The Coroner's Hut

Locust Coroner's Hut stands three li beyond the town, a lone grey-brick yard holding twelve thin coffins—unclaimed wretches who died by the roadside, waiting for kin or the magistrate. Old Qin has kept it twenty years; his temper is like the old locust in the yard—rough bark, rough heart. Each night at the dog-hour he locks the gate, lifts a storm-lantern, and counts the coffins round: one, two… twelve, never more, never less, year on year. Xiaoman, his helper, a half-grown boy lately orphaned, fears the dark and always walks in the shadow of Old Qin's lamp.

That twelfth month it snowed three days running, snow to the ankles. Xiaoman went home for his father's funeral, leaving Old Qin alone. The snow-night was uncannily still; even the stray dogs were silent, and the wind packed snow-grit through the door-crack into a white ridge on the floor. Old Qin locked up as always, lifted the lantern to count—and counted thirteen.

He thought his old eyes fooled him, rubbed them, counted again: one, two… twelve, and then at the wall corner a coffin plainly extra—of pine, unpainted, smelling of fresh sawdust, the lid ajar, seeping a damp river-mud smell from the seam. Yet he had locked the gate himself; the snow held only his own line of prints to the door, no second track. The snow still fell; had anyone carried a coffin in, there must have been marks.

The hairs rose one by one on Old Qin's back. He crouched, held the lantern to the pine coffin, and read a "Qin" charcoaled on its foot, the strokes crooked as a child's. His heart lurched—the hand was uncannily his own.

Twenty years of keeping dead men had toughened him. He reached out and eased the lid open an inch at a time. Inside lay a bed of dry straw, and on it a body face to the wall, in a grey padded jacket patched with a square at the small—the very jacket Old Qin had lost last winter, the cuff frayed to show the wadding.

Old Qin's hands began to shake. He turned the face over: wax-yellow, gaunt, high cheekbones, a black mole at the left brow—his own face. The body did not rot or stink, but the skin was cold as well-water, and the chest rose and fell faintly, as if merely asleep, about to open its eyes.

"Who's gone off in my jacket…" Old Qin murmured. He remembered the snow three days before, when he had indeed lost a jacket in the yard and blamed the wind.

He dared neither close the lid nor move, but kept the lamp and watched till near dawn. When the snow stopped he heard steps outside—Xiaoman back, calling through the gate: "Uncle Qin, open up, the snow's let off." Old Qin answered; looked again into the coffin—the straw was empty, the "body" gone, only his lost jacket folded neat at the bottom.

He took it for a nightmare. But Xiaoman's first words inside were: "Uncle Qin, why's your face so white?" Old Qin felt his own cheek—cold. He went to the well to see his reflection; the mole was there, but the look in the face… was the look of the body in the coffin.

After that Old Qin kept the hut as before, only each night he looked first to the corner. The pine coffin was gone; twelve remained twelve. Yet he felt it wrong by degrees: his shadow by the lamp fell a span shorter than a man's; the hand that lifted the lamp was sometimes not his but a withered, blue-knuckled old hand, holding the light for him. Often he dreamed himself lying in a coffin while someone laid straw over him, very gently, afraid to wake him.

Come spring Xiaoman found Old Qin dead in the yard, against the locust, a smile at his lips, serene as sleep. The hut still held twelve coffins. The town pooled money for a cedar one, making thirteen. Before the burial Xiaoman went to count and sat down in fright—beyond the twelve, at the wall corner, another pine coffin had appeared, unpainted, a "Qin" charcoaled on its foot, the strokes crooked as a child's.

The Midnight Record: the hut keeps the masterless dead, but sometimes it keeps the claimed as well. The extra coffin was never another's—it was kept for him. Beneath the locust the snow melts and freezes, freezes and melts; Xiaoman says that each time he passes at night he hears the sound of a lamp being fed in the yard, one slow stroke, as if someone were warming that coffin for himself, first.