The Shed Husk

Some imperial coffins, once opened, hold no body. Only a layer of something laid flat on the coffin floor, like a garment taken off and set down neatly — a complete human skin.

The skin is thin enough to pass light when held up. Rubbed between the fingers it feels like a cicada shell kept too long, and it gives a very fine brittle sound under pressure. The split begins at the exact center of the back of the head and runs down along the midline of the neck; there is no knife mark at its edges and none of the raggedness tearing leaves, as though something had pushed the skin open from inside and then backed out of it an inch at a time.

The same split turns up now and then on things that still walk. Seen from behind it is a very fine dark-red mark, thin as a hair, hidden in the hairline, and unless you look closely you take it for a parting.

The trade has no single name for it. The old hands in Guanzhong call the skin on the coffin floor the sloughed garment, the last thing the dead took off before leaving; the Lianghu country calls it the empty coffin-shell, with the weight on there being nobody inside; and some of the older generation insist the thing counts as no grave-good at all, but as something the owner left behind himself. The three accounts refuse to yield to one another, and the one point they share is this — if you meet one, back out, do not touch it.

On the lowest level of that nameless imperial tomb in Guanzhong there is a more complete one. It sits on the dragon throne in a rotted black dragon robe, upright, the chin raised to an angle close to arrogance. There are no eyelids on the face; the pupils in the sockets are bare, cut into vertical lines by some process nobody can name. Below the neck lies an extremely fine scale pattern, the kind of pattern no carver could produce, the mark left by something that grew outward from under the skin layer by layer and was then shed layer by layer.

If what is buried in the tomb is a shed husk, one question is left: where did the 'man' who actually wore this skin go afterward?