin. Zhao Gen made up his mind at once and arranged for Zhao Bayi to be taken for cremation.

Then the strange thing happened again. Zhao Bayi’s body, lying in the coffin, became as heavy as a mountain. Even with more than ten men gathered, they could not lift the body, nor even shift the coffin by so much as an inch.

Truly, it was strange. It was almost as if Zhao Bayi knew Zhao Gen intended to cremate him. Once Zhao Gen gave up on the idea, the body returned to its original weight, no longer beyond the strength of ten men.

By this point, Zhao Gen understood completely that his father, Zhao Bayi, did not want to be buried, and could only leave him lying in the house.

At first, for two days, Zhao Gen did not think too much of it. But then he asked himself: was he really going to keep his father’s coffin in the main hall for the rest of his life?

Besides, every midnight Zhao Bayi would scratch and stir a few times, which was horribly unsettling. He still wanted to bury his father.

So Zhao Gen went again to a well-known local master. Knowing the man would not come to help, he begged him instead to point out a way forward. After repeated pleading, the master told him to cast a divination.

When the omen was read, the master instructed him that at three in the morning three days earlier, he was to wear red clothes and head southeast. No matter what he heard along the way, he must not look back, and he was to keep walking until he met someone. During the journey, he was not to say a single word.

When he met someone, whoever it might be, he was to kneel and kowtow until his forehead touched the ground, then turn and walk back, making no sound at all.

Hearing this, I understood clearly: since I was already sitting here, it meant that the person Zhao Gen had encountered outside was that woman. He had done exactly as the master instructed, and the woman truly had followed him back to the house.

Inside the coffin, Zhao Bayi, as if aware that the woman could deal with him, thrashed violently. Seeing this, the woman slapped the coffin once.

With that single blow, the coffin that had been shaking violently a moment before became utterly still.

Afterward, the woman walked around the coffin three times and told him, “I’m going out for a while. Go find ten local eggs, and smoke each one with burning incense. If the coffin makes a sound in the meantime, smash the eggs against it.”

She left in the morning and brought me back with her that evening.

Zhao Gen knew I was the one the woman had found to handle this burial that would not accept burial. After he explained the reason, he treated me with great deference.

Thinking of the woman who could kill Xu Bu even without moving a finger, I knew this strange, unburied corpse could not be left untreated.

I stood up, drew a deep breath, and concentrated as I walked three circles around the coffin. As I moved, I saw that the resentment gathering around it seemed to know I was looking at Zhao Bayi. Wherever I went, some shadow of it would follow.

It was the first time I had ever seen such a thing. I carefully recalled the many cases my grandmother had told me about. There were no shortage of funerals ruined by resentment, but never one like Zhao Bayi, who had been buried only to crawl out of the coffin by himself.

By ordinary reasoning, when a corpse breeds resentment, it is because the dead cannot let go. At first, I thought Zhao Bayi’s refusal to remain buried was due to some lingering grudge.

But after hearing Zhao Gen’s account and studying his face, I was certain he had not lied. He truly was a filial son.

In physiognomy, broad eyes and thick, neat brows are signs of a person with filial devotion. The latter, especially, marks kindness: someone who gives his heart freely to friends and obeys his parents without question, believing in his heart that his parents’ kindness is the greatest kindness of all, a burden of grace as heavy as a mountain and never to be betrayed.

Zhao Gen was filial, and his daughter-in-law was filial too. I could not understand why Zhao Bayi still refused to be laid to rest.

Then it occurred to me that the resentment might have come after death, from Zhao Gen burying him again and again, as though trying to obliterate him.

But as the saying goes, every matter has its cause.

If Zhao Bayi did not have something unresolved, he would not refuse burial, and cremation would not be impossible. And when he sensed the woman’s arrival, his fury only sharpened, driving him to burst from the coffin.

After sorting through it all, I understood that if Zhao Bayi was ever to rest in peace, I would first have to discover what obsession bound him here.

The dead are held by obsessions. Some are weak, some fierce. Zhao Bayi clearly belonged to the latter.

Ordinary people do not know how to speak with the dead. By my grandmother’s account, even the masters who specialize in funeral rites do not necessarily know how to do it.

Most people think communication with the dead requires summoning a god or a spirit to possess the body. In truth, it is not so. Those methods apply only to the dead who have been gone for more than a month, because the souls of the newly dead are too unstable to take shape.

For someone like Zhao Bayi, there was only one way: serve the dead a meal.