What Hangs Above the Door

When day came Wang did not go to the garden room. He sat in his own study with the charm in his lap and waited for his hands to stop shaking, and they did not stop.

His wife sent to ask if he would eat. He sent word that he would not. He was watching the door of his study as though it, too, might open of itself, and the charm was still unhung, crumpled where his fists had clutched it.

At midmorning there was a soft footstep outside, and the woman's voice, gentler than it had ever been, calling his name. It was the voice he had loved, the voice that had made him feel less alone than he had in years, and hearing it now made him sick to his stomach.

He did not answer. The footsteps stopped in the passage. He heard her sigh, a small, patient sound, and then she went away, and the quiet she left behind her felt more dangerous than her voice.

That afternoon he ran, not to his father's gate for shelter, but through the whole length of the city to the temple where the Taoist had stood. He found him at last by the western wall, scattering grain to the pigeons, unhurried as ever. Master, Wang said, and could not say more.

The Taoist listened to the whole wretched tale without interrupting, without even blinking, as though he had heard it all before and was only waiting for the part where the young man finally understood. When Wang had finished, he nodded.

I knew you had not hung the charm, he said. A man who hides a thing from himself cannot be saved by paper. Paper only tells a truth that a man has already decided not to look at. You decided not to look, and so it looked at you first.

Then take it back, Wang begged. Take it out of my house, take it out of my life, and I will give you whatever I have. The Taoist rose and brushed the crumbs from his robe. It is too near now, he said. It has eaten one of your nights already; it knows the taste of your house. But there is one thing I can do.

He broke from his sleeve a little charm of bamboo slips and folded paper, no larger than a man's thumb. Hang this above your bedroom door, he said, and when the thing comes for you tonight, do not look at its face. It wants you to look. Whatever happens, keep your eyes upon the charm, and do not speak, and do not call out.

Wang took it and bowed until his forehead nearly touched the ground. He ran home through the streets and did not slow his feet once, not even when a cartman shouted at him for running under his horse's nose, not even when a neighbor called out after him by name.

He hung the little charm above his door with his own trembling hands, and tested it, and tested it again, as though he could make it more certain by touching it. Then he lay down upon his bed and waited for the dark.

He had never in his life been so afraid of an evening. He thought of his sick wife, sleeping in the other wing of the house, and he wondered, with a coldness he could not bear, whether she had slept beside the thing all along without knowing.

The afternoon drew itself out, shadow by shadow, across his study wall. The charm hung above the door and said nothing. Wang watched it, and the charm watched nothing at all, and between them they waited for the night that would not be put off any longer.