I had not seen Chen Wei An in three years, yet I recognized his voice the moment he called.
Chen was the one people turned to when something could not be explained properly. He kept records—old ones, careful ones—of things families preferred not to name out loud. Adrian had trusted him. That alone was enough to make me listen.
“Adrian Leong is dead,” he said.
Nothing else for a moment. Just breath, then the low crackle of incense somewhere near his phone.
I was standing in my kitchen in Melbourne, half-dressed for work, staring at rain crawling down the glass. I grew up in a house where incense burned every evening, but belief never stayed with me. Work had taken me here. Distance had done the rest.
“I thought you should come back,” Chen said. “Some things ended with Adrian. Others didn’t.”
I booked the flight before I could think better of it.
By the time I arrived for the funeral, the house was already full of murmured prayers and damp shoes. White cloth hung by the doorway.
The altar glowed in red and gold, but the incense smoke did not rise. It bent downward in slow gray threads, slipping toward the floorboards as if something below the house was drawing breath.
Chen saw me notice it.
He gave me a tired look. “You were always good at seeing the wrong thing first.”
I tried to smile, but my eyes kept drifting to Adrian’s photo.
He looked younger than I remembered.
Or maybe death had a way of returning people to whatever age regret preferred.
The Burial
The cemetery sat on a low hill where the ground held too much water. Even in daylight, the soil looked bruised, soft in a way that suggested it remembered everything placed into it.
Men in pale shirts moved carefully around the open grave, their shoes sinking slightly with each step. A few relatives stood with umbrellas, though no rain had fallen.
Everyone avoided one side of the burial ground.
Not obviously. But if you watched long enough, you could see it—the way people adjusted their steps, the way conversations curved away from that direction.
That patch of ground looked darker than the rest.
Adrian’s coffin was lowered slowly. Paper offerings burned nearby.
The smoke did not rise.
It bent.
Thin gray strands folding toward the earth, as if something below was drawing breath.
I watched it longer than I should have.
When I finally looked away, Chen was already watching me.
“You noticed,” he said.
“I noticed something.”
He gave a tired nod.
The burial ended slowly. People drifted away.
I should have followed them.
But something about the ground—the way the smoke had bent, the way that patch of soil seemed darker than the rest—kept me there a moment longer.
So I stayed behind.
That was when I saw the red packet.
The Red Packet
It lay half-buried near a crooked grave marker, its color too bright against the damp soil.
Not placed.
Left.
I glanced around.
No one seemed to see it.
I stepped closer.
For a moment, I hesitated.
Then I picked it up.
The paper was damp at one corner. Heavier than it should have been.
I turned it over once.
No name.
No markings.
Just red.
I should have handed it to one of the elders.
Or to Chen.
Instead, I slipped it into my coat pocket.
Near the cemetery gate, I took it out again.
I told myself I was just checking.
I opened it.
A photograph slid into my hand.
There was a photograph of a young woman in old-fashioned red, though the image itself was black and white. Her face was small and fine-boned. Not smiling. Not sad either. Just looking at the camera with a patience that unsettled me more than grief would have.
Folded behind the photo was a strip of paper with birth details written in brush ink. Eight Characters. I knew enough Chinese tradition to recognize that much, even if I didn’t understand the rest.
And wrapped inside the paper, tied with a single red thread, was a lock of hair.
Cold moved through my hands.
I slid everything back inside.
When I looked up, Chen was standing several paces away.
“You opened it?”
“Yes.”
He held my gaze a moment longer than necessary.
“You should have left it closed.”
What Adrian Never Finished
He came to Adrian’s house that night.
Incense burned at the altar, but the smoke did not rise. It folded downward, slipping along the walls.
I placed the red packet on the table.
“Tell me what this is.”
“Not here,” Chen said.
But Adrian’s second aunt had entered the room just in time to hear me mention the packet.
Her face drained.
She whispered one phrase under her breath, then crossed herself in an old habit borrowed from somewhere outside her own faith.
“冥婚,” she said. “Ghost marriage.”
The room changed after that.
She explained in a trembling voice. A red packet left in certain places could be part of a spirit marriage. If a man picked it up, it was an invitation. If he opened it and saw the details, it could be taken as acceptance.
“That’s superstition,” I said.
“Adrian said the same,” Chen replied.
He told me Adrian had been asking about unfinished obligations—about spirits who had been promised something and denied it.
“For who?” I asked.
Chen looked at the packet.
“Perhaps for whoever came after.”
I left the next morning.
Yet when I unpacked that night in Melbourne, the red packet was already in my bedside drawer.
I had not packed it.
The Woman Who Followed
At first, it was easy to dismiss.
A smell of incense that came and went. Dampness along the walls that never spread.
A strand of long black hair in the sink.
Then more.
Hair on my pillow.
An indentation beside me in bed—not fresh, but not old either.
I told myself I was imagining it.
One evening, I placed my keys on the table.
When I came back, they were gone.
I found them in the bathroom, placed neatly beside the sink.
I stared at them for a long time.
“I moved them,” I said out loud.
It sounded wrong.
Reflections began to feel unreliable.
In the microwave glass, I saw her once—standing behind me, head slightly lowered.
When I turned, the kitchen was empty.
Days passed like that.
Then one night, I heard footsteps.
Soft.
Measured.
Behind me.
I was sitting on the edge of the bed.
One step.
Then another.
Stopping just short.
I didn’t turn.
For a few seconds, I convinced myself it was nothing.
Then I felt it.
Not a touch.
A shift in the air.
As if someone had leaned closer.
I turned.
Nothing.
But the indentation on the bed was deeper now.
Clear.
Occupied.
I stood up too quickly.
“No,” I said.
The next day, I threw the red packet away.
That night, it was back.
Open.
The photograph clearer than before.
On the back, a line of brush ink that had not been there:
You opened my life.
I stared at it for a long time.
Long enough that the words began to feel less like ink—
and more like a statement.
The Refusal
I finally went to a Taoist priest in Box Hill because I had run out of explanations that sounded sane.
His temple sat above a row of shops, quiet and heavy with smoke.
He listened without interrupting.
“Picking it up is invitation,” he said. “Opening it is consent.”
“I didn’t agree to anything.”
“The dead do not always care about intention.”
The ritual took place after dark.
Talismans. Chanting. A bell that sounded too soft to hold onto. A peachwood sword cutting through the air.
For a while, everything went still.
No smell.
No presence.
I almost believed it had worked.
Then the cold returned.
She stood beside the balcony door in a red dress too faded to belong to this century. Her face was the same as the photograph, only fuller with presence. The sort of face you could imagine in a wedding portrait if you ignored the stillness in it.
She did not drift. She did not glow.
She simply stood there, patient as a bride waiting to be acknowledged.
“You took my name,” she said. “You opened my life.”
“I want this over,” I told her. “Gone. Finished. Forever.”
Something changed in her eyes then.
Not madness.
Not rage.
Injury.
“I waited to be chosen,” she said.
“I was buried before I could be joined. I was left between doorways with no house to enter.”
Her voice did not rise.
That made it worse.
“You took what was offered,” she said, “and then you wished me gone.”
The air pressed inward.
“If you will not take me,” she said, “I will take what was meant.”
Her fingers touched my chest.
The Curse
The windows rattled once.
Not violently. Just enough that I noticed.
The lights did not flicker. The world outside remained brutally ordinary.
Then she moved.
Not a step. Just… closer.
Her hand rose slowly.
Two fingers touched the center of my chest.
Cold.
Not sharp. Not sudden.
The kind that settles.
The kind that does not leave.
I woke on the floor at dawn.
My shoulder burned.
When I rolled onto my back, I saw it—
A patch of skin near my collarbone.
Gray.
Not bruised.
Aged.
I touched it.
It felt thinner. Colder.
Wrong.
The next day, I cut my finger.
It should have closed.
It didn’t.
The blood slowed, but the skin stayed open—dark at the edges, as if it had already given up.
After that, the changes came quietly.
A fingernail darkened at the base.
The skin at my wrists thinned.
My knees began to fail without warning. Not every step. Just enough that I started reaching for walls, for tables—anything that would steady me before the ground shifted.
Small things.
Never enough to stop me.
Enough that I noticed.
I went to a doctor.
Tests. Scans.
“Everything looks normal,” he said.
I remained alive.
I could walk. Speak. Eat.
But every few days, something shifted.
Not enough to kill me.
Enough to remind me—
something had already begun.
Then my sister called.
Her son had been born with a clouded left eye.
Two weeks later, my cousin’s daughter lost hearing in one ear.
Another child was born with a hand that would never fully open.
By then, I had stopped taking the stairs unless I had no choice.
Only one flaw each.
Never enough to kill.
Enough to mark.
That was when I understood.
And that was when I flew home.
What the Monk Negotiated
My family no longer spoke of superstition with embarrassment. Fear had made them practical. Through one of Adrian’s distant relatives, and then through Chen, we were taken to an old monk at a hill temple where the bells were green with age.
He listened to everything.
The packet.
The ritual.
The refusal.
The curse on the bloodline.
At the end, he asked for the photograph.
He looked at the woman for a long time and said, “She is not hungry for chaos. She is hungry for place.”
The ritual he performed was nothing like the Taoist severing. No swords. No battle. Only chanting, a low drum, and a basin of water set before the photograph. The monk spoke to her as one might speak to a person who had been wronged beyond measure and had built a home out of anger because no other shelter remained.
When her answer came, it did not come in words I heard aloud. The water in the basin trembled. The incense bent flat toward the floor. My mother began to cry without warning.
Afterward the monk told us the terms.
“She will release the bloodline from extinction,” he said. “But not from memory.”
My father gripped the edge of the bench. “What does that mean?”
“A shrine in the family home. Her photograph at the center. Offerings kept without neglect. Her name remembered during festivals and death anniversaries. No descendant may treat her as a ghost to be hidden.”
“And him?” my mother asked, looking at me.
The monk’s gaze held mine a second too long.
“He remains hers in suffering, though not in marriage. He will live with the curse already laid on him. It will not kill him quickly. That is her mercy.”
Mercy.
I almost laughed.
The Shrine
The shrine was built in my parents’ house within that month.
Not large.
Dark wood. Red cloth beneath the frame. A small cup of tea placed fresh each morning. Incense lit at dusk. Fruit set out on the first and fifteenth days of the lunar month.
No one forgot.
No one dared to.
Chen came once to see it. He stood in front of her photograph for a long time, saying nothing at first.
Before he left, he spoke quietly.
“Adrian thought his death was only one opened door,” he said. “He was right.”
By then, the decay had settled into something slower.
Not gentler.
Just… patient.
The skin along my ribs had begun to sink inward. Not enough to stop me from moving. Enough that I avoided mirrors that held me too clearly.
Some mornings, my hands would not close properly.
Some nights, I woke to the same quiet weight in my chest—not pain, not pressure, just a presence that reminded me I was not alone in my own body.
The doctors still had no name for what was happening.
My family had stopped needing one.
The Years That Followed
Years passed, and the offerings continued. My pain settled into routine. Some mornings I could almost believe the bargain had worked cleanly. Then I would pass the shrine at night and feel, with perfect certainty, that the house contained one more living thought than it should.
My sister had moved back for a time after her son was born, and on certain days she would bring the children with her when she came to tend the shrine. They learned early not to touch anything without being told. They learned even faster which questions not to ask.
Last month, while changing the fruit, my niece frowned at the photograph.
“She looks different,” she said.
She leaned a little closer to the photograph, studying it in a way that felt too careful for a child.
“She smiles more when you’re here.”
I rolled the wheelchair closer and settled beside her, careful with hands that could no longer trust my own weight.
“I think it’s the light,” I told her.
But when I looked at the photograph, I saw it too.
The face had not changed.
Only the mouth.
Somewhere along the years of incense and careful remembrance—
it had begun to smile.
I kept my eyes on it a moment longer than I should have.
And for a brief second—
I felt it again.
Not a hand.
Not a touch.
Just that same quiet weight at the center of my chest,
as if something had never moved on—
only settled in.
Related Stories
But Adrian Leong was already marked long before I met her.
What followed him to the grave was not only the curse I carried — but something older, something buried beneath his family’s land that had been waiting generations to return.
The Curse That Waited Three Generations Beneath the Fields
What followed Adrian to the grave did not end with the living—it continued in ways no one could record properly.
A man who believed he could correct death began losing pieces of himself instead.
