The Priest Kept a Ghost in His Gourd and Let Him Out Every Night novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Loft

The villagers give the priest seven days to stop the dead before they burn the gourd; in the loft that night the ghost admits he does not remember killing anyone and cannot swear he didn't. Pingan writes his name on the ghost's palm so he can hold a cup, both men admit they have never touched anyone, and a bell tolls under the river saying the ghost's name.

Pingan stepped between the torches and the ghost, because nobody else was going to.

"Auntie, look at her."

He pointed at the woman by the well, who was sitting up with a blanket round her shoulders and color coming back into her face.

"That thing was drinking her warmth. Zhuoran killed it."

"Zhuoran," said a ferryman. "He has a name now, does he?"

"He's had one all his life."

"Burn the gourd!" someone shouted from the back.

"Burn the gourd and the priest with it," said another.

Auntie Xu held up one hand, and the yard went quiet.

She picked up her cleaver from the mud and looked at Pingan for a long time.

"Four people in a month," she said.

"Four, found cold in their beds with frost on their lips. Do you know what the Bureau sent us? A letter."

"I know."

"Do you know what your ghost did to this place?"

"I know what the story says."

"The story is my grandmother."

"Then I'm sorry," Pingan said, and meant it so plainly that her jaw shifted.

"But something is killing your people, and it's not him. Give me time to find out what it is."

"How long?"

"Seven days."

She breathed out through her nose.

"Seven days," she said. "If one more person dies, or I see that thing near a child, the gourd goes in the river."

She added, "And you go with it."

"Agreed."

"You'll sleep in the loft. And you'll eat."

She had heard his stomach.

"Thank you," said Pingan, with great feeling.

The loft over the stable was low and warm and smelled of hay and old rain.

It had a lamp, a straw mattress, a small window facing the river and no door that locked.

Pingan sat on the mattress and put the gourd carefully on the sill.

The sun was long gone, so the ghost slid out of the gourd as smoke.

He sat in the window, see-through, with the lamp flame showing through his knees.

Neither of them said anything for a while.

"You asked to come here," Pingan said at last.

"Yes."

"You never ask for anything."

"I know."

"Why?"

Zhuoran looked at the river.

"For four years I've felt a hook behind my ribs, pulling toward this water. A month ago it started pulling hard."

"And the three hundred?"

"A hundred and thirty-one years ago I woke up in the old ferry house with the dead all around me."

"I don't remember doing it." His voice was dry as paper. "I also can't tell you I didn't."

"I believe you."

"You can't."

"I can. I've known you four years. You complain about the weather, you cheat at cards and you have never once hurt a flea."

"Fleas are not people."

"Zhuoran."

"Fools are the most dangerous kind of company," Zhuoran said. But the corner of his mouth moved.

There was a knock, and Auntie's arm came round the corner with a tray and went away again without a word.

Two cups of hot tea and four steamed buns.

Pingan ate one in three bites.

He saw Zhuoran watching the second one, and the old red ring in his eyes had gone small and hungry.

"You can't hold it," Pingan said. "Not unless I'm touching you."

"I know. Four years."

"I don't want to hold your arm all night."

"You could be quite flattering about it."

"I could write you."

Zhuoran went still.

On a hunt Pingan only ever wrote one stroke on his wrist, fast, in the dark, so the ghost could fight.

He had never done it just to give him a bun.

"Go on, then, little priest," said Zhuoran.

Pingan opened the brush case.

He wet the brush in the cinnabar and took the ghost's cold hand.

He turned it palm up and wrote his name in the middle.

The ink went on bright red.

Then it sank in, and the hand under his fingers filled with weight.

It was a warm hand now.

Zhuoran looked at it.

Pingan put a cup in it.

Zhuoran lifted it, smelled it, and drank.

His eyes closed.

"It's hot," he said, in a voice Pingan had not heard before. "Pingan. It's hot."

"Have a bun."

He bit one in half and chewed it, and for a minute he said nothing at all.

When he opened his eyes they were wet, and he was pretending they were not.

Pingan looked away to give him the room.

He put the cups down, and when he turned back, Zhuoran was looking at him.

"I should tell you something," said Zhuoran.

"All right."

"I was a sworn disciple of the Cloud Needle Sect, Pingan. I died at twenty-seven."

"I died a virgin, and I'll have you know nothing improved in the afterlife."

Pingan's ears went hot.

"I'm twenty-six," he said. "I've never kissed anyone either."

"I know. You talk in your sleep."

"I do not."

"You say, 'Master, there's a girl at the market who smiled at me,' and then you say 'oh no.'"

Pingan put his face in his hands and laughed until his shoulders shook.

When he looked up, Zhuoran had moved closer.

He was close enough to touch, and Pingan did.

He took the warm hand and wrote on the back of it, slowly, because he wanted to.

Then he wrote up the inside of the wrist and along the forearm.

The cold paled where the ink went in.

Zhuoran watched the brush move.

"Why does it feel like that?" he whispered.

"Like what?"

"Like you're writing me awake."

Pingan set the brush down, because his hand was shaking.

"You're looking at my mouth, priest," said Zhuoran.

"Yes."

"Stop looking at it and do something about it."

Pingan kissed him.

It was not graceful.

Their noses knocked, and both of them laughed into each other's mouths, and then they stopped laughing.

The second kiss was slower.

Zhuoran's inked hand slid into Pingan's hair and pulled out the peach-wood pin, and the topknot came down.

Pingan's big hands found his back and learned the shape of it through the thin burnt cloth.

They went down into the hay together.

Nobody was clever about it.

Their hands went wherever they dared, under sashes and over ribs.

Zhuoran gasped when Pingan's hand slid into his trousers and closed around his hard cock, where the ink had already warmed him.

"More," Pingan murmured, and Zhuoran answered, "Don't stop."

He did not stop.

Pingan found out that a hundred and thirty-one years of cold could be undone one stroke at a time.

Zhuoran's hand closed over both their cocks together, slick with pre-come, impatient and trembling.

They rutted into each other's fists in the lamplight, awkward and rushing, until cum spilled hot over their knuckles at nearly the same moment.

Zhuoran said his name into his shoulder.

Afterward they lay tangled in the hay.

The ink on Zhuoran's arm glowed a dull, steady red.

"That was a very good tea," he said into the dark.

Pingan started to laugh again.

Then the lamp flame bent flat, though the window was shut.

Under the floor, under the stable, under the whole length of the river, a bell began to toll.

It was slow and heavy and wet.

And along with it, so faint that Pingan thought he was dreaming, a voice said, "Zhuoran."

Zhuoran sat up.

The voice said it again, in a man's tone, almost gentle.

It sounded like him.

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