“Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that's what.”- Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses

Six hundred restaurants in Xi’an to choose from, and there wasn’t any doubt which one I’d chosen to return to. My dreams started there, at the Grand, the night I left the old capital city back in summer. Horrible dreams, so lifelike and terrifying that I woke screaming every night.

But that was summer; this was winter—and not just a typical Xi’an winter of dry air and zero-Celsius temperature. Ever since I arrived back at the Grand, a windy turbulence almost knocked me off my feet. These winds blew down from the Gobi Desert and covered the city in a patina of glittery dust. Walking about reminded me of the Covid era with every pedestrian’s face covered. The sun acquired a Martian-blue hue from so much dust in the air.

My fear of crowds doesn’t rise to the level of a phobia, but I’ve never felt comfortable around too many people. In China, you won’t find yourself in many places where you won’t see people everywhere you turn. When they aren’t in buses or cars, walking or riding bikes, they sit outside on curbs and steps. The fear of being hemmed in was exacerbated by my sleep terrors. I refused to enter elevators at the hotel because of the stress induced by that sardine-packing sensation every time I entered the elevator box. Sidewalks were always packed with pedestrians next to a busy street that was jammed with vehicles driving in the usual pell-mell fashion of drivers and aggravated by honking cars. A car horn to a Chinese driver is more than an appendage of the steering wheel. A driver’s first instinct is to hit the horn, never the brakes, and you have an unceasing caterwaul to go with the congestion.

  My stomach was roiling from sampling the food stalls during my walk in the Muslim Quarter of Xi’an City. Vivid, ghastly dreams pummeled me in my sleep. Researchers proved that dreams last a few minutes, not all night as many believe. Mine were similar to lucid dreams in that I was aware of myself dreaming, but unlike those who experience them in REM sleep, I had no control. The setting, the figures in my dreams, and the events never varied; every dream was the same and ended the same: I was attending a country fair back home in Indiana, strolling along, being alone in a crows as I often am when the entire ambience changed. All the fairgoers turned on me, pointing, some spewing a venomous hatred—perfect strangers mostly yet many of them neighbors among the crowd. They chased me down, beat me savagely, and inflicted the most horrific kinds of punishment on me. I begged them to tell me what I’d done and why they were killing me. No one answered; they kept torturing me. The only clue I had as to why these dreams kept happening was because of one word: as I was ambling down one row of concession stands before the crowd surged toward me in a bloodthirsty frenzy, out of the corner of my eye I noted the word XI’AN on one of those red 4-Sale signs. Behind it, a man in a heavy coat sat on a camp chair inside. That was the sole part of the dream that didn’t terrify me. It had to mean something.  It wasn’t just my career as an academic on the line; it was my sanity.

I didn’t have much time to get my answers, either, because the Lunar New Year was approaching. Xi’an City would be jammed with tourists coming for the Silk Road tour, a walk along the thirteen-mile City Wall, a climb to the top of the Big Wild Goose Pagoda and stay for the Lantern Festival at the end of the festivities. I spent a good part of my youth in Xi’an. I suspected my dreams and my past in that 1,000-year old city were connected psychically. My parents were in the diplomatic service, so I grew up speaking a choppy Mandarin which often made me the butt of jokes among my Chinese classmates at the Chinese-American school on Dengshikou Avenue. Beijing stamped me with thousands of indelible impressions and memories—mostly good ones.

Being a glorified booking agent for my college as well as interpreter, my job during the break was to plan our biannual goodwill visit, arranged by my economics department but coordinated through Peking University’s business college. Given the hostile climate between the two countries, I was charged with making every stop on the itinerary flawless and—this above all, the Dean explained—“as noncontroversial as possible. No international flaps . . .”

Five months ago, I thought I’d wrapped everything up for the coming year’s trip. The visit to the famous terracotta warriors of the first Qin emperor in Xi’an was to be the last stop on the schedule. My stay had gone as planned—until the dreams started on that final night. Had the dreams been nothing more than the indigestion resulting from Snow beer and fried bee pupae at dinner, I would have ignored them. But they were a nightly horror show of being killed over and over again. I had to know why.

A block from my rooms, I was walking about enjoying the summer evening air during a rising Blood Moon, amusing myself with the sights and sounds of the city. Unlike modern, hectic Beijing, in Xi’an you can order pizza or pray in a Catholic church, yet behind my fifteen-story hotel in the main shopping and dining district of Beilin I could wander about in vacant, weed-strewn lots, where squatters burn campfires to keep warm. That was when an old man in a long, frayed coat of gunmetal gray approached me, sidling closer. Noting his shabby overcoat so frayed at the cuffs it appeared to be fuzzy, I reached into my pocket for one of the dollar bills I kept there to hand out to street beggars who look for Westerners—a risky thing for any Chinese man or woman nowadays.

Instead of signifying hunger in the usual manner by rubbing his stomach, he shoved a flyer at me. I knew enough to infer that 嘉年华 signified “carnival.” The street named on it was within walking distance. What the hell, I thought. A carnival in winter? That made zero sense.

From my childhood on, I’d seen every equivalent of a Western-style carnival from impossible contortions, foot juggling, diabolo, plate-spinning, paper cutting, fortune telling, through acrobatic aerial skills involving children so young you knew their lives were harsh to become so proficient so young to the traditional lion dances. I loved the traditional Chinese dances but cried at an opera performance when the two performers engaged in a dangerous “combat” dance, where thrusting spears inches from the dancer’s face terrified me. I crumpled the flyer up, balling it in my fist, and attempted a jump shot into an open trash container near the curb.

I gave it no more thought. That night I experienced the first of my sleep terrors. I woke up before dawn screaming and flailing my arms, trying to ward off an attack by—what exactly?

“These are people in your past,” the psychiatrist I consulted said. “They’re transmogrified by your dream state into beings you think you don’t recognize.”

“Don’t recognize?”

I was perplexed. “How is it,” I asked him, “that I can’t recall them on waking although I stare into their faces as their beating me to death with fists, rocks, and sticks?”

He could not explain how my mind refused to yield anything other than the least fragments from the residue of the dreams terrifying me to the point of thrashing around until I woke myself.

Those sleep terrors plagued me ever since. Therapy didn’t help. Hypnosis didn’t work. Radical changes in diet and exercise failed. Most puzzling of all to me was the failure of prescription medication to alter any aspect of my dream life. I told the doctor who wrote the scripts that.

“That’s not possible,” he said. “You should have been knocked out cold.”

It started in Xian, the answer had to be there. I had to go back. I took a leave of absence from college. The fear of falling asleep and dreaming was ravaging me physically and mentally. I greeted the head desk clerk on my way out and said, in English, I was going out for a short walk. He didn’t know I spoke Chinese and called me their version of “cowboy” to his female assistant, who snickered.

I headed in the direction of Yongnying Gate from the hotel. The city was all but deserted from the late hour and the bitter chill of the winds. Gritty dust layered everything with a sooty veneer that ruined the effect of the day’s snowfall, something of a rarity in Xi’an. The filthy powder worked its way into the whirlpools of wind-blown snow around me. Every tree I passed looked doused with pepper. My eyes stung and I could taste the dust. The room clerk had done more than mock me for my stupidity in leaving the warmth of the hotel. He’d said something under his breath about the police. That sent a frisson of fear up my back. We Westerners don’t understand the mentality of being locked into an “iron triangle,” as the Chinese call it. Every citizen knows what it means, however. The local party boss has your file, called the dangan; the CCP in Beijing has your file, stamps your residency and work permits, and your neighborhood police precinct also has your file—all this decades before the Communist Party’s advanced facial recognition technology that not only plucks your identity from a database at light speed but it also applies your social ranking. Like an insect in a kill jar, you haven’t got a chance if you run afoul of the secret police. Foreigners have to expect some amount of surveillance, like mysterious calls in broken English to your hotel room at night. Being an American alone in Xi’an, I was automatically suspect.

The wind seared my forehead the minute I turned into it after leaving the hotel steps. Heavy trucks and delivery vans dominated the traffic on the road. I saw no pedestrians anywhere. I was alone—but not quite. Instead of the fat flakes of a snowfall in the Midwest, this was more like stinging hail—tiny BB balls of icy, graupel, or “corn snow,” as we call it in Indiana. It stings whatever exposed flesh it strikes. Three people a hundred feet or so ahead of me in thick parkas, bent double by the winds, walked in tight formation so close that they looked like a singular humped animal.

I should have turned back. I kept going, thinking I’d find an open doorway to shelter in or a business still opened. The temperature dropped and the snow changed back to a flurry, a whiteout of blinding snow. I was aware of twin hi-beams cutting though the veil as a car or heavy vehicle passed by but other than that I was completely blind. People froze to death in freak squalls like this. I could see no lights at all anywhere and I didn’t know how many blocks I’d covered since leaving the hotel. Something plucked my sleeve. At first, I thought it was that granular snow hitting my jacket. Fingers gripped me. I turned around, half-convinced I was about to be mugged on the street. There he stood, Shabby Man, looking at me with pleading eyes above a thin, patchy beard.

He shook his head from side to side, a slow-motion version of those opera dancers whose heads moved like hummingbird wings to avoid sword strikes. The Chinese do not possess our sense of space. He got right up to me so close I could smell his leathery body odor and the onions on his breath.

“This way, this way. You go, you go, you go,” he mumbled, pointing in the direction from which I thought I’d come, and repeating it like a mantra just as he’d done when he tried to get me to go to that street carnival last summer. His hands were red claws.

It was the last thing he said to me before shambling off into that blinding snow wearing that same heavy gray coat I remembered.

“Hey, old timer,” I shouted to his back. “There’s a snowstorm going on!”

The idea of a street carnival in January was ludicrous, surreal. Chinese cuisine will declare anything edible that walks, swims, crawls, flies, or so long as it displays its back to the sun, as the Cantonese saying goes, but you won’t find animals at any Chinese circus.

A fat disc of moon broke through the ragged clouds overhead. It rose between the tall buildings as I made my way toward some lights that promised shelter.

In summer, vendor stalls sold varieties of fried meats and vegetables favored by the locals. The night air would be heady with scents. Street merchants hawked their wares, such as pottery, hand-woven crafts—often dragon charms, bamboo shoots, and other symbols to ward off evil. In March, people squatted near blackened gourds or coffee cans, lighting phony money to appease the Hungry Ghosts seeking revenge for past evil deeds.

I found a shop that sold bottles of tea and C100, China’s electrolyte water. I was the sole customer but she was kind and smiled at me, spoke a rapid dialect I couldn’t follow. I understood she was happy to allow me to warm up in her shop. The snow began to subside and I could see the street. After a half-hour, rehydrated and warm, I was about to leave when she pointed to the plate-glass window in front where a lacy curtain of condensation obscured half the glass.

Glimpsing Shabby Man standing there, looking in at me and beckoning me outside, I was filled with anger. Bad enough I had to trudge back to the hotel in freezing cold and face the night terrors waiting for me but having this stranger attach himself to me made me boil. The Chinese, as a rule, are excessively polite to foreigners. As though he sensed my wrath, he moved off in a hurry.

Out in the street again, I noticed the night crowd trickling back into the open after that freakish storm. I kept my eye on him as I headed in his direction away from my hotel. He turned around, saw me approaching, and tossed a stack of flyers behind him and scurried off so fast down an alleyway that I couldn’t believe it was the same shambling old man.

I picked up one before the wind blew them away. It struck a chord in my neocortex somehow—some memory wherever one keeps unpleasant memories one doesn’t want to bring into the light. It flashed across my mind, the most troubling memory of my boyhood. My parents were leaving for some embassy function when I was around five. My mother gave my Chinese nanny, a kindly old woman, instructions from a piece of paper in her hand, which she tucked into her blouse pocket. It later fell out and I read it. My Chinese was good enough by then to understand the words for “unfortunate son,” although she actually used the pinyin expression for “ugly,” which gave me a quick stab to the heart. My mother told me years later that Li Hua slept beside my bedside because she said I was “haunted by ghosts.” My parents were non-believers. They raised me to be skeptical of religion. I never heard either one speak of anything tantamount to the supernatural, the religious, or coming anywhere near a belief system in the afterlife.

I had no memory of having nightmares growing up—not while I lived in China nor when my family returned to the States. Haunted by ghosts . . .

The flyer named the same street as the earlier one but added an additional ideograph this time—one for Suàn Ming or “fortune teller.” A shiver ran up my back. Before we left China, my nanny held me tight in her arms and whispered a prediction in my ear that shocked me: my parents would soon be dead. My father died by suicide, and my mother was killed in a fatal car crash the first year we were back in America.

On any other night, my mood wouldn’t have tolerated the notion of going anywhere, but I was feeling light-headed—maybe the alcohol consumed back at the hotel or my melancholy, owing to the gnawing sense of isolation and bad dreams looming. The air had cleared of blowing snow altogether by then and a full moon was looking down at me. Another spectacular moon rise owing to pollution.

“All right, old man,” I grumbled to myself, “I’ll go to your damned carnival.”

Twenty minutes walking at a good pace brought me to the corner of the street on the flyer. I saw nothing but a warehouse where I’d once bought a life-sized replica of a frowning terracotta warrior for the president of my college. At his annual Christmas party, it stood in the foyer glowering at all the visitors.

A narrow road angled off that street into a scraggly tangle of scrappy trees opposite. Just another vacant lot or two with wind-blown debris, those ubiquitous, one-use plastic garbage bags that snagged on every fence or tree branch. Plenty of abandoned farms, stunted trees, and rusted-out, barbed-wire fences. A light swung back and forth in the distance like an old-time railroad worker swinging a lantern from a caboose.

“You’re crazy, you old fool,” I said, “if you think I’m going back there.”

But crazy is as crazy does, and now I was intrigued. Before I took another step back toward the lights and noise of the Luomashi Walking Street, I heard a whistle. Not a party whistle, or anyone whistling a popular tune. It was the kind of whistle my father taught me with two fingers in the mouth. Exactly like his piercing whistle. I’d know it in my sleep: three long notes and then a short, sharp high one—high enough, I once laughed with my hands covering my ears, to make them bleed.

There it was again.

I crossed the street, compelled to see—to know, how that familiar sound of my youth could be duplicated thousands of miles away and thirty years from the last time I heard it.

The swinging light beckoned me onward. I didn’t know if this was some calculated ruse to get me mugged or to entice me into something I’d immediately regret. But I had to go.

The lot turned into a wide path surrounded by more stunted trees dusted with gritty snow and overgrown scrub brush. I kept that bouncing light in my vision walking steadily forward, my senses on high alert for danger. I rebuked myself for cowardice; after all, I was surrounded by civilization in a modern city, even though it was dark and the population mostly indoors by now. This postage-stamp of abandoned and uncultivated terrain should hold no fear. I could bolt in any direction, I told myself, if I felt things felt wrong. That path debouched into a much narrower one leading to a wooded area, tightly packed with shag bark trees and birch growing every which way. My shoes were rimed in the orange, clay-filled soil, and my pantlegs wore a curtain of spattered muck. A twig lashed me across the face, and my right eye wept. I was about to turn back when I saw her.

A child, a little girl. She was alone, chattering happily to herself but dressed for warm weather, not this cold. I watched her at play; she seemed to be surrounded by invisible playmates. Behind me was a teeming city. It wasn’t possible this brief sojourn away from the heart of Xi’an could be transformed into an uncannily quiet space where I and a child playing alone occupied it all.

Growing uneasy, I started to turn around. There was no carnival out here. I must have misread the date on the flyer. Not the first time I bungled a translation. But I didn’t like the idea of leaving this child in the cold. She looked to be about five and she was alone.

I called out, waving by hands back and forth. She kept playing, although she must have heard me from that short distance. Suddenly, she gave out a piercing wail and ran. The hackles on my neck rose. Now I was unsure what to do. I couldn’t go back without knowing what just happened to her.

More to break the spell my confusion had enveloped me in, I raced off in the direction I saw her go. I miscalculated the uneven ground, pockmarked with rodent burrows and thick clumps of vegetation. I went down face-first with the wind knocked out of me. Rising and brushing filth from my clothes, I suspected I’d drunk more than I thought. Muzzy-headed, disturbed by the girl’s appearance as much as by her weird disappearance, I cursed the old man and then myself for being stupid.

“To hell with it,” I said beneath the moonlit sky, “I’ve had enough for one night.” I still had to face my bed and the dreams that waited for me.

Almost at that very instant, everything went dark—a total absence of light. A fleet of ragged clouds had drifted across the face of the moon. I was standing out in the middle of nowhere, all city lights obscured. I held my breath, listening, waiting for the scudding clouds to uncover the moon again, yet whenever moonlight returned, it lasted for mere seconds before other clouds arrived to plunge me back into darkness.

Running in a pitch-black full of ankle-twisting holes made no sense, so I tried to take advantage of those moments of light by going as fast as safety allowed before the light faded. This cat-and-mouse chase with the moonlight went on for too long before I realized I’d lost my bearings. I should have arrived back at the street corner. Instead, I stood panting in a darkened field of knee-high weeds and muck that threatened to pull the shoes off my feet.

Then a flicker of bright light. I made for it, desperately hoping it would lead me out of this maze. The light flickered, disappeared at times as I diverted to avoid an obstacle, but grew in size until I was close, practically standing in front of it. Not a single light but a string of lights draped over the entrance to a large barn-like structure that must have been one of the major buildings in a commune back in Mao’s day.

Approaching it, I saw figures, dark shapes milling about in front of the entrance to this huge building where strings of lights had been attached to the rafters but cast only a dim reflection below. Shíshī, the stone guardian lions, sat outside feet from either side of the massive doorway. Voices echoed from inside. At first, it sounded like crowd noise. Stepping closer, it was raucous, a minor pandemonium—cries of fear, howls of rage or pain, noises that didn’t seem to come from human throats.

“What—what is this place, please?”

The people out front ignored me as if I weren’t there. Then a figure stepped from the barn’s interior to answer me: “Welcome, honorable sir, to the Fei Cheng Wu Rah Show.”

I knew that couldn’t be right; it translated to “You-Are-the-One Show,” which made no sense. Before I could ask him to explain, he disappeared back into the cavernous maw of the building. I repeated my question to this small group of men, some dressed as laborers like the construction workers outside the hotel patching potholes with shovels laden with hot tar. As if on cue, they moved away as though I were contagious.

An elderly couple walked out with grim expressions. I confronted them, hoping to get directions back to the city. They averted their eyes—a common thing for elderly Chinese, especially when accosted by a foreigner.

“Can you please tell me the path to return to the Beilin District?”

They ignored me and kept walking.

He appeared out of nowhere, watching me. The Shabby Man, stepping out of the dimly lit interior into the moonlight.

“You! Wait!”

Before I could take two steps toward him, he melted back into the blackness.

I didn’t hesitate this time. I was right on his heels, intending to drag him back if I had to and force him to answer to my questions. What happened next is hard to explain. Two pairs of hands gripped my triceps from behind. I never heard or saw them coming. Their fingers were ice-cold.

“Let go!”

Their faces were obscured and they had me positioned in such a way I couldn’t turn easily to see.

A soft male voice near me, said. “Don’t fight them.”

“Who are you?”

“These gentlemen will accompany us. You will not be interfered with. I shall be your guide, if you most kindly permit. My name is Zhong Kui. I live in the city. I promise to show you delights beyond compare.”

His dialect was all wrong for any dialect of Chinese I knew or had ever heard in my years of crisscrossing China. My translation was a crude simplification of what I understood him to say. His voice was courtly, his voice evenly pitched, not like the carnival barker. As he spoke, he reminded me of the graceful, poetic Mandarin of the elites in the diplomatic service back in my parents’ time.

The pressure of my captors’ grip on me relaxed but didn’t put me at ease. I twisted my head behind to see if I could discern any part of his features. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw replicas of the traditional door gods, the warriors Shen Tu and Yu Lei, which did not reassure me at all.

“I beg your pardon,” I replied. “I didn’t know this was a private showing.”

“Nonsense. You had an invitation. I myself saw it.”

I was speechless now, unable to form words of protest. That he commanded the men gripping my arms was evident.

“Come, let me show you our exhibits.”

We moved down the line of stalls in a stutter-step kind of progress, owing to the odd gait of my escorts. They seemed to hop rather than to walk at a normal pace. I asked my guide if he would tell his men to release me.

“It wouldn’t be wise” was his cryptic response.

Before I could ask him to explain, we came to the first stall. A man far back in the shadows was devouring something that looked like a shank butt of ham. I heard bones cracking, the sound of munching. I strained to see who he was in the poor lighting. Then he moved his face in our direction, and I saw the glittering madness in his eyes.

“Let us move on,” my guide ordered.

Out of the corner of my eye, I translated the plaque’s symbol: Cannibal Man Eating a Human Fetus. My gorge rose. I tried to pull myself free, but I was thrown to the ground, and a sharp knee was pressed into my back. I was pulled roughly to my feet, my mouth tasting of straw and dung.

“I beg of you not to do that again, please,” my guide whispered, dragging the sibilant S. “They won’t be so gentle next time.”

Staring straight ahead, I had no intention of looking into more exhibits. Those sounds I’d first heard sent ripples of chills up my spine. Screams, gagging, cries for mercy, pain being inflicted. But where were they? I saw no one else, no sightseers or actors, we passed no crowds capable of making that terrible din, that cacophony of human suffering.

My knowledge of Chinese mythology was sketchy but some of it flooded back to mind. It was a litany of cruelty most Westerners wouldn’t comprehend. Then it struck me, the obvious—of course, these were all actors performing roles! Just like Halloween actors at extreme funhouses back home. Nothing but theater paint and wires pulling on dummies. Shrieks piped in through hidden speakers. I overreacted. My mind raced to comprehend this bizarre circumstance. Had I been selected from the hotel as a likely target? Sure, that was it. Humiliating Americans was a Chinese pastime among youth.

“All right,” I said, regrouping, playing along. “I’ll check out your wares.”

The next stall we arrived at bore the name Daji on the plaque.

Daji . . . Daji . . .

The name was familiar from an illustrated book I bought on my eighteenth birthday. Daji was the cruel mistress of her palace Xanadu, a lover of lewd music and pornographic dances. Her emperor husband indulged her every whim. One illustrated page in my book was burned into my brain of a royal feast of thousands of guests. The emperor called it his “pond of wine” and “forest of meat.” Guests scampered nude among the forests for Daji’s amusement. When a concubine protested, he had her cut into pieces and fed to his servants. Another legend had it that, when she saw a farmer walking barefoot on a winter day, she had his feet cut off so she could study them.

When I peered into the recesses of the stall, I saw a woman in heavy makeup wearing a flowing silk gown that caressed her shape. A guttural moan from the other side of the stall must have been the signal to trip a light switch because her victim was grotesquely and suddenly illuminated: a hugely pregnant woman. The actor portraying Daji danced over to her, drawing a long blade from the sleeve of her elegant robe. She cut the woman’s belly. Her screams, I had to admit, were so convincing my knees weakened, and if it weren’t for the vicious grip under my arms, I’d have dropped to the floor again.

I tried to brazen out my fear, a passage from Sun Tzu coming to mind: “Show weakness when you are strong, show strength when you are weak.”

“That was lifelike, I’ll admit,” I said to my guide. “What’s next—zombies? Vampires?”

“We don’t have zombies or werewolves,” my guide said. “No vampires, although your escorts might demur.”

This time, I was able to see their haunted, gaunt faces and the greenish cast to their skin.

“Yes, very well done,” I said, getting into the game now. “I like the hopping bit, too. The jianzhi who can’t walk and must hop.”

“Ah, so you are familiar with our spirits, our ‘hopping corpses,’ as you’d translate, am I right?”

“I know there are plenty of mog wai in Chinese legend. I’m familiar with some.”

The banality of our conversation, like two academics chatting, added to the surreal circumstances I’d blundered into.

“We have no shortage of demons. Would you care to see Daji’s bronze cylinder before we move on?”

“Thanks, I’ll pass.”

“As you wish.”

Like the life-sized, bronze bull of that Sicilian tyrant who forced criminals into its hollow belly and then had a fire burnt below it to roast criminals alive, Daji used a bronzed cylinder, which she made her victims stand on as it was heated from beneath with a charcoal fire. The screams of the victim, while he shifted his feet, were music to her ears. Falling into the fire to be burned to death was all that remained for him to do. The smell of sizzling, rancid meat wafted over me as we passed.

“A nice touch, there,” I said flippantly, and regretted it immediately. My “host” hadn’t resorted to rougher tactics—so far.

“It is, indeed.”

“Back home, these freak shows are passé,” I said. “No more tents with a shill out front hollering at the yokels to come see Lobster Boy or the Bearded Lady.”

“Who can say?”

His nonchalance irked me. I was a hostage. His people were taking gross advantage of me, a guest in their country.

“That little girl out front, she’s your Judas goat to lead the suckers,” I said. “By the way, Mister Zhong Kui, I’m curious. How do you make money from tourists with these ‘exhibits’ if you’re so far off the beaten path? Do the authorities in Xi’an know about this sideshow?”

His operation involved too many people for it to be kept secret for too long.

“We don’t allow just anyone to come here. Our guests are always invited. Our special friends, those who dream us into being.”

A cold shiver ran down my back. Despite the steam issuing from my breath in the chilly air inside the structure, I was sweating under my coat.

He pointed at the stall we were just then approaching.

The plaque’s characters meant “Souls of the Dead.” In Chinese folklore, these were the gui, the “hungry spirits” for whom you burned banknotes as repentance for your sins so that they can have funds in the afterlife.

This stall was packed with young women, all beautiful, models of the caliber you’d find on the covers of Elle or Vogue. They stood around with the same vacant expressions on you’d find on a catwalk in Paris or New York. In Chinese mythology, those wandering ghosts, the non-demonic kind, can assume a young, beautiful female’s body by deriving the yang or essence from the sun or moon.

“They’re lovely,” I said, gawking. Instead of the grotesquerie of those other painted freaks, these women were glamorous, each adorned in expensive clothing and made up professionally from their shoes to their elegant coiffures.

“Wait a minute,” I exclaimed, “you can’t possibly make money when you’re investing a fortune in costumes like this.”

I turned around to face him, but he was gone.

The hands that had been applying constant pressure on my upper arms were removed as if by magic. So enthralled by that vision of feminine beauty, I hadn’t seen my two grim escorts vanish.

Had I been drugged? Maybe that old woman who sold me tea had doped me. I was the victim of a grandiose scam. No other explanation made sense. I assumed closed-circuit, hidden cameras were filming me, the kind used on trails to film nocturnal animals.

My first reaction was a subdued rage. Who would play this kind of expensive trick on a foreigner? Someone had to know that I was staying in Xi’an that day. Some sadist must be watching me now, laughing behind at computer screen.

But why me?

That question had no single answer. What had he said: “ . . . those who dream us into being—”

I was shaking from fear now. It occurred to me belatedly that everyone in the building except me failed to expel the steam of living breath. I walked along toward the entrance. On the way, I pretended to act calmly, browse the remaining stalls. I lingered before the stall of a nǚ guǐ, a female ghost with long hair in a white dress, a suicide. She seeks revenge for the terrible wrong she suffered in her life, often sexual abuse, or murder by her husband. Like our succubi, they seek out men to seduce and kill. The Chinese take shapeshifting, tormenting spirits seriously; they’ll eat souls to gain immortality. That mythology book told of a man who met a beautiful woman, took her home to meet his family but one night spies her through the bedroom window and sees a monstrously looking demon painting features on the skin of a beautiful woman like any one of those I had seen back there.

Further on, moving back toward the entrance from the other side, I witnessed “fox demons” eating the hearts and livers of dead men, whose writhing testified to their being eaten alive by the gorgeous lovelies they thought they had seduced. The sound effects gave me gooseflesh, but I held my composure, sometimes commenting to the actors in the stalls how admirable their performances were, how “lifelike.”

I saw hanged ghosts with long red tongues, actors dressed like demigods from tales dimly remembered, drowned victims, gray-skinned è guǐ, more starving ghosts foraging in their stalls among rotting garbage for food. Disgusting creatures said to roam kitchens for decomposing food, known for their pot bellies and small mouths preventing them from eating, they’ll eat any rotting scrap they can find, even human waste.

Hoping it to be sham but knowing I was in some other state of mind, I was compelled by horror to watch. Every sense in my being was activated by the spectacles—the stomach-churning odors, the appearances, the physical costumery to put these actors “in character” was stunning to behold, manifesting a Hollywood-level proficiency, I thought, and yet hating it all the while.

In the last stall, a woman standing beneath a banana tree held a baby in her arms. She said nothing like the rest of these ghost women, and like the rest, she stared at me as if she knew me. I turned to go when the baby let out a gurgle, stopping me in my tracks. It sounded so—real. The thought of an actual infant being used as a prop in this freak show offended every sensibility in my being. Even by ancient Chinese standards, this seemed too much.

Staring deeper into the darkness, I watched the baby’s limbs move and twitch randomly. It had to be a robotic prop, although no mechanical baby could move its limbs so naturally. The woman fixed me with an icy stare. Walking un steadily on my legs toward the open doors, I wasn’t going to show weakness. Displaying my terror would trigger something, I knew.

At the doorway, I saw the same cluster of laborers as when I entered. As before, they avoided my eyes and speaking to me.

I’d gone a few dozen feet from that mouth of horror into the darkness. It wasn’t an elaborate hoax, nor an ingenious engineering project aimed at deceiving one American citizen wandering in their midst on a street in Xi’an. But how could any of it be real, I asked myself.

I didn’t see footprints in the earth, any sign or sound of anything beyond my own pounding heartbeat. Then I noticed for the first time a sign I’d missed on my way into the barn with the character for Di’yu. A rough translation for our equivalent of “Hell.”

Stumbling farther away, almost at a trot, I tried to retrace my steps back to the city. The darkness and eerie silence didn’t no longer affected me. I was numb, exhausted by this ugly, horrific vision and distressed by the knowledge someone—or many people, more likely—had gone to great lengths and expense to make a fool of me.

Finally, footsore, half-frozen, I detected a glimmer of light. I summoned all my remaining energy and burst came for that wobbly patch of light until I almost fell out of the last patch of fir trees and could have wept from hearing the sounds of traffic again. Finally, I stumbled back to Xi’an just as the tops of buildings were lit by the first rays of dawn breaking. Big construction cranes were firing up for the day’s work. I sobbed with relief.

Walking past the last debris-strewn field to the street of my hotel, I passed early morning workers heading to their jobs in places of business. People parted from me a bow wave. No one looked directly at me. I must have looked a sight.

Back in my room, I showered and shaved, ordered two breakfasts brought up, and slept until early evening. I packed in a hurry to catch the first flight out to Shanghai and then a connecting flight back to San Franciso.

Time passed, my night terrors ended. Weeks later, I told my therapist about that long night of my fear and humiliation. I told him about what I’d seen in those stalls in that barn, watching his eyes widen in utter disbelief.

“I found Zhong Kui’s name in Wikipedia.”

“I don’t know who that is,” he replied.

“He vanquishes ghosts and demons. His face is on every other door post in every Chinese village.”

I was bullied as a child because of my “bug eyes,” resulting from thyroid eye disease. In China, kids drew “fish eyes” on my books and teased me with the name.

Zhong Kui was a brilliant student but was thwarted in life by his appearance and killed himself. When he was denied a government position solely based on his looks, despite his top scores on exams, he smashed his head into the palace walls until his skull cracked open. He was granted supernatural powers in the afterlife. He kept demons and ghosts at bay. In some legends, 80,000 of them were under his control. Some older, more superstitious Chinese still hang his likeness on the doors of their homes as protection from malevolent deities.

“You don’t believe in that superstitious nonsense, right?”

“I know what I saw,” I told him.

I never went back. A month passed and I decided to book a flight back to Xi’an. I made my way by cab to the Luomashi Walking Street. I could hear my father’s whistle in my head, that siren summons to the road that led me to the “place of ghosts,” as I referred to it.

The furniture warehouse was unchanged from my last visit, the same dirt road across the street. The same vacant lot and beyond it, that distant stand of trees. I went into it, remembering how I was that night—confused, aimless, led on by a whim and that peculiar whistle my father had taught me.

I found nothing. No barn, no people. The only sign of life other than me was a rabbit who jumped out behind a clump of vegetation and a screech owl. I returned to my rooms, the same as before. This night was going to reveal the full moon. It was also the fifteenth, a Ghost Festival day. I planned to wait until nightfall before leaving my rooms. I know, as much as I can know anything, that I’ll find that place. Who knows? I might meet Zhong Kui again. He favored me once before by keeping those dangerous spirits from harming me.

I’ve seen ghosts. They’re real. I know there’s another world out there that intersects with ours. I’ve never believed in anything before that didn’t come from a book or a university lecture. Now I know differently. I know this life isn’t the only life and that the sins we commit and those committed against us will haunt us until we make amends to all the Hungry Ghosts we pass by in our lives.

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