A Circle with a Piece Missing

On the kitchen lintel of an old house in the Old River District there was once a talisman slip with a single character on it. Red paper, black ink, edges worn to fuzz, and the character written by rules of its own—the brush enters with the tip concealed, the horizontal stroke drags slightly upward, the final falling stroke must not be too heavy. The old woman who pasted it up said only one thing about it: this is for the things that shouldn't come in to look at. As for what those things were, she did not say.

After the slip was torn away, a dark patch stayed on the wall—a circle with a piece missing. Whoever tore it off took the patch for damp and brushed paint over it. The paint covered the wall; the circle stayed. Its gap falls in a fixed position, clean enough to look like a mark left there on purpose. The person who tore the slip off forgot about it long ago, but that patch has stayed on the wall for years without fading.

On some nights it comes out clearer than usual. The brightness has not changed; the line has thickened, as though someone on the other side of the wall had traced the same circle again. The wall still feels like paint under the hand, and not one layer of the paint is missing.

Of those single-character slips for a lintel, that same way of writing has produced more than one character, each with a use of its own, and when the people who paste them up are asked they only say: just keep it up there. Even the rules for taking one down are in dispute. Those who know say to pick the hour when the sun is highest, and that the paper you take down must not be burned—it has to go into a paper bag and be set aside. Those who don't know throw it out as waste paper, and nobody comes to the door specially to correct that. But however it is handled, that circle on the wall stays.

Anyone who can see the reverse side of the city finds that the same figure is on more than this one wall. It turns up on the stone tablets of old temples, on the old stone at a bridgehead, in certain places that ought to carry no marks at all—a circle with a piece missing. It will also pick something that already has an outline and attach itself to that: a printed design on the cover of a textbook, the edge of a wing deepened by one full round, which under light from directly above looks like a printing fault, and only under raking light shows what it is—that round was traced from the back of the paper.

Nobody can say clearly what it is. But every time it turns up, that piece of the city is not quite right.