The One the Kiln Kept

The dragon kiln in Luoyan Hollow had belonged to Pei Changgen's family for generations. It was built at the deepest fold of the hollow, its back against a red-earth slope, a crooked stream in front. Pei was seventy-three. He had fired coarse clay for fifty-eight years, and the calluses on his hands were thicker than the kiln bricks.

What he fired were not bowls for eating. They were small burial figurines for the seven villages round about — boy and girl attendants, chickens, dogs, pigs, sheep, grain bins, water jars, each no bigger than a palm, bare unglazed bodies the color of dust. The hollow's people called them send-off goods: when someone died, you burned a few clay people to serve them down below, so the dead would not arrive friendless.

Pei had his own rules for stacking the kiln. Thirty-six pieces to a firing: six boys, six girls, the other twenty-four livestock and household things, laid in by six front, six back, seven left, seven right. Stacked, the door sealed, leaving one peephole the size of an egg for watching the fire. He kept watch the whole night, listening to the kiln's crackle — that was the moisture fighting its way out of the clay.

It began the third day after First Frost.

As usual he went to open the kiln at first light. He scraped the sealing clay away and a wave of heat hit his face. He reached in for the front row of boy-and-girl attendants, and at the seventh his hand stopped. The night before he had stacked seven left, seven right, clear as day — but now the left side held one more girl than the right held boys, and the spacing of the whole row had shifted, as if someone had edged every figure half an inch in the dark.

He thought he was simply growing senile, had misremembered. But for the next half month it happened every day. Each morning the positions refused to match the charcoal sketch he drew on the kiln door before sealing. Not scrambled — rearranged. What belonged on the left had crossed to the right, what belonged in front had drawn back, yet the count held at thirty-six, never one more, never one less.

Then the thing that made his skin crawl: the extra one.

On the tenth night he counted before sealing — thirty-six, sketched the plan. Next morning he drew out thirty-seven. The surplus crouched deepest in the chamber, against the peephole: an unfired green body, gray-white clay still damp, the marks of fingernails plain on its little joints, as if shaped and slipped inside only hours before. Pei picked it up. It weighed almost nothing. He brought it close and sniffed: red streambank earth mixed with pine resin — his own recipe for mixing clay.

But he had shaped no such thing the night before.

He asked around the hollow. No one had climbed the hill after dark. He asked his younger son, Pei Shitou, who drove a truck in town; Shitou took it for the fog of old age and said, Dad, rest, don't keep the kiln alone. Pei said nothing. He had kept kiln all his life and knew a kiln's temper, but a kiln had never stocked its own shelves.

The night of Beginning of Winter the wind turned hard and a skin of ice formed on the stream. For the first time Pei dared not approach the kiln mouth. He sat in his own kitchen until past midnight and noticed the hollow's dogs had gone silent — Luoyan's dogs were vicious by nature, yet those days not one barked, only trembled in their dens. He lit the oil lamp and watched through the window the kiln's dull red glow on the slope, like a half-opened eye.

In the end he went anyway.

His cotton shoes crunched on loose stone. Ten paces out he stopped. What leaked through the kiln door was not firelight but white — as if someone held a lamp flat against the seam. He held his breath, gouged a small hole in the peephole's clay, and pressed his eye to it.

The chamber was uncannily still. No fire, only the thirty-six finished figures stacked neat as the night before. But right before him, deepest in, the green body moved — not nudged by draft, but of itself, slowly turning its face toward the peephole. There were no features on the clay, yet Pei knew beyond doubt it was looking at him.

He reeled back, a shoe caught a stone, and he sat down hard. When he looked again the green body had turned back to face the wall.

After that he never went up the hill at night. Yet each morning the count still failed to match, the green body still waited. He learned not to count, not to look, only to carry the fired figures down in his baskets for the families who came to collect them.

Once Shitou came home and found the green body, turned it over in his hands, and said, Dad, this was never fired, why keep it — I'll toss it. Pei snatched it back and held it to his chest like a living thing. He did not say why.

Only sometimes at night he wondered: thirty-six were for the dead. The one extra — who was it for?

On the eve of Winter Solstice he dreamed he was stacking the kiln and came to the thirty-seventh, but there was no clay left at his hand. He woke with a start to a single crack from the slope's kiln — the exact pitch of a living man's sigh.

The next day he did not open the kiln. Nor the day after. On the fourth day Shitou came back from town and said, Dad, if you don't go soon the kiln will go cold. Pei nodded and shouldered his bamboo basket up the hill.

He scraped the sealing clay; heat washed his face. He reached inside —

Thirty-six. Not one more, not one less, stacked exactly as his night's sketch had shown. The green body was gone.

He stood at the kiln mouth, hand still hanging in the air. Wind from the slope poured into the chamber and carried out the smell of pine resin and red earth, the very recipe he used for his clay.

Slowly he closed the kiln door. He fired nothing new.

From then the dragon kiln in Luoyan Hollow never smoked again. Pei still climbed the hill once each day, an empty basket going up, an empty basket coming down. When the hollow's people asked, he said the kiln had broken. No one knew whether that extra one had finally been fired, or had never been fired at all.