The first hop came from the lane behind the inn, not from any living foot.
It was a single sound. Both feet together. A pause. Both feet together again. No scrape of a shoe. No bend of a knee. Wei Shun was thirty-four and had been paid to walk a body home, which was a trade older than the inn and older than the paper on the dead man’s brow. You bound the corpse upright. You put the fulu on the forehead. You rang a bell so the living would close their doors and not look. You did not, under any rule his master had left him, peel the paper off to see the face.
The man had died on the road south of the prefecture, too far for a coffin cart. Families still wanted the bones in the right earth. That was how the hopping started as a job before it started as a story. Two men with a pole. A stiff passenger. At a distance it looked like the dead were traveling on their own.
This one had slipped the pole after dark.
Wei found him in the lane by moonlight. Qing coat. Hat still on. Arms out like a man asking for a debt. The yellow strip of paper hung crooked. One corner had lifted in the damp. Under it the skin was the green-white of old rice. The eyes were closed. The mouth was not.
Wei held his breath.
That was the other rule, the one the priests and the coroners both kept. A jiangshi finds you by the living air in your chest. Blood is a Western hunger. This thing wanted qi. Breath is how it knows the room is occupied.
He did not breathe and he did not blink and he stepped backward until his heel found the inn’s threshold. The thing hopped once. The paper fluttered. For a moment the red characters were only ink. Then the hop closed half the lane.
Wei went inside and barred the door and let the air out of his lungs as quietly as a theft. Upstairs a guest laughed at a dice cup. The laugh was a beacon. Wei went up the stair and put his hand over the man’s mouth and pointed at the window.
They watched from the dark.
The jiangshi stood in the yard as if the yard belonged to it. It turned its whole trunk to face the wall. It could not turn a neck that no longer bent. It hopped toward the well, toward the gate, toward the place Wei’s breath had been. When the paper slipped another finger’s width the eyelids under it twitched like a man dreaming of light.
Do not take the paper off.
Wei had seen a driver do it once, years back, to prove the face was a cousin. The cousin had opened his mouth and the driver had not come back from the ditch. The fulu is not decoration. It is a lock. The lock is the only reason the dead agree to travel.
He waited until the hops went down the lane and grew faint. Then he took sticky rice from the kitchen because that was what the old women put across a threshold, and he took a fresh strip and ink from his pack, and he went out with his lungs empty.
The body stood under the eaves of the next house, listing. Wei pressed the new paper over the old one and said the words his master had made him memorize until they were only sound. The arms lowered a degree. The next hop was smaller. He got the pole under the shoulders the way you get a pole under a beam, and he walked, and he did not look at the mouth.
By dawn they were on the road that led to the right village. The hat stayed on. The paper stayed on. Farmers shut their doors when they heard the bell and that was as it should be.
Wei does not take night work now unless the paper is new and the ink is wet. He does not stay in rooms with a mirror facing the bed. He does not hold his breath as a joke. When a man in a tavern asks if the hopping dead are only cinema, Wei lets him talk. Talk is breath. Breath is how they find you.
The rule is older than the films with the funny hats.
If you hear two feet land as one, hold the air.
If you see a yellow strip on a brow, do not peel it to satisfy a dare.
If the arms are out and the knees do not bend, you are not looking at a man late for home.
You are looking at a man who missed home by enough nights that the body kept walking.
The jiangshi does not run.
It hops.
The ones who take the paper off learn that a face under a lock is still a face, and that qi leaves by the mouth you opened when you thought you were only curious.
