Barry Hughart - The Story of the Stone

The little old lady dissolved into something I couldn't identify, but Master Li muttered that it looked like a case of leprosy. The leprosy dissolved into a misshapen worm, a vulture, a poisonous toad, a sow bug, a patch of spleenwort, and then a happy laughing little boy who was torturing a gecko. The sins column went to work again, and Moon Boy's next incarnation was the stuff of legend: Mad Monk Mu of Midnight Marsh.

The ghoulish monk dissolved into a patch of quicksand as the Great Wheel of Incarnations tried again. The quicksand dissolved into feverish swamp vapor, a series of spiders, a vampire bat, a hyena, and finally into Moon Boy—but Moon Boy dressed as a girl and playing with a cat. I was relieved to see that he wasn't torturing it. Then I slowly realized that Moon Boy was training the cat to scratch the eyes from a rival's baby, and the mirror appeared to shudder as though gathering forces for one final effort.

Light formed around Moon Boy's beautiful face. The nimbus grew brighter and brighter, shimmering like tongues of fire. Moon Boy was changing and yet not changing, rearranging in a way that was both familiar and strange. His face lifted. His arms rose as though reaching for the sun. Brilliant colors moved around and through him. The sins column had overflowed and was stretching down the wall, and the virtues column remained empty.

Suddenly the columns disappeared. The image disappeared. Words formed in the mirror. “Judgment is beyond the jurisdiction of lower courts, and is reserved for the Supreme Deity.” Then the words vanished and Moon Boy was staring back at his own image.

“Heaven preserve us,” the Recorder whispered.

“Incredible,” Master Li said. “We must thank the gods that this fellow is not under our jurisdiction! The Son of Heaven will assign temporal punishment to him and his oafish accomplice, but I had best glance at the Register of Souls to ensure that an earthly sentence will not conflict with a divine one.”

I doubt that the Recorder of Past Existences would normally have allowed such a thing, but he was a shaken man. He meekly allowed Master Li to spend a minute in the room where the register was kept, and then he hastily escorted us back through the maze, opened a door, shoved us outside to a courtyard, and slammed the door behind us.

Master Li doubled over with laughter. “What a pair you are!” he chortled. “It's an honor to travel with such distinguished young gentlemen, so let's travel to see a friend of mine, and then on to see Tou Wan, the wife of the Laughing Prince.”

I had to admire Moon Boy. He had just discovered that his previous existences broke the world record for wickedness, but he preened himself as though nothing had happened and kept his voice steady.

“At the risk of sounding stupid, why don't we go see the aristocratic assassin himself?” he asked reasonably.

Master Li started off in silence. Finally he cleared his throat and said, “That would be a bit difficult. You see, according to the Register of Souls, the Laughing Prince managed to elude the bailiffs, and he has never arrived in Hell.”

Looking back at it, I think it was fortunate that Moon Boy and I were preoccupied with images of a mad mummy creeping up from a tomb to the room where Grief of Dawn lay helpless in bed. It distracted us from the details of Hell, and some of them were very unpleasant. We were approaching the river How Nai-ho, which is the boundary between the First and Second Hells. It is spanned by three bridges: One is gold and is used by visiting gods and their emissaries, one is silver and is used by the virtuous, and the third is a ramshackle bamboo bridge with no handrails that is used by sinners. The sinners scream in terror as they try to cross the river. Inevitably they fall off, and horrible bronze dogs and snakes splash through the water with jaws gaping wide. The water bubbles with blood, but it's merely a foretaste of what is to come, because the mangled bodies wash up on the far bank and are miraculously healed, and laughing demons lead the sinners to places where torment begins in earnest.

Master Li marched toward the gold bridge while Moon Boy bellowed, “Make way for Lord Li of Kao, emissary of the Son of Heaven!” and we proceeded past glaring demons and over the golden span as though we owned it. The Second Hell punishes dishonest male and female intermediaries and ignorant or unscrupulous doctors. The torment is not one of the terrible ones, but the smell is revolting, and Moon Boy and Master Li clapped handkerchiefs to their noses. I was used to barnyards, so I wasn't bothered very much. We made our way down long lines of pits, and finally Master Li stopped at one where a fat fellow with a mournful flabby face was buried in soft manure up to his chin. Even through the reek he could smell living flesh, and his eyes slowly lifted.

“Now, look here, Li Kao, if it's about that land I sold you—”

“Nothing like that,” said Master Li.

“I had no idea there was alkali in the soil! May Heaven judge if I… er… may Heaven judge… er… oh, shit.”

“Well, you should be an expert on the subject,” Master Li said cheerfully. “Actually, the Yama Kings were quite lenient, considering the fact that you sold some of the same land to your own father.”

The fat fellow began to weep, and tears made pale furrows in the brown goo that covered most of his face. “You wouldn't bring that to their attention, would you?” he sobbed. “You can't imagine what the Neo-Confucians are doing to this place! They'd send me to the Eighth Hell, and that's horror beyond belief.”

“You should see what the same fellows are doing to China,” Master Li said gloomily. “The other night I dreamed you had returned as court physician, and I hadn't been so happy in years.”

It was difficult to draw oneself up with dignity under the circumstances, but the fat fellow tried.

“Not all of my patients died,” he said huffily. “Some even managed to walk again, and one or two didn't even need crutches!”

“The ones you treated for colds?”

“Colds or pimples. It is not the physician's fault if a patient is lunatic enough to come in with a case of hangnails,” the fellow said reasonably.

“You were a doctor in a million,” Master Li said warmly. “Who else would have prescribed arsenic oxide for hiccups?”

It worked!”

“No patient is in a position to dispute it,” Master Li said somewhat ambiguously. “Medical expertise is not what I've come to see you about, however. Do you remember the walking trip we took in Tungan? It must have been eighty or ninety years ago, and I've reached the point where my brain resembles the stuff you're buried in. All I can remember is a girl in a scarlet sampan.”

The transformation was amazing. Flab appeared to melt from the fat fellow's face, and I realized that he had once been a lighthearted and rather handsome young man.

“You remember her too?” he said softly. “Li Kao, not a day has passed in which I haven't thought of that girl. Wasn't that a time? She sang ‘Autumn Nights’ and tossed rice cakes into the water and laughed as we dove for them like ducks. By all the gods, I hope she made it to Heaven.”

“Wasn't there a festival?” Master Li asked.

“A wild village one. Masks and drums and monkey-dances, and that big farmer picked you up after you'd blackened his eye and crowned you King of Fleas. We stayed drunk for a week, and they gave us gifts of food and flowers when we left.”

He gazed sadly down at his manure pit. “What a wonderful thing it was to be young,” he whispered.

Master Li told us to keep our eyes peeled for demons while he leaned down and tilted his wine flask at the fellow's lips. It had been a long time between drinks, and he gulped a quart.