Chapter 11 The Head in the Doll
In the cold Ice Cellar, everything in sight was burning red.
To the left of the ice coffin stood two large wooden racks, fitted with rows of iron hooks. From top to bottom they hung with all kinds of cut pieces.
Limbs, features, hair, organs... packed tight on the racks, like cured meat hung in the wind for the New Year.
He walked to the rack without hurry, paused a moment, and took a foot from a hook. He looked as natural as if he were picking fat and lean at a butcher's stall.
"A Yue, do you think you were only a little short of saving him?" As he spoke, he walked to a large wooden table on the right.
Knives, scissors, awls, needle and thread, and other tools lay in neat rows. He chose a fine small knife, pressed the foot down, and cleanly twisted off the big toe.
"How can a person or a deed fall short by a little. A little short, and it is no longer perfect."
"Perfection cannot have a flaw. What falls a little short must be thrown away."
The foot without its toe was tossed aside into a bamboo basket. In that basket, broken pieces had piled to a peak. Besides hands and feet, there were heads large and small. Some had the hair shaved off. Some had the eyes dug out.
He picked up needle, thread, and a knife, and walked to the ice coffin.
After a bout of work, he pulled me over to look.
In the ice coffin, ears, nose, mouth, eyes, hair, neck, fingers... all of it was stitched with fine thread into a strange doll.
I bit my lip hard. I could not stop shaking.
"Perfect? You always said the woman I painted was beautiful. Does this body look like her?"
He caught my hand and pushed it toward the belly of that body. "The one you want is him, right?"
The doll's belly had been cut open. A head was stuffed inside.
The real Xiao Yan's head.
I held down the nausea. I was forced to stroke, again and again, that head seeping slime.
"I used to be very puzzled. He and I were born at the same time. Why was he Crown Prince, honored and precious, while I could only be his double, taking the blade for him, bleeding for him."
"Later I understood." He held out his left palm. At the little finger, there was a faint scar.
"I had grown a little something extra. A superfluous thing."
"Back then I thought, it was only a little extra thing. I only had to cut it off."
"But that woman was not satisfied. She said I was sick, sick in the mind the same as in the body. She said the Imperial Observatory had foretold that a twin birth was the birth of a demon, and that only one of me and my elder brother could live."
"So the perfect elder brother lived in the sunlight, and I became his shadow."
"To her, I was the extra one. She did not allow me to call him Imperial Father. She could not even be bothered to give me a name."
"But since he was called Xiao Yan, I was also called Xiao Yan. Our names and our faces were exactly the same! Compared with him, I was only short by that little bit!"
"If only we were the same..."
"Since it was like this, I could only send my elder brother back into her belly to grow all over again."
"Grow all over again, and become the same as me."
He murmured, then laughed. "But she ought to be satisfied now."
"I made her so beautiful, so beautiful..."
"So beautiful! So beautiful!!" He suddenly roared, raised the knife, and stabbed wildly at the collapsed doll.
I shuddered and backed away.
So that was it.
No wonder there was a double who looked almost exactly the same. No wonder incomplete corpses kept appearing in the Eastern Palace. No wonder the woman he painted again and again looked so familiar.
Not because she looked like me. Because I had seen her when I was little.
I backed to that large wooden table, picked up a knife, and hid it in my palm.