Chapter 10: Chapter Eight — Period

Chapter Eight — Period

After more than three months of recuperation, I was finally discharged in early May.

Ever since I began listening to Wu Jianxiang recount the bizarre case, the two of us entered into a strange working relationship. I would take down his oral testimony while checking it against the draft I had already finished to make sure I hadn’t missed any details. I felt like a biographer, recording the extraordinary experiences of an exceptional detective. Sometimes he would wake from a nightmare and rouse me from sleep — bleary-eyed, I would scramble to note the details he suddenly insisted on adding.

Yet just as I finished the final chapter of the story, our close collaboration abruptly ceased. Wu Jianxiang’s manner reverted to the polite distance of our first acquaintance; his speech became formal and remote, the ardor that had marked him earlier evaporating. I had no idea why — it was as if, having finished telling his tale, he had also finished his duty of “being my friend.”

My attending physician congratulated me: after treatment my mild depression had subsided and there was no need to remain hospitalized. At last I could return north; my wife no longer urged me to avoid work stress.

I packed a few things, my writing kit and manuscripts, and left the ward. Wu Jianxiang smiled and held in his hand that yellow-black piece of matter.

It wasn’t a stone. It was the phalanx of Tom Shijing’s right index finger.

“With this I can avoid being hunted by the fiends… But they still lurk close by,”
he said — his closing remark after telling the story.

Hearing him, I felt the same uncanny sense of demonic surveillance.

On the night of April 11 last year, he had rushed into the municipal mortuary’s autopsy room and flung himself onto Tom Shijing’s corpse.

A pathologist preparing for an overnight autopsy had been taken aback and could not fathom Wu Jianxiang’s strange behavior; he promptly called the nearby precinct. A squad of officers arrived, but they could not pull the injured Wu away from the corpse. In the struggle, Wu held fast to a piece of fingerbone he had torn free with a Swiss Army knife.

After I was discharged, I went to thank a certain influential person who had arranged my hospital stay. In truth, I didn’t tell Wu Jianxiang the whole truth — it was not by chance that I met him and recorded his account.

Before my hospitalization I had read about the strange case in the papers. I was fascinated; I gathered every magazine report I could find and intended to write an explosive true-crime book. It would not be a police report copied verbatim — I planned to use my southward hospital visit to meet the detective in person and record his subjective perspective.

To get me an introduction, I enlisted the help of a prominent medical authority who had treated my mild depression when I was a student.

When I completed my initial draft, I found that his oral account diverged dramatically from media reports.

After Wu Jianxiang was detained, he still refused to relinquish the severed finger. Focus magazine’s April issue labeled him “a delusional rising star of the police.” It quoted him as saying, “The severed finger holds five centuries of power. If I let it go, the fiends will kill me immediately!” He rejected police requests to return the finger.

Prosecutors indicted Wu not long after, charging him with a string of murders in Kaohsiung. The precinct’s detective chief, Gao Qingfu, asserted that he was the only suspect in logical proximity to Zhong Sizao’s death. The other unidentified corpse found at Zhong’s death scene was later identified as freelance photographer Xia Yongyu after a concerned citizen reported a ransacked RV and the police traced the vehicle to Xia’s residence.

As the investigation unfolded, the police searched Xia’s home and discovered something even stranger — the chaotic scene of a forced entry and, in the study on the third floor, the disfigured corpse of a young woman. She had not been sexually assaulted, but the brutality was savage: her abdomen torn open and organs strewn about the room. In her handbag the police found an ID identifying her as Zhang Zhimei, twenty-one years old, and a service pistol — recently fired — whose serial number matched Wu Jianxiang’s duty weapon. Ballistics showed that the bullet that smashed into Tom Shijing’s skull and lodged in a wall was fired from that same gun.

With that evidence the police declared the case solved: the Polish Mormon missionary Tom Shijing, shot on Cao Road in Fengshan Township, had been killed, and the two people who fled the scene together were the young man and woman — Wu Jianxiang and the now-dead Zhang Zhimei.

The district prosecutor charged Wu with the murders of Zhong Sizao, Xia Yongyu, Tom Shijing, and Zhang Zhimei. Yet despite the prosecution’s array of evidence, they could not secure a conviction.

The reason: there was no motive.

The defense argued Wu had no connection with any of the four victims. The police could not find any reason why Wu would have killed Zhong. There was no evidence they ever met. The same applied to the other victims: the five of them appeared to have no links among them.

Moreover, Wu’s confessions and statements after arrest painted him as mentally unstable. His testimony brimmed with talk of magic, hypnosis, dreams, summoning spirits and the subconscious. Although parts of what he said matched observable facts, his story contradicted a material piece of evidence — the police could not find the DV tape nor any VHS backup. They also discovered that Zhang Zhimei’s past included work as a hostess; her relationships were complex and her movements in recent months had been unknown. She had indeed traveled to Europe in late 1999, but the police could not identify the companion or confirm the alleged cremation incident on Malta — it was possible the lovers had purposely traveled separately to conceal something.

Finally, Tom Shijing’s visa records were in order; he could hardly have been five hundred years old. He appeared to be an ordinary devoted church member who wandered Fengshan on a bicycle, nothing like the ancient black magician described in the tale.

On that basis the defense prepared to plead that Wu suffered delusional schizophrenia and that, during psychotic episodes, he committed the killings unconsciously — a strategy to seek a reduced sentence.

While the trial raged and controversy swirled, the court accepted medical advice and remanded Wu to a hospital for psychiatric treatment.

In other words, Wu Jianxiang’s courtroom confession — which matched the story he told me in hospital — could very well be nothing but delusion: a fabrication spun from his own mind.

My old university junior Xie Haitong, editor-in-chief of Kaohsiung Exclusive, graduated two years after me and was a fellow member of the Tides Society. We had met there; our tastes and ideas often aligned, so we kept in touch. The Tides Society wasn’t a pop band but a small circle devoted to new verse. Because Sun Yat-sen University abutted the West Bay, the ebb and flow of tide was part of the campus landscape; we’d sit on stones by the shore and read aloud. Xie and I had a connection.

After I left the hospital I wanted to ask him for help with the book — I needed sources on medieval magic. He agreed eagerly, though I suspected he might forget; I reminded him several times over the phone. Two weeks after returning to Taipei he sent a parcel of reference books with a note: “Good luck with the writing — no more brooding in the rain / your junior Haitong.”

That night my wife handed me the package and I took the books to the bedroom.

To my surprise one of them was A Study of Mediumship.

I remembered seeing the same title in Xia Yongyu’s study. Was this the same edition, or a coincidence?

I opened it and compared passages to the drafts I’d written with Wu in hospital. It was midnight; my wife, annoyed that I had work in bed, turned away and burrowed beneath the covers. I read.

The book’s chapter on famous mediums — Mrs. Papeau, Matthew Manning, Pearl Curran — lined up with what I’d seen in Xia’s study. The thirteenth chapter, Elementary Exercises for the Aspiring Medium, covered traits innately present in mediums, the differences between conjuring ancestral spirits versus prophetic apparitions, meditation and breath control. It looked identical.

But then something caught my eye: a passage I had transcribed from Wu’s dictation was not in the printed chapter.

My heart stilled. The passage I’d carefully jotted down the night he had suddenly shaken me awake read:

“The spell to summon the dead is not, in fact, a spell to resurrect the body. The summoned spirit is only the deceased’s last consciousness at the moment of death. That final dying consciousness is the deceased’s residual psychic energy; it can reproduce what the deceased thought and focused on in his final moments, and can answer simple questions, but it cannot undertake complex or prolonged actions. The spirit is an ephemeral aggregate of the dying mind and will fade with time; to achieve any effect with a conjuration you must work where and soon after the death occurred, to call back the clearest residue of the soul.”

Those three paragraphs were not in chapter thirteen.

Had Wu misremembered? Perhaps he’d seen the text in some other chapter and later assumed it belonged there. I searched the book again and again — nothing.

The more I thought about it, the colder I felt. I remembered who had insisted I write that very passage down in the middle of the night — and how insistent he had been. He had not been mistaken.

So why had he rushed me to write a paragraph that did not exist in the source? The passage itself was innocuous — merely an assertion that a conjured spirit cannot act like the living. Why invent it?

An incongruity in the story suddenly resolved itself. If a conjured spirit is only a residue of dying consciousness incapable of action, then how could the revenant of Hong Zichen — executed in 1995 — have physically carried out murders in Zhong Sizao’s flat and Xia Yongyu’s home? No matter how you turn it, the logic contradicted itself.

Then the shocking possibility took hold: that paragraph did not exist in the book because it was fabricated by Wu Jianxiang.

No — I told myself sharply — I should not call him “Wu Jianxiang” here. I should call him Xia Yongyu.

When I cross-checked events in the story against reality, the only one among them with genuine experience in occult studies was not Tom Shijing but Xia Yongyu. Tom was a devout churchgoer — he would not possess a cache of forbidden grimoires. It followed that the true architect of the “Juda’s Prison” curse, the guilty and obsessed man Zhimei feared, was actually Xia Yongyu.

In the original draft of the tale the names should be swapped. That would resolve the contradictions: Xia Yongyu could not literally have been Agrippa’s disciple or have lived five centuries, yet in life he was obsessed with occult books. He must have learned “Juda’s Prison” and combined it with hypnotic suggestion, somniloquy and sleepwalking techniques. After being rejected by Zhimei, he could have used the curse to slaughter her lovers; the spell backfired, and his own ritual consumed him. His necromantic work would explain why Zhimei later did not remember events.

Then the brilliant detective Wu entered the case, tracking the giant rat at Mrs. Ge’s and finding Zhong Sizao’s corpse in 401. That was exactly the trap Xia had set: he needed a living agent to perform a medium’s summons to retrieve a way to save himself. Though Xia was slain by a demon, his attempt to summon Zhong’s spirit succeeded in part — and Xia’s spirit briefly returned through Wu Jianxiang’s conjuring.

When Wu summoned Xia’s spirit, Xia possessed him. The phony descriptive paragraph I’d transcribed turned out to be a forgery: spirits were not limited to mere residues — Xia’s ghost could control a host and direct actions.

Wu Jianxiang, unaware of the possession, continued to search for Zhimei. Then Zhimei’s latent curse erupted again, endangering the briefly reunited lovers.

As for Tom Shijing, did Wu already know him? Did Wu owe him a debt of gratitude? Perhaps he had accompanied Zhimei to the church to ask Tom’s help. Tom, devout to the core, might have chosen sacrificial death in a bid to save the young couple.

But Tom’s blood was useless. The demon Hong Zichen still appeared and later killed Wu and Zhimei. Xia, seizing the opportunity, reanimated by inhabiting Wu’s corpse — the truth, I realized, could not align with the naive account that Wu survived the strangulation after those five minutes. He must have died; his body and memories were taken over by Xia Yongyu.

Xia’s post-possession power would still have been insufficient to fight the fiend. He learned in Wu’s memory how holy relics work: while the faith itself couldn’t save you, certain sacred objects had force. He took Tom Shijing’s phalanx from the mortuary as a talisman. To avoid jail, Xia—posing as Wu—laid a trail of lies and convinced the forensic psychiatrists he was a delusional patient. The courtroom brawl continues to this day.

Xia met me in the hospital. His maliciousness, cold and methodical, rose again. A popular novelist pestering him for material had become an irritation; Xia decided to lay the “Juda’s Prison” upon me.

Many nights he sat at my bedside — and in fact he was performing the ritual. The moment he finished weaving his invented tale, the curse was sealed. After that, he spoke no more. At my discharge he gave me a final smile.

Yet I never had that Agrippa nightmare. When I stretched out my right hand there was no blood-scabbed pentagram. Perhaps Xia had devised an altered, subtler form of “Juda’s Prison” I could not detect. Maybe I had briefly risen at night and gone to the lavatory without memory. The missing paragraph in the book made me suspect everything.

Maybe the author of A Study of Mediumship issued multiple versions; perhaps the passage I’d copied appears in one edition and not another. Or maybe my wife had been cursed and would transmit it by intimate contact to some unknown man.

Or perhaps Wu Jianxiang had not died at all; perhaps he was merely a fantasist who invented impossible episodes. Had I been infected by his delusion? I discovered, with a chill, that I already believed in magic without reason: I began to see it everywhere — in signs, images, in sounds that tempted me to madness. I no longer knew which traps Xia had laid after reanimation to make me enact strange, involuntary deeds.

Perhaps the love affairs of Zhimei and those men were merely jealous quarrels that escalated to ordinary human violence, and had nothing to do with an occult killing spell.

Did Xia use my acquaintances to bewitch me?

No. Perhaps he truly had lived five hundred years. If Agrippa’s disciple could keep jumping hosts like a hermit crab, Xia or some other ancient spirit might have been reincarnating continuously for centuries: Xia Yongyu and Wu Jianxiang only temporary shells.

If so, why didn't he simply kill me and occupy my corpse to escape legal consequence? Maybe he expected leniency.

Maybe he hypnotized my chief physician to release me so I could spread “Juda’s Prison” unwittingly.

Yet I did not possess Tom Shijing’s finger bone. If I were truly cursed by “Juda’s Prison,” the fiends would come for me at sunset. Though I never heard the demon’s breath at my door, any tiny nocturnal noise — a dripping tap, a breeze through the blinds — set me awake. My ears seemed filled with rustling: tinnitus or hallucination, I could not tell.

I would not let the fiends cross my threshold. I spent long hours in libraries poring through old newspapers, looking for deaths near my home to learn how these things might appear. Each night I checked and double-checked every door and window with near-obsessive care, leaving no crack through which a killer fiend could enter.

I had to lock the doors. But let me be plain: I do not have delusions — I simply lock the doors.

I mean it. I do not have a delusion; I simply lock the doors. I do not have a delusion; I simply lock the doors. I do not have a delusion; I simply lock the doors. I do not have a delusion; I simply lock the doors. I do not have a delusion; I simply lock the doors. I do not have a delusion; I simply lock the doors. I do not have a delusion; I simply lock the doors.