Body

A Fu was a medicine peddler who walked the mountain ridges of southern Anhui all year. That year, at Frost's Descent, he lost his way in the fog and blundered into an empty village. The stone tablet at the entrance had weathered to half a "Fall" character; the houses leaned or had collapsed, knee-deep in weeds. He remembered the old folk saying Fall-Wild-Goose Village had been struck by pestilence three years before and died out in a single night; the county sealed it, and no one dared enter since. The silence was wrong—no insects, only the wind whining through empty window-frames.

Dark came early, and the fog held a cold edge. Afraid to linger, A Fu tried to cut across the ridge, but the flagstones kept winding him back to the village center. There stood a wild stage—an open-air playhouse, its wooden posts half-rotted, dogtail grass sprouting from the cracked boards, and under the eaves two lanterns long stripped of paper, their bare bamboo ribs creaking in the wind. In the moonlight the stage-edge planks showed a damp white bloom of mold.

He was about to skirt it when he heard something on the stage.

Not the wind. Drums and gongs.

A clang, a clang, a quick tat-tat-tat—the urgent "hurried wind" rhythm sounded from the empty stage; the two paperless lanterns at the stage mouth lit themselves from within their bamboo ribs, a dim yellow glow like unseen candles. Then a wavering erhu, and though the stage was vacant, it sang the "Feeding the Hungry" passage from Mulian Rescues His Mother, the tune drawn out and circling in the fog, raising the hair on the back of one's neck.

A Fu held his breath and crouched behind the haystack at the stage's rear, peering with half a face at the audience below.

Below stood rows of benches, and on them sat "people"—not plainly seen, only a slight depression on each bench as if someone sat there, yet the "person" had no face and no shape, only a shadow a shade lighter than night, row upon tidy row, listening in perfect quiet. When the wind passed, he caught the smell of old cotton cloth mixed with incense ash—the scent of a household keeping a funeral.

At a climactic turn the singer reached, A Fu glimpsed at the stage-left a small table fully laid with bowl and chopsticks, the bowl steaming, the sticks laid askew—a seat kept for a "living guest." Only one empty seat, facing the stage mouth, as if reserved for a living man to fill, that the number might be made whole and the banquet of opera complete.

He understood suddenly: the dead of Fall-Wild-Goose Village were staging for themselves a play that never ends. One performance each night; below sat the village's exterminated souls, with a single empty seat kept for a living man—sit, and you are entered on their list, and come to listen every night thereafter, never to leave.

A Fu's calves cramped; he tried to retreat, but his feet had taken root. A gust rolled in and blew his straw hat from his head, straight into the ground before that empty seat.

Below came a rustle, as if a whole crowd had half-risen at once to make room for the "new guest."

A Fu's scalp burst; he scrabbled out of the village on hands and knees and ran to the ridge, not daring to rest until near dawn. He looked back; the fog-hidden village was long gone, and he was alone, gasping, his hat lost somewhere behind.

Back in town he told the tale; no one believed him, putting it down to the fright of a lost man. So he let it drop.

Yet from then on, at the hour of Hai each night, an extra set of bowl and chopsticks would appear on his eight-immortals table, steaming as if just set down. He counted: his household was three; the table always held four. And by the stove, the shadow sometimes gained an extra arm's outline, draped over the chair back, swaying gently. He tried burning the extra set in the stove, but the next night it was laid out again, the same.

He dared not return to Fall-Wild-Goose Village, nor eat alone at the hour of Hai.

The Midnight Record: the empty seat is not only on the wild stage—it may follow you home.