The Nuo Mask

Qingtang Village is tucked in a ravine between two mountains, fog-bound most of the year. I am A-He, twenty, a student in the provincial city. Last winter a letter came: my grandfather was dead. Grandfather was the village's nuo master, who kept all his life the nuo shrine and its Mountain-Opening mask.

Three years had passed since I'd been back. The bus lurched along the mountain road half a day; by the time it reached the village mouth it was late afternoon. The fog was thicker than I remembered, a white weight on the tiles. The village was strangely silent—no crowing fowl, no barking dog, not even wind through the bamboo; the whole place seemed to hold its breath.

Fusheng, the village head's younger son, met me. He smiled thinly and said, "Brother He, you're back." I saw at once something wrong with his face—his left cheek was overlaid with something, the grain of wood, red lacquer, as if half a mask had been welded to his skin. Catching my look, he tugged his collar up to hide it.

My heart knocked; I didn't dare ask.

Inside the village, one oddity after another. Several old men sat by the threshing ground, each with a mask over his face: some half-covered, some enclosing brow to chin, two eyes showing, the carved brow ridges high, the lacquer flaked to reveal the wood's yellow beneath. They said nothing; at sight of me they looked away, as if afraid I'd recognize someone.

The nuo shrine stood on the slope behind the village; the characters "Drive the Plague" over its door were bleared by rain. I climbed up. Within, the Mountain-Opening mask was enshrined—carved willow, three feet tall, glaring eyes and bared teeth, red and black, the lacquer cracked in fine lines like an old man's wrinkles. Before the altar steamed fresh rice and dishes; the incense ash was leveled neat—clearly tended daily.

Fusheng trailed behind and whispered, "Brother He, your grandfather… he's still in there."

"What do you mean?"

"The nuo master puts on the face, the god descends, and once down he won't leave. The year your grandfather led the great nuo, the plague rose; he wore the Mountain-Opening mask to invite the god. The god came—but wouldn't go. The village had no choice but to enshrine him in the shrine, feeding him daily. He said: so long as someone wears the face, the god stays in the shrine and harms no one outside."

My scalp crawled. Fusheng went on, "But the mask needs a wearer. When the wearer grows old, another must take it. Two years back your grandfather couldn't stand. The village meant to find a successor; no one dared. Then… then Old Fu put it on."

Old Fu was the village head's father, a jolly fat old man I knew. I turned; the half-mask on Fusheng's cheek bore the very grain of the one on the altar.

"Where's Old Fu now?"

Fusheng pointed to a locked side room behind the shrine: "In there. Wearing the face. Can't take it off. Take it off, and the god finds the next."

I understood suddenly why the village was so quiet—not that there was no sound, but that the masks swallowed it. Those face-covered folk hadn't put on masks; the masks had grown into their flesh and become their faces. Grandfather wasn't dead; he was "inside the mask." Old Fu had taken his turn. The next—Fusheng, or me?

I wanted to leave. That night I packed and slipped toward the village mouth before dawn. The fog was thick as paste; three steps and the road vanished. Behind me came a drum, muffled—thump, thump—like the nuo drum yet not, as if rising from under the ground. I ran, but my feet fell into another's stride, step by step, keeping the drum's beat.

At the old camphor by the village mouth I gasped and looked back—through the fog stood a figure in the Mountain-Opening mask, three feet tall, red-black face, drifting toward me. I couldn't make out the body, only the mask, identical in every cracked line to the one on my grandfather's altar.

I didn't look back again, and caught a passing tractor out of the mountains that same night.

Back in the city I lived two weeks thinking I was safe. Yet every midnight a drum sounded in my ears—thump, thump—creeping from beneath the pillow. The night before last I got up as usual and reached to my face—my left hand brushed my right cheek and met not skin but a cool, finely grained wood.

I turned on the lamp, and the mirror—

No. I did not look in the mirror. I switched the lamp off.

But to this day my right hand lifts now and then to touch the wood-grain on my left cheek. It grows clearer every day.

The Midnight Record notes: The nuo mask invites the god, and the god lodges in the face—not man wearing mask, but mask wearing man. The whole of Qingtang is faces. The recorder sought the shrine in vain; only a drum is heard in the hills, from midnight until the cock crows.