The Well Rope

Midnight Record, Vol. II — No. 4

The old well at the heart of Locust Tree Village was said to reach the river of the dead. Its rim was old Qing-dynasty bluestone worn into a deep groove by generations of buckets. On the windlass coiled a three-fathom length of old hemp rope, oil-black and glistening, soaked in well water for decades until it was hard as iron.

The rope was the village's common property. The rule: whoever drew water coiled it back on the windlass and left not a length hanging at the mouth—for the elders said something lived in the well, and to it a rope was a ladder; by night it would climb, and no one could be held to account. There was an older saying, too: one drowned in a well must find a substitute to be reborn, and the substitute most often went down by the rope that hung.

The girl had been called He Sheng, a distant niece of the well-keeping Shens, orphaned early and come to her cousin-uncle for refuge, only to die in the family's own well. The villagers sighed of it in private: He Sheng had been soft-hearted, loath to crush even an ant, and had gone into the water still clutching half a sole she had not finished stitching.

But the rule would not hold.

The first to find it was Old Li, who kept the well. Before dawn he went to wind water and found the whole hemp rope dropped down the shaft, its end submerged, wet enough to wring, its strands loosened as if someone below had untied his own end. Li cursed it for a wild cat's mischief, hauled it up, and set it to dry.

The second night it dropped again. The third as well. The water on it grew colder day by day, until at last it felt as if fetched from an ice cellar. The villagers panicked and took turns keeping watch. On the fourth night, at the third watch, the young man A Yan crouching by the well saw the rope move of itself—not blown by wind, but pulled from within, length by length, out over the rim, draping across the bluestone like a couching snake, its head pointing at the Shen household in the village's middle.

The Shens had moved in only half a year before. The man, Shen De, was a pedlar from elsewhere, shouldering his pole from village to village selling needles, thread, and rouge; his wife Liu, soft-featured, seldom went out, and with child, would only nod low to the villagers. When A Yan told the village, the elders' faces changed: thirty years earlier a girl had drowned in this well, pushed in by a drunken distant nephew of the former well-keeping Shens. The nephew's family had moved away and never returned. Shen De was likely the debt's descendant.

Liu grew uneasy and drew the old women of the village to ask, and so learned the old tale. She begged Shen De to move; he only laughed at a woman's timid fancies, saying the well rope, if loose, could be tied tight by Old Li—what ghost was there?

From that night the rope's end no longer drew back into the well, but crept night by night toward the Shen gate. Its wet track dragged from the well platform to the Shen step, drying by daylight and wet again the next night. Liu heard every night a rustle in the yard, as if the hemp rope were inching across the ground, halting beneath her window, then retreating without a sound. She told Shen De, who took it for the wind at the door-latch and rolled over to sleep.

The villagers urged Shen De to move. He would not, saying a pedlar drifts and has no root to pull. But on a rainy night Liu saw the well rope worm in beneath the window crack and slowly coil about her ankle, a chill climbing her leg—not tight, but as if testing, or inviting her down to look. She cried out in fright; Shen De lit the lamp and saw the rope's end quietly withdrawing, as if drawn back into the well.

After that the Shens fled in the night, shouldering the empty pole, not even their pots and bowls all gathered. The rope never dropped over the rim again. As they went Liu looked back once at the old well; in the moonlight the hemp rope lay coiled quiet and proper on the windlass, yet she felt the rope's head turned faintly toward the way they had gone, as if marking the road. Shen De called it fancy; but all the way she heard behind them a very faint sound dragging on the ground—like a rope, or like someone barefoot, step by step, following.

The night the Shens left, not a dog in the village barked. At daybreak one passing the well heard from its depths a very faint gulp, as if someone had turned beneath the water, then stilled. Since then, at the hour the Shens had left, the well occasionally sounds that once more—not a claim on a life, but the soft sigh of one who has waited in vain.

Yet the elders say the one in the well did not leave—she had only waited for the wrong person. The rope no longer drops because the one it should wait for never came; and the well water rises, year by year, until now it laps but three inches below the rim, as if something were reaching up, inch by inch. In years of great flood the water nearly brims, and the villagers stick three sticks of incense at the well's edge and scatter a handful of glutinous rice, begging her to slow. Only the incense is found the next morning, damp, clinging to the well's wall—as if someone below had breathed upon it, softly. Once a newcomer who knew no custom drew water at midnight and forgot to coil the rope; at daybreak it was found wound about his child's wrist, a red ring where it had bitten, and the child only said she had dreamed of an elder sister leading her to the well to see the stars. Since then the village made a new rule: the well rope must be coiled every day; what cannot be coiled, the one in the well has come up to coil herself.

The Midnight Record notes: The rope dropped down is waiting for a substitute. Refuse it, and it waits; wait in vain, and it rises of itself, inch by inch.