Chapter 5: The Taoist Makes a House Call
~1.5k words · 2026-06-22
The scalpel felt wrong in his hand.
Dr. Fang Changwei had performed this procedure three hundred and forty-seven times. He knew the weight of the blade, the precise angle of entry, the way the dermal layer would separate from the subcutaneous fat like pages of a wet book. But tonight, the instrument trembled against his thumb.
He set it down.
“Is there a problem, Doctor Fang?”
The woman on the table was forty-three years old. Divorced. Two children in international school. Her pre-op photos showed the kind of face that had been pretty in her twenties, then slowly eroded by Shanghai's humidity and the quiet desperation of a husband who stopped coming home. She wanted her cheekbones back. She wanted the line of her jaw defined like it was in 2012. She wanted to look like the woman her daughter's piano teacher, who was twenty-six, currently looked like.
Fang smiled. His patient smile. The one that cost twelve years of medical school and three hundred thousand yuan in bribery to perfect.
“Minor delay, Mrs. Chen. I need to verify our inventory.”
The nurse, Xiao Li, followed him into the storage room. She was new. Two weeks in. Still had that eagerness that hadn't yet curdled into the hollow-eyed efficiency of the others.
“Doctor Fang, the preparation is complete. The skin is already in the solution.”
He didn't answer.
The refrigerator hummed against the tile wall. White. Commercial grade. Inside, arranged on titanium racks, were thirty-seven sealed containers. Each marked with a name. Mrs. Chen's was on the third shelf, second from the left.
He pulled it out.
The solution was clear. The skin inside floated like a silk scarf, impossibly thin, impossibly smooth. It shimmered under the fluorescent light. He had harvested it six days ago from a spirit that had been haunting a karaoke bar in Pudong. A young woman who died in 1998, still wearing her barista uniform, still smelling of cigarette smoke and jasmine tea. She had been easy to catch. The desperate ones always were.
But the skin in the container wasn't smooth anymore.
Fang leaned closer.
Small bumps dotted the surface. Like gooseflesh. Like pores opening.
“Doctor Fang?”
“Get out.”
Xiao Li's footsteps retreated. The door clicked shut.
He rotated the container under the light. The bumps were not growths. They were indentations. As if something from inside the skin was pushing outward. As if the face wanted to turn itself inside out.
His phone buzzed.
A patient. Asking about her recovery. He scrolled through the messages. The first one, from three weeks ago: *Dr. Fang, my skin feels tight. Is that normal?*
The second, from two weeks ago: *I think I see something moving under my cheek.*
The third, from yesterday: *The face in my mirror isn't mine anymore. It's someone else's. She's trying to smile but she doesn't know how.*
Fang deleted the messages. He always deleted the messages.
He returned to the operating room. Mrs. Chen was still sedated, her face slack, her breathing steady. The room smelled of antiseptic and something else. Something faintly sweet, like overripe fruit.
He picked up the scalpel.
The first incision went clean. The skin lifted away from the muscle. He worked quickly, methodically, his hands finding the rhythm that had made him famous. His clinic was booked six months in advance. Celebrities flew in from Beijing, from Hong Kong, from Singapore. They paid in cash. They never asked questions.
He placed the harvested skin in the solution. It would keep for three more weeks. Then he would sell it to a dealer in Shenzhen who would process it into injectables for the black market. The rich didn't need to know where the collagen came from. They just needed to look young.
Mrs. Chen's new face was ready.
He peeled the protective layer from the container. The spirit skin glistened. It was warm to the touch, even after refrigeration. He positioned it over her exposed features. The edges aligned perfectly. He pressed down.
The skin adhered.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then the face began to settle. The pores opened. The blood vessels connected. The cheeks filled with color. Mrs. Chen's wrinkles smoothed away. Her jawline sharpened. Her lips plumped.
She looked twenty-five again.
She would wake up in four hours, look in the mirror, and cry with joy. She would not know that the face she was crying over had belonged to a dead girl who never got to be twenty-five. She would not care.
Fang stripped off his gloves.
“Monitor her vitals. Call me if anything changes.”
Xiao Li nodded. Her eyes were fixed on Mrs. Chen's new face. Something flickered across her expression. Not awe. Not curiosity.
Recognition.
“Doctor Fang,” she said. “I know her.”
“You don't know her. She's under anesthetic.”
“No. The face. I know that face.”
Fang's hand stopped on the door handle.
“She was a customer at my brother's karaoke bar. He showed me the security footage from 1998. A girl came in alone, ordered jasmine tea, and never left. They found her body in the bathroom the next morning. Strangled.”
The room went cold.
Mrs. Chen's new face twitched.
“I remember because of her teeth,” Xiao Li continued. Her voice was flat. Mechanical. “She had a gap between her front teeth. Just like that.”
Fang looked at the operating table.
Mrs. Chen's lips parted.
The teeth inside were not hers. They were yellowed. Cracked. And between the front two, a narrow gap that hadn't been there when she was sedated.
“Get out,” Fang whispered.
“Doctor Fang—”
“GET OUT.”
Xiao Li ran.
Fang stood alone in the operating room. The lights hummed. The machines beeped. Mrs. Chen's new face stared up at the ceiling, perfectly still, perfectly beautiful.
Then it turned toward him.
The eyes did not open. The rest of the body remained motionless. But the face rotated on its own axis, the skin twisting, the muscles rearranging themselves beneath the surface. It was like watching a mask come alive.
“You took my skin.”
The voice came from Mrs. Chen's throat. But it was not her voice. It was higher. Younger. Laced with the static of an old recording.
“You took my skin, and now I'm inside her.”
Fang's hand found the scalpel on the tray.
“Let her go.”
“I can't. You glued me on.”
The face smiled. It was not a human smile. The lips stretched too wide. The skin around the mouth pulled taut, threatening to tear.
“But that's okay,” the face said. “Because she's going to walk out of here, and she's going to go home, and she's going to look in her mirror. And when she does, she's going to see me. She's going to see the girl you killed in the karaoke bar. She's going to see me staring back.”
Fang took a step forward.
“And I'm going to tell her everything.”
The door behind him opened.
“Doctor Fang.”
He turned. The Taoist stood in the doorway. Old man. Gray robes. A string of wooden beads wrapped around his wrist. He looked at Mrs. Chen's twisting face and did not flinch.
“I've been looking for you,” the Taoist said. “I think you have something that belongs to me.”
Fang's grip tightened on the scalpel.
“I don't know what you're talking about.”
“Oh, I think you do.” The Taoist stepped into the room. His beads clicked together. “Those spirits you've been skinning? They were my patients. I was supposed to guide them across. But someone kept stealing them. Someone kept cutting them open and wearing their faces.”
He stopped beside the operating table.
The face on Mrs. Chen stopped twisting. It looked up at the Taoist. And it wept.
Real tears. Salty. Human.
“Please,” the face whispered. “Please help me.”
The Taoist reached out. His fingers hovered over Mrs. Chen's cheek.
“I can't,” he said softly. “Not while you're attached to her. You're bound now. Blood to blood. Skin to skin.”
He turned to Fang.
“What have you done?”
Fang's phone buzzed again. Another message. Another patient.
He didn't need to read it. He already knew what it would say.
*Doctor Fang, the face in my mirror just blinked. But I didn't blink.*
The Taoist's eyes went hard.
“You have one hour to tell me where your collection is. Every jar. Every container. Every piece of skin you've stolen.”
“Or what?”
“Or I'll let them find you themselves.”
Mrs. Chen's new face laughed. It was a terrible sound. Wet and broken and hungry.
“He's right,” she said. “We're coming. All of us. And we want our faces back.”
The lights flickered.
The temperature dropped.
And somewhere in the basement of the clinic, in the refrigerator with the titanium racks, thirty-seven containers began to vibrate.
Dr. Fang Changwei had performed this procedure three hundred and forty-seven times. He knew the weight of the blade, the precise angle of entry, the way the dermal layer would separate from the subcutaneous fat like pages of a wet book. But tonight, the instrument trembled against his thumb.
He set it down.
“Is there a problem, Doctor Fang?”
The woman on the table was forty-three years old. Divorced. Two children in international school. Her pre-op photos showed the kind of face that had been pretty in her twenties, then slowly eroded by Shanghai's humidity and the quiet desperation of a husband who stopped coming home. She wanted her cheekbones back. She wanted the line of her jaw defined like it was in 2012. She wanted to look like the woman her daughter's piano teacher, who was twenty-six, currently looked like.
Fang smiled. His patient smile. The one that cost twelve years of medical school and three hundred thousand yuan in bribery to perfect.
“Minor delay, Mrs. Chen. I need to verify our inventory.”
The nurse, Xiao Li, followed him into the storage room. She was new. Two weeks in. Still had that eagerness that hadn't yet curdled into the hollow-eyed efficiency of the others.
“Doctor Fang, the preparation is complete. The skin is already in the solution.”
He didn't answer.
The refrigerator hummed against the tile wall. White. Commercial grade. Inside, arranged on titanium racks, were thirty-seven sealed containers. Each marked with a name. Mrs. Chen's was on the third shelf, second from the left.
He pulled it out.
The solution was clear. The skin inside floated like a silk scarf, impossibly thin, impossibly smooth. It shimmered under the fluorescent light. He had harvested it six days ago from a spirit that had been haunting a karaoke bar in Pudong. A young woman who died in 1998, still wearing her barista uniform, still smelling of cigarette smoke and jasmine tea. She had been easy to catch. The desperate ones always were.
But the skin in the container wasn't smooth anymore.
Fang leaned closer.
Small bumps dotted the surface. Like gooseflesh. Like pores opening.
“Doctor Fang?”
“Get out.”
Xiao Li's footsteps retreated. The door clicked shut.
He rotated the container under the light. The bumps were not growths. They were indentations. As if something from inside the skin was pushing outward. As if the face wanted to turn itself inside out.
His phone buzzed.
A patient. Asking about her recovery. He scrolled through the messages. The first one, from three weeks ago: *Dr. Fang, my skin feels tight. Is that normal?*
The second, from two weeks ago: *I think I see something moving under my cheek.*
The third, from yesterday: *The face in my mirror isn't mine anymore. It's someone else's. She's trying to smile but she doesn't know how.*
Fang deleted the messages. He always deleted the messages.
He returned to the operating room. Mrs. Chen was still sedated, her face slack, her breathing steady. The room smelled of antiseptic and something else. Something faintly sweet, like overripe fruit.
He picked up the scalpel.
The first incision went clean. The skin lifted away from the muscle. He worked quickly, methodically, his hands finding the rhythm that had made him famous. His clinic was booked six months in advance. Celebrities flew in from Beijing, from Hong Kong, from Singapore. They paid in cash. They never asked questions.
He placed the harvested skin in the solution. It would keep for three more weeks. Then he would sell it to a dealer in Shenzhen who would process it into injectables for the black market. The rich didn't need to know where the collagen came from. They just needed to look young.
Mrs. Chen's new face was ready.
He peeled the protective layer from the container. The spirit skin glistened. It was warm to the touch, even after refrigeration. He positioned it over her exposed features. The edges aligned perfectly. He pressed down.
The skin adhered.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then the face began to settle. The pores opened. The blood vessels connected. The cheeks filled with color. Mrs. Chen's wrinkles smoothed away. Her jawline sharpened. Her lips plumped.
She looked twenty-five again.
She would wake up in four hours, look in the mirror, and cry with joy. She would not know that the face she was crying over had belonged to a dead girl who never got to be twenty-five. She would not care.
Fang stripped off his gloves.
“Monitor her vitals. Call me if anything changes.”
Xiao Li nodded. Her eyes were fixed on Mrs. Chen's new face. Something flickered across her expression. Not awe. Not curiosity.
Recognition.
“Doctor Fang,” she said. “I know her.”
“You don't know her. She's under anesthetic.”
“No. The face. I know that face.”
Fang's hand stopped on the door handle.
“She was a customer at my brother's karaoke bar. He showed me the security footage from 1998. A girl came in alone, ordered jasmine tea, and never left. They found her body in the bathroom the next morning. Strangled.”
The room went cold.
Mrs. Chen's new face twitched.
“I remember because of her teeth,” Xiao Li continued. Her voice was flat. Mechanical. “She had a gap between her front teeth. Just like that.”
Fang looked at the operating table.
Mrs. Chen's lips parted.
The teeth inside were not hers. They were yellowed. Cracked. And between the front two, a narrow gap that hadn't been there when she was sedated.
“Get out,” Fang whispered.
“Doctor Fang—”
“GET OUT.”
Xiao Li ran.
Fang stood alone in the operating room. The lights hummed. The machines beeped. Mrs. Chen's new face stared up at the ceiling, perfectly still, perfectly beautiful.
Then it turned toward him.
The eyes did not open. The rest of the body remained motionless. But the face rotated on its own axis, the skin twisting, the muscles rearranging themselves beneath the surface. It was like watching a mask come alive.
“You took my skin.”
The voice came from Mrs. Chen's throat. But it was not her voice. It was higher. Younger. Laced with the static of an old recording.
“You took my skin, and now I'm inside her.”
Fang's hand found the scalpel on the tray.
“Let her go.”
“I can't. You glued me on.”
The face smiled. It was not a human smile. The lips stretched too wide. The skin around the mouth pulled taut, threatening to tear.
“But that's okay,” the face said. “Because she's going to walk out of here, and she's going to go home, and she's going to look in her mirror. And when she does, she's going to see me. She's going to see the girl you killed in the karaoke bar. She's going to see me staring back.”
Fang took a step forward.
“And I'm going to tell her everything.”
The door behind him opened.
“Doctor Fang.”
He turned. The Taoist stood in the doorway. Old man. Gray robes. A string of wooden beads wrapped around his wrist. He looked at Mrs. Chen's twisting face and did not flinch.
“I've been looking for you,” the Taoist said. “I think you have something that belongs to me.”
Fang's grip tightened on the scalpel.
“I don't know what you're talking about.”
“Oh, I think you do.” The Taoist stepped into the room. His beads clicked together. “Those spirits you've been skinning? They were my patients. I was supposed to guide them across. But someone kept stealing them. Someone kept cutting them open and wearing their faces.”
He stopped beside the operating table.
The face on Mrs. Chen stopped twisting. It looked up at the Taoist. And it wept.
Real tears. Salty. Human.
“Please,” the face whispered. “Please help me.”
The Taoist reached out. His fingers hovered over Mrs. Chen's cheek.
“I can't,” he said softly. “Not while you're attached to her. You're bound now. Blood to blood. Skin to skin.”
He turned to Fang.
“What have you done?”
Fang's phone buzzed again. Another message. Another patient.
He didn't need to read it. He already knew what it would say.
*Doctor Fang, the face in my mirror just blinked. But I didn't blink.*
The Taoist's eyes went hard.
“You have one hour to tell me where your collection is. Every jar. Every container. Every piece of skin you've stolen.”
“Or what?”
“Or I'll let them find you themselves.”
Mrs. Chen's new face laughed. It was a terrible sound. Wet and broken and hungry.
“He's right,” she said. “We're coming. All of us. And we want our faces back.”
The lights flickered.
The temperature dropped.
And somewhere in the basement of the clinic, in the refrigerator with the titanium racks, thirty-seven containers began to vibrate.