The Yin-Walker

Old Gou is forty-three, yet all who have seen his face for miles around say behind his back that he looks barely out of his twenties. Not the look of blessing, but of the yin. The villagers call him "the man who grows backward"—other children shoot up year by year, but he peels backward, his flesh tightening day by day, the white at his temples long since turned black again, even the thick calluses on his palms from years at the oar thinning year by year, till now they feel like a young man who never labored. Only he knows the truth: what returns to his face is never youth, but yang—life-warmth. Each time he walks the yin, he must scrape a thin layer of his living fire from his body and leave it on the far shore, in trade for a single sentence. Scrape enough and the man is hollowed—hollow till his skin is pale and clean, like tender bean-curd lifted from a well and never sunned, yet his eye-sockets grow deeper year by year, uncannily deep, as if they could hold half a cup of clear water without a ripple.

He makes his living as a yin-walker. In this world, when a man dies, the living kin still have words caught in the throat—words they cannot ask, faces they cannot see—and so they come to him. He asks for nothing fancy: a lamp without oil, three stacks of yellow spirit-paper, a slender twig freshly broken from the old willow atop a grave-mound in the neglected burial ground. He sits on a bank where the grass stands taller than a man, beyond the village, closes his eyes, and his soul slips down quietly along that willow twig. Once below, he walks the streets and alleys of the dead, seeking for the living the last words their dead swallowed unspoken, or spoke but no one would hear. When found, he brings them back word for word, unbroken, and lays them before the one who asked. Take a man's coin, relieve his sorrow; at worst he spends a little yang—a fair trade, he has always thought. The villagers fear him, yet cannot do without him—whose family has not a dead one with words left unsaid?

His craft he learned from a blind man surnamed Zhou. On his deathbed Zhou took his hand and said only this: the yin-walker's crucial art is not the going down but the coming up; yang is the lamp-oil, and when it leaks away the lamp goes dark and the man stays below, become another's guiding light. He was young then and thought nothing of it, only that this trade was steady and could feed a family. Now he sees Zhou's words were an omen. Each time he comes up, the oil seems shallower than before—though then he could not see it; now this flesh has rendered that shallowness, thread by thread, upon his face.

Last spring, Widow Wang from the east end came knocking. Her only son died in the mines; the last call never connected, and he went with the phone in his grip, the screen lit, the dial half-made. Wang wanted Old Gou to go down and ask the boy whether he hated her for forcing him into the mines. Old Gou went, came back, and delivered the words verbatim: the son said he did not hate her, only that it was cold, the wind at the pit's bottom colder than the wind the winter she scolded him. Wang wept a great while, as if a stone she had carried three years had at last settled. Old Gou took two old hens, slept two days, and waking looked in the mirror to find he had grown a year younger again. He ran a hand over that face growing daily smoother and felt no comfort—he had fetched words back for others, yet year by year he lived backward toward his own beginning.

But this job was different.

It was the Zhao family of the town dye-works. Their younger son, seven, called Water-Born, slipped going for shrimp before the Dragon-Boat Festival and was gone. When they pulled him out, both small hands still clutched half a green shrimp, eyes wide as if he had seen something vital in the water and could not bear to close them. Zhao's wife wept herself out of shape; they said in days she wasted to bones, her eye-sockets hollowed into two black holes. She told how the night before he left, Water-Born lay on her lap, grinning his gap-toothed grin, and mumbled something—the wind was loud, she took it for childish nonsense, and minded it not; now that he was gone, that half-sentence had become a thorn in her heart she could not pull out. She begged Old Gou to go down and ask plainly what Water-Born's last words had been.

Old Gou took the Zhao gift as custom demanded—a bamboo basket of still-warm eggs, two cuts of yellow spirit-paper, and a crumpled, sweat-damp bill the old Zhao man pressed into his hand under cover of night. He asked the boy's birth-hour and eight characters, the time he went under, and the bend of the creek. The rules he knows by heart. When asked, he did not rush; he stayed home three days drinking ginger broth to gather himself. The yin-walk's art is all in storing force; a man thin in yang who slips below may not come back. His body now hangs by a slenderer thread than years before.

On the fourth night it rained. Old Gou carried the oil-less lamp, paper and twig inside his coat, and picked his way to the burial ground. The rain-needles were cold as embroidery pins on his face, yet could not pierce the skin that grows thinner each year. He chose a wind-backed bank, stuck the willow twig in the wet earth, struck a match to the spirit-paper. The flame was sickly white, lending his face no color at all. He closed his eyes; first the rain withdrew like a tide, inch by inch, then he heard his own heart go thud, thud—heavy as two stones dropped in a well—and then, beneath his feet, sudden emptiness.

The yin-walker, going down, always feels the floor drop first, as if he has cracked thin ice. When he lands again he stands on a gray-white road. He has walked it countless times: white gone gray, no trees on either side, only a dense press of stone steles, edge to edge, their faces blank, stretching beyond sight. From far off comes the smell of burnt-paper ash—not the warm ash of the living's burning but cold, crawling up the nostrils and into the sinuses. Wind pushes from behind, cool, running in rivulets down his spine—that is his life-warmth leaking out through the wind's eye, a feeling he knows better than any.

He walks the forest of steles, stopping each shadow to ask: do you know a child called Water-Born, seven, drowned, gone about the Festival? He asks seven or eight; all shake their heads. The dead mostly cannot recall the living world, as if behind a fog that will not lift. A few with keener memory tell him Water-Born is not on this road—he died by water, his soul swept by the cross-current to the Cross-Pond, the place of the drowned, where a living soul scarce enters, and scarce returns.

Old Gou's heart gave a lurch. Of the Cross-Pond he had long heard—an uncanny quarter of the dead that gathers those who fell in water with no rest. For a living soul to enter is like a landsman pressed into a deep pool; one caught breath and the bone-piercing cold pins him to the bottom, never to surface. Yet the Zhao coin was taken and the word given. He set his teeth and walked into the cold wind toward the Cross-Pond.

The road narrows; gray-white fades to blue-gray; the steles thin, and underfoot spreads a boundless shallow water. Not deep—just over the ankles—yet cold to the bone-marrow. He walks through it; now and then something slick brushes his feet—he dares not look down, lest looking freeze his step. A film of white froth floats the surface, as if someone had scattered unslaked lime; the wind stirs a fine sound. In the wind are the unfinished gurgles of the drowned, gurgle, gurgle, fine and everywhere.

Mid-step his ankle was seized. Old Gou looked down; a face floated beneath the water—a woman, hair loose, soaked white, but her eyes clear and fixed on him. Her mouth opened and closed, and water bubbled from her: "Young sir, the house ahead—do not enter. Those within wait specially for the living, ones like you. Your yang is strong; they take you for a guiding lamp." Old Gou tried to pull free, but her hand was cold as ice and gripped hard. She said again: "I have sunk in this pond three years, waiting for my babe to ask me one thing—he has not come. If you go in, carry her a word—tell him not to blame." With that a dark undercurrent rose; the woman loosed her grip and was whirled away, leaving only a slow-closing spiral on the surface. Old Gou stood in the ankle-deep cold, and the sweat at his nape was drop by drop as cold as the water.

At the far end of the Cross-Pond stood a house, alone.

Old Gou stopped, struck still. The dead world should hold no houses, and the Cross-Pond least of all—its charges are the water-fallen with no rest, who by right should drift in the water; how could there be brick and tile? Yet the house stood in the midst of the water, black tiles, white walls, its gate-tower askew, as if someone had lifted it whole from the shore and dropped it carelessly in. No lamp lit; the window-paper gave a greenish glow, exhaling an undefinable staleness, like a decades-old quilt, damp, stuffy, with the smell of yin-dried mildew. He would not have gone in, but Water-Born was within—he faintly heard, beneath the water, within the walls, a thin voice humming a child's tune, off-key but turning its circle without a break.

He reached out and pushed the gate.

The gate was unbarred; with a creak a gust of cold struck his face. The courtyard held water to the top of the foot; a few unburnt paper scraps floated, turning. He stepped in; behind him the gate shut of itself with a clack. He turned to push; it would not budge. His heart tightened, but he did not panic—the yin-walker's worst enemy is panic; panic and the soul scatters. He steadied himself and walked inward.

This was his first time entering a house in the dead world, and everywhere things were wrong. The hall stood empty, the offering table thick with dust, the incense burner overturned, its ash caked. He called "Water-Born" low; none answered, only the humming drew nearer from below. He followed the sound inward; along the corridor stood door after door, all wood, paint long gone, showing gray, water-blackened timber. Behind each door he heard a stir—not wind, but breathing, faint and even, as if someone stood pressed to the panel, waiting for him to pass.

He stopped and laid his ear to one door. Within, a voice, very soft, as if afraid to startle him, asked: "You… have come to ask me?" Old Gou's hackles rose one by one. The voice was an old woman's, hoarse, the dry rasp of one who has wept herself out, like a mouthful of sand. He dared not answer, dared not open that door—old rules say the house's doors in the Cross-Pond must not be opened at random; open the wrong one and what enters is no longer you. Yet the old woman asked no more, only stood within, breathing evenly, as if waiting for a living man to stop. Old Gou would later half-recall that last time he came down to ask of a drowned old woman for the Li family east of the village, her soul had slipped from him at the back of the stele-forest and never returned. So it seemed the one behind this door was she.

He quickened past that door and went on. Door after door, and behind them a rising and falling of sounds. Behind this one, a young fellow first coughed, then cleared his throat, as if a bellyful of words were gathered for telling—Old Gou knew that voice: the Zhang boy of West Lane who threw himself in the river early that year; he had gone to ask, and mid-answer a cold draft had made him shiver and half his soul scatter, unheard to the end. Behind that one, a child smacked its lips as if holding a sweet it could neither swallow nor spit—the suckling lost in the south bog the year before; its mother asked if the child had missed her at the last, and he had gone, lost his way halfway as his yang leaked fierce, and come up in a panic with no answer. Past another, a woman hummed low a lullaby, and broke off mid-phrase as if throttled at the throat—the wife drowned across the river last year; her man asked how the child finally fell in, and Old Gou that trip went in haste and never found the place. Behind each door stood a dead one, all waiting—waiting for a living man to pass and stoop and ask the one thing they wished asked.

Old Gou suddenly understood the house's uncanny nature. This was no ordinary drifting place of the drowned, but a place of waiting. These souls, each with one sentence caught in the throat unspoken or unheard, had sunk to the pond's bottom and become a door in this house, waiting day and night for one who would ask. And he, a yin-walker whose trade was asking for the living, having broken in, had become the one waited for. All these years the dead he had leaked and failed to bring back—so many—he had left them below, and now, door by door, they were all gathered in this house.

He quickened, meaning to skirt the doors and find Water-Born. But the house was boundlessly wrong; however he walked the corridor he could not leave it, and rounding a bend returned to where he began, the doors multiplying. He counted as he went; having passed the seventh door he looked back to find a dozen standing behind him—though he had plainly passed but seven. Cold sweat ran his nape, yet when he touched it, it was cold—his life-warmth was leaking through the house's very bricks, tenfold fiercer than in the stele-forest.

At last he came to the house's innermost room. It was no door but a screen, black, with faint child's writing upon it—a crooked "Father," its strokes unfinished. Behind the screen shone a little warmth—the first warmth in this house. He stepped around it into a small room: faded New-Year prints on the wall, a little quilt folded on the kang, and in the corner a pair of tiny tiger-head shoes, their fronts worn white.

In the room stood a child, perhaps seven or eight, pale of face, with eye-sockets uncannily deep, as if they could hold half a cup of clear water.

Old Gou stared at the child, and in an instant all the blood in him turned to ice. Those brows and eyes, that abnormally deep socket, that slight tilt of the head when he spoke—he had seen them in the mirror, identical, only the mirror's man was twenty years his elder. The child wore his very face, only smaller, only whiter.

"You came," the child said. His voice was clear, like the first ice cracked on water.

Old Gou opened his mouth; no sound came. All his life he had asked for others; now it was his turn to be asked.

"I am your son," the child said. "My mother never told you. The year she carried me, you walked the yin for the first time and leaked your yang so fierce you fell ill on return, senseless, and forgot us all. I was born without a father. At three I took a high fever and did not pull through. My mother held me and wept, saying father was a yin-walker who could go down and ask the dead—how was it he could not ask back his own son?"

Old Gou's legs went soft. He remembered—there had been such a thing. The year he first took commissions, his first job ran long; he lay half a month on return, knowing nothing. When he woke, that stretch of days was lost to him. He had taken it for a yin-walker's lingering ill; how was he to know what leaked away was not memory but bone and blood. These years his face grew daily paler—so it was that first trip had leaked his son away with it.

"I have waited for you here many years," the child said. "This house I built for you. One door, one soul you failed to bring back. I keep them for you, lest they drift in the Cross-Pond without rest forever. Each time you come down, I gather one more. The more yang you leak, the more doors."

Then Old Gou understood: those breaths behind the doors, those dead who waited to be asked, were all the souls he had leaked and failed to bring back over the years—the words he should have fetched for the living, yet the souls awaiting the asking he had himself left below. The child kept them for him, room by room, building this house larger year by year.

"Water-Born is within too," the child said, pointing to one of the doors beyond the screen. "He is one not brought back. You came down to ask him. But you may enter and not leave—for the doors of this house are built of your yang. You go, the doors fall, and the souls within scatter. Dare you leave?"

Old Gou stared at that door. Behind it the thin voice still hummed. That was Water-Born he sought, and also another stretch of himself the house had swallowed.

He thought of Zhao's wife wasted out of shape, of that half-sentence the wind had carried off, of the eggs, the paper, the sweat-damp bill he had taken. He had given his word.

"I must take him back," Old Gou said. His voice was raspy as sanded paper.

"Take him back, and you stay here," the child said. "It is the rule. One for one."

Old Gou said no more. He reached out and pushed open that door.

Behind the door was not Water-Born. Behind the door was a wall, and on the wall, dense as ants, a child's handwriting—"Father," again and again. He whirled; the child was gone, the screen gone; the room was empty, and he stood alone among countless doors. Behind each, someone asked softly: "You… have come to ask me?"

He heard his own voice, from very far away, answer: "Yes."

…

Old Gou was shaken awake on the burial ground at noon the next day. The rain had stopped; the sun shone wan and ghastly; he lay curled at the bank, the oil-less lamp clutched to his breast. The Zhao folk waited at the village mouth; seeing him wake they swarmed: Water-Born—what did he say?

Old Gou looked at them, his lips moving. He meant to say Water-Born's last words were spoken on his mother's lap—but his mouth would not open. He only remembered pushing open that door, a wall of "Father" behind it, and after that, nothing clear.

He brought no words back. The living took it for a failed walk. None knew that in that house he had left, behind the doors, both the Zhao child and his own son.

After that, Old Gou's face grew greener than before. The villagers said he looked more than ever like a man of two-and-twenty, but those who knew him saw it was not youth but emptiness. He dared take no more yin-walks, yet on every rainy night a lamp without oil lights itself on the burial ground—no one tends it; it kindles of itself, sickly white, illuminating a floor of paper-ash and, in the mud-water, a pair of tiny tiger-head shoes, worn white.

Lately he often hears water at midnight, fine and fragmentary, as if someone were humming an off-key tune in the yard. He pushes the door to look; outside is empty, only rain, and in the rain that bone-piercing, paper-ash cold. He dares not light the lamp, lest its light reveal a pair of tiny tiger-head shoes in the corner.

Once he could not help himself and, by the ghastly moonlight through the window-paper, looked into the yard. In the mud-water floated a few unburnt paper scraps, turning, like the scene within that house. He watched a long while and half-fancied the doors rising one by one from the water to his feet, and behind each, all those he had leaked through the years, gazing at him, waiting to be asked. He dared look no more, shut the door, and curled into his quilt; but that night, in the water, he heard his own voice answer again: "Yes."

The Recorder of the Midnight Watch: The yin-walker loses a stretch of yang each year; the dead behind the doors are all waiting for you to ask.