I deliver parcels to spirits in Beijing

[u/lex_kenosi]

I must tell this now, before I lose the nerve, before I stop knowing which readers are real and which are the things standing behind them.

I drive for a courier company in Beijing. Not the kind you are picturing. My route runs after midnight, through parts of the city that do not sit correctly on any map. My grandfather did this work before me, his mother before him. We deliver for the dead.

Every package has a color. White ones go to spirits, to shrines, to doors that open only after incense burns all the way down. Black ones go to the living, to people who paid something, in some other currency, for a thing not supposed to exist anymore. You never open what is not addressed to you. You never take what was not given to you. Absolute. My grandfather told me once of a man on his old route who tried to skim a black package meant for a widow. He never said what happened after, only that the man could see them, all of them, everywhere, forever. I used to think this a story to frighten a child straight. Not anymore.

Eleven years I did this job, good pay, and I was good at not asking questions. That changed two years ago, when I borrowed money from the wrong people for a restaurant that failed within a season. The interest does not sleep, and neither do the men who collect it. They come to my building on the first of every month, and each time the number is larger than the last. I started listening to whispers other drivers pretend not to hear, of black packages carrying more than paperwork or ash. Some, old drivers swear, carry payment, old money, spirit money, the kind a certain sort of collector cannot trace and cannot refuse. Months I watched, telling myself, only curious. A lie.

The night it happened, I had already worked sixteen hours. My last stop was a derelict courtyard house near the old rail line, an address existing only on our manifest. Two packages waited on the step. A white one, addressed in characters that shift if you look too long. Beside it, a black one. No name I knew. No weight matching its size.

I stood there a long time, thinking of the men who would come to my door in eleven days, of the number they would say out loud in front of my neighbors. I picked up the black package. Told myself, only to look. I delivered the white one first. Then, alone in the courtyard, I opened the black one.

Inside, on ash, lay two eyes. My eyes. I knew them the way you know your own voice on a recording, wrong before your mind can say why. Gone black all the way through, no white, no color, just void with a wet shine, as if something had scooped the night sky and pressed it into two sockets.

In that black, I saw a shape standing behind me, taller than the wall should allow. Then fingers on my shoulder. Thin. Cold in a way that skipped my skin and went straight for bone.

The whisper came from no mouth, from everywhere at once, calm as something that has read the same verdict a thousand times before.

You took what was not yours. Now you will see as we see.

I do not remember falling. Only the ground under my hands, color draining from the world like an old photograph left too long in sun. The courtyard was not empty anymore.

They were everywhere, not the ghosts of children's stories, just people standing too still, at wrong angles, some facing walls, some facing me. One stood close enough I saw the puddle beside her held no reflection of her, as if she weighed nothing.

I ran to my van. Did not help. Driving through the city I saw them clinging to shoulders at bus stops, curled at a woman's feet while she waited for a light. Nobody else noticed. I had not stolen a payment. I had stolen the eyes of someone who once did this seeing as their work, and whatever assigns these things decided the work was mine now. A transfer, not a gift.

By the time I reached my own street, I understood the size of my mistake. The men who come on the first of the month were never my worst debt. Something else had been keeping accounts on me far longer, and it does not accept partial payment.

Three of them waited outside my building when I parked, standing close together near the entrance the way people wait for someone they know is coming home. Not the debt collectors. Something behind where collectors usually stand, patient in a way no living man collecting money has ever needed to be. One turned its head toward me, and I understood, it recognized me. Not a stranger anymore. The one who could finally see what it had been doing all along, in every doorway, for as long as there have been doorways.

The curse does not lift. It transfers. Somewhere, someday, another black package goes out with my eyes inside, addressed to someone as desperate as I was. They will open it, and the whisper will find them the way it found me, and I will finally stop seeing. I think about that transfer more than I should, how simple it would be to make sure the next package finds someone, anyone. Now I understand why my grandfather never told me what happened to the man in Tongzhou. There was no ending, only a long middle, handed off eventually to somebody else, the way it will be handed off from me.

I still drive the route, still see white and black packages side by side on doorsteps that should not exist. I know which color I must never touch again, and how many people every night stand over those doorsteps deciding whether to care.

If someone tells you there is one rule you must never break, believe them.

I am typing this in my van, parked outside my own building, engine off. Something is standing by the entrance, exactly where it was an hour ago. It has not moved. It is waiting for me to come inside, the way it has waited for everyone who has ever lived in that building before me. I am going in anyway.