The business of Qingxi and the cat is recorded in the bing division of this work.
Twenty-two years after her death, in the summer of the renzi year of the Shaoxi era, her old mistress fell ill of dropsy and grew daily more desperate. The steward of the house, Wang Fu, said: “I have heard the second Mr Qian, who keeps the tea-shop in Tianjing Lane, say that there is a Master Pan outside Genshan Gate who is good at managing affairs in the dark. People call him Pan Who Sees Ghosts.”
They thought it worth trying. Wang took Qian with him and they went to Pan’s house.
Pan burned incense and paper money, and spread a handkerchief on the lamp before the image of the god he serves — and plainly saw a woman and a cat standing facing one another.
“There is a wrong on both sides,” said Pan. “But I do not know what is behind it.”
The two men took the handkerchief home and told the mistress what they had seen. She was greatly alarmed.
“It is true that I lost my temper with that girl and had her beaten,” she said. “But she died of her injuries. I did not take her life. Why should she plague me like this?”
She sent them back to him. Pan had a boy go into trance and held a summons, and the boy at once spoke in a woman’s voice:
“My name is Qingxi. I died a violent death and to this day I have not been allowed to be reborn. It is true my mistress did not kill me — but it began from her. In the old days her good fortune had not yet declined, and so I waited all these years.”
Pan offered her fasts, offerings and scriptures. She would accept none of them. She made the noise of a cat several times, and the boy went into a swoon; and when he came to, he remembered nothing at all.
So Pan transferred a writ to the City God, directing that she be placed in the palace at Fengdu. He also charmed a date into water and gave it to the sick woman to drink, and she seemed a little better. In a few days she sank again, and did not rise after all.
Qian went to the funeral. That night he dreamed of the woman, who said: “I was righting my own wrong. What had that to do with you? You had Master Pan throw me into prison. There is no help for it — you must come down below and give evidence.”
He took a burning fever, and died within a few days.
Alas. The reckonings of the dark road are vast and hard to call to account. That Qingxi, who died in the first place over a cat, should have brought disaster on her mistress and on Qian too — that was going too far. Or was it simply that their allotted numbers fell out together?
