The Soul-Nail

Luoyan Village leans against the hills and faces the water. The slow slope west of the village is called Crow-Roost Slope, where masterless graves lie scattered and the grass grows taller than a man. At the crest rests an old cedar coffin. Unpainted for so many years, its wood nevertheless gleams a deep black—the sheen of forty coats of tung oil, laid one upon another. Driven into its lid are seven soul-nailing spikes, of raw iron, each cap chiseled with the character zhen, "to suppress," the grooves filled with cinnabar; from afar they look like seven opened red eyes.

Inside lies Liu the woman. The old folk say she fled famine from another province; her husband died on the road, and she begged her way to the village with a baby girl, taken in by the clan elder as a concubine. The lawful wife would not abide it; a bowl of medicine, and Liu drowned, her eyes fixed on the elder's ever-burning lamp as she died. Fearing her wronged ghost would haunt the household, the clan summoned a wandering priest who drove the seven spikes in—to pin her soul inside the coffin, to rot there if it must, and never rise to take a substitute. The girl, Chan, was raised by the grave-keeper Old Sang, and died young too, buried at the foot of the slope.

Old Sang has kept this slope for forty years. He burns incense on the first and fifteenth of each month, and oils the coffin at spring's opening. When the nails rust, he sands them, raising a metallic stink mixed with incense-ash—a smell he knows by heart.

This spring brought much rain, and the soil on the slope turned to soft paste. Old Sang came up through the mud and knew at once something was wrong: a scent on the wind, not rot, but rust steeped in water, pressed beneath a layer of old incense-ash, as if the unswept heel of a temple censer, thirty years deep, had been turned up. Leaning on his staff, he drew near: of the seven spikes on the lid, three were gone. From the empty holes seeped black water, beads the size of soybeans, rolling down the coffin seams, blackening and gumming the grass beneath; close up, the stink was so rank it clamped his tongue to the roof of his mouth.

Old Sang's calves cramped. He knew that black water: long ago, the iron chains that had held a drowned body in the paupers' shed, hauled up to dry, had dripped just this color. The old called it "yin-rust water"—touch it and your hands stay cold three days.

He followed the water trail down the slope. The black drops came and went on the grass blades, dragged across a slab of bluestone, and led all the way to the foot of the carpenter Qian's courtyard wall. The earth there was wet in a streak, and from the door-crack drifted that same rust-and-ash smell.

The carpenter, Qian Gui, was handy and made the village's dowry chests and coffins. His new wife, Chunxing, had borne no child in two years. Last month a geomancer came from town, twirling his goat-beard as he paced Qian's house three times; the dwelling, he said, was afflicted by yin, and the suppressing spikes of the old coffin on the slope were hard wards—take three, have them smelted into a steelyard, hang it from the bedchamber beam, and it would crush the evil and hasten a son. Qian believed him. On a moonless night he crept up the slope with pliers and a sack, worked three spikes loose, and carried off cinnabar and all.

Old Sang came hammering on Qian's door, his voice cracking. Chunxing opened it, white-faced, a hand guarding the three-month child in her womb. Sang could not say the spikes pinned Liu's grievance; he only repeated, "Move a spike and the one in the coffin comes unbound—you've pulled the latch from the door." Qian laughed through the door: what harm in a few rusty nails? and clanged them into the iron basin by the stove, to be melted for the steelyard.

That night it rained, the drops drumming the tiles like scattered beans. At midnight Chunxing dreamed of a woman, soaked and cold, standing at the foot of the bed—a blue cloth jacket dripping, hair loose, a faceless white mask of a face. She said nothing, only slowly reached a hand toward Chunxing's belly, and in her palm clutched a spike of raw iron, its zhen turned straight at her. Chunxing tried to scream; her throat seemed stopped with that ash-smell. She woke in terror to a cold spread beneath her—the mattress soaked with black water, rank as the coffin's seep. Before dawn the three-month joy was lost, blood mixed with that black, and Chunxing lay senseless a whole day.

When Sang heard, he went to Qian's in the rain, fished the spikes from the basin, pressed them to his chest, and ran back to the slope, hammering six of them home by the rain. As he struck the sixth, a very faint creak came from inside the coffin—as if something within had gently pushed the wood from inside, or as if someone had sighed under water. His hand jerked; the hammer glanced and left a white dent on the lid. He dared not stay, but tumbled down the slope. Later he told me that sound was no wind—there had not been a breath of it that night.

With six spikes the weeping holes ceased. The seventh he hunted through stove, corner, henhouse, and pigsty crevice, and never found—perhaps it had flown into the grass when pried loose, perhaps Qian had taken only six and miscounted.

Since then the coffin on the slope wears six spikes, missing only the one at the northeast corner. That empty hole still weeps black water day and night; in heavy rain the beads string into a line. After Chunxing's loss, no steelyard ever hung from Qian's beam, yet each night before sleep a small wet patch appears at the foot of the bed; wiped dry, it returns by morning, sized exactly like a woman's foot. Chunxing never conceived again, and often sits listening to the rain, saying she hears dripping at the bed's foot—one drop, one drop, the same as from the coffin's seam.

Two years ago Old Sang was paralyzed abed; he took my hand and said, "The soul-nail pins the grievance, not the fate. Why would you pull it, why?" After he died no one oiled the slope again, yet the coffin's black water flows freer every year.

The Midnight Record notes: a spike may be drawn, but grievance is not so easily pulled; loosen one breath, and a lifetime leaks out. The recorder saw the stain himself, and dared not wipe it.