The Exorcism

In the gray of dawn they went together to find the Taoist. Wang's father led him by the arm, for Wang could no longer walk straight, and his brother's body was carried behind them on a wooden door that had been taken from its hinges.

The Taoist was sitting on the steps of his hut, washing his rice in a wooden bowl. He did not seem surprised to see them. He did not even look up until he had rinsed the grain a second time. It has come back to you, he said quietly. I told you it was too near.

Wang could not speak. He could only point at the burden the men carried, and then at his own breast, and weep without sound, the tears running down his face as though they had nothing at all to do with him.

The Taoist set down his bowl at last. I am not a murderer, he said, and I will not pretend to be one. But the thing you took in is old, and it feeds on kindness, and it will not stop because one house has taught it better. If I do not take it now, it will take the next house, and the next, until there is no village left on that road that will shelter a traveler weeping by a stone.

He took a small bronze bell from his girdle and rang it once, softly, as a man rings a neighbor's door at a late hour, not wanting to startle the household. The sound hung on the cold morning air. Somewhere in the ruined end of the garden, something answered, far off and wrong.

They went back together, the Taoist walking between the two grieving men, the bearers following behind with their burden. No one spoke. The road had never looked so ordinary, and no one trusted its ordinariness for a moment.

At the gate of Wang's house the demon rose from the shadow of a cedar. It had put the painted face back on, and it was nearly beautiful again, nearly the girl who had wept on the stone. Only the mouth would not close, and the eyes, when it turned them, were not the eyes of a person.

The Taoist rang the bell again, and the face came away, peeling from the skull beneath it like a damp cloth. He did not strike at the body; he struck at the face itself, and the body fell to the ground like a coat dropped by a traveler. It burned on the earth with a green fire that smelled of old paper and dry rivers and long-closed graves.

When the fire went out of itself, there was nothing left but a light patch of ash upon the ground. The Taoist bent and drew from the center of the ash a small human heart, still beating, still warm. He wrapped it in a cloth and put it away inside his robe.

Wang's father asked, in a voice that shook, what the thing meant. The Taoist said: It had learned to wear a man's face because it had stolen a man's heart. A heart like that cannot be buried in earth; it would only grow roots in the dark and come back up. It must be kept where it can be watched, and so I will keep it.

Then he bowed, and did not say goodbye, and was gone down the lane between the houses. No one in that village ever saw him again, though for years afterward the children on that road would not go near the poplars after dark.

Wang lived out his years, but he never again sheltered a stranger on the road. When travelers wept beside his gate, he sent them on to the next village with a handful of rice and a quick word. He was kind still, but his kindness had learned a boundary.

He had learned, too late, the oldest lesson of all: that the most beautiful thing a lonely house can take in is sometimes the very thing that eats it, and that beauty, in the dark, is not the same as innocence.