Chapter Eleven: Buried Alive

I must have pounded and shouted for a good ten seconds before I realized my breathing was growing increasingly labored; the air left inside the cabinet was running out. Fear gnawed at me, but I kept reminding myself not to panic, knowing full well that losing my composure now would only hasten my death.

First, I had to figure out where I was and how to get out. I felt around with my hands, then pressed my palms upwards. Just above my head, some ten centimeters or so, was another wall. I pushed hard, but it wouldn’t budge.

Despair was swallowing me when my hand suddenly brushed against a cellphone at my side. My instinct for survival flared instantly. I turned on the phone; the battery was at four percent—it could die at any moment.

Luckily, there was still signal. The first thing I needed to do was call for help. My grandfather came to mind, but I quickly dismissed the idea. The police, too, seemed out of reach. In the end, I dialed Wang Feiyang’s number.

Fortunately, he answered not long after the call went through, his voice groggy and annoyed from being woken up. I yelled into the phone, desperate, “Feiyang, save me!”

He sounded irritated, asking what was wrong. I had no pride left—my voice was close to tears as I explained my predicament, begging him to come and rescue me.

He fell silent, as though considering something, while my phone beeped with a low battery warning. I hurriedly pleaded, “Feiyang, I’m not joking with you. I’m locked in an airtight cabinet, and the air’s almost gone. You have to help me.”

At last, he spoke again, asking where I was.

“In the cabinet,” I replied.

He grew angrier. “Where is the cabinet?”

I froze. How was I supposed to know? I stammered, “I don’t know, I remember falling asleep at home, then having a nightmare, and when I woke up, I was trapped in this cabinet. But my house doesn’t even have a cabinet like this.”

He told me to listen carefully for any sounds, or to look around.

The silence around me was absolute. I couldn’t hear a thing. Fumbling, I used the phone’s light to look around, and what I saw made my skin crawl.

Square and narrow, wider at the front, made of wood, the walls lined with shavings that released a distinct, woody scent—I realized, almost shouting into the phone, “Feiyang, it’s a coffin! I’m nailed shut inside a coffin!”

In my panic, I’d missed the obvious. My family ran a coffin shop. Now I understood where I was.

I quickly told Feiyang I must be in my family’s shop, nailed inside one of the coffins.

He acknowledged with a brief sound and fell silent again. Soon, I heard him dash out of his paper effigy shop, and then the honk of a car horn—he must have reached the street. My heart finally eased a little.

To save power, I hung up. I didn’t dare turn the screen on again, waiting in the darkness. The air grew thinner, my breathing harder. An unprecedented terror gripped me. Alone, in this sealed, lightless box, I was helplessly aware that I was about to suffocate to death. The fear and despair nearly drove me insane.

My brain began to starve for oxygen; I grew dizzy. At that moment, in a haze, I witnessed something terrifying.

I doubted my own senses—was my soul leaving my body? I felt as though I was floating above the coffin lid, looking down at a glow beneath me. About ten centimeters below, a woman with hair hanging loose lay there.

I recognized her instantly—the woman in the red turtleneck sweater, the ghost who had haunted us for days. But now she looked nothing like before; her face was smeared with blood, hideously contorted. Her mouth gaped wide, gasping desperately for air, her legs rigid, her hands like claws, scratching frantically at the coffin walls.

I could understand her agony perfectly—I was suffering exactly as she had.

She had been nailed alive into this coffin and suffocated. Her face twisted with terror and despair, her struggles weakening until at last she convulsed a few times and was still.

She died, her face still grotesquely contorted, her eyes bulging and bloodshot, staring at me with a gaze of pure hatred.

She glared at me, unblinking, refusing to rest, and as her resentful eyes bored into me, I heard a shrill ringtone. All at once, everything vanished, and I found myself lying in the coffin again, my phone vibrating in my hand.

I answered in a rush, “Feiyang, are you here?”

He replied that he was, and asked which coffin I was in.

I rapped on the coffin wall and asked if he could hear it, but to my despair, he said he couldn’t.

I was stunned. I told him to call my name, and I listened, but the silence was unbroken. I couldn’t hear him at all.

Could it be? Was I not even in my family’s coffin shop?

Panic overwhelmed me. I shouted for Feiyang to save me, but before I could finish, the phone powered off with a final beep.

Despair engulfed me as I watched the screen display “byebye.” Was this a sign that I, too, was saying goodbye to this world?

The air was gone. My brain screamed for oxygen. I gulped uselessly for breath, the pain in my chest telling me I was about to die—I was finished.

With the last ounce of strength, I smashed the phone against the coffin wall, then closed my eyes, feebly clawed at the wood, kicked out with my legs—and followed in that woman’s footsteps.

I don’t know if I died, or how much time passed, when suddenly I heard a loud clanging above me. The next moment, it was as if I’d been yanked from underwater after holding my breath for several minutes—fresh air flooded my lungs, and I coughed violently, pain stabbing through my chest.

My mind cleared in a rush. I opened my mouth, greedily gulping down the sweet air. It took a long while for me to come to my senses; my heart was still pounding madly.

Moonlight spilled down from above. The sight of light told me I had been saved. The first thing I saw was the cold face of Wang Feiyang, kneeling above me, hands braced on the ground, a shovel lying at his side.

In that instant, I realized that his icy face wasn’t so unlovable after all. I almost thought I might be falling for him. I blurted out, “Feiyang, how did you find me? Where am I?”

He stood and replied slowly, “In your backyard. You’d been buried alive.”