By the time Jiang Ping received the job, three crews of renovation workers had already fled the old mansion on the outskirts of town. Every night at midnight, the sound of someone combing their hair came from the west wing. Someone had peered through a crack in the window and seen a woman in a Republican-era qipao sitting before the mirror, her hair trailing to the floor and a wooden comb with broken teeth clutched in her hand.
The homeowner was an elderly woman. She said the house had been passed down from her grandmother. Last month, while cleaning the west wing, she moved her grandmother’s old vanity table beside the window, and that was when the strange events began. Workers who got up during the night always saw the vanity’s mirror lights come on by themselves. If they went closer, they could smell the musty odor of hair oil. One young worker scoffed, “Quit trying to scare people with ghosts.” The next morning, he woke to find a strand of long, jet-black hair beside his pillow, its end tangled around a tooth from the wooden comb.
Jiang Ping brought three things with him: a compass, a cinnabar brush, and a peachwood comb soaked in rice water. As soon as midnight arrived, the sound of combing came from the west wing right on time. He pushed open the door, and the compass needle swung straight west, toward the mirror on the vanity. The woman sat with her back to him, combing her hair with a sharp, creaking sound. Jiang Ping didn’t rush to act. First, he recited, “Three Pure Ones, show me the way. Reveal the evil spirit.” Then he used cinnabar on his fingertip to draw a “Demon-Breaking Talisman” on the peachwood comb.
When the woman slowly turned around, Jiang Ping saw that her face was blurred, with only a crack at the corner of her mouth, exactly like the mark left by the broken teeth of the wooden comb. “Your obsession isn’t with your hair. It’s with this comb, isn’t it?” Jiang Ping suddenly said, pointing at the vanity’s drawer. “When you broke it, one of the teeth stabbed your hand. Your blood seeped into the cracks in the wood, and your soul went with the comb.”
The woman froze. The sound of combing stopped abruptly.
