IBGSW Chapter 123
The Tapping Spreads
"..."
Zhao Fusheng frowned.
"Uh-oh."
Seeing her displeasure, Zhang Chuanshi realized he had been too pleased with himself and quickly reined in his mood:
"Ever since my lord left Wan'an County the day before yesterday, around noon, with Big and Little Fan1 in the carriage, the sky in the county has gone dark early."
It was early in the eighth month, when days were long and nights short, and it should not have been dark before the Xu hour, around seven in the evening.
But the day before yesterday, just past the middle of the You hour, around six, the sky had gradually begun to darken.
People had felt a little uneasy then.
But they thought, no ghosts had been about in Wan'an County lately, the Beggars' Alley calamity had only just passed, so surely their luck couldn't be so bad that a ghost case would break out the moment the commanding officer left town? Ghosts had no brains and couldn't know Zhao Fusheng had gone out.
So no one took the early dark to heart.
Zhang Chuanshi, though, had felt uneasy. That very night he had packed his things and moved out of the coffin shop across the street into the Demon-Suppression Bureau.
For some reason he had the sense something big was about to happen.
Sure enough, that night he heard a bang-bang, clang-clang tapping.
"Someone came knocking at the bureau's door?"
Zhao Fusheng asked.
By now Magistrate Pang had caught his breath. He shook his head:
"Not only at the bureau. I heard the tapping too."
Zhang Chuanshi, cut off halfway through again, was displeased and glared at the thin magistrate:
"I was in the middle of talking—"
"Who said it was any different?" Zhao Fusheng rapped the table twice with a knuckle.
"How is it the same? He's stolen all the credit..." Zhang Chuanshi had started out loud, but when Zhao Fusheng gave him a cold look, he wisely shut up.
Zhao Fusheng didn't bicker with him. She looked at the others.
The officials, gentry and wealthy merchants of the county all wore frightened faces. Clearly the tapping was a ghost's work.
She asked:
"Did you all hear it too?"
"We did."
They answered in unison and all nodded.
Dozens of voices at once made the beams of the room hum. The menials outside peered in anxiously, clearly just as concerned.
"Yu Weide, you tell it."
Zhao Fusheng named Yu Weide once more.
The old gentleman came forward, trembling and leaning on his cane:
"To answer you, my lord, I'm old and don't sleep much. The night before last I'd finally dozed off, when in the half-awake middle of the night I thought I heard a bang-bang hammering."
Recalling that night still frightened him. Goose bumps visibly rose on his neck, and his voice cracked.
"I thought some servant had no sense, hammering away in the dead of night and robbing everyone of their peace."
Yu Weide slept poorly at the best of times, so being woken up made him furious. He got up at once and summoned people, meaning to find the servant who had been hammering and teach him a lesson.
But after searching a long while, they couldn't find anyone hammering.
And through all of it, the tapping had never paused.
"I won't hide it from you, my lord: that sound made my eyes swell and my head throb until I thought my eyeballs would burst, and my temper grew more and more explosive."
Zhao Fusheng nodded:
"Under the influence of a malignant ghost's domain, people may well show restless, anxious symptoms."
She had learned this from the case files left by predecessors.
A person's fear sometimes hides deep, and since pride keeps it from being vented, it can turn into rage and make one's temper grow strange.
Hearing this, Yu Weide nodded hurriedly:
"You are exactly right, my lord."
"And then?"
Zhao Fusheng asked quickly about the clues.
"The more I thought about it, the angrier I got. I thought these servants were saying yes to my face and doing otherwise behind my back. Surely these cunning slaves, seeing me old and weak, meant to bully me?"
Thinking so, he wouldn't let it go. That same night he had summoned his whole family and every servant to the main hall of the Yu house.
He made the household steward draw up a roll and call names one by one.
"I wanted to see who dared to hammer in the middle of the night and woke me, and still dared to keep pounding on something," Yu Weide said, recalling the scene. Perhaps because of the ghost calamity, his beard trembled as he spoke and he seemed angry still.
"Did you find any trace in the end?"
Zhao Fusheng asked offhandedly.
She asked, but in her heart she already knew. Magistrate Pang had long since stated the final result. She was only asking to learn the details of the case.
The moment she finished, Yu Weide's face changed greatly, and he shook his head:
"You must have guessed already, my lord. My whole family, young and old, was summoned to the front hall. After the roll call, every single person was there. Even the infant great-grandson in his swaddling clothes was carried in. No one was tapping!"
And all the while the tapping had not stopped.
"I still didn't think of a ghost case then. I wondered whether someone outside was hammering at something, and the night was so quiet that the sound carried loud and far into my house."
But Yu Weide was a famous gentleman of Wan'an County. His house was large, and the neighbors were far away on both sides. Normally even a loud noise would not carry that far.
Beyond the sound traveling far at night, the only other possibility was a malignant ghost at work.
No one had thought of that at the time.
The Yu household had gone out with lanterns to search a few li around, and found no one tapping, yet the sound had not stopped.
At this point Yu Weide seemed to remember something. His legs trembled in terror and he looked to Magistrate Pang for help.
Seeing his appeal, Magistrate Pang quickly stepped forward:
"Let me tell the rest."
"Go ahead." Zhao Fusheng nodded her assent.
"It was much the same at my yamen as at Master Yu's."
"I hadn't gone to bed yet. I was still sorting case files," Magistrate Pang said, then swallowed.
Lately, with Zhao Fusheng presiding over Wan'an County, he had felt at ease and found new drive for managing the county's affairs. Every day he gladly worked overtime and wouldn't rest until deep in the night.
When the tapping began, his wife had just brought a late-night snack and was urging him to rest early, saying the night air was cold and the mist heavy, and she feared he would ruin his health by staying up.
Magistrate Pang and his wife had been childhood sweethearts, and had been happily married for many years. When he took up his post in Wan'an County, his parents, children and grandchildren all stayed behind in the Capital. Only his wife came with him, afraid he would be lonely.
Taking the soup, he had laughed:
"I want to put the county's affairs in order and prepare the logistics for Lord Zhao, so she doesn't have to worry. She need only concentrate on ghost cases and keep our Wan'an County safe."
He had been at his post in Wan'an for under two years, and had had dealings with the previous commanding officer, Zhao Qiming.
Every time he was forced to meet Zhao Qiming, he felt afraid, as if he were speaking to a living corpse.
Magistrate Pang had watched with his own eyes as Zhao Qiming's temper went from gentle to unpredictable, until at last no trace of life remained in him, only cruelty and venom.
Any menial in the bureau yamen who displeased him would be killed.
Everyone had dealt with him on tiptoe, and Magistrate Pang had walked on thin ice too.
Even that life did not last. When Zhao Qiming died, the Wan'an bureau fell into a ghost case, and ghost cases erupted everywhere along with it.
Magistrate Pang had thought then that he was surely doomed.
With the county's bureau collapsed and the court withdrawing support, the county would sooner or later become a ghost town.
And at that moment Zhao Fusheng had risen from nowhere, and to Magistrate Pang she was a drowning man's drifting plank.
He had even found a surge of energy of the kind he'd only had in his youth, working tirelessly every day and never daring to slacken.
His wife understood how he felt and didn't dare press him to rest.
The couple talked for a while, and all the while the bang-bang tapping went on and on.
At first Magistrate Pang thought someone somewhere was just knocking a couple of times. It was abrupt at night, but perhaps whoever it was had the sense to stop after a few blows.
But after a quarter of an hour of conversation, the sound hadn't paused once.
He found it maddening, and worried about the pile of paperwork.
In front of his wife he complained:
"I'd meant to use Lord Zhao's absence to tidy up some county business. How am I supposed to work with that going on?"
His usually gentle and virtuous wife suddenly showed a strange irritability. At his words she flared up:
"You're right. In the dead of night, whoever dares do this, it's outrageous!"
Madam Pang's face was frosty:
"Don't worry, I'll deal with it. I'll find the insolent servant."
With that she stormed out.
The result, of course, was the same as at Yu Weide's.
Madam Pang went to great lengths and found nothing. The bang-bang sounded all night, and stopped only when day broke.
It was an unusually long night, and dawn was a little later than usual.
Only when the sky lightened did the sound that had tormented Wan'an's people all night stop.
Magistrate Pang had been furious, yet as the sky brightened he felt a faint sense of relief.
He summoned his secretary and had the yamen runners found, ordering them to track down whoever had been making trouble last night.
But the runners arriving for work looked exhausted too. When asked, it turned out they had all heard the tapping the night before.
"Some of the runners live far away and some near, with a good distance between them, yet they all heard it at once—"
Magistrate Pang still shuddered at the memory:
"I knew then that something was wrong."
But it happened that just then Zhao Fusheng, who could have solved it, had left the city.
During the day the runners went around making inquiries. The finding agreed with Magistrate Pang's guess: the whole of Wan'an County had heard the eerie tapping.
As though someone were pounding on something with a pointed-beak hammer.
Sensing something amiss, he decisively had his secretary dispatch a runner to Baozhi County with a letter.
"The runner set out in the morning, circled around, and came back at midday in a daze."
Recalling the scene, Magistrate Pang shivered and unconsciously showed fear:
"The moment he came into the yamen he shouted for help and demanded to see the magistrate of Baozhi County—"
He swallowed and went on:
"He held up a letter, claiming to be a runner sent from Wan'an County, and said he wanted to see Lord Zhao—"
From Magistrate Pang's account it was easy to tell that the runner had probably strayed into a ghost domain and had his perception scrambled by it, warping his eyes. After circling back to Wan'an County, in the runner's mind he had left Wan'an and reached Baozhi County.
And the one who met him hadn't been "Magistrate Pang." In his view, he had seen the magistrate of Baozhi County.
The situation resembled Goutou Village, where the senses had been deceived by a ghost.
"He didn't seem to know me at all and took me for someone else. He didn't even remember that the letter he held was one I'd written myself."
By now Magistrate Pang understood how serious the matter was.
To avoid further trouble, he had immediately had the runner, whose mind was disturbed by the malignant ghost, seized and confined.
The failure of the message showed that the whole Wan'an county seat had been engulfed by some eerie ghost domain.
All anyone could do was wait passively.
"And by yesterday afternoon, things had become even more terrible—"
Describing the scene, Magistrate Pang's expression changed drastically.
He swallowed:
"Yesterday, before the middle of the Shen hour, around four in the afternoon, the sky began to darken—"
In the two days and one night since Zhao Fusheng left Wan'an County, dusk had come earlier each day.
Magistrate Pang had already sensed what would happen after dark.
Sure enough, when night fell, the bang-bang tapping that everyone in Wan'an knew so well rang out again.
And this time there was more than one tapping.
At this point Magistrate Pang's eyes reddened and two lines of old tears ran down:
"When I heard it, besides last night's bang-bang there seemed to be another tapping mixed in, and just then my secretary came rushing to find me—"
He could not go on. He turned away and wiped his eyes with his sleeve.
Standing behind him, the secretary heard this and hurried to finish what the magistrate couldn't:
"Madam had met with trouble."
Remembering the scene, his cheeks twitched with terror:
"I heard the servants in the yamen report that Madam seemed bewitched and that they must tell the master at once."
"What did Madam do?"
Zhao Fusheng's heart stirred and she asked.
Horror and fear showed in the secretary's eyes:
"Madam took a hairpin and was pounding at a mirror with all her strength."
"..."
Gulp.
Zhang Chuanshi had clearly heard of this eerie affair already, but hearing the secretary recount it again, perhaps infected by his fear, he swallowed too and instinctively drew closer to Zhao Fusheng.
Zhao Fusheng gave him a disgusted look and warned him not to squeeze toward her chair.
"Heh heh." He gave two dry laughs and edged away carefully under her gaze, but the moment she looked elsewhere he crept silently back.
Zhao Fusheng couldn't be bothered to expose his little scheme just then. She asked Yu Weide:
"Did anything happen in the Yu house?"
"Yes!"
Yu Weide hurriedly nodded:
"My second son picked up a carving knife and started hacking at a block of stone—"
As he spoke, his expression gradually changed:
"Bang, bang, bang—every stroke made a sound like this."
Afraid the others wouldn't understand, he raised the cane in his hand and began to strike the floor.
Bang-bang, bang-bang—
The crowd had been quietly standing or sitting in the hall, waiting for Zhao Fusheng to finish questioning so they could discuss how to resolve the predicament. Who would have thought that in the middle of a perfectly good speech Yu Weide would start beating the ground with his cane?
Magistrate Pang, who had slumped into his chair after the mention of his wife, heard the bang-bang and sprang up from it:
"Master Yu, you can tell it without banging to frighten people!"
The crowd had been badly shaken these two nights.
If hearing the tapping had at first only irritated them, hearing it again now brought a bone-deep terror of the unknown, sinister malignant ghost.
Yu Weide ignored Magistrate Pang.
He kept raising his cane and striking in rhythm: Bang-bang, bang-bang—
"Yu Weide!" With each bang-bang Magistrate Pang's heart raced faster, the blood leaping in his head, and even his hands shook. His heart pounding and his breath short, he shouted:
"Stop tapping—"
At the rhythmic sound, the others too seemed to fall back into the terror of the past two nights, driven by an unknown tapping.
The hall of the bureau erupted. Scalps prickled, fear turned to anger, and without even waiting for Zhao Fusheng to say anything, people shouted for Yu Weide to be pushed back into his seat.
Bang-bang, bang-bang—
Yu Weide had stopped speaking.
As chaos broke out in the hall, Zhao Fusheng sat in the seat of honor.
At some point it had grown darker outside, and gray misty beads drifted into the hall. The candlelight was smothered by shadow, and the light dimmed.
The fear, panic and helplessness on everyone's faces passed from face to face along with the gray fog. Under the invisible influence of the ghost domain, everyone had already lost their composure and courage.
So they didn't notice that the fear, anxiety and other emotions on Yu Weide's face had vanished.
His old eyes had turned murky, the furrows in his wrinkles had deepened, and the corners of his mouth sagged, leaving a stiff, wooden, numb and cold expression.
Zhao Fusheng noticed that his hands gripped especially hard, holding his cane tight and pounding the floor as if to crush the stones under him and gouge out a great pit.
Bang! Bang-bang! Bang-bang-bang!
Expressionless, he lifted the cane again and again to hammer the ground.
"Stop tapping!" Magistrate Pang cried in terror.
"Stop tapping—"
The others joined the shouting.
Zhang Chuanshi had taken refuge in the bureau, and he was a lone man with no children. Perhaps through sheer luck, last night's strange events had not occurred in the bureau, so he hadn't witnessed the eerie scenes of Magistrate Pang, Yu Weide and the others, whose relatives had fallen victim one after another.
But he had just seen Yu Weide's fit with his own eyes.
Standing beside Zhao Fusheng, he saw Yu Weide, who a moment before was speaking, suddenly begin to lift his cane and strike the floor for no reason.
And while everyone else cursed, he alone was silent. That was truly chilling.
Thinking of this, Zhang Chuanshi instinctively turned to look at Zhao Fusheng.
But Zhao Fusheng looked thoughtful, frowning at Yu Weide. Scrutinizing her, he didn't seem to see any fear on her face.
As long as Zhao Fusheng wasn't afraid, he wasn't afraid!
Zhang Chuanshi's courage surged.
He thought of how badly he had begun with Zhao Fusheng, and how, having offended her over Paperman Zhang, he had seen her methods and come to fear her, dreading that she would settle accounts and strike at him one day.
Since the Goutou Village trip, he had longed to win her favor and sought every chance to show himself.
Now the chance had come. If he didn't act valiantly now, when would he?!
With this thought, Zhang Chuanshi stepped forward boldly.
Counting on the Soul-Life Register to protect him, he lifted his hand and slapped Yu Weide across the forehead!
Smack! Over the crisp crack of it, Zhang Chuanshi's loud voice bellowed:
"I told you to stop tapping, you old thing, are you deaf and blind, can't you see you're disturbing—"
He hadn't finished when Yu Weide, who had been standing rigid, collapsed like a heap of sand all at once and fell to the ground with a thud, motionless.
