The Witch's Market Read Online Free PDF Page A

single man as residence or to a family to be used as their dining room. In Laolao’s case, it was for meeting with clients.
    In this cozy—from a child’s point of view—little area, Laolao set up a small, round, wooden table with three stools and a lamp. On the walls she pasted lurid pictures of Daoist gods and goddesses. Here Laolao summoned the loved ones of the bereaved. Blindfolded with a red cloth, she’d tilt her head to show she was listening very carefully, then repeat messages in the loved ones’ voices.
    As word got around regarding Laolao’s talent of speaking for the dead, her business thrived. Because people would get sore muscles very quickly in the cramped space, they’d quickly pay and leave to make room for the next customer.
    When the dead spoke through Laolao, their words were always simple and curt. Her explanation was that she couldn’t let the dead dwell in her for too long since that would exhaust her and endanger her health. She emphasized over and over that, though paid, she was in fact doing her customers a huge favor by renting her body to their dead relatives and friends.
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    Laolao had once told me about a young woman who had come to her to find her deceased lover. But this was one of the rare times that Laolao couldn’t speak for the ghost. The woman got very angry, calling Laolao an imposter and demanding her money back.
    I asked my grandmother what had happened, and she said, “It’s not that I couldn’t reach her lover; it was because the man was a murderer and I didn’t want to deal with him!”
    Before I had a chance to ask more, Laolao continued. “Of course I could still let him talk to her through me. But I’d found out he was a con man planning to kill her to get her money. But then he put the poison into her mother’s soup by mistake. She should have told me that he’d been caught and was executed—she was lucky to be rid of the bastard.
    â€œHe reincarnated as a cat and was hit by a bus. You know, Eileen, I couldn’t possibly let my customer talk to a cat’s ghost.”
    â€œWhy not?”
    â€œAm I supposed to just sit here and meow?!”
    I never found out if Laolao made this all up for fun or really believed it.
    And soon after that, Laolao died.
    It happened on a day when my grandmother was seeing a customer as usual. A Mrs. Song had asked Laolao to speak to her stillborn baby. But the negative qi emanating from Mrs. Song’s body made Laolao extremely uncomfortable. However, since Laolao had already meditated and been paid to open her yin eye, she felt obligated to continue. All at once, she clutched her throat and her face turned paper white as she exclaimed, “Ahh . . . Ahh . . . Ahhhh . . .” as if choked by invisible hands. Under the eyes of waiting customers, she slid to the floor, dead.
    Laolao had never seen a doctor in her life, so I had no idea about the state of her health, or what caused her to die so suddenly. The only explanation I ever received was from Laolao’s friend, who told me it was Mrs. Song’s dead baby who’d taken Laolao’s life.
    â€œBut how, since he was a baby and dead at that?”
    â€œGhost babies can be very powerful. You know parents have to appease their baby’s ghost by giving a proper burial and hiring monks to chant sutras for its soul. Sometimes people adopt ghost babies to harass their enemies.”
    â€œHow can that be?”
    â€œIt was after Mrs. Song learned that her husband had been cheating that she lost the baby. After the baby died, she secretly fed her baby’s ghost with all kinds of goodies so his yin qi built up and he could go out to harass her husband’s mistress.”
    â€œThen what happened?”
    â€œThe mistress felt her body being pierced by hundreds of needles—the ghost baby used her body as a target for throwing daggers. The pain became so severe that she