Coming home on a rainy night, the secret Grandma …

Half a month of torrential rain had turned the road back to the village into a vast waterlogged waste. When Shen Du waded through knee-deep muddy water and pushed open the wooden door of the old house, the musty odor that enveloped him was laced with the acrid stench of burning joss paper. No light came from the main hall; only a dim yellow glow seeped out from the kitchen. His grandmother, Zhao Xiu’e, hunched over the hearth, was feeding sheets of yellow paper into the fire pit one by one. She kept murmuring the same phrase over and over—“The old man is back. The old man is really back.” Shen Du was an emergency physician who had returned from the provincial capital. He was convinced that every strange phenomenon had a pathological explanation—until, on the wall of his grandmother’s bedroom, he felt a gray brick seeping water.