Sandalwood Death: A Novel (Chinese Literature Today Book Series)

dieh was no pushover. He was hard as nails, not soft as bean curd, a man who’d done and seen plenty in the nation’s capital, where he’d lopped off a truckload—maybe a shipload—of heads; a power struggle between him and Magistrate Qian would be like a fight between a dragon and a tiger, and I could not say who would come out ahead. Now, at this critical moment, I was suddenly reminded of my tiger’s whisker. Truth is, that treasure was never far from my mind. According to my wife, it was my amulet, which could turn bad luck into good as long as I kept it with me. So I jumped onto the bed, reached over to the wall, and retrieved my red bundle, which I frantically unwrapped to make sure the curly, golden-tipped tiger’s whisker was still there. It was. As my little treasure lay in my hand, I felt it move, little flicks, sort of like a hornet’s stinger, against my palm.
    A huge white snake, as big around as a water bucket, stood in front of the bed and thrust its head toward me, a purple forked tongue darting in and out between its red lips. “Xiaojia.” It was my wife’s voice! “What do you think you’re doing?” Heaven help me, how could you do this to me? You know I’m afraid of snakes, and so you made sure that’s what my wife is. Someone I’ve frolicked in bed with for the last ten years without knowing she was a snake. My own wife, a reincarnated white snake. Of course, The Legend of the White Snake , now I get it. Back when she was on the stage, she played the part of the white snake, and I’m the scholar she married, Xu Xian. But why hasn’t she sucked out my brains? Because she isn’t all snake. She has a snake’s head, but arms and legs, too, and breasts. And there’s hair on her head. Still, well and truly frightened, I flung the whisker away like a piece of hot charcoal and broke out in a full-body sweat.
    My wife stood there sneering at me. Since I’d just had a glimpse of her true form, seeing her now as my wife was both strange and unsettling. That big, fleshy snake living inside her could break through the flimsy skin covering and take its true form any time it wanted. Maybe she already knew that I’d seen her true form, which would have explained the strange, forced smile on her lips. “Well, did you see it?” she asked. “What am I behind this human façade?” Cold rays of light shot from her eyes, eyes once beautiful but now ugly and malignant, the eyes of a snake.
    A foolish grin was the best I could manage to mask my terror. My lips had stopped doing my bidding; my skin tingled. She must have released a cloud of noxious airs onto my face. “No, I didn’t,” I stammered, “I saw nothing.”
    “Liar,” she said with a sneer, “I’m sure you saw something.” A chilling, foul odor emerging from her mouth—snake’s breath—hit me square in the face.
    “Tell me the truth, what am I beneath all this?” She smiled in a peculiar way, and light glinted off the shiny, scaly things on her face. I could not tell the truth, not without harm to myself, and I was suddenly no longer the fool I’d always been. “Really, I didn’t see a thing.” “You can’t fool me, Xiaojia, you’re a terrible liar. Your face is red, and you’re sweating. So, come on, tell me. Am I a fox? Or maybe a weasel. Or how about a white eel?” White eels are members of the snake family, real close members. She was trying to trick me. But I was not about to be fooled. The only way I’d let my tongue betray me was if she came out and admitted that in reality she was a white snake. The surest way to have her take on her true form was to tell her I’d seen that she was a reincarnated white snake. She’d open that bloody mouth wide and swallow me up. No, she knew I always carried a knife, and if I wound up inside her, I’d slice her open. That would be the end of her. So instead, she’d open a hole in my head with her tongue, which was harder than a woodpecker’s beak, and suck out my brains. Then she’d suck the marrow from my bones, followed by my blood, reducing me to a pile of hollow bones wrapped in human skin. You cannot pry the words out of me, not even in your dreams. My niang used to say to me, “Pretend you know nothing, and the spirits will have no control over you.” “Honest, I saw nothing.” This time she reacted by laughing and changing form. Laughing made her look more human and less snake-like. Pretty much all human. She began crawling out of the room, her body