The Painted Skin

A scholar of Taiyuan named Wang was walking out one morning very early when he met a young woman carrying a bundle and hurrying as if she could not keep up. He went up to her and asked where she was going. She said: "You are a passing stranger, and you cannot help me. Why ask?" Wang said, "What is your trouble? Tell me. I may be able to help." She bent her head and answered: "My parents, for the sake of money, sold me to a rich house. The first wife of the master is jealous, and from morning till night beats and curses me. I cannot bear it any longer. I am running away to a place far off." "And where is that place?" he asked. "I am running away," she said, "from a place I cannot live in. I have no place to go." "My poor home is not far," said Wang. "If you would do me the honor of going there, I will hide you."

She looked grateful and went with him. He took her into his house, gave her his own study, and hid her there. After several days no one knew of her presence. Then he told his wife, the lady Chen. The lady was alarmed and warned him that the girl might belong to some great family who would soon be after her. "She is not from a great family," Wang said. "Send her away," urged the lady, "or you will bring trouble on the house." Wang would not.

One day he was walking through the market when he met a Taoist priest, a man of great holiness. The priest looked at him with sudden astonishment. "What have you been doing?" he asked. "Nothing." "Demonic vapor circles you. Do not say nothing." Wang strenuously denied it. The priest left him, saying as he went: "Bewitched. Bewitched. There are some men who, when death is at the door, refuse to believe it."

These words troubled Wang. He thought a long time about the woman, but he could not believe her to be other than what she said. Even so, when he reached his gate he found it locked from the inside. He climbed the wall to look in, and found the front gate of his study also locked. He went up softly and put his eye to a hole in the window paper. What he saw made his blood freeze. Inside there was a hideous green-faced demon with jagged teeth like a saw, spreading a human skin over the bed and painting it with a brush, painting on the eyebrows, the lips, the cheeks. When the painting was finished, the demon threw down the brush, lifted the skin like a robe, shook it out, and put it on, and at once the demon vanished and the beautiful young woman was there.

Wang slipped down from the wall in horror and ran back to the priest. "Help me. Save my life." The priest said, "I can drive her out, but I cannot kill her. The poor thing has not had an easy life either. She has just found a substitute. I cannot bear to take her life." He gave Wang a horsehair whisk. "Hang this on your bedroom door. When the time comes, look for me at the temple of the green emperor." And he went away.

Wang did not dare go back into his study. He hung the whisk on the door of the inner bedroom, where he and his wife slept, and sat up late that night. About the second watch, he heard slow footsteps outside the door, and dared not look. He sent his wife to look. She put her eye to the keyhole and saw the woman come up to the door, see the whisk, and stop, gnashing her teeth. After a while she went away. Then she came back, cursing in a low voice: "The Taoist has frightened me. But I have already eaten, and I will not give back what is in my mouth." She tore the whisk down, broke through the door, climbed onto Wang's bed, ripped open his belly, took out his heart, and went off with it. The lady Chen screamed. The maid ran in with a candle and saw Wang dead, his chest a horrible cavity. She did not weep. She gathered the courage of a man and ran to find the priest.

The priest was furious. "I had pity on her, and look what she has done." He took up the whisk again and went with the lady to the house. The woman had vanished. The priest looked all around and finally pointed to the south. "There she is, she has gone south." He raised his wooden sword and called: "Ill-bred demon, give back my whisk." From the south of the courtyard there came an answer: a sudden movement, and the woman, no longer beautiful, falling on her face. Her painted skin slipped to the ground, and she became the green-faced demon, lying like a pig. The priest cut off her head with one blow of the wooden sword. The body became smoke that stayed close to the ground, and he took out a gourd, opened the cap, and the smoke was sucked into it like a draft into a fire. Then he stoppered the gourd and put it in his bag. The painted skin he rolled up like a scroll and put away too. Then he made ready to leave.

The lady Chen knelt and wept and begged him to bring her husband back to life. "I cannot do it," he said. "But there is a man, a beggar, who lives in the market and lies in the dust. Go to him and ask him on your knees. If he abuses you, do not be angry."

The lady went. The beggar lay in the street with his hair tangled and his face filthy, and a foul smell came from him. She knelt before him on the road. "I beg you, save my husband." "Are you my mother, that you ask such things of me?" he sneered. She continued to beg. He hit her and laughed. "Pretty woman, you would have anyone bring your husband back?" The crowd gathered to watch. He coughed up a large mouthful of phlegm and held it out. "Eat this." She turned away in disgust. He scooped up another. "Eat it, or I will not save him." She forced herself, eyes closed, to swallow. It went down her throat like a hard lump and stayed there in her chest. The beggar laughed: "Pretty woman, your love runs deep." He got up and walked away into a temple. She followed and could not find him. She stood there ashamed and went home.

In her chest the lump still hung, hard and cold. When she came to her husband's body and was about to clothe it for burial, she choked and a great clot leaped from her throat into the open chest cavity. To her amazement she saw it pulsing. It was a heart. She put it down inside the chest and drew the wound together with her hands. After a while it grew warm. She covered her husband with a quilt. In the night she felt his body grow warmer. By morning he was breathing, and by evening he was alive again.

He told his wife: "I had a dream as if I were drifting and falling, and someone gave me back."

She told him what she had done in the market. He went to look for the beggar to thank him, but the man was nowhere to be found.

The strange historian Pu Songling adds: People are foolish, beyond doubt. They look at a thing that is plain to be a demon, and they say it is beautiful. And they look at a thing that is genuinely good, and they say it is mad. They love what is to be hated, and they hate what is to be loved. The result is that men of foresight wander the streets eating dust, and women of true devotion are made to swallow phlegm. The way of heaven is a mystery to the wise, but it has not been a mystery this evening.