The Well Voice

In the village of Huaili stood an ancient well, its digging lost to the years. Since the onset of summer, each midnight the well had taken to uttering human speech, a muffled murmur as of several persons in converse, yet when one drew near it could not be made out. The villagers feared it and covered the mouth with stone, but the sound leaked through the cracks regardless, and could not be stilled.

The woodcutter Zhao Er, blunt of nature but stout of heart, believed in no spirits. One night he brought his axe and kept watch beside the well, meaning to spy the marvel. Past the third watch the sound indeed arose—at first like a woman's weeping, then a man's voice consoling her, faint and unceasing. Er lay prone with his ear to the ground and heard the water beneath stirred, and something within knocked and rang.

The next day Er let himself down by rope. At the bottom he found a bronze mirror and a wooden comb sunk in the water, and beside them two skeletons bound with red cord. Er understood: these were the man and woman who long ago had drowned themselves in the well for love. The village annals told that at the close of the former dynasty a widow and a hired man had lain together; when it came to light they leapt into this well together. The villagers loathed their lust and gave them no burial, leaving the bones to sink.

Er returned and told the headman, who gathered money to raise the bones and bury them together in the common grave beyond the village, setting a small stone that read 'They Who Dwell in the Well.' That night the well fell silent, and only the wind upon the water sighed like a lament, no longer speaking in human tongue.

The Chronicler of the Strange remarks: The well itself has no mind—how then should it speak? 'Tis but grievance long pent, borrowing the water's wave to carry its voice. In life they could not clear their name; in death they plead to an empty well—pitiable indeed. Yet are those who bear wrongs with no place to speak of them only ghosts within wells?