The Apothecary Diaries - Volume 10 - Chapter 11

Chapter 11: The Feitouman (Part 1)

The feitouman, the flying head, had first appeared about two months ago. The first person to witness it was a manservant. He’d finished his work and was ambling under the moonlight when he saw something pale float into view. He looked closer and discovered it was a white mask.

The man assumed it was someone playing a trick, but he was too tired for pranks just then. He was about to just walk by—when the mask turned and looked at him. Startled, then terrified, the man ran away.

The next morning, when he was feeling calmer, the man realized he must have just been seeing things. But when he went to where he’d seen the mask the night before, he found no trace of anything.

After that, other people started reporting the mysterious mask too. Some said they’d turned toward a strange noise to find the mask grinning at them; others, that it had been floating through the air.

Finally, more recently, stories started circulating of a woman’s disembodied head flying through the mansion—which inspired some to say that it must be a feitouman.

“So you saw it too, little lady?” Lihaku asked around a mouthful of congee.

Maomao was at the medical office eating with the others, and over breakfast she’d told them what she had seen the night before.

“Huh! What were you doing wandering around the house in the middle of the night, Niangniang?” Leave it to Tianyu to spoil a perfectly good conversation. His meal consisted entirely of some juice; it seemed he was not a morning person.

“Yes! Who knows what might be lurking out there at night? If you can’t sleep, you should at least stay in your room,” said the quack doctor, who’d prepared himself a hearty breakfast of congee, goat’s milk, and fried bread.

“Sorry. It was sort of...spur of the moment. Miss Chue invited me.”

Maomao’s apology didn’t sound especially apologetic. She was still tired from traveling, and on top of that she’d gotten back late from her evening excursion and then witnessed this “flying head.” In the end she’d hardly gotten any sleep at all. She didn’t have much appetite and would have been happy with a breakfast of juice just like Tianyu, but the quack insisted she have at least a little congee, so she was trying to force some down. What was he, her mother?

“By the way, Master Lihaku, what do you mean, me ‘too’?”

“Oh, someone came to me asking about the feitouman.”

“Eek! No one mentioned it to me!” The quack quaked. If he’d still had his mustache, it would have been quivering like a loach’s whiskers.

“I thought it might be best not to tell you. Ghosts aren’t your favorite topic, right?” Lihaku said. He knew the quack well.

“Who was it who asked you about it?” Now Maomao was curious. The whole thing had happened so late the night before that she’d resolved to worry about it the next day and had quickly said her goodbyes to Chue.

“One of the servant kids. I gave ’em some candy and now we’re friends.”

He makes them sound like a dog or a cat!

Lihaku’s repeated visits to the Verdigris House had taught him how to get on kids’ good side. If the apprentices don’t like him, they’ll never take his messages to Pairin, after all.

Why bother demonstrating his new talent all the way out here in the western capital? That’s what Maomao wanted to know. Maybe hanging around with the quack just left him with that much time to kill.

“I’m not saying I believe in spirits or whatever,” Lihaku added. “When I asked if you’d seen it, I didn’t mean... Well, I know you never take that sort of thing seriously.”

“Now that I have seen it, I’m keen to pin down what it really is.”

“I’d be happy to help,” Lihaku said. “I’m off for today, though. If anything happens, wake me up.” He cleaned his bowl and went to his room on the first floor to sleep. Even men of seemingly endless endurance had to get their rest. Getting a good sleep after a night on watch was part of Lihaku’s job. A relief guard stood outside the medical office.

As Lihaku was leaving, a small child came up to the room.

“Where’s Mister Soljer?” she asked, looking around, her face bloodless. Apparently the military man standing guard at the door didn’t count.

Maomao quickly realized what she meant. “If you’re looking for Master Lihaku, he’s off duty,” she said. This girl must be the servant Lihaku had mentioned. She looked to be about ten years old.

“O-Oh...” The girl looked disappointed and refused to meet Maomao’s eyes.

Maomao glanced at Tianyu and the quack. “Would you like me to call for him?” she asked.

“You’d bother an off-duty soldier?” Tianyu burst out. He was annoying, but right. It wouldn’t be pretty if their guard was sleep-deprived when something happened—but Lihaku had told them to wake him up if there was any need.

Lihaku was awake, and must have heard the noisy conversation, because he came right out of his room.

“Hey there!” he said.

“Mister Soljer!” The girl went right over to him. “We saw it again!”

“Oh you did? What did you see?”

“A head! A woman’s head!”

Somehow, everything kept coming back to this ghost story.

“Where did you see it?” Lihaku asked.

“Outside! The groundskeeper, he could barely stand up, he was so scared!”

“All right, I hear you. Where’s the groundskeeper now?”

“He’s out working in the garden. But he’s white as a sheet!”

“Good to know. Here, here’s some candy for you.”

“Yippee!” The girl skipped out of the medical office.

Maomao looked at Lihaku. “May I ask you something, Master Lihaku?”

“Yeah? What’s that?”

“You’re not doing this out of personal curiosity, are you? This is an official investigation.”

“I knew you were a sharp one.”

Lihaku didn’t make any effort to hide it. He believed there was a chance this “flying head” was really someone who might mean harm. If he was investigating, moreover, it was presumably on someone else’s orders.

“That Tianyu, he’s a heap of trouble,” Lihaku muttered to Maomao. It was rare for the sunny, cheerful soldier to complain like that.

The quack was humming a tune as he washed the dishes. Tianyu had finished his breakfast and was off brushing his teeth—an upper physician had ordered that the medical staff should not have rotting teeth; it wouldn’t look good. That physician being, not incidentally, Dr. Liu.

Sounds like Lihaku and Tianyu don’t get along. Maomao had sort of suspected as much.

“The two of you don’t click?” she asked.

“I guess. Tianyu and I...we’re just cut from different cloth, maybe. It’s not like we’re going to get into a fight, but I’m not sure how to talk to him. You know what I mean?”

Maomao did, indeed, know what he meant. Usually one could solve those problems by keeping one’s distance from the person in question, but that wasn’t an option here.

“You’re saying it wouldn’t normally be a problem, but we’re in such close quarters here that it makes things hard. And it might not be so bad if this was someone with whom you could settle things with a fight, but Tianyu is obviously not that kind of person. Am I right?”

“I knew you were a sharp one! It’s not that I can’t handle him, but...I don’t know what’s at his core. It’s like I can see the branches, but not the trunk.”

Lihaku seemed to have Tianyu pinned down by sheer instinct.

“Whereas you, young lady, there’s a logic to how you behave. Whatever you do, you can bet there’s either poison or drugs at the bottom of it.”

“You could at least say ‘drugs or poison,’ please,” Maomao replied. “As far as Tianyu is concerned, you’re right that his personality has a few wrinkles, but I don’t think it’s anything to be too concerned about.” He had managed to become a physician, after all, and shorthanded or not, they would never have brought him to the western capital if they hadn’t thoroughly investigated his background.

“Sure, I understand. Sorry. I’m a soldier—I guess I’m always thinking in terms of battle.”

“Battle? How do you mean?”

“The only thing I know for sure is that I could never trust him to have my back.”

Sheer instinct. There was nothing Maomao could say to that.

She decided to put the topic of Tianyu aside. “In any case, may I ask: Did the orders to investigate the feitouman come from the Moon Prince?”

“Yeah, that’s right. Master Jinshi told me to.”

There was a name Maomao didn’t hear much from other people these days. Wish he’d said something to me. Then again, Maomao did prefer to do things with the absolute minimum of conversation.

“Sorry, should I have told you? I know you—if something gets your interest, you work on it so hard you forget to eat or sleep. And my orders include not letting you run yourself into the ground.”

Maomao had thought she was keeping her monologue internal but apparently the words had come out of her mouth, and now Lihaku was apologizing on Jinshi’s behalf.

Not let me run myself into the ground, huh?

In that case, she could wish that he wouldn’t summon her to his room. For someone who never stopped piling fresh demands on her, Jinshi sometimes tried to be considerate in the strangest ways.

And now there’s a floating head involved.

He was always coming to her with problems that seemed right out of a ghost story.

“It’s strange, though,” Lihaku said.

“What’s strange?” Maomao asked. “Other than the flying head, I mean.”

“That’s exactly it. When I first heard the story, people talked about a floating mask. But over the last twenty days or so, a lot of people seem to be reporting a flying head.”

“Interesting point. What I saw looked more like a mask than a head.” She’d only glimpsed it, so she couldn’t be sure, but that was her initial impression.

“This is that thing we were talking about at breakfast? Hard to ignore, huh?”

Maomao spun at the voice behind them. It was Tianyu, back from brushing his teeth. He was grinning.

Lihaku didn’t look very surprised—he seemed to have guessed Tianyu was there. “Eavesdropping is bad manners, you know,” he said.

“Eavesdropping? Me? No, no. I was just curious how long the two of you would keep chattering together. An unmarried man and woman!”

“Believe us, it’s nothing like that!” Maomao and Lihaku replied in unison.

“Believe me, I don’t think it is.”

How much had Tianyu heard?

“So, that flying head. Some story, huh? Whaddaya say? Wanna let me in on it?”

“Absolutely not,” Maomao shot back.

Tianyu’s face fell. “Aw, why not?”

“Because you’ll tell.”

“I will not.”

“Because you’ll get bored in the middle of it and give up.”

“That I might do.”

Lihaku stayed quiet, letting Maomao handle Tianyu. He really didn’t like dealing with the guy.

“I can be useful!” Tianyu said. “If you don’t think I can be, or if you think I’m a risk or whatever, it’s just because you don’t know how to use me. Do you also refuse to use scissors because you could cut yourself with them?”

Maomao looked at Lihaku. He looked back as if to say it was up to her.

After a long moment, Maomao said, “Just don’t get in our way.”

“Yeah!” There was the faintest gleam in Tianyu’s eyes.

Maomao and Tianyu started by going out into the courtyard where Maomao had seen the feitouman the night before.

“So! What happens now?” Tianyu asked, although he sounded like he didn’t much care.

“What happens now is you show us just how useful you can be, Mister Scissors,” Maomao said, looking around the courtyard. She’d told Lihaku to get some sleep since he’d been on duty the previous night, but had convinced him to leave his map of the mansion with her.

Meanwhile, they’d told the quack they were just going to run a little errand, so their investigation had to be quick.

“You have to tell scissors which paper you want them to cut. Although you can stab any old thing from behind with them.”

Maomao didn’t respond to that. It sounded like Tianyu was miffed that she and Lihaku didn’t trust him.

He is who he is, though. His commitment to ethics seemed, well, less than enthusiastic.

“How about we start by looking around all the areas the spirit is supposed to have appeared?” Maomao suggested.

“Yeah, sure.”

The courtyard was where the mysterious mask was most often sighted. “Most of the reports place it by that tree or on top of that building,” Maomao said, looking at her blueprints. For an “annex,” this place was pretty big.

“Hoh!” Tianyu said, looking from the tree to the building and back. This was the same tree Chue had been dangling from last night. There were still a bunch of leaves under it, suggesting the groundskeeper hadn’t cleaned up yet.

“Anything catch your eye?” Maomao asked.

“Nah. What about you, Niangniang?” That was what he always called her. She’d given up trying to correct him, but these days even the other doctors were starting to do it. It was very frustrating.

“A couple of things.” First she looked at the tree. “This tree isn’t quite like the others I’ve seen growing in the western capital. It’s bigger and taller.”

“Yeah? So what?”

“Doesn’t it make you curious? Different kinds of plants means different possible medicines you can make from them! We need to get a little closer to be certain what we’re dealing with, though.”

“Okay. And that has what to do with why we’re here?”

That Tianyu—if he wasn’t specifically interested in something, you couldn’t get him to lift a finger for it. He was no fun, Maomao concluded, giving him a sour look.

“What’s the other thing?” Tianyu asked.

“The other thing is that the feitouman reported inside the house seems to take the form of either a mask or a face. Outside, however, people claim to see a head.”

“I’m sorry, how are a head and a face different? What did you see, anyway, Niangniang?”

“A mask, I’d say. I spotted it just as it disappeared around the corner of that hallway toward this courtyard.” She pointed to the place.

“A mask... So it didn’t look like a head to you?”

“No, definitely a mask or a face. But some of the reports describe it as a head.” The discrepancy nettled Maomao.

“A head is basically the three-dimensional version of a mask, right?” Tianyu said. He was clever, and he’d immediately put his finger on something key.

“I’m not completely sure we can put it that way, but I couldn’t help wondering. I was thinking I’d investigate that tree.”

“Go right ahead. Need anything from me?” The dull scissors had finally decided to sharpen up.

“If you’d be so kind, then.” Maomao took a handkerchief from the folds of her robe and wrapped it around a rock she found on the ground. “Toss this into the branches for me.”

“Yeah, sure. You make it sound so easy.” Despite his grumbling, Tianyu tossed the rock beautifully, catching the cloth on a branch. It wasn’t exactly proper etiquette for a court lady to be climbing a tree. A handkerchief that had been blown away would provide a convenient excuse.

Maomao trotted up to the trunk of the tree. The plant was a broad-leaved thing almost six meters tall.

“Osmanthus,” she observed. A tree that produced a profusion of small, strong-smelling blossoms that could be used for making osmanthus wine or floral tea.

Maomao grabbed onto the trunk and had just gotten off the ground when she exclaimed, “Yuck!” Her hand was covered in half-dried bird doo-doo. The stuff was all over the tree.

“Gross,” Tianyu offered.

“Keep it to yourself, please,” said Maomao. She studied the gunk on her hand, then gave it a vigorous sniff.

“Are you, uh, smelling that?” Tianyu asked, unable to ignore what he was seeing.

Maomao, however, just stared at the ground, then poked something she saw there with a stick.

“Hey, what are you up to?” Tianyu asked, more confused than ever.

Maomao picked up two small twigs and held them like chopsticks.

“Huh? You’re picking it up? You’re...picking something out of poop, using chopsticks.” He backed up a step, giving her a profoundly suspicious look.

Maomao wasn’t exactly thrilled to be doing this, but there was a lot you could learn from animal dung. In addition to the not-quite-dry bird droppings, the space under the tree was home to something that looked like hairballs. They came from specific kinds of birds—some of them would spit up things they couldn’t digest.

“This bird appears to eat mainly bugs,” Maomao said, dissecting the hairball with a stick. Inside, she discovered insect wings and legs.

“Well, yeah. Birds usually do, right?”

“There’s some fur in here too. Probably from a mouse or something.” She also spotted some bones alongside the fur and insect bits.

“So it eats mice? Probably from a hawk or some other bird of prey, then.”

Bugs were one thing, but if this bird was eating mice, then it had to be of a certain size.

“Yes. However...” Maomao looked around. The wealth of water and greenery in this house attracted a fair number of birds, but she didn’t see anything that looked big enough to eat mice, at least not at the moment. A bird like that would have scared off its smaller cousins, anyway.

Maomao gave it another moment’s thought, then looked at the building.

“It’s not possible to get up on that roof, is it?” she said.

“I dunno. Want me to throw another handkerchief up there?”

“Think you could get it that far?”

“Doubt it.”

This didn’t seem to be getting them anywhere. Maomao was just thinking it was time to go back when something moved at the edge of her vision. She looked toward it and saw some latticework decoration under the eaves.

“I changed my mind. I do want to climb up to the roof.”

“What? But there’s no way up!”

“There’s got to be something. Let’s find a ladder.”

“Easy for you to say. We probably have to ask the groundskeeper...” Which Tianyu didn’t look about to do. His interest seemed to be flagging.

The groundskeeper? That was the old man who’d said he’d seen the head yesterday, wasn’t it?

Maomao headed for where the groundskeeper was cleaning up. “Excuse me! Could we possibly borrow a ladder?”

“What? You think you can just march up and demand something like that?” The groundskeeper was looking very put-upon. He seemed all-around gloomy, maybe on account of his strange encounter the day before. “They told us to be polite to the visitors, but they never said we had to help you climb up and mess around on the roofs!”

“And right they were too,” Tianyu said.

Whose side is he on?!

Tianyu was obviously not going to be any help. Maomao would have to persuade this man on her own.

“I think there’s a bird nesting under the roof,” she said.

“Nesting? You know, now that you mention it, there have been a lot of droppings around lately.”

“Yes, sir. Having bird nests around can only mean more work, so I thought maybe I’d clean it up. I would be perfectly happy if I could just keep any eggs I happened to find—they’re a medicinal ingredient, you know.”

“Medicinal? You don’t even know what kind of bird it is up there.”

“True, sir, but most eggs are very nutritious, regardless of species.”

Maomao was sort of making things up as she went. Most eggs were edible, at least, if you cooked them.

Then she added one last, little push. “I think I might know what’s behind the ghost that’s been terrorizing everyone lately.”

“Y-You do?! Really?!” the groundskeeper said.

“Yes, sir,” she replied, confident she could solve at least half the riddle.

The groundskeeper found a ladder for them in short order, but it was old and rickety and wobbled when they placed it on the ground.

“Let me guess. You want me to climb up on the roof?” Tianyu said.

“You say that almost as if you didn’t want to.”

“I don’t.”

Even Maomao didn’t think she could impose on the old groundskeeper to climb up to the roof, so she resolved to do it herself. The only problem was the gaggle of servants and bureaucrats that had begun to form once the big ladder was put out in the courtyard. (Didn’t they have anything better to do?)

Sadly, none of them volunteered to climb in Maomao’s place; they just stood and stared. One of them, incidentally, was the original official with too much time on his hands: Jinshi was there. Everyone else took a few steps back at the arrival of this VIP.

Jinshi looked at what was going on, aghast, then said something to Basen. Basen nodded and came over to Maomao, his duck following him politely.

“It looks like you’re going to climb that ladder. Let me do it. What do you need up there?”

“You’ll climb up there for me, Master Basen?”

Frankly, if that was the choice, Maomao would rather go herself. Basen’s athletic prowess wasn’t in question, but she worried that he might not...improvise quickly enough.

Besides, who knows what he might do with his outrageous strength?

The duck gave a flap of its wings as if to cheer him on. Maomao’s disquiet only increased.

“You needn’t trouble yourself. I can do it,” she said firmly, but Basen would not be deterred.

“I told you, I’ll go up there. What do you need me to do?”

Basen was clearly here on the presumption that he was going to handle this task. Maomao would have to bend.

“I think—I think, now—that a bird has made a nest in the rafters of the roof. If you find it, do you think you could catch the bird for me?”

“A bird? Ah, birds, I know how to handle,” he said with a glance back at his duck. Domestic ducks, however, did not fly.

“I suspect this bird is nocturnal, so it’s probably asleep right now. If you could sneak up there very quietly, so it doesn’t wake up, please. If you can reach it, grab it.”

“Understood.” Basen was raring to go. Maomao felt less and less sure about this.

“Master Basen, one cannot get into Paradise if one takes a life unnecessarily, remember. Try not to strangle the poor thing.”

“Try not to strangle it...” Basen immediately sounded, well, smaller.

This is bad, bad, bad.

She definitely felt an ominous ripple of foreshadowing. She seriously considered waking Lihaku and asking him to handle this, but then she looked up at the rafters again. He would never be able to fit between them.

“You know, considering the size of the space up there, I definitely think I should do this,” she said.

“N-No, no, I’ll go. You can count on me!” Basen responded.

Then he set off up the ladder, Maomao’s anxiety mounting with every step. If there was a silver lining here, it would be that Basen was so sturdy that he wouldn’t hurt himself if he fell.

Basen made the top of the ladder, then peered in through the latticework along the roofline. He shot Maomao an all-good gesture.

Guess that means there’s a nest up there.

The latticework was designed to be removable, and Basen pried it away. He ran a rope through it and lowered it to the ground, then wedged himself into the roof space.

The entire assembled crowd, Maomao included, swallowed hard. Everyone seemed strangely silent—then Maomao realized that Chue had wandered up at some point and was holding a board on which she’d written Quiet Please.

For a long moment, nothing happened, and then there was a loud crash.

“Shoot! It got away!” Basen exclaimed.

Oh, come on!

Maomao was beside herself—but Chue put down her board and scrambled up the ladder. What was she doing? She took up a position in front of the open roof space, and as a small object came flashing out she caught it in a net.

Everyone, once again including Maomao, was stunned into silence at Chue’s display of dexterity.

Where’d she get that net from? Maomao wondered.

“Gotcha!” Chue cried and held the net aloft. She looked so thoroughly proud of herself that it was hard not to be a little annoyed.

She always did love to be the center of attention, and she’d found a perfect opportunity.

A hubbub spread throughout the courtyard, but when Jinshi, the most important person there, told everyone to get back to work, they obligingly scattered. Once the gawkers had moved on, the rest of them could see exactly what was in Chue’s net.

“What in the world is this?” Jinshi asked. He and Basen looked equally astonished. Judging from Basen’s reaction, the bird had gotten away from him before he’d seen exactly what it looked like.

Chue had captured an owl, about thirty centimeters in size. It didn’t look like a normal owl, though—the most striking thing about it was its face, which was eerie and strange, round and white. The feathers ringing its face were black, and if it were somewhere dark and the owl had its wings tucked in, it might well look like a white mask.

However...

“Isn’t it kind of small?” Tianyu asked, unimpressed. He didn’t hesitate to throw himself into the conversation in spite of Jinshi’s presence—the Moon Prince himself. Maomao jabbed him with her elbow. “Oops! Moon Prince, sir. I didn’t realize you were here. Very sorry.”

Maomao was coming to think that Tianyu was not very concerned with etiquette. Not that she was in any position to judge.

Jinshi’s expression was somewhat hard, but superficially, he wore a smile befitting one who “lived above the clouds,” a nobleman. “Considering the commotion, it would have been difficult not to notice. But what exactly were you doing?” he asked.

Playing innocent, are we? Maomao thought. Here he’d even sent Basen to do the dirty work.

Maomao, worried what Tianyu would say if left to his own devices, stepped forward before he could speak. “Sir. Rumor has it that an apparition has been spotted in and around this house of late. The soldier attached to the physicians told me that he’d heard about it from a servant, and he’s been investigating it on his patrols of the mansion. The same servant came to him again this very morning, but as our soldier was on guard duty last night, I hesitated to make him deal with it himself.”

Maomao assumed Chue would have filled Jinshi in on their experiences of the night before.

“As a matter of fact, I myself encountered what I take to be that spirit just last night, so I wanted to help find out what was going on.”

“Mm. And what about this physician with you? Presumably he has medical duties to attend to.” Jinshi looked at Tianyu coldly.

Damn. She knew it hadn’t been a good idea to let Tianyu get involved. She glowered at him. He, however, stepped forward with an innocent look. “My humble apologies,” he said as elaborately as possible. “I begged her to let me accompany her. Maomao here is far more accomplished in the mixing of medicines than my inadequate self, and has been graciously teaching me a great deal. When she said that she wished to examine the courtyard, I simply assumed she meant she was going to hunt for herbs and other ingredients, and followed along.”

Why, you little...

He was acting exceptionally polite and wasn’t even getting her name wrong!

Maomao thought Jinshi’s eyes glinted even more brightly. “Hoh, I see. I think I understand what’s going on here. You believe this bird is the alleged spirit?”

“Yes, sir. Anyway, that’s half the answer.” Maomao looked at the owl.

“This place is too public,” Jinshi said. “Perhaps I could ask you a few more questions somewhere else.”

“Certainly, sir,” Maomao said, and off they went.