Ten fresh graves had appeared on the western slope of the common burial ground, each mound wrapped in strips o…
Ten fresh graves had appeared on the western slope of the common burial ground, each mound wrapped in strips of blood-red silk. Travelers who passed by admired the sight, assuming some wealthy family had arranged a ghost marriage with fine ceremony. Only the village elders turned their eyes away and said nothing.
One night, Zhao Wu, a peddler cutting through the burial ground to save time, watched in horror as all the red silks snapped suddenly taut, jerking at the mounds until soil crumbled and fell. Dark, mottled hands clawed their way out of the earth, each wrist tied with a length of crimson silk, grasping blindly toward the moon.
"What wickedness..." An old villager seized the trembling Zhao Wu and dragged him away. Last year's drought, he said, had driven the village chief to declare that the mountain god wanted a bride. He had seized several young women from outside the village, bound them in red silk, and fed them into the mountain god's "embrace." The old man told Zhao Wu to leave and not look back.
That same night, fire broke out across the village. The flames curled around window frames like ribbons of silk. As the villagers struggled to fight the blaze, they saw dark, charred figures writhing in the fire, the red silk at their wrists still vivid and unburned.
By dawn, every villager who had played a part in the "bride offering" bore a red ring around their neck, appearing from nowhere. Within three days, twenty new mounds had been raised on the western slope, each wound tight with blood-red silk that glistened like an open wound.