The Ghost Wedding

Chang Sheng, the only son of Old Zhao Degui, died on the eighth day of the twelfth lunar month, three years back.

That day the snow fell like knife blades, and the wind screamed through the bare branches of the old locust at the village mouth. Chang Sheng was nineteen, hot-blooded, the kind who'd ride a wall once he'd set his mind to it. He was determined to cross the frozen river on foot to propose to the Liu family on the east bank—Liu Niang, his childhood betrothed, though the Lius had since broken it off, saying his ill-fated birth hour would curse a wife. He wouldn't hear of it. He tucked a red cloth bundle into his coat and left. Midway, the ice at the river's mouth was thin; it gave under his foot and he went through. When they pulled him out, his hand was still locked around that red bundle—two copper coins and half a piece of osmanthus cake, frozen solid as stone.

With Chang Sheng gone, the Zhao house lost half its roof. Degui is an honest farmer, a silent man of the soil. His wife, Wang, wrenched her back the year before and lay bedridden. The first year passed quietly. The second spring, the strange things began. Degui went to the fields and his left eye, sound the day before, went dim; the doctor found nothing, said it was from weeping—yet he hadn't wept much. Wang's back bent further, aching through the nights. The great beam in the main hall split for no reason; the village carpenter came and said the timber was good stock, shouldn't have cracked—as if something inside were pushing it apart. Most frightening were the snow nights: footsteps in the yard, crunch, crunch, slow circles around the hall. But at dawn, the snow lay pristine, not a hoofprint on it.

That was when Granny Huang came.

Granny Huang was past sixty, bound-footed, hobbling as she walked, but her eyes were sharp—she read graves and brokered ghost marriages, the only one for miles. She sat on the threshold cracking melon seeds and said, "Chang Sheng is a lone ghost. With no wife in the underworld to keep him, he'll come back to trouble the living. Marry him off down there, and he'll rest—and so will your house."

Degui grudged the three measures of grain and two strings of cash, but the nightly footsteps broke him. He nodded.

The "bride" Granny Huang found came from the riverbank. When the thaw came, Old Zhou the ferryman pulled a young woman's body from the river mouth—seventeen or eighteen, clothes rotted, face bloated white, a green stone pressed on her chest. Old Zhou said the stone was old custom, to keep a drowned wrong-death ghost from surfacing for a substitute. No one claimed her. Granny Huang looked and said the girl was hard-fated, never married—a fitting match. Grain and copper changed hands; the body was laid in the Zhao west wing, packed in ice, awaiting the wedding on the sixteenth of the first month.

Villagers muttered behind hands. Some said Granny Huang's trade was a sin; others quietly wondered if they too should find matches for their own lost children. My mother forbade me near, but I couldn't help it. I'm A-Chou, a stutterer, fourteen, the village boys' favorite jest—but my eyes are sharp, and I love to watch from afar.

The wedding night, black wind rose at dusk, flinging snow grit down collars. The bridal sedan was paper, pasted overnight by the shop, red gone murky, with paper lanterns at its four corners burning not wax but tung oil, their flames a sickly blue. By custom the living may not carry a ghost sedan; Degui hired four half-grown village boys, and I joined to make up the number. Degui pitied me, pressed a silver bit into my hand: "Grip the pole. Don't look back. Don't speak. Set the sedan in the hall and you're done—I'll give you two taels of sugar besides."

We four lifted it. Light as sin, as if empty. Granny Huang had said a ghost sedan should be empty; what rode was the bride's soul.

Out of the west wing, across the tall threshold of the hall, the wind drove in and the curtain slapped. Just then I heard a soft crack from inside—the silver pin in the veil snapping. The hairs on my neck stood; the pole nearly slipped. Ergou ahead hissed, "Keep walking. Wind. Don't scare yourself."

We reached the yard's middle; one of the four blue lanterns went out—that single instant of dark. My eye flicked to the curtain's gap—

A hand reached out from within. White, luminous, the nails tinged blue-violet—not the ashen white of the dead, but the white of one frozen all winter, just at the edge of thawing, the white of the living. That hand slowly lifted its own red veil.

I turned my face away, but the corner of my eye caught what was beneath.

Not the bloated corpse-face Granny Huang had described.

Liu Niang.

The Liu girl, vanished since Chang Sheng's death. The village said she'd run off with a peddler; others said she too had walked onto the river ice that night and never returned. She sat in the sedan, cheeks flushed from cold, lips too red, eyes bright with a fright, and she smiled at me—a faint smile. I knew that smile: when Chang Sheng, alive, passed osmanthus cake to her over the wall, she'd smiled just so, head lowered, sleeve over her mouth.

My legs went soft; I nearly fell into the snow. Ergou shoved me from behind: "Move! Set it down!"

The hall. We sank the poles; the sedan touched earth. Granny Huang waited inside, scattering grain, chanting the wedding words; Degui's hands shook as he set the two spirit tablets side by side. I slipped out in the commotion and glanced down—

The curtain hung; the sedan was empty. The red veil was folded square and neat on the seat, as if someone had stepped out herself and tidied her headdress to a hair. Cold air poured in; a corner of the veil lifted, as if she'd just left, still warm.

That night the Zhao hall burned lamps till dawn. I ran home with the silver bit, told my mother nothing, but heard my own heartbeat all night—like someone tramping snow outside, crunch, crunch.

At first light Degui pounded our door, his voice broken with shaking. I pulled on my padded coat and ran over. The hall floor bore a long wet trail of bare footprints, from the west-wing door to the old well in the yard, water dripping and soaking the bricks. Chang Sheng's tablet had a fresh crack; Liu Niang's was newly set, clean, its incense ash piled neat.

Degui trembled: "She… she walked over herself?"

I said nothing. On the well's rim was the wet print of someone who'd sat there, and a sweet-sour smell, like osmanthus cake gone sour.

Later I often thought: when Chang Sheng fell through the ice, what he clutched may never have been a gift for Liu Niang. The body Granny Huang claimed from the bank—green stone on her chest, no one to claim her—may from first to last not have been some nameless drowned girl. The year Liu Niang walked onto the ice, perhaps she'd gone to find him.

The Midnight Record notes: The ghost marriage done, the souls went each to their place, yet the wet marks by the well took three days to dry. The recorder, passing the Zhao house, hears on deep nights a woman's low laugh from the hall—as if paring osmanthus, as if calling Chang Sheng. He lifts the window to look: only mist rising from the old well, one blue lamp burning, for no one he can name.