The Stonemason
Old stonemason Geng carves a nameless face for Lin Xiu, a girl lost to the cliff. Each night fresh cuts appear on the blue stone in his own hand and the eyes watch him. A red ribbon and a single shoe lead him to the cliff, where he learns what the deposit money and the missing days conceal, and that Lin Xiu may never have sunk into the stream. He leaves his truest chisel and descends. On fog-heavy nights the quarry still hears a chisel tapping, light and slow, as if a face remains unfinished.
Thirty li west of Qingxi town, where the cliff breaks off, lies a quarry. Old Geng had cut stone on that mountainside for forty years. When a family in town needed a gravestone, a bridge, or a pair of guardian lions for the gate, they came to him. He spoke little and his hands were steady; the faces he carved, people recognized at a glance.
Late that autumn a young man climbed up to find him. The fellow called himself Zhou Ming, the young master of the cloth shop at the east end of town. He wore a blue linen shirt washed pale, and his eyes sat deep in their sockets, as if he had not slept in nights. He asked Geng to carve a stone for someone, no name required, only a face.
Where is the person, Geng asked.
Gone, Zhou Ming said. Last month she slipped from the cliff into the Qingxi. When we pulled her out, the rocks had torn her face. Her mother wanted something to keep, but there was no proper likeness in the house.
Geng was quiet for a spell. He had seen the girl, Lin Xiu, who drew water at the well by the town gate, with a thick black braid and a tiger's tooth when she smiled. He nodded.
Zhou Ming left half a silver dollar as a deposit and said he would return in half a month. At the door he added that the master should carve her as he remembered her, for he feared others would get it wrong.
Geng agreed.
He set up the oil lamp, braced the blue-stone block, and began with the rough shape. The stone came from the cliff, and water wept from its grain, cold enough to bite. By the third day a face had begun to surface on the block, round, a tiger's tooth, the eye corners lifted slightly. He stepped back to look and felt something off: this face held more than he remembered of Lin Xiu. He could not name it, only that it seemed to be holding something back.
On the fourth night he closed up and locked the yard gate, settling his chisels into the wooden box. Fog had risen in the hills and the lamp's light smeared into a yellow ball. He slept until past midnight, when a faint sound woke him, the tap of a chisel on stone, very light, very slow, from the far end of the workshop.
He pulled on his coat and went to look. The workshop stood empty, yet the lamp burned, and a new cut ran along the jaw of the block, as if someone had come while he slept and finished a few strokes for him. The cut followed his own hand, yet he had not lifted a tool.
He ran his palm over the stone. It was wet, not dew, but water seeping from the seam, carrying the stale scent of a riverbed.
For nights after, the faint sound returned. He kept watch twice, eyes open till dawn, and saw nothing, but each morning the stone bore fresh marks. The face grew clearer, and the eyes began, more and more, to look back at him, not a mason studying stone, but someone within the stone studying him.
Suspicion took him, and without telling Zhou Ming he went alone to the cliff. The water roared below, and fog climbed from the stream. He searched the rim for a long while and found, caught in the grass, a faded red hair ribbon, the very kind Lin Xiu had bound her braid with. Farther in, a shadow crouched behind the rock seam; at the sound of his step it shrank back into the trees.
He followed a few paces and gathered only a single embroidered shoe, soaked through with mud and water, yet its face was clean in a way that made no sense.
Geng tucked the shoe into his breast and went back to study the deposit Zhou Ming had left, that half silver dollar, its edge worn bright, plainly an old piece, not fresh from the cloth shop's mint. He recalled then that on the day Lin Xiu fell, Zhou Ming had been away collecting accounts and did not return until three days later.
He said nothing. When the half-month came he finished the stone. The face was Lin Xiu's, yet for the eyes he carved the ones he had seen at night, quiet, stubborn, as if waiting for someone. Zhou Ming came to fetch it, paid the rest, and wept over the stone, saying it was her, exactly her, alive.
Geng did not answer. When the man had gone, he laid his truest chisel on the cliff's edge and walked down the mountain.
The next spring the townsfolk said the blue-stone tablet by the cliff had been worn bright by touch, while the face upon it was blurred by rain, as though someone wept there every night. Geng never returned to Qingxi. Only on nights when the fog lay heavy, the men at the quarry say, you can still hear from the far end of the workshop a chisel tapping stone, light and slow, one strike and then another, as if someone still owed a face not yet finished.