The Shrine

In a fold of the hills lay a village called Shixi. At its mouth stood a small roadside shrine to the local earth god, no bigger than half a room. One mud wall had fallen, and dogtail grass grew from the cracks between the tiles. Inside sat a clay figure of the old god, its face bleached by rain, yet still wearing a single curve of a smile at the corner of its mouth.

Old Zhou came back to live here last autumn. He had worked forty years as a fitter in the provincial city; retired, with nowhere else to go, he remembered stealing offerings from this very shrine as a boy, and returned. The villagers, seeing him home, said only one thing: do not go near the shrine at night.

Zhou had never feared anything in his life. Gods and ghosts meant nothing to him; only his own two hands.

He first stepped inside on an evening after the Double Ninth Festival, bringing a broom to sweep the place clean. He pushed the wooden door and dust flew into his face. The incense censer on the altar lay upside down, yet inside it held a layer of pale grey ash — fresh, untouched by damp. He paused. The shrine had stood abandoned nearly twenty years. Who would come to burn incense?

He thought nothing of it, swept the floor, set the censer upright, and went home.

The second night, unable to sleep, he went again. Moonlight leaked through the broken tiles and showed the censer freshly topped with new ash, piled higher than the night before. At one corner of the altar sat half a mouldering rice cake, soft and collapsed, like an offering someone had set down. The air carried a smell — not incense, but wet earth laced with something sweet, a rot he could not name.

Zhou crouched and swept his torch across the floor. In the clay dust ran a line of small footprints, bare little feet, leading from the shrine door straight to the god's feet, then turning once upon themselves and stopping.

A cold crept up his back. Not fear — the damp cold of an old house.

He remembered his grandmother's words: long ago Shixi had been swept by flood, which carried off several children. The shrine was raised that year, and from then no one dared touch it.

He told no one. On the third night he brought his own liquor and set it beneath the altar, to keep what lived here some company. He sat past midnight while wind poured down the mountain pass, rattling the tiles, and the clay smile seemed to move with it.

He watched that face too long and decided the smile was not a smile at all. It was a wait.

Near dawn he rose to leave and glanced back. Moonlight fell exactly on the old god; in the hollows of the clay eyes pooled a little waterlight — no, he had misseen; it was only the rain that had leaked in. Yet the line of footprints now ran from the god's feet all the way to the shrine door, halting beyond the threshold, as if someone had knelt, then turned and gone home.

Zhou told no one. After that he went every few nights, bringing a pinch of incense and a little wine, smoothing the ash in the censer. The villagers still warned him off; he only smiled and said he was out for a walk.

One stormy night he found the censer brimming to overflow, the rice cake replaced by three fruit sweets in faded, years-old wrappers. He understood all at once: no one was worshipping here. Someone was waiting — for a child who would never come to fetch him.

He crouched and set the sweets one by one, coaxing softly: Eat. That is enough. Go home now.

The wind stopped. The rain went on. The smile at the clay mouth seemed a little shallower than before.

Zhou stepped out through the shrine door and looked back. The wooden door stood half open, the inside all black but for a dim red point at the censer. He reached out and pulled the door to, leaving a gap — in case the child came back and could not get in.

Later the villagers would now and then find the ash fresh again, and assume it was Zhou. Only Zhou knew that sometimes, when he had stayed away three or four nights, the ash was fresh all the same.

He would not break it open. Some things are better kept than spoken. Year after year the mountain wind crosses Shixi, rattling the shrine tiles, carrying that faint sweet rot — as if someone were still here.