The Painted Skin

A t dawn, on the road out of Taiyuan, a scholar named Wang met a girl travelling alone. She was perhaps sixteen, lovely as new snow, and she hurried as if her small feet pained her, a bundle clutched to her chest. Wang quickened his step to walk beside her. In Taiyuan there was a man named Wang. Going out early one morning, he encountered a girl going alone, carrying a bundle, walking with difficulty. He hastened and overtook her. She was about sixteen, and exceedingly beautiful. His heart was moved, and he asked why she walked alone at such an hour.

She told him a thin, sad story — a cruel household, a flight by night, nowhere left to go. Wang, who told himself he was being kind, offered her his study to hide in. For days he kept her secret, and the secret kept him happy. She said she was a concubine of a great house, ill-used by the principal wife, and had run away. Wang offered to shelter her, and she consented gladly. He led her to his study and concealed her there, and for several days no one knew.

A Daoist priest passed him in the market and stopped short. "You have been among something corrupt," he said. Wang laughed it off. But that evening he climbed the wall to his own study, looked through the window — and went cold. Meeting a Daoist on the road, the priest started and said, "You have been touched by an evil influence." Wang denied it. The priest left, murmuring that a man could be bewitched and not know it. Made uneasy, Wang returned and, finding the study door barred from within, climbed over the wall and peered inside.

“What wears a lovely face by candlelight may keep its true skin folded in a drawer.”

A creature the color of green rot sat hunched on his couch. It had teeth like a saw. Across its knees was spread a human skin — her skin, her sweet face — and it was leaning close, working the brush across the surface, painting her back to beauty stroke by careful stroke. He saw a ghastly demon, green-faced, its teeth jagged like a saw. It had spread a human skin upon the couch and was painting it with a brush. Finished, it threw down the brush, lifted the skin like a cloak, shook it out, and put it on — and became the girl once more.