Finally, the ghost-bearers and the crowd stood still and set the folklorist down. They unwound him from the enfolding sheet, and when his face emerged it was deathly pale. He kicked himself free from the sheet, brushed down his clothes and hair and told the village elder, ‘This is purely a re-enactment. It’s not real. I research folk customs. I am not a ghost.’
‘Of course it’s not real,’ said the old man. ‘If it were real it wouldn’t be like this at all. It wouldn’t be finished yet.’
‘I’m a little out of breath. I almost suffocated in there.’
‘It’s not finished,’ repeated the old man. ‘We have to put you in the urn, and then everyone has to hit you once, until you die.’
‘This far is fine. It’s been quite realistic enough.’
The folklorist heaved a sigh of relief, sat down on the urn’s edge and stared around him at the stupefied-looking villagers. The crowd drifted away reluctantly. Feeling strangely weak, he remained there until the moon rose over the distant chimney of the brickmaker’s kiln.
Gradually the people dispersed until finally only the scarecrow by the paddies was visible, rustling in the sobbing wind. His straw hat was gone; someone must have knocked it off during the confusion.
How could this have happened? The folklorist patted his throat, which felt constricted after the ordeal; it was still hard for him to breathe. He struck the lip of the urn a few times with the flat of his hand, then stood up. Though he had been unlucky to be named as the ghost, the incident once written up would make for his most outstanding piece of research yet.
I heard that it happened on the day he left Eight Pines.
As he walked through the lanes with his rucksack, several villagers bade him farewell from their dark, humid homes. He couldn’t hear what they said exactly, but he knew that they were words of parting. Lost in his own melancholy thoughts, he walked along the unsurfaced roads towards the main highway. The road was slippery with melted snow which had now refrozen. The wind was blowing very hard that day, and he had to zip up the collar of his anorak and walk sideways. As he reached the edge of the village, he took a last look at the longfeng urn. Over the course of one night, the water inside had frozen into blue-tinged ice. It was then that he scented the acrid smell of melting tin in the air, a curdled odour streaming from the urn, tainting his face and luggage. He lifted his head and looked around him. The old man who had recently mended the urn was already quite far away.
The pottery-mender was walking along the road ahead. Flame flickered from his kit bag, floating above the road like a firefly. The reappearance of the old man made the folklorist aware of a mysterious circle of events. All of a sudden he wanted to catch up with him, wanted to grasp the substance of that circle. Quickening his pace, he took the same gravelled road. He judged the old man to be about 300 metres away, from the length and speed of his stride, so the folklorist ought to be able to catch him up in five minutes or less.
He broke into a jog, but soon realized that the gap between him and the old man wasn’t decreasing in the slightest. It remained at about 300 metres and this bewildered him. He kept running, but his forehead became beaded with sweat and his legs felt limp. Assailed by doubts and suspicions, he was staggered along like a worn-out old mare. Then, faintly, he heard a call resounding down the road, from somewhere out of sight, indistinct and echoing:
‘Wulin. Wulin. Wulin. ’
The folklorist stood in the middle of the road and looked around in every direction, but except for the old man’s flame ahead of him, there was nothing to be seen. The village behind him seemed deserted. On the brink of desperation, the folklorist turned on his heel and sent a loud cry echoing up to the skies: ‘Wulin! ‘ He listened to his cry reverberate across the desolate fields and at virtually the same time, a powerful current of air pressed in on him from behind, closely followed by a blunt object. It sent him flying a little distance before he sprawled to the ground.
The lorry driver was a young man. He recalled sounding his horn from a long distance away, but the pedestrian stood blankly in the road without making the slightest movement. The driver had taken him for a hitchhiker, but he didn’t want to give him a lift. He had driven on believing that, like other hitchhikers, this one would move out of harm’s way in the end. But there was something wrong with this man: even when the front of the lorry hit him and he was sent soaring, he’d looked astounded, like an unwieldy bird frightened into flight. The terrified driver shifted into a higher gear instead of stopping and fled the scene of the accident as quickly as he could. But when he had driven all the way to the noisy, flourishing city, his own feelings of guilt began to oppress him. After parking his lorry in front of the county public security bureau, he jumped out and entered the building.
The officers sent to examine the scene of the accident walked along the road, the young driver at their head.
They all moved with their heads down, looking for traces of blood. Dusk was falling on the road and its gravelled surface was flooded with clean, white light. Neither blood nor body was evident.
The driver told the policemen, ‘This is really odd. I’m sure I hit him around here. I don’t understand why we can’t find anything.’
Someone suggested, ‘Maybe the villagers carried him back? We should have a look there.’
They turned onto a narrow unsurfaced road and walked towards Eight Pines. As they reached the edge of the village, the driver cried out suddenly, ‘His rucksack! That’s his rucksack over there!’
They saw a dark brown bag lying by a large urn. As they ran towards it, they began to make out the two legs protruding from the urn, while the rest of the body was curled up inside.
The dead man’s eyes were open. From his clothing and appearance it was easy to identify him as an academic. His face was pale and cold as ice, and frozen on his brow was an expression of astonishment.
‘In the urn?’ murmured the driver. ‘How did he get into the urn?’
The police officers, all experienced men, opened the dead man’s rucksack. Besides his clothing, towel, toothbrush, toothpaste and Thermos, they found a notebook with a plastic cover, the pages of which were covered in dense writing. The most notable circumstance was that a piece of foil fell out from between its pages. Though it was torn and damaged, a drawing of a ghoul could be discerned on the paper backing, along with the word ‘ghost’ written in large red letters beneath.
‘"Ghost!"‘ said the driver. ‘He was a ghost!’
I knew the folklorist in question. His death was certainly shrouded in mystery. But at his memorial service, I heard another folklorist murmur to himself, ‘It’s how the ceremony ends, that’s all.’
The Private Banquet
The last long-distance bus reached the town of Maqiao at dusk, and it was at that point that the passengers’ fears were realized: the bus broke down. Fortunately, it broke down at Memorial Arch, only fifty or sixty metres from its destination, and the driver decided to park the bus where it had failed. It turned out, however, that there was also a problem with the switch that opened the bus doors. The driver began by patiently, cool-headedly, pressing one button after another, but his movements became gradually more erratic, until he hit out at the controls with abandon. The bus passengers began to get up and look towards the driver’s seat and those at the back asked those further up front, ‘Why doesn’t he want to open the doors?’ And those up front answered, ‘It’s not that he doesn’t want to. It’s because the doors won’t open.’