It had begun three days earlier.
It was the thirteenth day of the seventh lunar month, two days before the Ghost Festival. Chenjia'ao, a tiny village nestled in a mountain hollow, was busy with preparations for burning paper offerings to the ancestors. The air was thick with the acrid smell of burnt paper money mingled with incense. The elders said the seventh month was the Ghost Month, when the gate between the worlds of the living and the dead cracked open. Children were warned repeatedly: be home before sunset, and never linger beneath the old locust tree at the village entrance.
Chen Wangtian had spent the day gathering medicinal herbs in the hills and was making his way home as the sun dipped low. His basket held skullcap, platycodon root, and a small handful of fine gastrodia tubers. He planned to sell them in town and buy cloth to make Nian'an new clothes. The boy's trousers from last year were already too short.
When he reached the village entrance, he spotted his son squatting beneath the old locust tree.
No one knew how many years that tree had stood there. The trunk was so massive three grown men could not encircle it. The elders said the character for "locust" was made of "wood" and "ghost." The locust tree was where a hundred ghosts took shelter. Dusk was the boundary between yin and yang, and beneath that tree, one was most likely to encounter things that should not be encountered.
Chen Wangtian saw Nian'an's lips moving. The boy wasn't talking to himself—he was speaking to someone. Head tilted, eyes fixed on a large moss-covered rock, he wore a serious expression, as if listening to a grown-up.
"Nian'an," Chen Wangtian called.
The boy did not turn around. His lips moved again, and then he nodded.
A nameless agitation rose in Chen Wangtian's chest. He strode over and grabbed his son by the arm. "Who are you talking to?"
Nian'an finally looked up. For a fleeting moment, his eyes held a strangeness—like someone pulled back from a great distance. Then he blinked, and his usual expression returned.
"An old granny in red," Nian'an said, pointing at the moss-covered rock. "She said my fingernails are pretty and wanted to borrow one. She gave me a piece of candy."