Body

He Jiu had kept the ferry on the Qingyi River for forty years. Short and wiry, he had never left that river in his life, and his very accent carried the smell of water. The ferry was his alone, with no one to talk to; at night he heard only the river, and now and then the old coroner-hut dog barking far off. Three years before, his younger son Shuisheng had drowned at Whirl-Dragon Bend downstream, and the body was never found. He Jiu did not weep; he only folded Shuisheng's straw cape and set it on the ferry's cabin board, burning a stick of incense for him every day.

On the night of the autumn equinox a fog rose on the river. As usual He Jiu let down his "deep hook" at Whirl-Dragon Bend—a rig for the deeps, a lump of iron on coarse hemp line, an earthworm on the barb, to draw the eels and river-lampreys below and eke out a bland life. Crouched at the bow, his pipe glowing and dimming, he heard something down in the water mouthing the barb, slow and deliberate, a muffled sound that was not a fish.

He lifted the rod; it was heavy. He lifted again; heavier. He put his weight into it, and with a splash the hook brought up a corpse.

The body was bloated and white, clad in a decades-old double-breasted coarse jacket whose hem had rotted to tatters, giving off a stink of rotten reed mixed with rust. In the river fog its face was unclear, yet it spoke, voice like a mouthful of water: "He Jiu."

He Jiu's pipe fell into the river.

"Fear not," said the corpse. "I have waited three years for you. Shuisheng sends word—he is cold, and misses his father. Come again at the midnight hour tomorrow, and I will let you see him."

He Jiu shook like a sieve. He knew that jacket—the cut of the year Shuisheng drowned—yet the corpse before him was bloated beyond any telling of age, plainly long in the river. He had no time to think; he loosed the hook, and the corpse sank back with a thud, the surface smoothing as if nothing had happened. All the way home He Jiu's feet floated over the planks. Shuisheng's face and the corpse's face overlapped before his eyes. If he could but see his son once more, what was sinking?

The second night he went back to Whirl-Dragon Bend. The midnight hour near, the fog thickened, greenish, as if something had opened its eyes below. The deep hook had barely touched water when the corpse surfaced again; this time it half-rose, its rotten fingers beckoning: "Come, it is warm below; Shuisheng waits."

He Jiu leaned to take the hand. His fingertips three inches from those fingers, he suddenly saw it—beneath the corpse's collar, a length of red cord, knotted to half a longevity lock. That had been Shuisheng's, tied by He Jiu's own hand. But the characters carved on the lock he read plainly through the water: not "Shuisheng," but "Zhaodi."

Zhaodi was the first child to drown at Whirl-Dragon Bend, forty years before. He Jiu remembered, for that was the year he came to keep the ferry, and he had watched them haul the boy up; the red cord was one he had cut.

Below the water, Shuisheng had never been waiting alone.

He Jiu snatched his hand back. But the boat lurched; his footing gave, and he toppled in. The icy river filled his ears and nose in an instant; he saw, below, a dense crowd of faces floating, mouths agape, and at their head one in a double-breasted jacket reaching out a hand—not to pull him up, but to take him in.

At dawn the ferry stood empty. Shuisheng's straw cape was still on the cabin board, and beside it a new fishing rod, its line dropped into the river with no end. Downstream they fished up He Jiu's broken straw shoes—one at Whirl-Dragon Bend, the other drifted to a shoal ten li away.

The town said He Jiu had thrown himself in. Only the night-watchman boatman knew that after that, on nights at Whirl-Dragon Bend, two figures could often be seen fishing from the bow, one old, one young, the hook sunk and never lifted again.

The Midnight Record: the river keeps its dead by showing them to you—and then taking you too.