Xi'an, China. 1967. A Kazakhstani writer has travelled through time to the heart of Communist China's barbaric Cultural Revolution. Now, he awaits trial, charged with crimes for which the penalty is death. The protagonist of his latest story, a girl called Junlei, finds herself trapped in a mysterious library. Solving the riddle of this library might just be the only means of escape, for both she and her author. But whilst both characters are held against their will, how could either of them ever escape this historic hell?
Xi'an, China. 1967. A Kazakhstani writer has travelled through time to the heart of Communist China's barbaric Cultural Revolution. Now, he awaits trial, charged with crimes for which the penalty is death. The protagonist of his latest story, a girl called Junlei, finds herself trapped in a mysterious library. Solving the riddle of this library might just be the only means of escape, for both she and her author. But whilst both characters are held against their will, how could either of them ever escape this historic hell?
This is the dramatic conclusion to two-part historical thriller, The Keymaker.
CW: public humiliation and torture, violence
Stories from the Hearth is an experimental storytelling experience ft. truly original fiction and thoughtfully produced soundscapes. The aim of this podcast is to rekindle its listeners' love for the ancient art of storytelling (and story-listening), and to bring some small escapism to the frantic energies of the modern world. Stories from the Hearth is the brainchild of queer punk poet, environmentalist, and anarchist Cal Bannerman. Vive l'art!
Episode #6 out Sunday 11th April 2021 (11.04.21)
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Welcome to Stories From The Hearth, the podcast for tall tales and fantastical fiction, short stories the likes of which you might once have heard a wandering bard tell, to a group of villagers, gathered around the fire. Explore the history of storytelling in bonus series The Wandering Bard, or escape your surroundings with a brand-new story, written and performed by me, Calum Bannerman, on the last Sunday of every month. Historical, romantic, science fiction, or fantasy; these are tales to transport you, doorways into another world…
Hi, I’m Cal, and if you’re new to Stories from the Hearth, there’s a few things you might like to know. This podcast is an experimental artistic space, kind of like a painter’s studio or a DJ’s headphones – it is a place where I can try new things, make art, and share it with others in the hope that it might bring some comfort, value, and escapism to their lives. It is also a means to an end; after all, it has been my dream ever since I was wee to tell stories for a living; just like the wandering bards of old, who I read about in my history books and fantasy novels. Each episode of Stories from the Hearth features a stand-alone work of fiction, performed to an immersive soundscape, which allows you to lose yourself in the tale. Usually, the stories are short enough to be contained within one episode, but a handful of them are split over two. If this particular episode isn’t your jam, don’t worry – there are heaps of stories to choose from, and no two are the same. This podcast is also a safe and inclusive space for all, which means that its stories actively embrace queerness and otherness, right alongside more mainstream walks of life. If you’re enjoying it, then please do tell your friends and review it on your favourite podcast app, Spotify, or iTunes. If you’re really enjoying it, then you can support Stories from the Hearth on Patreon and help yourself to early access, behind-the-scenes insights, bonus content, physical copies of the stories, shout-outs and much much more. Just head to patreon.com/storiesfromthehearthpodcast or hit the link down below. And speaking of shout-outs, a huge thanks to these fine folks who help make Stories from the Hearth possible: my warmest thanks to Nick, Vivian, Jen, Charlie, Rob, Sandy, Jane, Ruathy and Mully.
Now, come and gather round the fire, for I’ve got a story to tell. This is Episode Five: The Keymaker (Part Two - The Conclusion).
Last time in The Keymaker we watched on as a writer kissed his husband goodbye, before sitting down at his desk, and beginning to write. But the story which he told soon took on a life of its own. Junlei, the writer’s protagonist, finds herself facing an old and disused library, to which only she has the key. Turning it in the lock, however, and she opens more than just the library door. Suddenly transported to another, darker time – a violent time in China’s turbulent history – we last see the writer being dragged away by an angry mob, whilst Junlei, alone in her grandfather’s mysterious library, discovers a book which seems to tell the story of her life…
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Junlei sat amidst the wreckage of a bookshelf, ivory pages and paper covers strewn in fragments all around her, like a wheeling spiral galaxy, and she the shining nucleus, her cheeks wet with tears as radiant and explosive as stars.
Excepting the first few pages of the The Keymaker, an unfinished novel in which it seemed she was the protagonist, she had found no other mention of her name, nor of the names of anyone she knew in any of the author’s other work. Her search had proved fruitless. It had only driven her to distraction, the desire to make sense out of her peculiar situation fuelling frantic behaviour. Now, her energies spent, she sat quietly weeping. Her tears had long since lost their emotional sting, but still they fell, a monotonous drip-drip-drip that resounded through the empty library like the tolling of a bell.
She no longer asked unanswerable questions of the grand, sombre walls, as hushed and weighty in their silence as the tomb of some ancient librarian. She no longer cared much for the why of her situation, no longer hoped that in the Author’s Notes of some buried volume she might discover that this was all an elaborate trick of her grandfather’s, or, better still, it was all a dream. No, Junlei knew better than that. Writers didn’t write dreams into stories much any more. Too clichéd. Deep down, a mote of understanding was slowly kindling to flame.
It occurred to her that since arriving here, she had felt somewhat sluggish. This may not be a dream, but her motivation moved as slowly as legs do in a dream, when one runs and finds themselves hindered by an impossibly dense, impossibly invisible sort of Jell-O.
Of course, she had at first been delighted by the place: its sparse beauty, its grand elegance, its promise of boundless knowledge. But delighted, she now realised, like a child is delighted with a hot bubble bath – a simple, unnuanced sensation. A feeling which parents carefully orchestrate, using the pearlescent allure of bubbles to entice their children to wash. The child may feel it is their desire to jump into the frothing tub, but it is in fact the will of the parent who guides them. Ah, she thought, the bliss of ignorance. To Junlei, she saw now that this library was her bubble bath. She could remember very little before that moment on the steps, taking the key from her pocket as if stripping the clothes from her back; turning it in the lock and stepping inside, as if eagerly dipping that first cold toe in a steaming-hot bath. She dared not follow this line of thinking any further…
And then a thought struck her. The key. It was the first time she’d thought about her grandfather’s key since entering this place, its halls like a Rocky Horror memory warp. She spun around, pushing books and half-books about, first half-heartedly, then with purpose, and soon quite frantically. She pushed the hair from her eyes, tried the pockets of her jacket for the second, now third time. In her peripheral vision, an image floated: a large, polished wooden door swinging shut behind her, and in the hole on the other side, an elaborately-carved key. Though she tried all she could not to look directly at this image, soon she could do nothing but stare at it, helpless. She recognised reality with a sinking feeling, her stomach suddenly heavy as lead, heavier still, for its contents swished and swilled, and vividly she felt its pendulous presence.
Presently, Junlei vomited loudly and forcefully onto the library floor. She watched through stinging eyes as the liquid spilled out across the wooden slats, slid between the cracks; how the first ejection of chunky, soupy sick was followed by a second helping of slick and shiny bile-gazpacho. Finally, when every muscle in her body roared, and her throat ran red raw, Junlei sat back, and wiped the mess from her mouth and clothes.
There was no denying it, she had left her key in the door.
Somehow, before able even to test her theory (though when she did, she was proved right), so too did she know this: the library exit was now locked to her, and as far as this old building was concerned, she was going nowhere.
The writer’s legs throbbed with a baritone pain. It felt as if the Guards had sewn stones into his musculature. A faint memory of a favourite childhood fairy-tale sprang to mind. The idea of dispatching the baddy, by filling him up with stones, had seemed novel to him in his youth; but now, feeling that weight in his own muscles, he was newly repulsed by the fable. Wolf or man, what a horrible way to go.
The ache was not secluded to his legs, however, for in his back and hips too, raged the dual pains of weariness and spasm. For some hours he had cycled through a process of relaxing one muscle group at a time: resting his weight on the right leg to let the left rest, focusing his centre of balance in his knees to rest his hips, and vice versa. But now he no longer had the mental composure to keep it up.
The immense roar of the crowd, gathered excitedly in Drum and Bell Tower Square – a roar which one might have easily mistaken for the jubilant clamour of a coronation ceremony, comedy club, or concert crowd, under different circumstances – had, thankfully, become white noise, at this point. Aside from the odd person climbing up to spit in his face, or yell in his ear, the writer found he could exist in a sort of desensitized purgatory: half-way between sleep and death. Or at least, that’s how it felt.
He had no idea how long he’d been standing there, swaying like a pine tree in the breeze, but he knew that when once it had been morning, and he had sat typing at his desk with congee juices drying in his beard, now it was dusk, and night was approaching.
Around his neck was hung a placard, the weight of which seemed to grow with each passing hour. He could feel the heat of rope burn on the skin of his neck, agitated whenever some passer-by, wishing to publicly display their allegiance to the Party, grabbed or tugged it, just to see him wince, to hear him cry. On the board were painted in large characters a set of antiquated terms. Some of them the writer had rarely seen written, and even then, only in history books. The characters spelled out a dogeared approximation of his name, all the better for highlighting his foreignness. Following this, they read:
Bourgeois writer. Intellectualist. Capitalist-roader.
Caught attempting to slander our Great Chairman Mao:
The Red Sun in Our Hearts, The Saviour of the People.
Presently, in the freezing cold of early evening, the writer was stripped of his dressing gown, revealing to all the cartoonish proportions of Mao’s face, as satirized by his t-shirt. He could no longer feel the last half of his feet, and his ankles were swollen in the frost. When he tried to rub his thighs back to life – his hands resting on his knees as he stooped in a permanent bow – one or both of the Red Guards at his side would club him across the back for his impertinence. They screamed at him, reminding him that he should be grateful for the cold; the worse he suffered, the greater the penance he could pay to the Chairman, the Party, the People.
He did not even have the protection of his hair to keep him warm. The mob had made sure of that, people literally queueing up to take part in the ritualistic shearing of his hair. He still had a crick in his neck from all the pulling and pushing. He’d seen images of women in liberated France, their hair brutally shaved from their skulls as punishment for fraternisation with the enemy. (“Fraternisation” being code for her having been raped by some Nazi scumbag.) Hell, he’d seen photographs of exactly this: the dreaded denouncements of the Cultural Revolution; of Liu Shaoqi, once the third-most powerful man in Communist China, purged by Mao and forced to stand for endless hours, beaten and tormented, his hair torn off in clumps at denunciation meetings just like the one the writer was now the target of. He had never imagined how humiliating and agonising those meetings would actually be.
At one point, surprisingly late in the day, one of the Guards had noticed his Xi Jinping commemorative slippers for the first time. It was clear to the writer that not one of his captors quite knew what to do with these slippers, depicting the (then teenage) son of China’s disgraced Propaganda Chief as an adult; and not just any adult, either, but the new Chairman of a future China. The dates on his 25th anniversary slippers of Xi Jinping’s reign, 2013-2038, seemed to perplex the Guards even more. Soon, though, they’d woven between them a narrative which fitted the apparent crimes of the writer. Not only was he all of the things listed on his placard, but now, they proudly proclaimed, they had uncovered an even more sinister plot. Evidently, the bourgeois writer was planning a coup, to reinstate Xi Zhongxun and oust Mao. Look, they told the crowd, he wears his plans openly; he is guilty of hubris, on top of everything. He wishes to reinstate Xi Zhongxun so that his son, the exile boy Jinping, can become leader.
Not that the crowd needed an excuse, but they had relished this new information all the same, and had for an hour or two pelted him with stones and rotten fruit, which stung and stank in equal measure. With grim humour, the writer recalled his interest in finding out that people did actually throw fruit in situations like these. He had thought that the act existed only in books and film. He had of course considered enlightening his audience as to the unfolding of history; that the Cultural Revolution would not last, not once everyone realised the sham of it all, not once the crops failed, and the iron industry died on its feet. He had considered telling them how Xi Zhongxun would afterwards be reinstated, with or without the help of a lone author, and of how his son would require no help from anyone to later seat himself on the Red Throne of China. The writer imagined informing the gathered crowd of how Xi the Younger would reign for even longer than Mao, and would be known as one of the most successful capitalist leaders of capitalism’s dying years.
Of course, he said none of this. He only turned the words over in his mind, dreaming up scenarios in which his prophesies might be heard, believed, even. As he did so, he thought of the irony of every movie, every book, every play which had once imagined correcting the past with knowledge from the future. Of course, in theory the idea was quite perfect, beautiful in fact: knowing your lover would die in a car crash, one could travel back to the morning of their death and prevent them from ever taking that drive. In practice, however, things were not so simple, as his present situation made painfully clear.
Just a blur in the peripheries of his teary vision, the moon, crescent and sharp as a scythe, rose and fell as the dreary hours passed him by. When finally the crowds dispersed, to home or to work in the pale light of morn, the Guards brought him down from his pedestal. Less than an hour later, the writer was being flung into an unlit room by the restraints which cuffed his hands together. As the door swung to behind him, and he listened to the key clunk dead in the lock, he allowed himself for the first time to weep.
He had no moisture left in his body with which to cry, yet cry he did, and though it pained him unspeakably, he could not help the heaving breaths and shaking shoulders which accompanied his grieving. He thought of two things, mostly. Of his husband, of course; the man’s affection often reluctantly imparted, yet all the warmer for it, and when he hugged him, the writer would breathe in that uniform stench of the hospitality industry, worked deep into the man’s chef’s whites. But he also thought of Osmanthus honey cakes, baking in the ovens of Xi’an’s Muslim Quarter; that familiar pungency of sweetness had, this morning, been his one proper anchor to the Xi’an he knew. He thought of his first date with his husband, on which they’d shared a popsicle-served slice of the cake, and laughed at the sticky mess it made of each others’ cheeks. And he remembered the kiss they’d shared by the city walls, nervous and fleeting and tingling as is the nature of budding love.
In a prison cell in Communist China, the writer thought of these things, and wept.
Some time later, the door to his cell opened.
He watched a dark silhouette crouch, before throwing something across the floor. The thing clattered and clanged, and when it reached him, the writer saw in the thin beam of light from the doorway a metal platter, grey and indeterminate matter slopped across it. The plate was soon followed by a tin mug of water, which sloshed and tipped over before it reached him, much to the hilarity of the guards. Shamelessly, he dived for the cup, and finding it mostly empty began immediately to suck the moisture from the concrete floor. It tasted faintly of feces.
From the still-open cell-door came a gruff voice.
‘You’re to hang, traitor. Orders from the top. Enjoy your meal.’ There came another chorus of laughter from the hallway. The writer looked up from the water spill, his expression blank and uncomprehending. What he saw, though, made him smile.
For behind the gargoyle shapes of the guards – as his eyes adjusted to the brightness of daylight – he could see through a grated window, and out onto the street. And it was a street he recognised. Across the road, on the corner of a two-storey building, he saw his second-floor apartment. For a split-second, the writer thought he could see his home as it was in his own time, with a big bay window – double glazed – curving above signage advertising the arcase around the corner. Thought even that he spied the withering plants on the window sill, still clinging to life despite his husband’s best attempts. The sight of a horticultural holocaust, is what he used to call their living room, watching wickedly as his husband’s lips would curl defensively. It took the writer a moment to see his apartment in its current state: wooden and squat, with windows set at sharp, ninety-degree edges, still many years from being torn down and rebuilt in stone and concrete, glass and metal and plastics; many generations before its occupants would be able to idly watch commuters in their passage across the intersection, or call grocery orders to Mister Zhang, as he stood smoking on the sidewalk. All the same, the miraculous discovery that he had somehow been imprisoned so close to his own home stirred a smile on his tired face.
Completely distracted, the writer didn’t notice the guards’ laughter drawing to silence. Didn’t notice the boot, until it was connecting with his jaw and he was sailing back, through air, to hit the concrete with a glottal stop.
As the world faded from view, an idea began to form.
This was in fact not the first time the writer had written his stories into existence. Though it was the first time it had happened to him in adulthood.
As a child, playing in the vast cave systems of his native Kazakhstani mountains, the writer had marvelled at the ancient paintings scrawled across the walls. Horned and ferocious beasts, or big, lumbering livestock. Tall trees, arid plains, great flowing rivers which wound the cavern walls, carrying images of people and their histories as it went. Warriors with spears and bows, fighting other men, or women with exaggerated bosoms dressed as priestesses and seers: communing with the stars, or birthing the children of the gods. Before his family had been selected for educational relocation to the Chinese mainland, the writer had spent his countless unchecked years of boyhood exploring and reimagining the stories these paintings told.
He remembered his father explaining to him how ancient those pictures really were; how with just chisel and dye, the very first settlers of their land had immortalised their journey, so well, that even in the boy’s time, still their story could be told. The idea of telling a story that could last even half as long as that, had fascinated him ever since.
After school, and during the long, dry summer months, the writer had enjoyed guiding his friends through the caves, giving the god-figures names, and weaving new myths about them, telling of how far the horned deer could leap, or how vicious the jaws of the lions could be. When his friends didn’t believe him, the writer would sneak off down some squat tunnel which only he knew about, and would from there roar, or snarl, or boom in his deepest voice, speaking a nonsensical language which he hoped his friends would mistake for god-speak.
Sometimes though, when his friends listened the most intently and he, buoyed by this, told his stories most voraciously – with a passion and skill uncommon in a child – it had seemed as if those beasts and beings really had come to life: prowling and stalking the deep ways of the mountainsides, in search for little boys and girls to eat. Fantastical though it was, at the time the writer remembered feeling as if he really had conjured life from the old stories etched into the walls. In adulthood he had since discounted those memories as childhood fancy, but now, bruised and bloodied in a holding cell of the Communist State, in the midst of a Cultural Revolution of his own writing, he was not so sure.
He awoke from muddied dreams of dark holes, and streaks of paint in ochre, scarlet, and indigo. His head thumped, his stomach gurgled, and a groan crawled achingly from between his parched lips. He spied the upturned mug lying a short ways from his feet, and mourned the loss of water for a second time. This time, though, he remembered what it was that had kindled the beginnings of an idea in him, earlier. The handle of the mug, worn sharp by years of use, had come loose; the soldering joining it to its body was at one point now entirely severed, a result of it having been thrown across the floor, no doubt. Slowly, painfully, the writer rose to a sitting position, the bones in his spine cracking in harmony with the crunch of damaged cartilage. He leant over and picked up the mug. With a little prying, and a tentative bash against the wall (hoping desperately that the guards couldn’t hear him), he soon had the handle of the mug completely free, its sharpest end glinting dully in the tiny light from through the cracks around the doorframe.
Well, he thought, now I have a chisel, I’ll have to make do without the paint.
Squirming over onto his belly, the writer put improvised-writing implement to concrete, deciding that the floor was as good a place to start as any. Gently, cautiously, he tried engraving a single character: the ‘Ju’ part of ‘Junlei’. The tin handle scraped across the floor, sending a shiver down his spine. Nonetheless, in the vacuous space of the cell the ugly noise was soon swallowed, and from outside the writer heard nothing in response.
And so, training his mind as best as he could, he began once more to write…
‘Junlei stepped back out into the light of the main hall – golden, for it was approaching evening, and carried with it a sort of lethargy, which differentiated it from the dawn. It felt good to move her limbs again, stiff after the hours she’d sat, mourning the loss of her grandfather’s key. She had no concept of time, not knowing how long she’d lost herself to despondency (though she was glad to see the day had not yet turned to night). All she could say was that one moment she had felt empty, apathetic and morose, and the next she had felt revived, an energy in her veins which she’d known before, yet which had been absent ever since entering the library.
Presently, air filled her lungs with an eagerness to oxidise, the likes of which reminded her of the trembling air after a storm, or of a day in the wake of depression’s grip, when for the first time in what seems an eternity you can see clearly, and breath deeply again.
But there was something else. Something about the way she felt: compelled suddenly, as if her subconscious were decided in questions her conscious mind was yet to ask. With a shudder, a thought occurred to her. Was this what it felt like when he… Was this him? The idea chilled her to the bone.
Lashing out suddenly, Junlei kicked the base of a wooden pillar, with a force which left behind a mark. She bent down and ran her fingers over the wood, searching for the minute changes in texture which defined the scrape; they were there, all right. The act, entirely whimsical and spontaneous, comforted her some. She retraced the moment: the split-second decision to kick, the jarring sensation of her foot connecting with the pillar, the gently abrasive surface of its wood a testament to her realness, the real-life consequences of her actions.
From the memory folds of her brain came a voice.
“We are all subject to the fates. But we must all act as if we are not, or die of despair.”
Was it her grandfather who had told her that? Or some book, from the depths of her childhood? Her grandfather had often read to her, so there was, she supposed, the possibility that the voice had been both. Either way, she swallowed its sentiments with not a little bitterness.
From the foyer of the ancient library, Junlei noticed once more the giant scrawled characters of the scrolls, hanging above reception. Deep navy blue on off-white, stating the library’s name: Altered Time. This time, though, some new though nagged at her. She walked to the desk at reception, took the paper-softness of the scroll between thumb and forefinger, and rubbed it. She looked up at the length of the material, pondering the hand which had drawn those monolithic words. Slowly, Junlei walked around to face the other side. Here were the characters again, though of course from this angle the name Altered Time read left-to-right, in the Western style. And there was that nag again, like catching a splinter in one’s finger. She frowned.
‘What has four legs in the morning, two come midday, and three before bed?’
This time, there was no mistaking the memory of her grandfather’s voice: slow as the turtle, tuneful as the crow, he always used to joke. Hearing it, she was immediately transported, back to the first time she’d heard that riddle. She remembered with a smile how for a day, or more, she had pestered her grandfather for the answer. But he had not relented. Not, at least, until Junlei was on the verge of giving up.
‘It’s not possible, papa!’ She’d protested, eliciting a wry grin from the old man. ‘Nothing can grow legs like that, or lose ‘em! I thought a caterpillar, but they got more’n four legs, ‘n butterflies ent got three!’
‘Well, no,’ her grandfather had replied, ‘though that’s a smart guess. Tell me,’ Junlei still remembered the measured pauses in his speech, as enchanting as the words which followed them. ‘What have you taken the ‘bed’ in the riddle to mean?’
Junlei hadn’t had to think for long to answer. ‘Well, just that. Bed. End of the day.’
‘Mmm… What if you were to think of ‘bed’ as meaning ‘death’? What if you were to think of ‘morning’ as meaning ‘birth’?’
Junlei remembered her childish frustration at this answer. And yet, that had proved all she had needed, and now she recalled running back to her grandfather the following day, interrupting his work at the turnstone. ‘The answer’s you, granddad. It’s you!’ She had giggled with delight. ‘When you were a baby, you crawled. When you grew up, you walked; that’s the two legs! And now,’ she indicated his walking stick, resting against the wall of the shed.
It had elated her to see her grandfather’s smile, wide and beaming, his many wooden teeth spelling out another riddle in a pattern of brown and white, one which he too often kept to himself. But for young Junlei, solver of riddles, the old man had allowed himself a smile.
‘See,’ he’d said, ‘and all it took was looking at things from a different perspective. It is the best knowledge I can impart, Ju-Ju. Whenever you feel stuck, or trapped, or angered and confused, try changing your perspective. You never know what you’ll find on the other side.’
In the towering hall of the library, she grinned and shook her head.
‘You devious old bastard,’ she whispered.
Junlei stepped back, further and further from reception, until from her new perspective the hanging banners framed the great entrance door between them. She let her eyes blend in and out of focus in rhythm with her breathing, not actively searching for any one thing, but allowing whatever it was she might see to come to her. Now she closed her eyes, breathed in, breathed out, opened them again. She laughed.
There it was, clear as daylight.
Where the walkways of the upper-floors arched in bridges over the shape of the entranceway, two further banners hung, painted the same blue-on-cream as those by which Junlei stood. On these, however, were two new characters. From just the right angle, the banners at Reception and the banners above the foyer formed a sort of sentence. Read left-to-right, in the Western style, they were a jumbled mess. But then, who had told her to read them that way? Clearing her mind, Junlei instead read the characters afresh; and they read thusly:
Jǐnshèn dì gǎibiàn Shíjiān
Alter Time With Caution
And easy as that, the riddle of the library was finally solved. Its name was not Altered Time, as at first she had thought. Those first two scrolls had only been part of the message, a riddle some ancient author had been trying to relay. Now Junlei had learned how to read it, she could see that its message was a warning: alter time with caution. Confusing as the message was to Junlei, who was not to know of the fate of the writer, she was still comforted, feeling closer to the truth than she had before.
And there was more. Where the arching characters of the scrolls converged, on the first-floor corridor bridging the main door, there was another door. Though much smaller than the one in the foyer, it was shaped similarly, and carved of the same magnificent wood, lacquered dark and intriguing. She could not be entirely sure (certainly, being sure would mean admitting to a degree of magic or insanity which Junlei was not yet prepared to), but she did not think the door had been there before. After all, no other floor had a room above the foyer, and she had already explored all the other antechambers this vast mausoleum of learning had to offer.
But no amount of doubt could have curbed the speed with which Junlei took to the stairs. She felt drawn, magnetically pulled as if by some unseen force. Reaching the door, she paused, her hand on the handle. That invisible power she could feel, twisting and turning her like a marionette, clashed with her own impulse to turn and run. Her whole body vibrated, every molecule of her, every atom tense with the energies of conflicting instructions. She had never felt like this before, in fact she was sure few people had ever felt like this before. Junlei was a fierce woman, ardently independent, yet try as she might, she could not deny the feeling that her hold on reality was slipping, giving way to the gentle, yet panicked energies of that incorporeal other. Of the writer, carving out her story. At last, she surrendered to him, her will too weakened to fight any longer.
Turning the handle of the mysterious door, she stepped inside.
The room was utterly bare. There was no window to let in light, and the atmosphere was close, compact, tense. And yet there was little to stimulate the senses. No smells lingered, despite its supposed age; no sounds of scattering rodents; nor of the street onto which the room must surely have backed; no shapes made distinguishable enough in the light of the single candle for Junlei to have imagined their feel. It was a room which had been constructed simply, and quite deliberately, to serve its singular purpose. And as Junlei closed the door behind her, that singular purpose turned from his silent work at the vice and wheel, and took her in his gaze.
He was younger than she’d ever imagined him being, his frame lithe and athletic, his complexion suave, though less tanned than in his dying years. On his face he wore a neat moustache, which framed a pair of eyes, pearly and hazelnut, still yet to develop the astigmatisms which would later give cause for glasses. In the man’s hand he held a short shaft of iron, ballooned at one end into an oval handle, and at the other finishing in a complicated series of opposing teeth.
The Keymaker gave a little frown, followed by a smile, wide with recognition. His teeth were clean and brilliantly cream.
‘Ju-Ju?’ quizzed the man, and unable to stop herself, Junlei ran straight into the arms of her grandfather.
Though her tears were happy, Junlei’s cheeks were wet, as she took her grandfather’s youthful face in her hands, brought it to her. Quite simultaneously, it occurred to them both that, somehow, she must surely be older than him. Granddaughter of greater years than her ancestor. Just as quickly as the thought had come, however, it was discarded. The sheer joy of their reunion to great to lend space to any reservations.
After a time, Junlei shook her head.
‘How are you even… Papa, none of this makes sense.’
The Keymaker smiled again, and in his smile Junlei saw some of the wisdom she had so admired in the man’s older self, teaching her riddles, showing her the beauty of storytelling. Even now, though not yet fully bloomed, her grandfather commanded that same respect for knowledge: truly uncommon in the rest of the human race.
He considered Junlei’s question.
‘Nothing makes sense, unless viewed from the right perspective, Ju-Ju my dear. You know this.’
‘You mean,’ she began. But she knew to whom her grandfather referred. The writer. The author of those novels, the one with the funny name who had, somehow, told her story. Predicted it, or… brought it into being. Junlei shuddered. She supposed she had known all along, but until now had not dared examine the sparseness of her reality. Even now, some part of her held out against this most tremendous and cataclysmic truth.
‘Here,’ said her grandfather the Keymaker, ‘I am to give you this.’ Between his slender fingers –already knobbled from years spent hunched over his instruments – he held out to Junlei a key, with which she was intimately familiar. It was exactly the same as that which she had left behind, on the other side of the library door. And yet, not exactly the same. Here, at the head of the key, a change had been made. Either side of the head, in between those two frighteningly intricate rows of teeth, were etched a set of characters.
‘But how?’ started Junlei.
Her grandfather reached across, closed her hand around the key. His touch was gentle, yet assured, and in it she felt a familiar warmth: the kind which cannot be earned, only inherited.
‘Next time,’ said the young man, ‘you will remember the meaning of these letters.’ And as he said so, he raised her arm for her, so that the key was illuminated in the weak, buttery candlelight. By its fluttering light, she read the following letters:
J.D.G.S.
Jǐnshèn dì gǎibiàn Shíjiān
Alter Time With Caution
Junlei sighed the exasperated, affectionate sigh of a lover, caught out for the umpteenth time by a partner’s foolish joke. She looked longingly into her grandfather’s timeless face. You haven’t changed a drop, she thought. Same as ever. Won’t give me the key to the riddle, until I’ve solved it for myself. She smiled thinly, holding back a tear.
‘Will there be a next time?’ she asked.
But the Keymaker only smiled, and stroked her cheek.
‘There is only now, my Ju-Ju Bug. That’s all there ever is.’ He wiped at the corner of her eye. ‘Now, go on. You know what you must do.’
As the door to the room swung to, Junlei caught one last glimpse of her grandfather as he turned to go back about his work. She let loose her grief.
Back in the library’s foyer, squinting through blurry eyes, she slotted the key with a satisfying click into the hole of the door’s heavy lock. She tested the physicality of the key, rubbing its cool iron between thumb and forefinger, as she contemplated her grandfather’s final riddle. Gradually, meaning and understanding slotted into place, her mind becoming one with time. Junlei took a deep breath, and unlocked the do–’
The door to the writer’s cell flew open, and in poured blinding daylight. Had he happened to have been standing by it, the force of the guard’s thrust would surely have crushed him flat, between door and wall.
Silhouetted against the afternoon sun was a tall woman, her shoulders broad and face square, her hands wrapped round the barrel of a Type-63 assault rifle. On her head she wore the standard issue puke-green cap of the Red Guards, but the armband she wore told of superiority within the faction. Though the writer could not have differentiated her from her subordinates, he was in fact now face-to-face with a seasoned commander.
The woman turned to one of her officers.
‘This is him?’ The officer nodded. ‘Huh,’ she scoffed, ‘I’d expected more.’ Her voice was gravelly, though light, tinged with something the writer might under different circumstances have called empathy. Certainly, it was the voice of intelligence, though her comment at his expense suggested hubris, or the over-confidence of youth.
The writer, midway through carving the final character in Junlei’s story, cowered on the floor, still dazzled by the intensity of light infiltrating the safety of his darkness. In his hand he clutched his improvised chisel.
‘Your time’s up, capitalist,’ sneered the commander. When the writer ignored her, his hand quivering, holding something silvered and glinting, she barked at him. ‘Stand when you’re spoken to!’
At the flick of her wrist, her two officers rushed in. Before the writer could even think of his next move, let alone execute it, the mug-handle was kicked from his hand. He let out a yelp of pain, and the commander scoffed.
‘Please,’ he began to beg, ‘please, you’ve got it all wrong. I’m not a… a capitalist roader, I… I’m not even from here, I’m not even from now, I… I… your orders are–’
The writer was silenced with a sharp slap across his face, a knee to his gut. Stringy bile lurched, dangling like melted icicles from his lips.
‘We have no orders but our own, traitor. If you haven’t worked that out by now, then you’ve less sense than I’d been informed. Now, come along willingly, or we can skip the ceremony altogether, and put you to the firing squad right here and now.’
Half-swallowing a childish wail, the writer gargled compliance. He was dragged from the cell, an officer under each arm, his feet scraping dully across the concrete. When his captors stood him in front of their commander, the woman grabbed his chin in her hand. The unrestrained strength of her grip terrified him, it seemed she could have crushed his skull like a bear if she’d wanted to. What was worse, he could sense nothing in her eyes – so narrow and cold – which suggested she wouldn’t take pleasure in doing so.
‘Can you walk?’ She asked at last. The writer nodded. ‘Then walk,’ she said, pushing him out into the corridor with the muzzle of her rifle. ‘You,’ she pointed to an underling, ‘come with me. And you, see to his cell, they’ve cleaned out another college: lecturers and professors,’ she spat pointedly at her feet, ‘shipping them here this evening.’
As the writer stepped barefoot into the freezing mud of the street, he heard someone exclaim from back within the cellblock. The words, however, were lost amidst the clamour of a gathering crowd. Or, rather, procession. For as he got his bearings, the writer realised that he was being herded into a long line of people.
Aside from the armed guards, marching down the sides of the colony, the procession was entirely comprised of others like him: so-called ‘capitalist roaders’ and ‘counterrevolutionaries’, which he could quite easily surmise from the boards hung around their necks. Before he knew it, he too was being dressed in board and dunce hat, and kicked unceremoniously into the midst of the group. Turning in reaction, he watched the commander barking orders to other officers, already having forgot him, already making in the direction of some more-pressing matter.
Just like that, his fate was lost to the long and solemn march of death. And what irony, too, he thought, for as they walked, the procession came to a crossroads: the very same crossroads which would become an intersection, one which his husband and he had looked down on at their flat-viewing; the writer wrapped in his husband’s arms, imagining all of the wonderful memories they might make together in a flat as gorgeous as that.
The procession, he learned, was leading toward the city walls, atop which had been arranged a long line of gallows. It was to be a pointedly public affair, intended to purge Xi’an of the Revolution’s worst offenders. And as he walked, the writer thought of the end to Junlei’s story, which he had patched together (granted, a little shoddily) in etchings on the concrete floor of his cell. He thought with bitter humour of the last character, that for ‘door’, which had been left incomplete. Would it really have worked? He wondered, trying to suppress the bubbling tears, trying instead to hold in his mind the image of his husband in bed, the Iranian green of his eyes like polished emeralds against the cave-dark of his stubble, that tangle of downy fuzz on his chest the perfect pillow on which to rest one’s head. But the image only converted his fearful tears into mournful ones, and so, as he marched beneath his former-future flat, the mud he trod on was softly enriched with the salt of his sorrow.
Officer Meng Fu reached the end of the strange cell-story, scratched in brutish, trembling characters into the concrete.
‘What is it?’ Asked her colleague, a sour-faced goon who was known by the nickname ‘The Bull’. Meng decided not to tell the man what she’d found. The Bull was an uncanny character, the sort who, in normal times, would have fallen through the cracks of society, too stupid for skilled labour, too big of an arsehole for much else; in other words, a bully, whose reign of terror should have ended in High School. In times such as these, however, bullies swelled the ranks, and made more for themselves than they ever should have been allowed. Meng caught herself mid-thought, chiding herself for questioning the Revolution’s methods. After all, it was the farmers and industrial workers who were the real heroes; intelligence and learning was capitalist code for subversion.
Still, it didn’t mean she had to like The Bull.
‘Nothing,’ called Meng Fu. ‘You go on, I’ll finish up here. Catch you up.’
The Bull grunted his acknowledgement, hacked up a mouthful of phlegm, and spat it onto the concrete floor. Not that they were expected to leave the floors shining-clean, or anything, but it was for just this sort of behaviour that Meng so disliked her companion-in-arms.
Returning to the cell-floor’s half-started, half-finished story, Meng Fu studied the shape of its final character. ‘Door’ was traditionally shaped to resemble that which it represented, though in this case its author had only drawn one half, so that instead, it currently resembled a flag pole, its flag blowing in a westerly breeze.
Before she really knew what she was doing, Meng found herself unfolding the switchblade she carried on her belt. As she bent over the last sentence of the writer’s story, she heard her mother’s chastising voice: You just never learn when to leave things be, do you?
Scowling, Meng thought back: At least I learned how to survive, mother.
Then taking her knife, she put it to the concrete.
Junlei stood frozen, her arm rigid as if in death. Her mind blank. To all intents and purposes, she had become but another feature in that vast, un-aging library. Only her eyelids moved, fluttering as if asleep. Behind them, she watched the slow, pendulous happenings of another world.
The writer stood shivering under the first snowfall of winter; smart, delicate flakes dissolving against the ebbing warmth of his skin. To his left and right, as far as the eye could see, a long row of hastily-constructed gallows crowned Xi’an’s medieval walls. Stood on tiptoes, nooses tight around their necks, a hundred others waited, like him, for death. He closed his eyes and thought of home, and behind his eyelids fluttered untold possibilities, as yet undecided, un-fated.
Of a sudden, on him fell the welcome light of the sun, and opening his eyes he found to curious delight that the clouds had briefly parted, revealing to the quaking eyes of the damned both a sun and moon, majestically framed against the evening blue.
From somewhere behind, he heard the call of the anxious masses, the tangible bloodlust of their cries. And in response, he heard the Red Guard commander issue her command; felt the tremble in the trapdoor beneath his feet, as somewhere out of sight a lever was pulled.
With the concerted efforts of an obsessive-compulsive, Officer Meng Fu drew her knife across the concrete in one final, conclusive stoke.
Junlei, a tiny, fluttering fragment of life charging her muscles at the last, smiled into the darkness of the library foyer, and turned her grandfather’s key in the lock.
In the bleak and undefined regions of the universe, where possibilities swarm and scatter in the form of lost electrons, and all reality is subjective – a quantum-immersion of chaos and chance, the particle-soup from which all life must originate, and to which all life returns – from this vastness of potentiality emerged a new dawn.
Around the writer’s neck the horrid length of rope tightened… and then fell away, returned to dust. The writer dropped to his knees, the air knocked from his chest. He gulped back lungfuls of oxygen, and his tear ducts stung. Opening his eyes against a sudden brightness, he could not understand what he saw.
The ancient walls of Xi’an’s city centre still ran away from him in either direction. But the gallows were gone. In fact, barring the blue stone of its construction, almost nothing about the walls was the same as it had been, just moments before. In place of the gallows were notice boards and pay-per-view telescopes. In place of the condemned prisoners of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, were a countless gaggle of tourists. And the Red Guard were all gone, excepting an imitation cap, worn by a lone, young white man, who either didn’t know, or could not comprehend the history behind it.
Peering over the parapet, in the direction of Drum and Bell Tower Square, the writer found his horizon blocked. Here were skyscrapers, and flashing neon signs, advertisements the height of two-storey buildings; and everywhere the sound of rushing cars, people talking on cell phones, the inconstant clamour of tinny music from department stores and too-loud earphones. And laughter, the inane giggling of selfie-taking tourists, the pleasing, primally-awakening screech-laugh of toddlers, chased along the walls by fathers, followed by nattering mothers pushing prams. And litter, litter too. Not propaganda posters or the disused denunciation boards of disappeared millions, but crisp packets, disposable chopsticks, bubble tea containers, and the half-cylinder tubs the ladies at the foot of the walls sold stinky tofu in, the black-blue juices of the delicacy still fragrant in the midday sun.
In all his life, he had never imagined he would be glad for such a garish sight. He hardly dared think it, but somehow he knew it to be true.
He was home.
Sometime later, the sound of his husband’s keys jangling in the hallway door brought the writer skipping impatiently from the bathroom. He wore his head spun up inside a soft cotton towel, concealing for the time being the hack job he’d made of tidying up his torn and mangled hair. He wore another towel around his waist. His chest bore a constellation of bruises from his denunciation meeting, and so quickly he checked himself, grabbing a fresh t-shirt from the laundry and pulling it over his battered body. The t-shirt was plain, with no print or design of any sort.
I think I might stick to plain tees from now on, he thought.
So it was, laughing at his own half-mad joke, that his husband found him. The writer beamed, stifling a tear. He ran without pause to his partner, flinging his arms around the man’s muscular frame; the only man in the world he could ever have thought of, have pined for, when he’d felt his world collapsing around him.
‘Hey! Hey, what’s all this? Are you showered?’
The writer laughed.
‘Don’t act so surprised!’ Then, ‘I… my god, I missed you, baby. I missed you so much.’
His husband, too taken aback to fully understand how much the writer meant this, only dropped his bags of groceries to the floor, and returned the hug.
‘Mmm,’ he hummed, ‘you smell divine. Wait, is that my rather expensive, rather finite ylang-ylang and jasmine soap?’ The writer chuckled. ‘You devil!’ His husband cursed, and began tickling him under the armpits. The writer laughed wild with pleasure, before succumbing to the pain of his injuries.
‘Stop! Stop,’ he wheezed.
‘Oh, shit. Sorry. You okay?’
The writer smiled, clasping at his sides. He took the big man’s head in his hands, gazing long into those eyes, as deep and lustrous as the forest.
‘I am now,’ he said.
‘Well, good,’ replied his husband, ‘’cause I picked up dinner, and a little treat for after.’ He pulled open one of the bags on the floor to reveal a transparent tub. Inside, the writer saw two fresh slices of Osmanthus honey rice cake, baked that morning in the ovens of the Muslim district. He laughed, and his husband cocked his head like an uncertain canine.
‘You sure you’re okay?’ The writer nodded. ‘Oh, hey. Did you finish your story?’
Something swept across the writer’s face, perhaps the shadow of a passing cloud, or that of memory, slowly fading. His husband didn’t catch it.
‘You know what?’ he replied, ‘I think I did.’
And their apartment was full of the evening sun.
-
Thank you for listening to this month’s Story From The Hearth. you liked what you heard, please do subscribe, and share this podcast with friends, family, and anyone you know who could use just a half-hour’s respite from the chaotic energies of the everyday. You can also now rate podcasts on Spotify, so if you’re listening to it there, why not drop us some stars. If you wish to support the podcast, please head to my Patreon by hitting the link in the description. Similarly, you can check out the podcast’s Instagram, Twitter, website and email address via the links below. Story episodes are released on the last Sunday of every month. Additional episodes in The Wandering Bard historical mini-series will pop up from time to time. Until next we meet around the fire, I’ve been Calum Bannerman, and you’ve been listening to Stories From The Hearth.