IBGSW Chapter 68
A Ghost in My House
More important still, Zhao Fusheng had only recently been reborn in the Great Han and wasn’t familiar with the local roads, while Zhang Chuanshi, whose coffin shop had stood opposite the bureau, didn’t look like someone who traveled through villages and towns all year.
Thinking of this, she suddenly called, “Old Zhang, how did you drive all the way to Goutou Village?”
“Just drove here,” Zhang Chuanshi answered instinctively, not understanding. Then he asked, “My lord, is something wrong?”
She didn’t answer, and asked instead, “Had you ever been to Goutou Village before?”
“Never.” He shook his head with a look of distaste. “I used to do business in the city...”
Backed by Paperman Zhang and dealing with the bureau, he had lived a comfortable life. Why would he go out of his way to a backwater like this?
“Never been, never been.” He shook his head repeatedly.
“Then was anyone with us when we came?” Zhao Fusheng asked again.
“No.” Zhang Chuanshi looked blank, then said oddly, “It was just you and me on the road. Who else would there be?”
Before he finished, his face changed.
Oh no!
Zhang Chuanshi was no fool either.
Without a few clever tricks he couldn’t have dealt with Paperman Zhang and profited from it.
After answering Zhao Fusheng’s two questions, he finally realized what was wrong.
He had never been to Goutou Village in Wu’an Town. On his own he could never have reached it, so someone familiar with the local roads must have been guiding them all the way.
And Wu Liyou’s father had set out three days ago to report the case in town. By the timeline, he should have been taken to the county by people from the town, and Zhao Fusheng had decided to handle the ghost case, which led to their trip.
But now a living person had vanished into thin air, and he and Zhao Fusheng seemed to have lost all memory of him.
“...”
Zhang Chuanshi’s hands began to shake.
He thought of the shavings strewn all over Wu Liren’s mansion, of the dead skin Zhao Fusheng had torn from his own face.
The ghost had probably appeared long ago. Wu Dajing’s disappearance now probably meant he had already been harmed by the ghost, and after his death everyone seemed to have had their memories of him erased.
This... this ghost was fierce!
“My lord...”
Zhang Chuanshi’s face crumpled; he wanted to urge her to leave right away.
Zhao Fusheng said calmly, “Wipe away those tears. Now that we’ve run into its rule, running won’t get us anywhere. We can only face it head-on.”
Wu Liyou still didn’t know of his father’s death, and this wasn’t the time to reveal it.
The priority now was to figure out the malignant ghost’s origin and its killing rule, so she’d know how to deal with it when it appeared again.
“Wu Shaochun, carry the bedding in. Wu Liyou, find two women to take the quilt apart. Be careful and don’t damage what’s inside.”
Wu Shaochun, honest and bold, nodded. Wu Liyou had no idea what kind of riddle Zhao Fusheng and Zhang Chuanshi had just been trading. The villagers weren’t really stupid, but their daily work was heavy and they worried about taxes and harvests all year round, and their brains refused to spend energy on things that didn’t concern them, so they’d missed the important signals.
He called his wife and two sisters-in-law to help.
An oil lamp had been lit in the room, which was rare. The floor had been swept and the cabinets scrubbed, with water marks not yet fully dry.
The three women gingerly spread the quilt on the bed, took scissors, and began cutting the stitches from three sides.
Zhang Chuanshi hovered anxiously beside Zhao Fusheng.
At first he had looked down on Zhao Fusheng as a naive fool who’d been deceived into walking toward her own death.
After being outmaneuvered by her, he had resented her.
After she burned down Paperman Zhang’s house, he had come to fear her, and after she handled the Beggars’ Alley case alone, that fear had deepened into dread.
Now that he was marked by a ghost and likely to die an unnatural death, Zhao Fusheng, who had dragged him into it, had become his only lifeline, and he stuck close to her.
Zhao Fusheng ignored him, entered the room and picked out a corner to stand in.
She turned and hadn’t yet called anyone when Zhang Chuanshi had already carried over a stool. “Please sit here, my lord.”
Zhao Fusheng sat. Zhang Chuanshi, very attentive, said, “I’ll ask if the Wu family has a small table and an extra lamp for you.”
“Mm,” Zhao Fusheng agreed. “Go.”
Having received her permission, Zhang Chuanshi left, delighted.
Before long things were brought in. The women, while working, kept glancing this way, and when they saw the lamp lit on the small table, pain showed in their eyes, but none of them dared speak.
Zhang Chuanshi stayed at Zhao Fusheng’s side as she bent her head and reached into her sleeve. A moment later she pulled out a scroll.
“Even on the road you don’t forget to read case files. This is true diligence in governing. Our Wan’an County...”
Zhao Fusheng ignored his flattery, drew a deep breath, and slowly unrolled the scroll.
Her pupils contracted.
Pasted inside the case scroll were three skin scabs of different sizes. Two joined seamlessly; the third lay unevenly, as if stuck on in a hurry.
As the scroll opened, the memory disturbed by the ghost resurfaced in her mind!
Magistrate Pang leading Wu Dajing into the bureau, bringing up Wu Datong, then his “son,” her ear itching, her tearing off the first scab, then noticing the oddity and deciding on the spur of the moment to bring the case scroll.
She had been worried back then that she would later be interfered with by the ghost and lose her memory, and this precaution had indeed been a great help!
Afterward she had overruled everyone to come to Goutou Village. On the road Wu Dajing had talked about the village’s past, ghost's breath had appeared on him, he’d nearly been killed by the ghost, and she’d used the ghost arm to drive it back for the moment.
...
All kinds of memories surfaced.
After they reached Goutou Village, the villagers, lured by tax relief, had scrambled to provide clues, and said Wu Liren was born on the thirty-first of the seventh month of year 206 of the Great Han.
These words overturned part of Wu Dajing’s account, and in his panic he had publicly mentioned the birth date of Wu Datong’s “eldest son,” and what mattered most was that this infant’s birth had been unusual.
(He had said the baby neither cried nor laughed, its body was cold as a dead person’s, yet it still struggled and wriggled.)
Recalling this description now, she felt he had been describing a malignant ghost.
A malignant ghost, a “living” ghost cut from the belly of a dead person.
After saying this, Wu Dajing seemed to have broken a ghost’s lethal taboo and was killed instantly.
His body had burst apart, skin fragments flying, and even Zhao Fusheng had been touched by a trace of the yin energy.
At that moment she had torn off this largest fragment and pasted it onto the case scroll.
After recalling the past, Zhao Fusheng let out a long sigh. With her memory back, she had more clues.
Her gaze fell on the human skin pasted in the scroll, and her eyes gradually darkened.
What could now be said for sure was that Wu Datong’s “eldest son,” because his mother had been abducted, was fated to be a child who couldn’t see the light of day.
Assuming this child, cut alive from a dead woman’s belly, was born a ghost, Zhao Fusheng could now label its killing rule with several traits.
Shadow, invisibility, unable to bear light; its very existence was taboo, and mentioning it was equivalent to voluntarily stepping into the ghost’s perception.
Unlike the malignant ghost she controlled, which “blessed” and then took lives, this ghost made you scratch yourself each time it was mentioned, after which large amounts of skin flaked off.
In the end the ghost claimed the life: the person burst, and after that person died, everyone else’s memories of them became distorted, confused, even completely forgotten.
This ghost’s rule was truly formidable, altering people’s perception and memory.
If Zhao Fusheng hadn’t been suspicious and careful by nature, with even a little carelessness she might have died without ever knowing how.
She next thought of the oddities she’d seen while examining Wu Liren’s house tonight.
According to the villagers, Wu Liren was rich and powerful with many sons.
But once she entered the mansion, she’d found many rooms seemingly unoccupied for a long time, and in every room she’d found different skin shavings, apparently of different ages.
Though the villagers insisted Wu Liren’s sons often went out and about, Zhao Fusheng wasn’t distracted by those trivial side clues.
No matter what, she held to one understanding: this ghost had the formidable power to alter perception and memory.
With that, the truth surfaced: Wu Liren had been harmed by the ghost long ago, and the twenty-seven sons he had fathered had died one after another over the years.
But the ghost’s formidable rule had done its work, and the villagers had never sensed any ghost in the village and were completely oblivious.
Wu Liren himself probably hadn’t realized either, kept in the dark.
Thinking that Wu Liren had lived with a ghost for years and finally died by its hand, Zhao Fusheng shivered.
Worried her memory might be affected again, she was about to look up and tell Zhang Chuanshi to find her a brush when she heard a woman scream not far away.
“Ah!”
With a clang, the scissors fell onto the wooden footstool. The other two sisters-in-law leaned over, about to speak, and the woman said, trembling, “There’s... there’s something...”
As she spoke, she plucked up her courage and lifted a corner of the quilt, and the other two women, seeing what was inside, gasped.
“My lord.”
Zhao Fusheng nodded, put the scroll back in her sleeve, and strode toward the bed.
The three women of Wu Liyou’s house were scared out of their wits after seeing the skin in the quilt, and Zhao Fusheng pushed them aside with an arm. “Move.”
She stepped up to look. Most of the stitches on the quilt had been removed.
The other two women had been more honest and had kept their heads down unpicking thread, never daring to reach into the quilt.
The third woman, though, was a little sharper. When she heard the quilt had come from Wu Liren’s house, she thought of how Wu Liren’s was a famous rich household in the village, rolling in wealth.
And Zhao Fusheng had asked them to take the quilt apart, so there might be something valuable hidden inside.
Greed rising, she had worked through most of the stitching, and seeing her sisters-in-law dutifully working, she couldn’t help reaching into the quilt, and her hand had touched a cold, slimy skin.
At that touch her instincts warned her of danger, and she screamed.
When Zhao Fusheng stepped over, she looked at the woman and barked, “Shut up!”
Her gaze was sharp, and the woman’s little scheme seemed to have nowhere to hide. Frightened, she covered her face and cried.
The two sisters-in-law stood bewildered, crowding around her.
“Get out,” Zhao Fusheng said, not bothering to console her.
The human skin in the quilt bore on the ghost case, and the ghost case bore on her life. That woman had pawed at it blindly, and Zhao Fusheng hoped she hadn’t damaged the joined skin.
She ordered Zhang Chuanshi, “Bring the lamp.”
Zhang Chuanshi had of course also seen through the woman’s little scheme.
If Zhao Fusheng hadn’t needed him for something, he’d have given her two slaps.
He came forward with the lamp, and the two women led the sobbing woman out.
Wu Liyou, waiting outside, hurried to ask, and after a few low whispers, soon the sounds of angry scolding, thumping, and a woman’s soft weeping carried into the room.
“They’re putting on a show for you, my lord,” Zhang Chuanshi said bitterly.
Zhao Fusheng shook her head and carefully picked out the remaining threads.
The women had already done most of the work, so the rest came out easily.
She lifted off the upper sheet and pulled down the cover cloth, revealing two layers of padding sewn from thin hemp cloth inside the quilt.
Zhao Fusheng carefully lifted the thick upper pad, and a layer of thin, soft human skin sandwiched between lay before her eyes!
Because the woman had pawed it carelessly, one side of the skin was a little wrinkled, but the woman, afraid of being discovered, hadn’t moved much, and the skin was undamaged.
This joined human skin was the same width and length as the quilt. Zhao Fusheng estimated it about 1.5 meters wide and nearly 2 meters long.
It was different from ordinary scabs: smoother, almost silky, its texture far finer than scratched-off skin.
What surprised Zhao Fusheng and Zhang Chuanshi most was that a few characters had been hurriedly written on one corner of the skin.
The characters weren’t large. By their position, they lay in the middle of the quilt’s width, slanted and twisted, rather strange.
At first neither of them recognized what the characters said.
Zhao Fusheng didn’t rush to make them out. She mimed it out, then said, “The quilt was Wu Liren’s. If he slept on the bed with the quilt up to his neck, he’d only need to push a finger a little to shift the stitches and reveal this line of characters.”
From where he lay, the characters would be right in front of his face, so he could see them.
That is to say, “These characters may have been written by Wu Liren.”
She bent to see the characters more clearly.
They looked as if pricked with a needle, ink seeping inside to leave faint marks.
And the characters were mirrored, as if written by Wu Liren while he pried the quilt open.
Thinking this, she reached out and lifted the human-skin quilt.
At the sight, Zhang Chuanshi’s back prickled, and he felt it was both ominous and wrong. He recoiled, and his back began to itch to the bone.
He hadn’t yet found the key that would unlock his memory and couldn’t recall all of Wu Dajing’s death, but he knew the village had a ghost and its killing method had to do with “skin.”
He trembled, but remembered Zhao Fusheng’s vengeful, grudge-keeping nature.
If he backed off now, someday there would come a time when he’d wish for death.
At that thought, this fear outweighed even his dread of the ghost, and he raised the lamp and stepped forward to light up the human-skin paper.
With the human-skin quilt lifted, seen from the front the characters were now clear.
They read:
There's a ghost in my house.
THERE'S A GHOST IN MY HOUSE!!!
