The Road Pass

Midnight Record, Vol. II — No. 1

On the third night after First Frost, Ah Cheng slipped out of the town gambling house just as the second watch sounded. He had lost everything that night; in his pocket remained only three coppers and a clammy film of sweat, his trouser cuffs stained with wine, as he walked home over ground frost. The wind carried the smell of river rot and spoiled lotus leaves, and the moon, smeared flat by cloud, shed a fish-belly grey over the rime on the path.

He owed the gambling-house keeper Hu San. Half a month before he had pawned the silver bangle from his wife Chun Xing's dowry, promising to win it back—and only sank deeper. The keeper saw him to the door and clapped his shoulder, smiling. "Ah Cheng, if you don't come tomorrow, I may have to call on Chun Xing myself and settle the matter." There was no warmth in that smile. Ah Cheng stepped onto the frozen mud road out of town, his heels gone numb, and the old yellow dog at the village edge, seeing him from afar, actually tucked its tail and retreated into the wood-shed without a bark—the beast had smelled the wrong of it before any man.

Chun Xing was seven months with child, and every night she lit an oil lamp to wait for him, sitting by the empty bangle box once the oil burned dry. These thoughts bit at him like lice all the way back to the village.

The way home cut through a scattered graveyard. Ah Cheng was not afraid—he had grazed cattle on that mound as a boy and could name who lay in every grave with his eyes shut. But tonight the old locust at the mound's mouth was wrong: branches that usually clawed at the sky all bowed low, pointing at something on the ground.

A sheet of paper.

Cut from spirit money, palm-sized, its edges printed with dark-red talismanic marks, and down the middle a line of ink: Such-and-such county, such-and-such village, the deceased Zhao Mancang, guided to Fengdu. In the corner a cinnabar seal, red and tacky, as if the paste had not yet dried.

Ah Cheng bent to pick it up. The paper was cold—not the cold of an autumn night but the cold of something just hauled from a well. He meant to drop it; it was none of his. But then he remembered the lonely old Zhao Mancang buried on the west slope the month before, childless, and guessed a wrong wind on the day his road-pass was burned had blown the guide here. His heart softened; he folded the paper into his sleeve. "Uncle Mancang, I'll keep this for you and press it back on your grave at first light."

Then he remembered his childhood: his grandfather crouched on the threshold rolling a cigarette, tapping his forehead with the stem. "Never pick up a road-pass by the wayside. It shows the way to those beneath; you pick it up, and the way becomes yours." He had laughed at the old man's foolishness then. Now the words pricked out from the bottom of his mind like a thorn.

The moment the words left his mouth, a layer of cold sweat rose on his nape and crept down his spine.

He turned for home, but the road had changed.

At the fork that should have gone east, his feet turned west on their own. Where he should have crossed the stone bridge, he stepped onto a soft earthen path from nowhere, spongy underfoot, as if treading on someone's back. He thought the wine had not worn off, yet his mouth was bitter and the haze was long gone—even the sting of his losses had turned cold. He looked back: no town, no mound, only a narrow embankment wide enough for one, flanked by black paddy water and waist-high dead rice stubble like a row of unshaven teeth, rasping in the wind. Even the frogs had fallen silent; the quiet was so complete he could hear his own teeth chatter.

Panicked, he pulled out the road-pass to throw it away. The paper clung to his palm and would not shake loose; cold crept down the lines of his hand into the bone. By moonlight the ink writhed across his palm like living earthworms and settled at last into four characters: walk on.

At the embankment's end stood a bridge. Not stone, but a wooden span half rotted, its planks worm-eaten through, crying creak under his step. Beneath it was no water but an impenetrable black, from which bubbles occasionally blubbed up, as if something below were breathing. Across the bridge stood a house; through paper-paned windows leaked a dim yellow light, and at the door hung a white lantern—a funeral lantern, its tassel still.

The door groaned open.

Out stepped an old man in starch-stiff burial clothes, his face white as if plastered, the corners of his mouth stretched wide—Zhao Mancang himself, from the pass. He smiled at Ah Cheng, a smile frozen and without warmth: "Young man, you held the guide for this old fellow, so you are half a guide yourself. A guide who reaches the border is met by his own. Since you have come, step in and warm yourself with a bowl of soup."

Ah Cheng tried to retreat, but his feet were rooted. Only now did he understand: the road-pass was never meant for the dead. It was for whoever picked it up—the living man scouts the way for the dead and cannot return. Chun Xing's face struck him then, her pregnant shape sitting under the lamp, like a needle in his gut. From his throat came a tuneless whimper.

With a low roar he slapped the paper to the ground and ground it with his sole, cursing Zhao Mancang's ancestors. The paper tore, and Zhao Mancang's face tore with it, like broken window paper revealing a black hollow behind, where countless eyes seemed to open and fix on him. The white lantern puffed out, and the dark closed in with a rush.

He opened his eyes kneeling at the foot of the old locust, near dawn, soaked in dew, his sleeve empty. He crawled home and found on the stove a bowl of sweet-potato congee Chun Xing had kept warm, the lamp-oil spent, its wick curled to a black knot.

After that Ah Cheng never walked at night. He gave up gambling and barred his door before dark, and the next morning redeemed the silver bangle from Hu San and pressed it into Chun Xing's hand. But every time he closed his eyes the rotting bridge swayed before him, the white lantern at its head swaying softly, and Zhao Mancang's "warm yourself with soup" circled behind his ear. He never again picked up a scrap of paper from the road, not even if the wind blew it to his feet—he walked around it. Later he often told the village boys: mind your grandfather's words all your life—never pick up a road-pass by the wayside.

The Midnight Record notes: A road-pass guides the dead; in a living hand it becomes the pass that guides himself. Whomever you hold it for, that one holds the door open for you.