[Folk Horror] Ten Days of Mourning

This scene made you feel weak from vomiting, and your friend took you to the river to rinse your mouth desperately, until you felt like you were about to gargle the smell of blood in your mouth, and you two returned home with a pale complexion.

Your parents haven't come back yet.When it comes to what to look for, the first thing you think of is the small utility room in your house. When you first bought an induction cooker, you could only use an earthen stove. At that time, the small utility room was used as a woodshed .Later your grandpa (grandfather's father) left, and your grandfather passed away when you were ten years old. The old man's room was cleaned up, and things were not easy to throw away, so they all piled up here.

As soon as I opened the door, I saw firewood and straw, and some unnecessary things, such as old furniture, and other sundries were scattered and countless.

"Let's split up and search separately." You said to your friend.The friend nodded.

You look around and finally pull out a bundle of old books from behind a broken sofa.

It is said that your ancestors were considered to be half a scholarly family, and some ancestors were selected as scholars.Both your parents only went to junior high school, but they are also people who like to read idle books.There are everything in this pile of books, your elementary school homework books, pirated Taiwanese romance novels from decades ago, some relatively easy-to-read classics, all of them are very old, and I flipped through them randomly, nothing special.Then there are your grandpa's old books, which look old in no time, and even some thread-bound books, which seem to be old enough.

You pick one up at random, and its binding snaps completely, and the book falls apart, with yellowed pages floating all over the floor.

"Grass..." You cursed and were about to tidy up when you suddenly noticed that among the yellowed book pages scattered on the ground, there was a very old piece of paper, a piece of paper torn from a cigarette box, with a cigarette brand on the back, Probably it was originally caught in the book, but now it is shaken out together.

You pick up the piece of cigarette paper, on which there are small characters written with a pen, you hold it like this, and read it word by word:

"50 years later, those things still seem like yesterday. I thought these things could stop with my son. Now it seems that I was wrong. I don't know what my father did right or wrong, but now I want to Doing this, [A long series of sentences that are blacked out, written heavily, I can't see what was originally written at all]...

The Yin God agreed, and he said that I was capricious, maybe so, my granddaughter is now his descendant for three generations.But that child's time is doomed to be short.Let her only live to 20?Is this really right?

Now there is no need to regret it, why are you still tossing and turning

The millennium was written in the middle of the night"

Signed by your grandfather.

those things?

stop on your dad?

Capricious?

That kid only lives to be 20?

Your mind is in a mess.

"Hey! Look, what is this?" Your friend shouted, interrupting your increasingly bizarre speculations.You turned around to find her direction, and stuffed the cigarette pack paper into your pocket.

The friend opened a large wardrobe.That wardrobe was originally built by your grandfather when your parents got married. Later, when your family bought new furniture, your grandfather moved it for his own use.It is very old and old now, I don't know if there are any insects and ants.At this moment, the closet door was opened, and there were several pieces of your grandfather's clothes hanging. Following your friend's fingers, you found that in the lower drawer of the closet, there were three neatly folded rolls of cloth:

Linen, white cloth, red cloth.

"This is our hometown...it should be used for funerals." You stared at the three rolls of cloth, "I was only ten years old when my grandfather died. At that time, when I went back to my hometown, as soon as I entered the door, the deceased was placed on two sheets of paper. On the bench, a mat was built, in the middle of the hall, almost scared me to death... Then there was the funeral, I remember kneeling on the river, burning paper at the river head, kneeling to welcome the guests, and guarding the spirit, my father was the eldest son One night, I was the eldest granddaughter, and I walked around the whole village with the portrait in my hand... Then I was cremated. It took seven days, but luckily the weather was not hot at that time..."

"Your customs are quite complicated." My friend sighed.

"It's all like this in a small place." You said, picking up the roll of linen, "These cloths are also used for funerals, men wear hats, women wear cloth; sons and daughters wear linen, grandchildren wear white, and great-grandchildren wear red. At that time, I was sending my grandpa to the funeral. The day before, I folded a basket of origami money as a spare, and I just stepped on the sewing machine to make funeral hats and mourning clothes..."

The roll of linen was covered with dust, you shook slightly, and suddenly heard a "click", something that was originally rolled in the cloth fell out--looking down, it turned out to be a wooden sign and a small sachet.

Yes, sachet.The stitches are so delicate, just like the old lady's things from a wealthy family, with peonies embroidered on the front and winter plums embroidered on the back, lifelike, the base fabric is like blood, stitches are densely stitched, as if twisted into a heart.

Regardless, stuff like this shouldn't be in your house's clutter.

You intentionally avoided the sachet, picked up another wooden sign, and turned it over to check.The red rope is worn on a wooden sign, and the front of it should be a relief of a Bodhisattva, sitting on a green lotus with thousands of leaves, wearing cassock, wearing a Vairocana crown, with a tin staff in his left hand and a jewel in his right hand.But the face of this Bodhisattva statue was dug out, and a whole piece was sunken on the relief. A snake head was drawn like blood with a Chinese ink brush on the depression. Staring at you with cold malice.

You suddenly felt unwell, and suddenly turned the image of the Snake Buddha face down, and held the wooden sign upside down in the palm of your hand, not looking at it further.

The friend opened the little sachet, and then let out a sudden uh.You see her crouching down and pouring out the contents of the sachet on the sackcloth.You unconsciously made a voice of doubt: "What is this...?"

Not because you can't see what it is, it's three strands of hair, very obvious, and wrapped in sackcloth, white cloth, and red cloth, all of which have become a little weird with age, and don't look like human hair anymore .The years are written on the cloth in sequence—1940, 1950, 2000.You make such a sound because everything is getting more and more beyond imagination, why is there such a thing here, in the wardrobe that your grandfather used when he was alive?What is the use of these things?

2000, the millennium, is your birth year, and 1950 is your grandpa's birth year.What about 1940...?

You noticed that the hair wrapped in white cloth and red cloth, which has not rotted for decades, is short and soft, as if you have seen it somewhere...

Oh, you remembered.

That looks a lot like baby lanugo.