The Talisman Debt

Qingtang Town lies folded into a crease of the ten-thousand mountains, fog-heavy all the year round, the sun rarely breaking through clean. A dark river, the Green Water, winds through the middle of the town; not wide, but black of water, and the old said too many nameless drowned lay at its bottom, so that all the town's affairs carried a damp that would never dry. The townsfolk trusted charms more than they trusted magistrates, physicians, or the Bodhisattva. In sudden sickness they sought no medicine, but first came to the temple for a charm of safekeeping; a restless new house brought Xuan Yi to paste charms at its four corners; even two families quarrelling over a ridge of field would each have a sending-charm drawn, to see who let go first. The charm was the reason of Qingtang, and Xuan Yi was the one who spoke that reason. The Green Water River took a life every year, and those it took were nameless strangers; the townsfolk feared their own dead would become nameless ghosts at its bottom, and so trusted this yellow paper all the more — a single charm was a name that could cross the river.

At the west end of the town stands the Azure Pond Temple, and its last talisman-painter bore the surname Xuan, the Daoist name Yizhuo; the townsfolk called him Master Xuan Yi.

A'yan was a young man from the town who had gone to labour in the provincial city for three years. One day a telephone call came: his grandmother, old Madam Shen, had passed. He took his leave and rode back to Qingtang through the night. The bus reached the edge of the town; the fog was thicker than any year he remembered, the streetlamps bleeding into yellow halos. He walked home over the cold, wet flagstones and found that every door along the way now wore a freshly pasted yellow charm, a copper coin weighting each corner, the cinnabar red seeping dark in the mist.

His heart turned to fur. He did not know what evil the town had stirred. When at last he pushed open his own door, there in the hall stood his grandmother's spirit tablet, and before it, pasted square and proper, was a charm identical to those on the doors outside. The paper was yellow spirit-paper, and upon it in cinnabar were drawn the three-terrace charm-head and a single charm-gall; beneath were the two characters for "imperial command," while the corner stood empty, as though waiting for a name to be filled in.

When A'yan was seven or eight he had lain at the temple table watching Xuan Yi draw a charm. The master's hands were not yet red through then, only the fingertips stained with cinnabar. He watched the old man cleanse his hands, burn a stick of incense, tread the Steps of the Dipper, and hold his breath as the brush-tip laid down the charm-gall, as though afraid of startling something. When done, the master tapped the paper with a knuckle and said: what is written here is what the living dare not say to the face, and the dead cannot open their mouths, so they must entrust the brush. A'yan had not understood then, only felt the yellow paper breathe an indefinable damp in the lamplight. Now he thought: that damp had been debt.

At the street's mouth he met A'xiu of the tofu shop. A'xiu was a few years older; she held an empty tray to her breast, started at the sight of him, and said low, "You are back. Since autumn came the whole town has gone to the temple for charms — Master Xuan Yi's hands… do not look." A'yan asked after the sending-charm for her infant lost early; A'xiu went white. "I left that charm in the temple and never went to burn it at the crossing. Lately I dream my child laughs beyond the threshold, and wake to find a wet charm at the door." She hurried off, as though afraid that one moment more and the laugh would press against her from behind.

A'yan kept vigil by his grandmother's spirit through the night; the candle never went out. Half-waking, he suddenly recalled his childhood, his grandmother holding him, pointing at the lamp in the temple to the west: the talisman-painter's hands are red, she had said, and that red is the guilt he bears for the living — when you are grown, do not go near it. He had taken it then for nursery fright, yet now, staring at the charm before the spirit, he remembered it for no reason at all, and a chill ran the length of his back.

At dawn he went to ask Master Xuan Yi. The temple door stood half open; the courtyard held the stale smell of cinnabar mixed with paper-ash, dizzying to breathe for long. Xuan Yi sat upon his rush cushion, thinner and drier than three years before, and what seized the eye were his hands — ten fingers, from nail to palm-line, soaked through with a dark red that would not wash away, as though he had steeped them in blood, or as though the cinnabar had seeped into the very bone.

"Master," A'yan forced down his panic, "why does every door in town wear a charm now? There is one pasted before my grandmother's spirit too."

Xuan Yi lifted his eyes; the whites were cloudy, yet still held a light. "Half a month before she passed, your grandmother asked me to draw a charm, to send to your grandfather. He has been gone three-and-twenty years; in the end she could not let go." He paused. "That charm — I never carried it to the crossroads to be burned. Burned it was not, before the third watch, and so the charm came back into the hand that drew it."

A'yan did not understand, only felt that something else was folded into the old man's words. Xuan Yi led him to a side room behind the temple. The door opened, and A'yan drew in his breath: against the walls were stacked hundreds upon thousands of yellow charms, some curled at the edges, some gone mouldy, each bearing the name of a dead soul, and beneath it an unfinished petition — "to my departed husband," "ask if my daughter-in-law is well," "demand the grain owed that year," "call my son home" — and deep in the heap a pale grey smoke seemed to move, as though every charm were breathing for itself.

He recognised a few. The oldest in the heap by the wall read "ask if my son has eaten his fill," and beneath it pressed a hardened crumb of flatbread — old Widow Zhou of the west end, whose son had died away from home; for seven years after his third year gone she came nightly to beg a sending-charm asking after his warmth and cold, and not once spared to burn it at the crossing. Another, painted with a little boat, was entrusted by Old Ke the boatman, begging the river-god to return his brother still living; its edge soaked with water that would dry for no amount of airing. And deepest under all lay one of densest cinnabar, reading "ask him for me — was it his own hand that swept clean the threshold that New Year's Eve" — A'yan knew the hand; it was his grandmother's. So all these years her sending-charms for her dead grandfather had never been burned, only stacked here, one a year, for three-and-twenty years.

"This trade of drawing charms," Xuan Yi stood among the smoke, his voice flat as a sutra, "when the living come, it is to suppress evil, to drive off sickness, to settle a house; when the dead come, one must draw a sending-charm, naming who and asking what, to be burned at the crossroads before the third watch, its ashes scattered on the wind, only then delivered to the underworld court. But people now, they kowtow like pounding garlic when they beg a charm, and once it is drawn they will not go burn it at the crossing — too much trouble, too afraid of ghosts on the night road, too sure that burning a scrap of paper amounts to nothing."

He smiled bitterly and raised those dark-red hands. "The charm not sent, the debt falls upon the hand that drew it. One or two I could hold; hundreds and thousands… your master's hands turned red thus."

Only then did A'yan understand: that unwashed dark red was no cinnabar — it was pickled out of the debt of charms.

Xuan Yi went on: the drawing of a charm has its rules. One must cleanse the hands, burn incense, tread the Steps of the Dipper, and complete the charm-gall in a single breath; break the breath midway and the charm is dead. Once drawn, it must not be seen by a dog, nor brushed by the east wind — seen, it leaks; brushed, it scatters. A sending-charm must be burned at the crossroads before the third watch; past that hour the charm takes the drawer for its master, and the debt returns of itself. He added: a sending-charm is in truth a letter posted to the underworld court. The three-terrace charm-head is the lamp that guides the underworld runner; the single charm-gall is the breath the writer presses down; the words "imperial command" beneath borrow heaven's authority to speak for the dead. The dead soul's own name is written at the left, the question at the right, and the corner stands empty — which is where "proxy bearer" ought to be filled. By the old rule, left empty, the debt falls wholly on the drawer; fill in a living name, and the debt changes hands. Xuan Yi had not understood in his youth; only on the night before his master's passing was it made clear: the talisman-painter spends his life drawing charms so the dead may speak, and in the end someone must close the painter's mouth for him.

In his youth he trusted no such superstition. Once he drew a sending-charm for A'xiu of the tofu shop at the east end, to send to her infant lost early, and A'xiu wept and swore she would burn it at the crossing, then forgot by the turning of her face. The charm lay in the temple seven days; on the seventh night Xuan Yi dreamt the child sat at his bedside and laid a hand on his, and waking found the tip of a finger gone red. Since then he had dared not let a single sending-charm fall overdue — yet the townsfolk grew ever lazier, entrusted him with ever more charms, and alone he could not in the end hold them all.

These half-year past, the sending-charms stacked in the room began to alter their own characters. Where the charm-gall had been drawn as the character for "suppress," the ink in the night silently shifted, and became the character for "summon." To suppress is to shut without the door; to summon is to take within. The charms on the townsfolk's doors had been household charms he drew to settle the living — now their galls had quietly turned to "summon," the meaning wholly reversed: the charm he pasted by day to shut evil out had by night become an invitation for evil to enter. Worse, some households woke at dawn to find the charm pasted on the inside of the door, the cinnabar still wet. A charm within the door means the evil is already in the house. Old Mo the butcher, west of the river, opened his door one dawn to find the charm pasted within, and that night fell into a burning fever, saying he dreamt someone sat at his feet counting copper coins; the physician found no illness, only spoke of evil taken in. Such cases, since autumn, numbered seven or eight in the town.

"So the town is very quiet," Xuan Yi's voice dropped, "not because nothing stirs, but because all that stirs has gone indoors. The living still sleep, and the evil has already taken its seat at the bedside."

A'yan's spine turned to ice. He thought of the yellow charms lining the streets — they had not been guarding the living at all; they had been holding the door open for the evil. He asked, "And my grandmother's charm?"

Xuan Yi did not answer, only drew from his sleeve a crumpled yellow charm and handed it over. A'yan unfolded it: across it was written "to my departed husband Shen Mao," and sure enough the corner stood empty, yet there was a line of very fine small characters; he leaned close to read them — "proxy bearer: Yan."

A'yan's fingers went rigid. Proxy bearer — the one who would bear this charm-debt in the master's stead. His grandmother's charm undelivered, the debt should have fallen on Xuan Yi; but Xuan Yi had quietly written A'yan's name into the corner, and once the charm was burned, the underworld court that came to collect would know A'yan, not the hand that drew it.

"Master…" A'yan looked up, and saw in Xuan Yi's eyes no apology, only a tiredness gone flat. "Your grandmother entrusted me before she passed; I ought not to have. But this hand of mine truly can hold no more." Xuan Yi spoke slowly. "My own master, in his time, wrote the debt of a roomful of sending-charms into my name, likewise. On the night before he died he pressed the brush into my hand and said the talisman-painter's debt must always pass to another; if you will not take it, it falls into the dreams of a whole town. I have taken it thirty years. I can take no more."

He looked at A'yan and the corner of his mouth twitched. "This night, at the third watch, you will come with me to the crossroads, and we will burn all those sending-charms in the room; the debt will be cleared. When you burn, stand to the windward side, and do not look back."

Only later did A'yan chew upon it: whom Xuan Yi wrote as proxy bearer was never by chance. For debt to land, it must find a root. The debt his grandmother owed was rooted in the Shen family; Xuan Yi himself had no heir, and his own master had written him. The proxy of a sending-charm is always written upon blood, upon one who still owes the breath of life.

A'yan believed, and feared, yet had nowhere to go. He thought of how his grandmother had doted on him in life; if there truly were an underworld debt, to bear it a while for his grandmother seemed right enough. And looking at Xuan Yi's red-soaked hands, he felt a pang of pity — that red was, after all, thirty years of guilt borne for others.

Night fell, the fog heavier, carrying a faint smell of paper-ash. Xuan Yi carried a bamboo basket, within it those hundreds and thousands of sending-charms, and A'yan followed behind, clutching his own charm in his hand. The two groped their way to the crossroads outside the town, where a broken stele stood half-buried and rank grass came to the knee — the place where the town's yin and yang met.

Xuan Yi taught him the rule of burning: face the broken stele, speak the dead soul's name three times, then cast the charm into the heart of the fire — never at its edge, for cast at the edge, the charm knows the road home and will not go. A'yan did as told, naming them one by one, and by the last the names had rolled on his tongue into a single tune, like the dirge the town's old folk sing.

Xuan Yi lit a pine-torch and bade A'yan cast the charms one by one into the fire.

The moment the fire rose, the strangeness began. The yellow charms, touching flame, would neither curl nor scorch, but came alive, fluttering out of the fire like wings, their cinnabar characters writhing in the heat as plainly as hundreds and thousands of mouths reciting their petitions. In the firelight A'yan faintly saw pale grey shapes rise from the charms, each turning its face to him, mouth open yet soundless, only lifting the two characters "proxy bearer" before his eyes. He heard those mouths' petitions lay one upon another into a single swell, no telling whose — "I am cold," "I am hungry," "is my son well," "return the grain you owed that year" — a hundred years of words the town had swallowed back now spat from the yellow paper, circling his ear, stroke by stroke, as though to read him into a charm as well. Among them was a small charm painted with a child hugging a melon; he knew it for the lost infant of A'xiu's house, and the charm flitted to his feet, cold enough to pierce the bone. He drew back his foot by instinct and heard the child laugh, very softly, once. Another charm read "to the Green Water River," its water-stain never to be dried by any warmth, and near it one could smell the river-bottom's brine; its shape knelt at the fire's edge and kowtowed toward the river, again and again, as though begging to be returned to it.

The fire burned higher, yet the voices grew lower, until at last there remained only a very faint hush, ten thousand sighs laid one upon another, like wind crossing an empty river. A'yan felt the ground soften under his feet, as though beneath the crossroads lay that black river, opening its mouth again and again to catch the ash falling from the sky.

Xuan Yi shouted from the far side of the fire: "Do not look back! Burn your own!"

A'yan's hand trembling, he brought the charm reading "proxy bearer: Yan" close to the flame. The very instant the corner curled, a cold crept up his fingertips that held the charm, boring straight into the nail-bed; wherever it passed, the flesh slowly flushed with the same unwashed dark red as Xuan Yi's. He let go abruptly; the charm fell into the fire and rose a strange cinnabar smoke that would not scatter, but wound about his wrist and settled there as a faint red ring.

The fire died by slow degrees. The crossing returned to its dead silence, and the pale grey shapes faded with the smoke. Xuan Yi loosed a long breath, as though a thousand catties had been lifted; yet he hunched visibly, and the dark red on his hands had faded somewhat — the debt, sure enough, had changed hands.

"Go home," Xuan Yi said, watching the red ring at his wrist, the corner of his mouth twitching. "Your grandmother's charm — consider it delivered."

A'yan looked down at his own hand; the red ring was still faint, like a brand fresh laid. Xuan Yi, though, pushed his sleeve up to show the wrist — the red that had reached below the elbow now retreated beneath the wrist-bone, leaving a greyish faint circle, as though thirty years of weight had been evened, an inch, onto another.

A'yan fled Qingtang as though fleeing for his life, that very night. In the provincial city he rented a small room, and with soap, with spirits, even with lye, he scrubbed the red ring at his wrist again and again until the skin broke, yet the ring seemed grown into the flesh, and only shone the brighter for the washing. He dared tell no one, claiming it was merely an allergy, rubbing ointment on in secret, and at night hid the wrist beneath the quilt for fear of being seen.

The first three months passed quiet enough, and he began to suspect he had imagined it all. One day after the winter set in, he worked late and came home to fall asleep at once. Between sleep and waking he heard, beyond his door in the building's corridor, a very soft sound, as of someone folding paper with a fingernail, one crease at a time, unhurried, as though folding something with care. He started up, went barefoot to the door, and peered through the cat's-eye: the corridor empty, only on the floor a speck or two of cinnabar-like red dust. He crouched and pinched up a grain with his fingertip; the red seeped into his thumb-pad, the same dark as the ring at his wrist.

He loosened his breath and turned back into the room — and his eyes fell upon his own door-panel, and his heart sank.

On the inside of the door, pasted at some unknown hour, was a yellow charm. A copper coin he had never owned weighted its corner; the charm-gall drawn in cinnabar stood square and proper; beneath were the words "imperial command"; the corner stood empty, yet there was a line of small characters, written in a hand very like his own:

"proxy bearer: Yan."

A'yan reached to tear it off; the instant his fingertip touched the paper a familiar cold spread from his palm. He remembered Xuan Yi's words — a charm within the door means the evil is already in the house. He turned to look at his empty room; the lamp was a sickly white, and in the corner a very faint grey shadow seemed to move, rising and falling, as of someone breathing crouched beneath his bed.

He tried to tear the charm from the door and held it to the stove-flame; the fire licked it, yet the paper would not curl, and the cinnabar characters brightened in the heat, as though smiling. His hand shook; the charm drifted back to the door, square and proper, as if it had never left. Only then did he understand: this charm had not been pasted on — it had grown out from within the door.

He scrubbed at the red mark on his hand like a madman, but the mark not only did not fade — it crept silently a finger's breadth upward along the wrist-bone. He stared at his hand and saw his own knuckles, gone at some unknown time the same unwashed dark red as Xuan Yi's, from nail to the root of the palm.

Later he dialled Xuan Yi's number; the line was dead. A neighbour home to Qingtang on a visit said the Azure Pond Temple had long stood empty, its charms taken down by no one known, and the townsfolk only said Master Xuan Yi had wandered off and never returned. A'yan listened, hand clenched beneath the table, the red ring at his wrist burning as though alive.

By slow degrees he found that in the nights he could not sleep, his hand would of its own reach toward paper and brush, and the red ring at his fingertip, as if with a will of its own, would lead him to want to draw a charm — for whom, to where, he dared not think out. Once he did trace a charm-gall upon a scrap, and woke to find the paper gone, while in the door one more pinch of red dust had appeared. At last he understood: Xuan Yi had not left; he had taken up residence in these hands of his. Henceforth, every charm he should draw for another, the debt would creep back up his wrist, inch by inch.

Now he wakes without cause on many nights, palm turned outward, and sees the dark red has crept from wrist to the root of the fingers, the five fingers dyed through in turn, until it joins in one colour with the speck of cinnabar at the master's fingertip he once watched, child upon the temple table. He has become the next talisman-painter — only this time no one will write a proxy-bearer's name for him; he must choose, among those who still owe the breath of life, one for himself.

In the corridor, the sound of folding paper rose again, one crease, then another, unhurried, as though folding for him the next charm.

Editor's note to the Midnight Record: what the talisman-painter draws was never only a charm. The brush that suppresses evil must in the end find a living hand to bear its un-dispersed breath of cinnabar. The charm is within the door, and the evil has taken its seat — that red ring at your wrist, can it still be washed away?