IBGSW Chapter 71
Another Death
Mentioning the malignant ghost’s existence triggered the curse, and the more detailed, true-to-life, and specific the telling, the easier it was to trigger.
Zhao Fusheng was now entangled in a ghost curse. If she couldn’t solve the Goutou Village case, she might well die here.
She pinched the incomplete paper figurine between her fingers and turned it back and forth, trying to work out what exactly it was.
The figurine was made of scabs, and the scabs had been assembled from skin she had torn from her own body. In the end, after she recorded the birth date of Wu Datong’s eldest son on them, they had transformed by themselves into the rough shape of a paper figurine.
The change puzzled her, but she was certain that something very strange had happened to this human-skin husk.
When the ghost arm had helped her find the scroll earlier, it had suddenly revived and refused to let go. Perhaps it had not been grabbing at the scroll at all, but at this figurine.
She couldn’t yet make sense of cause and effect, but she was sure the human-skin husk was bound up with the ghost case, and having taken on the ghost’s aura, it could very well turn into a malevolent entity.
She thought for a moment, tucked the figurine into the scroll, folded the scroll back up, hole and all, and stuffed it into her other sleeve.
With her memory restored, her disrupted perception recovered too.
An old brush lay by the foot of the table, and she bent and picked it up.
The sounds of the vanished Wu family returned. The aroma of cooking and the noise of people at work drifted one by one into her ears.
She called, “Wu Liyou, send someone in to tidy up.”
Hearing her, Wu Liyou answered from outside and shouted a woman’s name.
Before long two women came in, uneasy. At the sight of the messy table they were startled, and when their eyes fell on Zhao Fusheng’s face, streaked with grease and blood, they jumped. “My lord...”
“I had a sudden nosebleed. Bring me some hot water. I want to wash my face.”
Then she glanced at her sleeves and frowned. “Find me a change of clothes. I need to change out of these as well.”
The two women nodded repeatedly. Zhao Fusheng added, “Take that bedding away too. It’s no use to me now.”
At this, both women’s eyes lit up, and each rushed to be the one to claim the bedding.
Wu Liyou, standing by, feared the two would fight and make a spectacle in front of an honored guest. He shot them a warning look. “Fetch water for the lord to wash first, then wipe the table. We’ll split the rest later.”
The two women agreed. Zhao Fusheng washed her face and hands and changed clothes, feeling a little more comfortable.
She had a clear picture of this ghost case now, so she didn’t stay in the room, but stepped outside.
Outside, Wu Shaochun and the others hadn’t gone. They had stayed to help kill and pluck chickens at the Wu house, and when they saw her come out they greeted her warmly.
Wu Liyou’s household had set up several large torches that lit the courtyard bright as day. Zhang Chuanshi was nowhere in sight.
The old rascal had probably heard her say that acting alone might actually keep him alive, and had gone to hide somewhere.
She had no use for him at the moment and didn’t look for him. As soon as she appeared, Wu Shaochun and the others greeted her cheerfully. “Finished with your work, my lord?”
She nodded and walked toward them.
“I just heard from Uncle Liyou that you had a nosebleed?” Wu Shaochun held a chicken by the head in one hand and the feet in the other, turning the plucked bird over the fire.
The unplucked down burned and gave off puffs of scorched smell, which actually made Zhao Fusheng hungry.
“Yes.” She nodded.
Wu Shaochun said, “You should be careful.”
His hands were quick, and as he turned the bird he swallowed some spit and told Zhao Fusheng, “Our village’s feng shui isn’t very good. Lots of people have this bleeding problem, and once the bleeding starts, they don’t...”
His mouth had run ahead and nearly spoken an ill-omened word. Realizing it, his face went white, and the chicken in his hand nearly dropped into the fire.
He caught himself in time, bit the tip of his own tongue hard, and his eyes swiveled. “You lost some blood. Ten eggs wouldn’t make it up. I’ll have my aunt boil you extra eggs later, so you can eat plenty.”
As he finished, the woman coming out with the bedding happened to hear. She glared at him fiercely but dared not make a sound.
Zhao Fusheng smiled and didn’t take the little episode to heart.
As long as the ghost couldn’t kill her in a single blow, she wasn’t afraid of it. What was a little blood?
She asked, “Since quite a few people in your village have this seven-orifice bleeding trouble, tell me, how long do those who bleed usually last from the first symptoms until death?”
“You’ve asked the right person, my lord,” Wu Shaochun said with a smile.
His mother shot him a sideways glare. He grinned awkwardly and said softly, “My father died of this complaint, too.”
The young man was shrewd and good at reading faces.
He could see that Zhao Fusheng wasn’t superstitious about the blood, so he summoned his nerve. “Decades ago, quite a few people in the village already bled to death.” Seeing she didn’t scold him, he went on, “At first everyone thought it was some illness. The village doctor prescribed medicine to clear heat and relieve fever, and nothing worked. Later, more died, and we asked a spirit-medium to read flowers and water, and that didn’t help either.”
Taking the hint, Wu Liyou brought out a long bench and set it beside Zhao Fusheng. She stepped back half a pace and sat down.
A fire had been lit here, and when the others saw Wu Shaochun chatting with Zhao Fusheng, they gathered around too, curious but timid.
“Afterward there was nothing to be done.” Wu Shaochun finished roasting that chicken and picked up another. “Either way, once the bleeding starts, your days are numbered.”
When he finished, his mother glared at him again. He ducked his head, then looked at Zhao Fusheng, and seeing that she wasn’t angry, a weight lifted from his heart.
“From the first bleeding until death, how long does it generally take?” Zhao Fusheng asked.
Wu Shaochun looked at his mother. She held a chicken, not knowing what to do.
But Zhao Fusheng’s tax relief had emboldened her. She thought and said, “It was better years ago. These last years it seems faster.”
Afraid she hadn’t made herself clear, she hastily added, “Earliest of all, my aunt also fell ill, back when I was newly married. It started with nosebleeds, then she coughed blood. From the first sign to the end, it must have been a little over a month.”
“Right.” Wu Liyou, who had come over carrying a cleaver and a chopping board, also put in a word. “It was about the same when my grandmother died. I remember it was around the seventh or eighth month. One night she was too hot to sleep, and at midnight she suddenly had a nosebleed. It gave my father a terrible fright.”
Zhao Fusheng’s memory was restored, and at his mention of Wu Dajing’s mother she was suddenly interested. “What day of the eighth month did the symptoms appear?”
Hearing this, Wu Shaochun gave Zhao Fusheng a slightly odd look.
Wu Liyou wasn’t so sharp. He didn’t notice that she seemed to have a precise grip on the onset of his grandmother’s illness, even seemed to know it better than he did. He casually handed the chopping board to Wu Shaochun’s mother, who set it down and began chopping meat.
Amid the clunking of the cleaver, Wu Liyou thought for a moment. “Now that you put it that way, I remember. I think it was the first of the eighth month.”
Memories decades old had long been sealed away, but at Zhao Fusheng’s slight prompting, he recalled a key point. “The moon was very round that night. Our Ligong, my third brother, that is, insisted on looking at the moon and said there was a person in it. My grandmother scolded him and said you must not point at the moon, because it cuts off your ears.1”
He reminisced, nostalgia on his face. “My father laughed and said Ligong had seen wrong. How could there be a person in the moon?”
“My grandmother’s face didn’t look good then. She said children’s eyes are pure and can see shadows grown-ups can’t.” Once the floodgate of memory opened, everything that had happened rushed back to Wu Liyou. “But then she said there is supposed to be someone in the moon, Chang’e lives there...2” As he spoke, he scratched his side. “Before she finished, I saw two streams of blood run from her nose.”
The family hadn’t thought much of it at the time. Wu Dajing took it for his old mother being parched and overheated, and next day he went into the hills, gathered some self-heal herb, and boiled a broth for her to drink.
The first two days it didn’t help. Then the nosebleeds came back, heavier and heavier, until she was coughing blood without stopping, with blood from her ears and eyes as well.
“There was another symptom. She seemed to get sores on her skin, and they itched,” Wu Liyou said. “By the sixteenth of the ninth month, my grandmother said she wouldn’t make it and told the family to prepare for the funeral.”
The coffin and shroud were ready-made.
In this age, a woman’s dowry at marriage included a coffin, which sat in her home from youth until old age. So any household that kept to custom wasn’t flustered even when a death came.
Zhao Fusheng nodded and asked, “Before your grandmother died, did she say anything?” She remembered Wu Liyou mentioning that his third brother Wu Ligong had seen a “figure” in the moon; perhaps Wu Ligong had seen a ghost.
“Now that you ask, I do remember,” Wu Liyou said, his eyes lighting up. “Right before she passed she was shouting that a ghost had come to claim her life.”
As he said it, his scalp seemed to itch to the bone, and he scratched hard several times. A clump of hair tore loose, dragging a fingernail-sized flake of scalp with it.
“A ghost claiming her life?” Zhao Fusheng already knew the truth, but the sight still made her scalp crawl.
At some point the crackling of firewood in front of them had quieted, and thick black smoke rose above the roaring flames.
The dark clouds covering the moon parted, and a full round moon appeared above.
Moonlight poured down like water.
It was the eighth month and still warm, and though the nights in Goutou Village cooled somewhat, it was still hot around a burning woodpile. But within moments an inexplicable chill came over them, and the people around the fire instinctively edged closer to it.
The instant the clouds parted and the moon emerged, Zhao Fusheng, as if possessed, raised her head.
It wasn’t yet mid-eighth-month, but tonight’s moon was strangely round and bright, and she recalled Wu Liyou’s words: on the first of the eighth month in year 205 of the Great Han, his grandmother had been looking at the moon at night, and the young Wu Ligong had seen a human shape in it.
Perhaps influenced by that story, she looked at the bright moon and indeed seemed to see a pair of blood-red eyes flash within it.
A faint black shadow poked its head out of the moon, cold, numb eyes staring icily at the Wu family.
Hoo... hoo-hoo...
An owl called in the distance. The hollow sat low, and the echo lingered. Goosebumps rose along Zhao Fusheng’s neck and arms, and she snapped back to herself. When she looked again, the moon was wreathed in hazy mist, with no figure at all.
Just a false alarm!
Wu Liyou, unaware of her lapse, was still talking. “...She said it was a malignant ghost claiming her life, that retribution had come.”
The feeling of being watched in that moment had been too strong to be an illusion.
She thought of how, while handling the Beggars’ Alley case, she had stood before the Confucian temple, spying, and had instead been spied on by the ghost.
Her heart chilled, and she was certain: the malignant ghost was close by.
Perhaps because the ghost was invisible, or perhaps because everyone’s perception had been disturbed, no one could see it.
Her gaze moved over the faces of Wu Shaochun, Wu Liyou, Wu Shaochun’s mother, and the other villagers helping. Everyone’s expression was lively and real, and all were somewhat familiar, the ones who had led the way earlier.
Where was the ghost?
She forced down her unease and asked, “How do you mean?”
“My lord, you’ve waived the bureau’s taxes and you’re our village’s benefactor. To tell you the truth, back then Wu Datong didn’t handle things right.”
Wu Shaochun’s mother, holding the cleaver and killing the chicken, summoned her courage and put in a word.
“He lost his father young and was poor. At his age no one would marry a daughter to him, so he grew vicious...”
As she spoke, she split the chicken in two with swift, thunking cuts, sliced it into strips, chopped those into chunks, and dropped them into a winnowing basket.
“That wife of his wasn’t come by honestly. My mother-in-law said years ago that he killed someone and took her by force.”
As she spoke, a bead of sweat rolled down the bridge of her nose and landed on the tip. It seemed to itch, and she scratched it hard several times.
Under her nails was either chicken blood or human blood, and it smeared across her nose. A layer of scab flaked off and drifted about the tip of her nose. She tore it off without caring.
“I heard that in the county city there’s some place called Beggars’ Alley...”
At this Zhao Fusheng’s heart stirred, and she interrupted. “Beggars’ Alley?”
“I don’t know,” Wu Shaochun’s mother said, shaking her head. “I’ve never been to the county city in my life. I just heard people say so. They say a whole street there is nothing but beggars and kidnappers, who roam the land doing no honest work and abduct other people’s children to sell.”
As she spoke, a strange intuition rose in Zhao Fusheng: Wu Shaochun’s mother seemed quiet but might say something useful.
This Ghost of Oblivion was very powerful and held control over perception. She had to prepare in advance.
Thinking so, she hastily shook the scroll out of her sleeve and motioned for the woman to go on.
“Many kidnapped people are hidden there for trading. My mother-in-law said Wu Datong’s earlier wife came out of that place.”
“I don’t know if she was surnamed Meng or Shen. Anyway she cried and fought fiercely at first, and everyone in the village had heard about it.”
“We figured, a woman, she resists at first, but once she has a baby she’ll accept her fate. Who knew she wouldn’t make it through.” Wu Shaochun’s mother shook her head and sighed. “Then she died in a hard labor. Aunt Rong told me Wu Datong cut her belly open and took the baby out, but perhaps it was too late, the child had been in the womb a while too long, and it came out a dead baby.”
As she said this, the atmosphere changed.
The wind stopped.
The owl’s call had vanished too, at some point.
The flames of the roaring woodpile were suppressed, and the sinister chill returned.
Wu Shaochun’s mother, unaware that disaster was upon her, kept talking. Zhao Fusheng’s hair stood on end as she felt the ghost’s aura.
She forced down her trembling and looked around.
Beneath Wu Shaochun’s mother’s feet, a shadow was writhing.
In the darkness, a pitch-black head slowly rose out of the shadow, half of it showing, with eyes like a dead fish’s, staring grimly at Zhao Fusheng.
“We thought Wu Datong had lost both mother and child, but Aunt Rong said the baby hadn’t died after all.”
No warmth, no breath, no pulse, no crying or fussing, yet it still moved.
Wu Shaochun’s mother swung her arm mechanically, chopping chicken.
Two streams of bright red blood ran from her nostrils, pouring into her mouth, dripping down her chin and staining her clothes.
The blood gushed like water through two opened sluice gates, spattering onto the chopping board before her.
She didn’t seem to notice and went on. “I heard my husband say that Wu Datong even named the child Wu Liren...”
“Wu Liren!”
Zhao Fusheng was thunderstruck.
And the moment Wu Shaochun’s mother spoke the name, something terrifying happened once more.
Blood gushed from her eyes and ears, and a ghostly shape less than three feet tall climbed onto her back and merged with her shadow.
Then her body burst with a pop.
Wu Shaochun’s mother didn’t even have time to scratch or scream. She died horribly at the ghost’s hands in an instant.
