The Ghosts People Carry

Li never imagined he would find himself working alongside his aunt in her trade. He'd always thought it was a scam, the kind of thing only old-fashioned rural people still believed in.

But people kept coming to her. They treated his aunt like some kind of oracle, convinced she could commune with mysterious forces. Sometimes she'd gather strange props, dress herself in outlandish clothes, and go to someone's house to do what everyone called "driving out ghosts."

Li just saw it as taking advantage of people. He figured she must be raking in money. So when he lost his job in the city, spent a year hunting for work with no luck, and dragged himself back to the countryside in defeat, and his aunt said, "You've got nothing else going on. Why not be my assistant?" he said yes.

Li's mother had passed away when he was little. There was a stretch of time when his father had to work and would drop him off at his aunt's. Her own children had moved to a big city and rarely came home. So when Li came back, she was genuinely happy.

And so, here and there, he started helping out. Two things became clear. First, her line of work didn't make much money at all. A lot of her clients were elderly, and sometimes they'd just give her fruit or vegetables from their plots as payment. It didn't even compare to those people online doing tarot readings. Some of them had built large followings and were earning far more than his aunt ever did. The second thing: his aunt was, without a doubt, a fraud. She couldn't speak to the dead, couldn't channel spirits, and those purification rituals were pure theater.

Li once asked her about it. She just smiled and said nothing, then told him, "Stick around a bit longer. You'll see."

Li consoled himself with the thought that he was basically a magician's assistant now, just saving up some money. These days, even college graduates were struggling to find work. Once he'd scraped together enough, he'd head back to the city and try again. Besides, he'd noticed that plenty of the villagers probably knew deep down that his aunt was faking it, yet they kept coming anyway.

His aunt was getting old, and sometimes Li filled in for her. He figured he'd pretty much picked up her techniques: it all came down to a thick skin and decent acting. She'd even kept meticulous files on her clients. When he had to impersonate a dead husband or someone's dead dog to chat with a client, he could get the details right and not slip up. And he honestly felt he never did slip up, but the clients were never quite satisfied. They'd always ask for his aunt the next time.

She would tell him, "You can't keep thinking of this as fake. You have to get into character, treat it as real." Li didn't buy it. It wasn't that he had a problem with deception. Didn't rich people and bankers lie through their teeth every day? He just thought scamming people for such meager returns wasn't worth the effort.

Then something shifted. One day, a young woman showed up. She said her old family house was haunted and asked them to come take a look.

"Do you need a full ritual? An exorcism?" Li asked.

"No, no, not yet. Just… come and look first," she stammered.

Li volunteered on the spot. His aunt didn't stop him, only said they needed to prepare and would go the day after next. By "prepare," Li knew exactly what she meant: they'd quietly snoop around first and find out whose house it was and what the people were about. That was his aunt's real gift. She could blend into a crowd and coax information out of people without them ever catching on. She had a way of getting people to open up to her without them even realizing it.

This time was no different. The next morning his aunt went out, and by the afternoon she was back. "So it's her daughter," she said, her expression turning somber. "The poor girl's been through enough. I'll go this time."

When she explained, Li fell silent.

More than twenty years ago, the girl's mother had died unexpectedly in that old house. Not long after, the girl and her father moved away to another city. Recently, the girl had returned to the village. Word was that the accident had been caused by the girl's childhood mischief. Gossip spreads fast in the countryside, and Li could well imagine how those rumors must have reached the young woman after she moved back.

"That business back then, I remember it," his aunt said, a trace of anger in her voice. "It was an accident, plain and simple."

Li knew then what his aunt intended to do. The next day, he walked with her to the old house. He didn't go in, just waited outside the door. From within came the familiar bustle of a ritual in progress, and then, after a while, silence. He peered through the window and saw his aunt, dressed in one of her strange ceremonial outfits, holding the young woman in her arms.

Watching them through the window, Li suddenly thought of his own mother. Maybe his aunt had never really been a magician after all. She was something closer to an unlicensed therapist. No diploma, no license. Just years of listening to lonely people talk.