When Mr Song arrived on the scene, he was devastated with grief and remorse. The spot where the strange old lady had been Caption

The old crone spat a mouthful of water straight at them.

seen before she vanished was examined minutely. Excavating to a depth of three feet, they uncovered white hair; digging still deeper, they found the remains of an entire corpse, an old woman exactly like the one the maid had described, her face still covered with flesh as if she were still alive. Mr Song ordered them to strike it, and when they did so the flesh and bones simply fell away. Beneath the skin the corpse was all rotten. It consisted of nothing but water.

5.

TALKING PUPILS.

In the city of Chang'an there lived a man by the name of Fang Dong, known as a gentleman of considerable accomplishments, while at the same time having a reputation as an unprincipled libertine. If ever a pretty woman caught his eye on the street, he would trail her and do his utmost to seduce her.

The day before the Qing Ming Festival, he happened to be out strolling in the countryside when he saw a small carriage pass by, with red curtains and embroidered blinds. It was followed by a train of servants and horses, including one particular maid on a pony, who struck Fang as being very good-looking. He went closer to get a better view of the girl on the pony and, as he did so, noticed through the slightly parted curtains of the carriage a young lady, about sixteen years old, gorgeously attired and of a beauty such as he had never witnessed in his life. He gazed at her dumbfounded, rooted to the spot, and then proceeded to keep up with the carriage for several miles, now walking slightly ahead, now trailing behind. Finally he heard the young lady command her maid to come to the side of her carriage.

'Let down the blinds, girl! Who does that wild young man think he is, the one who keeps ogling me in that insolent fashion!'

The maid let down the blinds and spoke angrily to Fang. 'My lady is the bride of the seventh young lord of Hibiscus Town, and she is on her way to visit her parents. She is no village lass for the likes of you to gawp at!'

So saying, she took a pinch of dust from the ground by the carriage wheel and threw it in his face. Fang was momentarily Caption

Fang was momentarily blinded.

blinded and could not even open his eyes. He rubbed them, and when finally he did succeed in opening them, carriage and horses, young lady and maid, had all vanished into thin air! He returned home in great perplexity of spirit, all the time aware of a continuing discomfort in his eyes. He asked a friend to lift up his eyelids and take a look inside, and the friend told him that there was a clearly visible film over each of his eyeballs. The next morning, the condition was still more pronounced and there was an unstoppable flow of tears from each eye. The film continued to thicken, and after a few days it was as thick as a copper coin. In addition, a spiral-shaped protuberance began growing from the right eye, which resisted any treatment.

Fang was now totally blind, and his condition filled him with despair and remorse. Hearing that a Buddhist scripture, known as The Sutra of Light, had the power to cure ailments such as his, he acquired a copy and found a person to teach it to him so that he could recite it by heart. For a certain period of time, his physical discomfort and mental perplexity continued unabated, but after a while he began to find a certain peace of mind. Morning and evening, he sat cross-legged chanting the sutra and counting the beads of his rosary, and after a year of this he eventually succeeded in attaining a state of genuine detachment and serenity.

Then one day, out of the blue, he heard a voice, quiet as a fly, coming from within his left eye. This is what it said: 'It's pitch black in here! Unbearable!'

From his right eye came the reply 'Why don't we go out for a little stroll? It might help us shake off this gloom.'

Then he felt a slight irritation in both nostrils, as if two little creatures were wriggling down his nose. After a while he felt the creatures return and make their way back up his nostrils and into his eye sockets again.

'I hadn't seen the garden for ages!' said one voice. 'Aren't the Pearl Orchids looking withered!'

Now Fang had always been especially fond of orchids, and cultivated several varieties in his garden, which he had been in the habit of watering himself every day. But ever since losing his sight, he had lost all interest in them and had completely neglected them. Hearing this exchange, he promptly asked his wife why his orchids had been allowed to wither away. She in turn asked him how he even knew this to be the case, since he was blind, whereupon he told her about his strange experience. She went out into the garden, and sure enough, the flowers were quite dead. Greatly intrigued by what her husband had told her, she decided to hide herself in his room and keep watch. It was not long before she saw two little mannikins neither of them any larger than a bean emerge from his nose and fly buzzing out of the door. They were soon well out of sight, but were back again in next to no time, flying together up on to his face and in at his nostrils, like a pair of homing bees or ants.

They did the same thing two or three days running. Then Fang heard a voice speak from within his left eye.

'That tunnel is a dreadfully roundabout way of going in and out. Most inconvenient. We really should think of making ourselves a proper doorway.'

'The wall on my side is very thick,' replied the right eye. 'It won't be easy.'

'I'll try to make an opening on my side,' said the left eye. 'Then we can share my door.'

Presently Fang thought he felt a scratching and a splitting in his left eye socket, and an instant later, he could see! He could see everything around him with absolute clarity. Beside himself with delight, he promptly informed his wife, who inspected his eyes afresh and found that in the left eye a minute aperture had appeared in the film, a hole no larger than a cracked peppercorn, through which gleamed the black globe of a pupil. By the next morning, the film in the left eye had disappeared altogether. But the strangest thing of all was that, on careful inspection, there were now two pupils visible in that eye, while the right eye was still obscured by its spiral-shaped growth. Apparently both of the two eye-mannikins, his talking pupils, had now taken up residence in the left eye. So although Fang was still blind in one eye, he could see better with his one good eye than he had ever done with two.

From that day forth, he was a great deal more circumspect in his behaviour, and acquired an impeccable reputation in the district.

6.

THE PAINTED WALL.

Meng Longtan, a gentleman of Jiangxi Province, was staying in Peking with his friend the Provincial Graduate Zhu. One day, they went to visit a monastery together not a particularly spacious establishment, with a modest hall of worship and a number of cells for Zen meditation. There was a single elderly monk in residence, who, seeing the visitors arrive, smartened himself up, went out to greet them and took them on a tour of the precincts.

In the main hall stood a statue of the Zen Master Baozhi, and there were superb murals on the two flanking walls, representations of men and animals that seemed to breathe with life. On the eastern wall was a painting of Apsaras Scattering Flowers, beautiful fairylike beings, among whom Zhu noticed one maiden with unbound hair, a flower in her hand and a magically smiling face. Her lips seemed to move, and the light in her eyes rippled like water. Zhu stared at this maiden like a man transfixed, and was soon utterly transported by the vision. He was wafted bodily up on to the wall and into the mural itself. He felt himself pillowed on clouds, and saw stretching before him a grand panorama of palaces and pavilions, a veritable fairy realm. He could see an aged abbot preaching the Dharma from a pulpit, surrounded by a throng of robed monks. Zhu was mingling with the crowd when presently he felt someone secretly tugging at his sleeve, turned to look, and saw the maiden with the unbound hair walking smilingly away from him. He followed her down curving balustraded pathways to the doorway of a small pavilion, where he hesitated. The maiden looked back and beckoned him on with the flower that she still held in her hand. So he followed her into the pavilion, where they found themselves alone, and where with no delay he embraced her and, finding her to be far from unreceptive, proceeded to make love to her. Afterwards she left him and went away, closing the door behind her and bidding him not to make the slightest sound. That same night she returned, and so their liaison continued for a further two days.

Her female companions perceived soon enough that there was something afoot, and discovered Zhu in his hiding place.

'Look at you!' they teased the girl. 'You've most probably got a baby on the way by now, and still you wear your hair like a little girl!'

They brought out hairpins and pendants, and helped her put up her hair like a grown woman, while all along she maintained a coy silence.

'Come, sisters, let's go!' cried one of them. 'We're spoiling their fun!'

And off they went, giggling among themselves.

Zhu gazed at her once more. With hair now piled high in a black cloudlike chignon and phoenix ornaments hanging down from it, she seemed even more adorably beautiful than before. They were alone again and soon fell to further sports of love, his senses suffused with the heady perfume that emanated from her body, a scent of orchid mingled with musk. Their raptures were, however, rudely interrupted by the clomping of boots, the clanking of chains, and a confused and raucous shouting outside. The fairy girl leaped up, and she and Zhu hurried to the door. Peeping through, they saw a guard standing there in full armour, with a face black as pitch, carrying chains and cudgels, and surrounded by a throng of maidens.

'Are you all present?' he barked.

'All present!' came the reply.

'Are you quite sure one of you is not harbouring a man from the world below in here?' cried the guard. 'If so, bring him out this instant! Don't go causing trouble for yourselves.'

'There's no one here!' they all protested.

The guard cast a piercing gaze around him, implying that he was about to search the place. Zhu's fairy went ashen pale.

'Hurry!' she whispered, turning breathlessly to her lover and trembling with fear. 'Hide under the bed!'

She herself opened a little side-door in the wall, through which she escaped, while Zhu took refuge beneath the bed, hardly daring to breath. The heavy boots came marching into the room, then left again, and as they stomped away into the distance, he heaved a sigh of relief. But he could still hear a great deal of coming and going and talking outside the door, and remained in a state of unbearable suspense, his eyes burning and his ears buzzing like crickets. He resigned himself to waiting quietly for his lady friend to return, barely remembering any more who he himself was or where he had come from in the first place.

Meanwhile his earthly friend Meng Longtan, who had been standing in the main hall of the monastery, suddenly noticed that Zhu was no longer by his side and asked the monk-guide where he had gone. The monk gave a wry smile.

'He is listening to the sermon.'

'Where?'

'Not far from here.'

Then, after a little while, the monk tapped on the wall with his fingers. 'What has kept you so long, sir?' he called out.

At that very instant the outline of Zhu became visible on the painted wall, standing there, his ears inclined as if he was listening to something.

'Your friend has been waiting for you all this time!' the monk called again.

All of a sudden Zhu drifted effortlessly down from the wall and stood there before them, dazed and deeply abstracted, like a lifeless block of wood, his legs swaying unsteadily from side to side, his eyes staring in front of him. Meng Longtan was absolutely flabbergasted and inquired, as nonchalantly as possible, what had happened to him. Zhu told him the whole story, concluding, 'So there I was waiting quietly under the bed when I heard a tapping noise like thunder, so I hurried out of the room to see what was going on.'

They all looked up at the maiden in the painting, the Apsara with the unbound hair. Sure enough, her hair was no longer Caption

They all looked up at the maiden in the painting.

hanging down but had been dressed in fine coils on her head. Zhu was utterly amazed. He bowed respectfully to the old monk and begged him for some sort of explanation. The monk chuckled.

'The source of illusion lies within man himself. Who am I to explain these things?'

Zhu seemed altogether downcast by his experience, while Meng was simply out of his depth, and heaved a sigh of incomprehension. The two men took their leave, walked down the monastery steps and went on their way.

7.

THE TROLL.

Sun Taibo told me this story.

His great-grandfather, also named Sun, had been studying at Willow Gully Temple on South Mountain, and came home for the autumn wheat harvest. He only stayed at home for ten days, but when he returned to the temple and opened the door of his lodgings, he saw that the table was thick with dust and the windows laced with cobwebs. He ordered his servant to clean the place, and by evening it was in sufficiently good order for him to be able to install himself comfortably again. He dusted off the bed, spread out his quilt, closed the door and lay his head down on the pillow. Moonlight came flooding in at the window.

He tossed and turned a long while, as silence descended on the temple. Then suddenly a wind got up and he heard the main temple door flapping noisily. Thinking to himself that one of the monks must have forgotten to close it, he lay there a while in some anxiety. The wind seemed to be coming closer and closer in the direction of his quarters, and the next thing he knew the door leading into his room blew open. He was now seriously alarmed, and quite unable to compose himself. His room filled with the roaring of the wind, and he heard the sound of clomping boots gradually approaching the alcove in which his bed was situated. By now he was utterly terrified. Then the door of the alcove itself flew open, and there it was, a great troll, stooping down at first as it approached, then suddenly looming up over his bed, its head grazing the ceiling, its face dark and blotchy like an old melon rind. Its blazing eyes scanned the room, and its cavernous mouth lolled open, Caption

There it was, looming up over his bed.

revealing great shining fangs more than three inches long. Its tongue flickered from side to side, and from its throat there issued a terrible rasping sound that reverberated through the room.

Sun quaked in sheer terror. Thinking quickly to himself that the beast was already too close for him to have any chance of escape and that his only hope now lay in trying to kill it, he secretly drew his dagger from beneath his pillow, concealed it in his sleeve, then swiftly drew it out and stabbed the creature in the belly. The blade made a dull thud on impact, as if it had struck a stone mortar. The enraged troll flailed out at him with its huge claws, but Sun shrank back from it. The troll only succeeded in tearing at the bedcover, and pulled it down on to the ground as it stormed out.

Sun had been dragged to the ground with the bedcover, and he lay there howling. His servant came running with a lantern, and, finding the door locked, as it usually was during the night, he broke open the window and climbed in. Appalled at the state his master was in, he helped him back to bed and heard his tale. Afterwards they examined the room together and saw that the bedcover was still caught tight between the door and the door frame. As soon as they opened the door and the cover fell free, they saw great holes in the fabric, where the beast's claws had torn at it.

When dawn broke the next morning, they dared not stay there a moment longer but packed their things and returned home. On a subsequent occasion they questioned the resident monks, but there had been no further apparition.