The Night It Came

Darkness fell early that night, as though the year itself had drawn a blanket over the window and pulled it tight. Wang lay with his eyes fixed on the little charm above the door and did not let them move, though his eyes burned.

He heard the outer gate open. He heard the slow footsteps cross the court, and he counted them, because counting was the only thing he could do. They were not the quick light steps of the girl; they dragged, as though the thing wearing her dress were learning how to walk in it for the first time.

It stopped outside his door. He heard its breathing, which was not quite breathing, and then he heard her voice, very low, saying his name as though she were hurt and had come to him for comfort.

He did not answer. He kept his eyes fixed on the little paper charm, and he repeated the Taoist's words in his head: do not look, do not speak, do not call out. The Taoist had been right: the thing wanted him to look. He could feel the wanting in the air, like a hand held out in the dark to be taken.

The door burst inward. He heard it splinter, but he did not look. He heard the thing enter the room. He heard it cross the floor toward him, and the boards creaked under a weight that was not a woman's weight at all.

Then he heard a sound he had not expected: a scream. It was the thing's own scream, not his. It had struck at him out of the dark and found nothing to strike, and the charm had bitten where it stood. He heard the flesh of it tear, and a heavy fall, and then a scrambling sound as of something fleeing on hands and knees.

He did not lift his eyes even then. He lay as the Taoist had commanded, eyes on the charm, until the scrambling sound faded down the passage and out through the broken window. Only then, when the room was silent, did he let his breath come back.

At last he dared to turn his head. On the floor, torn and blackened, lay what had been left of the painted skin. The face was split clean down the middle, and inside it there was nothing but old smoke, and the smell of a river that had been dead for a hundred years.

Wang crawled off the bed and did not stop crawling until he had reached the door. He called for his family; he called until the serving girl came running with a lantern, and the light showed him what the charm had not quite finished.

The thing had not died. It had escaped out through the broken window, leaving its painted face behind it like a snake leaving an old skin in the grass. And in its flight, it had found, on its way out, the one person in the house who had trusted it without a single question.

They found Wang's younger brother at the threshold of the garden room, and what they found was not something a lantern could make whole. The boy had been drawn there by the woman's voice, as Wang himself had once been drawn, and the voice had not stopped singing when the thing took him.

Wang did not scream. He stood in the passage and looked, and his face was the face of a man who understands at last what he has done. The horror of that house was never that the demon had come for Wang. It was that Wang had let it in, and the house had paid for his kindness.

He went down on his knees in the cold passage and said nothing, because there was nothing left to say. Outside, the cocks were beginning to crow for a morning that would never be the morning he had woken to the day before.