The Red Lantern on the Mountain Road
Lao Han hauls freight at night over an old mountain. At one hairpin bend, an old man in a raincoat always stands waving a red lantern, slow — and in the seconds after, the road beyond is either a rockslide or a stalled truck. He later learns a road-mender once died on that bend.
Lao Han has hauled freight for twenty years, and these last three he takes only the night shift, running the old national road that climbs over the mountain west of the city.
The new expressway bores straight through the mountain's belly — fast, yes, but the tolls are dear, and the shippers won't pay. The old road winds up the slope, coil upon coil; at night the fog is thick and the bends are sharp, and fewer and fewer people drive it. Lao Han is not afraid; he knows this road with his eyes shut.
The strange thing happens at a hairpin halfway up. It is a near one-hundred-eighty-degree dead bend, a cliff on the far side, no way to see oncoming cars. The first time was last autumn. Lao Han was just turning in when he saw a man standing at the mouth of the bend, in an old army-green raincoat, holding a red lantern, waving it slowly at him. Instinctively he hit the brakes, dropped to a crawl, and eased around the bend — and just as he turned, his headlights caught a heap of fallen rubble lying across the road beyond, half the lane buried. Had he taken it at his usual speed, he would surely have gone over the cliff.
Lao Han broke into a cold sweat, stopped, and meant to thank the old man; but looking back, the mouth of the bend was empty — raincoat, red lantern, the figure, all gone.
After that, the old man appeared every few nights, always in the instant before disaster. Once it was a broken-down trailer sprawled across the bend with no lights on; once the road was glazed with black ice. The red lantern waved, Lao Han slowed, and each time he was spared. He told the men in the fleet; none believed him, all saying the night road had driven him mad.
In early spring he came early on purpose, parked at the road-maintenance depot at the foot of the mountain, and found a retired old worker to ask. The old worker smoked a while before he spoke: over twenty years ago, there was a road-mender on that bend — forgot his surname, only remember he liked to stand at the mouth of the bend at night with a red lantern, stopping every car that came, telling folk to slow down. Then one rainy night he flagged an overloaded coal truck; the truck couldn't brake, and struck him, man and lantern both, down the cliff. Ever since, no mender has dared keep that bend at night.
Lao Han heard him out and said nothing. On the way back, passing that bend, he stopped the truck, took out a red lantern he had prepared, hung it on the guardrail at the mouth of the bend, and lit it. He set down a bottle of liquor too, and bowed three times.
That lantern he comes to replace every month. When a driver asked what he was after, Lao Han said: someone on this bend watches the road for me; the least I can do is keep the lantern in his hand from going out.
Midnight Record note: A mountain has its perils, a road its old souls. In life the mender flagged cars to make them slow; in death he still holds a lantern and keeps a single bend. The man is gone, but the wish to keep others safe did not go with him. What Lao Han hangs is not a lantern, but the taking-up of a shift for a man who kept the road half his life.