In the dilapidated gray-brick house, several large wooden chests stood against the walls, bedding spread over them to make beds. Others were gathered in the middle of the room: some served as tables, with a dressing mirror, writing brushes, paints, and the like set on top, and some were used as stools.
Everyone sat on the chests, with troupe master Chang Dafeng in their midst.
“Master, what is the situation in Daliang Village, really, right now?” The man who spoke in that pinched, high voice looked at Chang Dafeng with great deference.
Zhou Yang noted that when Chang Dafeng was away, this same man would accuse him of never doing anything useful all day, only running circles around the village.
“That’s right, Master. Whether we go or stay, we ought to make up our minds,” agreed the broad-faced man with the thick brows, in a muffled voice.
Chang Dafeng was lean, wearing a blue cotton-padded jacket and a dog-fur hat. One earflap hung down; the other was turned up and tied to a button on the crown.
Hearing their questions, and meeting the anxious eyes of his other disciples, he patted both knees with his hands, looking as though he wanted to speak and yet held back.
“Is it… have we really run into a ghost?”
The tall, powerfully built man asked hoarsely. His voice was so hoarse that his words came out slightly blurred, but when he said “run into a ghost,” the anxious atmosphere in the room was like a pot of boiling water into which a ladle of cold water had suddenly been poured—
the whole pot fell instantly silent.
A small room, crowded with six people, and yet a chilling cold still seeped through the dark corners the oil lamp could not reach.
Everyone’s face showed alarm and doubt.
Chang Dafeng tucked his hands into his jacket sleeves and hunched his shoulders.
He gave a heavy “Mm,” which counted as his answer to the big man’s question.
The silence only deepened. Everyone could not help hunching over, pressing closer to one another.
For a while, there was nothing in the room but the rise and fall of breathing.
“Then why aren’t we running? We can’t just sit here waiting to die!” the boy of about twelve or thirteen shouted in terror, tears actually rolling down his face. “My ma and my pa were both eaten by ghosts!
“It’s too scary, I don’t want—”
“Run where?” Chang Dafeng’s eyebrows shot up, and his man’s face—a face oddly like a woman’s—suddenly took on a frightening authority.
His voice rose and drowned out every other sound in the room. “Look at our feet—which of us can run far? Which of us can run away at all?”
At his words, Ding Ling looked down at her feet.
Below her trouser legs, the feet in her straw sandals were frozen red.
Zhou Yang looked at her feet and saw nothing amiss beyond a few chilblains.
But when Ding Ling turned her gaze and he followed it to the others’ feet, he was startled—the feet of these men, in their cloth shoes, looked a size smaller even than Ding Ling’s.
The toes of their shoes were sharply pointed, like the three-inch golden lotus shoes of Qing times.
Chang Dafeng’s feet were even smaller than any of theirs.
“We’re opera folk—which of us doesn’t bind his feet?
“With a pair of little feet like these, run all you like, how many li can you cover?” Chang Dafeng lowered his voice and rebuked the weeping boy, then turned to Ding Ling, sitting in the corner, and said with pointed meaning, “And even if you could run, could you outrun a ghost?”
Ding Ling’s small face went slightly pale. Her hands folded together in fear in front of her belly, and she lowered her head, not daring to look at Master Chang’s face.
“Besides, I still can’t be sure what kind of ghost has gotten into this village.
“So first we’ll try a method—a method to see that ghost…
“to see whether it’s a ghost or a kui,” Chang Dafeng said in a low voice.
Zhou Yang’s heart stirred.
The falsetto man immediately asked the very question he wanted to ask: “If it’s a ghost, what does that mean?
“And if it’s a kui, what does that mean?”
“If it’s a kui, we put on a ghost-and-god play—three days and three nights of it!
“We sing until the play reaches the gods, until the play takes possession, and that will scare the kui away, and then we can go home safe and sound!” Chang Dafeng declared this vigorously, then suddenly gave a cold laugh. “If it’s a ghost, we still put on a ghost-and-god play—
“never mind how long we sing; let’s treat it as the last performance of our lives.
“When it’s done, we each sit and wait to die.”
The falsetto man’s face twitched. He sighed and closed his eyes.
“So ghosts and kui are not the same. A ghost sounds a good deal more formidable than a kui.
“After all, with a kui there’s still a way to scare it off—‘sing until the play reaches the gods, until the play takes possession’—but that method is useless against a ghost.
“When the people of an opera troupe meet a real ghost, all they can do is wait to die.” Listening to them, Zhou Yang turned it over in his mind. “Then what exactly is a ‘ghost’ like? What outward signs and behavior does it have?
“And what is a ‘kui’ like?”
As he was turning this over, he heard Chang Dafeng speak again: “Now I’m coming to the most important thing. Little Stone, if you keep crying here, there’s a ferule waiting for you!”
With that, Chang Dafeng drew a black-lacquered ruler from the chest behind him.
At the sight of it, the boy, Little Stone, who had been crying without pause, clamped his mouth shut and gritted his teeth. Though tears still circled in his eyes, he did not dare let another drop fall.
Clearly that ferule had taught him a lesson he would never forget.
His manner seemed to satisfy Chang Dafeng.
The troupe master nodded, lowered his eyelids, and said slowly, “The old people told many methods, all of them teaching how a person might secretly catch a glimpse of a ghost’s true appearance.
“Useful or not, they’ve been gathered together, and people gave them a name: the ‘Ten Ways to See Ghosts.’
“Of these ten ways, the only one I’ve seen others use, and used myself, that truly works is one.
“That is ‘combing hair at midnight.’
“We’ll use that one. It’s the safest and the most reliable.”
Ten ways to see ghosts, combing hair at midnight?
Zhou Yang came wide awake at once.
He remembered that some films he had watched in the past had mentioned this kind of method.
To think such a method would actually work here and now?
If the people of the opera troupe could use “combing hair at midnight” to tell the traits of a “ghost” or a “kui,” then perhaps he could use it too, to tell whether those villagers in Guancun were ghosts or kui!
At that moment Chang Dafeng raised his eyes to Ding Ling.
Ding Ling’s heart and Zhou Yang’s both gave a jump at the same instant.
They heard Chang Dafeng say, “Ding Ling, your illness is nearly over, and this is just when the yin energy in your body runs heaviest. If you use this midnight-hair-combing method, you’re the most likely of us to see a ghost’s appearance.
“Listen carefully—
“Tonight at the hour of the Rat, set the oil lamp in front of the mirror and sit yourself down before it.
“Let your hair down first. Comb it forward forty-nine times, and back forty-nine times.
“After that, ask the mirror: Is anyone there? If there is, come out and show your face.
“Ask it three times running, and then look into the mirror.
“By then, the true appearance of the ghost haunting this area will appear in the mirror.”
Here Chang Dafeng lowered his eyelids, not looking at Ding Ling, and sank his voice deeper still. “Have you got that?”
In the room, the stalwart martial actor Qian Heng, the dan player with the stage voice, Li Yichun, young Little Stone, whose kung fu was not yet up to standard, and the painted-face actor Gao Hongbo all turned their eyes to Ding Ling in unison.
Ding Ling bowed her head and hunched her shoulders tighter still.
In this world as it was, who wanted any dealings with a “ghost”?
Master Chang had only explained how the “combing hair at midnight” method was used, but any method for seeing ghosts was bound to come with danger and ill fortune.
One slip, and the person who saw the ghost might drop dead on the spot!
Everyone in the troupe understood that, and so they all kept silent now, counting on Ding Ling, the troupe’s cook, to take up this heavy burden.
Day to day she did the hardest work and took the least pay.
Anyone in the troupe could order her about.
And now, having been ill and woken up, she had become the troupe’s castoff.
“Can I refuse him?”
Ding Ling kept her head down and gave no answer to Chang Dafeng’s words, but her thought surfaced in Zhou Yang’s mind.
Zhou Yang was somewhat surprised.
He had not yet found the right moment to hold his first conversation with this retribution body of his.
And now, unexpectedly, she had come straight to him.
“Is she certain that another consciousness has moved into her body?
“Or is her asking me in her mind, right now, a kind of test?”
Zhou Yang pondered this as he pinned the first label on this, the first of his retribution bodies: clever, and bold.
In so short a time she had set the distractions of the outside world aside and sorted out her own thoughts—she was a clever one. And she had gone straight at the suspicion that another consciousness dwelt in her body, testing it at close quarters without flinching—that was boldness.
He had worried that this female retribution body of his would not be able to accomplish anything in surroundings so vicious within and without.
Now, seeing Ding Ling’s reaction, the worry in his heart eased.
In his mind, a laugh sounded.
With that laugh, he gave his answer to Ding Ling’s question: “Have you refused?”
Chapter 5