Chapter 15: Scary Stories

The long-promised new palace women finally arrived. Three of them came to the Jade Pavilion; everyone but Maomao seemed to know them already. Maomao observed the three newcomers and immediately thought: Hmm. Their names don’t match their looks.

Maomao only really remembered things that interested her, so it was hard for her to start conversations with the new girls for a while. Well, she’d never been that much of a talker to begin with, so a simple “Hey, you!” would work. There was a bigger problem to address.

“Maomao, it’s time for you to go back to your room,” Yinghua said, her hands on her hips.

“I was told this was my room!” Maomao replied, all but clinging to the small storage shed that she’d been given in the Jade Pavilion garden. She’d stocked it full of tools and dried herbs—why, she’d finally finished moving them all from her former quarters.

“That was just a joke, obviously! Why would you take it so seriously?”

What kind of example would this set for the new girls? Yinghua wanted to know.

“It’s no problem. Just let me stay here.”

“You can’t! Come on, the girls are looking at us!” They made quite a sight, Maomao clinging to a post in the shed and Yinghua trying to detach her from it. Chief lady-in-waiting Hongniang would never stand for two of her subordinates making such a display: Maomao and Yinghua both took a good smack.

Maomao moved back to her old room, in the end. When she saw the scads of equipment and ingredients in the storage shed, though, Hongniang seemed at last to accept the reality; she reported the matter to Consort Gyokuyou, and the consort, ever partial to interesting things, laughed and said Maomao could do as she wished with the shed. She had to sleep in her quarters, but otherwise she could do what she liked.

Maomao marveled at what a fine boss she had, but Yinghua, predictably, looked put out. Now she watched as Maomao gleefully began working in the little building. The tea party was over, and they had no more obligations until dinner. With the three new girls, the amount of work any one of them had to do had plummeted.

Sigh. This won’t do.

That remark Yinghua had made—Maomao didn’t really think it was any of her business, but she’d said it out of concern for Maomao, probably in hopes that she would start getting along with the newcomers sooner rather than later. At snack time today, she’d likewise tried hard to get Maomao and the new trio all involved in the conversation. Yinghua was thoughtful that way.

Maomao set down the polyporaceae mushroom she was holding and looked out of the storage shed at Yinghua. After a moment she said, “I’m sorry. I know I’ve been a bit self-absorbed.”

“It’s all the same to me,” Yinghua said, her lips still pursed. Maomao watched her, not quite daring to come out from behind the wall. “I mean, you can do what you want. But...” Yinghua turned so the wall was between her and Maomao, and then she said, “I’m going to borrow you this evening, all right?” Then she grabbed Maomao’s hand and grinned a rather intimidating grin.

Yipes.

“We’re the only ones who are free tonight, Maomao! It’s perfect timing!” She shook Maomao’s hand vigorously, obviously really enthused.

She got me, Maomao thought, heaving a sigh and staring at the shrewd lady-in-waiting.

Maomao found herself brought to a dilapidated building in the rear palace’s northern quarter. She’d worried that Hongniang wouldn’t give them permission to go out so late at night, but she’d been surprisingly willing. “A person ought to be a part of that sort of thing from time to time,” she’d said.

“That sort of thing”? Maomao wondered what was going on, but she’d followed Yinghua nonetheless as they walked by the light of a small lantern. The breeze was overwarm and uncomfortable, and she kept hearing bugs buzz around her ears, but she didn’t complain. They stopped at the entrance to the building. “Here, Maomao, put this on.” Yinghua held out a thin cloth.

“Isn’t it going to be hot?”

“Don’t worry, you’ll cool down soon. C’mon.”

Maomao was perplexed but did as she was told. Yinghua rapped on the door, and a palace woman appeared from inside.

“Welcome. Two participants, yes?”

“Yes, thank you.”

“A pleasure to have you.”

Yinghua bowed, and Maomao followed her lead. The woman who’d met them smiled and gave them each a small flame, but asked them to put out their lantern. She was beautiful even by the dim light, but perhaps a little older than the average inhabitant of the rear palace.

The inside of the building looked every bit as weathered as the outside. Not so much like it had worn over time, but as if it had declined rapidly after people had stopped using it. It had been minimally cleaned, but some of the fittings were poor and the floor creaked.

“This building was used in the time of the last emperor,” the woman informed them. As populous as the rear palace looked now, there had actually been more women here during the reign of the previous monarch. Women gathered from all over the nation, shut away in here to bear a son for the sovereign. Now, with fewer ladies, this place went uninhabited, though at moments like this it might still be used. But what was it being used for?

When they arrived at a large room at the end of the hallway, about ten other people were already there, sitting in a circle, their faces mostly covered with pieces of cloth. Each held a flickering flame, giving the place an eerie ambience.

What were they doing here? What else did one do on a summer night?

“Very well. Let us begin.” The woman who’d greeted them sat down. It appeared she was the hostess. “Does everyone have their story ready?” She produced a handful of twigs to serve as lots. “Tonight,” she said, “we shall savor thirteen tales to chill the blood.” The way the light danced across her grinning face made her truly unsettling.

Evidently, Maomao was in for a night of scary stories.

One woman sat at each of the four points of the compass, with two more in between each of them. Maomao held back a sigh as she sat there with a cloth over her head, half hiding her face. The first woman to speak seemed a little nervous, delivering her story in such a halting manner that it was hard to take it seriously. The story itself amounted to little more than one of the various rear-palace rumors, hardly enough to make the blood run cold.

As the second storyteller was about to get started, Maomao felt a jab from her right. It couldn’t have been Yinghua, who was sitting to her left.

“Evening!” a sweet voice whispered.

“Hello,” Maomao said. She recognized the other woman, even with half her face covered: it was Shisui. In the low light, she hadn’t noticed her until now.

Shisui sleepily offered something to Maomao. She thought she caught a whiff of the seashore—then realized it was dried squid.

“Want some?” Shisui asked.

“Yes!” Maomao took a big bite, chewing slowly so as not to make any noise.

The second woman told a perfectly unremarkable scary story, but at least it was a scary story, unlike the first woman’s attempt, and she managed to spook a few of the attendees. Indeed, the cloth slipped from Yinghua’s face, and from time to time she could be seen peeking out from between her fingers. That was her business, but she would also occasionally cling to Maomao. She was awfully strong for her relatively small size, and a couple of times Maomao was almost strangled.

So she’s a scaredy-cat, but she still enjoys this, Maomao thought. It wasn’t that unusual. She’d probably invited Maomao along because she was afraid to come alone.

Maomao wasn’t particularly fond of storytelling get-togethers like this, but they seemed to be widely accepted in the rear palace, where there were so few amusements. After all, even Hongniang had agreed to let them come here, and Shisui was present as well—although Maomao had the feeling Shisui would have managed to show up with or without permission.

And so it went, until half the women had told stories. Each time one of the tales was over, one of the lights in the room was extinguished, so that now there was half as much illumination as there had been at the beginning. The seventh woman’s turn to tell a story came. Maomao listened vacantly, chewing on a mouthful of squid. The woman’s flame flickered on her pale face as she began to speak.

○●○

This is a story from my hometown. There’s a forest there, which everyone has always been told not to go into. They say if you do, you’ll be cursed, and your soul will be consumed by ghosts. One time, though, there was someone who didn’t listen. Someone who went in anyway.

See, that year, the harvest had been especially bad. Not quite bad enough to starve, but there was one house where the breadwinner had just died, leaving only a child and its mother. No one had enough extra resources to help them, and the child was constantly hungry.

One day, the child went into the forbidden forest, thinking maybe there was something to eat in there, and in fact they came back with all kinds of nuts and berries, which they showed their mother, smiling. “There’s lots to eat in there,” they told her.

She tried to prevent the child from saying any more, but it was too late. The village chief summoned them and reminded them not to go into the woods. After that, they had no choice but to stay away from the forest. After all, otherwise they would have been ostracized by the entire village. It didn’t matter how much food there was in there—they just had to give up on it.

But then something very strange happened. That night, some people saw a flickering light floating near the house of the mother and her child—and come the next morning, the woman and her child had collapsed.

The villagers, fearful of the curse, wouldn’t go near them, and before long they died. The child went first. Before the mother died, however, she said, “Listen. I have something wonderful to tell you.” She smiled as she said it, and as she attempted to tell them whatever it was, she died.

Even today no one in my village knows what she wanted to say, but everyone stays away from those woods. Well, almost everyone. Once in a while, somebody decides to go in anyway. And when they do, that night, a little dancing flame visits their house and steals their soul.

○●○

Huh, I get it, Maomao thought, listening to this basically quite common story as if it all made sense to her. In her mind, it didn’t exactly have a real “scare” in it, but everyone else was shivering as they listened. It was probably the atmosphere in the room; it was designed to cause that sort of reaction.

She finally swallowed the dried squid, which had gotten nice and soft, and a new piece was promptly offered to her. “You look awfully calm,” Shisui whispered to her. Like Maomao, she showed no sign of having been unsettled by the story.

“I guess.”

“Why?”

“I’ll tell you later.” Revealing the secret behind the story here and now would only spoil things. But often, such stories contained a kernel of truth.

Maomao listened as the tales rolled on. Yinghua continued to grip her hand tightly, grabbing onto her anytime anything remotely frightening came up.

In due course, it was Shisui’s turn to tell a story. Maomao rubbed her eyes. She was feeling lethargic and tired. Not only had they packed more than ten people into a small room, everyone was wearing copious perfume, maybe self-conscious of any body odor. Maomao, with her keen nose, was getting a little tipsy on the aroma.

Shisui, meanwhile, slid the cloth off her head and held her flame up near her face. She’d always looked young for how tall she was, but her balanced features took on a certain imposing authority in the dancing light.

“This is a story that comes from a country far to the east,” she said, lowering her girlish voice for effect. Gradually, she ceased to sound like a young woman and began to remind Maomao of a veteran storyteller.

○●○

In this land there was a famous monk. One day, the lord of the neighboring province died, and the monk went to perform the funeral. This story is about his journey home.

There were two mountain ranges the monk had to cross on his way back to his own temple. The journey was impossible to make in a single day, so the monk would be obliged to find lodging for the night.

The going had been easy. The weather had been fair and the distance had passed quickly, and finally the monk had decided to stay the night at the temple of another monk he knew.

Thinking that the return journey would be just as pleasant as the way over, the monk was surprised to find his feet felt oddly heavy on the way back. The sun was already sinking before he had covered two-thirds of the distance he’d expected to, and he was nowhere near the temple at which he’d planned to spend the night. This monk was observing particularly rigorous strictures, so he had no attendants and no horse.

Looks like I’ve made a misjudgment...

He was on a wide plain full of pampas grass, and he could hear wild dogs howling in the distance. If he tried to camp out, they might attack him. So the monk picked up his pace, and soon he came upon an old peasant hovel with a thatched roof. He hurried up to the door and knocked.

Pardon me! Is anyone home?

From the hovel emerged a young couple. The monk explained his situation and begged them to let him stay the night, even if he had to sleep in the corner of a storeroom.

My, but you must be tired from the road.

The young wife received the monk most hospitably. She offered him eggplant and cucumber, and although she claimed they were nothing special, he found them quite delicious. The husband, for his part, watched the monk with suspicion. And who could blame him, with an unknown traveler suddenly arriving at a young couple’s home?

The monk had few possessions, including only the scantest amount of money to pay for lodging. Yet the couple treated him as an honored guest, preparing a place for him to sleep in the next room.

Deeply grateful for the soft bed, the monk wondered if there was anything he could do to repay them. About the only thing he could think of was to chant a sutra, and so that was what he did, sitting down and intoning a holy text. Normally, he was utterly focused while reciting the scriptures, but today he was oddly, acutely aware of the sounds around him. He could hear the wind in the grass, along with a noise rather like a bell. Insects, maybe.

The monk continued to chant, but he listened closely, and then he realized that the bell-like sound was a person’s voice.

What shall we do, dear?

It was the lady of the house.

Nothing to do. It’s enough.

Another bell: the husband’s voice. The monk thought they sounded strange, but once he had begun chanting a sutra, he never stopped until he was finished.

Now, now, dear, that will never do. I don’t want to be left alone.

The woman was raising her voice. They didn’t seem to think the monk could hear them, but his ears were better than the average person’s. He knew it was wrong to eavesdrop and tried to make himself focus on his chanting, but he couldn’t stop the voices from reaching his ears.

You can think what you want. (The wife again.) I’m going to do it anyway.

Do what, exactly?

The monk felt a shiver run down his spine. Should he stop chanting and intervene in the argument, or—?

No. No, he couldn’t stop chanting. He had to continue reciting the holy text. He wasn’t sure why; he just felt it.

Yes, why? Why was his whole body trembling? He had goosebumps everywhere, right up to the top of his head, which had been shaven bald for so long.

What is this?

Come, let’s do it.

The unsteady sliding door hushed open, revealing the woman holding a hatchet, her eyes wild. The monk let his eyes shift to look at her, but with his mouth he continued chanting.

Where’s that monk? Where’d he go?

The woman swiped with her hatchet just in front of the monk. Whoosh! But she seemed not to notice him.

Where is he?! Did he run away?

The woman left the room, her shadow stretching out, forming strange shapes. Inhuman shapes. And then another bizarre shadow joined her.

Search, my love. We must find him. Or else... Or else...

The woman was in a panic. Why was she panicking?

Otherwise, you...

There was a triiing, like a bell. Then there came a munching, as of someone chewing up paper.

The chewing went on and on. All throughout it, the monk never stopped chanting the holy sutra.

The moment the sound stopped, he went outside. He didn’t say his farewells to the young couple, didn’t look at them, simply left the house.

There, he found an insect’s brownish wings lying on the ground.

Triiing, triiing.

He heard the sound of a bug from the pampas grass, and then it faded.

The monk brought his hands together in prayer over the tattered insect wing, and then, still chanting, he walked off into the night.

○●○

Everyone listened raptly to Shisui’s story. Maomao reflected on how important intonation and delivery were: usually so airheaded and innocent, when she was telling her story, Shisui sounded like a completely different person. She looked it, too, with the light of the flame flickering across her face.

She almost looks...familiar, somehow, Maomao thought absently as she regarded Shisui in profile, but then the other girl looked at Maomao and grinned. She blew out her flame, disposing of the wick and oil in the brazier in the middle of the room.

“Okay, you’re next,” Shisui said, smiling guilelessly once more. Ah, yes, Maomao realized—if she was going to come to a scary-story convocation, she was eventually going to have to tell one herself. She nodded.

What should I say?

Maomao wasn’t the type to believe in these kinds of tales, which made it hard for her to come up with anything compelling. Left without any other options, she decided to tell a story she’d heard from her old man.

“This happened some decades ago,” she began. “It was claimed that a small, floating flame, said to be a wandering human soul, appeared near a graveyard.” Now that Maomao was the storyteller, Yinghua let go of her, pulling her cloth around herself until only her eyes were peeking out. “Thinking it most peculiar, some brave young people decided to go find out the truth of the matter. And when they did...”

Maomao could see Yinghua biting her lip. If she was so scared, she should just cover her ears, Maomao thought.

“...they discovered that the explanation was perfectly mundane. A man who lived in the area had been walking among the graves. Someone had just said the light was a restless soul.” Unfortunately, the story she was telling wasn’t quite the eerie tale everyone had been expecting. Yinghua let out a breath that seemed at once relieved and disappointed. “He was just an ordinary grave robber.”

Yinghua’s forehead struck Maomao’s shoulder with a whack. Then she looked straight at Maomao and said, “Grave robber?”

“Yes. He was obsessed with some bizarre curse, and was trying to make a concoction that was supposed to work on all kinds of illnesses. You grind up human livers, then smear them all over your body...”

Whack. This time Yinghua connected with Maomao’s forehead.

“That’s the story,” Maomao said, rubbing her head.

Yinghua was next, but her story was something less than coherent. Nonetheless, she got through it, and then there was only one light left. Holding it was the woman who had greeted them.

Come to think of it...

With a woman seated at each point of the compass, and two more in between each of them, that came to twelve attendees. But this woman had said thirteen stories. Maomao wondered what was going on here.

The last woman told a tale of the time of the former emperor. She spoke of a moment when the population of palace women had grown too large, when only a handful of them were His Majesty’s bedfellows.

Maomao just couldn’t seem to follow what she was saying. Her head was spinning. She gazed vacantly at the brazier before them.

Huh?

The speaker came to some terrifying conclusion, sending a shiver through everyone else, but Maomao didn’t really hear what she was saying.

“Now, as for the thirteenth story...” Their hostess was just about to throw the final light into the brazier when Maomao stood up and opened the window.

“Hey, Maomao!” Yinghua tried to stop her, but Maomao wasn’t about to let her. The wind rushed into the room, blowing everyone’s coverings aside. Maomao took a deep breath of the fresh air and let it out again.

No wonder I was starting to feel dizzy, she thought. The extinguished lights had all been put in the brazier. The brazier had charcoal in it, and the remaining wicks had caught again. Put a bunch of half-consumed charcoal fuel in a cramped room and close the window, and of course only one thing could happen.

Maomao went over to some of the more alarmingly slumped ladies seated around the brazier and brought them over to where the airflow was best. Yinghua, belatedly catching on, started to help.

Burning a flame in an airless space produces gases harmful to the human body. That was why she’d felt in more and more of a stupor as the night went on.

I was too slow noticing it, Maomao admonished herself, wondering why she hadn’t picked up on it sooner. At the same time, she realized her actions had been rather rude to the host. She turned to the other palace woman to apologize, but didn’t see her.

“...Bah, and I was so close too,” she thought she heard someone say, but there was nobody there.

“So what was with that one story?” Shisui asked. The meeting had broken up with everyone drifting away. Yinghua was giving Maomao a look as if to ask Who’s this girl? Shisui still had her cloth over her head, seemingly happy that way.

“What one story?” Maomao asked.

Shisui meant the story of the flame in the forest. She hadn’t forgotten that Maomao had promised to tell her the story’s secret.

“The prohibition on going into the woods might have been a superstition, but that doesn’t necessarily mean there was no good reason behind it.”

For example, suppose the forest was dangerous. Suppose it was full of food—but also full of things that couldn’t and shouldn’t be eaten. That could have inspired the ban. And what then? Suppose someone new came to the area, someone who hadn’t grown up in the village. By then, “you mustn’t eat what grows in the forest, for it will harm you” had, over many years, become simply “don’t go into the woods.” And precisely because people had observed the restriction so scrupulously, nobody knew how to distinguish what was and wasn’t edible in the forest.

All of this suggested the following: wracked with hunger from the crop shortage, the mother and child tried to sustain themselves on the abundance of the forest. Knowing they were violating the village’s customs, however, they did it secretly, when no one would see. They snuck into the forest in the brief moments of twilight, while there was still light but it was difficult to see anyone, and gathered mushrooms and berries. They returned home with the sunset—never knowing what they had harvested.

“There’s a fungus called the moonlight mushroom,” Maomao said. It looked much like the ordinary oyster mushroom. “It looks quite edible, but in fact it’s poisonous and induces nausea when eaten. As its name suggests, it has one unusual characteristic.”

Namely, the mushroom glowed after dark. The fruiting body was indeed quite delicious—so delicious, in fact, that she hadn’t been able to help herself from chopping one up and eating a bit of it, whereupon her old man had forced her to vomit it back out, one of her most pleasant memories.

In any event, the mother and child had gathered the mushrooms before they glowed, so they never knew what they had as they walked along that dark path. The glowing of the mushrooms in their basket might have looked to some distant observer like the floating flames believed to be wandering human souls.

Meanwhile, when the woman and her child got home and lit a light, the fungus would cease to shine, looking perfectly normal as they emptied out their harvest and ate it. Moonlight mushrooms weren’t ordinarily poisonous enough to kill, but what if they were eaten by someone who was severely malnourished? The child would die first, followed by their mother.

Then there was the question of what the woman had tried to say at the end. Perhaps she’d tried to tell the other villagers “There are delicious mushrooms in the woods” or something of the sort. A little act of revenge toward the neighbors who had refused to help her or her child.

“So that’s what it was!” Shisui fluttered her cloth, looking satisfied. Then she said, “Okay, I’ve gotta go this way!” and then she went pattering off like a little girl. She struck Maomao as quite a free spirit, and not especially interested in what anyone else thought—not that Maomao was one to judge.

“Huh. So it’s not so scary after all,” Yinghua said. She was puffing out her modest chest bravely, very much the opposite of how she’d acted earlier. “I’ll bet the other stories have explanations like that too.”

“Maybe,” Maomao said. “I wonder.”

Together, she and Yinghua headed back to the Jade Pavilion.

“Oh, you’re back earlier than I expected,” said Hongniang, who was waiting for them. She was doing some stitching, making little adjustments for the fast-growing princess.

“Yeah, things got a little wild at the end,” Yinghua said.

“I suppose so,” Hongniang said, as if this made perfect sense. “After the lady who always hosted those gatherings died last year, I was a little worried about who would take her place.” Hongniang set down her needle, sighed softly, and rubbed her shoulders. “She was a thoughtful woman. I owed a lot to her kindness, myself. I’m sorry it was all over for her before she even got out of the rear palace.”

Maomao studied Yinghua’s expression: her earlier bravado was deserting her, her face turning pale.

“Er... About this lady...”

“This is strictly between us, but she was one of the former emperor’s bedmates. I don’t much like get-togethers like that, but it was one of her few amusements, and it would have been churlish to stop her. After she passed last year, I have to admit I felt sorry to think of the tradition simply disappearing. I’m glad someone stepped up to keep it going.”

Hongniang put her sewing tools away in a lacquered wooden box, and with another sigh she went to her bedroom. Maomao couldn’t help thinking that Hongniang’s story sounded familiar somehow—and then she realized that it resembled the tale the hostess had told. She couldn’t remember the exact details, but judging by Yinghua’s bloodless expression, she was thinking the same thing.

Hmm. Maomao crossed her arms and puzzled over it. The world was full of things she didn’t understand. In any event, she was glad the convocation had concluded before they had become the thirteenth story.

Yinghua, terrified, insisted Maomao stay with her that night, leaving Maomao too stifled to get much sleep.