The Night Watchman

Midnight Record, Vol. II — No. 3

Old Qin had beaten the watch-clapper for thirty years.

The town was small—one main street of blue flagstones, with a stone arch at either end that, once shut at night, made a box cut off from the world. Old Qin was the lock on that box. First watch at the dog hour, second at the rat, third at the ox, fourth at the tiger, fifth at the hare, and then near dawn. In his rasping voice he dragged out the call: "Sky's dry, mind the flame—"—one clap, one cry, and the stray ghosts drifting along the street were all kept beyond the gate.

The young laughed at his superstition. But the old folk remembered that before Old Qin came, thirty years back, the town was haunted every year by the "ghost barber"—you slept sound, and woke to find your hair shaved clean to the scalp, the skin gone cold; and night-walkers met the "ghost wall," wandering a whole night and never reaching home. Once Old Qin arrived and the clapper sounded, all such mischief died at the root. The elders said the clapper's sound was the living's boundary stone; the dead could not abide it, and hearing it knew they must not go on.

Old Qin was a silent old bachelor who lived in a leaking shed by the gate arch, kept company only by his clapper and a jujube-wood mallet. He never missed a watch, not even in snow, his fingers split with cold and bound in rags as he went on beating. When the townsfolk heard the clapper at daybreak their hearts settled, knowing another night had passed in peace. Once the west-street child burned with fever and raved that there was someone outside the door; Old Qin took his clapper and stood guard at the child's door beating until dawn, and the child's fever broke. The mother later pressed two hot sweet potatoes on him; he would not take them, only said, "The clapper must not stop. Stop it, and the boundary breaks." Another year, on the eighth day of the twelfth month, the widow Wang's oil lamp went out at midnight and she dared not relight it; hearing the steady clapper beyond her door, she fell asleep to its sound—with Old Qin's clapper out there, she said, she was not even afraid of the dark.

The young men of the town, sorry for him, pooled money to hire a half-grown boy to beat the small hours in his place; he waved them off. "I have beaten it all my life. A stranger's hand, the wild ghosts won't know the tune, and the boundary slackens." He had even spoken of his own end, saying that when the day came the clapper should go into the earth with him, not be wasted. The young men took it for jest—none guessing how plainly he spoke. He lived spare, and the coppers he saved he slipped quietly to the village's orphans and widows; his own padded jacket he wore a dozen years, the elbows patched and repatched until the cloth was bleached white.

That year, at the halfway point of the seventh month, three days of storm swelled the river over the dike and softened several old graves in the paupers' field east of town. Those nights Old Qin beat the watch more often than due, his voice coming with a wheeze, and he coughed in the small hours. Old Woman Sun of the west street, sorry for him, brought a bowl of ginger broth to the gate arch and found him hunched under the leaking eaves, the clapper held to his chest like a child. She urged him to rest a night; he shook his head. "The rain is heavy and the wild ghosts easy to loose upon the water. Tonight of all nights it cannot stop."

On the night after the sixteenth, the rain stopped, and the sky hung close and stuffy as an overturned pot. At the third watch the clapper did not sound from the main street—it came from the paupers' field to the east.

"Sky's dry, mind the flame—"

Rasping, drawn out, every syllable right—Old Qin's very cadence. Yet the voice was wrapped in the smell of wet earth and rotting grass, sounding out, beat by beat, from a half-collapsed old grave.

At first the townsfolk took it for Old Qin having changed his round. Only at daybreak did someone screw his courage to visit the field. It was the young man Gou Sheng who went, gripping a shoulder-pole, his calves trembling. Before the collapsed grave he first heard two muffled thuds from within, like the mallet on rotten wood; peering close, he saw Old Qin's clapper jammed in the cleft of the tomb. The fissure was narrow, yet the clapper was wedged fast, as if someone from inside were pushing it out, and the push rang the wood. Gou Sheng dropped the pole in fright and crawled back to town with the news.

Old Qin lay on his own bed, his body already cold, yet a smile hung at his lips, as if he had just called the last watch. Inside the collapsed grave, a thin-plank coffin swollen by the rain had thrust its lid askew, and in the seam was stuffed half of Old Qin's old sweat-towel.

The old folk knelt before the grave and slowly understood: Old Qin's clapper had held the wild ghosts back for thirty years, but the field had softened and the ghosts poured from the tombs, and so Old Qin had gone to beat the watch among the dead—setting the boundary stone in their very midst.

After that the town hired no more watchmen. Yet on every rainy night at the third watch, from the paupers' field to the east still comes that rasping cry: "Sky's dry, mind the flame—." The townsfolk are not afraid; they only bolt their doors the tighter, and the children are told: when you hear the clapper from the graves, that is Old Qin on his round—the living must not go out, lest they cross his path.

Traveling merchants from abroad, hearing it for the first time and knowing no custom, have followed the clapper toward the paupers' field to ask the watchman the way, only to be found at daybreak asleep at the field's edge, clothes neat, the wet grave-earth on their soles, yet unharmed. The villagers say Old Qin walked them back—he kept the boundary for the living all his life, and would not abandon it even in death.

The Midnight Record notes: The clapper's sound was the line the living drew for the dead. The line is drawn inside the graves now; the living should know that tonight the keeping of the boundary has changed hands.