The Scapegoat

The old folk of Locust Creek all remember the "Ram-God" enshrined in Black Dragon Pool.

That year the drought was uncanny. The wells cracked; the seedlings burned to a torch; even the village dogs lay tongue-out in the shade. People queued at the well, and by the last scoop drew only a gourd of yellow mud-water. Some began selling their children for a mouthful of well-water; some dug damp earth from graves at night to wet their throats. The old locust in the village died first, then the two camphors before the ancestral hall, their leaves strewn crisp underfoot, crackling like a count of days. The elders said that if the drought held, even the wild ghosts in the gullies would wake thirsty.

The elders said a sacrifice must be sent — a pure-white mountain goat, red silk wound on its horns, pushed into Black Dragon Pool to bear the calamity for the whole village. The man in charge was Patriarch Zhao.

But the drought was so cruel that even the goats starved; not one living beast could be found. Patriarch Zhao set his eye on the beggar boy Gousheng — nine years old, his parents dead on the famine road, crouching at the village mouth in a ragged gunnysack, barefoot, his toes red with cold. The men in charge coaxed him: "Go down and hide; when the water rises we'll pull you up, and steam you a white bun." Gousheng believed them. They wound red silk on him and carried him to the pool's edge. He was small; the red silk about his thin neck looked oversized, like a fate tied on. At the shove his two small hands clawed the bank and missed; with a plop the pool's surface trembled and he was gone. The bank was silent a long while before someone let out a soft breath.

That year the pool truly rose. The drought broke, the seedlings headed, and the villagers took it for the Ram-God's grace. Ever after, each Ghost Festival they tossed red silk into the pool — thanks, and a seal on the lips. No one spoke of the child pushed down that year.

But as the years deepened, the story warped. The young only knew there had been a white goat; each Ghost Festival they tossed the silk carelessly, some even washing old silk to reuse, for convenience. Only the Zhao men, on that night, slept ill — as if an unseen thread were tied specifically to the master of the house.

Patriarch Zhao lived to eighty-nine, surrounded by descendants. Yet every Ghost Festival, at the midnight hour, he heard at his pillow a bleat from the pool's edge — like a goat, like a child holding its breath to sound like one. He would wake to damp mountain-wool on the pillow, smelling of the pool's foul silt, as if someone had leaned close in the dark to exhale.

After he died, the strangeness moved house. On the Zhao ancestral altar, the bowl of offering set for the old patriarch was disturbed every Ghost Festival — beneath it, a pinch of mountain-wool, the water not yet dry. And the family's ruling heirs, one after another, began to hear the bleat on that night, walking from the pool's edge to the bedside, leaving one cold, clammy corner of the sheet. Once Mingyuan's little son woke screaming, saying a "white-lamb doll" crouched at the foot of the bed; he reached to touch it and found a hand of water, and ran a high fever three days. Only then did Mingyuan learn the bleat hunts not only the master, but Zhao blood down the line.

The current master is Zhao Mingyuan. Reading the genealogist's margin-notes, he pieced together the truth: what was pushed down that year was never a goat, but a living nine-year-old. He thought the "scapegoat" had become a spirit returning to settle with Patriarch Zhao.

But he came to see it knows no face — only the chair of authority. Whoever sits it is the one who sentenced a living child to the pool. The debt knows no person, only the seat: then it was Patriarch Zhao; now it is Zhao Mingyuan.

He thought to flee, as the joy-matron once fled her dead match. But paging through the genealogy, he found that not one Zhao man who had sat that chair in any generation had died well — sudden illness, drowning, falling, madness, every one. He understood then it was no coincidence: the chair collects interest for the one in the pool, year by year.

On Ghost Festival night, Mingyuan carried the great armchair out of the hall and sat by Black Dragon Pool. Snow fell; the water was bottomless black, and now and then a bubble broke — someone breathing below. He heard a bleat from the water, very soft, like a nine-year-old boy at last accepting his fate, no longer struggling.

At dawn, the red silk floated at the pool's edge, faded to white. In the chair sat a dripping shadow, nine years old, the horn-silk also faded white, quiet — as if it had at last found the one to sit in its chair. The Zhao servants came at dawn to pay respects, found the chair empty, and took it the master had gone to the nunnery for morning incense; only that white silk stayed wet at the pool's edge the whole spring.

The Midnight Record: the one who bears the blame was never the goat, but the person who took the blame for another. The debt knows no face, only the chair — sit in it, and it is you.