Hell Money

Ge Chang, who runs the Longevity Funeral Goods shop, is the man in town who sends money to the dead.

The town is small, and the dead are quieter than the living. When a family holds a funeral, the paper effigies, incense, and tin-foil ingots all come from his shop; the last step is burning—he throws stacks of hell money into the chipped iron basin in the back yard, and the flames lick the ash upward while the living kneel and kowtow, muttering foolish things like "don't pinch pennies over there." Ge Chang himself never kowtows. His mother has been bedridden three years, half her body gone numb, and the cost of her medicine leaks away like a bucket with no bottom. Nights he keeps the shop, he sits staring at the cold ashes, breathing in the rusty tang of incense, remembering he too has not slept a full night in three years.

The trouble began after the seventh-day rites for Boss Chen, who died at the east end of town.

The Chen family bought all their paper from his shop, and Ge Chang burned the regulation three catties of hell money in the back yard. That night he lay down and found a layer of ash on his pillow, pale as a thin fall of snow. He brushed it off; the next night it was there again. The third time, by the oil lamp, he saw the ash had hardened into scraps of hell money—edges still charred yellow, and up close it smelled of incense mixed with the iron-rust stink of old blood. He thought himself addled from sleeplessness and crumpled it into the stove.

But on the seventh night the shop door was tapped, gently.

Outside stood a limping man in grey cloth, back a little humped, who said he was Manager Gou of the east-end Tongji Pawnshop. Manager Gou squinted and smiled, his teeth yellow. "Boss Ge, the money you burned for the dead—they won't take it. It's all been sent back to the living world. I'll exchange it for silver at seventy percent." From his sleeve he drew a wad of damp bills and laid them on the counter, real enough.

Ge Chang took one to the rice shop and bought two catties of coarse rice; the shopkeeper took it. He took another to the apothecary for his mother's medicine; that was taken too. For half a month his mother's medicine held out, and he slept a few more nights.

He went to exchange on the seventh of every month. Behind Manager Gou's counter a lamp without a shade always burned, its light green, painting faces the color of sickness. When the bills passed into his hand, his fingertips always caught a little cool, damp ash, and back at the shop that ash would sprout another patch of moss on the back of his hand. At first he thought nothing of it; later he noticed the moss's grain was the very same as the small printed characters "Underworld Bank" on the hell money.

Yet by the third exchange, washing his hands, he noticed grey mould blooming on the backs of them, like moss in a rainy wall-corner, that would not scrub off. By the fourth, ash seeped from under his nails, black, and would not wash away; after long scrubbing a thin papery skin formed on his fingertips. Alarmed, he went to find Manager Gou—but there had never been a pawnshop at the east end. Only an empty, long-vacated courtyard with an old wooden plaque nailed above the gate, faintly the character 当, bleached white by the rain.

The fifth time he dared not go. But that night the iron basin in the shop lit itself. The fire was small and blue, and burned not paper but the heap of hell money by his pillow—sheet after sheet drifting up into the flame, the ash falling back onto him, cold.

He raised the oil lamp to look at himself. In the light, his shadow was a notch shorter than the man.

He remembered the old folk saying: when money burned for the dead is refused below, a living man must settle the account. As the money is redeemed, sheet by sheet, in the world above, the living man "expires," sheet by sheet. First the hands go mouldy, then the ash seeps through, and last the shadow shortens by an inch as the soul is taken inch by inch; when the shadow is gone entirely, the man has become the very sheet of hell money burned for himself.

On the night of the seventh exchange his mother called from the inner room. He answered and went in; in the lamplight she suddenly said, "Chang-sheng, why do you smell of burning paper?" He looked down: his cuff was dusted with ash, pale, flaking away.

At dawn the shop was shut. The town said he had taken his mother to the city for treatment.

Old Sun the ragman later told people: one midnight, passing that empty courtyard at the east end, he saw a row of papers hung out to dry inside the gate, dozens of them, pale, rattling in the wind. He lit a match to look—and the one at the very edge bore the face of Ge Chang.

The Midnight Record: money sent back from the dead must be caught by someone; catch too much, and the living become the unburnable stack of paper.