The Reviving Incense

The dusk her husband Shen San died of a sudden illness, the coffin lid had scarce been closed when Zhou regretted it.

Shen San traded in herbs and walked the mountain roads; his frame had always been stout. Yet that day he came home white-faced as if plastered, spoke but a few words, and with a crook of the neck was dead. Zhou wept till she swooned; waking, her first thought was of the "reviving incense" in Old Song's shop at the town's end.

Song was a half-taught physician who also sold incense. In his shop was a compound said to be of an earlier dynasty: a dead man who drew one breath of its smoke would return to the sun. Townsfolk passed it by word of mouth—a family whose dead was given this incense had "woken," could walk, could speak, the very image of the living. Yet pressed for details, none could say which household had truly woken; the tale always broke off after the words "they say." Song himself, years before, had lit it once for his own dead wife; that night he heard her hum half a tune in the inner room, and the next day, only ash remained, the body still cold.

Zhou would not be dissuaded. On the night before the burial, while the watchers dozed, she drew a half-stick of reviving incense from her sleeve, lit it at the eternal lamp, and tucked it into the coffin's seam. The incense burned maddeningly slow; its smoke was blue-grey and would not disperse, a smell of incense-ash long stored, like the heel of a temple censer years deep. She closed the lid and dared not sleep.

The next day Shen San "woke." The coffin lid pushed itself ajar and he sat up, eyes open yet hardly moving, as if filmed with a thin haze. He called "wife," his voice hoarse but unmistakably Shen San's. Zhou wept and laughed; neighbors came and called it a marvel.

But as days passed, things were wrong. Shen San shunned the warm stove; his hand, to the touch, was cold as well-water. He would not drink raw water, only sipping at a bowl's rim as if it were foul; he did not sleep at night but lay with open eyes listening to the sounds beyond the bed, half a watch at a time; and over him hung that stale incense-ash smell, which no washing took off, only deepened. Strangest was his pulse: the coroner Old Song was called, and after long feeling he frowned and said the pulse ran backward—the cubit beating faster than the inch, as if the soul were poured back from the soles and had stalled before reaching the heart.

Song sighed and drew Zhou to the kitchen. "This incense does not return the soul," he said. "It forces a scattered soul back into an empty shell; what dwells in the shell is long since not your Shen San. Look at his nail-beds." Zhou pried Shen San's hand open; sure enough, his nails were packed with blue-grey ash, the very color of the stick in the coffin.

Zhou would not believe it—the man sat plainly before her, how could he not be? Song shook his head and pressed no further, only leaving her with this: "One truly woken first seeks water to see himself; if he will not, you will understand."

The change came a month later. That night Zhou rose, and seeing Shen San "asleep," leaned close to tuck his quilt. In the moonlight she saw clear—beneath his lids the eyes did not move, like two grey-filmed glass beads; and from him breathed a wisp of incense, blue-grey, coiling. She was about to retreat when Shen San spoke suddenly: "Wife, I have woken"—yet the voice came not from his throat but from her own, with that ash-smell, as if someone borrowed her mouth to speak.

Zhou fell back three steps and overturned the chamber-pot. Shen San lay as before, eyes unmoving.

Later Zhou fell ill too, coughing, and sometimes her phlegm carried a fleck of blue-grey. At her own burial a half-burnt stick of reviving incense was found in the coffin, a half-stick, no shorter or longer than the one she had tucked in Shen San's. When another in the village died and kin came to buy incense at Song's, he always shook his head and said not to light it. Yet the shop's incense dwindles year by year—always someone, in the night, takes it for himself.

In the first days after Shen San 'woke,' neighbors came to congratulate; as time passed they stopped. Granny Sun the tofu-seller said once she brought tofu to the door and found Shen San seated in the hall; at her step his neck turned, inch by inch, yet his eyes did not follow—a face set in the wrong place. She left the tofu untouched and fled. Another night the neighbor heard two voices from the Zhou house, a 'wife' and an 'I have woken,' yet when asked next day Zhou said she had been alone, Shen San in deathly sleep.

Old Song later said the shop's recipe was meant to buy a last breath for one not yet dead; on one truly dead, what it bought was no breath but a shell. He added that every household in town that had lit this incense later acquired a strangeness: someone, at midnight, would hear from his own throat, a step ahead of himself, that phrase 'I have woken.' Zhou was not the first, nor would she be the last.

In the days before Shen San's burial Zhou would hear, late at night, a very faint scratching inside the coffin, as if nails raked the cedar, of a piece with the ash later packed in her own nail-beds. She dared not tell Old Song, and pasted three yellow talismans on the coffin's side; but by dawn each talisman's corners were damp, as if softened by the blue-grey smoke breathing from within.

The Midnight Record notes: incense may return the soul, but not the man; what wakes is the shell, and what sleeps is you.