001

The phone call came at a little past three in the afternoon.

I was lying on the bed in my rental room, staring at the ceiling in a daze. The phone vibrated three times before I picked up. A landline number was displayed on the screen—the area code was from Xiangxi.

"Hello, is this Chen Du? Chen Du from Coffin Gorge?"

The voice on the other end sounded like it was coming through a layer of water—broken and intermittent. The signal was absolute garbage. I grunted an "Mm," saying nothing.

"I'm from the village committee… your family's ancestral house… overall relocation plan… need you to come in person to sign…"

A big chunk was swallowed in the middle. I only caught a few keywords.

"When?"

"Sooner the better… before the year ends… if you don't come…"

The last sentence was completely eaten by static. I switched the phone to the other ear and pressed it closer. All I heard was a crackling hiss, like someone was rubbing sandpaper on the other end. Or like something squirming underneath the soil.

"Hello? Hello?"

No answer.

The signal dropped.

I tossed the phone onto the bed and fished a pack of cigarettes out from under the pillow. There was still half a pack left. I lit one and walked over to the window.

It was already cold in the provincial capital in November. Outside, the sky was a hazy gray. The glass curtain wall of the office building across the street reflected a light that carried no warmth. Down on the road, traffic was endless—horns and brakes blending together into the white noise I'd been listening to for four years.

Coffin Gorge.

When those three words rolled off my tongue, they felt rough and coarse.

Twelve years. I hadn't been back in twelve years.

The last time I left that place was 2007. My father took my mother and me, riding the village entrance tractor out of the mountains, switching to a bus in Guzhang, then catching a train in Jishou. My mother threw up twice on the tractor. My father smoked in silence. I sat in the back on a bag of fertilizer, watching the mountains recede one by one.

I was six that year.

What came after was simple—county town, middle school, high school, university. My father died in a mine accident the year I was a sophomore. The compensation was 170,000 yuan. My mother took the money and remarried, moving to Shaoyang. On holidays she'd send a text message, the content always the same: "Take care of yourself."

I never went back to Coffin Gorge.

Not that I didn't want to. I didn't dare.

Even saying that out loud feels self-indulgent. A grown man with a higher education—what is he afraid of? Afraid there's no signal in the mountains? Afraid the smell of a pit latrine? Afraid of those distant relatives whose faces you barely remember grabbing your hand and saying, "If only your father were still here"?

No. None of that.

What I'm afraid of, I can't quite explain. It's like when you were a kid and you hid a jar of something in the cupboard, sealed it tight, left it for over a decade. You know it's still there, but you don't want to open it. Because you vaguely remember that when you sealed it, your hands were trembling.

Halfway through my second cigarette, I made a decision.

Go back. Sign. Get the money. Leave. Three days would be enough.

I pulled out the backpack I'd been using for four years from under the bed. Inside was still the voice recorder and notebook from the last fieldwork assignment I hadn't unpacked. I was a Chinese literature graduate, working as a copywriter at a cultural company, occasionally taking on folklore research gigs. Basically, I ran around listening to old folks talk about this and that, then pieced it all together into WeChat articles—two hundred yuan a pop.

I tossed in two changes of clothes, a charging cable, and a foldable umbrella. Thought about it, then pulled the fleece jacket out of the wardrobe and put it on. The mountains of Xiangxi were cold—not the same cold as the provincial capital. This was the kind of cold that burrowed into your bones.

Before leaving, I stood in front of the mirror for a while. Black-rimmed glasses, a face as pale as if it had never seen the sun, a few stubbles sprouting on my chin. I looked exactly like a city person.

Good.

The high-speed train was at seven the next morning. Provincial capital to Jishou, three and a half hours.

I picked a window seat, stuffed my bag into the overhead rack, sat down, and started staring outside.

The first two hours were nothing much to look at—plains, farmland, industrial zones, high-voltage towers, an occasional dusty little town flashing by. The carriage was quiet. Across from me sat a female college student with earphones on. Next to her, a middle-aged man was fast asleep, drool nearly dripping onto his tie.

After Huaihua, the landscape started to change.

The flat ground disappeared. Mountains pressed in from both sides—first low hills with sparse Masson's pines, then higher and steeper, limestone faces as if split by a blade, grayish-white, draped with dead vines.

The tunnels started coming one after another. The carriage went from dark to bright and back again. Every time we entered a tunnel, the window turned into a dark mirror, and I could see my own face reflected on the glass—pale, eye sockets shadowed.

I glanced at my phone. Four bars of signal had dropped to three.

Out of a tunnel—bright for a moment—then back into another.

Three bars became two.

The lights in the carriage flickered once. The broadcast announced we'd arrive in Jishou in twenty minutes. The college student took off her earphones and started packing. The middle-aged man woke up, wiped the corner of his mouth, and adjusted his tie as if nothing had happened.

I stared at the mountains outside the window. They no longer looked like mountains. They looked more like rows of closing teeth, swallowing the tracks and then spitting them back out.

Two bars became one.

When I got out of Jishou train station, I didn't linger. I dragged my bag straight to the bus station.

I bought a ticket to Guzhang. Departure at one in the afternoon. The plastic chairs in the waiting room were greasy. I didn't sit. I stood at the entrance and smoked a cigarette. The air in Jishou was better than in the provincial capital—tinged with mountain mist—but it also carried a whiff of diesel.

The bus was one of those old mid-size coaches. The paint on the body was bubbling, the tires caked with yellow mud. The driver was a scrawny old man in his fifties, an unlit cigarette dangling from his mouth as he tapped at the rear wheel bolts with a wrench.

There were about a dozen people scattered on the bus. Other than me, all were local faces.

A few middle-aged men in dark jackets, skin dark and ruddy, hands covered in calluses, bulging woven plastic bags resting on their knees. Two old ladies wrapped in headscarves sat in the very back, with a few bamboo cages between them containing chickens, which clucked now and then.

They were talking. In dialect.

I could barely understand. I could catch some when I was a kid, but twelve years had passed, and those syllables had become hard and foreign—like stones clacking against each other. Bam, bam, bam. Occasionally, I'd grab a word or two—"market day," "potatoes," "prices went up."

No one looked at me. Or rather, they glanced once and then looked away.

I was out of place on this bus. Fleece jacket, hiking boots, black-rimmed glasses—I looked like an art student on a sketching trip. They probably took me for a tourist. Tourists heading to Fenghuang Ancient Town sometimes took the wrong bus and ended up in Guzhang. Nothing unusual.

The bus lurched forward.

Once we left the Jishou city area, the road started winding around the mountains. A rock face on one side, a cliff on the other. Down below was the Youshui River, murky yellow water with a few dead branches floating on the surface. The driver drove hard—no slowing down on the curves. When the bus tilted, I could hear things sliding around in the overhead racks.

The old lady in the back started muttering something. Not loud—like she was chanting a sutra, or maybe cursing. The chickens fluttered a few times in their cages, then went quiet.

The phone signal briefly jumped back to two bars when we passed through Guzhang county town. I took the chance to send a WeChat message to my landlord saying I'd be away on a business trip for a few days. The landlord replied, "Okay," followed by an emoji.

That was my last connection to the provincial capital.

By the time the bus pulled into Guzhang station, the sky was already dimming.

Winter arrives early in Xiangxi. By four-thirty, the sun had dropped behind the mountains, leaving behind a grimy orange streak on the horizon. The station was just a tin-roof shed by the roadside—not even a proper sign. The ground was littered with melon seed shells and cigarette butts.

I got off, stood by the roadside, pulled out my phone, and checked the map.

Coffin Gorge was northwest of Guzhang County, about thirty kilometers as the crow flies—but all mountain roads. No buses, no taxis, not even a motorcycle taxi in sight. On the map, the road leading to Coffin Gorge was a faint gray line that looked ready to snap, labeled "Township road, condition unknown."

I waited by the roadside for two hours.

It was completely dark by then. There was only one streetlight, dim and yellow, attracting a swarm of moths. The temperature dropped fast. I zipped my fleece jacket up to my chin, hands in my pockets, pacing back and forth.

Occasionally a car passed by, headlights flashing once before disappearing.

I started wondering if there was something wrong with my brain, coming all the way out here. I could just skip the signature. Let the ancestral house collapse if it wanted to. It wasn't like I was living in it. How much could the compensation be anyway? A dump like that—at most, thirty to fifty thousand.

But my feet didn't move.

It wasn't about the money.

I couldn't say what it was about.

Just before six, a farm tricycle came sputtering from behind the mountain. The flatbed was loaded with bags of fertilizer, tied down with ropes. Only one headlight was working, casting a crooked beam ahead.

I stepped into the middle of the road and waved.

The tricycle stopped.

The driver was a middle-aged man in a faded army-green cotton coat. His face was etched with deep wrinkles, and the stub of a dead cigarette was clamped between his lips. He didn't say anything. He just looked at me.

"Hey, uncle, heading to Coffin Gorge—can I hitch a ride?"

No answer. The dead cigarette stub twitched at the corner of his mouth.

"I'll pay. Is fifty okay?"

He still didn't speak, but his eyes moved—from my face to my fleece jacket, then to the backpack on my shoulders.

"I'm from Coffin Gorge," I added. "Going back to take care of some business."

When he heard "Coffin Gorge," his eyelids lifted. He gave me another look.

I couldn't read that look. It wasn't surprise. It wasn't curiosity. It was more like some kind of confirmation—as if he'd verified something in his mind and arrived at a conclusion he didn't intend to say aloud.

"Get on."

Just two words. His voice was hoarse, like sandpaper.

I went around to the back, climbed onto the flatbed, and found a spot among the fertilizer bags to sit. The hard edges dug into me, and the ammonia smell of the fertilizer stung my nose, but I couldn't worry about that now.

The tricycle started up again and sputtered into the mountains.

The road kept narrowing. Asphalt turned to concrete, concrete turned to gravel, gravel turned into two muddy ruts. The tricycle jolted so hard my insides were fighting each other. I grabbed a rope with one hand and clutched my phone with the other.

The signal was down to one bar.

Even that one bar was flickering—sometimes appearing, sometimes vanishing—like a dying person making one last struggle.

The mountains were blotting out the sky.

The rock walls on both sides pressed in, dark and oppressive. The headlight only reached three or four meters ahead. Beyond that was pure blackness. Not the kind of blackness you get in the city, with some undertone of light. This was a solid, absolute black—a black with no source of light anywhere. Like ink poured into a coffin.

Wind rushed into the flatbed, cold enough to cut the skin. I shrank my neck and looked down at my phone.

That last bar of signal was gone.

The top right corner of the screen was clean. Nothing. It didn't even show an X—just blank.

I stared at that blank space for a long time.

The tricycle kept moving forward. The sputtering of the engine echoed through the valley—muffled, like something beating a drum underground. The wind rustled the branches. Occasionally, something scurried across from the grass by the roadside—too dark to tell what it was.

I put the phone back in my pocket.

An indescribable feeling rose from my stomach. Not motion sickness. Not fear. It was a feeling of falling—like standing at the edge of a deep well, looking down. You know you won't fall, but your body is already leaning forward.

The provincial capital was behind me. The high-speed rail was behind me. The signal was behind me. The life built on Wi-Fi, food delivery, and a rented room was behind me.

Ahead was Coffin Gorge.

Twelve years.

The tricycle rounded a curve. The headlight swept across a stone tablet by the roadside, its engraved characters half-covered in mud. I could only make out the last two characters—

"Gorge."

We'd arrived.

The driver stopped on a patch of flat ground and killed the engine. After the sputtering of the motor cut off, the silence was unnatural. Not the comfortable kind of silence. It was the kind of silence that made your ears ring—like the whole mountain was holding its breath.

"We're here," the driver said. Same hoarse voice.

I jumped off the flatbed. My legs felt weak. I stood for a moment before steadying myself. I pulled fifty yuan from my pocket and handed it over.

He took it, didn't count it, stuffed it into the pocket of his cotton coat.

Then he looked at me again.

Still that unreadable look.

"Don't wander around at night."

He said that, started the tricycle, turned around, and sputtered away. The red glow of the taillights flickered a few times on the mountain road before disappearing around a bend.

I stood alone in the darkness.

Wind blew in from the valley, carrying a damp, rotting sweetness. Not the smell of flowers. Not the smell of rotten fruit. It was a sweetness I couldn't name. I'd smelled it as a child, but I couldn't remember where.I took a deep breath, tightened the straps of my backpack, and walked into the darkness ahead.

The road under my feet was a dirt path, soft and silent to tread on. On both sides were dense bamboo groves, and when the wind blew, the bamboos knocked against each other, making a creaking sound.

Like someone splitting bamboo in the dark.

I paused.

I pricked up my ears and listened for a few seconds.

Only the sound of wind and the rustling of bamboo. Nothing else.

I cursed myself and kept walking.

A few faint lights flickered ahead, dim and yellow—the kind cast by kerosene lamps or old-fashioned incandescent bulbs.

Coffin Gorge was here.

I was back.